Author: Administrator

The second person I want to talk about in this series is a woman called Clara Celestia Hale Babcock.  She holds a significant place in the Christian Churches’ tradition.  She was born in 1850, a little over a hundred years after Susanna Wesley died.  She was an American, born in Ohio, the daughter of a Methodist preacher.  Her father died when she was too young to remember him.  From an early age she was interested in the Christian Temperance movement.  This was the movement whose response to alcohol abuse was to try to outlaw the manufacture and sale of alcohol.   She met and married Israel Babcock in 1865.  She and Israel had 6 children, though only 2 of them survived into adulthood.

The pair of them joined the Christian Churches movement in 1880 after hearing an evangelist at a revival meeting.  Clara was active in women’s civic organisations, particularly temperance ones.  She was gifted, intelligent communicator and was in demand as an evangelist and a temperance speaker.  In 1888 she came to lecture about temperance at the Christian Church in Erie, Illinois.  They liked her so much that they asked her to stay as their pastor.

So Clara Babcock became the very first woman in a recognised denomination to be ordained to an extended ministry in a congregation in the United States.  She was a very successful evangelist during the period of what is called the Second Awakening.  It is said that she baptised 1502 people over the course of her ministry.  Her ordination and those of the women who followed opened a fierce debate within the Christian Churches movement.  It was one of the factors along with the place of musical instruments and other essentials of the faith, that eventually in 1906 caused the movement in the States to split into the more conservative Churches of Christ and the more open Christian Churches/ Disciples of Christ movement.  Today in the United States the Disciples of Christ has a woman leader who is in her 2nd term of office, and the Churches of Christ are still debating the validity of women preachers.

Paul’s statement in Galatians that there is neither male nor female in Christ was central to Clara Babcock’s understanding of the validity of her ministry.  When it was questioned she simply pointed to what she did.  Here is what she says about one of her years at Thomson Illinois.

‘The visible results of my work are 96 additions – 38 heads of families, 8 from the Methodist Episcopals, 6 from the Baptists, 9 reclaimed; preached 240 sermons, 16 funerals, 12 weddings, 470 visits made, 1500 miles travelled to and from my labour.  I am currently in perfect health and I haven’t missed an appointment in over four years’
Perhaps that last remark was directed at those who argued that a woman’s constitution was unsuited to pastoral ministry.  Like Susanna Wesley it seems she had a tremendous capacity for work.

Clara Babcock held a number of pastoral positions in Illinois and Iowa and South Dakota over her 35 years of ordained ministry.  She was involved in active ministry right up to the end of her life.  She died in 1924.

But I discovered something that shocked me about her when I was reading through old newspaper clippings.  One recorded that her funeral service was packed and that Women’s club, the Ladies Aid Society and the women’s Auxiliary of the KKK attended in a body.  Later on it said that the Erie KKK escorted the funeral procession to the cemetery.  Did KKK mean what I thought it did?  It appears so.  ‘Should I be talking about her at all?’ I wondered.  I started to read a bit around the women’s auxiliary of the KKK in Illinois at that time.

In 1919 Abolition came in and the temperance movement that Clara Babcock and many from the churches were part appeared to have won.  What happened of course was that Abolition was extremely unpopular and the bootleggers arrived and the mob started to make a lot of money out of illegal grog.  Those of you who have been watching the Boardwalk Empire series on TV will have some inkling of what went on.  There were law and order issues.  There were very few blacks in Illinois; the KKK at that stage was more anti catholic and anti-newcomers from Europe than anti Black.

The Klan styled itself as patriotic upright white Protestant American, upholders of morality and community standards.  Perhaps that’s not all that different from what Klansmen do today, but the real difference is that in the early 1920s they had wide general support in the community, especially the church community.  They seemed to be on the same page.  There were alliances that we would not be at all comfortable with today with the benefit of hindsight.  Clara was a woman of her time and it would appear that through her temperance associations she had these other less desire able connections.

On a more positive note one of her obituaries reads, ‘Her life, her work in Erie and elsewhere is the most fitting and lasting eulogy that could be written of this noble woman.  Beloved by the community she was always a welcome visitor to their homes or social gatherings.  She was always ready and willing to assist in any undertaking for the good of the community.’  Another of her legacies was that there were at least 15 other women who were ordained as preachers either directly or indirectly through her influence.

When one person is prepared to follow where their God given gifts lead them, they open up space for others to do likewise, and the church and the community are the richer for that.  Both Clara and Susanna Wesley illustrate that.

Who has made space for you to develop your God given gifts?

Whom have you made space for so that they can develop their God given gifts?

Let’s give thanks for those who have helped us and for those whom we have helped.

 Sources:

The Encyclopedia of the Stone-Cambell Movement:Christian Church (Disciples of Christ/Churches of Christ) ed.  Douglas Allen Foster, Eerdmans 2004
Erie Cemetery History Project- www.angelfire.com/folk/foec/babc001.html
www.discipleshistory.org/history/people/clara-hale-babcock

On this All Saints’ service I’ve chosen to bypass the blokes and to begin a biographical series on some of the women who have been significant people in the strands of the Christian church that are part of our DNA here at Tawa Union (Methodist, Christian Churches, Presbyterian).  These women are saints in the Protestant sense of the word, that is in the same way that all of us can be called saints.  In their various ways these women allowed their faith in God to affect the choices they made and the ways that they lived.

The first has been called the mother of Methodism.  The title is hers not just figuratively, but literally.  I am talking about Susanna Wesley; she was John and Charles Wesley’s mum.  The origins of many of the spiritual practices that came to be associated with Early Methodism can be traced back to Susanna.  She was a very organised, devout and disciplined woman.  Organised, serious devotion was what marked those early Methodist communities.

Susanna’ s father, Dr Samuel Annesley, married twice.  Susanna was the youngest of his 25 children (yes, I did say that).  I have no idea how many of them survived into adulthood.  Susanna, herself, would give birth to 19 children.  Only 9 of them survived infancy.

Susanna’s father was a dissenter – a minister who refused to sign the Act of Uniformity in 1662.  This act brought in changes to the Prayer Book.  He left his Anglican parish in Cripplegate, London and set up his own congregation.  He was an independent thinker, a highly regarded preacher, and at one point chaplain to the parliament.

Susanna displayed a similar independence of mind, when she chose at the age of 13 to rejoin the Church of England.  She married Samuel Wesley in 1688 – she was 19 and Samuel 26.  Samuel was a Church of England minister.  The couple spent the first years of their married life in London and South Ormsby.  They then moved to Epworth a village near Lincoln.  Epworth was to be their base for the next 40 years.

Susanna’s life was a hard one.  Samuel’s work and personal circumstances saw him away from the parish for extended periods of time.  He was not good at managing money and ended up in debtor’s prison on a couple of occasions.  This put a great deal of pressure on the family and their health.  Had young Samuel, the oldest of the Wesley children, not been away from home, working and able to send money home the family might have been even worse off.

