St. John’s United Church

Reaching Out in Love

We know what love is because Jesus gave his life for us. That’s why we must give our lives for each other. If we have all we need and see one of our own people in need, we must have pity on that person, or else we cannot say we love God. Children, you show love for others by truly helping them, and not merely by talking about it. (1 John 3:16-18)

I invite you to take a trip with me this morning … to a safe place. Close your eyes, if you’d like, and imagine it in your mind … a place where you know instinctively that you “belong.” Someone you love is there … someone who loves you, too … someone who knows your highest aspirations, your deepest secrets, your biggest fears, your worst failures … and loves you unconditionally.
In your dear friend’s company, you long for nothing for every need is met: physical sustenance, mental release, emotional support, and spiritual encouragement. Here, you find much-needed respite from the demands of your life. Here, you are fed and served … warm comfort and cool refreshment are yours without even asking. All you have to do is “be” there.
The one who loves you soothes you, … speaks wisdom that grants clarity to your confusion, and peace to your pain, healing your hurts as only one who knows you fully can do. In this place, your next step is revealed as clearly as if you can see it in front of you … where there is peaceful and loving encouragement, there is openness to explore the improbable … even the impossible … and to believe in your purpose. This is where you come when life is good … to celebrate fully. And this is where you come when life crowds in … when you know pain and frustration and fear more intimately than you ever wanted to. This is where you run for cover.
The one who loves you stands with you - slaying dragons on every side when all else fall away. The one who loves you speaks the truth you know you need to hear, while holding your hand and looking in your eyes. The one who loves you plans a party for you to anticipate through your hour of trial. Those who have opposed you will be invited, to see you stand firm in your success. They will know that your purpose is sure, for they will see the blessings that surround you, and all will know that you will not be shaken. In this promise, you have hope. In this place, you are encouraged. By the one who loves you, you are empowered, and you leave your safe place to go back to the world, more able to meet the demands that await you.
This safe place is described in the 23rd Psalm. The one who loves you is Jesus Christ, the Great Shepherd, who laid down his life for us, and asks us to lay down our lives for others.
Many of you, however, may have envisioned someone else caring for you in your safe place.
Now, you may have been thinking of a parent or a sibling or a spouse or a dear friend. If you find that it brought to mind more than *one* special person in your life, REJOICE that you are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses! For those who create safe havens in our world are those who have heard the command and followed it. “And this is the commandment,” Robin read to us in 1 John 3:23, “That we should believe in the name of {God’s} Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.” And *how* did he command us to love one another? In John 13:34, we are told that Jesus said, “AS I HAVE LOVED YOU, so you must love one another.”
It seems like such a simple thing until you consider the fullness of the request … to love one another as Jesus loves us, we must *lay down our lives* for one another: we must *voluntarily* sacrifice self for others … even those who do not believe as we believe, even those whom we call enemies, even those who demand more than we think we have to give. We must *lovingly* create a safe haven for all with whom we come in contact. We must be *willing* to share the good news of the Gospel not just in words, but in faithful action out of obedience to God. And we must *cheerfully* share our of the abundance of our blessings as God’s hands on earth, meeting the needs of God’s children everywhere.

It is the theology espoused by Bishop K. H. Ting in his new book, God Is Love. This Chinese Bishop preaches a global or universal love. We no longer live apart from one another, but are literally neighbors in a shrinking global village. It is the love of Christ that unites us and transcends every barrier, every nation, every race, every culture, and every people.

Like a mature and majestic Chinese banyan tree with aerial roots gracefully developing from the branches, Bishop K. H. Ting’s indigenous theology has developed and spread over a large area of the church’s life, mission, and ministry. Like the mammoth umbrella of the banyan tree, its canopy has provided excellent spiritual shade, shelter and strength for Chinese Christians as they have faced the rigorous responsibilities and challenges of their church and society.
In this theology, there are many primary boughs, beautiful leaves, and rich fruits. Today, I want to focus on one of the primary branches or contributions Ting has made, not only to the Chinese church but also to global Christianity. First, God’s primary attribute is love, and Jesus is both the Great Lover of all humanity as well as the Cosmic Christ. This conception of God as the Divine lover undergirds all of Ting’s theology and approach to the mission and ministry of the church in the world. For him, “God is love. This is the greatest fact of all the facts of the cosmos.” Ting believes God’s nature of love was revealed in Jesus Christ. Two portraits of Jesus in the New Testament especially appeal to Ting. One image is that of Jesus the Great Lover of all men and women, who reaches out to every human being, regardless of how outcast, marginalized, or mistreated. Both to the “sinner” and the “sinned-against” Jesus offers love and compassion. To the lost, lonely, and last, Jesus offers love, forgiveness, care, compassion, and companionship. In Ting’s words, “We see a Jesus who weeps with those who suffer and rejoices with those who rejoice, a Jesus who refuses to condemn a person who has gone astray but protects her, a Jesus who has loved his friends and loves them to the end. Bishop Ting describes Jesus as: “…the lonely man, homeless and self-forgetful, with his outpouring of love and sympathy, his suffering and agony, his tender words on the cross, and the final victory over ruthless power. He lived and died as one who loves, a true lover.”

Practically, a “banyan tree” type of theology, that understands God as love and Jesus as both the Great Lover and Cosmic Christ, provides great shelter and hope for the Chinese people and church. This theology affirms that it is not God’s will for the masses to suffer or for evil to prosper in the political processes. It reminds persons that God is not all-powerful in control of every event in their life, but that God is all loving, caring about every event in their life. It lays an understanding that socialism could possibly be “love organized for the masses of the people,” helping them to live more decently than previous models of economic government have permitted. It opens the door for an evangelical witness to a loving God active in nature and history to make human life more human.

