An Open Letter to Cole Michael Sywulych and Isla Kerstin Sywulych
To here an audio recording of this Letter as read at the 10.00 a.m. eucharist please click here.
12 August 2012
Dear Cole and
Isla,
Today you are being baptized and
will begin what I hope will be an exciting and joy-filled life as a member of
the Christian community. I am writing
this letter in the hopes that some years from now, probably after I have retired,
you will know something about the people who believe that Jesus of Nazareth
shows us how to be truly alive and how God helps us to become the people that
we are created to be.
So I want to tell you why I am a
Christian. There are many other ways of
following God in the world and I think that they each offer us a way of
understanding who God is and what God expects of us. But I am a Christian and today your parents
have chosen to bring you here so that you can begin your life by following this
path to know and love God and to become a wonderful sign of God’s love to other
people.
It is very important for me to tell
you why I am Christian because of something that happened on this past Thursday
morning. I was walking down Broadway
towards the office of one of my doctors for an appointment. A man passed by me on my right and, as he
passed me, he handed me a little slip of paper, about the size of a business
card. He never said a word to me, just
handed me this piece of paper.
I won’t tell you exactly what was
written on the paper; it’s not that important for you to know right now. What I can tell you is that the man thought
of himself as a Christian and that what was written on the paper goes against
everything I believe Jesus taught us and against everything I believe about who
God is and what God expect of us. So I
thought it was important on this day, this special day for you, to tell you
what I believe and what I believe is the heart of the Christian story.
I believe that God created us in love
and for love.
Cole and Isla, there are many
Christians who spend most of their lives afraid of God. They think that God is angry with us and that
God tries to find every reason to condemn us.
They try to make other people afraid, and they hope that by making other
people afraid those people will choose to follow the way of Jesus. It’s a strange way of sharing our faith, but,
I’m sad to say, it seems to work from time to time.
But this is not what I believe about
the God who created the universe, who gave us the knowledge to travel millions
of kilometers to other planets and who brings forth life in all its
diversity. The God I know and the God in
whom I believe created us because God loves.
When you love someone, you do not want them to be afraid of you. You want them to know everything about you
and you want to know everything about the one you love. You do everything you can to help the other
person grow up and become the best person he or she can be.
This is why God created the universe;
so that we might love and be loved. Only
then can we all fulfill our potential.
I believe that
God does not like the walls we build that separate us from God and from each
other.
The truth is, Cole and Isla, that we
are not perfect. We may try hard to
love, but we all make mistakes and sometimes make bad decisions. Sometimes we make too much of how we are
different from other people and make the mistake of thinking that our
differences make us better than others.
Sometimes we become selfish and forget to care for other people. We begin to think that we are the centre of
the universe.
When these things happen, we build
walls. We think that these walls will
protect us and keep others out, but all they do is make our world smaller and
smaller. As our worlds become smaller,
we become less and less human.
This has happened so many times in
the history of the world that God has tried many times to show us how to live
with one another. One of those ways is
the way of Jesus of Nazareth. I follow
the way of Jesus because I find it the best way I know to break down the walls
we build and to build bridges to connect me with other people whose way of
thinking may be different from mine. I
follow the way of Jesus because I find it the best way I know to learn who God
is and what God wants me to do in my life.
I believe that God speaks to us every
day in many and different ways.
There are people who think that the
only way God speaks to us is through the words of the Bible. I believe that God does speak to us through
the Bible, but the meaning of the words are not always clear. These words were written by people who loved
God many long years ago and we have to use many tools to understand what these
words mean to us now.
But the Bible is not the only way
God speaks to us. God speaks to us when
scientists make new discoveries about the universe, our earth and living
things. God speaks to us when a friend
says the word we have needed to hear.
God speaks to us when people who have been fighting one another or who
have not trusted one another find a way to stop fighting and to trust one
another. God speaks to us in literature
and movies and music. What I find hard
to believe is how many people there are who believe that God is not speaking to
us!
I believe that God wants us to be part
of something big.
Cole and Isla, today you will
baptized and become a member of something big.
It’s called the Church. The
Church is a special group of people who believe, like I believe, that God
created us in love and for love, that God does not like the walls we build to
separate ourselves from God and from each other and that God speaks to us every
day in many and different ways.
Some people believe that ‘church-people’
only care about buildings and love to fight about all sorts of things. It’s true that we do care about our buildings
and that we do fight about all sorts of things.
But the most important thing we do is to come together and to work
together to share in the great work that God is doing in the world. The ‘big something’ God is doing right now
and throughout all time is finding people who will help God take care of the
world, help people live together in peace and give shelter and food to those
who have none.
Almost sixty years ago my mother and
father brought me to be baptized. I was
only three months old then, but I am still here today. I am here because I want to be part of what
God is doing in the world. I want to
share the good news of God’s love shown to us in creation, God’s love shown to
us in Jesus, God’s love shown to us every day.
I hope that you will read these
words one day. I hope that when you read
them you will understand a little bit of what I have written. I hope that you will be discovering God’s
love in every moment of your lives. I
hope that you will be doing your own part in God’s ‘big something’.
In Christ’s
love,
Richard +
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