Fire twice destroyed the Rectory at Epworth during their residence.  In the second fire 5 year old John Wesley had to be rescued through a second storey window.  His younger brother Charles was just a baby and Susanna was pregnant with her youngest child.  It was a devastating time for the family, in particular Susanna.  She was forced to place her children in different homes for the best part of 2 years while the rectory was rebuilt.  She was not all that impressed with their manners and behaviour when her family was once again reunited.  She determinedly set about getting them into line again.

Susanna developed the practice of spending an hour a week one on one time with each of her children.  In that time she would ‘enquire after the state of their soul’ and check in on what they were thinking, their fears, expectations, goals.  In doing this she was instilling in her children a regular practice of self-examination.

Susanna homeschooled all her children, girls as well as boys.  On the first day of her tuition she expected them to learn the entire alphabet.  They all learned Latin and Greek and Classical Studies.  She was obviously a good teacher.  The three boys went on to take Master’s degrees from Oxford.

At one point when her husband’s work took him away for some months, the supply minister whom he’d arranged to take his place was so awful, that Susanna decided she needed to supplement her family’s religious education for the duration of the supply.  On the Sunday afternoon she would gather the children.  They would sing a Psalm.  Then Susanna would take one of her husband’s or father’s old sermons and read it out loud and then they would finish with another Psalm.  When others in the parish got to hear of this they asked whether they could join in.  It got to a point where there were over 200 at Susanna’s afternoon service and almost no one at the supply minister’s Sunday morning service.

To nurture her own spiritual life Susanna had a practice of daily devotions.  She also wrote scripture meditations, and commentaries for her own use on things like the Lord’s Prayer and the 10 Commandments.  Many of these went up in flames in the rectory fire.  Some remain, however, as well as some of her letters to her children, sharing her wisdom and advice on life and the Christian faith.  Susanna’s husband, Samuel, comes across in what I have read as somewhat inept.  His life’s work was an exegetical commentary on the Book of Job.  It was a labour that took its toll on the family finances and has long been forgotten.  Susanna’s more practical offerings had a far greater and more positive affect on the family and beyond.  They are the writings that are remembered.

Susanna was a person who grasped the usefulness of good structures and habits.  One can imagine these things would have been lifesavers in the chaos she endured.  She integrated her wisdom about structures with her approach to faith.  Her spiritual life was disciplined, practical and devout.

She also understood the importance of education for girls as well as boys.  She could make up her own mind about things and create solutions for problems she faced.  Women of her day weren’t given credit for being able to do those things.  In her, Charles and John had a role model of a highly capable, intelligent woman.  Her influence was surely one of the reasons why John was open to women in the Methodist movement exercising their gifts in leadership, not just among other women but in mixed gatherings as well.  In time he would even let authorised women preach.

Methodism is very much in her debt.

 Sources
En.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susanna_Wesley
Susanpellowe.com/susanna-wesley.htm

Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.  And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age. 

Matthew’s Great Commission has been an important and formative text in the church’s understanding of its mission.  Sometimes, I think, those who are enthusiastic users of it could be a bit more imaginative and expansive on what that Christian discipleship entails.

The text has had a particular impact on the modern missionary movement from its beginnings in 19 century evangelicalism – the Church Missionary Society, the London Missionary Society are children of this.

 Samuel Marsden preaches the first Christian sermon on New Zealand soil.   25 Dec 1814.   

It was the text behind John Mott’s cry ‘The evangelisation of the world in this generation.’  The Student Volunteer Movement that John Mott led was an ancestor to the Student Christian Movement and the Tertiary Students’ Christian Fellowship.

Another of the important texts on mission is Jesus’ statement before the home crowd at Nazareth, of what he was on about.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour. 

This statement about God’s mission in the world being about the restoration of social and spiritual wholeness, healing and release proclaimed and modelled by Jesus and fulfilled through him, is perhaps the favoured mission text of today (in theory at least).

I’ve been reading a book lately that takes Luke 10: 1-12, the passage about the sending out of the 70, and suggests that we would do well to reflect on what it tells us, about how the church should go about participating in God’s mission.   I haven’t made up my mind about whether the text can bear all that this writer hangs on it, but he makes some interesting and challenging observations that are worth thinking about.

The author’s name is Alan Roxburgh.  His basic thesis is that ‘the mission of God’ is the centre of the gospel and the central concern of Jesus.  It is not about the church, he says.  It’s not about church planting or church growth or healthy churches or any other form of church survival.  Communities that are shaped by the Christian gospel are called first and foremost to be people who are committed to partnering with God in God’s mission to the world.

That partnership with God in God’s mission may sensitise us to pastoral needs, justice issues, spiritual needs, conservation concerns, to places that are doing good work and could do with a helping hand.  It may draw us to pray, to speak, to do, to share resources, time, expertise, something of our own story, something of the Christian story.   Whenever our sense of the grace, love, justice and faithfulness of God motivates our responses to the world around us we are partnering God in God’s mission; we are doing kingdom work.  We need, Alan Roxburgh says, to rediscover that the gospel is the hope for all human life and for the creation that surrounds us.

Churches don’t grow.  We  grow. And when we grow, churches change, and when churches change Communities are transformed, and God’s mission is to transform the world. Nigel Hanscamp, Making Connections Weekend

The gospel of Luke was probably written in the last quarter of the first century.  It was written with Gentile congregations in mind.  By the time the gospel was written Jerusalem had very likely fallen to Titus who would soon become the emperor of Rome.  With its fall those who had been associated with the most Jewish of the Christian communities had been scattered or had perished.  By 75 AD there would have been a good number of 2nd generation Christians among those to whom Luke was writing.

Roxburgh believes that Luke wrote to encourage Christians who were having a crisis of faith.  The expectation of the earliest Christian communities was that within a short time Christ would return and the Kingdom of God would come in its fullness and the kingdoms of the world (including the superpower of Rome) would come to an end.  As time went on this expectation was needing to be looked at again.  Christians were a minority, living in countries that had been occupied by the Roman army and incorporated into the Roman Empire.  Life was not always easy.  It was not uncommon to be subjected to harassment and discrimination.  It was tough and costly believing and giving allegiance to an alternative kingdom, when the signs of the power of Rome surrounded them on every side.  The Roman Empire seemed as entrenched as ever.  Was the cost of being different too great?  Why was God taking his time in bringing things to a close? What was God up to?  Who was really winning?

