Sadly, with the sewerage having been up to 2 to 3 metres on peoples walls
the instruction came from the authorities to destroy all property and send it
to the tip. For many, this was a devastating thing to have to do and to watch
for that matter. Someone from the
churches had this bright idea to invite all people effected to bring their
precious items of crockery etc. and linen to the church halls and members would
wash them and disinfect them so that the people affected had something to hang
on to. It was a time of grief but a time of great love and compassion.
During that time, my role was to help find people to ensure their
well-being and help people find their precious property. I also assisted some
of those people in getting their bits and pieces to those doing the washing and
cleaning. One day I watched as a woman, who was ignoring the television news
camera pointed at her, as she found something she recognised in the rubble. She
exclaimed out loud that she had found her favourite object, and I watched as
she ran to the object, dug her hands into the debris, and pulled out what could
only be described as a fragment of what could have once been that precious
item. She clutched it to her in shock as if it had been made of gold.
She seemed so glad to have found something she thought she had lost in
the flood. In this place of loss and grief, even a part of a precious object
that is recovered seemed like a treasure, for it may have symbolised for the
woman a truth she had known but could not prove: “Once upon a time I lived
here. I had a normal life, I had a job, I had a car, I had this object which
was precious. This is a precious object.
Saint Paul, who wrote some of the letters in our Scriptures and has had
many others attributed to him, gave a message to the church which comes in a
time of turmoil and chaos; suddenly everything the followers of Jesus thought
to be true about the fellowship of believers has been turned upside down, and St.
Paul reminds the church to take stock, to count every earthly gain as loss, and
to count any suffering that has to be endured for Christ’s sake as ultimate
gain. What are the remnants of our earthly selves that we search for, in an
effort to hold on to something that reminds us that we exist, that we count for
something in this world? What scraps would we hold dear to our chest as if they
were gold?
For St. Paul, the answer is this: “Christ Jesus has made me his own.”
That’s it. That’s the bottom line. After taking stock of his conversion on the
road to Damascus, after accounting for all the church plants he created, after
being arrested and thrown in prison for the sake of the gospel, it all boils
down to this one truth, and the symbol for it all is the cross. The cross is
the piece of a precious object you see. In every church that ever has burned to
the ground, or has blown away, the cross— or even the idea of the cross if we
couldn’t find a physical, tangible one. And as Richard Rohr states, if there was
one phrase to describe the Christian faith, it would be the “Way of the Wound”
It is the evidence that, God loved the world, came to earth and dwelt
among us and died for us, and we have life because of it. We are good at rules:
making them and then breaking them. St. Paul reminds us that, when we gain
Christ Jesus as our Lord and Saviour, we receive exactly what we need—
forgiveness, grace, hope. God declared us beloved children which brings us a
confidence that, whatever we do, we can do it well because we are already
equipped and already approved— that’s a lot to live up to. We strive to fulfil
the confidence that God places in us, knowing that God spurs us on, having
already declared us winners.
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