Remembering Well
Do you ever have those moments where you walk out of a room and immediately forget what your doing?
Or get to the door and can’t recall why?
I seem to have left my office multiple times this week only to return to try and remember why I’d left.
Trying to remember can be a challenge
So I feel for Cam at Police College.
Not only does he have to know what he is doing and why – he has to commit acts of parliament to memory. That is laws passed by parliament that are drawn on for court when a person is accused of a crime.
If an act is remembered incorrectly by a police officer – the accused can be released even if they are guilty. Take the search and surveillance act 2012 – if an officer collects evidence incorrectly the evidence is discarded and the case is dismissed.
Cam has to remember and remember well.
In this morning’s reading we are challenged by Paul to ask and examine what we are doing and why we are doing it. To remember well.
First Corinthians was written to a divided Church.
Paul calls the people to “repent of their rivalries, build up the faith of those who are new to the faith and witness effectively to nonbelievers”[i]. Paul argues that the Corinthians remember the motivations for his work – the sharing of the Gospel.
That all he does he does so others may come to know Jesus and in so doing he becomes a servant, he becomes “all things to all people.”
One can hardly read this text on the 7th of February and ignore the promptings of the Spirit to examine our own division as a nation and our colonial past.
Yesterday, as many of you may be aware – was Waitangi day.
This is the day we get a long weekend, Briscoes kicks off another sale and we realise autumn is just around the corner.
But for many this day means much MUCH more.
And - I’d like to suggest, as Anglicans, should be a day that means much to us too.
We as Christians are founded in the practice of remembering.
We are called by the Scriptures to remember what God has done, and recall what God is continuing to do.
So how do we remember Waitangi day?
I remember touching on the treaty of Waitangi, te tiriti o Waitangi at school with mild curiosity, and again hearing about it in a few elective papers at uni, I remember being proud that we didn’t celebrate it like Australia day but it wasn’t until I arrived at theological college that the significance of the treaty hit me.
The treaty is significant to us as a Church because it was missionaries that set it up. It was the early Church that established it. It’s a part of our history.
So let’s set the scene.
Many of you may be aware of the story of Marsden and Ruatara.
Samuel Marsden was the first to officially preach the gospel in New Zealand on the 25th December, 1814 in Oihi Bay, bay of plenty.
Invited, and translated by Chief Ruatara - Marsden’s words were weighed and measured by the many Maori gathered to hear. Unfortunately Marsden – a product of his time – saw the best way to spread the gospel as a form of colonisation – and a violent one at that.
In came the missionaries, and in came the western Church conflicts.
Whalers and traders speed into the country and Kororāreka, today known as Russell, was coined the “hell-hole of the Pacific”[ii].
Entropionising Englishmen began to carve up the land and sell it before anyone had had a chance to verify if it could be sold.
Meanwhile William Colenso and William Williams finally began translating the Bible into Maori and this was quickly taken up . Unlike the colonial approach to spreading the Gospel having the words of God for themselves brought many Maori to faith and rapidly could be called a revival.
Then a decade before the Treaty was signed we have the story of a girl named Tarore.
Tarore of Waiharoa had been mentored in the gospel by the Brown missionaries and shared her faith with her faither Ngakuku. She had been gifted the gospel of Luke and carried it with her in her kete – a small bag like necklace.
Sadly tribal warfare continued and Ngakuku, tarore and CMS missionary John Flatt among others, retreated elsewhere, - where a raiding party caught them and Tarore’s life came to an end.
The Gospel of Luke made its way into the hands of Tarores enemies and as they read the word of God, the Spirit began to transform them. So infectious was their enthusiasm for Jesus that slowly they began convincing others to follow Jesus too. The early Jesus movement among the Maori grew to such an extent that a few members were able to sail to England and meet the Queen.
They then returned and began to encourage other Maori to take up the idea of Kingship in their own right. That such an idea could help protect them and bring order over the settlers, when taken up through their own maori worldview.
Let me show you for a moment an example of a Maori worldview.
Which person doesn’t belong?
Turn to the people around you and tell them which one you think it is and why?
Within our western thinking we all assume this guy. The little one.