This is the context of Luke’s audience.  In the gospel itself the story of the sending out of the seventy is surrounded by stories that indicate that the gospel from its beginning had a mixed reception, and also that it has never been easy to follow Jesus.  In fact in the section before this passage Jesus’ words are more discouraging than encouraging to those who register expressions of interest in following him.  ‘You’ll be living on the margins.  It will demand your undivided allegiance.’  It is clear, too, that the highly regarded and well known were disproportionately absent from Jesus’ band of disciples.  All in all they were a pretty ordinary bunch.  ‘Thank you God,’ Jesus says, ‘that you have revealed these things to children and not to the smart and savvy.’  Luke’s audience will have recognised something of themselves and their experience in all these things.

Jesus has set his face toward Jerusalem.  He sends 70 of his followers out ahead of him into the places that he will be passing through.  They are to travel light, so light that they will be forced to depend on whatever hospitality is offered to them- no purse no bag no sandals.  (‘Comb and toothbrush and no extra luggage’- The Message.)  They are to stop where they are first welcomed.  They are not to move around looking for the best place to stay.

This is a very different approach to mission from the default of most Western churches.  Here the followers of Jesus are recipients of others’ hospitality.  They are not creating a programme or responding to what they guess is a need or gap in services in the community.  They are not creating a dependence on themselves for a service, and hoping by that that people might stick around.  They are not even extending hospitality with no strings attached.  Instead they are the powerless ones, dependent on those who have allowed them to move in and live alongside them, sharing in the work of the household and sharing food at their table.  This is the sort of space where genuine conversations, free from church agendas can take place.

Alan Roxburgh paraphrases, ‘If you want to discover and discern what God is up to in the world just now, stop trying to answer this question within the walls of your churches.  Like strangers in need of hospitality who have left their baggage behind, enter the neighborhoods and communities where you live.  Sit at the table of the other, and there you may begin to hear what God is doing….  Part of Luke’s response to his audience is that they will rediscover the meaning and shape of the gospel as they enter the towns and villages where the Spirit has sent them to live.’

Roxburgh reflects that the church in this passage is not in a gathering of like minded people in a scheduled religious meeting, it is in the living spaces and working spaces of people who are largely outside of those meetings.  It is sitting at their tables, listening to their stories, breaking bread with them, and entering into a human dialogue that is not a well- rehearsed sales pitch.’

Now there a lot of us at Tawa Union Church who have or have had very strong links and connections with our communities.  We have an older generation here, in particular, who were instrumental in setting up some of the infrastructure of our suburb.  Many of us too have worked in community oriented professions or in the public service.  And others of us have worked with integrity in the private sector.   We have a strong tradition of community service in this church and in fact in the suburb.

 What we do sometimes lose touch with, though, is a sense of being sent.  The 70 were sent out by Jesus; that is what gave their journey its purpose.  It wasn’t just a billeting experience for their own development, or to do a bit of good.  Jesus had sent them to speak God’s word of peace and wholeness, to heal the sick and to announce the good news of God’s kingdom- a very different sort of establishment to the Roman Empire.  We need to recover our belief that God has sent us to be part of the communities that we connect with.

God hasn’t sent us there to interject with trite religious formulas or give some Christian sales pitch.  God has sent us there to rub shoulders with those who are in those communities, to work alongside them, to listen to their stories, to share coffee with them and enter into genuine dialogue.  As we do that and reflect on our own stories and the stories of God’s people, we may notice what God is up to in that place and discover our ministry there.  It is our sense of being sent that opens our eyes to see our life’s journey and our work, paid and unpaid, as a calling.  When we wake up to our life as a calling, it is amazing how often we catch sight of God.

The 70 came back to Jesus bubbling with all that had happened, full of stories of what God had done through them.  Jesus says, ‘That’s great, but the real triumph is not your authority but God’s authority over you and God’s presence with you.  It’s not what you do for God but what God does for you- that’s the agenda for rejoicing.’ It is our ongoing awareness and celebration of God’s kindness and grace towards us that gives our ministry balance and keeps it genuine.

Clare Lind

Reference:
Missional- Joining God in the Neighborhood by Alan Roxburgh;  Baker Books, 2011

A Service with the BB Learners’ Band.

As most of you know I’m a bit musically challenged.  I inherited this characteristic from my father.  My dad was the non musical one in a family that produced some quite good musicians.  But although my dad couldn’t keep a tune he loved listening to music – classical music.

Anyway, maybe once a year dad would take himself and a particularly favoured child or two off to a symphony orchestra concert at the Dunedin Town Hall.  It was a pretty special occasion.  We dressed in our best and stayed up much later than we were normally allowed.  One time we went to a Royal concert put on by the NZSO in the Town Hall and attended by the Queen and Prince Philip.  The Town Hall was very full.  We had seats way up in the Gods.  For the uninitiated that’s as far back from the stage as you can get.  So we were a very long way from the orchestra and a long way up.  We did however have quite a good view of the back of the Queen.

It was by my dad’s side that we were exposed to the mysteries of the orchestra.  It was pointed out to us where the strings sat, and the woodwind and the brass and perhaps best of all the percussion with its highly polished timpani drums.  We would listen as the musicians tuned their instruments.  We learned that the Leader of the Orchestra was the leader of the first violins and that when s/he entered the conductor was not far behind.  The air was full of anticipation and excitement at that point, the performance was about to begin.

We learned to watch the percussion section at the back of the orchestra.  Among the drums there might be a glockenspiel.  Sometimes there was even a gong.  As the volume of the music rose we would look to see whether this was the time that someone from the percussion section would stand up and come forward to be at the ready to strike the gong.  The triangle was another instrument we would watch.  The strings and the wind instruments keep everything going; they are the workhorses of the orchestra.  But there are times in music when a note is required from the gong or the triangle, no other instrument will do.  It’s true in life too, isn’t it?  Sometimes the voice that is hardly heard, at the right time says it the best of the lot, or it seems to sum up all that has been said before in a few succinct words.

A Couple of Words

Now I have just demonstrated that I’m not a musician.   I have talked more about the spectacle and drama of the orchestra, but the musical among you will want to set me straight – ‘Yes…  Yes… but it’s first and foremost about sound, about the music, not the spectacle.’ And you are right.  The orchestra (and the composers if they were still around) would agree with you.

Music affects us all.  But particularly for those who are musical, it is a direct route to the soul.  It speaks to our emotions.  The right piece of music has the power to cut through all that’s on top and to move the person who is sensitized to it to tears with its beauty or its pain or its truth.  The other day one of our musicians here told me ‘music is a mysterious energy.  It affects you emotionally and even physically and no one quite knows how.’

You can find a contemporary witness to the power of music at http://www.musingonmusic.com/

The following is a music blog by Keoni Lewis.  He writes:-

I attribute music with helping to ‘raise’ me in a cold world.… it drove me to be expressive and achieve a level of creativity I was unaware of….  Music has helped me discover who I am.  Assisted me through some of the darkest times in life.  Gave me insight to relationships.  Softened my approach to life in a time when I hardened myself to fight life.  Without music, I fear my mind, heart and soul wouldn’t have developed as it has, and I would be another cog in the vicious cycle of a violent upbringing.’

