Archibald Shaw: Witness to Christ in the Sudan

Sermon preached in Christ Church

Alexandria, Virginia

June 6, 1999

The way to faith in God for many of us has run through a person. One definition of a saint is a person through whom God's light shines. You would of course expect me as a seminary professor to emphasize the importance, for a mature faith in God, of asking questions and of engaging in serious study. But most of us would never ask our questions or pursue them seriously if we had not first met someone who in their person communicated to us deep trust in God. These people who have embodied for us trust in God are unforgettable. They have made us who we are.

Some of these people are very personal: no one but me know the impact my saints have had on me. These are saints with a very small "s", unknown to the Church at large. Others are the witnesses that all of us who are Christians depend on, such as Saints Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the first to set down in writing all that God has done through Jesus; or St. Paul, who first shared the news of the Jewish Messiah with us non-Jews. Each of these capital "s" saints is remembered in the Church with an annual feast, ususally on the date of his death, or in St. Paul's case on the date of his conversion to Christ.

And then there is that vast and varied inbetween group of Christian people who have gone before us, not known to the whole Church universal, not part of the foundation of prophets and apostles on whom we all depend, and yet more widely known than my personal mentors and private, little "s" saints. This inbetween group might be called lesser saints. Some of them are listed in a book published by the Episcopal Church entitled Lesser Feasts and Fasts. These are the people that Steve Wilson, our inimitable former assistant to the rector who now serves a parish in Carthage, Missouri, used to teach us about on his voice mail recordings. You can also find their names in regular type, as opposed to boldface, in the calendar at the front of the Book of Common Prayer.

From this vast company of lesser saints, we thank God today for a group known as the Uganda Martyrs. These young men were pages to the King of Buganda, one of the more highly centralized governments in subsaharan Africa in the nineteenth century. The King of Buganda wasat first open to contact with both Arabs and Europeans. Teaching of both Muslim and Christian ideas was for a time permitted. Then in 1885 the King turned against his Christian subjects, in part because of the ideas of right sexual behavior that these converts now insisted on observing. Thirty-two young men were tortured and put to death, the largest group on June 3, 1886, for refusing to renounce Jesus and his law, whom they had so recently embraced. They said they now served a higher king than the King of Buganda. Many walked to their deaths singing hymns and praying for their enemies. The impression this witnesss made on bystanders has continued to give courage to Christians in Uganda. In the 1970's Archbishop Janani Luwum, along with other other Anglicans and with Roman Catholic Christians, was shot to death for protesting againsts the vicious government of Idi Amin. This week across the Anglican communion people are thanking God for the encouragment these Uganda Martyrs give to us to face our own times of testing. The batik print with the yellow background outside the church door gives details and is worth a minute's contemplation on your way out. Members of this parish who have spent time with Christians in Uganda can add their own reports of ways the faith of these martyrs lives on in that community.

Now I would like to introduce you to a lesser saint who does not, to my knowledge, appear on any calendar. However, the Episcopal Diocese of Southwestern Virginia, which has had a companion relationship with the Sudan since 1978, has proposed adding this person to the Episcopal Church's Lesser Feasts and Fasts. This man was not martyred, but he gave fifty years of his life to a people who live down the Nile Valley from Uganda in Sudan, a cattle-herding people who call themselves Jieng, but have been known to outsiders as the Dinka. The name of the man who went to the Dinka was Archibald Shaw, and he died in 1956. He had held his first service of prayer on the bank of the White Nile in January 1906.

Three qualities of the life of Archibald Shaw have stood out for me, since Marc Nikkel, our current missionary in Sudan, first brought him to my attention. Two of Shaw’s qualities help us to see God at work in the world; the third is a quality that may suggest Shaw belongs to us as well. I will try to describe to you what I have learned about Shaw's stickability, Shaw's rapport, and finally Shaw's ability to inspire faith.

