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Paul and Ina Watson's visit to St Edward's
27th July 2008
Its really wonderful to be here again with you this morning. As we drove from Macclesfield the fog lifted as we came into Leek. It was a wonderful entry here, really super. Thank you so much for your help and your support over the last four and a half years and these last few verses from our reading from Romans 10 crystallise that when it says, ‘How can they call on one they have not believed in? How can they believe in one they have not heard? How can they hear without someone preaching and how can they preach unless they are sent?’ And you had sent us, that’s the bottom line. You, along with a few other churches, had sent us to Sri Lanka. We couldn’t be there, doing what we were doing, without your help and your support. And what I want to do this morning is just to take ten minutes from that passage in Romans to talk about the Gospel that we believe in as Christians, in a Buddhist context.
Now there are many similarities to your situation here in Leek or in the UK generally. Because there are two main alternatives to the Gospel that we preach. And these two alternatives we find - in the Jewish people and we find them also in Sri Lanka. The first is that we can gain merit by doing good works, that we can earn our salvation. (In fact, in Sri Lanka, they have car stickers - Buddhist people have car stickers which say - because some Christians have these “Jesus says…” stickers on the back of their car or scooter, - Buddhist’s have these stickers which say, “We can only save ourselves…” Or something along those lines.)
The basic Buddhist understanding is as Moses said in Romans 10 verse 5:
“The righteousness is by the Law. The man who does these things will live by them.”
Moses was talking about the Jewish people but it is the same for folk in Sri Lanka also. That as they act righteously, as they live properly, as they do good deeds they obtain merit. And that merit can be passed on to others who have already died. So that in their next life they are re-born up. Which usually means, in our context, being re-born as a Scotsman! [ Paul is a Scotsman!] Well may be not, but perhaps something else. But through good deeds they can obtain merit which can be shared with others. And it is a righteousness which comes from doing good actions and its not dissimilar really to Medieval Catholicism in that sense. And actually it produces sometimes some wonderful people. I mean some of them are very meritorious in their lives. They work very hard to do good things. But they believe salvation lies that way and we have people in the UK like that as well don’t we? And we ourselves can fall into that trap, even as Christians. We think that God’s acceptance of us depends on coming to every single Mother’s Union meeting, for example, or making it to the choir every Sunday, or the Sunday School. Of being there. All these things are important but God’s love for us does not depend on them. I will come on later to what God’s love does depend on. It is very tempting for us - all of us - to slip into trying to earn God’s love and God’s salvation by what we do. By basically gaining merit or as we say in English getting ‘Brownie points’. But out of this first kind of temptation I’ve had Muslim friends also say to me, “You Christians have it so easy. We have all these laws to do. How are we to do everything?” Its a basic misunderstanding that we have it easy and I will show that in a minute.
The second temptation for us as Christians or the second reality in the Sri Lankan context is to be clever - to be sophisticated - and this is what Moses says here. He says,
“Do not say in your heart who will I send to heaven or who will descend into the deep?”
What he’s meaning there is the temptation to go looking for the answers to these big questions of salvation and suffering and problems of life. To go looking for them in some very exotic places. Or in some very sophisticated philosophies. Now Buddhism has the most unbelievably sophisticated philosophy. An understanding of human personality and human psychology especially. But they also have a very high, complex understanding about the nature of reality that most ordinary Buddhist people do not understand. But it gives Buddhists - some of them - a kind of sense of satisfaction that their religion is far more clever than this simple Christian message of a virgin birth and a man who died on a tree and who rose again. They think its simplistic. It doesn’t compare to the sophistication of Buddhist teaching and not so much Buddhist teaching but how they have developed it over the years. Now in Britain as well it can be like that. We can be a little bit embarrassed sometimes about the simple Gospel. It doesn’t quite stand up to the same scrutiny or it doesn’t seem to have the same kind of gravitas as some of these wonderfully complex philosophies we hear about today. Ideologies and different alternative views of psychology of human self understanding or politics or whatever and our simple Gospel seems rather simple. And the temptation for Christians in Sri Lanka is to kind of keep their heads down sometimes because in our discussion with Buddhist friends they will quite quickly corner you unless you really know what you are doing. And they will quite quickly try to unravel this simple truth that you believe in. I mean I had a friend who was having a hair cut and next door there was a Buddhist meeting going on and they were actually mocking - mocking - Christian belief. Now this is not that common but it does happen and it does happen more. They were laughing, the speaker was saying, ‘Oh they believe in this virgin birth and all that!’ So these temptations for us also to try to kind of spin our simple message, to kind of ‘tart it up’ a bit, to make it seem more clever than it really is. I think we get tempted by that sometimes and yet what does Paul say here? He says this very simple thing,
“If you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.”
(I don’t have time this morning to unpack all of that.) But I want to make two very quick points about this, because this shows how profound this simple Gospel is. And the profundity comes first of all when we say - Jesus is Lord - when we say that, what we are saying to our Muslim friends with all their complex set of laws, what we are saying to our Buddhist friends with all their complex set of meritorious acts, when we say - Jesus is Lord - we are saying that our lives are no longer our own. That I am no longer the main actor in the story of my life. And if that truth really sinks into our hearts and becomes the central narrative and focus of our lives, we will more than complete all these laws and meritorious acts because our lives are not about ticking the boxes any more.
We don’t have to do things to earn God’s favour because God already owns us. We are his. And so good acts come automatically. Oft in fact, given to what God has done for us and out of his sovereignty in our lives - the most amazing things are done by Christians. Not to earn God’s favour but out of sacrifice. And in Romans, two chapters later, Paul talks about that. So when we say Jesus is Lord, that one little sentence is so profound because it has in it the total giving over of our lives for God to use for his glory. If we really mean it that’s why we should say it in public - confess with your lips - then people will hold you to it. People will say, “Is Jesus really your Lord?” when we get stuck in a traffic jam, or when you get stuck in a queue at Sainsburys.
The second point briefly is that when we believe in our hearts that God raised him from the dead. Why is that so important? Why doesn’t it say we believe in our hearts that Jesus died on the cross because its the resurrection that vindicates Christ’s death on the cross. Its the resurrection that shows God accepted his sacrifice. And its the resurrection, most importantly for us this morning, that gives us hope for our work. Because it is God’s future breaking in to the mess of our present. It is actually a very sophisticated statement then, if you want to put it in those terms, you could spend your whole life unpacking the implications of the resurrection. And it is the most powerful analysis not only of human situation and suffering but also answer to that. So that if we believe in our heart that Christ was raised from the dead we are saying we believe something very profound. That it is simple but deep, its simple but not simplistic. Its not maybe rational but its beyond reason. Its not irrational. But you can’t reduce it to rationality, to a system of sophisticated understanding. But you could spend your whole life plumbing the depths of this. And the wonderful thing about the Christian faith is that it is shallow enough for my children to paddle in it, but deep enough for an elephant to swim. So the simple Gospel that we proclaim in Sri Lanka as a church, on the first point, we confess Jesus is Lord and that is the basis of our salvation. That is the basis of our good work, our service. And secondly, when we say that we believe that Christ was raised from the dead by God, we are saying something of incredible, profound truth and relevance for our world and for the mess that we have made of things.
So that’s the Gospel we have been trying to share with people in Sri Lanka. Something we have tried to be faithful to. Its been hit and miss sometimes but its the same Gospel you preach here. Sunday by Sunday you bear testimony to and its the same temptations and challenges you face. So don’t be suckered by them, by those who say you must earn your salvation because we do ourselves if we’re not careful. And don’t be fooled by those who say I know something far more clever than you do. Because Christianity has depth and wisdom to it. You confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead.
Amen