No Answers

No answers.

No speculations.

A long sometimes lonely road.

He walked that road before we knew him.

Two become one.
I cannot guess such loss.

He found a friend on the road.

Two become one, the unity of joy.

We knew them then, their rocky road broadening out into a high plain.

“Be careful when you shake his hand.”

A long arduous path from the heights

Descending steadily into a new darkness.

Joy is there in the darkness. Of course.

Joy is always there. So is darkness.

“Rage against the dying of the light” –
How do we rage, when light has died?

Two become one.

Separation at the end of a long journey.

We sing of hope we cannot see.

We claim new life we cannot feel.

Only questions

Untamed untameable thoughts

Continue in the dark.

The phone rings – another plea for money.
A voice says my name, then adds “Reverend”.

I guess I am. Preacher, teacher, answer man.

No answers.

No speculations.

A long sometimes lonely road.

Reflections of a White African: 5 (What’s so special about Africa?)

I have been asked to talk about Africa. I was born in Zambia and lived in Zambia and Zimbabwe for over 20 years. I lived in the USA for 25 years, and now also in Canada for 20 years. I have layers of identity (as most of us do), with Africa at the centre, so that Africa lives in my heart.

I grew up in a country run by a small White minority. When colonial Rhodesia became free Zimbabwe, many of my fellow White Africans “took the gap” – they left the country never to return. I am in contact with some of them. They are good people, but they miss the privilege that we had when half of the country’s resources were spent for a minority of five percent.

Some of them miss Zimbabwe for other reasons. Some have stayed in Zimbabwe, because Africa is home and they don’t want to live anywhere else. My question this evening is: What’s so special about Africa? What has caused White Africans to remain when they are no longer in control of the country? Why do some return after living elsewhere.

The answer varies from person to person, so I am speaking only from my own experience. I think that what I have to say applies more broadly, but you will have to talk with people from other countries in Africa to find out if what I say about Zimbabwe is true in their homes as well.

What’s so special about Africa?

1. Some people point to the scenery and the animals out in the bush. Having an elephant stalk past your little rondavel, brushing against the window as it passes, is an incredible experience. I have driven through a herd of water buffalo – slowly, not wanting a stampede – with the sound of a Wild West movie playing inside my head. And the scenery! I was born near Victoria Falls – twice as wide as Niagara Falls and one and a half times as high. Immense and powerful, with spray that drenches the surrounding grassland and turns it into a rainforest.

The truth is, of course, that Africa is incredibly beautiful, but so is the rest of the world around us. From China’s Great Wall to the Canadian Rockies, from the Rift Valley in East Africa to the Ruwenzori Mountains of the Congo, from Iguassu Falls in Brazil to the Taj Mahal, we have beauty all around us. Africa is beautiful, but that is not the primary reason that anyone would choose to go back home to live there.

2. Some people remember their youth, and they think that what they had when they were young was clearly better than anything since. This would be true for those with whom I grew up. Often they are right, but they forget the human cost of what we had. I remember Rhodesia of old. There were 300,000 White people at the most, and about seven million Black people. The White schools were excellent, but there were only a handful of places for Black scholars.

I remember the situation when I was a teacher there in the early 1970s. Consider, after grade seven Black Zimbabweans took an exam to see who could go on for further studies. The top 12 percent went on to high school. Then after grade 12 (as we would call it), they took another exam, and this time the top eight percent went on to university or teacher training college. Roughly one out of 100 Black children were able to pursue higher education. No wonder we had high standards! The whole process was built on systemic injustice. Those who think that colonial Africa was better forget the human cost of the colonial system. Remembering the old days is no reason to call Africa special.

3. I know what I miss. I love Zimbabwean music and the sound of the people singing and speaking, laughing and being. There are certain foods that I miss. I miss biltong and Marie biscuits, lemon cremes and gooseberry jam. I miss the crumbly Cadbury’s chocolate I used to get in Bulawayo and the licorice that was actually more green than black. I miss buying shelled peas from the vendor on the way home, not to mention roasted peanuts poured into a funnel made out of newspaper. I miss mealies (corn on the cob) roasted over a charcoal fire.

