Into the Water Together

July 21, 2024

Jason Lee Sunday

Pastor Mike

Acts 8:26-40

At the Annual Conference session last month, Rev. Allen Buck, the pastor of Great Spirit UMC in Portland and leader of the Greater Northwest’s Circle of Indigenous Ministries, issued an invitation to all Oregon-Idaho Methodists to participate in the Circle’s new Truth-Telling Project. The purpose of the Truth-Telling Project is to build relationships and tell stories that will lead to repentance and healing for Indigenous communities often marginalized and traumatized by the Church. The initiative will contribute to the first phase of a robust new plan for indigenous ministries that was presented by Rev. Buck and adopted by delegates at last week’s Western Jurisdictional Conference. After truth-telling, the other three phases of the Jurisdiction’s plan are practices of repair, practices of self-determination, and leadership development. The Western Jurisdiction delegates approved spending $100,000 over the next four years to support this work.

One of the gifts of participating in a denominational system such as Methodism is realizing that the hopes for the Church which we hold as individuals – that our congregations be places of healing, authenticity, equity, and vibrant relationship – are shared by other people, and that there are people just like you and me who are involved in the system and doing something about what they want and inviting you to work alongside them. If you are interested in learning more about the Truth-Telling Project, I have a QR code here that you can scan, and I’ll also put out some information in the August newsletter for you.

It would be impossible to tell the truth about the relationship between indigenous peoples and Christianity in a place like Pocatello without taking a sustained critical look at Reverend Jason Lee, the Methodist preacher who became the first Protestant missionary in what was then called the Oregon Territory. Yes, Lee was courageous and ambitious; he founded settlements and schools; he helped set the stage for the annexation of Oregon to the United States. He responded to the call of God on his life as he understood it, and the Methodist Church in Blackfoot can trace its history directly to him, as we can trace ours to theirs.

But Lee was also a fallible man. He carried upon his body and in his mind the ideologies and sins of his generation. He came to this part of the country to evangelize its indigenous peoples – which for him was an expression of responsible love. But we know from his own journals and papers that did not – perhaps he could not – see them as fully human. He made the fatal mistake that so many colonizing Christians of that era made; a mistake that we, too, if we are not careful, can still so easily make: He bound together sharing Christ and imposing whiteness; he believed that, for a native person to become a Christian, assimilation to the culture, language, economy, and worldview of white Americans and Europeans would also be required. He equated faithful discipleship with a particular way of being human, and so he participated in the widespread erasure of native ways of being and in the theft of native land.

Jason Lee did not invent these sins and he certainly did not set off to the Northwest in order to bring about pain. But, as the scripture says, sin “clings” to us “so closely,” and Lee, as much as anyone of that time, viewed native peoples as problems and projects, not necessarily as partners and siblings. He wanted to change them; to improve them; to foist upon them a sense of identity bound up in labor and property ownership rather in ritual, community, and place. He didn’t consider that expanding the family of faith would require him to convert, require his understanding and practice of Christianity to change.

My point here is not to make us ashamed to be Methodists or Americans – that would be counterproductive – but to simply say that the present is built on the past, and that our history is full of good that’s been done and harm that’s been done. While we can’t go back and change things, we can learn from the past, the good and the harm, and move into the future with greater wisdom and care. Which brings me to today’s scripture.  

The early church’s expansion, recorded in the New Testament book of Acts, took a radically different form than the model of Manifest Destiny. After the pouring out of the Holy Spirit upon the first Christians on Pentecost, people began to preach and teach and baptize in Jesus’ name wherever they found themselves. At first the movement was centralized in Jerusalem, but very soon, due to persecution, it was scattered abroad into neighboring towns, cities, regions, and, eventually, through Paul’s ministry, into nations. The movement was meant to expand. Jesus came to reveal the heart of God to the whole world, and before his ascension he had commissioned his followers to go and make disciples in Jerusalem, Samaria, and then on to the ends of the earth.

As the Church grew, the earliest conflicts were about whether or not new believers from outside Israel had to adopt all the old Jewish customs. The apostles thrashed this out and decided that, no, people did not have to adopt a single set of customs, or a single language, in order to be the Body of Christ. One faith, one Lord, one baptism, but not one way of being human.

In fact, what happened instead was that the earliest apostles, the Jewish Christians, were changed through their encounter with the Gentiles. They, the missionaries and evangelists, were transformed by their love for these supposedly unclean people as much as the new converts were changed by the gospel. This is evangelism as true joining, where there is mutual change. It is very much like falling in love and combining families. Messy, transformative, we adopt this tradition from your upbringing, that one from mine, and we make some other things from scratch together. I don’t impose changes on you; you don’t impose changes on me. Instead, through our shared desire for Christ, we come closer to one another and figure out what it means to live together there, near him. 

We see something like this in the encounter between Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. These two people could not be more different. Philip was a Jew living in Jerusalem who was elected by the apostles to be one of the Church’s first seven deacons. The Ethiopian eunuch was from Africa and despite his bodily trauma, he was politically and financially powerful. The only reason the two of them met at all was because the Holy Spirit led Philip into the eunuch’s path.

When they encountered one another, the eunuch was reading from the Hebrew Prophet Isaiah, and the two men began a conversation about what the scripture meant. Philip responded to the eunuch’s curiosity and questions, very much like the way Jason Lee, according to the tradition, responded to an inquiry by several native people in the Northwest by coming out to Oregon as a missionary.

But here’s where the paths diverge: when the eunuch heard what Philip had to say and believed him and then asked, “What would hinder me from being baptized right now?” Philip’s response was, “Well, nothing. Let’s do it.” But in most situations during American colonization and expansion, there were conditions for indigenous communities becoming Christian. If they were not outright forced to do so, which often happened, native peoples were expected to become like the settlers – become capitalists, property owners, English speakers, etc. And these conditions were enforced by American military pressure.

Here in our story, there is no condition for the eunuch’s baptism. In fact, after the baptism, Philip is whisked away by the Spirit to someplace else. Which is very significant. Having shared the Gospel with this traveler, he does not get to go to the traveler’s home and oversee how things will unfold from there, that is, if the eunuch will be a Christian “the right way.” The eunuch takes faith in Christ back to his own people and gets to share that faith in a way that is authentic to him and authentic to his context.

The baptism at the climax of the story shows us what baptism, which is the fundamental identity-marker and initiation ritual in our faith, means for the community. We enter the water together. We both end up changed. There is no imposition but only a Spirit-inspired encounter, only curiosity leading to conversation, and conversation to mutual conversion.

The history of Methodists in this particular place is not unique. We are dealing with the same complicated legacy as the Lutherans, the Episcopalians, the Catholics, the Presbyterians, and others. But we do need to deal with it, to tell the truth, to begin the work of repentance and repair.

If God wills it and the Spirit guides, perhaps someday there will be a relationship between our church and members of the Shoshone Bannock tribe. Maybe someday a beloved community will be born that places obstacles and hindrances before no person. But for that to happen, we would need to be willing to set aside much that we think is normal, necessary, and permanent and enter the primordial waters of creation, the flood waters of judgement, the baptismal waters of new birth.

Maybe one day we will. Amen.