Month: September 2024

In the news about the Die Post (the state-owned mail company in Switzerland): “Die Post verändert sich. Filialen schliessen. Dienste warden digital. Es stösst auch auf Widerstand” (The Post is changing. Settlements are closing. Services go digital. There is resistance.). This is not just something Swiss, it is happening in all countries. Some weeks ago, I was talking to someone in the Netherlands who was complaining about how much she has to pay for a letter to be delivered. Nowadays, you don’t even get the guarantee that the letter will be delivered the next day. It might even be 3 or 4 days later! I said to her: “It’s your fault.” She looked at me with incredulous eyes, like “Why me?” I said: “It is because you don’t send enough letters and that’s why they have to reduce their services, up the prices and try to make it work within those limited parameters. I am old enough to remember the times we did not have email, WhatsApp, Facetime, Messenger, Facebook and what-not. When you wanted to inform family, customers, potential customers, send invoices, insurance papers, damage claims, there was only one sure way: you sent it by mail. Die Post was your biggest and reliable friend and Postman Pat was not only delivering envelopes, but he also contributed to the social cohesion of your village or neighbourhood. But how many times do we send a physical letter nowadays? Very few times. Invoices come into our inboxes, we speak to family far away through some video service and we submit our stuff through secure websites. And Die Post gets the short end of the stick and we complain about the prices and the quality of their services. Anybody with some economic sense that looks at these developments can have seen this coming from miles and years away. But we still resist when it happens. Why is that? Why can’t we accept the inevitable? Galatians 6:8 tells us: “A man reaps what he sows. Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life.” God gives us the warning – beforehand – that our behaviour, our ‘sowing’ has consequences. But then when we get the predicted ‘short end of the stick’, we complain. We can see it coming from miles and years away. But we still complain when it does come. Better then that we learn to ‘sow to please the Spirit’. We can see the results coming from miles away: “from the Spirit we will reap eternal life”. Let’s be keen to sow in the right place today. And tomorrow. And all the days after that. I can see those results coming from a mile away as well!

The laws of entropy/thermodynamics states that ‘as one goes forward in time, the degree of disorder of any isolated or closed system will always increase, or at least stay the same.’ More popularly expressed: left to itself, any closed system will deteriorate to a lower level of organization. This is true for thermodynamics and energy, but we see this in any kind of life. If you doubt this reality, just look at how a kids’ room looks after it is cleaned up and look at the same room two days later when mom or dad didn’t pay attention! The laws of entropy are the biggest argument against spontaneous evolution of life. The reality we see around us is that things spiral down. They never spiral up. If you have to manage in your vocational life, you know what I’m talking about. One moment everything is lined up, your team is all arranged, all noses are pointing the same direction, everybody knows what to do. You turn around and don’t pay attention for some weeks and you’ll find that you need to put in a fresh dose of energy to get back to the same organizational readiness of your team. This also applies to our spiritual lives. Left to itself, it will deteriorate into a lower level of energy. Chaos increases, organization decreases. You can’t pump up your spiritual life on a Sunday or whatever day that you get some spiritual input and then trust it to remain at the same pumped-up level for the rest of the week. One Jesus-experience in the past is not enough to get you through life and into heaven in a glorious state. As one pastor said it so fittingly: we leak. We leak energy. We leak spiritual air. We’re like an air mattress that has a tiny little hole in it. It feels like it is pumped up and sturdy to sleep on, but long before the night is over, you’re on empty and you feel the hard floor underneath. The writer of Hebrews admonishes his readers: Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. Make level paths for your feet, so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed (vs 12+13).Your spiritual fullness needs topping up regularly. You need to inject new energy into your system on an ongoing basis. Our spiritual lives are not a closed system. It needs input, it needs topping up. Also, this Wednesday morning.