People have understood the power of music for 1000’s of years.  The word music comes from Greek.  It comes from the word Muse.  The muses were the Greek goddesses who inspired creativity.   So in Greek thought music was something inspired.  It was something that came from beyond us and was breathed into us.  It was a divine gift.  Certainly the musicians worked at their art and practiced, but there was a realisation that when music did its magic the results were more than the sum of what went into it.

Our Jewish and Christian heritage also regards music as a gift of God.  It is a gift that has always played an important part in our worship.  The Bible is full of songs and poetry.  At its centre there is a songbook with 150 songs- the book of Psalms.  There are songs in this book that are 3000 years old.  Some of them have notes about the tune that they were to be sung to, though the tunes themselves have long been lost.  …To the tune ‘A Silent Dove in the Distance’, to the tune ‘Don’t Destroy’, to the tune ‘Lily of the Promise’….

There are other songs too that are scattered throughout the Bible particularly in the Old Testament or Jewish scriptures.  The one that was read this morning (2 Samuel 1:17-27 ) is one of those.  It is a lament.  David’s response to the news of the death of his good friend Jonathan and Jonathan’s father, King Saul, is to pick up his harp and compose a song in their memory – a song that everyone can sing and so remember two of Israel’s heroes.  It is a song that is included in a song book called the Book of Jashar.  My bible translation has a note saying that this book may have been a collection of ancient war songs.  David calls the song, ‘The Song of the Bow’.  It is a beautiful, poignant song.

‘together in life, together in death,
they were faster than eagles
and stronger than lions’….
(Good News Bible)

The songs that are in the book of Psalms and those scattered throughout the Bible are about all sorts of things.  Some are laments, some put Israel’s history into song, some give instruction, some are prayers in desperation, some are hymns of praise to God, some glory in the beauty of the created world, some are royal prayers as a new king is enthroned, some are love songs, some are angry and keen on revenge and some are full of joy.  The whole of life is there – the beautiful and the ugly- and through music it is gathered up and brought before God and hallowed or at least brought into a place where it can be redeemed and changed.  Collectively these ancient songs teach us that nothing and no one is out of bounds.  We are all in the reach of God.

So that is music, a gift from God.  I want to say something briefly about the word ‘instrument’ since we have quite a few of them here this morning with the Boys’ Brigade Learners’ Band.

Instrument comes from a Latin word which means to set in order, to make ready, prepare, equip or instruct.  An instrument is something that equips us to do a task.  It is a tool or an implement.  And the tools that the band has with them today- well strictly speaking they should be called musical instruments to distinguish them from scientific and other instruments,

According to the dictionary musical instruments are devices for producing musical sounds by vibration, wind or percussion.  Musical instruments are pretty much like any other instrument- they are things that are used to perform a task and they are useful to the extent that they do what they are made to do.  Sometimes of course if there’s a botch up it’s not the fault of the instrument but its handler- it’s the handler that needs training and practice and the commitment to persevere.

I started this sermon with the picture of an orchestra.  It strikes me that an orchestra is a great image for the community of God’s people.  God has composed the music and God is our conductor.  We are there with our different instruments learning how to play the music God has given us, and learning how to play it together.  As we learn to do that in our worship and our living the whole will most definitely be more than the sum of the parts.  Together we will be swept up into God’s symphony and carried along in it.  The result will be something of beauty and mystery.

 

A few years back I did a course that meant that I had to travel to and from Palmerston North every four weeks or so.  There were four of us from Wellington doing the course (one lay person and three ministers) and we got into the practice of car-pooling.

It had been raining one day as we left Palmerston North and then the sun had broken through and we were treated to a magnificent rainbow.

We all admired it, and then we became absorbed in our conversations.  I was in the front with the layperson and I found out that she had a B.Sc.(Hons) in Zoology.  While working for the Wildlife Service she spent time working for her supervisor on a project trying to get some idea of the population and range of Whitaker’s skink.

I’m not sure whether you’ve heard of Whitaker’s skink, but you may have noticed that as you come into Pukerua Bay, the sign announcing the settlement has a lizard on it.

That lizard is a depiction of the Whitaker’s skink. Old skeletons of  Whitaker’s skink have been found elsewhere in the North Island, indicating that the lizard was at one time more widely distributed, but Pukerua Bay is the only place on the New Zealand mainland where they can still be found.  There are a couple of colonies of the skink on some of our reserve islands off the Coromandel Peninsula.

The skink is an elusive creature that likes humid conditions.  It forages in the early evening and it prefers temperatures around 15 – 20 degrees C.  It has been found in seabird burrows (you can imagine how slick they are), between the boulders of stable scree slopes and in leaf mould.

My travelling companion’s task was to set and check lizard traps.  She would identify any lizards caught in the trap and count them.  I asked her how she knew that that she wasn’t counting the same lizard over and over again.  Lizards squeeze through tight places and our New Zealand lizards are small creatures, so it wasn’t an option to use a ring or tag it.  I was told that when they caught a Whitaker’s skink they would clip a toe to identify it as one that has been counted.  Evidently it caused the skink no discomfort and it had the great advantage of not hampering its movement.

Whitaker’s skinks are on the vulnerable list of New Zealand fauna.  Even at Pukerua Bay they are rare.  In a survey in the 1990’s, similar to the one my colleague participated in, of just over 2600 lizards caught in the area only 78 were Whitaker’s skinks.

So the talk in the front of the car was all of conservation, and the talk in the back of the car…?  Well they were ministers, it was of pastoral matters.  They were seeking one another’s wisdom on pastoral issues, wrestling with how best to care for those who were under their care.  I don’t know more than that.  It wasn’t my conversation.

On a number of occasions I looked out the window and that rainbow was still with us.  Here we were caught up in two separate conversations – one about how best to respond in love to those around us, and the other about the efforts to save one of God’s smaller creatures from extinction – and, if you please, there was one very tenacious rainbow out the window.

It was as though God was sharing a joke with us.  It was as though we were in our own little ark travelling back home to our various areas of concern and ministry with the rainbow accompanying us.  At Shannon it was still with us.  It was still with us at Otaki and Waikanae.  It was still there at Paekakariki.  It was only when we were almost home, when we turned up the hill into Pukerua Bay that we lost it.  All the way from Palmerston North to Pukerua Bay… a rainbow.

You know wherever God’s people are wrestling with how best to care for creation and how best to care for others, there is hope and promise.  There’s a rainbow.  We are working for the Kingdom of God.  We are embodying in some way the hope and promise and challenge of that new order that Jesus spoke of, and that God affirmed through the resurrection.  Like the very first Christians we are engaged in the work of Easter, we are bearers of Easter hope.