I miss the African night, so dark that you can really see the stars. I miss idonsakusa and icela inkobi – the names of the morning and evening stars. I miss the Southern Cross, which you can’t see in the northern hemisphere. I miss the sounds of the birds, the grey lourie crying “G’way!” I miss the brightly coloured lizards that scamper about the rocks. And I miss the rocks themselves, big boulders that make themselves into mountains in the Matopo Hills, where I grew up. But none of these things are what I miss the most. None of these things are really what makes Africa special.

What makes Africa special?

Our son once said that he wanted to go back to Zimbabwe to live. He was about 10 at the time and had been five years old when we left Zimbabwe. I asked him what was different about Zimbabwe from North America. He thought for a bit, and then replied, “In Africa, they treat people like people.” Bingo! That’s what’s special about Africa!

We have a saying in Zimbabwe. “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.” Literally: A person is a person with people. More fully: You become a real person (fully human) in community, in relationship with other people. Desmond Tutu used to describe this quality of life in Africa as “Ubuntu” – humanness. When one person hurts, the whole community gathers around that person. When someone dies, we gather with the bereaved family and make sure they do not have to face death alone. When someone is in need, someone else will leave what they need at their door. No questions, no fuss, just care.

Canada is a great place, but we prioritize tasks over people. We care for each other, but we value getting things done even more. In Africa, we prioritize people over tasks. We want to get things done, but “in Africa, they treat people like people!” That’s what makes Africa special.

Healer of our Every Ill

We are broken people who live in a broken world. “Tell me something I don’t know,” I can hear someone say under their breath. “This is not news!” I have a friend who recently lost his mother. She gave him physical life, carrying him first in her womb and then in her arms. Now she is gone, and he experiences a brokenness that many of us have also felt. Another friend is nearing the end of a ten-year prison sentence. A bad decision in his university years, connected to drugs, has left him in a difficult place, with long-term implications for his life.

Many of us have been broken, but our world too is broken. This past week I read a news story about the head of the EPA in the United States, who wondered aloud if perhaps global warming is good for us. I grew up with Moody Science Films. I remember how they stressed the amazing wonder of the fine tuning of creation. If the earth were tilted on its access a little less or more than it is, or if the amount of radiation we receive from the sun were a little more than it is, or several other variables were not finely tuned, we would not have life on planet earth. God created wonderfully fine-tuned earth, and EPA head Scott Pruitt thinks that maybe we can tune it a little better. Wow!

One could multiply examples: The effects of racism and of consumerism and on and on. We live in a broken world. We know that our brokenness comes from sin because we know that God created a good earth and gave it to us. Human rebellion broke our relationship with God, and as a result we live with the long-term results of human sin (Genesis 1 to 3). We know that God wants to heal our brokenness and give us new life and new joy in a fully restored relationship with God. So, we turn to our passage in Mark 1 to see what God is doing in our lives.

Mark 1: 29-39

Mark begins the story of Jesus abruptly and dramatically. There is no birth narrative, just the announcement that this is the gospel of Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God. John the Baptist bursts on the scene, and then comes Jesus. Jesus is baptised and then tempted in the area near Jerusalem. Then the action shifts north to Galilee, where he preaches the gospel of repentance. He calls his disciples and then begins teaching in the town of Capernaum, on the north shore of Lake Galilee. At the close of the sermon, he casts out an evil spirit, setting the stage for our passage. Jesus went with Simon and Andrew to their home in Capernaum or Bethsaida (about three miles away). There they find Simon’s mother-in-law sick with a fever. Jesus healed her. The news spread quickly. Soon crowds of people, with sick and possessed family members, pressed around Jesus, and he healed everyone who came to him. Jesus left early in the morning, looking for space and silence. Simon and his friends found Jesus and asked him to come back to heal more people, but Jesus went instead on a preaching tour in the surrounding towns and villages. We see two basic points in these verses.

