Sermons

SRI LANKA, SYRIA, AND THE UNITY OF CHRIST’S ONE CHURCH

Vista La Mesa Christian Church

October 4, 2015 ~ Michael Kinnamon

Over the years, it has been my privilege to work with churches in different parts of the world, including the island nation of Sri Lanka. My wife, Mardine, and I were back in Sri Lanka in the summer of 2013 when I spoke at a conference celebrating the 100th anniversary of the council of churches (work for Christian unity) in that county. This morning I want to speak briefly about that experience and why it should matter to us. In case you’ve not been there, Sri Lanka is the tear-shaped island off the southern tip of India–just north of the equator. It has a population of, roughly, twenty-one million with an area slightly larger than West Virginia (which has a population slightly under two million). Driving in Sri Lanka is a challenge, although the roads have certainly improved since I was first there in 1981. But if you were to drive, it is 270 miles north to south and 140 miles east to west–with heavy vegetation along the coasts, and mountains, with tea plantations, in the middle. It is a lush, beautiful country–and a remarkably educated one. The literacy rate for Sri Lanka is over 91 percent, higher than that of Mexico or Jamaica or Lebanon, and nearly twenty points higher than neighboring India. If you read about Sri Lanka over the past thirty years, however, it was probably because of the tsunami that devastated parts of the island’s east coast in 2004, or because of the civil war that raged from 1983 to 2009. This war pitted the Sinhalese majority, an ethnic group who are mostly Buddhists, against at least part of the Tamil minority, who are mostly Hindus. Perhaps as many as 100,000 persons, mostly civilians, died as a result of this awful conflict. By the way, you and I couldn’t tell the two groups apart. Before 2013, the last time I was in Sri Lanka was 2003 when a ceasefire was in effect between Sinhalese government forces and what were known as the Tamil Tigers, a guerrilla army fighting for an independent Tamil homeland. Because of the ceasefire, I 1 was able to fly into the town of Jaffna, center of the Tamil community on the island’s northern coast. The town itself was pretty well bombed out. The old Dutch fort, a remnant of the period when the Dutch colonized the island was gone, as were the large downtown churches. Because of my work with the world and national councils of churches–and because our partner denomination, the United Church of Christ, once had a significant mission in the Jaffna area–I was warmly welcomed by the Christian community, which took me to visit congregations outside the town where the fighting had been even more intense. In one small village, three hundred persons had died, including a number of Christians, and the church building had been destroyed. In another, the pastor told me how he and his family had survived by hiding in a tiny closet next to the stone fireplace, while most of their parsonage was blown away. A favorite weapon, I was told repeatedly, were cluster bombs supplied, of course, by the United States. Everywhere there were Sinhalese soldiers in helmets and flack jackets and signs warning of mines (some one and a half million, by UN estimate)–which makes agricultural recovery very difficult. Not long after I was there in 2003, the war resumed, ending in the complete defeat of the Tamil fighters, but not before an absolute bloodbath with civilians trapped between the army and the guerillas. At the meeting I attended in 2013 were friends from the Tamil areas who spoke of their community the way the Psalmist speaks of destroyed Jerusalem. It is not surprising that two of our worship services at the conference began with the reading from the biblical book of Lamentations that is now on the screen. Let’s read it aloud together.

How lonely sits the city that once was full of people! How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations!…The roads to Zion mourn, for no one comes to the festivals; all her gates are desolate, her priests groan; her young girls grieve, and her lot is bitter.