You know, wherever God’s people are wrestling with how best to care for creation and how best to care for others, there is hope and promise.  There’s a rainbow.  We are working for the Kingdom of God.  We are embodying in some way the hope and promise and challenge of that new order that Jesus spoke of, and that God affirmed through the resurrection.  Like the very first Christians we are engaged in the work of Easter, we are bearers of Easter hope.

Clare Lind

The first railway line out of Wellington went via what is now the Johnsonville line.  The line was put in by a group of Wellington business men.  They were impatient with governmental procrastination.  They could see that a railway line north was critical to the economic future of the region, and so they formed the Wellington Manawatu Railway Company.  The line went beyond the current Johnsonville line down through Glenside fairly much along the current motorway alignment to Tawa.  By 1885 it went as far as Paramata, linking the Wellington and Porirua Harbours.

In 1908 the company was bought out by the government.  The Main Trunk Railway through the North Island had just been completed and the Wellington Manawatu Railway Company line became the southernmost section of it.

I don’t know whether you have travelled the Johnsonville line.  It is a windy route around the northern hills.  There are seven tunnels on it and a number of fairly tight bends – which, I gather, is why they are having trouble with noise on it from the new Matangi units.  All going well it took 45 minutes to travel from Wellington to Tawa along it.  While the line no doubt served the needs of the inner northern hill suburbs it was a circuitous route out of Wellington for freight trains and passengers going north of Wellington.

A proposal for a tunnel through the hill to shorten the route was being put forward as early as 1913.  World War 1 stopped the proposal going any further and it was 1923 before any action was taken on it.  Tenders were put out for the two tunnels that would need to be built.  The idea was to use New Zealand contractors for the first and shorter of the tunnels, and to use experienced overseas contractors for the long tunnel.

The local contractor failed to get going on the job and the overseas tenders were too high, so the Public Works Dept decided it would just have to do the job itself.  There was a lot of infrastructure to set up before the tunnels even began.  It wasn’t until 1929 that they began the actual tunnelling.  They began by drilling from both ends at once, and the initial holes progressed at a rate of around 18 metres per week.  That initial hole was then enlarged, reinforced and lined – a slower task that went at the rate of around 13.5 metres per week.

While the tunnels started in hard stable rock, it was not long before the tunnellers met broken rock and underground streams.  The opening of Tunnel No 1 is on the Wellington fault line and the rock had splinter faults that the geologists had not been aware of.  It was hard and dangerous work.  As well as the tunnels, ventilation shafts and service tunnels had to be drilled.  Midway through 1934 the tunnels were handed over to the Railways Dept to lay the track and to put in the electrification.  Electrification was necessary because the tunnels were too long for steam engine to negotiate safely.  Three years after the handover trains were regularly running through the tunnel.

The longer of the two tunnels is over four kilometres long.  When it was built the Tawa No 2 tunnel was the second longest tunnel in New Zealand- the one at Otira being the longest.  Today Tawa No 2 is still the 4^th biggest double track tunnel in New Zealand.  Once it was in use, Tawa people could get into town in around a third of the time that it had previously taken.  In the long run that was to have a profound affect on the shape of this suburb, and on the sorts of people who came to live here.

 

 

 

 
Old Fell Railway Tunnel on the
Rimutaka Incline,
Wairarapa, New Zealand.

 

I want you to think about tunnels – not so much the natural ones, but the human made ones.  What are tunnels? Why are they built?

I’ve been thinking about tunnels and Easter.  (It wasn’t the Easter bunny that got me started.) I was thinking about these tunnels on the Main Trunk Line and what they are and what they signify.

Tunnels like those are a way of making a connection between one place and another, over having a route through one almighty weight of obstruction.  Thinking of tunnels in those terms started to sound a bit like Easter to me.

The events of Easter can be thought of as God making a route through one almighty weight of obstruction….  Our angst, our hurt, our wilfulness, our suspicion, our fear, our hatred, our pride, our denial, our self justification, our self absorption, our lack of care, our small mindedness, our unkindness, our thoughtlessness… it is quite a mountain.  But through Jesus Christ God builds a tunnel, opening up access to himself for us… drawing us to him in love – the same challenging, fierce love that shone through his Son, Jesus Christ.  The God of Easter longs to connect with us.

The God of Easter also invites us along to continue that reconciling, connecting Easter work.  Sometimes it will take us to surprising places and lead us to startling conclusions, just like it did to Peter and the leadership of the Jerusalem church.  It got them putting things together that they had thought could never go together, and yet the Spirit of God was obviously in the connection.  Who would have thought that God was concerned with that, or that God was wanting to connect with them!

Those main Trunk tunnels on the Government deviation changed things for people up the line and this access that we have to God changes things too.  It changes things for us.  It connects us with God’s passion and purpose in this world.  It hauls us into a community that is greater than we had assumed it would be and it wakes us up to a vision beyond anything we had imagined.

 

Books used for information

Tawa Enterprise and Endeavour, Ken Cassells, 1988,Wellington.

Rails Through the Valley: the story of the construction and use of railway lines through Tawa, Bruce Murray and David Parsons, Tawa Historical Society, 2008, Tawa.

We have photos of our boys beside some place name signs in the Cotswalds in the U.K.  –Upper Slaughter and Lower Slaughter.  On one the oldest is pretending to throttle the younger and on the other the youngest is pretending to throttle the older.  Evidently the name Slaughter has nothing to do with butchery or battle.  It comes instead from an Old English word, Slohtre, which means a muddy place.

What weird and wonderful place names have you come across?

Signpost with the longest place name
in New Zealand and possibly the world.
It means- the place where Tamatea, the
man with the big knees, who slid,
climbed and swallowed mountains,
known as ‘landeater’ played his flute to
his loved one.

 

Places receive their names for various reasons.  Sometimes they are named because of a family that lived there, sometimes after an eminent person, sometimes because of an industry or after an event.  Sometimes they get their name from a geographical feature.  Sometimes places are named in a more hit and miss way.  A person in a planning office has the task of coming up with a whole batch of new street names, and the only constraint is that they can’t use a name that has already been used elsewhere, so as not to confuse the Fire Brigade.

Our Bible passage this morning is, among other things, about the naming of a couple of places.

It follows a very nasty episode in Shechem, where one of Jacob’s daughters is raped by a man fron one of Shechem’s leading families.  A peace of sorts is brokered.  However the brothers of the woman who was raped are not happy with what was negotiated.  So they attack the town when the men are off guard and sore (part of the peace deal was that the men of Shechem would be circumcised).  These angry sons of Jacob kill the men and loot the village.  The father understands that this act of revenge puts the whole family in jeopardy.  The brothers only see that their sister was wronged and someone needed to pay, and what do they care if it was the whole village.

Jacob had bought land around Shechem, intending to settle there.  Now it was certainly not safe for the family to remain in the area.

