Sermon for November 26 2006 - St James’s, Cambridge
One family under Tian - One world, one dream
Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14; Psalm 93; Revelation 1:4b-8; John 18:33-37


PRELUDE - BIBLE READINGS FOR TODAY

Those of you who know me well have discovered that I have two passions - Bible Study and China. Well, having just come back from five wonderful weeks in China I’m bursting to share something of that experience with you. But I’m so committed to the Bible readings which our lectionary sets before us each Sunday that I can’t preach without a few words about the lessons we have just heard.

So I’ll begin with the readings and offer an unabashed invitation to our Sunday morning Bible Study group. Even with a sermon wholly based on the scriptures there still isn’t enough time for what last Sunday’s collect invited us to do about the Holy Scriptures -- to “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them.” That’s why we have a discussion group upstairs each Sunday from 9:15 to 10:15, to talk together about what we think the readings mean and what they say to us. Anybody is welcome, whether regularly, occasionally, or maybe just for the Sundays of Advent as we prepare our hearts and minds for the coming of Christ at Christmas.

Liturgically (that is, according to our church year), today is the last Sunday before Advent, a Sunday often called CHRIST THE KING. Throughout the summer and autumn we have been hearing gospel stories about what Jesus said and did. Today’s readings bring this to a conclusion by helping us say “Wow, this Jesus really was great, really  worthy of praise and glory and kingly honor and power and rule.”  The scripture writers and translators used royal, imperial images and words from their times to proclaim Christ as King. We of today might chose other, more modern  terms to talk about Christ’s universal realm and how Jesus is Lord of our lives, each of us speaking from our own  contexts.

So for me, having just come back from China, the readings remind me that there is one God, one Heavenly being, one Tien (as they say in Chinese) over the whole creation. These readings remind me that God’s kingdom is (as Daniel said) for “all peoples, nations and languages.”  “Everlasting” as the psalm says.  The “Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end” as Revelation says. A “kingdom not of this world” as Jesus said, but universal, from Cambridge to Africa, to Brazil and Ecuador and to China, and indeed to all the places on that world map hanging in the parish hall where we invite you to put your name and homeland when you come to coffee hour today.

This is the Sunday before Advent, the season when we prepare for the coming of Christ which we celebrate at Christmas -- Jesus Christ who comes anew each year with love and peace and healing to people throughout the world.
            



 
PURPOSES OF MY 2006 TRIP TO CHINA

Today’s Bible readings speak to me of God’s presence in all nations and peoples and languages, but they speak especially to me about the loving welcome which Chinese friends and Chinese churches gave me on my recent trip. I felt that I was as much a part of Christ the King’s family in China as I was in Africa and as I am here today in Cambridge

John and I had been to China twice before but those were times for sightseeing and family visits. This trip was very different. I went because so many of the Chinese visiting scholars we have come to know at Harvard and  through our international ministry at St James have said “Come and visit us when we are back in China.” And so I went,  alone this time, because John said I’d learn more Chinese that way.

I went, with four purposes:
 
1. To make pastoral visits to Chinese scholars who had visited and worshiped with us at St James.
2. To learn more about the homes and situations from which visiting scholars come and to
     which they will return.
3. To learn more about Christianity in present day China, especially in the academic communities.
4. And to make a little progress in Chinese language learning.

And by the grace of God, the prayerful support of friends like you all, and the care I received from Chinese friends new and old, I had a happy, healthy and blessed visit. Praise God!  I can only share a few high points today – literally mountain top experiences for me. And a few of the deep, quiet, searching conversations in between.

1. THE GREAT WALL - THE DRAGON ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS
I spent the first three weeks in Beijing living in the homes of three families in three different university communities. I shared their daily lives, visited their work places, and when they were busy I hung out with their students who were eager to practice English, teach me Chinese, show me Beijing, and talk about their hopes, fears, and religious questions in rapidly changing  modern China.  
I went with friends to a different church each Sunday and was drawn into religious conversations almost everywhere I went. I discovered the hunger of so many people in China for faith and moral guidelines, yet I also heard reasons why there are still so many barriers to belief and to public affirmation of faith, especially in urban academic settings.

