Isaiah is talking to a nation who’s about to return to its own land after generations in exile. The people think that they know why they’re heading home: to rebuild their city and to settle back into the same kind of life that they had before the destruction of war. But Isaiah is telling them that God’s answer to their purpose in returning home is different than they imagine it to be. As far as God is concerned, they’re returning not to get comfortable again, but in order to bring God’s salvation “to the ends of the earth.” God is asking them to reach out beyond themselves, beyond putting things back the way they were. Today, too, God’s calling is never just about us—it’s always about reaching beyond ourselves.
Today, I’d like to tell you the story of Elias Neau (spelled n-e-a-u). Why am I telling you this story today? (Well, there’s the fact that I’ve spent all my free time for the last two weeks with this story, trying to finish the corrections to my thesis on this guy ...) But I’m also telling you this story today to tell the story of another suffering servant of God: one who is just as unlikely as we are.
Elias Neau was born in 1660 in a small seaside town on the Western coast of France. His people were simple sailors, followers of John Calvin, Protestants in a Catholic country ruled by the powerful King Louis XIV. They were despised by the Catholic majority, economically oppressed, and soon to be persecuted. Elias, like other boys his age, went to sea as a cabin boy at age 12. He had a simple faith and very little education. He was insignificant, just one of many boys born in a troubled land, at a troubled time in history.
As a teenager, he made way across the Atlantic to French-ruled Saint-Domingue, now Haiti. It was a tough place, full of rough men, pirates, sugar cane, brutality, and slavery. But the rules were easier on Protestants there, for awhile, at least. Young Elias probably got an eyeful of human suffering and depravity in Saint-Domingue. When the crackdown on Protestants came to the islands, Elias and his friends drifted north to Boston, where he continued the hardscrabble life of a sailor. He worked hard, though, and soon married and became a naturalized English citizen. He even became a ship’s captain. But just as things were looking good for him, out of the blue, Neau’s ship was captured by French pirates on its way to Barbados. Nothing ever goes as planned in this world, does it?
The pirates seized the ship and took Elias back to France, where they promised to free him when the ship’s owners paid ransom. He had thought that he would be let go, since he was now an English citizen. Indeed, he should have been set free. But Elias was a hated Huguenot, a Protestant, and once in France, he was told to abjure his faith. When he refused, he was accused of the crime of escaping the country illegally and was sentenced to life on the galleys.
Nothing was more miserable than life as a galley slave. Elias was first chained to hundreds of other men by the ankle and sent on a forced march across France to Marseilles. The men were starved and beaten, walking in rain and scorching sun, alike. Once on the ships, they were chained six to a bench, where they remained-- to eat, sleep, live, and row, until they died. Galley slaves were considered scum—the lowliest of men. Most didn’t live long.
But Elias was cantankerous. He was far from meek and mild. In fact, he was pretty stubborn and ornery. He kept singing psalms and telling the other prisoners about Jesus. So the authorities took him off the galleys and put him in the infamous prison in Marseilles, the Chateau d’If. For several years, he lived in a windowless cell, without light, full of vermin and disease. Part of the time, he shared his cell with a physically decaying man who had already lost his mind. Part of the time, he was alone. To pass the time, Elias started writing amateur poetry, song lyrics that he would sing to the psalm tunes that he learned by heart as a child. He poured out his suffering, his sense of abandonment, and his faith that God would save him, that God would free him from this living hell, one way or another, by death or by new life. It wasn’t good poetry, but it was his.
Finally, Elias was freed, thanks to petitions on his behalf and lucky changes in international politics. He came out of prison a “hero of the faith.” Who would have thought it? He was hosted throughout protestant Europe and invited to write and tell his story. He was suddenly, for the first time in his life, an “important” man. He went back home to Boston, and then to New York. Understandably, he never went back to sea. He became a merchant and made money. He bought a big house and a couple of enslaved Africans to work for him. He was no saint, remember, just a regular man of his time, a participant in the evils of slavery.
But God didn’t intend for Elias to return to life as it had been before. Elias heard a strange call from Jesus: to free the souls, if not the bodies, of the suffering enslaved people around him. He used his own money to start a school in his home—a school for enslaved Africans and Native Americans and for poor white servants and sailors, like himself. He visited his pupils in their homes when they were sick. He endured the ridicule and even the hatred of his white friends because of his work. He even left the small French Protestant Church, the Church for which he had suffered so much. He left his friends and his comfortable worship to become an Anglican. He knew that he couldn’t do this work alone. He needed the support of the official state church in New York.
Elias wanted to teach those in chains about the love of Jesus, to teach them to read the Bible, to pray, to find the peace that he had found in prison. But his students were never as numerous as he had hoped. The white masters made it hard for them to attend. And maybe they just weren’t interested in what an enslaving church had to say. Elias’ struggled. Given his orneriness, he often rubbed influential people the wrong way, too. He despaired of the small impact that he was making, of the difficulties that plagued his work. When he died, I doubt that anyone would have called his dream a “success.”
But Elias taught hundreds of people to read and to sing—to sing together the powerful psalms and the songs that Elias continued to write for his students. His songs were about suffering, about God’s powerful love in Christ. Elias’ pupils loved to sing those songs. They sang them so loudly and so well that people would come stand outside the classes to listen. The enslaved students could hear the hidden promises in those songs, promises of true freedom that even Elias might not have realized were there. They could experience the power of raising their voices together, as one, of being heard by someone, somewhere. They could find hope in a hopeless situation. Because of one insignificant, imperfect man’s suffering, his response to God’s call, and his willingness to be open to change, hundreds of enslaved people were able to get a small glimpse of freedom. And here we are, listening to Elias’ story today, three hundred years after his death.
Like Elias, we, too, follow the Lamb of God, the slaughtered Passover Lamb who protects us as he leads us all from bondage to freedom. We don’t have to be perfect to follow him. We don’t have to be important or influential. We don’t have to do it alone. We don’t even have to meet the world’s standards of success. We just do it as a scrappy community that reaches out, despite ourselves... A community that lets God’s healing light “shine to the ends of the earth.” Can we do it? Well, as Jesus says, “Come and see!”
No comments:
Post a Comment