Into this situation God speaks to Jacob, ‘Go to Bethel at once and live there.  Build an altar there to me, the God who appeared to you when you were running away from your brother, Esau.’

So Jacob is summoned back to a place where he himself had previously encountered God and found hope, long ago when he was escaping the consequences of his own skulduggery.  Bethel is the place of Jacob’s ladder.  It is the place where Jacob hears for himself the promise that God has made to his family- the promise of the land he lay on, and descendants as numerous as specks of dust.  Through Jacob and his family every nation on earth will be blessed.  Then there is the personal promise, ‘Remember I will be with you and protect you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land.  I will not leave you until I have done what I promised.’

To this doorway to the house of God, the gate that he felt opened into heaven, Jacob brings his family, escaping from trouble and danger that they have had a part on bringing on themselves.  Yes, Jacob orders his family to purify themselves and leave behind the vestiges of foreign gods, but Bethel is not shrine for the lily white.  It is a place where sinners, those with murky lives, meet God and are reminded of who they are and the promise they stand in.  It is a place where the frightened find hope.

The account of Jacob setting up the altar at Bethel here in chapter 35 is one of two versions found in Genesis.  The first is found in the Jacob’s ladder story in chapter 28.  There Jacob upends the stone he was using as a pillow, as a memorial stone.  The accounts in both cases are very similar.  The upshot of both is that a place that once was known as Luz, is now known as Bethel, (the house of God).  Something has happened there significant enough to change a place name.  This is a God place now.

There is another place naming in this passage – a poignant one.  Rebekah’s nurse, Deborah, dies near Bethel.  Whether she was Rebekah’s own nurse as she was growing up , or the wetnurse who looked after Rebekah’s first son, Joseph, we don’t know.  But she was someone close to Rebekah, and a loss.  They buried her beneath one of the big trees below Bethel.  (Most translations have oak, but the Hebrew word means any stately tree.) The spot became known as Allon Baccuth – the Tree of Tears.

Through our services over Lent we are looking in a more focussed way at some of the stories of this area.  I’ve been doing some reading around this from the Tawa /Porirua section of the library and I’ve come across some interesting place names and sometimes the stories behind them.  I thought I’d share some of them with you.

The block of land that runs down to the Plimmerton bridge, Section 98 on the first subdivision, was bought by a man called Henry London.  It was the site ofLondon’s accommodation house and his store and a wharf.  Local Maori called it Tinipia.  Large numbers of Maori would call atLondon’s trading potatoes and maize and pigs from settlements in the bay and along the coast.  Henry London used to brew ginger beer, and it was very popular with the Maori who came to trade.  That is why they called it Tinipia (a Maori transliteration of ginger beer).

Had I been a sailor I might have known about this next one before now.  There is an underwater feature called The Bridge.  It runs from the creek valley on Mana Island to the mainland at Bridge Pa, a bit south of Titahi Bay.  Evidently around 8000 years ago Mana Island was part of the mainland.  The shoal or Bridge is all that remains of that connection.  On either side of the Bridge the depth of water can be 2-4 times deeper than the depth of the water on the shoal itself.  The deepest sounding on the shoal is 4.5 fathoms.  Immediately south of the Bridge the water can be as deep as 20 fathoms.  The shoal is an underwater bridge that creates a stretch of shallow water.

One last one will appeal to your sense of humour.  On the harbour side of Paremata Railway Station there was a rag tag collection of cottages along the shore of the harbour.  They disappeared when the motorway was realigned.  They were mostly fisherman’s cottages.  Sometimes on a high tide the sea would wash under them.  They were pretty primitive.  The area was sometimes called Slum Alley or Slug Alley, but it came to be known as Hobson St.  Hobson St in Wellingtonw as a posh street.  Hobson St in Paremata was a joke that stuck.  It is said that some of the Paremata residents were skylarking around Wellington one night and they brought back a souvenir- one of the signposts from Hobson St.  They erected the sign on their own home ground.  The name stuck, and by 1948 had become official.

The names Jacob gave to places reflected what had happened there… Bethel (House of God)… the Tree of Tears.  The place name was a way of remembering.  I want to give you a minute to think of a place that you have lived in or perhaps spent a lot of time working in.  It might be a whole town.  It might be a street or just one building.  Think of the place and the learning that went on in that place….

Forget about the name that that place already has – forget about Luz or Stalag 13 or what ever it was called- and give it your own name, as Jacob did.  What would your name for it be?

What is the prayer or thanksgiving bound up with that name and that place?

Clare Lind

Books used for information

The Bay- A History of Community at Titahi Bay, Linda Fordyce and Kirsten MacLehn, Titahi Bay Residents and Ratepayers Progressive Association, 2000, Titahi Bay.

The Paremata Story, Barbara Heath & Helen Balham, Paremata Residents Association, 1994, Paremata.

The book of Judges is an awkward book – perhaps the bloodiest in the Jewish scriptures. One of its most gruesome episodes concludes this story of Deborah and Barak – Jael and the tent peg.

Judges is a translation of a Hebrew word that comes from a root that means judge – hence ‘Judges’. It is clear though that the book’s judges weren’t judges in our sense of the word. Deborah is the only one of them who seems to have settled cases. Mostly they seem to be a maverick assortment of charismatic figures who emerged from time to time to rescue the people of various tribal areas from those who oppressed them.

Sometimes these figures were deeply flawed. Samson is a case in point. A man with tremendous talent but little discipline, who acts like a lout and finally squanders his talent because of his attachment to a beautiful woman who is only too happy to betray him. At the end of his story there is a suggestion that he achieved more through his death than he did during his life.

פטשׁ (sh f t) means judge, but there is an archaic sense of the word that means govern. The word, ‘governor’ or ‘leader’ does seem to describe more what these people did than ‘judge’.

Although the final form of the book of Judges implies that the judges had influence over most ofIsrael, a closer reading suggests that this is probably not the case. The conflict that Barak and Deborah are called to take part in was something that just affected the northern region of Tribal Israel. Hazor, the Canaanite king’s base, was north ofGalilee. Those, whom Barak summons to help him, come from two of the northern tribes- Naphtali and Zebulun. These were most likely the tribes that had borne the brunt of this particular Canaanite oppression. The battle they take part in is also fought in the north on the plain of Jezreel.

Sisera had the greater military force ( the same army that had terrorised the north and kept it under thumb for many years) and he had the equivalent to tanks in the military currency of the day – 900 iron chariots. The gathered force that Barak led against him was made up of lightly armed infantry; some of the force probably carried farm implements as weapons.

The land they did battle on was the flood plain of theKishonRiver. It was a place that was subject to flooding and was often boggy in the wet season. But in the dry (which was when armies went to war) it would have been considered a battlefield well suited to chariot warfare.