1. Jesus delights in healing people’s brokenness. When Simon’s mother-in-law was sick, he healed her. When people brought their sick friends, he healed them. Jesus healed people physically and spiritually, emotionally and mentally. We can take this as a basic principle of reality: God wants to make us whole. God has made us for an eternity of delight and joy in God’s presence, which includes removing our brokenness.

2. Jesus does not heal for the sake of healing. He said, “Let us go somewhere else—to the nearby villages—so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.” Jesus came to preach the coming reality of God’s reign. God’s reign includes reconciliation and wholeness, but begins with repentance. Therefore, Jesus begins with getting people to think. The healings and exorcisms of chapter one serve God’s purpose in at least two ways – by getting people to acknowledge their own brokenness (repentance), and by helping people start to ask, “Who is this man?” Jesus wants to provoke people to examine themselves and to turn to him. The healings of his ministry meet human need, but they do so in order to do God’s will.

We turn, then, to Job 7.

Job 1: 1-7

You know the story of Job. It begins in the courts of Heaven, with God and the angels. Satan joins them, and God holds up Job as a man of unusual integrity and devotion to God. Satan credits Job’s goodness to a kind of quid pro quo: God blesses Job, and Job praises God. Remove your blessings, he challenges God, and Job will curse you. God allows Satan to remove Job’s possessions, children, and other physical and emotional blessings. As a side note to this morning’s thoughts, you observe that this action lays the brokenness of our world at the feet of Satan, not of God. Nevertheless, God is ultimately in charge, and Job knows it.

Job’s wife says, “Curse God and die” (Job 2:9). Job refuses. Three of Job’s friends come to him. They sit and weep with him for seven days, a remarkable show of support. Then they try to make sense of what has happened to Job. Their explanations reduce to one basic thought: You must have done something wrong. Job defends himself without fear. His conscience is clear. He knows that he has honoured God throughout his life, and he calls God to account.

In the last act of the story, God appears. God does not answer Job’s questions, but says only, “Look at me.” God asks, “Who are you, anyway?’ and redirects Job’s attention to God. Job repents (of what, we wonder) “in dust and ashes” (Job 42:6), and God restores him to full health, with more possessions and children than before. God also tells the three friends to plead with Job to pray for them, because Job is righteous and they are not. They do so, and they all live happily ever after.

Job 7 comes near the beginning of the story. Job is in despair. He knows that life is short and full of pain, and he is ready to die and leave this world behind. He cannot see hope beyond his pain and says, “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and they come to an end without hope. Remember, O God, that my life is but a breath; my eyes will never see happiness again.”

From this brief excerpt, we see clearly that any appeal to the prosperity gospel is false. Job suffers even though he is clearly righteous. The friends’ claim that he must have sinned brings down God’s wrath at the end of the story. We see that there are those seasons of life when all that we can see is darkness, when we also say, “I will never see happiness again.”

We see also that God had one primary purpose in all that happened to Job: God’s purpose was (and is) to glorify God. Job’s suffering was a lens to direct everyone who saw to God. God used Job’s pain to respond to the charge that people are only good when God blesses them. However well or however little we understand the pain Job experienced (and I do not understand it at all well), one thing is clear: God’s glory is the final answer to the pain and brokenness of this world.

Synthesis

This point is the connecting point with Mark 1. In Mark’s gospel, Jesus healed the sick to stimulate the question, “Who is this man?” He wanted them to see God. In Job 7, the underlying theme of Job’s suffering (visible only when we get to the end of the story) is that it strips away Job’s defenses until he sees God’s greatness and glory. This does not mean that God breaks us so that we can see God. It doesn’t explain pain and suffering. Rather, this point tells us what happens in our brokenness.

