Who was Saint Paul's press officer? Sermon on 2 Timothy 1:7-10 and Luke 1:1-4

Sermon preached at Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Geneva
For the Press Officers Network of European Churches (PONEC)
7 September 2008
Rev. Jane Stranz

2 Timothy 1:7-10
Luke 1:1-4

Au nom du Père et du Fils et du Saint Esprit, Amen.


(The first rule of communication is to check whether the microphone they’ve put in your pocket is switched on!)

You may be surprised to know that St Luke - the apostle who wrote one of the Gospels and also the Acts of the Apostles - is sometimes described as the journalist of the New Testament.
That idea may sound a bit anachronistic, after all there was no television or radio in first century Judea, probably no daily newspapers, certainly no internet.

But what is it that a journalist actually does? One definition puts it like this - journalists gather and present news, including information about current and historical events, things that have changed in the world and other topics of interest. They take notes and record information. They carry out background research for their reports or articles, and, we hope, check facts carefully. They interview people. They write news articles and background features, written in such a was that their readers, listeners or viewers can understand what has been going on. This means they need to know their audience.

[I should add it was the journalist I live with who put me up to saying this!]

If we look again at the text from Luke we can see that at the beginning of the Gospel
Luke sets out his audience - his friend Theophilus. Luke notes too that he has been closely following all the developments concerning Jesus – or perhaps we should call it the Jesus story - and it seemed that it was time to write an "orderly account", so that Theophilus may know the truth concerning the things of which he had been informed.

The tone of Luke's gospel is rather different to Mark's rather breathless and hasty style, or to Matthew's regal and scholarly tone, or to John's opaque, poetic and very theological approach.

But Luke the journalist also makes great literature out of the orderly account he writes for Theophilus. You only have to consider his versions of the story of Christ’s incarnation, passion and resurrection to see how beautifully constructed his account is.
Unlike the other Gospel writers Luke doesn't end the story he tells with Jesus.
He rightly understands that Jesus' story goes on in others – this is the meaning of resurrection.

The orderly literary account Luke narrates, continues in the Acts of the Apostles, where he recounts the exciting missionary tours of Paul, in Cyprus, and Antioch, Asia Minor, Macedonia, Thessalonica, Athens, Corinth, Galatia, and Ephesus, leading to Paul's imprisonment, trial, his trip to Rome, the shipwreck.

And there was also of course a major conference in Jerusalem to deal with - a controversy which threatened to tear the Christian Communion apart – centring on the question do Christians have to be circumcised according to the law of Moses?

That must have been a tense and difficult time. Sounds familiar?

If we think people today from the same or different churches are rather “muscular” in the negative criticisms and public statements they make about one another, then reading some of what Paul and Peter and their supporters said to one another in Jerusalem may convince us that being in the church has always been about very animated and committed debate and not particularly about being nice and well-behaved!

Today I wonder whether the Jerusalem conference had an assembly preparatory commission, or an 18 month long communications plan … I suspect not.

But as I was wondering where Luke got the information from, the stories, the narratives, the great statements of Paul, I came up with rather a surprising hypothesis.

I think it's clear that Paul must have employed a great press officer, a spin doctor, as we say these days, to make sure that his side of the story got a good telling.

A press officer is someone employed by an organization - or sometimes a person - to provide the news media and journalists with information about the organization or individual.

You may object, and say - but there is no reference to any spin doctors or press officers in the Acts of the Apostles.

But that just shows how well St Paul's press officer was doing his or her job. Alastair Campbell - Tony Blair's spin doctor - once said he would have failed if he, and not Tony Blair, became the story (and in fact he finally resigned when he DID become the story).

But St Paul's press officer was so good, that she - or he - never did become the story.

But just think of the challenges the press officer had to face ...
– this Christian preacher and his companion get greeted and treated like Greek gods in Derbe (try explaining that to the evangelicals).
– can you imagine trying to pick up the pieces in Galatia after Paul's so called “pastoral” letter in which he calls the Galations stupid (try explaining that he’s a nice guy really to anyone after that).
– or explaining Paul's iconoclastic theology saying it's all right to eat the food offered to pagan gods in sacrifice.
– or trying to spin the huge unrest and rioting that seemed to attend Paul's travels (the forces of law and order are really not going to have much time for your explanations).

And of course all the time this person had Paul, their boss, telling them, 'It's not about me, it's about Jesus Christ living, dying and rising again for us, that's what you should be saying to those writers and storytellers'. While the press officer will of course also have been trying to keep the boss 'on message', and with someone like Paul who had such wide and broad knowledge, that really won't have been easy!

As you have heard, for the past two days press and communications officers from churches right across Europe - from Albania to Ireland and from Finland to Italy - have been meeting in Geneva, swapping experiences and insights about how to communicate their churches -
and looking at one particular conference that is soon coming up.

It’s not a conference in Jerusalem like in Acts but the 13th assembly of the Conference of European Churches that will take place in Lyon next year. And I hear that the press officers have come up with bags of ideas about communicating the assembly.

But what is it that makes a good press officer? I sometimes wonder whether the text we heard from Timothy does not provide a good summary of the qualities that are needed: For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.

In English we do not have the wonderful word “Besonnenheit” to render the Greek σωφρονισμου (sophronismos) and so we have
Power love and self-control
power love and right mindedness
power love and sound judgement
and my personal favourite which comes surprisingly from the Darby translation
power love and wise discretion

Any press officer, particularly a church press officer, will need power or dynamism to do their job. They will also need love, a sense of passion and purpose in what they are doing; and they will need buckets-full of wise discretion, sound-mindedness, self control, and more besides.

Perhaps those seem like rather high values for press officers, but I'd like to suggest that actually those values apply not only to them and to the rather timid Timothy (you notice that Paul doesn't mince his words even to those closest to him – 'come on Timothy stop being so scared - get on with it!') but to all of us in the churches.

Each of us and all of us are God's press officers, telling the story of Jesus in today's world.

We bear witness through our lives, the way we do business, the way we speak and interact with one another …

Think for a moment of a local church, or a diocese or a church organisation, or a church-run aid organisation.

How does it and can it bear witness to story of Jesus in today’s plural, globalized world?

Perhaps we should take a leaf out of Paul’s book and not feel embarrassed by the debates, discussions, tensions and politicking, but actually dare to tell the story and say how it adds and gives meaning to our lives.

Bearing witness to the essential is not easy – we’d rather say, 'oh you know I go to church out of habit, for the music, to see friends'. We’re frightened about being seen as too religious.

In a book he has written, the French Protestant theologian Laurent Schlumberger says how important it for Christians today to reclaim the language of bearing witness to their faith. His book is called Sur le seuil which means on the threshold, in the doorway - between our faith and other people’s lives, questions, faith, concerns and convictions. Schlumberger says that if our faith talk is to have any resonance with others, we will need to dare to speak of our doubts as well as our convictions, as part of daring to go to the threshold of interaction.

Before I finish I’m afraid you are going to have to allow me one final linguistic aside. There is a wonderful German word Schwellenangst – it means fear of the threshold, fear of knocking on a new door, doing a new thing, being on a new threshold.

But God has not given us a spirit of fear of the thresholds where the witness to our faith takes place, but a spirit of dynamic power, passionate love and wise discretion.

So may God's Spirit truly blow a hurricane of wise discretion, love, and power calling us to live on that threshold where we bear witness to the faith and keeping all of us - 'on message'.

Amen.


Laurent Schlumberger, Sur le Seuil: Les protestants au défi du témoignage, Lyon, Editions Olivétan, 2005.


copyright (c) Jane Stranz