Readings
Isaiah 58:1-9a,
Isaiah’s words are more detailed and have more of a challenge to them than a similar reading from Micah. But Micah wanted us to walk humbly with God, but Isaiah also wants some action, a rethink of our expectations and lives changed.
Maurice Andrew suggests that people want to be given credit for their fasting, but the trouble is they serve their own interest on a fast day, oppressing their workers. Balanced budgets and increased productivity are not satisfactory in themselves unless bread is shared with the hungry and the oppressed are allowed to go free. [1]
Matthew 5:13-20
Today’s Gospel follows on from Beatitudes which were directed to the disciples. Those same disciples are now instructed to be the salt of the earth, the light of the world.
Warren Carter points out that ‘as salt of the earth the community of disciples, not the ruling elite or the synagogue, are to live this flavouring, purifying way of life that is committed to the world’s wellbeing and loyal to God’s purpose’.[2] The disciples are to live in the world in the midst of the poor in spirit, the mourning, the powerless, and the hungry and thirsty, dominated and exploited by the ruling elite.
To shine as a light, to be salt, and to be a city on a hill is to be living out the attitudes espoused in the Beatitudes.[3]
Sermon
This is the Sunday nearest Waitangi Day. A time when we celebrate the beginning of our nation with a treaty which, despite what followed, was a genuine effort to humanise colonialism. Early colonisers who rightly felt cheated by the New Zealand company forced the confiscation of Māori land with unfortunate results. But over recent years we have made huge steps to honour the treaty, restoring mana and lost wealth. We have tried to bring Māori culture into mainstream Aotearoa and celebrate the uniqueness of who we are becoming.
But in the last two years we have seen a backlash against such progress from people who ought to know better. We have lobby groups like The Taxpayers Union which places the individual above the community and should really be called The No Tax and Deferred Public Works Corporation. We also have a group called Hobsons Choice who have very little understanding of what little choice the Colonial Office back in London gave Hobsen.
Nevertheless, the real salt in our communities are still focused on reform. I was thrilled to see a letter from my old High School explaining that Māori Culture was an important part of education that they were not stopping.
Furthermore, in spite of the President of the United States encouraging racism and sending the world towards a breakdown of trade and diplomacy some of the exciting examples of inspirational change have come from people in the USA.
One of the totally inspirational films I have seen in the past was called Hidden Figures. That film is about the story of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson who were African American women working on America’s space programme.
They were some of the mathematical brains behind one of the great exploring adventures in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit. That achievement restored the nation’s confidence, turned around the Space Race, and galvanized the world.
That visionary trio of women crossed all gender and race lines to inspire generations to dream big.
But nobody told us. They were the salt hidden in the project.
At the time when computers were just developing those three women, and the others in their computing unit, made it all happen with nothing more than pencil and chalk.
The film’s timeline compresses events in the three women’s real-life careers, but those events ran through the civil rights movement and the quest for desegregation. In their own way, the talents of these women were part of those changes.
As well as getting John Glenn into orbit, and later sending men to the moon, those women’s hard work and talent were part of the advancement of human rights for African Americans and for women.
In the movie John Glenn specifically asked that Katherine Johnson verify the IBM calculations and that really happened.
All three women went on to have exceptional careers and when the space programme became NASA in 1958 segregated facilities were abolished. Looking back we can see that these women were as much a part of the civil rights movement as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King.
Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King were shining lights for the world to see. Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson glowed in their own world and in reaching for the stars put men on the moon and a black woman into space.
They were all church attending Christians who cared for their families and wanted a better world. They had parents that dreamed of a better future for their daughters.
From the time of slavery onward African Americans took the scripture of the Old and New Testament and read it for their time and place. Slave owners used the scripture to subdue their slaves with a promise of a better life in heaven.
But the Gospel message has an urgency that looks for change through individual action. Jesus said the kingdom of God is at hand.
So it wasn’t long before ‘Swing low sweet chariot coming for to carry me home’ became:
‘Old John Brown’s body lies mouldering in the grave, while weep the sons of bondage whom he ventured all to save; but tho he lost his life while struggling for the slave, his soul is marching on.
Of course the rhythm was so good it got tidied up and turned into The Battle Hymn of the Republic.
By the time of the great civil rights marches there was a real urgency to the lyrics of African American music as people sang. ‘I ain’t a-scared of your jail, because I want my freedom.’
The poets the musicians and the activist were all salt and light. But so were the faithful people who quietly exercised their own God given talents. They included the people who crunched the numbers that sent men to the moon or even just encouraged their children to dream impossible dreams.
The forming of our nation involved a meeting of two cultures and that is what we celebrate on Waitangi weekend as our defining moment.