You remember the sermon on the first Sunday of Advent last year. Julia Thiessen told us the First Nations story of the raven. The raven broke the containers of light so that light could stream through the brokenness into our dark world. That is like the truth I’m stating here – that God uses our brokenness to reveal the light of God. 

The Man Who Was Thursday

One hundred and ten years ago, G.K. Chesterton wrote a small book called The Man Who Was Thursday. It’s a strange little book, which Chesterton described as coming from a time early in his life when his ideas about what he believed were quite unsettled and unsystematic. Bear with me while I try to describe it.

Gabriel Syme is a detective who is given the job of infiltrating a circle of anarchists in London, England. The Anarchists want to destroy society, and Syme is recruited by a large man in a dark room to infiltrate the anarchists’ central governing council, which has seven members named after the days of the week. When he tries to join the council, his chief rival is an anarchist named Gregory, a real anarchist. Syme is elected over Gregory, and he joins the council as Thursday. The head of the council is Sunday, who calls a meeting to plan a political assassination, but instead tells the council that one of them (Tuesday) is a traitor and a policeman. He expels Tuesday, threatening him with destruction if he ever talks about them. 

After the meeting, Syme is followed by one of the others, who also turns out to be a policeman, recruited by a large man in a dark room to infiltrate the anarchists. One by one they uncover each member of the council, from Monday to Saturday, and find that they are all policemen, recruited by the same large man in a dark room. They realise that Sunday is the large man in a dark room, and pursue him all around Europe and England, going through agonies and danger that threaten their lives and almost destroy them. Finally, they catch up with Sunday in a mansion in the English countryside, where they are each given a room and bath to clean up, and then they join Sunday in a great banquet. They have suffered greatly together, and now they sit down to eat with their tormentor. As they eat, they realise that Sunday represents both God and the One who has led them into great danger – much like Job. As they talk during the banquet, Gregory, the real anarchist, walks in and challenges all of them. I read now from the book. 

There was complete silence in the starlit garden, and then the black-browed Secretary, implacable, turned in his chair towards Sunday, and said in a harsh voice—

“Who and what are you?” “I am the Sabbath,” said the other without moving. “I am the peace of God.” 

The Secretary [who was Monday] started up …. “I know what you mean,” he cried, “and it is exactly that that I cannot forgive you. I know you are contentment, optimism, what do they call the thing, an ultimate reconciliation. Well, I am not reconciled. If you were the man in the dark room, why were you also Sunday, an offense to the sunlight? If you were from the first our father and our friend, why were you also our greatest enemy? … Oh, I can forgive God His anger, though it destroyed nations; but I cannot forgive Him His peace.” …

[Each member of the council makes his complaint in turn and Sunday replies.] “I have heard your complaints in order. And here, I think, comes another to complain, and we will hear him also.” …

“Gregory!” gasped Syme, half-rising from his seat. “Why, this is the real anarchist!” “Yes,” said Gregory, with a great and dangerous restraint, “I am the real anarchist.” 

“‘Now there was a day,’” murmured [Saturday], who seemed really to have fallen asleep, “‘when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them.’” 

“You are right,” said Gregory, and gazed all round. “I am a destroyer. I would destroy the world if I could.” … You are the Law, and you have never been broken. … … I do not curse you for being cruel. … I curse you for being safe! … Oh, I could forgive you everything, you that rule all mankind, if I could feel for once that you had suffered for one hour a real agony such as I—” 

Syme sprang to his feet, shaking from head to foot. “I see everything,” he cried, “everything that there is …. It is not true that we have never been broken. We have been broken upon the wheel. It is not true that we have never descended from these thrones. We have descended into hell. … I repel the slander; we have not been happy. I can answer for every one of the great guards of Law whom he has accused. At least—” 

He had turned his eyes so as to see suddenly the great face of Sunday, which wore a strange smile. “Have you,” he cried in a dreadful voice, “have you ever suffered?” 

