A sermon preached by Kathryn Woolford at the 2007 Watchnight Service at Ockbrook

The Enduring Love

As we celebrate this past year and look forward to 2008 it is ap-propriate that the New Testament text reminds us that whatever hap-pens in our lives nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
When we look back at the history of the Moravian Church dur-ing the 1460s we see how the people were already beginning to be persecuted because of their beliefs and how difficult their lives had be-come. J. E. Hutton in his book, The History of the Moravian Church, wrote this:
"Meanwhile in 1461 the first persecution of the Brethren had begun in deadly earnest. King George Podiebrad was furious. He issued an order that all his subjects were to join either the Utraquists or the Roman Catholic Church. He issued another order that all the priests who conducted the communion in the blasphemous manner of the Brethren should forthwith be put to death. The priest, Old Michael, was cast into a dungeon; four leading brethren were burned alive; their peaceful home in Kunwald was broken; and the Brethren fled to the woods and mountains. For two full years they lived the life of hunted deer in the forest. As they durst not light a fire by day, they cooked their meals by night; and then, while the enemy dreamed and slept they read their Bibles by the watch fire's glare, and prayed until blood was dripping from their knees…. As they gathered around the fire they read to each other the golden promise that where two or three are gathered to-gether in his name he would be in their midst and rejoiced that they, the chosen of God, had been called to suffer for the truth and the church that was yet to be."

It is good that as this year ends when we have been celebrating the founding of the Moravian Church in 1457 we should be reminded of the struggles of those early members and of their strongly held belief that whatever happened to them, whether it be persecution or whether it be the suffering caused by their having to live away from their own villages, nothing could separate them from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. Sometimes I think that we need to be reminded of that because we often feel that Christians are in a minority in our country. We need to be reminded that nothing can separate us from that love of God.

This year when we have also remembered the abolition of the slave trade we should be reminded of the suffering of those slaves in the West Indies when the first Moravian missionaries went there in 1732. I spoke to you before about the life of one of those slaves, Rebecca, and of the difficult life that she had when she became a Christian, of her imprison-ment because of her preaching and teaching the people about Jesus Christ, how she married Matthaus and after his death she married Prot-ten and went to live with him in Guinea, how her two daughters both died at a young age and yet despite all of that her faith in God and in Jesus as her Saviour remained strong and she knew that nothing would separate her from that love of God. The slaves that she brought to God suffered greatly for their faith and had tongues cut out for speaking against their master, had hands chopped off for disobedience, and yet through all of that their faith remained strong. When we read stories of events like this it makes us realise that, in fact, we do have a very easy life as we are able to practise our faith without fear and without preju-dice.

Although we read stories of people suffering for their faith we imagine that all of that is now finished, that people everywhere are able to worship freely as we are, that people are able to gather together to worship, to read their Bibles when they want, to preach about their faith to others and yet that is still not true. There are still people who suffer for their faith. In many Middle Eastern countries where Christians are very much in the minority there are people who are imprisoned for their faith, people who are tortured for their faith and people who still die for their faith. I remember a few years ago hearing the story of some Chris-tians in Vietnam who feared for their lives because of their faith.

They believed that they were being followed as they went from village to village telling the people about Jesus Christ. Because they feared for their lives they used to go to one village, change their clothes, their motor bikes which was their form of transport and so change their identity before they moved on to another village. Even then they feared not just for their own lives but for the lives of the people that they visited and in whose homes they stayed. I am not talking about a long time ago; I am talking about now. However those people know that whatever happens to them because of their faith, nothing will separate them from the love of God.

As we move forward into a new year we do not have any idea what the new year will bring for each of us. What we can be sure of is that it will be a year of happiness and of sadness, that there will be ups and downs, that there will be times when we wonder how are we going to cope with what life is throwing at us, that there will be times when everything in the garden is rosy. I often say that it is a good thing that we do not know what is going to happen in the future and I certainly would not do anything to try to even predict what the future holds for all of us in the year to come. How-ever one thing that we can be absolutely certain of is that, whatever does happen, God will be there to help and to guide us and that nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God.

Let us go forward into this new year in the sure and certain knowl-edge that nothing is going to happen that, with Jesus, we can not handle and that nothing, absolutely nothing, will separate us from the love of God. I pray that for all of you there may be more ups than downs, more happiness than sadness and that 2008 will be a wonderful year for you all.

One of the most disturbing and shocking news stories of recent weeks has been that telling of the deportation of Ama Sumani from Britain to her native Ghana. This 39year old widow, suffering from terminal cancer, was taken from a Cardiff hospital on January 8th by immigration officers and put on a plane to Ghana. It is unlikely that in Ghana she will be able to have the regular dialysis and other treatments she needs to make her condition a little easier, but even apart from that, the physical and mental distress caused to a sick woman by such treatment does not bear thinking about.

Legally, the immigration officers were quite correct in what they did. We don’t condemn them as individuals. They were carrying out orders based on the law of the land. Mrs Sumani’s visa had been withdrawn some time ago. She had no legal right to be here and a spokesman for the Immigration Department claimed that “removals are always carried out in the most sensitive possible way, treating those being removed with courtesy and dignity.”

Maybe! But here was a woman suffering from terminal illness. What of common humanity? In such a situation, would we not expect a civilised country to go beyond the law and to act with compassion and a wish to ease her suffering rather than make it worse?

One journalist notes how a nurse stood by the side of Mrs Sumani, stroking her arm, as the immigration officers came to take her away. What a contrast between individual caring and State indifference. It is often claimed that we are, today, a more compassionate, caring society than in the past. Sadly, stories like that of Ama Sumani give the lie to that claim. Is part of the problem the failure of the Church to speak out more strongly for those on the edge of society?