Pastoral Letter 3

Dear Members of St. Andrew’s Uniting Church, Friends and Adherents,

Hope you are all well and safe.

As a follow up to my earlier Pastoral Letters 1 and 2, I write this third letter, as we will not be able to meet tomorrow to have our regular Sunday Service to worship our God and have fellowship together. As we have decided, after praying and taking into consideration the strong recommendation of the Uniting Church Synod and Presbytery advice, to suspend all our service and activities until further notice, we will keep on communicating via email, phone calls and our church website.

In these prevailing tough and most unpredictable times, as we face the terrible pandemic and the quick spread of the coronavirus – Covid-19, when we don’t know what tomorrow holds, our only hope is God, our heavenly Father who loves; the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, who comes to us with His grace and the Holy Spirit that gives us power to resist evil and all the challenges of life.

With this email and the attached Order of Service as an alternative to our church service, where we sing, pray, read the scripture and reflect on it to get the message, I ask you to follow the Order on Sunday morning at 9:30 am, by reading the script, the prayers, Responsive Reading, Bible Readings and sing the hymns and think about all those who are worshiping with you at the same time.

We can do, and we will do this! Please read the summary of the message that you will find below, meditate on it further and see what more God is saying to you. Also, I urge you to put your offering in a dated envelope, set it aside and when the time comes to recommence and reconvene for our services in the church sanctuary and worship together, please bring the envelope/envelopes with you as a sign of your gratitude and thanks to God for keeping you safe and giving you the chance to come and join again with the loving and caring congregation, your brothers and sisters in Christ, to worship and celebrate. This will be one of the best ways to express our faith in God and our Saviour Jesus Christ, who was, is and will be with us always as He has promised. The promises of our God assure us that all things will work for out for the better over time.

I will be writing to you every week with a similar message and urge you to do the same, until such time when we will be able to meet again on our church premises.

Undeniably, we will miss the company of our sisters and brothers in Christ, the fellowship and the singing and the music of Mark and the choir. But God is good and great; and perhaps He seeks to tell us something about not taking things for granted.

I am grateful for those who have written to me during the week with encouraging words and appreciation for sending the Sunday’s Order of Service and the message summary. I am sure you have followed it step by step, as I read from those emails that I have received during the week. Some have shared their own thoughts. Thank you for the encouraging words and keeping open the communication lines.

Please keep communicating with me for anything you need. I am more than happy to assist you, besides praying for you. If need be, I am happy to come and see you face to face but respecting the current social distancing regulations. In the meantime, please communicate with each other with phone calls and keep informed everyone, with any new developments that happens with you, your family and any of the congregation member that you know is having any problems.

Sadly, on Monday morning I got a call from Jane Arakwa, Betty Chapman’s daughter, letting me know that Betty had peacefully passed away on Friday 20 March. Her Funeral service was held on Wednesday 25 March at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium’s Northern Chapel. Attendance was very small in number per the regulations.  Please pray for Betty’s family, seeking the comfort of the Spirit to be with all her family.

Keep praying, praying and praying and leave everything in the hands of our great God, who is our refuge and strength.

Krikor Youmshajekian

Your Minister

 

Message Summary

“You Will Live!”

Ezekiel 37:1-14

With everything that is going on in this world and in our country, it is needless to say that we think we are in despair and in a hopeless situation. As we follow the news, we hear that as time goes on, the cases of infection grow rapidly. We are not alone with having similar thoughts. We are all in the same boat. The prevailing pandemic is something new for us, with no precedent for the last hundred years. We are in fear and our emotions are all over the board.

A few weeks ago, everything seemed fine and under control. We started the year 2020 with great hopes and planned the year ahead, full of programs, services, gatherings, trips, etc. Also, we went into the Lent season to prepare ourselves for Palm Sunday, Good Friday and a great Easter celebration, after a period of self-examination and disciplined time of prayer and fasting.

And then a deadly virus appeared and started spreading all over the world and caused people and governments to panic and put in place restrictive measures to be implemented stage by stage.

During this pandemic, many of us are tempted to fear, feel anxiety, be in despair and lose hope.