As he gazed, the great face grew to an awful size, grew … larger and larger, filling the whole sky; then everything went black. Only in the [darkness] he seemed to hear a distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard somewhere, “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?”

Conclusion

Chesterton expresses something beyond our understanding here. God comes to us most clearly in our brokenness and vulnerability. When we are broken and accept our brokenness, we find Jesus, who was broken on the cross. We live, someone has said, in a cross-shaped world. In the darkness of systemic racism, we find Jesus. In the loss of the mother who first carried us in our arms, we find Jesus. In the fear that I feel when I think of the way that we abuse the earth, we find that Jesus is there – not there in our abuse, but there in our fear. I can embrace the darkness of our broken world, because there I find the light of Jesus.

Remember Mark’s gospel. Jesus loves to heal. God loves to heal. He is the healer of our every ill. Jesus is the great healer who comes to us in life and in death and gives us life, life deeper than all the pain and suffering of this world. The path to healing is the path of the cross.

This week we begin the season of Lent – the path that leads to the cross, and therefore also the path of our healing. Jesus is indeed “healer of our every ill.” I love this time in the church’s year, in which we find that our deepest fears are the place where God is most at work, bringing to birth “joy unspeakable and full of glory.”

“Healer of our every ill, light of each tomorrow,

Give us peace beyond our fear, and hope beyond our sorrow.”

Steinbach Mennonite Church

11 February 2018

Texts

Job 7: 1-7

7 “Do not mortals have hard service on earth? Are not their days like those of hired labourers? ² Like a slave longing for the evening shadows, or a hired labourer waiting to be paid, ³ so I have been allotted months of futility, and nights of misery have been assigned to me. ⁴ When I lie down I think, ‘How long before I get up?’ The night drags on, and I toss and turn until dawn. ⁵ My body is clothed with worms and scabs; my skin is broken and festering.

⁶ “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and they come to an end without hope. ⁷ Remember, O God, that my life is but a breath; my eyes will never see happiness again.”

Mark 1: 29-39

²⁹ As soon as they left the synagogue, they went with James and John to the home of Simon and Andrew. ³⁰ Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they immediately told Jesus about her. ³¹ So he went to her, took her hand and helped her up. The fever left her and she began to wait on them. ³² That evening after sunset the people brought to Jesus all the sick and demon-possessed. ³³ The whole town gathered at the door, ³⁴ and Jesus healed many who had various diseases. He also drove out many demons, but he would not let the demons speak because they knew who he was.
³⁵ Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. ³⁶ Simon and his companions went to look for him, ³⁷ and when they found him, they exclaimed: “Everyone is looking for you!” ³⁸ Jesus replied, “Let us go somewhere else—to the nearby villages—so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.” ³⁹ So he traveled throughout Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and driving out demons.

A Story of Passports

I wonder what the plural is for a group of passports -- a murder of crows, a flock of birds, a herd of cattle. Maybe, a story of passports?

My siblings and I went through Dad's stuff this past July, after Dad's funeral. He had made sure that we had taken most of what we wanted before he died, but a small room remained. His last home on this earth. In these remnants of our parents' lives, we sifted through various items. Then we handed our selection to Nevin to keep at his house, since Lois and I were flying home.

When we visited for Christmas, Nevin handed us back our stuff, several boxers symbolizing Dad's life. I found his collar and dickey -- a black dickey (sort of like a bib) with white collars, which he used to wear as a minister in Zimbabwe, more than 50 years ago. I tried to see if I could put it on, but the collars are faded and brittle. I am ordained, as he was, but I will stick to normal Western wear.

I found two of his pocket knives. Dad was never without a pocket knife, for use, not for show. With me, they are purely for show. I found his date books -- 50+ years of date books. In the last year of his life, he weighed himself daily and recorded his weight. He had trouble keeping his weight up, so he chronicled his daily journey to eat enough eggs and get enough protein.

Finally, I found an envelope. A large plain brown envelope with the address of BIC Missions and some stamps. Inside I found passports, dated from 1946 to 1963. Here (briefly) is their story.

