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Led by a star.
Except it wasn’t actually a star that led Agnes to travel her 7252 mile odyssey from her home to where God led her. It started in Agnes’s childhood with her mother saying: “My Child, never eat a single mouthful unless you are sharing it with others.” “Mama, who are these men and women around our dinner table?” “Them Darling? Some of them are our relatives but all of them are our people” Perhaps childhood shaped the Magi too - legends of Daniel shaping the Persian Court, or the Queen of Sheba shaping the childhood of the Ethiopian Magi.
I wonder…. What is it in our childhoods that has shaped our following of God’s call….
And so it was that aged 13, Agnes felt the call to become a nun. And after much waiting (Did the wisemen have to wait? What’s it like to wait?) And after much waiting, aged 18 Agnes left Albania and travelled to Dublin to train with the sisters of Loretto. 3132 miles in the wrong direction. Do you ever feel God has been taking you in the opposite direction of where you think you are meant to go?
But after a year in Dublin, her training was complete. She took the name Sister Maria Teresa, and travelled out to Darjeeling to teach in a missionary school. Mileage-wise she was almost there, like the Wisemen arriving in Herod’s Palace in Jerusalem, so close to their journey’s end, and yet so in the wrong place. So in the wrong place. 7252 miles from Skopje to Dublin to Darjeeling. It would 17 years until she would travel the last 380 miles from Darjeeling to Calcutta.
And like the wisemen arriving in Herod’s palace, the bible spoke to her. For the wisemen it was the location of the Messiah “And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah…” For Sister Maria Teresa it was the sheep and the goats (Matt25:31-46) “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family,* you did it to me.” (v40)
And so it was that like the wisemen, she had to kneel before the infant Jesus and offer him Gold. What sort of Gold? Gold like the treasure St Lawrence offered when the Romans came demanding the Christian’s treasure, expecting their challices. “Come with me and I will show you our treasure” and so Lawrence led the Roman soldiers out to see the beggars and paupers whom the early church cared for. “Here is our treasure” Sister Teresa would have heard those stories about the early Christian Martyr Lawrence. And she knew God was speaking to her and telling her to give up her order, give up teaching her children, and go and serve the poorest of the poor, the homeless dying beggars of the slums of Calcutta. I wonder…. What is it like to have God speak to you so strongly that you give up everything you know to follow his call of your life?
Gold of Obedience - the curse of the nun. For two long years she waited for permission to leave her order and begin her new calling, two long years like the journey of the Magi through the desert from Persia to Palestine. Till finally permission came, the missionaries of Charity were born, and Mother Teresa of Calcutta began her new journey worshipping Jesus in the poorest of the poor.
Led by a star.
Except it wasn’t actually a star that led Jackie to travel her 5969 mile odyssey from her home to where God led her.
In began in the early 1960s by doing the wrong thing. Astrology is a wrong thing. The Old Testament is quite clear. It is condemned. Yet God speaks to the Magi through it and led them to Jesus. The wrong thing. Jackie was coming home on a train from a party. Not a salubrious party. And friends saw her on the train and spoke to her. She would never have gone to the bible study if they hadn’t mentioned racing cars, and bikinnis and boys. She’d never have gone to the bible study if it were not for the boys.A wrong thing? Yet God spoke to Jackie through it and led her to Jesus.
I wonder… what is it like when you are doing the wrong thing, and God uses that to lead you to Jesus?
And so it was that Jackie became a Christian and began attending churches. And just as the scribes and chief priests of all the people gave wisdom to the wisemen, Jackie went to consult a vicar, Revd Richard Thompson of Shorditch. “I think God is sending me to the mission field, but where to?”. He gave her a word. “Buy a ticket for a boat going as far as you can. And pray. And you will know when to get off the boat”.
So Jackie got on the boat, not knowing where she was going. Well she thought she was going to Africa, like the wisemen thought they were going to Herod’s Palace. But the boat docked in Africa and God told her to stay on.
I wonder … what is it like for you to think God is taking you one place … and find that is not at all the place God is taking you?