Perhaps the high point for me in Beijing was when I visited the famous Great Wall of China. A friend and I went north from Beijing on a public bus packed with families going to see their country’s best known symbol and favorite tourist attraction. After an hour driving through the cold grey smog which hung over Beijing we suddenly came out into bright clear October air, blue skies, white clouds, and mountains rising all around us, the slopes ablaze with autumn leaves. Then we began to catch glimpses of the wall itself, winding like a snake or a dragon over the tops of the hills in the distance.  A wall seven meters high, seven meter’s thick, and wide enough at the top for five horsemen to ride abreast.  It was a defensive wall first built two centuries before Christ, eventually stretching from the eastern sea coast near Korea all the way to the western Gobi desert where it
paralleled the ancient Silk Route by which Tibetan Buddhism, Mid-eastern Islam, and  European traders like Marco Polo entered China.  The Great Wall, once more than 2000 miles long, had been built to keep foreign enemies out of China. Now murals of its picturesque remains welcome foreigners to the Beijing International Airport and its image is printed on every Chinese visas.

My friend and I walked with thousands of other tourists along the top of the wall. We posed like everyone else for photos with a backdrop of the wall, the autumn red mountains, and on a distant slope the Beijing 2008 Olympics sign which reads “One World, One Dream.”  One world, one dream. What is that dream, that vision,  which China  has, which you and I have this morning, which the Bible and our faith set before us?  

If Christ is King, if God’s kingdom is for all nations and people and languages, then
- What are we doing to make Christ’s vision of love, peace, goodwill for all people come true?
- What are we doing to share that vision with others?
                                        

2. WUHU - YI CHI SHAN - METHODIST MISSION HOSPITAL

I came down from that mountain top and moved on to visit my next Beijing hosts: Yanfen who is recovering from a bad auto accident in Cambridge last June, her husband Xifang and their daughter Yiwei. I give thanks that Yanfen’s broken bones have healed. Baptized before she left Boston, she now reads the Bible avidly, her faith is growing and I was able to take her and a friend who is battling stomach cancer to the Chongwenmen church for worship and healing prayers. It was the first time either of them had ever attended church in Beijing. I discovered that in China it is often difficult to find a church and hard to get up the courage to go if it has never been a part of your life before. But once we got there we discovered that this church, like every other church I visited in China, was packed to overflowing at 2 or 3 services each Sunday

My second mountain-top experience was  a few days later after Xifang and I traveled south for 12 hours by train  to visit his parents in the small city of Wuhu on the banks  of the great Yangtze River. I was thrilled when Xifang invited me to go with him, because Wuhu was a center of early 20th century mission activity. Our  very own John Hixson’s great aunt, Dr Hyla Waters (or Hyla Doc as she was called), had been a pioneering medical missionary in Wuhu from 1925-1949. Hyla Doc’s letters talk so sensitively about her love and respect for traditional Chinese culture, religion, literature, food and most importantly, people.  John and I knew Hyla Doc as a medical missionary in Liberia, West Africa, where she spent ten more years as a medical missionary after being forced to leave China in 1949.

 So it was such a joy to go with Xifang to Wuhu, then to climb a little mountain called I-Chi-Shan on the banks of the Yangtze River and visit the original Methodist mission hospital where Hyla Doc served for so many years. We also saw the vast modern teaching hospital which has grown out of the seeds planted by those early missionaries and saw the Chinese government doctors and nurses who are carrying on God’s healing work.


 
Later that day we visited a beautiful Catholic church in Wuhu and talked with a vibrant young Catholic sister doing pastoral work, and a faithful old lady cleaning the church. The old woman had worshiped there when the church was at its high point in the 1940s before the Communist takeover. She remained faithful during the 25 years that the church was closed under Communist rule, and was now part of a rapidly growing new congregation since the church reopened in 1980. We also visited the old Episcopal mission buildings now transformed into an interdenominational protestant church with 80 people at worship on a Wednesday afternoon and others waiting for medical care at the busy church clinic next door. From what I could see the churches are alive and well, growing and finding new ways to be doing God’s work in Wuhu where John Hixson’s great aunt once worked with so much love.

3. JIU HUA SHAN - BUDDHIST MOUNTAIN
From Wuhu, Xifang and I moved to another city nearby where we were both put to work teaching classes and giving lectures at a high school and a teacher training college where Xifang’s  old school-mates were teaching.  

On the weekend between teaching days I had my third mountain top experience visiting nearby mount Jiuhua Shan with Xifang and his friends.  Jiuhua Shan is one of four famous Buddhist mountains in China. Again we had to drive an hour out of the urban smog, past dusty construction work on new roads and buildings, and through the fog which spread along the Yangtze River’s vast expanse of marshes,  irrigated rice fields, lotus pools and fish ponds.  Then suddenly we were out of it,  heading up towards the gorgeous mountains, trees and clean air, blue sky, white clouds.

The winding road went over mountain streams, through tiny villages, then past the  yellow walls and curving roofs of a big Buddhist Theological Seminary, and then into the Jiuhua Shan village itself. There were little hotels, shops, houses and temples everywhere among the pine trees and more temples perched higher and higher up the precipitous slopes of the mountain rising above us.

