Last month Clarence preached here on “The Church of the Good Samaritan.” Do you still remember it? My wife insisted that I print out his sermon so that she can read and re-read it and appreciate it more fully. As a preacher it is natural for me to be able to recognize a good sermon when I hear one. Preachers are human and have pride and it is not often that we applaud the fine sermon of another preacher. I had no difficulty on that Sunday and I sought out Clarence immediately after the sermon, patted him on the shoulder and complimented him, “Excellent sermon, You must go home and put it down on paper and put it on the web.” I have since circulated the sermon to my friends and they were inspired and wondered how this layperson can preach sermons better than the trained preachers. Clarence may yet one day find his true calling. The sermon is for the historical record of this church. In the not too distant future one of you should compile some of the sermons preached in FCC into a book and circulate them for our study and reflection. The world outside also needs to know who we really are and what God is saying to this congregation which is so maligned and so marginalized. It is not the devil that has drawn us together but the same God in glory and majesty that they worship in their churches. What kind of a church are we and what do we hope to become? These were the two questions that Clarence posed and challenged us.

He shared these disturbing thoughts. “You know I wonder if we truly worshipped God today. Our music is getting better. The standard of the sermons is getting better. Our communion liturgy is beautiful. We even now have a congregational prayer time. But I am not sure we worshipped God.”

“The priest had worshipped in the temple. The Levite had worshipped in the temple. But Jesus is saying that the only one who truly worshipped God that day was the Samaritan who first loved unconditionally – yes unconditionally because he could not know whether the victim was a Jew, a Samaritan or some Gentile. The imagery is beautiful, first the Samaritan binds the wounds of the victim as God binds our wounds as is often stated in the Old Testament… The priest and the Levite had come before altars of stone at the temple but the Samaritan worshipped God through acts of love at the altar of a broken humanity.”

We commonly regard the church as the place we worship. We say that we come to praise God and we feel good that we have sung our praises. Are we clear about who this God is whom we offer our sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving? Do we image him sitting on a throne high and lifted up in heaven and receiving these offerings from us?

When I was young I used to accompany my mother on festival occasions to the Chinese Temple near our home in Kampar. We bring along the customary food and meat offerings and burn the joss-sticks and paper offering on the first and fifteenth of the lunar month. I can still visualize the different idols where we stand and kneel to make our sacrificial offerings. We feel good that we have done our religious duties and the gods have been placated and they will in turn protect and bless us.

Is this understanding of worship any different from what we do today in church. Different time, different place, different place of worship but the same intention, same motivation, same interest for us to worship. I hope not and I trust you not stuck in the kind of past history that I was in years ago.

After my meeting up with some of you in the sessions on Biblical Interpretation, Dominic gave a photocopy of some material that he had read and thought I will be interested in it. He read my mind and he was spot on. Incidentally Dominic has made the pages of Wall Street Journal when he made a comment about Gay Singapore. What he handed to me was a chapter of James Alison on “The Importance of being Indifferent.” It was part of an attempt by this Catholic theologian to “what we might be doing in exercising ministry as gay and lesbian people, or for gay and lesbian people. Alison was captivated and committed in his ministry by the phrase “Feed My Sheep.” In action to his homophobic church which places so many obstacles to ministry to the LGBTI he calls for an attitude of indifference to the institutional Church which is so important for Catholics.

First he recalls the history of the Jewish Temple which was destroyed in 587 B.C.E. and the collapse of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. and has not been rebuilt since. He quoted Ezekiel 34:11-16 which ends with the Lord God saying “I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, I will bind up the crippled, and I will strengthen the weak, and the fat and the strong I will watch over; I will feed them in justice.

The new Temple in the vision of the prophet is that God dwells in the midst of the people and feeds them as God the Shepherd feeds the sheep. The prophet including Jeremiah criticized the obsession of the faithful worshippers with the presence of the Lord in the Temple and there they go to make their sacrifices in worship. There tends to be the fixation that God is only in the holy Temple. So people have to work through the fascination and attachment to the Temple, Church or places of worship to a certain kind of indifference as he terms it. Indifference is defined as “neither repelled to something or attracted to it…”

But far more important in the world which is the Temple of the living God. That is why Jesus was able to enter the sanctuary and have the Cleansing of the Temple and even proclaim “I am able to destroy the temple of God.” This resulted in the Pharisees charging him for blasphemy and condemning Him to Crucifixion.

The Temple is not just a place to make sacrifices to God except to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” (Romans 12:1). Earlier the Psalmist in 51:16-17 more vividly say to us “For thou hast no delight in sacrifice; were I to give a burnt offering, thou wouldst not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God thou wilt not despise.”