Finally the boat docks in Hong Kong. In a dream, like the one that told the wise men to go home by a different route, God tells Jackie Pullinger that here in Hong Kong she is to get off the boat. It takes a miracle to be allowed to. The local authorities don’t want to let her in because she doesn’t have enough money. But after a lot of prayer, a distant relative’s god child who just happens to be in the Hong Kong police, turns up and vouches for her. And she goes to live in Kowloon’s Walled City.
Incense owns a deity nigh. I imagine Jackie singing to herself the old worship song “let my prayer rise before you like incense”. But the smells that surround Jackie in the walled city are not those that waft from a thurible. Excrement. Rubbish. Death. All the usual smells. But also the smell of opium. God has called this 19 year old upper class oboist to live among drug addicts, using cold turkey and praying in tongues to lead them from death to life; from slavery to drugs to freedom in Jesus. It was not what she had in mind. Would Jackie Pullinger have gone if she knew this was where God was taking her. Would you have gone where you are now if you had known where God was taking you?
Yet Jackie’s project so successful,so many lives changed, that the Hong Kong Government began giving her houses for her rehabilitation houses.
Led by a star.
Except it wasn’t actually a star that in 1823 led my great great great grandfather to travel his 11,326 mile odyssey from his home to where God led him.
It started with Myrrh’s bitter perfume: death. When young Henry was just 12 years old his loving father died.Two years later, Henry signed up to the navy to take the financial pressure off his family. For 9 years from 1806 to 1815 this child fought in first the Napoleonic Wars and then a war with America. I wonder … what its like as a teenager to have your life shaped by horrible things going on around you, by death of father and then of colleagues? I wonder what that would do to you? Or has done to you?
For Henry - a moment came in the middle of a storm, the waves so high, the wind so terrifying, when like John Newton before him he thought he was going to die and he promised God to serve him if only he lived. Did he realise that like the Magi he would end up journeying across the globe, taken by God to a place where people didn’t speak his language. What does it feel like to be so scared as to promise God ANYTHING if only he will get you out of this mess? I wonder..., if it was you, would you keep that promise?
Henry did. And when he was demobbed from the Navy, he signed up with the Church Missionary Society. And he and his new wife Marianne set out in a boat for the unknown land of New Zealand. When the wise men set out they left countries like Persia full of wealth and luxury for the back of beyond, Bethlehem. Did it feel like leaving civilisation behind when Henry and Marianne left Gosport and sailed to New Zealand? When they got to New Zealand they were based in a small mission station of around ten people in the Bay of Islands. On the far side of the bay there was a colony of the only other people who spoke English - escaped convicts from Australia. And in between - Maori. A polynesian people for whom war showed how strong you were, and who believed that eating the bodies of their defeated enemies gave you their mana - their psychic strength. I wonder, what do you feel like, when you are surrounded by strangers and you don’t know how they will react?
So from 1823 this young couple, and the 11 children they give birth to, live in this alien land, teaching people, learning Maori and telling people about Jesus. And for 7 years almost nothing happens. Like the Magi’s two year long journey through the desert, it must have felt like they were getting nowhere. By 1825 one person had converted to Christianity. It took until 1830 until a second had converted. I wonder,... would you keep going 7 years into something God has called you to when it feels like a complete failure? Did the wise men feel silly turning up at Herod’s palace and there is no baby messiah there? Would you feel silly travelling 11,000 miles to spread the Gospel and 7 years later just two people had become Christians?
And meanwhile there continues Myrrh’s bitter perfume. Whalers sold the Maori muskets. Suddenly wars that had been skirmishes where one or two died became blood baths. A tribe that had the gun would sail down and massacre a tribe that didn’t. And then feast on them. What has he to offer the infant Jesus, but placing his experience of War and death into service for the one who died to reconcile us all. And so Henry Williams becomes a peacemaker, trying to end conflicts and bring tribes together. And God uses that accidental ministry. People come to respect him. Wars go down. And within a few years 30,000 people have given their lives to Christ. I wonder… what it’s like to find yourself doing something you totally didn’t feel called to, and yet find God using it to make a difference?
And so it was that in 1823 an orphan who ran away to sea founded the church in New Zealand.
Led by a Star
Except, will it actually be a star that leads you on your odyssey? I wonder … what it is that God is speaking to you through… Has he spoken to you already? Is he speaking to you tonight?
I wonder…..
