“... part of the FCC culture andlife is that we allow diverse views to surface,
challenge andshape us, primarily because we do not claim to fullyunderstand
the mind of GOD. It is assumed that all discussion and expressions willbe conducted honestly and honorably, bearing in mindthat it is a community we
are building. Thischurch is not called the Free Community Church for noreason.
It is a community of real people with reallives, … and the test of the pudding is
not in its written description,or even members' review. It's in the eating. It's how
we relate to each other within the community, and beyond.” -- (peter goh)

Given the FCC culture, putting together this FOUNDATION SERIES proved to be one of the most difficult things this church, and in particular our working group, has had to do. In our attempt to lay down a common content of the basics of our Christian faith, we began to see instead different alternatives of viable options. And this will become obvious as you look through the materials that accompany this Series. Instead of having authoritative answers we find ourselves in a never-ending search for them. This may disturb some of us who are not usually taught we have options when it comes to religious beliefs.

But how could it be otherwise given that religion, life & the world we inhabit is so complex and multi-faceted? How could it be otherwise given that even our own small church wears a gloriously multi-coloured robe?  And therein lies the identity of FCC. This is Who We Are -- a rainbow of diversity. And I believe if we keep our minds and hearts truly free and open, the revelations, insights and inspiration can be infinitely numerous, rich and wondrously exciting.

This 6-session Foundation Series is built around the HEART, a motif borrowed from Marcus Borg’s latest book, in an attempt to discover some core, some essence of our faith -- the “heart of the matter” as it were. What is it about Christianity that is deeper than the intellect, deeper than any set of beliefs, ideas and creeds? What is it about Christianity that reaches us at our “heart” level and transforms us?

I will mention briefly the 6 sessions and leave the rest of the team to lead you through them in the next several Sundays. After my message we will spend some time praying on our Community Life Principles, and each cell will offer a prayer of solidarity and hope for the many key principles we stand by.

Our vision statement describes Who We Are in FCC and our community life principles who we hope to be. In the larger world, we are God’s creation. We are a thousand faces, both deadpan and lively, lost and found, but all in continuous worship, bowing down and serving something or someone – a person, an institution, an artifact, an idea, a spirit, or God through Christ. Each of us being shaped and growing towards some measure of fullness, whether of righteousness or of evil. No one is exempt. We surrender into sinfulness and loss or we commit to personal righteousness and gain. This is the central fact of our existence. And within it lies the story of creation, the fall, redemption and new creation or final loss.

Who God is
Ground of our being, Yahweh, Love, the great I AM, Allah, Father/Mother, Supreme Being, Ultimate Reality – The Heart of Reality. God has many names. And because God is infinite, all religions recognize an element of mystery in their attempts to define God. God-language can never be precise or exhaustive. For Christians however, images of God are revealed in the Old Testament, the same God again is met in the New Testament. As Christians we cannot help but open our restless hearts to God and at FCC we hope for “a vibrant heart relationship” with Him. But how does one relate to God, how does one know God?  As Christians we see who God is in the person and work of his son, Jesus Christ. This leads us to,

Who Jesus is
He is the revelation of God’s character, of what God is like. He shows us The Heart of God. The God who has been uttering His Word from the beginning, now that Word has become flesh in Jesus Christ, giving a living picture of God in history. The most basic conviction of our Christian faith is that Jesus of Nazareth, a first-century Jew, is the Christ, the Messiah, the one in whom all the promises of God to Israel come to fulfillment. In Jesus is Emmanuel, “God with us” and in him God’s grace, love, mercy and salvation are a reality in human life and in history.

Christ the Saviour has come. He has done a work that no one else could ever do. Having come to us in the past, he comes again and again, yet he abides in us forever. God in Christ, Christ in God, the Spirit in Christ, Christ in the Spirit, the Spirit in us in Christ in us. This is what it means to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

Who the Holy Spirit is
The Spirit of the Father pours into us God’s love and grace. Who gives us the gifts of the Spirit, gifts that God empowers us by, to live and to serve. The specific gifts of the Spirit are directed toward ‘the common good’, as Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians, toward building the community and extending the love of God through the community to the world. The entire Christian faith is thus energised and directed by the Holy Spirit, The Heart of Life. 

