12^th August 2013

Rev Dr Max Champion at St John's UCA Mt Waverley Sunday 4 August 2013

Lessons - Psalm 109:1-9; Colossians 3:1-17; Luke 13:22-30

'Because you have been raised with Christ, there is no longer Greek
and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or
free, but Christ is all and in all!' (Colossians 3:11)

It is a happy coincidence that the Colossians reading is set for
consideration today after our recent trip to Myanmar. It has been a
privilege to meet with minority Christians from ethnic, cultural and
linguistic backgrounds that are so different from our Western traditions
in a country which, until 2011, was ruled by a harsh military dictatorship
and where long-standing conflicts between ethnic and religious groups
still threaten social cohesion.

Our text reminds us that the Christian Church, having sprung from Jewish
roots, is a world-wide community that embraces people from every society
and social class, including those often thought to be inferior (Luke
13:30). Differences of culture, language, ethnicity and status that
sociologically define the human race, and are often the cause of
suspicion, hatred and brutality, have been overcome 'in Christ'.

The unity of the Christian community is wonderfully unnatural. What
usually divides us cannot be allowed to separate us from the forgiving
love of God in the incarnate, crucified, risen and ascended Lord. (v14).

Consider the groups mentioned in our reading that had nothing in common.

* The Greeks took pride in a high culture and reverence for many gods
built on their intelligence; Jews had a more ascetic culture built on
faith in the One God.

* Being circumcised was an indispensable mark of Jewish faith; but not to
other nations or religions.

* The 'barbarians' were regarded as uncultured and irreligious peoples.

* The Scythians were an ethnic group whom the Jewish historian Josephus
described as 'differing hardly at all from wild beasts'.

* Slaves and free men belonged to the lowest and highest echelons of
society respectively.

Although these groups had nothing in common, the believers among them were
united in a new community 'bound together in perfect harmony' (v14), not
by natural ethnic, cultural or social ties, but by the mercy of God
revealed 'in Christ'. Natural distinctions of worth between cultures and
within societies count for nothing in the Christian community. Groups that
are so different from each other in the 'natural order' are united 'in
Christ'. The rich diversity within the human family - far from being a
barrier to Christian unity - is a sign of the power of the Gospel to unite
people in a community formed to praise God.

Ruth and I saw something of this power in the tiny Christian community in
Myanmar (five percent of the population). Myanmar Evangelical Graduate
School of Theology is dedicated to good theological scholarship and the
training of missionaries and teachers in an overwhelmingly Buddhist
society. Teachers and students meet daily for worship, prayer and singing.
A 200-strong congregation of young people and families held four services
on Sundays on the ninth floor of a building without lifts or fire escape.
This church set up 17 homes across Myanmar for girls abandoned or orphaned
in a society where the State does not provide welfare for vulnerable
children.

No doubt some British colonisers of Burma regarded the people as
barbarians or 'Scythians'. Not so the missionaries who came 200 years ago.
Despite their failures to fully understand local customs, they treated the
people as fellow beneficiaries of the grace of God in Christ. Today,
leadership of Christian communities comes largely from among the Chin,
Kachin and Karen peoples, where the influence of missionaries was
strongest.

What we glimpsed in Myanmar is what happens whenever the Church focuses on
its Christ-centred unity. People are motivated to proclaim the Gospel to
the corners of the earth. No person or people - however primitive,
inferior or godless they are thought to be - are beyond the reach of the
love of God who has poured out his life for the world in the crucified and
risen Christ.

As this is the centre of the Gospel we must read the passage carefully,
not only in relation to mission in other countries but also in our own
context.

Some preachers today will use the text to exhort their congregations to
embrace multiculturalism and be more open to asylum seekers. They will
rightly bemoan a tendency in the Australian community to treat people from
non-Western cultures as inferior to long-term residents and unworthy of
being treated with dignity. Also, they will rightly remind us of our
binding obligation, as a Church and a nation, to welcome the stranger and
protect the persecuted, the abused and the vulnerable.

However, in responding to this present challenge, let us not miss what
Paul says. He is not promoting the kind of multiculturalism which says
that we must accept all the practices and customs of the various groups
that make up society. Christians are not united only by our ethnic and
cultural diversity!

In Colossians, and in Scripture as a whole, there is a clear distinction
between 'diverse life-styles' that arise from our life in Christ and those
that are inherently hostile to God's revelation in Christ.

What Paul says about the unity that overcomes natural divisions is based
on what God has done for the human race - all ethnic groups - in Christ.
'He is the image of the invisible God' (1:15) who, through his cross and
resurrection, has brought peace and mercy into our often strife-torn and
hate-filled world. He encourages those who 'have been raised with Christ'
and 'died to themselves', and whose new life is 'hid with Christ in God',
to 'do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus' as they look forward to
the glorious future that awaits them in him.

They are called, not simply to celebrate multicultural differences -
important as it is to befriend others - but to embrace what the late Pope
John Paul II called a 'culture of life'. As a Christian community that is
made up of people 'from east and west, north and south' (Psalm 109:3; Luke
13:29), they are set apart to be compassionate, kind, humble, patient,
forgiving and loving in relation to each other, and to worship God in song
and prayer (vv 12-16). In Christ they are to live life to the full!

At the same time, they are a warned to resist the 'culture of death'. The
flipside of life in Christ is worship of the self, manifest in
fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, envy, anger, wrath, malice,
slander, lying and abusive language (vv 5-9).

That such things took place in early Christian communities should alert us
to the need to give up behaviour that threatens unity. It is not
multiculturalism as such the Church should embrace. People from all ethnic
groups behave badly!

Our unity in Christ certainly breaks down 'natural barriers'. But it is
not our ethnic, cultural, linguistic or social status as such that defines
the Church. Whether we are Greek, Jewish, barbarian, Scythian, free,
slave, British, migrant, indigenous, Burmese and so on, the crucial thing
is that we 'put on Christ' and 'put to death' things that undermine the
unity of the Christian community.

We are 'united in Christ' as people who are 'diverse' in culture,
ethnicity and social standing. But we are not united by diversity as such!
Some forms of diversity, like behaviour mentioned in our text, destroy
Christian unity. As members of the Uniting Church in Australia we belong
to a church in which people from many parts of the world are rightly
welcomed. At the same time, we do well to remember that the test of a
multicultural church is not ethnicity as such but our common-unity in
Christ who has come that all nations may have life in all its fullness (vv
12-17).

~~~~

Ruth and I have been richly blessed to have met fellow-Christians in
Myanmar - from such different cultural, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds -
whose warmth, faith, kindness, generosity, joy, love and hope shone
through despite the difficult circumstances in which they often minister.
May we here in Australia also rejoice in the Gospel of Christ that has
reached into the far corners of the earth to be a source of blessing to us
and to others.

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Rev Dr Max Champion is minister in the St John's Uniting Church,
Mt Waverley, Victoria, Australia.

Dr Champion is Chair of the Assembly of Confessing Congregations within
the UCA.