In November of 2005, the door was opened to Myra McWilliams and others in the Bay of Quinte Conference to travel to Sechewan Province in China to see this at work. They traveled at the invitation of the Amity Foundation – a partner with the United Church of Canada – to see our Mission and Service dollars at work. The UCC contributes $100,000 a year ($40,000 block grant to be used as Amity sees fit and a $60,000 grant for staffing).

The Amity Foundation, an independent Chinese voluntary organization, was created in 1985 on the initiative of Chinese Christians to promote education, social services, health, and rural development from China’s coastal provinces in the east to the minority areas of the west. Abiding by the principle of mutual respect in faith, Amity builds friendship with people at home and abroad. Through the promotion of holistic development and public welfare, Amity serves society, benefits the people, and strives to promote world peace. In this way, Amity: contributes to China’s social development and openness to the outside world; makes Christian involvement and participation in meeting the needs of society more widely known to the Chinese people; serves as a channel for people-to-people contact and the ecumenical sharing of resources.
Amity’s successful development work is the result of fruitful partnerships between individuals and project partners at the grassroots, Amity staff in Nanjing and Hong Kong and a circle of international friends and supporting agencies. As a development agency dedicated to providing social services and development aid to China’s poor, the organization has followed the country’s development closely as it responds to social needs. “Seen from the perspective of China’s long history, twenty years is just the blink of an eye. But what an extraordinary blink it has been, for China and the Amity Foundation.” (Theresa Carino)

Church Run Projects
Amity implements church-initiated projects across China, especially in areas where there are active local Christian communities. These projects include medical clinics, homes for the elderly, kindergartens, animal husbandry and farming. Amity’s participation includes organizing workshops on church-initiated social service; providing personnel training, basic equipment and facilities; and promoting development education for Christian communities.

Social Welfare
Amity emphasizes rehabilitation and training educators for children with special needs — those isolated by a hearing impairment, afflicted by polio, or orphaned as infants. Amity has initiated and supported a variety of training programs in cooperation with specialists in and outside of the country. Amity’s work with children marks a unique approach to care within China that involves volunteers, parents, community, administrators, and front line staff and an underlying belief in the child’s potential.

Education
“If you are planning for a year, sow rice;
if you are planning for a decade, plant trees;
if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.” Confucius

Amity’s education projects focus on changing hearts and minds. We emphasize people-to-people contact and the building of personal friendships which promote mutual respect and broader global perspectives. Through language teaching and learning, domestic scholarships, service-learning initiatives and support for migrant workers’ children, the Education Division tries to promote a better quality of life and achieve a lasting positive impact on communities.

Relief and Rehabilitation
Amity responds to survival needs caused by natural disaster with food, health care, clothing and shelter. Assistance is given to communities whose churches, rural health clinics, schools, social welfare institutions, homes and water conservancy facilities have been destroyed.

Rural Development
Amity encourages the use of local resources and initiatives to promote projects that meet basic needs and assist self-development. In many remote villages, water shortages have resulted in poverty for many generations. Amity cooperates in building water pumping stations and digging wells. In other areas, fuel resources are scarce and natural fertilizers have been ravaged in the search for fuel. Amity helps build biogas systems to improve living standards, address the effects of ecological destruction, and relieve women of time-consuming labour. Amity supports programs for women to strengthen their position in the village and strives to provide children with access to schooling. Its development approach in local communities looks towards a balance between nature and human society.

Medical
Amity emphasizes medical training for ethnic minorities and grassroots personnel, and promotes primary health care. In remote poverty stricken areas inhabited by national minorities, resources are often scarce and of poor quality. Amity conducts half-year courses for obstetricians, gynaecologists and surgeons and one-year training courses for village health workers. Amity has trained medical workers from the countryside who have a deep love for their villages. They work directly for grassroots people in the northwest and southwest. With a long-term commitment to their work in poor agricultural areas, these medical workers provide a foundation for competent medical care in China’s remote areas.

Blindness Prevention
Amity combines the training of health-care workers with community education to bring about real change in the lives of blind, deaf and mute people in China’s countryside. Amity’s promotion of cataract surgery means that more people in rural areas can now see; the publication of educational materials helps prevent unnecessary blindness; and the training of special education teachers and the provision of specialized equipment and tools means children with disabilities can be integrated into mainstream education. Amity’s rehabilitation efforts have also brought large numbers of disabled farmers back into the mainstream of society.

I began this morning’s meditation by inviting you to take a trip with me this morning … to a safe place. I invited you to close your eyes and to imagine it in your mind … All you had to do was “be” there. Following worship, Myra McWilliams is inviting us to do the same – to travel with her to China – to see through her eyes and her slides how WE – you and me – are reaching out to others in love. As Myra tells her story and shares her experiences, may our eyes be opened, our hearts be touched and our minds stretched so that we may be partners with God in creation and love our neighbours as Christ has loved us. For this is what God asks of us this day and every day.

We know what love is because Jesus gave his life for us.
That’s why we must give our lives for each other.
If we have all we need and see one of our own people in need, we must have pity on that person, or we cannot say we love God. Children, you show love for others by truly helping them,
and not merely by talking about it. (1 John 3:16-18)

This is the Good News of Christ’s gospel. Thanks be to God. Amen and Amen.

Acknowledgements: Ray and Julia Gvillo; Amity Foundation; Donald Messer (Banyan Tree)

A meditation preached by the Rev. Myra Garvin at St. John’s United Church, Brockville
Sunday May 7, 2006 – Easter 4B