What the Bible is
For us as Christians, the Bible is our sacred scripture, our sacred story. Written in prose and poetry, in prayers and praises, as history and as mythology, in laws and teachings, as literal fact and as metaphor, it is a true story of a faithless people and a faithful God who seek constantly to renew their relationship with each other. As such, the Bible is the foundation of our Christian tradition, it gives us a sense of who we are and what our life with God is about. It is The Heart of the Tradition.

The closing session of our Foundation Series is the test of the pudding. How then should we live?

The Christian Life
It is quite simply about “loving God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. It is about relationship, transformation and practice. It includes being part of a Christian community, a church, and taking part in its life together as a community. It includes worship, Christian formation, deeds of hospitality, acts of kindness and compassion. It includes devotional disciplines, like prayer and spending time with the Bible. And it includes loving what God loves through the practice of compassion and justice in the world. It is a path, a way of life, The Way of the Heart.

With the sequence of God-in-Christ-in-the Spirit-in us, within our sacred tradition and stories, we now complete the circle, and return to who we are, the communion of all believers.
 
(jean lee)
We are all branches on the Vine.  All interconnected, all called to unity, even though the branches to the left may be far distant from those to the right. Together we are all one in the Body of Christ.  It is the Vine (Christ) who maintains the dialectical tension between apparently opposing voices, conflicting preferences, contrasting theologies. Our faith thrives through conflicts & struggles as we wrestle with the deep issues of living authentically as Christian witnesses. Our spirituality is crafted through tension as opposed to easy resolution. I'm not suggesting here that we should be deliberately provocative, argumentative and controversial for its own sake. But merely that we should persist in our 'soul-searching' with much angst, agony, remorse, fear,... but do it together as a community, unpretentiously, with humility and holding each other in the highest esteem. 

(tuck leong)
Dream however we like of a nicely systematic world to live in where all things are rational, in place and orderly; but the nature of life itself resists being pigeon-holed into a grand story, nicely fitting jig-saw puzzle. And rationalizing coldly, morality, ethics and theology is often one of the ways we run away from ourselves and from God.

At a far corner God probably sits amused at our musings seeing His children trying to grow up while history wears on and humans behave as humans do - and God will forever be a father/mother figure promising to nurture and give us space to mature. And as children we will argue to differentiate ourself from another - one of those things we do as we grow into our identities. God will nudge us on, telling us it is high time to realize that we are individually different. And knowing our differences is one sign that we understand ourselves better; playing out our differences, another sign of being more comfortable with our relationships; and with our differences we can either sulk or make a note to commit more strongly to each other and to God.

So Christianity provides a foundation for our search for meaning in life and how we should live. As Christians we know we are created for a special relationship with God. We have a unique place and purpose in God’s plan for his creation. He has a plan for our lives. But we cannot embark on our journey without the support and accountability of at least one other human being. We cannot be a Christian alone.

So in Christ, we are members of one another. This is the body of Christ. Whether you are a member of this church or not, you are part of this Body. The body of Christ is one of the most significant of the church’s images.  We worship, serve and participate together, we do so at one with each other. It does not mean we become each other, pry into each other, or take possession of each other. Rather it means we enter into the lives of our brothers and sisters, as family, so as to weep, to mourn, to rejoice, to identify with, to intercede for, to uphold, to support, sometimes to correct. Christ-in-us-in-each-other is the glue by which even the most bleeding community is held together.

This is the grand plan. But the reality of my own heart and mind is far from it. Knowing what I know about myself, how can Christ possibly dwell in me? For goodness’ sake, surely he knows how I judge my brothers and sisters? How I gossip unkindly about them? How I often take advantage of them for my gain? How does Jesus put up with my sinfulness?