Within a Maori worldview it’s this guy – you see the first two are mum and dad and then a child, and that guy is the aunt or uncle, the one outside the immediate hapu.
Maori thinking works through relationships
Western thinking works through rationale.
Thanks to the French philosopher Renae Descartes “Remembering the past [is seen as] a hurdle in the way of the free-flowing inquiry of the rational mind.”[iii] It gets in the way of the future. It gets in the way of progress. So it’s not surprising many of us don’t take the time to remember or learn so that we can remember well.
Waitangi day makes its yearly round on the news, another round of conflict and a painful reminder that promises were made and not kept. For many New Zealanders we roll our eyes and think “This, again.”
Our media plays the missionaries as the bad guys, and Christianity as the vehicle of colonisation – and while that was the case post the treaty I wonder do we ever seek to examine this narrative? To hear what was happening before the Treaty was signed?
I have been challenged recently to explore this.
At a Chaplaincy conference last year we meet a man named Jay Ruka, who has written a book “huia come home” about our past and the misconceptions we have about the earky gospel in New Zealand.
He writes the early Missionaries in New Zealand had a drought of faith for the first decade or so until they came alongside the people to share Christ – rather than forcing them to become like Europeans. At the same time in England the Clapham sect – which William Wilburforce had been a part of – was advocating in parliment for a treaty with the maori. A different way of being in relationship.
Up in Otaki - Octavius Hatfield and others saw that unless a treaty could be made the relational worldview of moari was in real danger. Many missionaries and maori worked hard to put the treaty together to protect this relational worldview.
Meanwhile Maori all over New Zealand were coming to faith in such large numbers that the majority of services were in Maori for Maori.
So what does examining and remembering Waitangi day mean for us as a Church?
Fast forward to 1990 and the Anglican Church of the South pacific recognised that where the Church had begun in new Zealand with the Maori – colonisation had silenced many Maori voices and ways of being within the Church.
And so the Three Tikanga province of Aoteroa, New Zealand and Polynesia was birthed.
The idea being that the Western worldview would not reign supreme but would be checked against the worldview of Maori and Pasifika. While not a perfect structure by any means our Church works to this day that nothing can be passed into Church law until all three tikanga come to an agreement.
We are a three tikanga Church.
Tikanga Maori, Tikanga Pakeha and Tikanga Pasifika.
Woven together as one.
Take a prayerbook out from the pew in front of you, the red ones - and take a look. In the opening page we see “a New Zealand Prayerbook, He karakia Mihinare o Aoteroa” and a woven cross. The logo of the Anglican Church here in the South Pacific.
Archbishop Sir David Moxen, writes “The woven flax cross, Te ripeka whiringa harakeke, was chosen as the first work of art in our prayer book and has become a sign of being Anglican in these islands. At the centre of the woven cross pattern is the koru, a sign of life. The koru is presented in red, a sign of life blood, of the life giving love which flows through the heart of the Christian message and Christian mission. The design presents the flax strands moving outwards, symbolising the life patterns of the Gospel being formed in a new creation.[iv]
It is a symbol of the intertwined nature of our Church, the idea that we are all woven together, separate strands united in one kete.
Many of us may not be aware of these origins, or that we are a three tikanga Church. If I’m honest I had no idea until I actually went to theological college!
Remembering Waitangi day has many implications for us as both a local and national Church. It raises questions for us about how we - like Paul - are called to share the Gospel and speak truth in the midst of conflict.
How we are called to explore those conflicts within our own communities, with open honesty and a willingness toward restoration.
How we are called to challenge our own worldviews, to explore the assumptions laid out by our media.
How the Gospel is the foundation for our community, the beginning, the present and the future.
So this weekend, let us remember.
Let us remember the Gospel, let us remember the treaty of Waitangi.
Let us seek to remember well.
By Lucy
[i] Intro to 1 Corinthians, ESV student Study Bible
[ii] Ruka, J.. Huia Come Home (p. 34). Oati. Kindle Edition.
[iii] Ruka, J.. Huia Come Home (p. 21). Oati. Kindle Edition.
[iv] Extract tajken from https://www.anglican.org.nz/About/The-Woven-Flax-Cross-Te-Ripeka-Whiringa-Harakeke