1946. Just after World War Two. Mom and Dad were scheduled to travel to Africa to begin their first term in Zambia, but pent-up demand for berths made it almost impossible to find space to sail to England. Dad told me the story of how one day he and Grandfather C drove to New York to look for tickets to sail to Africa. After much searching, they found a travel agent who told them he could get them seats on an airplane -- not the way we normally travelled in those days. Dad and Grandpa drove back to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and out to Ira Musser's farm. Musser was the missions board secretary, and in charge of getting them to Africa. They found him in the field, ploughing, and asked him if they had permission to buy the tickets. he immediately told them to buy the tickets and to get seats for the rest of the missionary party also. I think their party consisted of eight people: Mom and Dad and Donna (above), Lewis and Gladys Sider (with son John), and Lulu Asper, Rhoda Lenhert, and Florence Hensel.

They flew from New York to Gander, Newfoundland, where they were unable to land because of fog. I think they went to Monckton, NB. The next day they went on to the Azores islands, two-thirds of the way to Portugal, and then on to Portugal. From Portugal they flew to Dakar, Senegal, and then on to Monrovia in Liberia.  Finally they flew to what today is called Kinshasa, Congo, and then to what is now Lubumbashi. The last stage of their journey was by train, from Lubumbashi across the border into Zambia, and then on south to their destination in Bulawayo. They arrived in Bulawayo on Christmas Day, 1946. The beginning of almost 20 years in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Their passport has the stamps from government officials chronicling their journey. A story of passports.

1950. I suspect that the passports had a five year limit, since their next passport includes me, issued four years later. They travelled on a family passport, showing and signed by David Climenhaga and Dorcas Climenhaga, and adding the names of their children, Donna and Daryl. I think I can see some weariness in my parents' faces. They had another daughter in between, who never made the passport, Dorothy Leigh, born in April 1948, and died in November, 1948. Expatriate life is often hard.

1956 (I think). Just before Denise joined the family. A typical missionary family photograph. You can see the collar and dickey my father wore, sort of like an Anglican priest. Odd, for Brethren in Christ folk, whose motto was simplicity, but understood by the people around us in a British colony. The same reason that my parents finally bought a wedding ring for mother about five years later. It stopped the English from thinking that they were not married, but "living in sin".

1957. Denise was born, and we added her to the family passport by the simple expedient of adding a picture of mother holding her, signed before the relevant American authorities. So much simpler than life is today. Denise looks unimpressed by the proceedings. I like the way that the side view shows mother's covering, a part of her dress that I took for granted for the first 15+ years of my life. I notice also (at least I think I saw this) that, when she stopped wearing the covering, it disappeared from her clothes entirely. Dad took off the collar and dickey at the same time, but it was still in his dresser drawer when he died, just over 50 years later.

1959. This photograph appeared in the book of missionary families in 1960, a copy of which sits in my office. here it served first to include Donna and then to remove her from our family passport. We must have travelled home to the USA on this passport in 1959 as a family. Donna remained in the USA when we returned to Zimbabwe the following year. As a result, she got her own passport, and had to be removed from the family passport. Again, a simple procedure, appearing before the relevant American official, who crossed her off, and it was done.

The last two passports complete the journey. I think that these were the first individual passports they held. Denise and I got individual passports at the same time. A little context. This was a period of political instability. Dad was the bishop of the church and general superintendent of the mission. If troubles of some sort or other broke out in Zimbabwe, especially in Bulawayo where we lived, individual passports enabled us to travel separately if necessary. Dad could stay behind and keep things going, while mother and Denise and I could head for South Africa and home.

I have wondered about that time. I remember getting my passport. It felt cool, and I felt grown up. I'm not sure I would have felt quite so pleased if I had known why I now had my own passport. Two years later we left Zimbabwe. I returned for three years in the 1970s, so that I was there for the beginning of the Liberation Struggle, but that's another story. A story of passports.