March 30, 2003
Sheila's Ginger Beer
The Rev. Linda A. Knieriemen
Three weeks ago today your mission immersion team to South Africa was worshipping with black South African Presbyterians in the Guguletu Presbyterian Church. I bring you greetings and gratitude from that congregation, their session, and the pastor, Rev. Bonisili Mdyseha. Your Vision 2000 benevolence dollars allowed this church to complete the rebuilding of their sanctuary which was destroyed in 1999 by a rare tornado. The liturgy was spoken and sung in the Khosa language, but followed a familiar order of worship. When we phonetically sang the words of the hymns, we didn’t know what the words meant, but we knew we were singing to God. When an exuberant chorus repeated again-and-again to the beat of a drum, and the women danced to the front of the chancel, we recognized the joy of Gloria Patri. In deference to us the sermon was in English, but when Pastor Bonisili got passionate about his message; he slipped back into his mother tongue and “let-it-rip”!
Two weeks ago we worshipped at the Presbyterian Church in the so-called “colored” brown community of Retreat, just outside of Cape Town. The pastor, Victor Pilay, is a convert from Hinduism and leads that congregation of several hundred with energy. The service was in English; the worship was charismatic; and the singing was praise music. They too welcomed us warmly, especially pleased to have visitors.
Our two weeks in South Africa was a painful crash course in the evil apartheid and its lingering effects, but also the miracle of a post-apartheid culture which offers reconciliation and forgiveness. It was a vivid reminder of the expanding worldwide AIDS pandemic. It was also a reminder of the gracious, abiding presence of the Spirit of God in the church. Attending the Summit on Racism last Tuesday and hearing Archbishop Desmond Tutu that evening, literally brought those lessons home and challenged us to make the global, local.
During Lent Riley and I are preaching on the beatitudes and today we have come to the fourth one: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. As I put together my photo album and ponder the images it shows, I have come to realize that my photo album may interpret this piece of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount better than mere words alone could ever do. (It’s not that South Africa offers something unique, unavailable right in our backyard, but sometimes our observation skills are sharper when we are out of our context, and so this pastor offers her observations and reflections.) I see there what it looks like when someone is “hungering and thirsting” after goodness. I see in those photographs the shape of righteousness, of a life well lived. I think I see glimpses of the fullness of God’s Realm. And I want to show you what I mean in four virtual photos. The Biblical caption under each, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”
The first photo serves as a backdrop for today’s South Africa. It is not a sunset, or a church, or a skyline, or a flag. It is an abandoned lime stone quarry on Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town. The maximum security prison on the island was known as the hell-hole of apartheid and became known for its brutal and spartan conditions. It was to here that Nelson Mandela and other black opponents of apartheid deemed enemies of the white government were sentenced for life. Today Robben Island is a museum with a focus on freedom, human rights, and democracy. Ex-prisoners work as guides, and tell their stories again-and-again, repeating and thus teaching Mandela’s words that “never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land shall ever experience oppression of one by another.” These words are a plea for righteousness, a plea by those hungering and thirsting for a more just world. Words echoing Isaiah, urging all people to align themselves with God’s intention to restore peace and justice and health.
But why the photo of a rock quarry? Instead of remaining in solitary confinement Nelson Mandela asked to be sent here (even though it was the harish of punishments) because it was here under the open sky that prisoners could speak more freely with one another, share their dreams, exchange ideas, learn from one another, and draw strength from one another. It was here our guide told us where black and brown and white met in the first integrated university. It was here that the first truth and reconciliation meetings took place as guards and prisoners shared their humanity and bonded. It was here that they sipped on goodness, the nectar of God’s intention for a redeemed humanity! Meant to be the place where spirits and rocks were crushed, it became the place where hungry and thirsty men fed on the hope of democracy and freedom.
In 1995, on the fifth anniversary of Mandela’s release, a reunion was held in the stark sunbacked quarry. This time the ex-prisoners voluntarily chipped away a piece of limestone rocks and placed stone upon stone in a permanent proud rock pile commorating the place where the pain of yesterday gave way to the freedom of today. Last Tuesday Archbishop Tutu told the crowd at the Van Andel that only those who have been unfree can know the exhilaration of having their shackles knocked off. Maybe that is what the happiness of being filled feels like.
Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…they will be filled.”
In the next photo, I want you to meet Pastor Bonisile Mdyesha. You’ll recognize him by his robins-egg blue clerical collar, and the serenity in his dark eyes. He’s not alone; he is standing on the chancel behind the Communion Table with the men and women of the session at the Presbyterian Church of Guguletu, a congregation of about 250 people. Bonisile (encouraged by the success of a neighboring congregation) is working and praying with his leaders to create in that congregation a place of acceptance for men, women, and children with HIV and AIDS. Theirs is a wholistic ministry which goes beyond the spiritual feeding of souls at the Lord’s Table to welcoming of whole persons -- body, mind, and spirit.
