Can Eat? Can Say?

Good morning/afternoon!

Sermon Title : Can Eat? Can Say?

Occasion : English Sanctuary Service

Location : Paya Lebar Methodist Church Sanctuary

MPP : It is alright to engage in cultural practices as long as they are not religious in nature…

Good morning/afternoon!

I guess unless you had just arrived from Singapore from a remote part of the world or even from another planet, you would know that the Spring Festival or 春节, or more popularly known simply as Chinese New Year, is just around the corner…

And this is obvious from all the decorations you see in the supermarkets and shopping centres, and even along the streets in Chinatown…

This festival as is implied by the name Spring Festival, celebrates the arrival of Spring, during which new things will start to grow…

This is significant to our forefathers because they were agrarian who depended on the land…

So during winter, nothing could be grown because of the cold, it was dark and dreary… but come Spring, things could grow again and they didn’t have to depend on food that had been stored the previous summer which perhaps by now would be getting low in stock…

So it is usually a time for great celebration…

is This is not exclusive to the Chinese, for the Jews had something similar, during which they celebrated the Yom ha-Bikkurim, or the Day of the First Fruits, which is recorded for us in , which also happens in Spring, during the month of Nissan [not the car, but the Jewish month] to thank God for the harvest…

As for the Chinese New Year, there are many things that are done traditionally, such as stocking up Mandarin Oranges so that we can exchange them when we do visitations, do spring-cleaning in our houses, wearing red or pink (which is why I’m wearing my pink tie) and of course, for the married couples and those who are higher up in the family hierarchy, prepare the red packets to give to the children… then there’s the reunion dinner that is traditionally held on the eve of Chinese New Year with all those yummy dishes with auspicious meanings that take days to prepare for…

Because it is such an important festival, with so many things to think about and prepare for, that because of your busy schedule, I’m sure you’re anxious to get back to doing, I’m declaring that you shall have not only one but two days to do so, and I’m going to keep today’s sermon short so you can go and continue your preparations…

Is that ok with you?

And in the spirit of the season, I’m going to say some greetings and because my mandarin is not so good, I say the first part and you continue with the rest ok?

Here goes…

新年（快乐）， 万事（如意）， 马到（成功），步步(高生)

The Lord be with You… (and also with you)

You may be asking yourself, what has the last greeting got to do with the rest?

Well, firstly, I didn’t say that I was just going to use Chinese greetings… I just said that I was going to say some greetings, and they are going to be relate to the season, of which the last one is actually a Biblical greeting found in which happens to be during the harvest time… (I bet you didn’t know that)

Secondly, I have a point to this, which is to bring home the point that many a times, we do somethings because it’s part of our culture, and over time, some religious things had been infused into our tradition, and we do it so often that we practice them without even thinking…

I’m sure you’ve heard of the joke about the pastor who is trying to conduct the Holy Communion who out of sheer frustration with the malfunctioning mic shouted out “I hate this stupid system” to which the congregation responded “and also with you”

Or even if we think about it, we are seldom able come to a conclusion…

So, is it right for us Christians to engage in such practices, since so many of the practices are laden with symbolism and centre around seeking good fortune for one another?

Well, today, I’m going to attempt to give some sort of a resolution, but I would like to manage your expectation….

I’m not going to give you a directive respond, telling you whether you can or cannot do a particular action, but would give you some broad principles to guide your thoughts…

And to guide our thoughts, let us now turn to , focusing on verses 19 to 21…

Which reads,

19 “It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God.

20 Instead we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood.

21 For the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.” [1]

This is the summary of the discussion that took place in Jerusalem, among the apostles and the leaders of the early church, in response to the insistence by a group of people (most scholars think they are the Judaisers) for the new Gentile Christian converts to first become Jews, then become Christians…

In other words, they were insisting that Gentiles must go through circumcision and thereafter follow the cultural laws of the Jews, it is only then that they can be saved…

So some of the Jews were not convinced that the Gentile Christians were saved…

This, we read in during which Peter gave an impassioned sermon, arguing from his Joppa experience recorded in , when God revealed to him in a dream while Peter was hungry (strange things happen when you’re hungry), Peter’s ministry to go to Gentiles and minister to them…

During that experience, God told Peter, when referring to the Gentiles, “do not call anything impure that God has made clean”

