Our Church Flags: 7. Hong Kong

On a sadly memorable day in which Russia launched bloodshed upon Europe, it seems appropriate to have a cheerful flag.  The flag of Hong Kong.

That is not to suggest that everything in Hong Kong is going well.  Those who come to our church from that background would not say so.  But the flag at least is a cheerful thing.

In this blog series we have seen often enough that red on a flag usually means bloodshed.  It is hard not to imagine some (perhaps many) years hence a Ukrainian flag with red on it somewhere.

Happily the Hong Kong flag's red is the festive celebratory red more familiarly found in Chinese New Year decorations.

Then there is the flower.  Astonishingly for such a tiny land area, this is representative of a flower that was actually first discovered in Hong Kong.  Nobody looking at the teeming city would imagine it as the place of such a discovery.

Oh for a world that discovers flowers instead of shedding blood.

A Fool's Guide to Resurrection

Easter!  New Life! Spring!  But on April Fool's Day I contend that resurrection is overrated.

At first thought it seems impossible to overrate it. Doesn’t it deal with the one thing that China’s manufacturing, the US military, Microsoft, the United Nations Security Council, Apple or the International Monetary Fund cannot?  Doesn’t it deal with death? When we lay our dear ones in the dust nothing seems more important.  If only mortuaries could be replaced by Resurrection Units!

But what if. 

What if the first human being to conquer death had been Adolf Hitler, emerging victorious from the rubble of his bunker never to die again?  Or you or me?  What would we do with our newly-evident resurrection power?  Do we seriously trust our untrustworthy selves to make resurrection life a virtue?

That’s not all. What is resurrection for?  

Resurrection is not attractive if it reintroduces the resurrectee to illness or further serious injury, to more wars and violence, to other years of heartbreak and despair, to new enemies and more pollution.  A thousand years of hospital appointments has its limitations.  Globally over 100 million people seriously contemplate ending their own lives each year - the very opposite of resurrection. Life is the problem sometimes.

The resonance of Easter with returning spring is both obvious and meaningless.  Yes, the bunnies jump, the daffodils bloom, the birds sing and daylight dissolves the darkness.  But this is life again, not life transformed.

Simply put, resurrection is useless without Jesus.  It had to be him.  It had to be the rebirth of humanity, the new creation beginning on the First Day of a new week.  It had to be life with a Leader, resurrection with a Redeemer, it had to be the Way and the Truth as well as the Life. It had to be the One who could credibly promise a life that would always be worth living!

On a previous day when, one might think, Lazarus became the resurrection and the life as he meets us from his tomb Jesus said it - I AM the resurrection and the life.  And Jesus hadn’t even died yet.

Para-translation

The Paralympics are a great tribute to Great Britain which seems so much more able to celebrate diversity and integrate disability than many other cultures.  I suspect this has much more to do with its Christian Heritage than the Big Bang that the opening ceremony lauded but, hey.

Samuel Sherechewsky was also suffered from becoming largely paralysed.  He was in the process of  translating the Bible into Wenli Chinese so paralysis was apparently terminal to that task.  Yet he had a typewriter made to construct the characters necessary and with his one useful finger continued the task.

He sat for twenty years.  Of course this is not what was to be expected of the Bishop of Shanghai.  His life that had carried him to China from Lithuania via the United States had certainly not been sedentary before. "It seemed very hard at first", he reflected, "but God knew best.  He kept me for the work for which I am best fitted."

Buttons

That morning Hudson Taylor had donned his customary frock-coat, as befitted a Victorian English gentleman, and started another day of brave, even reckless, Christian ministry. Here he was in the depths of China, a place forbidden to foreigners, far beyond the reach of consular support. Yet as he preached in town after town along the inland waterways he found that his foreignness guaranteed him an audience. And that, after all, is what every preaching missionary needs.

Irritatingly his foreignness seemed to be more alluring than the message itself. And on this, as it was to be, historic day pairs of eyes were transfixed upon him. Before the question, the wonderfully polite man had explained that they understood the usefulness of the strange things (buttons) on the front of his jacket. They were there to go through the holes and somehow hold the clothing together in the cold wind. But, the foreign teacher was asked, "What can be the meaning of those buttons in the middle of the honourable back?"

A lesser missionary might have laughed off the question about his decorative buttons. Hudson Taylor was not such a man. The question haunted him as he made his way to the next location. He resolved to dispense with the niceties of western regalia and adopt clothing, and habits, that were the best suited for his purpose of pointing the people of inland China to Jesus.

What a different place the world would be if Christians and their Church had more frequently dispensed with ornamental buttons!