This week, I gave the Thought for the Week on RTHK Radio 3. This is the transcript of the talk:

Good morning, I’m Ross Royden

I am no longer happy to call myself a Christian. Now before anyone thinks that I have lost my faith, let me try to explain.

Our age may not believe in God, but it remains religious. Our religion is ourselves. Its creed is summed up by the well-known advertising slogan, ‘Just do it’. We can just do it, we are told, if we just believe in ourselves. We should follow our dreams; be true to our own identity; be who we want to be and accept no limitations. The problem is that we don’t always feel we can just do it. We get lonely. People let us down. Our hopes come to nothing. None of this is our fault, of course. But bad things do happen to good people like us. So, what are we to do when they do?

Enter the Christianity popularly on offer. Want someone who understands and will help you realize your dreams? Jesus is who you need. He accepts everyone and condemns no-one. He is here to help you to just do it, whatever it is you want to do and whoever it is you want to be. Jesus believed in himself and did what he believed in. True, it got him killed, but that shows he will understand when people don’t understand you and when they try to force their views on you: #youarenotalone

This is ‘Jesus my imaginary friend Christianity’. It makes no demands because it is not meant to. It is meant to be comforting, positive, and encouraging. It builds up our image and doesn’t fill our minds with negative thoughts, and especially not about ourselves.

This is all very different to how two young women, Perpetua and Felicity, saw things. They were Christians at the beginning of the third century when it wasn’t a good time to be a Christian. The local authorities were demanding that people deny they were a Christian and make a pagan sacrifice for the Emperor. Perpetua and Felicity refused. The penalty for not doing so was death. Perpetua’s father begged her to just do it. What did words matter? Perpetua pointed to the vase on the table and asked her father whether it could be called anything other than a vase. ‘Of course not’, answered her father. ‘And neither can I be called anything other than what I am, a Christian’, Perpetua replied.

Perpetua and Felicity died a horrible, brutal, and humiliating public death, leaving behind two young babies. The name that Perpetua and Felicity died for, rather than deny, meant for them something very different to what is often meant by it today. So, if you ask me whether I call myself a Christian, if you mean what St Perpetua and St Felicity meant by a Christian, I consider it an honour to have the same name as them. But if you mean the religion of ‘Jesus, my imaginary friend’, then I would be letting them down if I said I was. The real Jesus said:

‘If anyone wants to become my follower, they must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life because of me and because of the gospel will save it.’ (Mark 8:34-35)

Jesus did not come simply to befriend us: he came to save us. But that, of course, suggests that we need saving; that it’s not enough to believe in ourselves; that we can’t just do it; and that life is to be found, not by pursuing our dreams, but by giving them up. We find our true identity, not by believing in ourselves, but by following Jesus, the Jesus, that is, whom Perpetua and Felicity followed.

Thought for the Week - August 4

I had the privilege of giving the 'Thought for the Week' on RTHK Radio 3 today. This is a transcript of the talk with a link to the broadcast in the Radio 3 archive.

Anne Frank

Many of you will know the story of Anne Frank.  Anne; her parents, Otto and Edith; and her sister, Margot; together with four others went into hiding in a secret annexe of a building in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during World War 2.

On her 13^th birthday, just before the family went into hiding, Anne was given a diary.  During her time in the annexe, she wrote about her life there describing her thoughts and feelings.  Those in the annexe kept in touch with what was going on in the outside world through those who were helping them and by listening to the radio.  One day on the radio, Anne heard the Dutch Minister of Education, who had escaped to England, appealing to people to keep hold of any diaries or documents they had for use after the war.  Anne was inspired to go over her diary and rewrite it into one running story of her life in captivity, hoping it would be read when the war was over.

Before Anne had completed her rewriting, however, on this day, August 4 in 1944, Anne and her family were discovered in a police raid on the building.  Anne was taken to prison and then transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration camp.  Otto was sent to the camp for men.  Anne, Margot, and her mother to the labour camp for women.  In 1944, Anne and Margot were deported to the Bergen-Belsen camp where they died.