On the last day of August of this year, a world record has been put in the Guiness book of Records by 1’006 Swiss Alpenhorn players on the Klewenalp in Nidwalden. If you missed it, you can find a news item here from the Swiss new service SRF. It is an impressive accomplishment. The Alpenhorn is a rare instrument and to get so many of them together on the mountain meadow overlooking Lake Lucern and having them play a melody of 5 minutes long is an impressive feat. This is Swiss heritage at its best and if you have any feeling for pride and honor, you’ll have some chills running down your spine and perhaps a tear in your eye. In general, the Swiss are doing a great job at celebrating heritage. If it is not their church bells, it is their Schwingfests, and if it is not their Alpabzug, it is their Fassnach. And right they are. When I grew up, we read a piece from the Bible at the end of our family dinner meal. Personal faith was not really a thing, but this piece of heritage was part of my Reformed tradition. It is a good piece of heritage, and I wish we had done the same when my boys were growing up. Probably you can think of good exercises of heritage when you were growing up. Telling each other what you are thankful for, before you ate the Thanksgiving Dinner. Taking a time of prayer before you kicked off the New Year. Writing poems or rhymes with your Christmas presents, so that opening them was not just an act of ripping off the paper, but a celebration of relationships. Serving at a local soup kitchen regularly as a family, so that you and your kids know that it is not all peaches and cream for all people. I want to encourage you to think about good heritage, good habits that you need to keep alive or revive. They can be milestones that you will look back on later in life. At those milestones, significant things happen. This is what Deuteronomy 11:18 tells us: Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.  It is not enough to just recite the words of the law for the Jews. They have to wear them as symbols on their hands and bind them to their foreheads. Of course this indicates it should determine their deeds and their thinking, but it sure helps if you are reminded of these things by actually wearing them. The Lord’s Supper is also an important piece of heritage, which the Lord Jesus commanded us to keep on doing: For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes 1 Corinthians 11:26. Take your example from the Swiss people today and think about which heritage you should keep on celebrating or reinstitute.

Last Saturday, we organized an evening together with Compassion Switzerland. Some of you were there. A former Compassion sponsorship child talked about the impact the sponsorship had on his life. Without it, he would not have been the young professional that he has become. It gave him an incredible boost to become more than just a nameless kid from a disadvantaged family. The story was impressive and moving. If you were not there: you missed something significant! I have worked for an organization that organized both child sponsorship programs and granny sponsorship programs in Eastern Europe and East Africa. These are the two most vulnerable groups in societies: kids and elderly. In a lot of countries there is no AHV and BVG or other pension programs. It was my duty to go check on those sponsorship programs that we organized in conjunction with local churches and Christian organisations. I have spoken to many sponsorship children and their parents and a whole row of grannies that received sponsorships from a “rich” sponsor from a western country. I have seen the impact on the kids or elderly that were brought together in a program to share community and togetherness. School tuition was paid for the kids, school uniforms were purchased, the elderly received medical care and (in Ethiopia) came together for a ‘coffee ceremony’ or in other ways supported each other. If you click this link, you can watch a little clip from a few of those visits. Sorry for the poor quality, they are from two handfuls of years ago. Every time I come across those clips and watch them, tears spring into my eyes, and I know that sponsorships make a HUGE difference. And as the auditor of the projects, I can honestly say that by far most of these projects are squeaky clean financially. No penny goes to waste. While I was in Tanzania, I met one of my ‘own’ sponsorship children and one of my ‘own’ grannies. Although it is some 10 years ago, I remember these encounters like yesterday. They are engraved in my mind forever. Until today, my wife and I have six sponsorships, two children, four grannies. Why am I writing all of this? It is simply, because becoming a sponsor is a splendid way to heed the call of James 1:27: Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress. We all have food in our mouths, a roof over our heads and if we find ourselves in need, there is always somewhere to turn to. For kids and elderly in developing countries that’s just not the case. They go hungry, they get rained on in bed because the roof is leaky, there is no money to pay for school and no resources to get medical care. I know, there are other ways you can implement James 1:27, so by all means, do it! Sponsorships are not the only way. We have asked Compassion to leave a few ‘sponsorship files’ on our Welcome Table for a few weeks. Hook up with a child in a developing country that needs your support. To be fed. To sleep in a proper bed. To be able to go to school. Grab one of those files and let’s make sure we do something more than lip service. See you Sunday,Pastor Nico