The Second Sunday before Lent

15th February 2009: Sung Eucharist 9.00 am

Preacher: The Revd John Chynchen

Readings: Proverbs 8. 1, 22 – 31; Colossians 1. 15 –20 ; John 1. 1–14

The world economic engine has all but collapsed. A great number of countries are officially in recession. There is a new President of the United States, the world’s largest economy and only super power. Although he has taken office amidst the ravages of war and terrorism and economic chaos, the anxious inhabitants of our so-called global village look to Barack Obama for leadership and inspiration. Here at home, in Hong Kong, a considerable number of people have lost their jobs, and more likely will. Others have seen much of their provision for retirement disappear.

On this particular day, the second Sunday...the half-way mark ...in our Stewardship Campaign, I find myself called to take up the Dean’s theme from his sermon seven days ago. The rub – the challenge – lies in the context of the scriptural ambush embedded in the lectionary...the prologue of John’s gospel...with which, only seven weeks ago, we greeted the infant Jesus at midnight on Christmas Eve.

So, in the midst of our lowliness, in the time of our testing, the Lord appears among us. God enters our hearts with a love that cannot be extinguished. God offers us a guide to faith and salvation that no economic collapse can erode or cheapen. God takes our puzzlement and our failure and redeems them with new insight.

If the light truly shines in the darkness, then where have we been living? Some would say we have chosen darkness over the light. We have chosen to live on credit. We have chosen to live beyond our means as nations and as peoples. We have forgotten that there is always a price to pay for greed – a price paid by all of us. And if we were honest, we would admit that deep down, we all knew this economic splurge would have to end; perhaps not with a bang, but a whimper.

But in that darkness comes the light of the Word made flesh. Within the darkness can always be found the seeds of light.

In a neighbourhood shelter in Cape Town, South Africa, there was a financial crisis. Grant money that usually supported the shelter had dried up, and the place that many relied on for a daily meal was faced with imminent closure. A local rabbi came by to see the director and asked, “Why are you closing?”

“We’re out of money, rabbi,” she said.

“Well,” he replied, “time to go and get some!”

She looked at him oddly for a moment and then realized she hadn’t thought about any alternatives. In a month, with the rabbi’s help, seven churches and a synagogue had taken on support of the shelter. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

So, how is it with you as our fleeting winter gives way to long and sultry summer? Are you simply waiting to see when the other shoe will drop? Are you waiting for President Hu Jintao and our Chief Executive to come up with the goods? Or President Obama to do something big and bold? Alas, already he is in up to his proverbial neck in bailouts, toxic assets and wars.

It is time to go to work, time to act like the gifted people God created us to be, time to be about God’s business in our church, our community, and our family – business that is committed to redemption, and business that brings graciousness to the lives of all people. That is what we should be doing, because that is what God has done for us.

We learn from John that there is a definite connection between the Creation and revelation. God created the world. Jesus Christ was part of that process, and continues to reveal to us the wonderful works of God in all creation. Some people have built a great barrier between the world and God, and see the world as evil and depraved, deserving nothing more than God's wrath. But this passage of Scripture dignifies all creation by connecting it to God through Jesus. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being (John 1:3). We cannot separate ourselves from other creatures and the created order except at our peril. Chaos, hell, death, and evil have insinuated themselves into the ordered creation, so beautifully described in today’s first reading from Proverbs, and are now characteristic of the way we are re-ordering the world. When we do violence to creation, we do violence to the creator.

Half a century ago, J B Phillips analysed society’s misconceptions about what Christians believe. He observed that God had become remote and ridiculous, irrelevant to the misery of the world as we experience it. A theological imbalance had become the cheap parody of Christian faith, and it remains so in the minds of many people today.

But perhaps our understanding of God and the compelling attraction of faith can be revitalised and expanded by the recovery of the vision of God that others have held in earlier generations. Here we discover a faith in God that is more robustly tentative and extravagantly provisional.

God is the foundation of all reality; what God is guarantees the unity of the universe. God does not need strict institutional definitions, membership requirements, or enforcement policies to keep it going or insure its integrity. Christ is the one in whom all things (divine and human, heavenly and earthly) hold together.

The writings of the German theologian Ernst Käsemann were of great interest and inspiration to me when I was at Theological College back in the late 80s. A pupil of Bultmann, he was part of the Confessing Church movement during the 1930s in Germany and ended up in Gestapo detention as well as later becoming a prisoner of war. His academic work was primarily on the subject of the "new quest" for the historical Jesus.

I’ve unearthed a sermon about Käsemann entitled "A Confident Wandering" by B J Robinson. Here's an excerpt:

We all started out with such fervent hopes and dreams. Faith seemed so sure and alive and wonderful. But life has a way of exploding those temples we construct for ourselves into a million pieces. For we find that keeping those marriage vows is not as easy as we were told. And the church is not always a Christian place to be. And the people you believed you could trust let you down. And all that you had ever worked for and wanted to be can also blow up in your face. The day your world fell apart and you thought you were going to die because the place you thought was home – wasn't. And it seemed as if your faith was slipping away.

But by the grace of God, your life didn't end; and, looking back, it seemed like a new chapter began. God was turning your disaster into a new beginning. Jesus was asking you to get into the boat with him and sail off to the other side of the lake. It is times like those when faith stops being something firm and unshakeable and becomes an adult kind of relationship.

...an adult kind of relationship? Without it, I would suggest, we become either sentimental or cynical. And then it becomes very, very difficult for us to be of support to others who are experiencing true adversity.

Ernst Käsemann himself put it this way:

Had I no other faith to live by, I should yet live and believe with him, and one single beam of his light in our existence seems to me more important than the full sun of orthodoxy. For what is decisive for all time is not how much we have believed, but that we have believed and followed him however little we understood about him.

God creates us to stretch up to our full stature, to become persons who can exercise adult discernment and have the integrity to live by it, come what may. Sovereign and all-powerful, God has no need to be a gate-keeper, because if God had wanted something different, God would have made something else! Amen.