In his sermon the day we worshipped there, Bonisili talked frankly with his people about HIV/AIDS, the newly formed support group, and the Christian task to become involved in prevention, education, and in pastoral care for people with the disease. Although the same stigma is attached to the disease as in the United States, faithful churches in South Africa can’t ignore the reality of the pandemic. Monthly, if not weekly, pastors of all denominations conduct memorial services for members who have died, soon after diagnosis due to poor nutrition, and lack of expensive anti-retro viral medications. Estimates are that 5 million persons or 20% of the adult population in South Africa has HIV. In 2001, 360,000 adults and children died from AIDS. Not only has HIV/AIDS affected the Presbyterians in the pews of Bonisili’s church, but it has also affected his fellow pastors. In the Presbytery of the Western Cape alone we were told that there have been at least 6 deaths of pastors.
I see in the faces of Bonisile and his session resolve. Resolve because they have a purpose and are pursuing it. For them, hungering and thirsting is for the sake of survival, not only about their eternal salvation, but also about the saving of lives.
Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness…for they will be filled.”
In the third photo, standing tall and proud is Thembezana Ngalwana (Thembi for short) -- a 24-year-old woman from Guguletu -- the same township where we worshipped. She’s holding a gift she gave us, gave all of you really -- its a traditional mat, similar to one which would be given at a wedding. The words on the mat read: I Love Jesus. And that’s Thembi. Over the past two years, your mission dollars have allowed Thembi to study for ordained ministry in the Uniting Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa. Her gratitude overflows to you because you share in her vision, to commit her life to the proclamation and demonstration of the gospel.
Thembi is a trailblazer in a denomination where clergywomen are few, but her call is clear and her focus is sharp. I asked her at one point, “Thembi, what is your dream for the future?” She surprised me when she said; “The only thing I want,” came the quick reply, “is to become a minister of God.” When I asked her about her call, she told me that even as a small child she came home from church and mimicked the preacher in the pulpit. The bottom half of the Dutch doors became her pulpit, and she preached away with gestures and all! Her sisters told our group that she preached really well as an eight year old, in the cadence and with the confidence of their pastor! When she was small, her mother thought it was just for play, but later, when she found out that women could be ordained, she acknowledged and affirmed the call of God on her daughter’s life. The academic work has been challenging for Thembi, and she has just come through a debilitating health problem, which made her weak and caused her grades to suffer, but she persists. Thembi has an unrelenting thirst for God and to be God’s witness as a preacher and in the community as a worker for justice. She won’t give up any more readily than a hungry woman looking for a loaf of bread.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Finally, I want you to meet Sheila. Sheila is standing in her kitchen. Sheila and her family were among the thousands of black and brown South Africans who in the earliest years of apartheid were forced to move from their family home into what was then the new black-only township of Guguletu. (We learned that well-established integrated neighborhoods where races lived in harmony were intentionally broken apart into separate and distinct racially divided neighborhoods. The fabric of entire communities was torn apart. Families who had lived side-by-side for decades didn’t see one another again. Black women married to white men were sent to live apart and couldn’t see each other without a government issued pass.) Sheila, divorced and in her 50’s, now owns the tiny 4-room home into which she was involuntarily moved 30 years ago, and lives there with her daughter and grandson. She has electricity, but no phone. She has a flush toilet and a tub, but they are in a separate building in the backyard. She has a refrigerator, but it’s nearly empty. The neighborhood is dangerous. Even on 90-degree nights, she closes and locks the windows. Apartheid laws have been removed, but the affects of 4 decades of oppression aren’t erased easily. Along with 40% of that community she is unemployed and depends upon her daughter’s meager income for basic supplies and food, but she has a tenacious spirit and she has her pride; she believes in prayer and she is creative. In a building (really just a room adjacent to her tiny house) Sheila houses a day care for about 20 children. She barely breaks even because so many of the parents make so little they aren’t able to pay much for her services. She keeps it open not as a business, but as a gift to the community. Sheila spreads a little love, offers a little care, wipes a nose, and fills a bottle.
Three nights a week, Sheila makes ginger beer. In a plastic bucket in the kitchen sink she mixes her own special concoction of water, powdered ginger, sugar, and just a little yeast. Early the next morning (now just a little bubbly, not alcoholic) she fills an assortment of recycled bottles of various shapes and sizes and sends them off with her adult daughter to sell at lunchtime. If they had the time and energy the night before, there might be cornbread or cakes to sell besides. She nets the equivalent of a few dollars each day which improves her diet. She’s not begging. She’s not sitting back, living only off the kindness of others. She’s not given up; she’s not become embittered. Sheila is just putting one foot in front of the other, working with God the best she knows how, pushing forward to the Kingdom of God on earth.
I think that in this beatitude Jesus is trying to tell us that in the Kingdom of God. He smiles on those who are in the pursuit of justice, goodness, and right living. It is those, like Mandela, and Thembi, and Pastor Bonisile, and Sheila, who have set themselves in step with God’s desire for the world’s redemption, who can show us something about being happy in a broken world.
On Tuesday night Tutu was asked, “What is the biggest obstacle you have had to overcome?” He said it was those times when he had to denounce the people, when he just wanted to love them. There were times, he said, when he just wanted to shut up, and he couldn’t do it. Because, he said, when God grabs you by the scruff of the next, you’ve had it. I guess when you see God’s future (and you can almost taste it) you start hungering and thirsting for its fullness; and its a life-long road and probably a happy one.