So there was a good reason why Barak wasn’t bursting with enthusiasm when Deborah gave him God’s marching orders. He had been summoned 50 miles south to Deborah’s base in the Ephraim hills, for her to tell him that God wanted him to do something that was (from a military point of view) foolhardy. She was expecting him now to trudge 50 miles back north and do it. Well if she was going to ask him to put his and his people’s lives on the line, then he was going to demand that she put her life on the line too.

‘I will go if you go with me,’ he says, ‘but if you don’t come with me, I’m not going.’

A betting person would have put their money on the Canaanites – it was a dead cert. win.

There are two tellings of the story in the book of Judges. In chapter four there is a prose version and in chapter five a version set as a victory song, sung by Deborah and Barak. The song is thought to be one of the oldest bits of poetry in the Jewish scriptures. It is only through the song that we find out the physical reason why Sisera suffered such a big defeat.

In the prose version Deborah announces to Barak that it is time to attack. ‘Today the Lord will help you to defeat Sisera. In fact the Lord has already gone on ahead to fight for you.’

Here is what the song says….

Canaanite kings fought us at Taanach,
By the stream near Meggido-
But they could not rob us of our silver,
From the pathways in the sky
The skies fought Sisera
And his soldiers were swept away
By the ancient Kishon river.                Judges 5: 19-21. C.E.V.

It seems that an unseasonal rainstorm brought the streams up and caused a flood. Sisera’s heavy chariots and horses would have got mired in mud and they would have been worse than useless. The lighter armed force of Barak was much more mobile than Sisera’s army. Sisera’s army was thrown into confusion and Barak’s force was able to press home their unexpected advantage. The victory was so complete that even the enemy commander, Sisera, did not survive the day. He fell victim to a woman with a spare tent peg.

At its core this story celebrates a salvation. God has stepped in through a couple of leaders, and the people ofIsraelare free of their oppressors once again. It’s a story that reminds me of the great Jewish salvation story- the Exodus, in particular the crossing of theRed Sea. Interestingly victory songs are sung after both events and a prominent woman leads the singing. In both cases what happened can be explained as a natural phenomenon- the miracle is in the timing.

The stories of Judges are a hotchpotch, gathered from different places. They hang together because they are joined in a very patterned way.

The people of Israel forgot the Lord their God; they sinned against him and worshipped the idols of Baal and Asherah. So the Lord became angry with Israel and let King Cushan Rishathaim of Mesopotamia conquer them… then the Israelites called out to the Lord and he sent a man to free them.                   Judges3:7-9, GNB.

The people of Israel sinned against the Lord again. Because of this the Lord made King Eglon of Moab stronger than Israel…. The Israelites were subject to Eglon for 18 years . Then the Israelites cried out to the Lord, and he sent a man to free them.        Judges 3:12

And from the beginning of our passage…

The people of Israel sinned against the Lord again. So the Lord let them be conquered by Jabin, a Canaanite king who ruled in the city of Hazor. …He ruled the people of Israel with cruelty and violence for 20 years. Then the people of Israel cried out to the Lord for help.

You get the picture.

We may not particularly agree with the editor’s conclusions. They may seem a bit too neat and tidy. But we do need to recognise that by and large these brutal, vivid stories from the book of Judges do celebrate salvation and rescue from oppressive awful situations, and they attribute that salvation to God.

The past year has been a brutal, chaotic year for planet Earth. – The civil wars across the Middle East and the continuing turmoil, the gruesome celebrations after the execution of Gaddafi that were played many more times that we wanted them to be, across our TV screens in our own peculiar western form of gloat… The frequent reports of western soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan… Our knowledge that for every western soldier killed there has been many, many more civilians in those countries who have been killed our maimed… The captain of the English rugby team who has had his international career brought to a premature end because of loutish behaviour off the field.

The stories of the book of Judges have an almost contemporary ring.

I wonder whether in the traumatised, conflicted parts of the world these stories might be more solid beacons of hope than the tidy, sanitised salvation stories that we would prefer them to be.

Perhaps some of you know the story about the ladder that has been on a ledge of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem for over 150 years. The church that claims to be on the site of Jesus’ burial and resurrection has an equally well known reputation for being one of the most fraught and conflicted buildings in the Christian world. The events of Jesus’ death and resurrection that the Holy Sepulchre church was built to honour are central to the Christian story of reconciliation between humankind and God. It is a sad irony that the various Christian communities that have been stakeholders in the church have had such suspicious, fraught relationships with one another. Their tensions, that have been known to flare into violence, have run for centuries.

We may shake our heads at the vocal and powerful fundamentalist sector of the world Moslem community, but in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre the Moslem community has provided the important neutral space that has allowed this fractured worship space to function as a church. Since 1192 the keys of the church have been held by the same Moslem family and another Moslem family have been the doorkeepers. This was the peacekeeping arrangement by a Moslem Sultan, put in place because the Christian factions did not have enough trust between them to allow one of them to hold the keys for all.

An agreement under Ottoman law in the middle of the 1700s acknowledged the legitimate interests of six different Christian communities in the site – Roman Catholic, Greek, Armenian and Syrian Orthodox, Coptic and Ethiopian. The current demarcation of which area belongs and is the responsibility of which community and which are common to all, was drawn up in another Moslem peacekeeping effort in the middle of the 19th century. Times and places of worship in the common areas are strictly regulated. The current agreement is a fragile truce that even in the last 10 years has been broken by violent incidents.

In 2002 a Coptic monk who was guarding an entrance to a small rooftop monastery that Coptics maintain is their territory moved his chair out of the blistering sun into some shade a few feet away. This was read as an hostile action by Ethiopian monks who already disputed the Coptics claim to the little monastery. Fighting broke out and 11 monks had to be taken to hospital.

Ironically this disputed little monastery on the roof with its two chapels and 26 tiny rooms is in such a dire state of repair because the groups can’t agree about maintenance and responsibility that engineers worry that it may fall down through the roof and into the church.

So the two communities in this dispute are, in their fight to hold to and protect what they see as theirs, placing not only what they are tenaciously holding on to on jeopardy but the whole building itself. This in a building intended to honour the one who talked about forgetting ourselves and surrendering rather than jealously guarding our lives in order to save them.

And the ladder? Sometime in the middle of the 1800s a monk from one community put up a wooden ladder above the main entrance to do some maintenance and a priest from one of the other communities accused the man of trespassing. The ladder is still there…. I can’t help thinking they could do with an earthquake.

A couple of things from today’s reading.

There are two groups Paul is addressing his comments to- one whom he calls the weak in faith – from what he says they are stricter about their religious observance- , Paul mentions vegetarianism (presumably because they were worried about how meat might have been butchered- whether it came from a pagan temple or not) and he also mentions the special honouring of a particular day of the week.

The other group, the strong in faith aren’t overly worried about where their meat comes from and they say that all days are the Lord’s day.

