Silliman University Church Reflections

A Celebration of God’s Faithfulness

Texts: Psalm 46:1-11; Mark
10:42-45

by Rev. Noriel Capulong
 

Good morning! Allow me first to greet you together with my family on this historic occasion of your 97^th founding anniversary as a congregation of our church. I am deeply honored and humbled by this privilege of being invited here to preach before you on this very special occasion.

This is also a joyous opportunity for me to express my continuing thankfulness and gratitude for God’s faithfulness and gift of healing. Because of this gift and because of the prayers and support of so many of you I am able to stand before you to share with you the word that needs to be proclaimed on occasions like this and in situations like ours today.

I was told that the theme of our anniversary this year is “A Celebration of God’s Faithfulness”. Ninety seven years is certainly more than enough reason to celebrate! Surely each one of you has a story to tell about how God has remained ever faithful in your life and in the life of this church.// We can only imagine how blessed you are as a church community in spite of the challenges and trials you have faced along the way if you compare our situation with those of our brothers and sisters who worship and witness in even more trying  conditions, such as the churches in parts of Africa, in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and in parts of Indonesia where being a minority religious group puts them at times in situations of great risk and danger to their own safety.

In spite of the challenges of the times, God has been so good and so faithful to Silliman Church with its atmosphere of serenity and the pristine natural beauty of its setting, so conducive to both study, reflection, worship, prayer and a meaningful church life, and serving as the soul and center of a Christian university.  //But to talk of faithfulness is actually to talk of being in a relationship in which faithfulness is required of the partners. Being faithful is being true, being loyal to the terms of a relationship. It is being loyal to the partner and to the interests and welfare of the partner. It is being unconditionally committed to a lasting covenant relationship.

In our relationship with God, however, it is us who often fail to come up to the demand for faithfulness. More often than not, it is us who have fallen into a kind of “covenantal amnesia”. That is, we tend to forget that we are in a covenant relationship with a God who has called us and blessed us as a church community.// But, the amazing thing is that, in spite of our own human tendency to be unfaithful to our God, it is God who remains faithful to us no matter what. It is the creator being more faithful to His own creatures rather than the creatures becoming faithful to the demands of the creator.

Analogous to this God-human relationship, this is similar to the superior party being more faithful to the inferior party. It is like the boss being more faithful to the employees than the other way around. It is like the master being more faithful to his own slaves. This is quite the opposite of normal, traditional expectations, where employees, subordinates are expected to display utmost loyalty to the company and to their bosses and superiors in order to gain favor and security in their positions.// But here, it is that faithfulness of God that is willing to come down to the level of the creatures, to the level of God’s own children, to be with them, to be Immanuel to them.

This kind of faithfulness of God to us, in spite of our inability to be faithful to His covenant demands is what we call Chesedh, that wonderful, amazing, steadfast love of God. This is the basis of the persistent invitation through the book of Psalms to “Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good, for His mercy or chesedh endures forever. For his unfailing love and wonderful deeds, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good!”

To talk of God’s faithfulness however is also to experience the sustaining grace of God especially in the midst of the most depressing and tragic realities we can ever go through in life. It is to affirm and assert that God is in control even when events appear to be so chaotic and confusing for us already. To talk of God’s faithfulness is to talk about hope even in the midst of the most catastrophic and painful tragedies we can experience in life. It is to talk of hope even in the midst of the most hopeless of situations that we can ever face. // This is precisely the point being raised and affirmed in our text in Psalms 46. “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help, a very reliable help in trouble.” This abiding faith affirmation was even used by Martin Luther in composing the classic hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is our God.”

Unfortunately, so many of our people in their days of trouble and crisis have not heard that there is a refuge they can go to, that there is a source of strength they can appeal to, that there is a source of help that they can call upon.// A mother in Laguna, out of extreme poverty and wanting to end it all, poisoned her own three children before committing suicide herself. Another mother just a few days ago, so desperate over her failure to find food to appease their hunger, hanged her own young child and then killed herself. A young school girl in Mindanao committed suicide because in the face of the poverty of her family, she found no hope of a better future./ Hope is fast fading in the hearts of millions of our people these days.

Our nation is supposed to be the only predominantly Christian nation in Asia. Yet, we have to bear the stigma of being perceived as the most corrupt in Asia and one of the most corrupt countries in the world. This only indicates a very serious erosion of the spiritual and moral fibre of the nation. This has been the subject of the talk of Jun Lozada last Thursday right in this pulpit and the source of his deep anguish to the point that he sounded like a man who has already lost hope. He voiced out the conviction that our people, in the various corruption scandals that he had personal knowledge of, had been robbed, not only of billions of pesos of precious resources that could have decisively improved their living conditions and provided a better future for them. They have been robbed of their hopes and ability to dream.  

The president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, Bishop Angel Lagdameo, formerly assigned here in Dumaguete, described the observance of Human Rights Day last Wednesday as A Day of Shame in the Inquirer headline that day owing to the long list of unresolved human rights violations record of the government. This includes the case of the murder of my younger brother Noli. No one’s been arrested, no one’s been brought to court, no one’s been convicted and put in jail for any of the more than 900 cases of extra judicial killings and involuntary disappearances that has occurred under the present government.

These are also days of continuing wars and conflicts between peoples and nations in various parts of the world, and even in our own neighboring Mindanao, where anyone or even every one, even innocent civilians can become targets of violent attacks.