Back to Alison who wrote “From now on the Temple is wherever ordinary human beings are engaged together in prayer, in treating each other in a way with builds up, and wherever they are together undoing the world of violent sacrifice.” We are called to evolve into a church which shepherds God’s people especially to those poorest of the poor, pushed to the extreme margins of society, confined to the tightest closets. We are to lead people trapped in traditional sacred structures as well as imprisoned in discriminating social conditions. This is the liberating ministry that the church is called to be in as we feed God’s people in the world today.

Let me now take you further as to how the followers of Jesus shaped the Christianity community in history. The Bible is a religious and a theological account of the early Christian Church community It does not give too much historical information about the social life of the people in general. Lately I have been reading about the social history of the people in New Testament times and the rise of Christianity. It is the world of John the Baptist, Jesus of Nazareth and Paul the Apostle. The Christian message was shaped not only by the religious traditions but also by the social conditions and political circumstances of the people at different periods of their history.

In recent times scholarly studies and archaeological excavations uncovered fresh historical information and insights about the life of the early Church. The rubble villages, shattered pots, corroded coins, and flimsy fragments revealed the economic and political conditions at that time. Jesus appeared in one of the most undeveloped region in the Roman Empire. It was a poverty-stricken area. Jesus and his father Joseph were in the lower rungs of the social ladder. They were the artisans working with wood as a carpenter on a daily wage basis. They did not own land and had to depend upon the city people and the farmers for carpentry jobs. The majority of the artisan class were poor or destitute.

The economy at that time was agrarian and it depended upon the produce of the farmers The peasants and slaves were forced to serve the urban economy and even they survived on subsistence level. A system of religious and political taxes was instituted. Religious taxes were imposed to support the Priests and the Levites and for the maintenance of the Temple. They were made poor by the government policy of heavy taxation. The tax burden was hard for there were different taxes. It was also Pay and Pay system. From the tax money new cities were built for the Roman officials and their retainers including the privileged Jews. Farmers who could not produce enough or pay their taxes had their land confiscated and they became tenant farmers and when it failed they became slaves.

Tax collecting was outsourced by the Roman authorities. Tax collectors had to bid in the auctions for the right to collect taxes for the people and send it to the government. They therefore had to bid high and tax the people higher in order to gain profit from tax-collecting. That is why they were such a hated lot of people despised in the community.

It was in that social and political situation that the Jesus movement began. No one would have responded if they did not address those conditions. A number of movements arose to empower the people to remove the yoke of Roman colonialism. John the Baptist encouraged the people with the message of repentance for the end is near and God will restore the kingdom of justice and freedom. Jesus sought baptism from John and it is believed he shared in John’s ministry for a period to time. Jesus added this dimension - the kingdom of God is not only coming but is here already. The kingdom of God is within you.

Jesus called for a change in which the people were to enter into a new spirit of cooperation and mutual assistance. The belief in a God who would bring deliverance to the poor, weak, and sick stood at the center of his message.

Jesus was a faithful Jew and he limited his ministry to the Jews. He did not mean to start a new religion but sought to renew Judaism. He nourished the hopes of his suffering people of the coming of the Messiah to restore the kingdom of justice and peace. He appealed to the people to live in the kingdom or under the rule of God in the here and now.

Christians were steadfast in their refusal to worship the pagan gods and pay homage to earthly rulers who regard themselves as divine. They were charged to be a subversive lot – attacking the power of Rome and the Temple hierarchy.

Christians aat first were mostly ignored by Romans for it was regarded only as minor Jewish sect and there were a number of them. After 64 C.E sporadic persecutions occur originally along with other Jews later as a Christian community. It was usually in response to poor harvests or other disasters. To maintain their power and legitimacy the Roman rulers persecuted the Christians on suspicion of practices, secret gathering, refusal to obey imperial edicts relating to sacrifice and worship of the Emperor. But the official persecutions not only failed to wipe out Christianity but strengthened it: ‘the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church’ (Tertullian). Martyrdom to showed steadfastness and holiness of the followers of Jesus, It led to more tolerance from pagan population and acceptance of the faith by the Gentiles. It projected the value of sacrifice when the faithful are willing to accept torture and death. It gained the admiration of the pagans.

The Jesus movement did not end with his death. It took a dramatic turn with the work of Paul among the Jews who were in dispersion and the Gentile community in the Greco-Roman world. It developed an urban ministry.