Stickability is a word used, and perhaps coined, by one of Archibald Shaw's colleagues to describe this man's refusal to abandon a commitment once begun. Six young men were sent by the Church Missionary Society to plant churches on the upper White Nile in 1906; by 1908 all but Shaw had left. Even a pair of Ganda Christians recruited from Uganda to help the Europeans found the Dinka language, food, and prejudice too hard to take. Shaw continued through illness and through long months when the conservative, seminomadic, cattle-proud Dinka rebuffed his invitations to talk about the Gospel and teach their children to read. They said: "What good is reading and writing to us? We have no need of it, and don't want it." Shaw persevered. In time his veranda was crowded with as many as thirty boys rreceiving instruction. Boys from other groups, such as Moru, Zande, and Ganda sometimes proved more teachable than the Dinka. Mass movemnts of people in response to preaching of the Gospel occurred among Kakwa- and Bari-speaking groups. But Shaw persisted in cultivating the unresponsive Dinka. He learned their language, their family structure, their songs, and the value they vested in their long-horned bulls and cows. Shaw stuck on the White Nile until he retired to Nairobi at the age of 61; even then he returned annually during the dry season to Dinkaland. Children in the schools he had founded welcomed him back as an elder returning home.

Stickability without rapport is stubbornness, even alienation. But Shaw 's stickability was combined with rapport. In an era when other British missionaries and those assigned to administer the new Anglo-Egyptian Condominiumin in the Sudan were tempted to racism, Shaw went among the southern Sudanese seeking friends. According to Marc Nikkel, Shaw in his early years would wrestle with young Dinka men on their terms, even sustaining a dislocated hip. As an unmarried man, Shaw formed something of a surrogate family among the Dinka. In his first year, he wrote home: "Some of the younger men, who come every day, and work for us in various ways, I begin to look upon as real friends..." He noted the affection Dinka men, even as adults, showed their mothers. Once a Dinka elder named Alier Bol commandeered a bull from the herd Shaw was bulding at the mission station, believing that a foreigner was not worthy of such a fine animal. Shaw pursued him relentlessly to recover the bull. After another such confrontation with a different patriarch, Shaw reflected: "I feel as if I was being impertinent to my grandfather." Shaw honored herbal medicine practitioners. He once refused a British Governor's order that he be evacuated by boat to be treated in a mission hospital in Khartoum, preferring to be nursed where he was by a faithful Dinka friend. Shaw loved and encouraged Dinka singing -- a tradition that lives on today as new hymns are composed in local languages, both to lament the terrible losses of war in southern Sudan and to cry out in trust to God. Shaw's rapport with Sudanese was not just in his own mind. Following their custom of taking an animal name, people in Dinkaland called Shaw "Chief Machuor," "Machuor" being the word for the color of an ox he owned. The first Sudanese bishop of the Episcopal Church, a man who grew up at Shaw's mission station on the Nile, once said that Shaw was "the only white man with the heart of the Dinka."

These words of this first Sudanese Anglican bishop about Shaw's heart point to a rapport that goes beyond things temporal. Shaw did the work of an ethnographer, a translator, and a long-sticking resident: he fulfilled the conditions that make deep human friendship across ethnic boundaries possible. But above all these activities, and in all these activities, Shaw was a witness for Jesus, the true Word of God spoken to all ethnic groups for all time. Here was Shaw’s greatest grace: he was used by God to inspire faith. Shaw explained his early strategy by saying: "...we pray ... that our influence and teaching may bring [young workers and students at the mission station] to be servants, not only of us, but of Him whom we serve." It appears that Shaw, for all his authoritarian behavior, managed to convey to southern Sudanese who met him that he was himself a man set under authority. Marc Nikkel reports that forty years after his death, Shaw's ox name of Machuor is invoked with warm affection by Dinka, both traditionalists and Christians, whether in wartorn southern Sudan, in refugee camps, or in the shantytowns of displaced southerners in the north. Shaw's example is invoked in prayers, that God will raise up leaders of equal stickability, rapport, and devotion. Dinka Episcopalians, who have seen the war erode many of their ancestral ties and traditions, emrace Shaw as their ancestor in faith. Shaw's grave in Nairobi's Forest Road Cemetery has become, for some uprooted Sudanese, a place of pilgrimage and prayer.

I invite you to learn more about this lesser saint Archibald Shaw, through whom the light of God shone in his lifetime and for many continues to shine. It may be that God has not yet finished using his faithful witness Archibald Shaw. Even now, to the extent that our life is bound up with the life of Christians in the Sudan, we can say that Shaw helped make us who we are.

THANKS BE TO GOD!

-- Richard J. Jones