Indeed, we live in an age of growing hopelessness, fear and loss of the spiritual and moral moorings of so many of our people. We live in a time of growing insecurity and fear over what the future may bring. Headline after headline in the newspapers these days contain almost nothing but bad news that forebode more of bad times to come. With the global financial meltdown afflicting every major developed nation of the world, and now threatening to spill over right into our own backyard, threatening the jobs of thousands of our own overseas Filipino workers, we cannot but feel the growing fear and anxiety of many families these days.

But what if we still add the almost regular occurrence now of natural calamities that come with more devastating impact than ever before, whether it is here in our country or in many other countries. We now have more powerful and destructive typhoons, and deadlier floods and landslide and mudslides burying entire villages, but much warmer and drier and longer summers, and fast melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, all brought about by global warming.  It is all happening now. // It is, as if, as our text says, the earth is indeed changing and the mountains are shaking in the heart of the sea, the waters are roaring and the mountains trembling with its tumult.

 Kingdoms and nations are in uproar, the environment is fast becoming a desolation. // Yet, our text affirms this one basic truth, the Lord God is still the one in control. God is still the Lord of all nations and He can make wars and conflicts cease. God can break the bow and shatter the spears of those waging war against each other. God can transform this world into a new earth and a new heaven.

And there is a way by which this abiding truth can be discerned and experienced by us. It says in v. 10: “Be still, and know that I am God.” “Be quiet, stop for a while, cease for a moment from your normal routine and know that I am God!” In the midst of all the turmoil and the tumult all around us, we need to pause, stop, and reflect prayerfully to discern and hear the voice and will of our God. God would want to be known by us in the stillness and serenity of the quiet moments. //We may have been used to so much noise and so much tumult around us. We are in the season of making noise, the noise of the past fiesta, the noise of the coming Christmas, the noise of parties all over, and of course the far greater noise of the New Year.

As the Psalmist has said, it is good to praise and thank God with a joyful noise. But there is danger of overdoing it, as the noise may eventually drown out the divine voice and thus we fail to hear what God is really saying to us in times like this. It may also serve as a means to escape from the need to be sensitive in listening to the voice of God emanating from the situation of those who suffer and are in need of compassion and our caring response in this time of turmoil and crisis.

Even before we have known and have acknowledged it in prayer and songs, God has already acted in all faithfulness. God has already displayed how amazing is the kind of grace God has showered upon us all. This is all because of Jesus and his coming as a baby born of a poor and socially insignificant family, and his ministry of preaching and healing, exorcising demons and evil spirits, restoring even the dead, confronting the powers that be in his society. Jesus came and gave hope to the hopeless, faith to those in despair. He came transforming the lives of people, sharing a vision of a new world, God’s kingdom where dominant values will be reversed, where those who have always been last will now be first, where those who have been always in the margins, will now be put in the center of God’s concern, where the mighty and the powerful will be brought low, where the least are the ones to be raised, and those who want to be greatest, according to our gospel text, would have to be servants of all, and where service to the lowliest of the lowly even to the point of sacrifice and martyrdom becomes the mark of faithfulness among his followers.

This is how amazing is this kind of faithfulness shown by God to us through his Son Jesus. But it is also just as amazing the kind of faithful response our God demands from us who would want to become His disciples.

On your 97^th anniversary, as you journey on towards your centennial year, and in response to the manifold blessings you have been receiving, you are being called as a community of the faithful, towards a ministry of bringing hope for the many hopeless and despairing people in our community, to the unreached, the unchurched, those who hear and experience nothing but bad news in their lives, and who need to hear the good news, that we have a God who is a refuge and a source of hope and strength even in these very troubled times.

Certainly, it is in these days of bad news and rising fear that we need to hear the good news which the church needs to proclaim with even greater vigor, just like what the angel said to the shepherds: “Fear Not, I bring you glad tidings of great joy!”  // You are being called to a ministry of faithful witnessing to the dawning of a new world, where our environment that is truly hurting now will finally experience healing and renewal because you as a church have the faith and the courage to speak about it and  do something about it.

You are being called to a ministry of moral recovery and spiritual renewal, to help transform the self-centered and highly materialistic values that are at the root of the endemic corruption that had plagued and further impoverished our nation, and to uphold, defend and protect the sacredness of every human life as a child of God. // As you have done before, you can still produce and nurture leaders for our society and nation imbued with gospel values, who can provide the modeling of a leadership that we can emulate and be inspired by, who know clearly what is right from wrong, what is good and beneficial to all from what is destructive and self serving, who know clearly what it means to fear God when entrusted with power and authority.

You are being called to a ministry of peacemaking and reconciliation, to be agents of dialogue between conflicting parties in our community and in our nation;  because people would always look up to the church, especially Silliman University Church for moral and spiritual guidance when the moral leadership of those who govern begins to fail them.// You are being called to challenge, and empower those who otherwise would not care, those who would rather remain apathetic and unconcerned, those who think they can just remain as members without being involved, to awaken in them a faith that can make a difference in the life of others, for them to also become active bearers of hope in our community.

Finally, we are being called to a ministry of listening and active discernment of the will of God in this world that is full of noise and troublesome tumult. That is,  to listen to the voice of God calling us all towards greater involvement in the mission of our Lord Jesus, in ushering in the reign of God in this part of God’s kingdom, proclaiming and witnessing to the coming of a truly new world that God has prepared for all us. As we respond to these calls, in faith and in trust, only then can we experience the real joy of serving and obeying our God. Thus, events like this would then become a real celebration, a celebration of hope, a celebration of God’s steadfast love, of God’s faithfulness to us all. May your celebration of the 97^th anniversary of SU church be truly meaningful and full of blessings not just for you but for many others too in this community and beyond.  Amen.

Rev. Noriel C. Capulong  SU Church 97^th Anniversary Service//  Dec. 14, 2008.