Rideau Park United Church

What do you know of your family history? Where did your family come from? What did your people do? Who were your ancestors?

The church family that we are a part of, what do we know about it? What about that family tree? What about our ancestors in the faith?

Knowing something about our collective family history, about the genealogy of the people of God can be helpful. Knowing about the women and men who have gone before us can help us understand ourselves better, understand our faith more fully. How did we come to be here? How did we get to be the people that we are? What wisdom can we glean from the experience of those who have walked this way before us...?

On this Sunday and next I'd like to tell you something about a few of our ancestors in the faith. A few summers back, I shared the stories of Patrick of Ireland, Julian of Norwich, Francis of Assisi and Paul of Tarsus. We have probably all heard of St Patrick and St Francis and maybe Dame Julian and certainly the Apostle Paul.

Next week we will look at Mary Magdalene. You've heard of her I am sure. Today I want to share with you the life of someone you probably never heard of... and that's what makes his story so interesting... Timothy of Seleucia.

-----------------------------------

Think for a moment of the Christian story. A greatly abridged version of church history would go something like this: the church is born in Jerusalem. It spreads around the Mediterranean. It takes root in Asia Minor and Greece and Italy and spreads through the Roman Empire. At first it is persecuted, but with Emperor Constantine it becomes the sanctioned faith of Rome and so moves with the Empire into much of Europe. When Rome falls and Europe enters the Dark Ages, it's in Ireland, in her monasteries, that learning and Scripture and the wisdom of the ancient world is preserved. And in time, the ancient wisdom is carried back to Europe and the Christian story rolls on, with Europe and her colonies in the New World at the centre of the Christian faith.

That's the way the church's story is often told. The Jesus movement is centred in Europe and its big names are European. Francis, Patrick, John Wesley, Martin Luther, John Calvin...

But did you know that this Eurocentric version of Christian history is completely wrong. Or at least is two-thirds wrong. Christianity spread and took root, in its earliest days, not only in Europe and then in her colonies. It went South and East, to Africa and deep into Asia. For most of its history, Christianity was a tri-continental religion, with powerful representation in Europe, Africa and Asia, and this was true into the 14th century. We see Christianity as a predominantly European project not because this continent was the heartland of the faith, but by default: Europe was the continent where it was not destroyed. (The Scripture story tells us about Paul, the Apostle to the West, but does not tell the story of Thomas and Thaddeus and the apostles who went South and East.)

As late as the 11th century, Asia was home to about a third of the world's Christians, Africa another 10 percent, and the faith in these continents had deeper roots in the culture than it did in Europe, where in many places it was newly arrived or still arriving. So for more than the first half of Christian history, Asia and Africa were the oldest and most established lands for the Christian faith.

And now we can look to Timothy as a prominent person in the forgotten part of the Christian family.

About the time of Charlemagne's, Charles the Great's investiture as Holy Roman Emperor in 800, when Christianity was really taking root in Europe, the Patriarch, or leader, of the Church of Asia or the Church of the East, the Asian Pope if you like, was Timothy, based in Seleucia near modern Baghdad, in Mesopotamia.

In prestige and authority, Timothy was "arguably the most significant Christian spiritual leader of his day," much more influential than the Western pope. Unlike the popes of Europe, he had no political power, as he lived in a land ruled by a Muslim Caliph. But he had great spiritual influence. Perhaps a quarter of the world's Christians looked to him as their spiritual head. His duties included overseeing churches in Yemen, Arabia, Iran, Turkestan, Afghanistan, Tibet, India, Sri Lanka, and China. Remember that this is in the eighth century. The Church of the East may even have reached to Burma, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, and Korea.

The Church of Asia had deep roots. They spoke Syriac, a language closely related to Jesus' Aramaic tongue, and so when they read the words of Jesus they were hearing Jesus speak in a familiar language.

The Asian church was also more intellectually accomplished than its European counterpart. Its operating languages were Syriac, Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and Chinese rather than Latin and Greek. Timothy himself translated Aristotle from Syriac into Arabic. Much of the "Arab" scholarship of the time, such as translations of Plato, Aristotle, and others into Arabic, or the adoption of the Indian numbering system, was in fact done by Syriac, Persian, and African (Egyptian and Nubian) Christians.