The early Christians appeared powerless and weak, they were scorned and ridiculed. The earliest Christians did not have church buildings. Even though they continue to worship in the Temple they did not receive a welcome there. They typically met in homes. They did not have public ceremonies that would introduce them to the public. They had no access to the mass media of their day. Except for the Apostle Paul, the faith spread through a multitude of humble, ordinary believers whose names have been long forgotten in the first century

They continued to promote belief in the one living God in midst of all the pagan deities. In contrast with the Roman gods who are unconcerned with this world. And what kind of lives did they lead? Justin Martyr, a noted early Christian theologian, wrote to Emperor Antoninus Pius and described the believers: "We formerly rejoiced in uncleanness of life, but now love only chastity; before we used the magic arts, but now dedicate ourselves to the true and unbegotten God; before we loved money and possessions more than anything, but now we share what we have and to everyone who is in need; before we hated one another and killed one another and would not eat with those of another race, but now since the manifestation of Christ, we have come to a common life and pray for our enemies and try to win over those who hate us without just cause."

In another place Justin points out how those opposed to Christianity were sometimes won over as they saw the consistency in the lives of believers, noting their extraordinary forbearance when cheated and their honesty in business dealings.

We need to know also the observations of those who were against the Christians. Governor Pliny in his letter to Emperor Trajan in 112 C.E. commented: “…they declared that the sum total of their guilt or error amounted to no more than this: they had met regularly before dawn on a fixed day to chant verses alternately among themselves in honor of Christ as if to a god, and also to bind themselves by oath, not for any criminal purpose, but to abstain from theft, robbery and adultery, to commit no breach of trust and not to refuse to return a deposit upon demand. After this ceremony it had been their custom to disperse and later to take food of an ordinary harmless kind.”

When Emperor Julian ("the Apostate") wanted to revive pagan religion in the mid-300s, he gave a most helpful insight into how the church spread. This opponent of the faith said that Christianity "has been specially advanced through the loving service rendered to strangers and through their care of the burial of the dead. It is a scandal that there is not a single Jew who is a beggar and that the [Christians] care not only for their own poor but for ours as well; while those who belong to us look in vain for the help we should render them."

But what finally mattered is what they did have. They had not only a faith and a community of believers. They had a new way of life. They trusted that their Lord was and guiding their daily lives. These were the important things.

Rodney Stark examines the early Christian movement in his classic book, “The Rise of Christianity” with the subtitle "A sociologist reconsiders history" or "How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries.”

Stark points to a number of advantages that Christianity had over paganism to explain its growth. Terrible plagues occurred in the second and third centuries. The smallpox epidemic erupted in 165 C.E. and lasted 15 years and decimated one-third of the population in the Roman Empire. Christians were more likely to survive in times of plague, due to their care of one another. They set the example of staying with the afflicted to care for not only the Christian but also the pagans. Cyprian, the Bishop of Carthage commented: “Also, the Christians cared for the sick when other healthy people left town if they could, and that this gave Christianity more prestige.” The pagans after the plague were drawn into the Christian network. The Christians who faced death bravely during the plague also influenced the pagans to become followers.

Christian populations grew faster, due to the prohibition of abortion, infanticide where girls babies were the victims and birth control. Consequently, Christianity women outnumbered men, while in Paganism men outnumbered women, leading to a high rate of secondary conversions, when the Christian women married the pagan men and converted them to the Christian faith. It is interesting to note that women joined the Christian movement even then because opportunities for women to realise their identities for the church gave them status.

Christianity also promoted liberating social relations between the sexes and within the family. Christianity also removed class differences when slave and free greeted one another as brothers and sisters in Christ. Christians revitalized life in the city with new norms of behavior and new kinds of social relationships. To the homeless and impoverished the Christians gave charity and hope. To the newcomers and the strangers the Christians provided relationships. To the orphans and widows the Christians called for a new sense of family. To the people divided by ethnic strife the Christians offered solidarity. Stark's basic thesis is that ultimately Christianity triumphed over Paganism because it offered its followers a better and at times longer life.

What is the direction in which FCC should evolve? What kind of a church are we building? The nature of the Church and the Temple is not a place or a building as sanctified as they are. It is not a place where we make our sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving. You are reminded that you are the Temple of the Living God and wherever and whenever you make a living sacrifice of yourself in sacrifical service of love to one another and to all people you become the Temple.

As individuals become the temple we join together to form a new community of faith. What then is the nature of this community. I am grateful for friends like Jean Lee who pushed me further in my thinking when I received from her an article on Community of Faith. What is the shape of this community in the new future. Using IT language we tend to be the default reality in the traditional Christian communites and afraid to click to a new divine domain or Kingdom of God. We find it hard to escape from the gravity of the conventional, habitual and typical. We find it difficult to be freed from dogmatic addictions and regard the Church only as a salvation machine processing us to enter heaven. We must have the courage to be an alternative community which transcends tribalism, ethnicity, nationalism and homophobia. Bishop Sano in his concluding remarks to us advised each one of us to hear the stirrings of our heart and engage in the open future facing new realities, new opportunities and new horizons. This is the future of Free Community Church.