George Augustus Selwyn

George Augustus Selwyn
April 11, 2024

Lectionary Link
Ephesians 2:8–10
Psalm 96:1–7
Matthew 10:7–16


George Augustus Selwyn was a man of his time, as we are people of our time. As prisoners of our time, we cannot help but be temporally provincial. We live compromised lives knowingly and unknowingly with things that are tacit in our culture that are not good for people now or for people of the future. We approach people of the past with the charity which we want for ourselves.


The era of Bishop Selwyn was the colonial era. I grew up on the romance of the famous explorers and famous missionaries who left the comfort of their homes and made long grueling trips to foreign peoples with foreign customs and different languages. In my early 20's I lived in Iran for four years in Shiraz where Henry Martyn had come to translate the New Testament into Farsi. In my Near Eastern Studies, I read the accounts of E.G. Browne, Lord Curzon, Richard Burton, and T.E. Lawrence. In a cursory view of our calendar of saints, we can find a common feature of the lives of the saints; they left the comfort of what was familiar and traveled to bridge great cultural divides in order to become bi-lingual and bi-cultural enough to communicate the message of Christ.


In our Christology, we believe that Jesus is the one who traveled the furthest from home to be completely bi-lingual in the experience of divinity and humanity so as to communicate across the great divine/human divide of difference. As we know, not everyone did or could receive his message about the nature of God. For a long period of time the message about Jesus was an underground message within an Empire which had the cult of the Emperor who was not to have any contenders.


What was the nature of the colonial times? England and other countries were in the wake of the Enlightenment, industrialization, and an expanding mercantile system to bring raw materials from colonies around the world. The native peoples of the colonies were in the words of Tennyson, the White Man's Burden. What was that burden? The burden was having the responsibility to bring Christianity, Civilization, and Commerce to people of color in the colonies established throughout the world. And in the cruel practice of slavery, it was commercializing of people as a chief commodity.


George Augustus Selwyn was privileged enough to attend Eton and Cambridge. At Cambridge he was a member of the first crew team in what became the annual rowing competition with Oxford. After graduation he returned to teach at Eton, and soon after was ordained deacon and priest. In 1841, he was consecrated at Lambeth as Bishop of New Zealand, just a year after New Zealand was made a British Colony. On his voyage to New Zealand, he learned Maori from a native on board, well enough to preach and teach in Maori on his arrival. He also learned ship sailing on the voyage, a skill he used when he traveled to various places in New Zealand. He was known for his organizational skills and these skills were required in New Zealand. He also experienced the same sort of inter-church issues which were exported to the colonies from the homeland. Bishop Selwyn was more of a high church Tractarian and the missionaries were mainly low church evangelicals. What does smells and bells have to do with evangelism?


Bishop Selwyn was perhaps like many of his age in being blind to the linkage of the message of Christ with the Imperialist practices of the Empire. And while we might feel today that we have arrived at rebuking critiques of the colonialism of people of Selwyn's age, we can still carry with us a sense of having a superior culture and superior religion, something which surely contradicts the humility of Jesus Christ.


I think that persons of colonial Christianity and we as post-colonial Christians have not faced up with honesty the supreme irony of the New Testament. The irony is that the New Testament was written by and for oppressed people who did not have full status within the Roman Empire. The only way that I can understand the beatitudes is to see them as Christly martial arts living by oppressed people so as to survive and win favor from their oppressors. Those who lived the beatitudinal martial arts lifestyle could impress with such winsome behaviors.


We live as inheritors of Empire Christianity. And we pretend with great contortionist gymnastics that our experience is similar to the people of the New Testament. When in fact, by force, white colonialists required people of color to live the life of the beatitudes so that we could be proud of them as our "well trained pets."


Thankfully, contained within the Gospel is the demise of Empire Christianity. Why? If you preach the love of Christ, the hearers eventually are going to say or think, "We really love this Jesus whom you preach, but we want the same and equal dignity that is part of this good news of Christ."


St. Paul once wrote a rather backhanded thing: I rejoice not in how the Gospel is preached, but that the Gospel is preached.


We can say the same about Bishop Selwyn and about ourselves. Selwyn was concerned that he preached the good news, and we still find ourselves with this goal.


With the Psalmist, Bishop Selwyn and we, too can agree, God is truly most catholic. Kata holos means on the whole. God is more on the whole than Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, or any other religious faith. The Psalmist implored the entire earth to sing to the Lord. God belongs to everyone.


With Bishop Selwyn, we would also agree with Paul that it is not the works that we have done which gives us divine citizenship or status, rather it is grace, original grace of God's image upon us, and realized grace when we accepted God as our parent.


Finally with Bishop Selwyn we can agree with our appointed Gospel, that the Gospel needs strategies or it remains a highly kept theoretical secret. The appointed Gospel lesson provides us with the passage that has been reduced to what is called evangelical poverty, one of the counsels of perfection. The joke on Episcopalians is that we've not excelled at evangelical poverty. Remember the joke from your seminary professor asking, "why were Episcopalians last to arrive on the frontier?" Answer: They were waiting for the invention of the Pullman Car, so they could arrive in luxury.


I don't think that this Gospel is about the monastic practice of evangelical poverty. It simply exemplifies that the Gospel needs strategies appropriate to the time and place. And isn't that what the life of the church on all levels is about? Finding strategies appropriate to our situations to get the good news out to the people who need to discover it.


You might notice that the strategies parallels the strategy which Jesus saw in his own life when he read from Isaiah: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. After reading this passage, Jesus told his listeners, "I resemble in my ministry these requirements of the good news. In Hebrew, "basar."


The year of the Lord's favor is the realm of God at hand. The message appeals holistically to bodies, souls, and spirits of the people who need to know the good news of their lives.


For us today, embracing evangelical poverty should mean ridding ourselves of any kind of personal or cultural baggage which gets in the way of letting people know the full dignity of Christ. Amen.