A New Creation is everything
From Wellington Cathedral of St Paul
Sermon preached in the Cathedral of St John the Evangelist, Hong Kong on 4th July 2010. Frank Nelson served on the Cathedral staff 1998 - 2001.
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!” 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’ . 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.
