Reflections...

A sermon preached at Kowloon Union Church on Sunday 5th August 2007 by Ms. Jelita Gardner-Rush. The scripture readings that day were Hosea 11:1-11, Colossians 3:1-11 and Luke 12: 13-21.


Good morning.

It’s a great privilege to have this opportunity to reflect on God’s Word to us with you today. I have been sharing in worship with you for more than 2 years now. For some people that will sound like a long time. In a place like Hong Kong that moves so quickly and has many transient residents, 2 years can be a long time. But for many of you it will seem as though I arrived here yesterday. For our congregation is blessed both with visitors and with many people who have a long commitment to this church and its mission. As I say, I am privileged to share this time of reflection with you and I have been privileged to call this church home since I came to Hong Kong.

Many of you will know that I am a lawyer by profession. One of the first phrases I learnt in Cantonese was “Ngoh hai leuht si”. And “Wo shi lu shi” was in my first Mandarin lesson a few months ago. In Hong Kong, everyone asks what you do for a living. This is a highly industrious city. Many more women especially engage in full time work out of the home than would be the case in Australia. And I always feel that my answer to the question about work has some impact on the way people are going to behave towards me.

Before I came to Hong Kong, I was also a lawyer in Australia. I expect only a few of you know how a person who is a lawyer in one country, becomes a lawyer in another country. As you know, the laws of Australia and Hong Kong are not the same. How is it that, as an Australian, I can be a lawyer in Hong Kong? The answer is that I had to re-qualify. To gain admission as a foreign lawyer in Hong Kong, I was required to sit 4 very hard and very long exams. Studying for these exams took almost all of my spare time for about 4 months in my first year after arriving here. And in the final month, when the exams were held, I did not go to work at all, but spent day and night at home studying. It was one of the most gruelling experiences of my life.

Why did I have to study so hard? I had seen the statistics on passing these exams. They were not encouraging. Many people speculated that the purpose of the exams was not, as you might have thought, to check that foreign lawyers had enough knowledge of Hong Kong law to give good legal advice. The purpose of the Overseas Lawyers Qualification Exams was to exclude foreigners from the legal profession as much as possible. Each year at least one of the four exams would have a pass rate around 30%. In this way, they suggested, the legal profession would be preserved from including too many foreigners who might harm the success of local lawyers. The qualification process was designed to exclude rather than include foreign lawyers in the legal profession in Hong Kong.

Why am I torturing you with information about admission to legal practice in Hong Kong? It is because I want to consider with you today the qualifications we require for entry to heaven. I believe the Bible passages that Robert read to us today have an important message about how we can qualify for God’s love. And about how we might be trying to qualify by taking the wrong exams or even setting the wrong exams for others.

Let’s start with Jesus – usually a good place to begin. What did he say?

As Luke retells this event in Jesus ministry, Jesus is prompted to teach by a person’s real situation and he goes on to use a parable to illustrate his point. A man asks Jesus to adjudicate between himself and his brother on their inheritance. In fact, the man asks Jesus to determine that he and his brother should receive equal shares of their father’s property. Equal shares seems like a pretty fair outcome to us. But under to the law of the time, sons received disproportionate inheritance according to their birth order. The eldest son was designated to inherit the position of head of the family. This position would bring both privilege and responsibility including financial obligations. The eldest son therefore usually received a larger inheritance of the father’s property to meet these obligations and set him up to continue the family’s prosperity.

So the man who asks Jesus for an equal share is the younger son. We don’t know why he thought he was entitled to this much, that is, more than he would usually receive. Maybe the two sons had shared equally in building up the family property with their father. It’s interesting that this man believes that Jesus can decide between them. Clearly he trusts Jesus’ judgment and maybe he thinks Jesus will be take pity on the younger son who receives less. After all, Jesus has a reputation for being kind to those who are missing out in society.

But Jesus redirects the man’s concern. Instead of granting or denying the man’s petition, Jesus simply refuses to get involved. Then he turns to the crowd and warns them against seeking more wealth than they already have, being driven by greed.

A couple of weeks’ ago when Rev Judy gave the children’s talk about Mary and Martha, she asked them the question – What would you do if you met God? This man too had the opportunity to meet God and to ask his most important question. And what does he do with this moment? He wants to know if Jesus can work it so he gets a bit more of his Dad’s money. It might seem like a wasted opportunity to us. It shows how driven by his desire for more wealth this man was.

But, although Jesus might be disapppointed, he doesn’t spend more time rebuking the man. He uses the man’s request to teach. Jesus describes a rich man who had so much grain he decided to build extra barns to house it. And when they were built, the rich man felt satisfied. He said to himself: “Well, I’ve made it. I have more wealth than I am ever going to need. I can sit back and relax and enjoy it.” As it turned out, the rich man did not have much longer to enjoy his wealth for he had to leave it behind that very night. The rich man thought he had qualified for everything that mattered. But he was wrong. As Jesus says to the crowd: “A person’s true life is not made up of the things he owns, no matter how rich he may be.”

