Travel Diary - Day Thirty Six

Day Thirty Six – Hot Hot Hot
Sunday 04 Oct 09
I really like being hot here. There is just something about being hot that I find relieving. The only problem with being hot like we are here is that I do a lot of sweating, and I mean a lot. By the time I had walked the 400m to church this morning, at 7:10am I was drenched. In fact, by the time I had finished preaching the first sermon I am quite confident that if I had taken off my shirt and wrung it out it would have dripped out as if it had been in a bucket of water. I don't even mind that, except that I am very aware that its not a good look! Anyway, by the time my right foot is aching, almost certainly from dehydration induced gout, and I am absolutely drenched in my own sweat I'm not feeling like I am offering the best look I have ever managed. But for the most part I don't mind because I am happy being hot.

The services here are interminable! We begin with 20min of choruses, sometimes they're in tune. Then we have the general prayer. When I say general I really mean general - you get everything crammed into this prayer! Praise, confession, prayer for ourselves and others, it just goes on and on. I haven't timed one of these prayers but I would guess at it being a good 10min long at least. I nearly fell asleep during one last week. Then there are the hymns. Oh my goodness, the hymns. I think we had about 7 or 8 on Sunday, and this on top of the choruses. It wouldn't be so bad if 1. Everyone knew the hymns and 2. Everyone sang them with gusto and in harmony. Unfortunately neither is true and to be quite honest it is awful.

In between all the hymns we have a prayer for the youths (always spelt and pronounced with an 's' here) and children, another interminable prayer. All the children and young people stand up at this point. It's kind of nice although young people seems to carry through to everyone under the age of 30 as best I can tell. There is the offering, the Bible readings including a responsive Psalm, and there are the notices. I have never sat through so many notices. I guess that this is partly a function of the fact that no-one gets printed notices, but everything is given such detail that you begin to wonder if there will ever be an end to the notices. Every service I have been to I have been welcomed at length, even though I was welcomed the previous week. And at every service I am welcomed by pretty much everyone who stands up in the service. Definitely roll your eyes time by the end of it. In fact in the second service the church secretary, while giving the notices actually managed to welcome me twice, and both times went on for ever...go figure.

I did my sermon - set up a mock wedding using young people as props and then proceeded to talk about the bride, and getting ready and how the church was like the bride. I took great pleasure in using some fairly graphic imagery in Song of Songs, just to get a rise out of people - it worked. :-) Actually the sermon has really grown out of the work I am doing on my theological reflection where I am making the claim that much of the imagery regarding the church is highly sexual in nature and that we need to understand what the Scriptures are trying to get at if we are to really be the church. I begin with the point that the very first thing Adam and Eve did when they sinned was to cover their nakedness. Makes for some interesting theological points if you care to take it further, which I am doing. Basically the point I am driving at is that the church is called to be beautiful, just like a bride on her wedding day. And when the bride makes the effort to be beautiful like that she becomes incredible attractive to everyone else even though all her effort is aimed at one person - the bridegroom. Food for thought eh!

Anyway, I got some good feedback from people afterwards. In fact one young lady came up to me afterwards and shared some really deep things about how it was relevant to her and her relationship with her husband. It's always cool when you get it bang on the button for someone like that, even when its not actually the point you thought you were trying to make!

After the second service Pastor Bourne and I sat and talked for a while about ministry and surviving. She is a full-time seamstress and looks after two churches in her spare moments. In addition she is taking two management papers and has a family - kids are at least grown up! She is showing classic symptoms of stress and early burnout and so I suggested that she take up her daughters offer to go to the expo that afternoon and I would run the catechist class and prayer meeting. It didn't take much persuasion and so it was good to send her off for at least an afternoon of R&R although to be honest she really needs a couple of weeks.

So that meant I had to get myself sorted out for the catechism class - difficult when I didn't have the material, but it was all about the sacraments and so I wasn't too worried that I would find anything I couldn't handle, even if the correct answer was, 'I don't know.' After I have worked through baptism and communion in plenty of depth with the youth so there was no real need for concern. Class started at 3pm, which really means no sooner than 3:15pm. Sure enough that was what happened. I got started with 3 and by the time we finished we had 7. I pushed them a bit harder than Pastor Bourne in terms of their participation. It was kind of hard work - they're not used to me - but I reckon give me 5 weeks and I would have them whipped into shape. :-) It's just a pity that its the last time I will see them.

We finished the class on time, having covered everything we needed to cover and having had all of them pray out loud, apparently a new concept to them. Several wanted to know if I was serious. When I assured them I was they all did pretty well.

After the class I headed down to the internet café for 30 min before the prayer meeting. It was just enough time to check a few emails and look at the NZ news before I headed back to lead the prayer meeting. I had decided to do a Lectio Divina with everyone and it was an interesting experience. There were three older people and one young woman. The three older people just didn't get it. They were so fixated on interpreting and giving their opinions to everything that they entirely missed the point of simply sitting with the scripture and letting it speak to them rather than them speaking to the scripture. The young woman on the other hand just got it. She zeroed in on listening to what God was saying to her and got some really lovely personal insights from what we were reading. Made it worthwhile for me.

Came back to the house around 7pm and just chilled out for the rest of the evening. It's all good. Lots to do tomorrow so plenty of sleep can't hurt.