At first, Peter did not quite understand what this meant and was noted to have thought about it, but after a while, Peter understood that this was about the difference between cultural norms and spiritual laws, which is why when Peter talked to Cornelius, he said that “it is against our law for a Jew to associate with… a Gentile” because the latter is thought to be as ceremonially unclean, being outside the covenant…

It is interesting to note though the word “law” here is not the usual word for “law” that is used in the New Testament, which is “νομος” which can mean statutory law or traditional law…

But the word used here is “ἀθέμιτον” (Athimon) a very rare word used only twice in the whole New Testament, which has the nuance of something that “violates canons of decency” or disgusting… – something that goes against the grain of society…

Something that is against the social laws so to speak…

Perhaps akin to someone digging his nose or ear and spreading the ear wax on the bus seat…

So, when Peter asked in verse 10 “why do you… [put] on the necks of the disciples a yoke that neither we nor our father have been able to bear?”

Knowing that the word “yoke” here is another interesting word for it is the same word used in , which is translated to balance scales, which depicts fairness and judgement, or in this case, the lack of it, Peter was making a profound and deep argument against the Judaisers to stop being a racist and think that their cultural way is the only way…

He probably recalls how even though he rejected Jesus Christ three times, he was restored to apostleship, he probably recalls how the Jewish people had failed God time and time again, in the wilderness, during the times of the judges, and yet God continued to reach out to them…

He saw that it is only by the grace of God that the Jewish Christians were saved… And this grace had been extended to the Gentiles, which is recorded for us in and he distilled down to what is essential as our relation with God…

This, we see in that tells us that the most important thing for us as Christians is that our heart needs to be right before God…

And the heart, for the people of antiquity refers to the centre of your being…

It refers to your core, from which your personality, intellect, emotions and desires and will come out from…

This we can probably know is important because our actions sometimes are not reflective of our inner motivation…

Sometimes we do things grudgingly (just ask a teenager to clean up his or her room) and the point here is that our relationship with God is not bounded by our actions of piety!

Even in the gospels, we read of how Jesus chastised the Scribes and the Pharisees for being whitewashed tombs… nice and clean on the outside, doing all sorts of wonderful things and yet on the inside, thinking all sorts of horrible thoughts…

In fact, he went on to describe them as being “full of the bones of the dead” in …

The message is clear…

Piety acts don’t make you a Christian…

Coming to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to a shoe-shop makes you a shoe or going to a bakery make you a jiam tao lo ti…

So, in other words, you can don’t come to church and still be a Christian…

In fact, I think there is some truth to this joke I heard about a person not wanting to come to church who told his friend the he thinks that God would prefer to be at home thinking about church than to be in church thinking about home…

So coming back to our main topic for today, which is whether it is ok for you to engage in all those practices that are traditionally done during Chinese New Year, the answer is don’t worry…

If your heart is in the right place, and as long as you have a genuine relationship with God, you will not lose your salvation…

In other words

1. Engaging in cultural practices is acceptable and will not make you lose your salvation

But if I were to stop there, it would be really irresponsible of me as a pastor and a preacher…

It is true that your actions do not undermine your salvation…

But to say that just because you are saved, you can do anything you want, is akin to telling your spouse, your fiancée or boy/girlfriend, when you’re sending him or her off at the airport “Darling, I will miss you” then as soon as he or she takes-off, go for a date with someone else…

My message is not that actions and behaviour are not important…

It is that they are of secondary importance compared to our core, our motivations and our desires…

speaks of how if someone’s heart is not in the right place, out of it will come evil thoughts which will eventually be followed up by actions and the list given there include “murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony and slander” and these are the things that truly defiles a person…

And tells us that out of an evil heart flows evil speech and deeds…

In other words, if your actions and thoughts are bad and ungodly, chances are your heart is not in the right place…

While it is not the primary means of determining your salvation, and your relationship with God, it is usually a good indication of where your relationship with God is…

Especially your thoughts and actions when nobody is watching…

Our actions, behaviour, character and thoughts are not as separate as we think and it is like a dance among all these attributes within us that determine and affect who we are…

So even if you are currently in a good and genuine relationship with God, constant engagement with questionable behaviour will ultimately affect your heart…

Conversely, engaging in behaviour that builds you up will facilitate your ever closer relationship with God…

