The Fifth Sunday after Trinity
4th July 2010 9:00am Sung Eucharist
Preacher: The Very Revd Frank Nelson
Reading: Isaiah 66:10-14;
Galatians
6:7-16; Luke
10:1-11, 16-20
A new Creation is everything!
Kia Ora – tena
kouta katoa. Good morning. I greet you in Maori as I bring greetings to you
from the Wellington Cathedral of St Paul and the Bishop and people of the
Diocese of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand.
It is good to be back here where Christine and I, together with our three
children, spent three happy and fulfilling years ten years ago.
“But a new creation is everything!” [1] With
these few words St Paul comes to the crunch of
his message to the churches in Galatia.
This is the incredible message of Paul – that in Christ crucified a cosmic
change has been initiated by God.
Over the past few weeks I have come
to appreciate this new creation, ushered in by Christ’s death on the cross, and
proclaimed by St Paul,
in a new, deeper and richer way. Let me tell you something of the last 6 weeks
of my life.
At the end of May thirty of us flew
out of Wellington, New Zealand heading first for Singapore and then on to
Munich and Greece. In a hotel dining-room in Singapore we gathered for the first
time to worship God. A glass of wine from the hotel bar, a freshly baked bun
bought in the local supermarket, a baby’s high chair as an altar, and the stole
presented to me by the Filipino Fellowship of this Cathedral – gave us the
makings for a Eucharist. This was to set the pattern for many such gatherings
as we travelled together.
In the 17th century the
villagers of Oberammergau,
a tiny village in the Bavarian Alps of Germany, made a vow to God – save us
from the terrible plague that is sweeping through our country and we will
perform the story of Jesus’ last days. So began the tradition of the Passion
Play at Oberammergau.
Every ten years for the past three hundred years the villagers have re-enacted
the story of the Passion – moving from Palm Sunday through Holy Week to the
death of Jesus on the Cross. Today the Passion Play attracts tens of thousands
of people and is performed five times a week for five months before an audience
of 2000 each night. The village reminds people that the cross stands at the
very heart of Christianity. It is hard to understand. It is hard to make sense
of the cross. Writing to the Christians of Corinth St Paul said that for some,
the Greeks, the cross is foolishness – it is ridiculous; and for some, the
Jews, it is scandalous, a cause of stumbling. Yet today we gather here, as do
people around the world, to worship a man who died on a cross; whom we call
God!
From Germany
we flew on to Athens in Greece and
began a journey that would take us into the world of the ancient Greeks and
Romans – a world full of myths and legends, of great heroes and beautiful
women, of gods and goddesses. It is a world of incredible learning – of
geometry and rhetoric; of great military conquests and exquisite argument; a
world of building with such precision it makes the sky-scrapers of this city
look like child’s play. It was a world of both beauty and cruelty. We stood and
marveled at the courage of St Paul
who arrived alone and frightened in this sophisticated city where everyone
seemed so knowledgeable. We heard how, when he addressed the clever people of Athens from the
Areopagus, he homed in on an odd thing he had noticed. Among all the temples to
different gods in the city there was one altar dedicated to ‘an unknown god’ [2] .
It is this unknown god I have come to tell you about, said Paul. He proceeded
to tell them about Jesus Christ.
So we journeyed through Greece, reading the book of Acts, reading from
the letters of St Paul,
visiting different places. In Corinth we listened to St Paul speaking to us
from his first letter, chapter 11, telling of the tradition handed on to him –
how, on the night Jesus was betrayed, he took bread and wine, gave thanks to
God and said, this is my body, this is my blood – do this in remembrance of me.
In Philippi we gathered on the bank of a stream in a shady spot just outside
the ancient city walls where it is thought Lydia
heard the Gospel of Jesus and became the first person in Europe
to be baptized. In Thessaloniki we read from the very first of St Paul’s
letters as he encouraged those early Christians not to lose hope, to hold on to
the faith in Jesus Christ professed at baptism. As if to underline this we
visited a Greek Orthodox church and watched the elaborate ritual of baptism, as
the baby was slowly undressed and then dipped three times into the holy water.
The priest anointed the child on head, lips, heart, hands and feet. In Ephesus we marveled at
the way Paul got carried away as he wrote about the great things God has done
in Christ, the words pouring out one after the other.
As Christians have done for 2000
years these thirty pilgrims from New Zealand gathered to pray, to
read the Bible, to break bread together, to sing God’s praises and be
encouraged to live into God’s Kingdom. As we moved through the country we
learned more about the early church, the great ecumenical councils which argued
over the nature of Christ, the meaning of salvation, and which books should be
included in the Bible. We saw, through architecture, the development of Christian
churches from the early Roman basilicas to the monasteries built by monks high
on the tops of mountains to protect themselves from the threat of invading
Muslim armies. In a quiet moment I watched as two Romanian artists wrote ikons,
wondering how their faith had been sustained through the dark years of
communist atheism.
And then, on to London, the most cosmopolitan city the world
has ever seen; where over four hundred languages are used in city schools.
Here, in the shadow of the great Cathedral of St Paul, Dean Andrew and I met
with priest colleagues. We came from New York
and Toronto, Madras,
Cape Town, London,
Wellington and Hong Kong.
Our agenda was simple, to sample the life of a priest and friend who exercises
his ministry in the City of London
– where there are no Sunday services and where people in offices trade billions
of pounds every day. As we talked, listened, worshipped and ate together, we
experienced something of his priestly life, with its joys and struggles for the
Kingdom of God. We saw a different side of history
in London – not as ancient as that in Greece, but a
well-preserved history of Christian life and witness through centuries of war
and peace, plague and fire. The abbeys and churches kept alive the arts of
writing and healing, as well as those of chivalry and crusading. In a tiny
church sandwiched between tall buildings we heard of its bombing by the IRA in
1995 and the subsequent rebuilding as a place of peace for all people – a place
which seeks to provide not neutral, but mutual, space for people to find each
other in their differences.
More travel for Christine and me
took us to Ely and on to Lichfield and its cathedral with strong connections to
New Zealand
and the missionary days of the 19th century. North to York to see a friend, both priest and doctor, only to find
he is now in Haiti,
part of a medical team responding to a call for help from Christians there left
destitute by the earth-quake. The circle seemed complete as I recalled the
vision given to St Paul of a man from Macedonia
asking him to come across and help.
Today’s Gospel reading has Jesus
sending out the seventy on a mission to preach and teach about God’s Kingdom.
They were told to take little with them – trusting to the good will of those
who received their message, and the providence of God. The great churches and
Cathedrals we have built over the years often seem to be at odds with this
message – but the message goes out nonetheless – wherever people seek to live
in the shadow of the cross. It may not always seem to be the ‘new creation’
that St Paul envisaged, but the influence of countless Christians faithfully
following the way of Jesus continues to make a difference – whether that is
here in Hong Kong, in your home countries wherever they may be, in my home
Cathedral of ST Paul in Wellington New Zealand.
May God continue to bless, encourage
and cajole you in your walk with Christ in this place.