Anne’s writings were discovered and looked after by those helping the Franks.  Her father, who alone survived, published an edited version of her diary after the war.  It was an immediate success.  Later a fuller version was also published.  The Diary has made Anne famous, and the house where they went into hiding is now a major tourist attraction.  A quote from Anne’s diary is well-known: ‘I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.’  This positive outlook in the face of adversity appeals to us and Anne’s story has been made into a universal story of youthful optimism and the triumph of the human spirit.  This, however, will not do.

We like to think of Anne in the annexe full of life and hope.  But hers is not a story of any girl, it is a story of a Jewish girl who suffered like millions of other Jews for no other reason than that they were Jews.  Anne’s final words in her diary were: ‘if only there were no other people in the world.’  But there were.  And many of them were anything but ‘good at heart’.  We pass over the awfulness of Anne’s death in our desire to read of her life, but as we read in her diary of her life, we need also to remember how it ended.  This is a description from an eye-witness at the Concentration camp:

‘I saw Anne and her sister Margot again in the barracks … It was winter and you didn’t have any clothes.  So all of the ingredients for illness were present.  They were in bad shape.  Day by day they got weaker … You could see that they were very sick.  The Frank girls were so emaciated.  They looked terrible.  They had little squabbles, caused by their illness, because it was clear that they had typhus … They had those hollowed-out faces, skin over bone.  They were terribly cold.  They had the least desirable places in the barracks, below, near the door, which was constantly opened and closed.  You heard them constantly screaming, “Close the door, close the door,” and the voices became weaker every day.  You could really see both of them dying …’

Anne and Margot may have died in the camp of typhus, but it was antisemitism that killed them.  As we see antisemitism on the rise again in our world, we need to read these words, heart-breaking though they are, and make a simple promise:

Never again.

I had the privilege of giving the 'Thought for the Week' on RTHK Radio 3 today.  This is a transcript of the talk with a link to the broadcast in the Radio 3 archive.

Thought for the Week: April 21, 2019

Easter Sunday

Today is Easter Sunday.  This is the highlight of the Church’s Year.  It is the day when Christians all around the world celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  It all began when, nearly 2,000 years ago, a group of women who had followed him went to the tomb where he had been buried after his crucifixion by the Roman authorities.  They found it empty.  One of them, Mary Magdalene, claimed that Jesus had appeared to her.

His closest male disciples also claimed that he had appeared to them and other appearances followed.  It wasn’t long before the disciples were telling everyone that Jesus was alive and people were believing them.  The fact that the authorities couldn’t produce his body, which would have shut everyone up, only gave added credence to the reports that he was alive.

The rest, as they say, is history and the Christian Church was to go on to greater and greater success, eventually becoming the dominant force in the growth and development of western civilization although its influence has been felt all over the world and the Church today is strong in both Africa and Asia.

It’s a great story of success and the Church is right to celebrate it.  It’s just the sort of story for this time of year as well when, in the northern hemisphere, we are enjoying the arrival of Spring and looking forward to Summer.  In my own Church today, the Church will be decorated with lots of flowers as we celebrate Jesus being alive.

So far, so good; and far be it for me to say anything to spoil it.  However, it’s one thing to celebrate Jesus being alive and another thing altogether to understand what it means.  And this is where even Christians have some difficulty.  In the Bible, Jesus’ resurrection is linked inseparably to his death, not in the obvious sense that you can’t come back from the dead unless you first die, but in the sense that his death was for a purpose: it achieved something, something more than someone dying for what they believed.

This may be why Christmas, for most people, is the more popular Christian festival.  What’s not to like about celebrating the birth of a baby?  We can all get our minds around this and get together because of it.  And this too may be why Christians prefer to focus on the events of Easter Sunday rather than the events of Good Friday.  My Church will be full today.  It wasn’t full on Friday.

