Jeremiah 29:1-7; Matthew 2:1-2, 13-23
The story of the wise men following the star is one of our Scripture readings again for two reasons.
This week on 6 January Eastern churches will be celebrating the birth of Jesus and the Epiphany or “manifestation of Christ” to the Gentiles.
Secondly it is of interest, because we also are “in the East.”
How do we see the light of Christ differently and in some ways, more clearly, because of where we live, because at this moment we are “in the East”?
In both readings places make a difference to how people experience God and understand what he is like.
Jeremiah is telling Jewish believers in exile that they can still worship God in a different place from their own country and that God wants them to be committed to the good of that country.
Matthew is reminding Jewish Christians 500 years later that Jesus did not only come for them, but also for people from other lands like the Magi from the East.
Places make a difference. For instance, living in Malaysia may teach us about prayer in a way that living in New Zealand may or may not. Being a migrant or a refugee makes parts of the bible, including perhaps the letter from Jeremiah to exiles, come alive to us.
As a pastor part of my work is helping Christians with different experiences of God understand one another better. People have different gifts, are at different stages of life, and have different personality types. They come from different places which affect their assumptions about how things should be done.
One of our challenges is learning which of these differences matter because they are due to sin, and what differences just have to be managed because they are due to the goodness and diversity of God’s creation, not to failure of some kind.
Church history can also remind us of the importance of different places and how they have affected what Christians think of as normal ways of being church. For Presbyterians – places like Edinburgh in Scotland or Geneva in Switzerland are places where significant things happened. But some of the problems and answers from those places are not the same as what was worked out in Africa or India, or China, or Korea or here in Malaysia.
Christianity in the East has its own history, and unfortunately much of that history has been neglected and forgotten.[1] One person who helped its rediscovery was a Scottish clergyman Claudius Buchanan who was a chaplain to British traders and soldiers in the East India Company. In 1809 preached and published a sermon which he called “A Star in the East” on this same text from Matthew we have read this morning.
At that time missionary work in British India was illegal. While in India he had begun to appreciate some of the ancient stories of Christianity in Asia before European contact, including the stories of St Thomas coming to India in 52 AD and dying there twenty years later.
Buchanan got involved with William Wilberforce and others to open India to Christian mission. He even created an essay competition on the best means of evangelizing India with the enormous prize money of £500.
As well as a presence in India from the first century there had long been Christian churches East of Jerusalem in Syria and Armenia. There were also churches along the Silk Road to China. Medieval visitors like Marco Polo and Catholic diplomats travelled through Southeast Asia. In medieval times there were Christian tribes in what is today Mongolia. Later the Jesuits had missions in India, Melaka, Macao, the Moluccas, Japan and into China. The Spanish brought Catholicism to the Philippines.
The 19th century saw huge expansion of mission. Penang, Singapore and Melaka attracted missionaries waiting for China. In 1910, there was a World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh to coordinate Protestant missionary efforts. Representatives later visited Asia and came to Singapore in 1912.
In the 20th century it was realised that there was a problem how to relate together the new churches which were growing in Africa and Asia to the older churches of Europe and North America. Now there were Christians in most parts of the globe it was a general question how much should the churches in Asia and Africa be Asian and African – or did you have to be European to be truly Christian? Even if you answered “Of course not!” the details were not easy. Whose culture has the right to define what is authentic Christian faith?
Of course we share faith in Jesus Christ. We believe that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.” We all use baptism as a form of initiation. We all use prayers based on Jesus’ last meal with his disciples. We all read the Bible. We all pray in the name of Jesus Christ. Whatever our differences we all seek to be followers of Jesus.
And yet some things are different. One area is the effect of science on faith.
In Western countries the success of science had affected how people understood the way God worked in the world. People began to assume that God was a scientist and that so his laws must be scientific laws. While some saw science as a just a different overlay map of the same reality, others saw it as a threat because it said the reality was different and it gave alternative explanations for how the world worked and how it had been created. For many people miracles, prayer and the very existence of God now became problems.
For some time protestant missionaries from the West believed their brand of Christianity could cope with science and that science was useful ally in the fight against superstition and irrational religion. It was also believed that because of this English was the only safe religious language and in India missionaries persuaded the British administration to support English language schools more than schools in local languages.
(Others realised that every language present some risk to Christian truth, and that at the same time every language and culture is capable of bearing the good news of the Gospel. Because Jesus was truly human as well as truly God we believe that God’s word in the bible should be translated into the language of every nation.)
In the West in particular popular science, sociology, and psychology started to help erode confidence in the existence of God and reduced the status of the church. I have known Malaysian Christians practically in tears over the state of the churches they saw in Europe and they wondered how it was that these once great missionary countries could have so lost their faith and emptied their churches.
There are different issues here in the East.
Here I have known people who came to Malaysia who changed their understanding of what it is to be Christian. Some made a personal commitment to Christ for the first time. Malaysia has provided a freedom to explore what it means to be a Christian, and that has been a wonderful discovery. And if you are on that journey I encourage you to take another step.
I would like to encourage us all to think what is it about following Jesus that you can discover more clearly here, than you might somewhere else.
1) We may find being here presents the gift of opportunity. Here you may have time to be part of a bible study or fellowship group which at other times and places has not been possible.
2) Here you may discover permission to pray – there is no problem saying grace before a meal in any Malaysian restaurant.
3) Being in a society in which different religions are practiced, helps you understand other faiths the beliefs and customs of real people who are quite different from media stereotypes. It also gives you permission to think about what is God really like. You may read the bible with new eyes. You may find friends willing to discuss questions which were not taken seriously in other places.
4) You may find opportunity for fellowship with Christians different from you own tradition. We may discover that issues which seemed central to Christian faith in other countries, here are not so important.
5) It may be an advantage that here you may be away from places where you had an unhappy experience of the church. Here some of those associations are broken and you can think about God in a fresh way.
6) Here you may hear stories of how God has helped other people in their lives, in their work and business, in their health, in their concern for members of their family. You may discover that God wishes to be much more involved in our personal lives than you realised. You may be struck by how people have made choices to be Christian that are costly, but it has been their decision.
7) You may also discover here that your understanding of God expands. God is not only more personal he is also more concerned with larger issues and problems than those of our own world, however important. So we can discover that God is bigger not smaller. This is a place to grow our understanding of what God is like.
In conclusion I want to pick up the words from Jeremiah 29:1-7. It includes an extract from a letter to people who have been forced into exile. They had known what it was to deal with God in their home land and they wanted to go back. Jeremiah had to tell them that that was not going to happen any time soon and they needed to face being committed to where they now were.
Sometimes we apply to ourselves the promise “I alone know the plans I have for you, plans to bring you blessing.”
It is an important promise, but I think the more important word is verse 7 “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you . . . and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare, you will find your welfare.”
The “city” here can represent each of the cultural groups we relate to – one’s own family, church, other Christians, one’s own ethnic group, other ethnic groups in the one country. This is not simple. They all matter. Some of their needs conflict, but each one of them is likely to enrich our understanding of what it means to be a Christian.
St Andrew’s seeks to be an international church where we own these multiple cultural dimensions of identity and work out what we have to do to work together as a Christian community which takes seriously biblical teaching on Christian love, being an equipping church, seeking to serve others and one another in the name of Christ so that we grow together in him. Other churches in other lands will have a similar vision, but our being in Malaysia will make this possible in a way that is also unique.
We too, like those wise men of old, will have seen his star in the East.
AMEN.
John Roxborogh
[1] See Philip Jenkins, The lost history of Christianity, Oxford University Press, 2008.
