Sermon Tone Analysis

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Sermon Title : Looking to the East

Occasion : English Sanctuary Sunrise Service

Location : Paya Lebar Methodist Chapel

MPP : In God, there is always hope no matter how bad your current circumstance may be.

Let us now listen to the word of the Lord… Taken from which reads

43:1 Then the man brought me to the gate facing east,

2 and I saw the glory of the God of Israel coming from the east.

His voice was like the roar of rushing waters, and the land was radiant with his glory.

3 The vision I saw was like the vision I had seen when he came to destroy the city and like the visions I had seen by the Kebar River, and I fell facedown.

4 The glory of the Lord entered the temple through the gate facing east.

5 Then the Spirit lifted me up and brought me into the inner court, and the glory of the Lord filled the temple.

[1]

Let us pray…

Good morning!

I ended last year by preaching at the latest sermon in the Church calendar, the watchnight service, and now, I am preaching at the earliest sermon in the Church calendar…

And my advice to you remains the same…

Because it is out of your routine in your circadian cycle, you might find it hard to keep awake… and it is understandable…

But if you dose off, please do not snore too loudly and disturb the person next to you…

Another similarity between the two sermons is that they are both preached when it’s dark outside…

Let me then ask you a question… “are you afraid of the dark?”

Well, I suspect that many of us Singaporeans would not know how to answer that question, because we are so pampered with electricity all the time, and we are so often basked in bright lights…

In fact, when I was still flying professionally, it was so easy to find Singapore at night, when I am on my way back from overseas because it is just so bright…

And the light always bring a smile to my face…

Especially when I’ve been away for a while…

The light actually provides for me direction and hope…

And because Singapore is always so bright, with constant light sources everywhere…

I think a lot of us take it for granted…

Until it is taken away from us…

Such was the case for my friend who were having their lunch at a Koran BBQ restaurant just this January when the wide-spread blackout happened in Thomson, Bishan and Ang Mo Kio area…

Not only was their sizzling stove stop sizzling, they were plunged into darkness and they didn’t know what to do…

With no hope of cooking their raw food, eventually they gave up on lunch and bumped and stumbled their way out of the darkness and into the light…

Probably not before knocking into a few tables on the way out…

Of course, after the incident, they had a heyday complaining about the incident…

And they were not the only ones…

Many people took to the social media to voice how disruptive it was to their lives…

But do you know how long it took for the lights to be restored in that place?

90 minutes…

90 minutes may feel like a long time for us Singaporeans…

but it pales in comparison to what the experience of Lise…

Now who is Lise?

Well, actually she goes by a few other names…

Including Odette, Madame Chambrun, Frau Churchill… depends on who’s asking…

You see, Lise was a British Spy during the Second World War, and in fact she was the most decorated spy male or female…

And she was an excellent spy…

But when the war started, she was actually a very ordinary lady, not even a soldier, but was a housewife, with 3 young girls… not trained in any military work…

However, when the war started, she wanted to do something for the Allied war effort, applying to the British war office… thinking she would be given a clerical job…

However, she was talent-spotted by the spy agency, undergone tough training and was covertly inserted right into German-occupied France…

She took to her job like fish in water, and was an excellent spy, only to be betrayed by a less competent British spy who was trying to save his own skin…

And because she was so good at her job, causing so much trouble to the Nazis, she ended up being Ravensbrück, the most feared concentration camp and when she got there, she was promptly ushered to what was called the bunker…

The bunker was in the Ravensbrück was the most severe form of punishment, and hence was reserved for the most incorrigible prisoners…

The place was tiny, four and a half paces long by two and a half paces wide—

being 3.4m by 1.8m <Walk around>

and was unheated even during winter…

There, inmates are often beaten, are deprived of books, exercise and bath…

But the worse punishment was that there was no light in the cell…

Except for the few seconds, three times a day, it took for the guards to push food through a tiny hatch through which a sliver of light shines through,

The few minutes of artificial light the inmates got when the light bulb in the cell was turned on,

But other than those short periods of light,

The bunker cells was covered with thick darkness…

So dark, Odette couldn’t see her hands even when they were right in front of her face… <gesture>

So dark, she couldn’t tell day form night…

And to make things worse, her cell was just beside the room in which they tortured the inmates…

Darkness and the penetration of the sounds of screams and torture…

And she described it to be “a black hole… that absorbed everything – sense of time, sense of individuality, hope and sanity…”

Corrie Ten Boom, who stayed a few units away from Odette described the place as “hell itself”

Most people wouldn’t stay in the bunker for more than 3 days…

They either left the cell because they were given a short punishment for even the Nazis recognized how terrible a place it was,

or they died because of the harsh treatment…

Many people just lost hope and gave up…

Without hope, people do not last very long…

What about Odette?

Well, she lasted more than 3 days in the bunker…

She was in the bunker for 98 days… that’s slightly more than 3 months…

And do you know how she could last for so long?

Odette replied that “in our darkest moments, we must focus to see the light…”

And she did that by focusing on God…

For during those 5 precious minutes of light every day, she would look at a leaf that she found one day on her way back from the infirmary…

Why a leaf you may ask?

Well, for the most of us who are outside her situation, we would take the leaf for granted…

But for her, it was a symbol of life, of creation and God Himself…

It’s how she reminded herself of God… to her, the leaf was a cross…

I guess this was very similar to our passage for reflection this morning, in which Ezekiel was given a vision of a perfect temple…

Now, you must remember that during Ezekiel’s ministry, there was no more any temple to speak of because the temple was destroyed in 586 BC…

There was no nation of Israel to speak of also, the Assyrians had already destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel more than 200 years before then…

And by the time we came to this point in the history of Israel,

The Babylonians had overtaken Jerusalem and the people were in exile…

They were a shell of their former self…

Far cry from what they were during King Solomon’s reign when they were so rich, according to , received 16.6 kilo tons of gold every year…

And silver was so plentiful, 2 Chronicles 4:27 described them as being as plentiful as silver…

And during King David’s reign, they had absolute supremacy over the region…

But now, they were no longer a people and in fact, Ezekiel was not even in Jerusalem when he received this vision…

For he like many of the Israelites had been deported by the Babylonians,

in a foreign land, made to be slaves, dispersed and made to serve in various places across the vast Babylonian empire…

An empire that stretched from the middle of modern Turkey to the West, to the middle of Iran to the East,

From a human perspective, it seemed like Israel would be a nation that would be forever lost…

It seemed like the covenant that God had with Abraham on his descendants being a great nation blessed with material procession, having territory of their own and having great influence over the land, seems to be lost forever…

It seemed like they would be forever be hopeless lost as a nation because of their disobedience and idolatry…

The Israelites looked at their own lives, looked at the hopeless situation they were in and asked “where are you God?”

They looked at what was promised to them through the covenant and asked…

“My Lord, My Lord, why have you forsaken me?”