So, please don’t stop coming to church for in our time and season, God chose to use church as the community of faith that we are able to continue to build one another up, help one another up, growing and drawing closer to God… renewing our hearts…

This is the instrument within which we as Christians are able to ensure that our hearts are right with God…

Therefore, our second reflection this morning is that

2. Our adoption of cultural practices needs to be informed by Godly principles and vice versa

This, we can see in the speech by the practical apostle, James who laid down a few recommendations for the Gentiles Christians to follow, namely that they should abstain from “from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood.”[2]

James, when arguing the case probably had to 20 in mind, which are the parts which forms the bulk of the instructions by God to the Levites, the priestly tribe, that does not talk about temple worship, and hence perhaps is the most relevant to the Gentile Christians… After all, there was no temple to speak of either during or shortly after the council took place, since the temple fell in 70 AD…

Therefore, just like what we are trying to do today, by reading a text that is written for a slightly different cultural setting, and trying to extract cultural practices from spiritual principles, James took the Mosaic law that was available to them at that point of time, and made it relevant to the Gentiles Christians…

So for the remaining part of the sermon, let us use the advice of the apostles as a guide for us to use when evaluating whether certain practices should be done…

The first part talks about “food polluted by idols” of which the word “idol” probably pops out at you… and most scholars agree that this has to do with religious inclinations… and is related to the first of the 10 commandments…

This, James was summarising which speaks of the proper way of sacrifice, which in the old days before Christ, speaks of the Levitical Priest through whom all petitions must be made through, but now, after the coming of Christ to earth, should be made through Jesus Christ our risen Lord…

The most important portion is in which speaks of the specific prohibition of worship of satyrs… which is probably where we get the classical depiction of Satan from…

Of course, Moses did not just refer to satyr, the half-man, half-goat figures, but was using a poetic tool, the synecdoche, to use one item to represent the whole community…

In other words, make sure that whatever you do, make sure you do not participate in worship of any form other than that for our triune God…

So coming back to our main topic of Chinese New Year, how does that work?

In his book “A Biblical Approach to Chinese Traditions and Beliefs,”

Rev. Daniel Tong laid down a few principles for evaluations, of which I would highlight three, namely:

1. Whether the practice is based on historical fact or myth…

2. The context and the connotation in which the practice is carried out, which express the underlying beliefs…

3. To determine the superstitious and symbolic aspects of the practice…

The illustrate this point, Rev. Tong looked at the lion dance which is a common practice during the Chinese New Year, and applied the principles…

With regard to the first principle, he reminded us of the mandate Paul gave to Timothy in , to stay away from myths and to teach people to do so through the words “so that you may command certain people not to teach false doctrines any longer or to devote themselves to myths…” This is a wise advice

However, when applying the first principle, the origins are unclear because there are at least four versions on the origin of the Lion Dance…

Two versions lean more towards the lion dance being of mythical origin, with one talking about the Goddess of Mercy bringing a dead divine lion back to live after the Jade Dragon chopped of its head, one talks about a monk dreaming of a lion, while two stories lean towards historical origins, talking about actual battles in the Tang Dynasty being won because either a lion appear (and hence the commemoration) or soldiers dressing up as lions to scare their enemies away…

So this is inconclusive…

Using the second principle, the context in which the lion dance is performed is quite varied from the commemoration of special temple events, and business-to-business or house-to-house blessing during Chinese New Year… However, on the other hand, they had been seen in public performances at shopping malls and competitions to showcase the agility and skills of the performers….

For the former list, the context is some sort of a religious affair whereby idols and deities are invoked to bless the temples and the houses and the businesses… this is definitely unacceptable since the underlying belief is that the gods and the patron deities will bless those institutions because of the acts…

But as for the latter list, there seems to have no religious connotations and the context is in the public square, so it may seem quite acceptable…

Using the third principle, some of the practices of lion dance are superstitious in nature, such as the dotting of the eyes of the lion, which is said to be an invocation of the deities to give the lion life… a very Taoist concept, where 气 is a big part of their theology, obvious from the frequent use of pearls in their practices as well as decorations in their temples…

On the other hand, the fact that the lion has golden color to symbolize wealth or the fact that the lion 采清, being a play on the Chinese word 采meaning pluck,菜meaning vegetables and财meaning fortune, appears to be symbolic in nature and not superstitious…

