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This message was given by Pastor Gene Preston at Community Church Hong Kong on January 2, the second Sunday of Christmas and Epiphany Sunday. Far from being a "low" or slacking off Sunday following the grand Christmas and millennium worship events at the APEX, this was a particularly affectional and friendly family type of service. The New Year's greetings, the prayers which were delivered within fifteen or so small groups after the message, the great songs of hope (Billy Joel's "2,000 Years", "The Jubilee Song," "This is a Time of New Beginnings") and the Holy Communion brought us a sense of palpable Christian fellowship. And on this Sunday raised our fourth liturgical banner, an Epiphany banner showing the guiding star of Christ and the three wise men lifting up their gifts to the star. . Thanks to Carlson Leung for this wonderful tapestry.
In my regular posted mail and nowadays in my e-mail I receive frequent announcements that I have been chosen for some prize or some discount or some travel or investment award. I seldom read the details because I know that all these "Gene Preston rewards" are finally only "come on" solicitations. If I've been chosen to receive a $25.00 certificate from Barnes and Noble, the catch is that I must first purchase $l00 in merchandise; if I've been chosen by Publisher's Clearing House, to receive a million bucks, I must first subscribe to a dozen magazines and then hope to win the elusive cash jackpot. There are no free lunches and every reward carries an offsetting, and for me offputting, obligation. Therefore I hear with surprise and skepticism Paul's announcement to me, and you, in Ephesians that God has given us a reward from the beginning of all time. The reward is that we are made blameless and holy. Let's hear what he has to say: BLESSED BE THE GOD AND FATHER OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST, WHO HAS BLESSED US IN CHRIST WITH EVERY SPIRITUAL BLESSING IN THE HEAVENLY PLACES. JUST AS HE CHOSE US IN CHRIST BEFORE THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD TO BE HOLY AND BLAMELESS BEFORE HIM IN LOVE. HE DESTINED US FOR ADOPTION AS HIS CHILDREN THROUGH JESUS CHRIST, ACCORDING TO THE GOOD PLEASURE OF HIS WILL, TO THE PRAISE OF HIS GLORIOUS GRACE THAT HE FREELY BESTOWED ON US IN THE BELOVED. Do we want to claim this offer and can we possibly believe that there's no catch about it? Can we accept that there just may be some free lunches? The reward of "blameless" is appealing to me. Despite all our modern sophistication, we know we live with blame so much so that we can't handle it. Our modern litigation tries to absolve us from our excess of blame by offering us no fault accident insurance policies and no blame divorces. Even so, there's plenty of blame to go around and it sounds really great that God wants us to know we are blameless. The other part of the reward, that we are declared holy, is more suspect. Many of us have been steered away from respecting holiness because we have seen overly pious and excessively religious people get their own lock on that word. Holiness reminds me of the Jehovah Witness at my door mouthing endless religious platitudes and with total lack of humor and grace. To be rewarded with blameless status sounds too good to be true while full-time holiness sounds like a lot of work and no fun at all. But perhaps we'd better take another look at this reward which Paul says God has marked out for each of us before we were even born. And a common illustration from human relationships may help. Sometimes when a couple seem especially well matched, in marriage or friendship, we say that it seems like they were made for each other. Or we might say, that theirs is a match made in heaven. Such couples often knew each other from their shared childhoods, grew up together, married and lived happily ever after. Surely that kind of chosenness in which their relationship seems foreordained from the beginning of time to stability, affection and permanency, is a very fine model. And that is an apt model for the spiritual chosenness and reward of a permanent, never compromised relationship which Paul is saying is ours. In Ephesians l, Paul believes that our relationship with God goes way back, not to when we were children, or even to when we were born, but before we were born, before anyone was born, before the world began. God chose us in love. Before he ever even created anything, God pictured the two of us, that is you and God, and you and God, and you and God, and me and God, as committed to one another. Way before he created you, he chose you for his own. The problem as we know, even if what Paul says is true, is that we're no longer a compatible couple - us and God. Each of us has grown apart from God. We have developed a wandering eye. We were made for each other maybe, but these days we have a tendency to ignore the one for whom we were made. It seems we're not satisfied loving one God. We don't give God the sort of attention a healthy relationship deserves. And so we get into all sorts of sinful and silly stuff that makes our heavenly lover heart-sick and strains the relationship. He made us to be his own, to be holy, which is to say, hopelessly devoted to him. To be holy means to be hopelessly in love with God just like those made in heaven relationships show total adoration and commitment. God made us to be blameless which is to say God considers us perfectly compatible with God. Our problem, which is God's problem, is that this offered relationship is not one we stick with or just naturally accept. We do resist the love of God, and resist falling back in love with God, because of a variety of reasons and excuses and defenses: Sometimes we have intellectual reservations; sometimes we nurse some great hurt for which we hold God responsible; and more often we just prefer to go on living according to our interests and values which we rightly suspect would need to be changed if we fell back in love with God. The Rev. Art Bauer who runs the little office in New York City which counsels ministers in international ministry sent us this quotation for the new millennium: "While sitting on the bank of a river one day, I picked up a solid round stone from the water and broke it open. It was perfectly dry in spite of the fact that it had been immersed in water for centuries. The same is true of many people, especially in the Western world. For centuries they have been surrounded by Christianity; they live immersed in the waters of its benefits. And yet it has not penetrated their hearts; they do not love God. The fault is not in Christianity, but in human hearts, which have been hardened by materialism and intellectualism" An Indian Christian, Sadhu Sundar Singh, wrote that about l920. With our dry, hardened hearts, we might expect God to just dump us , write us off, find somebody new to love. But, it turns out, God is powerfully devoted to us. He chose us from the foundation of the world and not even our sinful wandering ways can finally put him off. God's love is tenacious. God has gone all the way for us to the cross to keep the two of us together. God has found a way to give us the holiness and blamelesssness that we need for a new compatible relationship with him. He gives us back our original holiness and blamelessness as a gift in Christ. And the holiness and blamelessness God gives us is not something we struggle to achieve or be. Holiness is God's gift to us. Holiness is not some struggle to be pious in order to prove we love God. Paul says: "Praise be to God who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in Christ." In a mysterious and wonderful move, God clothes God's sinful, philandering, people with the holiness and blamelessness of his son, Jesus Christ. And so our reward from heaven has not been erased, never revoked. As we worship on the first Sunday of a new year and a new millennium it's pretty wonderful to realize that God has clothed us fully in the blessing of Christ so that we are blameless and holy as we begin a new the year 2000. Of course, we still need to get used to this relationship in a process called growing in faith. Growing into the holiness of Jesus is a life process in which the Holy Spirit constantly works in our lives to turn us away from those things that hurt our relationship with God and to promote those things that move us into a closer and more intimate relationship with our divine lover. Our holiness, a gift from God, is simply God making it possible to be in love with him. So it seems there may be some free lunches. There may be some rewards we want to accept with no strings attached. And when we go to Jesus' supper, which we are now about to do, we learn again that there are some free meals, given us in love and for our eternal salvation.
Pastor Gene Preston
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The Rev. Gene R.Preston14th Floor, Blk 36, Lower Baguio Villa Tel : 25516161 Fax: 25512114E-mail : gpreston@netvigator.com |
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