Meditations – Page 2

Category: Meditations

Preaching a Christmas sermon

26 December 2020 blogpastor Leave a comment

This meditation was written during the Christmas of 2016. I read it again this morning as I was tidying up my website. It has a freshness and relevance to it. I decided to repost it:

INCREDIBLE TRUTH

The wonderful truth, the magnificent truth, the incredible truth of the Christmas story is that God came to this hopeless, blinded, wayward world dressed in robes of humanity to live with us and suffer for us and die in our place. God dwelt among us as a babe, as a toddler, as a child, as a teenager, as a working young adult. He identified with our suffering, divided, and uncaring world. He revealed himself to us so we could know him through his words and deeds. He came to make salvation and union with God possible. Without the incarnation there would be no salvation, as much as without the cross and empty tomb there would be no redemption.

PREACHING DURING CHRISTMAS SEASON

There are many characters or “lampstands” in the Christmas story: Zechariah and Elizabeth, Mary and Joseph, wise men, shepherds, Simeon, and Anna. However, when we preach about the characters in the Christmas story we need to hold before the congregation the main thing: Jesus was God incarnate who came to reconcile rebellious humankind to himself. The characters were like menorah lampstands shedding light together so that we can all see that God sent Jesus to save us from all our sins.

Without ignoring this contextual truth, we can look at some smaller picture highlights and use them as focused points of relevance. I am thinking of all the seniors. There are four of them and their journeys lend secondary insights that we could apply to lives of seniors today.

MANY SENIOR CITIZENS IN CONGREGATIONS

There are so many seniors in the churches in Singapore. During the heyday of the revival among evangelicals and the charismatics many youths came and followed Christ fervently. Most of these people are now gray-haired and white-haired and no-haired in our churches. If ladies stop dyeing their hair for a year we will indeed get a clearer impression of the ageing of our congregations. And there is a spirituality for seniors just as there is one for the kids in Sunday School. The seniors have to learn to navigate in a godly way some of the transitions and experiences they will encounter from 55 to 95. The four inspiring seniors in the Christmas story addresses some of them.

Seniors will face a faith challenge. As they near the end of their life, they will think more deeply about faith and life after death. They will think about God, about religion, and about death and eternity. Zechariah’s story of a disappointed faith restored is a good story to inspire people to think about the quality of their own personal faith, and how God wants to assure them when they have doubts.

ELIZABETH’S STORY

Elizabeth’s story is one of deep disappointment, shame, sadness and barrenness. She would have often recalled her past and felt she had failed to make a meaningful life. However, the angel came along and intercepted her pain and tears and delivered the impossible. In her senior years, her life took on purpose and meaning for she and her husband would have the privilege of rearing John the Baptist, the forerunner of the Messiah. This inspiring senior prods us to realize that even in senior years and beyond retirement there can be a higher purpose and great weight attached to living out our faith till death or Jesus comes.

SIMEON’S STORY

Simeon was another godly senior, a prophet without a card. A man ahead of his time. 400 years of silence – no prophetic word to Israel. Suddenly Simeon filled with the Spirit, guided by the Spirit declares by the Spirt the destiny of the child Jesus when the parents came to do Mary’s purification rites and the child’s dedication. Then he prays, Lord I am now ready to go home. I am ready to die. I have seen the Messiah and it is enough. Simeon was able to pray like that because he lived well –he walked in the Spirit and did not gratify the lusts of the flesh. Seniors in our churches need to learn to live well so that they can die well.

ANNA’S STORY

Finally, there was Anna. Great material for inspiring seniors. Seniors will need to learn to grieve well for they will lose loved ones, lose health, lose investments, lose their beauty and they would need to learn to grieve well. As well as Anna who lost her husband at the probable age of 21 after seven years of marriage. The text is silent after that but indications are that she grieved well and had no bitterness towards God or man for she spent her years in dedicated prayers and fasting, serving God and his people and the Temple. What an inspiring elder.

Advent has four Sundays leading up to Christmas day. Do consider preaching a series on inspiring seniors in the Christmas story. Singapore churches need to hear a relevant word for them. Let’s not always focus on the young; speak up to meet the needs of the elderly and inspire them to finish well.

The journey of faith

16 December 2020 blogpastor 2 Comments

We live in a world where it is expected that you know which direction you are heading in life. It is desirable you have a plan. It looks impressive: you have figured it out, you are ahead in the game, you are in control. People nod in approval. They are impressed and the probing stops.