And symbolism is not wrong in itself just like how our paraments are green this season to symbolise growth and the ordinary times…

The conclusion Rev. Tong gave, therefore is lion dance can be an acceptable practice so long as all those religious and superstitious elements are absent from the practice itself…

This is not too bad a rubric you can use to evaluate other Chinese New Year practices such as the reunion dinner when the family gathers together and partake of a sumptuous meal with lots of yummy food… or saying New Year greetings…

For both of them, they do not have any mythical origins, but birth out of the everyday actions of people, the context of both are in the everyday aspects of life and take place in homes and every setting, not in any religious settings, and finally the names of the food that had been carefully crafted to sound like things associated with health and wealth, as well as the greetings we give are generally symbolic in nature and do not have any religious connotations and hence are not contrary to our worship and piety to God…

As for food offered to idols, Paul advised us in that the food itself is nothing at all, but if you struggle with it and it is possible, one way is to ask for food to be apportioned out for you before the rest of the food is placed on the altar… but even if you cannot do so, don’t worry, God looks at your heart and He knows your pure desire to please Him…

And closely related to the issue of reunion dinners, what about the part in James’ advice about abstaining from strangled animals and from blood?

Charles W. Carter points out that this may be related to civil law, for he pointed out that blood is often associated with violence and is perhaps seen as an idiomatic way of saying do not shed blood…

While it is not conclusive, it does have some traction considering that the adjective strangled was used here to describe the way animals were choked to death…

Some other scholars suggest that strangling an animal would mean that the blood continues to be within the animal versus other means of preparing the animal, which would cause the blood to be drained off the animal…

This too makes sense, considering the parallel passage in , within the non-priestly portions of Leviticus which speaks of the partaking of blood being prohibited because blood is the source of life, is used the atonement at the altar which makes its use for food quite inappropriate because of its deep atoning significance…

Yet another group of scholars point out that it may be due simply to hygienic reasons because blood is a rich environment within which many pathogens can thrive in…

Needless to say, the reason is inconclusive and it is my pastoral opinion that is still best nevertheless to abide by this advice given by the apostles…

Having said that, I think it is of great comfort to us Chinese in Singapore that the apostles did not emphasis the need to abide by the food laws in , so when you have your reunion dinner tomorrow night, thank God that you can have your crabs, prawns, sioh bak and char siew because as far as the apostolic advice is us are concerned, these restrictions don’t allow to us anymore…

And don’t worry, I checked some websites…

As far as I know, none of our animals we eat are strangled so you don’t have to be a vegetarian this New Year…

And as for you steak eaters out there…

That red liquid you see oozing out of your rare or medium-rare steak is myoglobin and is part of the component of muscular tissues… so that is not blood, so don’t ruin a good steak through ignorance and don’t get stumbled from you see a Christian leader eat steak… that is not blood… it’s perfectly fine…

As for the last part of the statement by James, I think it is quite self-explanatory for it is consistent throughout the entire bible, Old Testament and New Testament, the Pentateuch, the Historical Books, the Prophetic Books, the Gospels and the Epistles….

The message is clear “abstain from sexual immorality” and since it is without any qualifications, would suggest that the entire section of still applies…

No incest, no extramarital sexual relationships, no unnatural sexual behavior (with animals or with the same gender)…

The message of the apostles is to keep to natural order and the warning of the Lord is clear “keep my commandments and do not follow any of the detestable customs that were practiced before you came and do not defile yourselves with them… whoever does any of these things will be cut off”

So friends, I hope I have given you at least some basic principles to work on in evaluating what traditions can be followed this Chinese New Year…

Knowing that your salvation would not be lost in a single act of cultural practice, but you should do your part to use Godly principles to evaluate which practice to adopt.

Perhaps using the rubric Rev. Tong came up with, which is

1. Whether the practice is based on historical fact or myth…

2. The context and the connotation in which the practice is carried out, which express the underlying beliefs…

3. To determine the superstitious and symbolic aspects of the practice…

But using the apostolic advice to abstain from idolatrous acts, sexual immorality and from the meat of strangled animals and from blood.

May you go forth and have a restful, safe and blessed Chinese New Year. Amen.

[1] The New International Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), .

[2] The New International Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), .