Paul wants these groups to respect each other’s expression of their Christian faith even if it is different to their own. He warns the strong not to treat those who haven’t their freedom in faith like rubbish. Don’t mock them. And he says to the weak don’t judge those who do differently to you- don’t think that they are lax and their faith is hopelessly compromised.

To both he says, ‘Sort out what you think is right for you and do that to honour the Lord, not to justify yourself as intellectually, morally or theologically superior to those whose conscience leads them to do otherwise.

I want to close by saying something about the word, welcome. It is there in verse one when Paul tells the strong in faith to genuinely welcome those who are weak and it is also in verse three. ‘The person who eats meat mustn’t rubbish the person who doesn’t, and the vegetarian mustn’t judge the non vegetarian, because God has welcomed that person.’

It is our experience of God’s welcome and hospitality that unites us, however that works its way out in our lives. We are people whom God is pleased to see. You and I and our brothers and sisters in the Tawa Union family, and the folk from across the road at the Gospel Hall, and down the road at St Christopher’s, and the Sallies, and the Baptists and the New Lifers, and whatever else blooms in this Holy City of Tawa. God has said ‘Welcome’ to all of us…. ALL of us.

It is a lifetime’s education learning the enormity of the welcome, and a lifetime’s transformation learning how to offer that same welcome and hospitality to one another and those around us. Amen.

Every culture has its way of marking out what is sacred, special, to be respected, and what is ordinary and needs no special respect. For instance, in Maori and Pacific culture you may eat specially consecrated food like communion bread and wine in a place of worship, but you don’t eat ordinary food there. Palagi culture doesn’t mark its sacred space in that same way, so we have no particular issue with eating in a worship space. I’m sure that the Pacific families that are part of our church can point out a few ways that Palagi do mark sacred space though. Some of them will be the same as Pacific people and some not – move the chairs, touch the organ, bring the drum kit and synthesiser, forget to light the candle, shift the bible, let the service go on a bit long….

When a couple marry and move in together, (or move in together and then marry)- they are suddenly confronted with a whole lot of differences in the way things are done. They have taken on not just the person they love but, horror of horrors, the way that that person goes about life as well. In her family they know about dirty clothes baskets, in his they use the floor for that (or so he says). He works to a budget, she sees something she likes and just buys it. One of them squeezes the toothpaste tube at the bottom, the other just squeezes it.

There are all these things, that all their lives, they have just assumed that that’s the way it’s done- it has never crossed their minds that it can be done another way. It is very easy to guild the way we do things with words like logical, best, sensible, obvious, right, proper….

So the negotiations begin, in that mix of love and frustration, understanding and argument, Negotiations that will hopefully lead to some workable compromise in which both win some of the time, and the essentials get done one way or another.

Whether it is a matter of different cultures being brought together or different people being brought together, it is a chance for all to sort out what is really critical, and what isn’t quite so important and might even be let go. This may not feel like a blessing in the cut and thrust of negotiations, but it is. The chance to recognise what is core, and what isn’t, is one we probably wouldn’t have had had, had we encountered only more of our own assumptions and conclusions instead of difference.

Segments of Jewish culture in Jesus’ day made a very definite division between what was holy and what was ordinary. The Hebrew and Greek words for holy both have a strong sense of being set apart from ordinary use and dedicated to sacred service.

There was the sacred and the profane. Profane in this sense doesn’t necessarily have a negative connotation. Our word ‘profane’ comes from two Latin ones- fanum which means temple and pro which means before. Profane means something that is outside the bounds of the sanctuary- it is before it, not inside it.

The New Testament equivalent is koinos ( you may have heard the word koinonia-fellowship, community- they are both from the same root). Koinos means communal or common-something that comes into contact with anything and everything. Ordinary, unfussy, profane… and because it could have been in touch with anything it was regarded as ceremonially impure or unclean.

Something that was koinos (ordinary) was approachable and usable without any ceremony. That was not the case for anything that was holy. There special attention had to be paid, precautions had to be taken. You did not mix the sacred and the profane. You did not bring anything that was potentially unclean, including yourself, into a holy place.

The Pharisees were the holiness movement of the day. Wherever possible they avoided contact with anything that might render them unclean. They were fastidious in their observance of Jewish ritual law. Within their own circle and outside of it, they gained a lot of kudos for going above and beyond the basic legal requirements for ritual purity. They were seriously holy. They prided themselves in not only following the Torah (the legal requirements of the Hebrew scriptures) but also in following the oral commentary that rose up around that law and came in the end to be written down as the Mishnah.

Their protest about proper hand washing is a case in point. The Torah only stipulates ritual hand washing for priests. On the strength of their oral tradition the Pharisees had adopted the practice whether they were priests or not. Then on the rationale that Israel was a holy priesthood in respect to the rest of the world, they sought to impose the practice on the wider community. This was not an argument about public health; it was an argument about who was holy and pure. It was an argument about authority.

The Pharisees were very sure that there was one route to holiness and they were the ones who knew it and practiced it. So anyone who wanted to dedicate themselves to God had better get in behind. There was no room for negotiation for they had the mind of God, or at least the wisdom of the elders, on this.

Jesus responds by giving them a flea in the ear about a particularly glaring short coming in their brand of holiness. Then he calls the crowd and makes a statement that scandalises the Pharisees and astonishes even his own disciples.
Listen and try to understand. It is not the food that you put into your mouth that makes you unclean and unfit to worship God; the bad words that come out of your mouth are what make you unclean. Mt15:10-11

That’s a direct hit on Jewish dietary law, one of the major ways in which Jews observed their faith and honoured what was sacred. You can imagine any Gentile hearing or reading Matthew’s gospel in the days of the early church going, ‘Yes!’ It meant, you see, that dietary law was cultural, not core. ‘It is what you say and do that are far better indicators of the state of the soul than what you take in by way of food,’ Jesus explains to the disciples.

It is not the things that come from outside that taint us; it is what comes from ourselves- poor attitudes, economy with the truth, stories told to justify theft, infidelity and violence. That is the stuff that makes us less than what we should be. If we are scrupulous about external religious observance yet neglect the nudges of God’s Spirit within us to accept God’s love and forgiveness ever more deeply, and to allow that same love and grace to spill over into our living then we have missed the point. We are not a plant planted by the Lord at all, only a weed that robs other plants of the sun and the nutrients and space that they need to grow. We make dangerous guides, because we have no real idea of where the track is or even what it looks like.

The high priests of computing say ‘Garbage in, garbage out,’ but when it comes to humans Jesus says ‘Garbage out, garbage out.’ What comes out is indicative of what is inside. Faith that lacks integrity is nothing. But faith with integrity… that is something else. That is God’s treasure hidden in the ordinary, earthenware vessels of our lives. That is the sacred touching and transfiguring the profane.