Here’s how – infinite grace. Sinners are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Jesus Christ. Infinite grace is continuously poured out by the Holy Spirit in the ways and directions It calls. It washes feet, it makes breakfast. It heals relationships and restores souls. It makes the blind see, the lame walk. It conquers drug addiction. It sets the oppressed free. It embraces the poor, weak, the broken; the rich and the famous. It anoints our heads with oil. It makes its way into the dark alleys & bright highways of the world, it goes to the ends of the earth. And it is through the power of the Holy Spirit that the church receives spiritual gifts by which it ministers in the world.

I move on to talk about 2 key Christian sacraments, ancient rituals because they go back to the time of Jesus, but up till today full of depth and meaning for us. They provide the occasion, the language and the gestures for us to encounter truths that, left to ourselves, we may never look for and even avoid. They enable us to hear, tell and act out the truth about ourselves and about God “whose ways are not our ways, whose thoughts are not our thoughts” – so they grant us also, an encounter with mystery and the holy.

Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are two faithful signs of incorporation into the body of Christ, and two of the foundational sacraments of the church.

The meaning of BAPTISM is rich and multi-faceted. Baptism is the sign of new life through Jesus Christ. It unites the one baptised with Christ and with his people. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free … 1 Cor 12:13. The scriptures and the liturgy of the Church unfold the meaning of baptism in several images which express the riches of Christ and the gifts of salvation.

Baptism means almost everything that the human experience of water means – birth, death, cleansing, refreshment, life. In our baptism we choose to die with Christ, be raised with him and walk in newness of life (Rom 6:3-5); we are washed, sanctified and justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ (1 Cor 6:11); we are born again of water and Spirit (John 3:5); and as we are baptised into Christ, we have clothed ourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, for all of us are one in Jesus Christ (Gal 3:27-28).

As such, Baptism is both God’s gift and our response to that gift. Not just a momentary response but a life-long growth into Christ, of continuing struggle for many of us, yet also of a continuing experience of grace. As a criteria for membership in FCC we will ask you to make this personal confession of faith by baptism, and for the already baptised, that we re-affirm our faith and celebrate the occasion together as one family. 

THE LORD’S SUPPER, also called “Communion” or the “Eucharist”
is another gift which God makes to us in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. Every Christian receives this gift of salvation through communion in the body and blood of Christ. In the eating and drinking of the bread and wine, we experience the relatedness of all creatures on earth and in heaven through the sharing of food, the gathered community, and the presence of the divine. Christ grants communion with himself. God himself acts. Giving life to the body of Christ and renewing each member. 

The Lord’s Supper is also a reminder of the violence, betrayal and death that are part of Christ's passion -- "The night in which he gave himself up for us" and said, "this is my blood of the new covenant, poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins". Perhaps we are not called just to remember an event in the past but also to acknowledge the continued violence, oppression and death in our word today. And during the Lord’s Supper, we not only act out our hope for the just distribution of bread and wine to include all gathered people, but promise to act and respond as a gathered people to help God bring this about.

This is “good’ ritual -- it both delights and disturbs, it comforts and it challenges. Often in the predictable pattern of sacraments, there is comfort and security, we know the words and gestures well. But in good ritual we are also surprised, disturbed and perhaps confronted with something we have not seen or heard before. Something new. We see ourselves, our world, and God in a new way, and we are renewed in the process.  

Let me bring you back to the four theological worlds I identified previously. World 1 – the Stranger, World 2 – the Warrior, World 3 – the Orphan, World 4 – the Fugitive. We accept that there will never be a universal, uniform World ever again. We know firsthand, that words & doctrines can have contrasting meanings to different people, we experience firsthand why we never arrive at an easy consensus in this church, why we keep gravitating into cliques. We accept that will be alternative worlds. But alternative Worlds can be and have been in conflict because each claims the right to function as the truth. We need to overcome this dilemma, and lead the way to becoming a church that insists upon diversity as inevitable, acceptable, and thus creative. But at the same time, we will commit not only to support but also to nurture our members with viable alternatives that make the Christian life worth living.

If you want to be part of this vision that brings with it new and creative ways of ministry – in Christian education, in preaching, in worship, in evangelism and outreach. If you want a stake in this community, a say in the life and direction of this church, then I encourage you to apply for membership and be a part the robe of Christ that adorns this Body -- a gloriously multi-coloured robe!