So it’s pretty clear that if we plan to qualify for God’s love, money is not going to be a big help and “wealth accumulation” is definitely not the exam paper we ought to be enrolling for.

In his letter to the Colossians, Paul reminds us that we already know which qualification we needed. Indeed, what we know is, we have already received the ‘pass’ on our exam paper. Paul writes: “You have been raised to life with Christ.” Not only have we already been qualified, but we didn’t even sit the horrible test. We know that Christ, who had all the answers, went and took the paper for us. And, by our faith in the importance of Christ’s death and resurrection, we get to take that pass mark on our report card too. Earlier in his letter to the Colossians, in a passage we heard two weeks ago, Paul wrote: “by means of the physical death of his Son, God has made you his friends, in order to bring you holy, pure and faultless into his presence. You must of course continue faithful on a firm foundation, and must not allow yourselves to be shaken from the hope you gained when you heard the gospel.”

Holy, pure and faultless in the presence of God – we could not possibly want for higher qualifications than those.

And we are to remain faithful and maintain the hope we have because of God’s great gift to us in Christ. In the passage from Colossians we heard today, Paul said more about two consequences of our being freely qualified for God’s kingdom. Not qualifications for God’s love, but outcomes of being already fully qualified.

The first of these is the way we understand ourselves and live our lives in the here and now. Paul admonishes us to change our behaviour to reflect the great change in our status before God that Christ has accomplished for us. He calls us to put away the old behaviours and ways of being that were hurtful to ourselves and others – anger, hateful feelings, indecency and lies. We should put on the new self. It sounds like putting on a new piece of clothing, like a new suit or dress. And we know how sometimes just wearing new clothes can make us feel different. But unlike clothing, which only changes our outer appearance, Paul says we should put on a whole new being. To me this means, not only that we should treat others differently because of the new life we have received but that we should treat ourselves differently too. We should adopt God’s attitude of forgiveness and grace towards ourselves as well. Not wasting our energy and joy in self-loathing, self-pity, self-deception or unhealthy self-criticism. We are fully qualified for love from God – we need not deny ourselves the experience of true grace.

The second consequence of our being reconciled with God of which Paul writes is that we should recognise this new life and new being in others as well. We no longer need to distinguish people by the old measures – because those qualifications are no longer relevant. We should not be assessing people with tests that are designed to exclude those who fail. We all hold the same diploma – the sacrifice of Christ. So, Paul says, there is no longer any distinction between slave or free, Jew or Gentile and so on. Then he sums up the whole of the message for today in 7 words: “Christ is all, Christ is in all.”

Christ is all any of us needs to be within God’s grace, and all of us have received that gift of grace through Christ. Not through any process of qualification that depended on our own effort or merit. What remains is for us to live as though we believe it – because we do.

I see this attitude – Christ is all, Christ is in all – very much alive in our congregation. It is one of the reasons I love to be a part of this church. For in our congregation there is no distinction between those who are wealthy and those who are in need; between those who are older and those who are younger; between those who visit once and those who have come here for decades; no distinction between those who practice law and those who have been in prison; those who come early for worship and those who barely catch the sermon. As for distinctions between Jews and Gentiles, we have an abundance of ethnic, cultural and linguistic origins among us. I have long worshipped in city churches. From Canberra to Jerusalem. Their congregations have a particular character – membership changes often, they may be multi-cultural, they are usually conscious of wider social and political issues. I have never seen a congregation that seeks to hold so much diversity together in one body as this one does.

We welcome people from all walks of life, from any Christian tradition, we invite them to pray in their own languages, we seek a unity of worship and fellowship that includes all, we offer people membership without relinquishing their affiliations elsewhere. We ask people to exercise their gifts in whatever way they feel able; and we allow people just to be, in this space and among us, in peace. When you share the peace with one another today, look around at the diversity of the body of Christ. There is much to be thankful for.

We know that none of us has qualified for the love of God by our own actions. When we hear Paul’s list of behaviours that we ought to put away like old clothing, maybe we feel that we are again falling short of what is required. We may be tempted to focus on the ways in which we see others failing to implement their new being in Christ. It is important for us to remember the passage we heard from Hosea today. It reminds us that God’s love for us has been constant and ardent long before we knew of it. Hosea speaks of God as a tender parent, bending down to care for a child, gathering up his people in his arms, even when they did not acknowledge him. God mourns for the harm we do to ourselves and others, and God is also angered by it, but God’s love is too strong to allow what we do, our shortcomings, to turn him away. “How can I give you up? How can I abandon you? My heart will not let me do it.” says the Lord in Hosea.

In our own hearts and in our caring for each other let us continue to be constantly renewed in the image of this loving God. Amen.