We took a cable car up to visit one of the temples which would have taken us hours if we had climbed. We did hike to several other temples, monasteries and convents and we walked through  bamboo forests, little tea farms hugging the slopes, and village shops serving not only the tourists but also the devout Buddhist monks, nuns and pilgrims who come from all over China.

We entered the first temple just as a  ritual of blessing and healing was beginning on behalf of an affluent family of pilgrims who had come from Shanghai. A chorus of two dozen monks began chanting with deep drum and gong accompaniment, and then the officiating monks and the Shanghai family solemnly entered. I don’t know their concerns, or the words of the liturgy, but their devotion was as sincere and deeply meaningful as any prayers I have ever shared in. And I am sure that the one God, Tien, the Heavenly creator of all the world and all its people  rejoiced to hear those who offered their music and prayers and fragrant incense on that mountain top.

In the entrance hall of another ancient temple there was a solitary barefoot nun in a tattered grey robe standing, kneeling then prostrating herself again and again and again in devout prayer. Nearby was another smartly-dressed woman reading Buddhist prayers or chants from book she held. Each of these pilgrims as well as the many resident nuns and monks offered their sincere prayers and praises and petitions.
 


4. SHE SHAN CATHEDRAL

A week later I climbed another holy mountain, this one  holy to Chinese Catholic Christians.  I had gone from the rural beauty of the Yellow Mountains and the Yangtze River basin, to the vast,  modern skyscrapers of Shanghai where I stayed with other former scholars who had visited Harvard and then returned to teach at Fudan University.

On my Shanghai Sunday they arranged for two of their students to take me early in the morning to a huge Catholic Cathedral at the top of SheShan Mountain, a much smaller mountain rising out of  the flat peri-urban sprawl an hour’s drive west of Shanghai. Here again we found ourselves at the foot of a holy mountain where pilgrims were buying incense and candles to take with them as they climbed up the pilgrim way.  People asked if we were tourists or believers. My student friends said that we were believers, so instead of an instant cable car ride to the top, we walked with the other pilgrims up and up and up through lovely forested slopes until we heard singing from a church half way up. We were just in time for an 8 am mass so we joined the local Catholic “believers” and I  was able to share in the eucharist for the first time on my journey. We worshiped with several hundred believers of all ages including a dozen young Catholic nuns from who led the singing and many young people preparing for confirmation and children who went off  to Sunday School with the sisters.

As we climbed on up the mountain we passed Christian pilgrims who paused to kneel, light candles and pray at each of the stations of the cross which marked the way up.  Some sang or chanted prayers, their music sounding so similar to that of Buddhist pilgrims I had heard a week before on Jiuhua Shan.

Finally we reached the top where a  giant empty cathedral towered over us, built by Spanish Catholic missionaries 135 years ago. Once beautifully decorated with stained glass windows, statues of the saints and Chinese silk vestments. All was shattered, destroyed, emptied and closed up during the cultural revolution – but the faith was not destroyed as the worshipers that morning testified. And once places of worship were permitted to reopen after 1979 people again flocked to this holy mountain as to all the other churches I visited in China. Now the cathedral is being restored and schools for the training Catholic priests and religious sisters have sprung up on the slopes of the mountain below.

From that Sunday morning’s high point we came back down to the dusty suburban roads and factories, then back to the glitzy streets and skyscrapers of Shanghai itself. There too we found hundreds of church goers packed into an afternoon service in a lovely old colonial church building while thousands of other people rushed past on one of the busiest shopping streets in Shanghai.

I looked up at the Chinese characters inscribed a hundred years ago on the front of that church, and I was told that they say: The truth will make you free.



CONCLUSION


I believe that Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life.
That Jesus shows us the Way to live a life of Love in this world.
I believe that we as Christians do have a gospel to proclaim, good news to preach to the world.

But I also believe that we have much to learn from other people around the world
    who are also on their journeys of faith.

I give thanks to the Chinese families who took me into their homes and their lives
    and made this pilgrimage of learning and sharing possible for me.
                                                

At the end of Hyla Doc’s book she tells of assuring a Chinese Muslim that Christians and Muslims believe in the same God, the one God, who is variously called  Allah or Yahweh or Jehovah in the Arab and European worlds and who is called Shengdi, Tian-fu or simply or Tian in China.

Then Hyla Doc concluded with a Chinese proverb:
    Tian xia, yi jia - Under heaven, one family.

I thank God for the reminders I have had these past few weeks that we are indeed
    one family under heaven  –  one world, one dream.

May each of us find ways in our own lives to experience and to share this dream.