Behind the pageantry and high-profile chiefs and officials the sighing the Treaty involved people who were salt and light in the forming our nation.
The traditional beacon of Christianity arriving on these shores is Marsden’s sermon on the beach on Christmas Day. But even reading that story we come across the acts of kindness and friendship between individuals that made the event possible.
It is also worth considering that, in the beginning of European settlement, Māori were trading with Australia. They also served on whaling ships around the world. So there must have been many times the gospel was shared in one-to-one contacts or through acts of healing kindness.
My father had a good knowledge of Te Reo and a number of Māori skills including carving which he learned from the Māori workers on the family farm as he grew up. Undoubtedly British culture and Christian faith went the other way by the same one on one process.
Christian mission played a vital part in building the trust that made signing the Treaty possible. Certainly there was also competition amongst tribes and a desire for power both economic and military among the Maori chiefs. There was also a desire to choose the most helpful allies in the competing world Māori were discovering.
But there was a blending of spiritual understanding as well, along with a desire for a better future.
Furthermore, missionaries cultivated an image of the Queen as personally loving towards Maori. This could be seen as somewhat conniving but the missionaries most likely believed it to be true. Victoria was a strong willed woman who did a lot to firm up the British monarchy.
Henry Williams affirmed to Māori at Waitangi that the Treaty was an act of love towards them on the part of the Queen. This thinking led many chiefs, who were by then, either Christian or associated with Christianity, to see the Treaty in terms of a spiritual bond – a covenant.
Unfortunately some of the future misunderstanding has been because Pākehā see the treaty as simply a legal document that their lawyer can wiggle their way through. But at the time of forming the Treaty there was good intent on behalf of the colonial powers.
James Stephen was the permanent undersecretary in the Colonial Office. He was possibly the most influential civil servant of his time and was also profoundly influenced by the gospel. James Stephen’s gospel convictions expressed themselves in a deep commitment to the abolition of slavery championed by his brother-in-law William Wilberforce and others.
He later became concerned about the negative impacts of colonisation on indigenous peoples. Wanting to avoid a similar pattern in New Zealand he drafted the instructions for Lord Normandy which were given to William Hobson when he was sent to New Zealand in 1840. Parts of the instruction were that, all dealings with Māori must be conducted with sincerity, justice, and good faith. They must not be permitted to enter into any contracts in which they might be ignorant and unintentional authors of injuries to themselves. The instruction to Hobson was not to purchase from Māori any territory that would be essential, or highly conducive, to their own comfort, safety or subsistence.
The content of the Treaty was shaped by Stephen’s instructions and the instructions themselves were shaped by the gospel. [4]
When the trust in the Treaty was lost, trust in the missionaries was also lost, but Māori Christianity emerged in faiths like Ringatū and Ratana. Rua Kenana founded a self supporting pacifist settlement deep in the Urewera Mountains. He also formed a bond with his Tūhoe people and the Presbyterian Church. That connection is still strong today, as I suspect is their link with the Ringatū church.
Part of the forming of our Treaty partnership, the building of trust, the loss of trust and the moving on to new beginnings involved people with Christian conviction who were, and still are, the unseen salt in the recipe. There have also been individuals that became beacons of light in the darkness and illuminated the way ahead. People who were Hidden Figures. which was a great name for a film about three mathematicians that history almost ignored.
I loved the opening scene in that film where a policeman stops to harass the three women whose car has broken down. He struggles to believe their space programme IDs but then gazes up at the sky and gets swept away in a wave of patriotism.
The racist culture of the policeman was conditioned by his culture. But suddenly in a chance encounter his understanding was changed. He met three African Americans who opened his vision to the stars. That scene was a clever synopsis of one of the films major themes. But it also showed how ideas flow across barriers through personal encounters.
The gospel can be proclaimed in great gatherings by talented orators. But in today’s Gospel Jesus tells his disciples that they are salt of the earth. Jesus affirms the quiet person to person encounters, the kindness shared and the child encouraged. The salt and light of our faith are all those hidden figures throughout history. People like those small points of light in a dark struggle that are hidden from view as the world watches a man launched into space.
We can’t all travel into space or perform on the world stage, but we can all be salt and light.
[1] Maurice Andrew The Old Testament in Aotearoa New Zealand (Wellington: DEFT 1999), p., 439.
[2] Warren Carter, Mathew and the Margins: A Socio-Political and Religious Reading (London, New York: T&T Clark International 2000),pp.137,138
[3] http://wwwstaff.murdoch.edu.au/~loader/MtEpiphany5.htm
[4] http://www.nzcms.org.nz/200-years/wp-content/uploads/The-Gospel-and-the-Treaty-of-Waitangi1.pdf