This isn’t just because death is something that we don’t want to think about – although there is that in it – but because of the Bible’s unremitting message that the responsibility for Jesus’ death isn’t down to those like Pilate and the governing authorities who arranged it, but because of you and me.  How on earth can we be held responsible is the obvious question?  The answer lies in the earliest explanation of Jesus’ death given by his first followers.  Their message quite simply was that: ‘Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures’.  In other words, that Jesus’ death was an event designed and determined by God to bring forgiveness for sin: yours and mine.

The universal symbol of Christianity is a plain Cross.  Jesus may have died on the Cross, but the Cross is now empty.  Christ is alive!  At the front of my Church, however, is a large Crucifix – a wooden Cross with the figure of Christ nailed to it.  A reminder that there is no escaping the death of Christ as much as we might like to.  The Risen Christ who Christians celebrate today is the Christ who died for us and who now today invites us to find forgiveness through his death for us.

And that really is something worth celebrating.

Thought for the Week; Easter Sunday

Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Establishment Day

I had the privilege of recording the 'Thought for the Week'  on RTHK Radio 3 this morning.  Today is the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Establishment Day.  This is the written version with a link at the end to the audio version on the RTHK website.

Thought for the Week: July 1, 2018

Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Establishment Day

I remember very clearly where I was on the day of the ‘Handover’ – as it was described by everyone at the time, although I realize the problems with that word now to describe what was happening.  I was the minister of a Church in the North-east of Scotland, and I had been invited to the home of my Church Warden to watch it with him on TV.  Stanley – or Professor Wilkinson as he was more formally known – had worked as an architect in Hong Kong and had a real love for the City.  To me, then, it was just a place on the map.  Little did I realize that, in just three years, I would be moving to Hong Kong to live.

Apart from being good friends, Stanley and I both had in common, as Englishmen, that we were expats in Scotland.  We also both came from Liverpool.  Well, I have now been in Hong Kong for nearly 18 years, and although I see Hong Kong as my home, I am still regarded as an expat, which, I suppose, is fair enough.  After all, we British were happy enough with the appellation before the ‘Handover’, so we can’t complain that it has stuck after it.

There is, however, a far deeper truth to this description of me than people who use it realize.  For while Hong Kong is my earthly place of residence, for me, as a Christian, it is not, and never can be, my true home, any more than Scotland, Liverpool, or wherever, can be.  St Paul in a letter to a church in a city that was a Roman colony wrote: ‘But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.’  (Philippians 3:20)

Christians should always value their earthly homes and work for the good of the places where they live, but we should never forget, whatever our human origins, background, and ethnicity that Christians are all ‘expats’.  Our beliefs, values, and attitudes are, or should be, not those of the earthly city, but of the City that is above – the City of God that is our true home.  The writer of the Letter to Diognetus, one of the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament, expresses it this way:

‘Christians are indistinguishable from other people either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in (wherever it may be) ... And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labour under all the disabilities of aliens.’

Our mission in this world is to invite people to join us and become members of the City that is above.  The benefits of citizenship are great: forgiveness of all the wrong we have done, liberation from all those forces that oppress us, eternal life, and, above all, a relationship with God himself.  The demands of citizenship, however, are also great: including a willingness to give up our own desires and to follow law of Christ in the service of God.

Christians look to Jesus as their Lord and Emperor – as their President.  Their allegiance is to Jesus as the Ruler of the heavenly City to which they belong, even though for now they are forced to live as aliens in the cities of this world.  This situation, St Paul again writes, must continue until Jesus has put all his ‘enemies under his feet’ and then when that day comes he will hand all rule back to God (1 Corinthians 15:24-28).  Until that time, we wait patiently, living as citizens of the City of God as exiles in the cities of this world, longing and praying for the Day of the Ultimate Handover.

RTHK Radio 3: Thought for the Week