One reason I mention all this is that Christians anywhere are part of our family. Of course, it is just as tragic when Buddhists or Hindus are killed, but if we take scripture seriously, there is a special bond among Christians. Indeed, scripture suggests that Christians are related to one another by blood–not ours, but Christ’s–something we celebrate each week at the Lord’s Table. Paul’s favorite metaphor is that the followers of Jesus are like the members of a single body in which “if one member suffers, all suffer together with it.” I vividly remember a conversation at the World Council of Churches assembly in 1991, right in the middle of the first Gulf War, when a bishop from the Chaldean Catholic Church in Baghdad said to a group of us, mostly Americans, “These bombs are falling on you”! I hope you see his point: What happens to Iraqi Christians happens to us. If we take scripture seriously, the Sri Lankan civil war also happened to us. That is the wonder, and the burden, of the church. That is the point of World Communion Sunday. There is, however, another lesson I want to draw from the Sri Lankan experience. The Christian community there is, by Asian standards, quite large: around 7.5 percent of the population. And Christians are the only religious group that includes both Tamil and Sinhalese. There is a common Protestant seminary for both ethnic groups; individual denominations include both in their decision-making bodies and assemblies. So you would think that the Christian community would be a significant, forceful witness for peace–except that this 7.5 percent is divided into Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists, the Church of South India, Baptists (of various varieties), Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, and a host of evangelical and Pentecostal groups, many of whom have refused to join the council of churches. An effort to form a united Protestant church began in the 1940s. After all, these divisions aren’t native to Sri Lanka! Europe and the U.S. exported our church divisions to Asia where they make no historical sense. Plans for the inauguration of this new 3 united church were set for the early 1970s, until a handful of dissidents took the churches to court, claiming that their property would be taken away. In 1981, while I was on the staff of the World Council of Churches, I organized an international conference of united churches (like the United Church of Christ) in Sri Lanka with the hope that this would give new momentum to the union effort. But, of course, the civil war blew that away as well. The point I want to make, probably obvious to you by now, was summed up in a conversation I had with a Sri Lankan church leader during our 1981 conference, just before the outbreak of the civil war. “Are you able,” I asked him, “to encourage government officials to work for reconciliation between Tamils and Sinhalese?” “We try,” he said, “but they usually just laugh. They want to know how we Christians think we can contribute to national reconciliation when we can’t even overcome the church divisions inherited from the colonizers.” Now I need to preach! We, Christians, have a peacemaking, reconciling vocation. Alexander Campbell, the key figure in the early history of our movement, put it bluntly: “The beatitudes of Christ are not pronounced on patriots, heroes, and conquerors, but on ‘peacemakers’ on whom is conferred the highest rank and title in the universe: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the [children of God].’” The Apostle Paul, in the passage we read from 2 Corinthians, emphasizes that we have been reconciled to God and to one another in order to become “ambassadors” of reconciliation. And the reason Paul spends so much time talking about the unity of the body of Christ is because Christians can’t really proclaim the message of reconciliation if we undercut that message in the way we live with one another. The church, as Paul sees it, isn’t just called to preach the gospel with words, or even just to enact it with service, but to embody it in the unity of our fellowship. This call to unity for the sake of mission has been a key part of our Disciples witness, and it is the point my friend in Sri Lanka was making: No one takes us seriously as reconcilers because we are so visibly unreconciled. And not only in Sri Lanka. One of 4 the most dramatic moments at a World Council assembly came in 1975 when a pastor from Northern Ireland practically shouted, “When will you realize that a divided church costs lives.” In this country, our churches pretend that there is no cost to our divisions; but, of course it’s not true. Who can doubt that Christians were far less effective than we should have been in the cause of racial reconciliation because, as Dr. King put it, Sunday morning is the most segregated time of the week? Another place where I have been privileged to travel is Syria–most recently in 2008 when, as General Secretary of the National Council of Churches, I met with Bashar al- Assad at the presidential palace in Damascus. The picture of me and NCC president, Archbishop Vicken Aykasian, with President Assad and his advisors, which was on the front page of papers in Damascus, is not among those I treasure! But the reason I was there is one I hope you appreciate. The Syrian Christian community, about 10 percent of the population, had been relatively safe under Assad’s regime. And I was trying to help keep it that way by reminding him that U.S. Christians care about what happens to Christians in the Middle East. To be honest, however, I’m not sure he believed me, and I’m not really sure it’s true. I have had educated people in Disciples congregations tell me they didn’t know there were Christians in the Middle East–let alone pray for them in their suffering. Again, I need to be clear. Archbishop Aykasian and I raised questions about human rights for all Syrians during our meeting with President Assad; and we thanked him for receiving one and a half million refugees from Iraq–some of whom were Christian, but most of whom were not–at a time when our own “generous” country had received a grand total of 7000. But our main purpose was to be representatives of the one body of Christ in which the eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you.” There is, once again, another dimension to the story. Archbishop Aykasian and I had to travel to a number of places in Syria to meet with leaders of the Greek Orthodox, Melkite Greek Catholic, Oriental Syriac Orthodox, Assyrian, Chaldean Catholic, 5 Armenian Apostolic, Armenian Protestant, and various evangelical churches because, you guessed it, they are too estranged from one another to meet easily together. The bottom line of this sermon is a point that Pastor Rebecca regularly makes, but which we emphasize on World Communion Sunday: namely, that this communion table does not belong to Vista La Mesa Christian Church. We need to imagine it stretching out the doors and down the street and, ultimately, around the globe, linking us with sisters and brothers in Christ in Northern Ireland and Syria and Sri Lanka. I think this makes it incumbent upon us to learn about the church in other places (as we did with the Congo), perhaps especially places experiencing conflict. Incumbent upon us to pray for Christians in places such as Syria or Sri Lanka–Iraq or the Korean peninsula–until their suffering, and rejoicing, feels like it’s part of our story–because it is. One of the most successful programs ever organized by the National Council of Churches was a series of church-to-church visits with the Russian Orthodox Church during the 1980s. For thirty years, “they” had been Soviet enemies. But thanks to actual exposure, more people in U.S. churches began to see them as fellow Christians; and I have no doubt that this contributed to the end of the Cold War. In this way, the church shows its essential unity and becomes an ambassador of God’s reconciliation. But, of course, unity isn’t only with Christians in distant countries. In fact, sometimes that’s easier than dealing with people down the street! Working for closer relations with other churches in La Mesa and San Diego, especially those of other races and cultures, is also part of our calling as followers of Christ, whose love binds in one body all who claim his name. May God strengthen us to be ambassadors of reconciliation here in La Mesa. May God help us to recognize our connection to Christians in other parts of the world. And may this communion table be always for us a sign of God’s reconciling love. Michael Kinnamon 6