Some have already lost their lives, others have lost loved ones, some have been and still are ill, some have lost their jobs and their income, schools are almost pupil-less and our lives are disrupted totally.

The questions that comes to our minds at the moment are:

How are we dealing with this crisis? Do we have hope? Can we still trust God, believing that He is still in control?

In our Scripture passage for this morning, we see that the portrayed picture of Israel mirrors our situation. It was a very dark time for Israel, and Ezekiel himself was exiled to Babylon for 11 years when he delivered this message. Jerusalem had fallen, the kingdom had come to an end and they had been left with nothing. And they thought that God had been defeated. They were not only in exile, but actually they were having a crisis of faith. They had lost their faith and their lives were on the verge of extinction. In their despair they were exclaiming: “Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.” (Vs. 11)

In that moment God’s loving grace breaks through and Ezekiel’s prophecy speaks of hope, revival, restoration and LIFE.

We read: “The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones. He led me back ….”. (Vs. 1-3)

The scene was not beautiful. It was of death and despair.  Imagine Ezekiel’s situation and try to enter his mind and look to the questions popping out. Where is the hope? Where is the life?

He could only see death, death and death! Nothing else. No hope and NO LIFE.

And then, suddenly God asks Ezekiel a question: “Son of man, can these bones live?”

Let me tell you, the bones were dry; meaning they were there for a very long time.

“Can these dry bones live?” “Can they be a firm structure and come together; can tendons and flesh come on them and skin cover them?”

“Can these bones have life?”

These “dry bones” that God is showing Ezekiel, were an image of the condition of the people of Israel. They represented the reality of hopeless situation of no life. Similarly, today we can feel that the feeling is the same for so many people around the world and especially for certain countries and areas, especially at the moment Europe, America and Australia.

“Can these bones live?” “Is there hope for those who are under the threat of illness? Those who are infected and those who are going to be infected?”

It is terrifying and scary. Especially when you talk about death.

Our church sign board for the last two weeks read: “Covid 19 is deadly, but our God is great!”

Yesterday, when I was changing the saying, two ladies were passing by and it was clear that they read our sign board regularly. One of them said: “That’s much better”.

She reacted and said those words, because the new saying that I was putting on the board read: “Our doors are closed, but our hearts are open”. (Now you know what our church sign board will read until Easter Sunday).

I believe she was not happy with the word ‘deadly’ in the previous message. And she was right, as the message was giving a sense of negativity. We don’t like talking about death. We don’t like death, we prefer life. Though death is inescapable, but we know that we have or can have life with Christ.

For the man Ezekiel, dry bones are the very definition of dead, gone, not coming back, but he chooses faith over despair and he answers God, “Sovereign Lord, you alone know”, when God asks him: “Son of man, can these bones live?”

As we continue reading the passage, we see what happens next and what God tells Ezekiel. He gives a clear message that nothing is impossible with Him. He is the sovereign Lord, the God of life and hope.

The story of Ezekiel should remind us that life itself is utterly and totally reliant on God and offers us hope. God brings new life, even when everything seems to be completely hopeless, completely dead.

For nothing, nothing is impossible with God.

He is the source of life. He is the Almighty, who gives us hope and assures us that we can live with Him.

And just as God breathed new life into the valley, putting the lives of these dead people back together, God’s promise is always a promise of new life!

We face the unknowns, the uncertainties, the madness of this pandemic, and as we do this worship service in our homes, on our computers rather than joining together in worship in our beautiful sanctuary, with the beautiful music and singing and communal prayers, as we have always done, let us remember that we worship a God of Resurrection, who promises life and more life to us through His Son Jesus Christ.

It could seem that we have lost hope and maybe we are at the end; but rest assured that God is in control and He is with us, in this very difficult, critical and challenging time, as He has always been.

As we deal with this situation and as we enter these final days of Lent, let us pray that with God’s sovereign will, we will be able to overcome this threat and be filled with the life-giving spirit of God. We will come out of this anew, full of new hope and life.

As in today’s passage we saw that God breathes new life in those very dry bones, He can keep us, protect us and give us hope for better times.

Therefore, let God’s life-giving breath fill our hearts, minds and body and assure us that we will live with Him and for His glory.

Amen.