What if you have no plans of what you will do, for instance, after retirement? What if you said, “I do not have a plan. I don’t know. I am giving God a blank page.” Such answers go against the grain. It goes against common sense and conventional wisdom. It shows a lack of preparation. It surprises some people and they try to hide their surprise, and change the topic, as if to protect you from further embarassment.

I am one of those without a plan for post-retirement. Actually, my old self-reliant me would have a sustainable, convergence plan. But I have deliberately refrained from strategizing. I do not even have a tentative plan. I want to rely on God more.

For me personally, it is okay, even imperative to not know what lies ahead. God is weaning me from self-reliance and self-sufficiency. He is teaching me to follow in the footsteps of Abraham, my ancestor in the faith, who obeyed even though he “did not know where he was going” (Heb 11:8b). It’s a journey of faith. He will lead me and I will end up being where He wants me to be, doing what He wants me to do. In the meantime, I want to be content with being with God, until He reveals what I am to be doing for God. Both “being” and “doing” are important but the order is paramount: the former must precede the latter.

Already He has shown me two things He has already written on the blank sheet. He wants me to write; and second, to journey with younger pastors. Therefore, I will begin to obey Him with these two divine directives. I will obey, and watch and pray to see what develops from these steps of faith.

Recently, I was hiking when a vista captured my attention. I stood there and saw a path that disappeared into the foliage. I could not see beyond a bend. What I could see were several large rocks at the beginning of the path. I took the photo above.

In silence I stood still and pondered. Suddenly I realized I was on holy ground. I was in front of the burning bush and God was reassuring me that though I may not have charted a map for my future, and did not know what the future held, He was with me at this beginning of my journey, as certain as I could see those rocks.

This reminded me of Thomas Merton’s honest and humble prayer:

“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please You. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that, if I do this, You will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore, I will trust You always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for You are ever with me, and You will never leave me to face my perils alone.”(Thoughts in Solitude)

Holy Saturday: patient waiting

11 April 2020 blogpastor 2 Comments

Most Protestants do not know bother meditating on Holy Saturday. Who would blame them? As a pastor I myself hardly taught about it, or even thought about it. It is exposure to contemplative spirituality that led me to discern a rich vein of golden truths hidden in the tomb.

The waiting in the tomb speaks to me in so many ways. It tells me that many periods in life can be like being in the uncertain tomb, between the certainties of death and resurrection. To the disciples who followed Jesus it was certainly a period of anxiety, confusion, ambiguity, and the humiliation of not knowing what to do. There are times of transitions in our life when this is exactly how we feel too. We do not know for certain how things will pan out. Will I be able to get a job after the pandemic? Will I lose my current job?

We do learn however that we need to do during this time of uncertainty is WAIT. Waiting patiently is not exactly a Millenial’s favourite thing to do. For that matter, nobody of any age likes to wait. But this stillness, silence and waiting in the tomb is exactly what God is inviting us to do. For in that waiting will be birthed forth and formed the new you that will be able to cope, enjoy, endure and triumph over what is NEXT.

Waiting in stillness, silence and in darkness

Which is what this period of ‘circuit breaker’ seems to be all about. We are in our homely tombs. We feel uncertain as the daily number of covid-19 cases increases rather than decreases. Its been five days and uncertainty still prevails. It is clear we need to be more strict and careful with our social distancing. But what happens next nobody can be sure, although the graph should show a downward curve by the end of the one month of tempered lock down. We are in the in between period, the liminal space of neither here nor there, or not knowing what or how, of seeing through a glass darkly. We will learn that God’s delay is not denial, and his silence is not abandonment.

Jesus stayed still, silent and waited as the dead would. But in his faith perfected by suffering, he knew that the Father, in due time would come to rescue him from the grip of death, and breathe in him the resurrection life of eternal power. We too will need to exercise a faith that after we die in the Lord, there will be a resurrection of the dead from the graves and columbariums and the seas and the earth, and it will be a resurrection unto life, not condemnation or judgment.

Online seder-bringing together four households through WhatsApp

This Holy Saturday, my daughter in law, Ping, organized and led a seder passover meal, a Christian version. It brought together four households via WhatsApp video call. We got the bread, grapejuice, some bitter stuff (wasabi, or herbs), a candle. We gave parts to everyone, including our grandchildren, and went through the script patiently. How wonderful for family to be together in this way – pondering over the great escape from the angel of death through the Blood of the Lamb applied on the doorposts of every believing familiy! This is good preparation for the Lord’s Table on Easter Sunday tomorrow.