If you would like to read about the Eastern Church of Timothy you can read Philip Jenkins book, The Lost History of Christianity. Thanks to Frances Dawson and Flora Patterson for recommending this book to me. But in the short time we have today, I will pull out a couple of things from this forgotten history of the Eastern church that are helpful for modern Christians.

• The Church of Asia, this ancient church, can teach us a lot about being flexible. When Timothy was asked a question about spiritual practice or ways of worshiping, and much of his correspondence is preserved, he would answer something like: "Well in Turkey they don't do this, but in Tibet they do practice that..."  The Asian church spanned so many languages and cultures and embraced so many ways of being Christian and as a result there was great freedom of practice. We tend to think that whatever we do, it's always been done that way. But over the two thousand year history of the Christian movement there are more ways of practicing than we can know.

• In the modern day, there is a new emphasis on interfaith dialogue. We are learning about our religious neighbors as our population grows more diverse. Well,Timothy and the church of the East are way ahead of us on this front. His was a church immersed in cultures of a many kinds. Timothy engaged in a famous dialogue with the caliph al-Mahdi, a Moslem scholar, and their correspondence still survives. The church's milieu was not only Jewish and Muslim but also, perhaps more so, Buddhist, Manichaean, Zoroastrian, and Confucian. This made for relations that defy many of our usual assumptions about history.

  Historian Philip Jenkins recounts how "in 782, the Indian Buddhist missionary Prajna arrived in the Chinese imperial capital of Chang'an, but was unable to translate the Sanskrit writings he had brought" into Chinese or other useful local languages.

  So, Prajna did the obvious thing and consulted with Bishop Adam, head of the Chinese church, who was deeply interested in understanding Buddhism. As a result, "Buddhist and Christian scholars worked amiably together for some years to translate seven huge volumes of Buddhist wisdom into Chinese."  These same volumes were taken back home by Japanese monks who had been in Chang'an, and became the founding volumes of Japanese Buddhism. So Christian scholars helped to bring Buddhism to China and Japan.

  More than this, scholars suggest that some of the practices of Islam may also have originated in the Church of Asia. Asian Christians prayed by kneeling and then falling forward, prostrate on the ground, as Moslems do today, and this Eastern Christian practice preceded the birth of Islam. So Moslems and Christians may well have learned and borrowed from each other.

  From Timothy and the Church of the East we can find a model for openness to and dialogue with other faiths.

• Lastly, the Asian church is making a comeback in a new form. We think of Christianity as a Western, European project but Christianity is was and is a global faith.

  In the year 1287, a Christian bishop named Bar Sauma, a Mongol, was sent on a diplomatic mission to the West. The Europeans were amazed to discover both that the church stretched to the shores of the Pacific and that the emissary from the fearsome Mongols was a Christian bishop, one from whom the king of England subsequently took communion.

  In the modern day, would we Western Christians be surprised to see that we are a minority group in the global church? One scholar has written that as early as 2025, sub-Saharan Africa will be the heart of the Christian world. Africa will be the second largest Christian region in the world in a short time. And in places like Ethiopia, the church has roots that go back almost 2000 years.

  Number one, the biggest Christian region, will be Latin America... Central and South America.

  The third largest region of the church will be Asia. There the church is exploding with growth. The largest Presbyterian Church in the world is not in Scotland but in South Korea. The largest Christian congregation in the world is not a famous American mega-church like the Willow Creek in Chicago or the Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral. It's the Yoido Full Gospel Church of Seoul South Korea with 700,000 members. The fastest growing Christian community in the world by nation state is also in Asia, in Communist China where 2.5 million people come to the faith each year.

An early hymn of the Eastern Church, the Church of Asia, written at a time when her people were being persecuted and driven away says:

Listen, my chicks have flown, left their nest, alarmed By the eagle. Look, where they hide in dread. Bring them back in peace.

In the late 10th century, a Christian monk from Arabia visiting China reported his horror at discovering that Christianity had, after centuries, by then become "extinct."  But Christianity is now in its fourth phase of expansion in China: more people there go to church than do in Europe. Perhaps the hymn and prayer of the Church of the East will be answered: "Bring them back in peace."