11/11/73

Scripture: Ephesians 6: 10-17.

In 1936, I was one of those delegates from Hawaii to the third biennial meeting of the General Council of Congregational Christian Churches. The meetings were held at South Hadley, Massachusetts. After completion of the sessions there, we three from Hawaii went to New York City to attend a short summer session at the Union Theological Seminary. While at Union, I went to breakfast one Sunday morning with Dr. Horace H. Leavitt of Honolulu. He was scheduled to be the guest preacher, later that morning, at First Presbyterian Church of New York City where, a dozen years earlier, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick had been the preacher.

Before we were seated Dr. Leavitt noticed Dr. Fosdick already eating alone at one of the tables and, since those two were well acquainted, Leavitt asked if we might sit with Fosdick. After an exchange of greetings and some pleasantries, Dr. Leavitt said: “Harry, I’m preaching today at First Presbyterian Church.” With a smile, Dr. Fosdick wished him well and said warmly, “Give my love to that old pulpit.”

This morning I appreciate the invitation of Cal Fischer and Gerry Bertsch to speak here. It gives me a chance to give my love to the pulpit of this church where it has been my privilege to serve, and to share in worship, with so many of you for a good many years.

More than five years have now passed since I retired. Cal has been our senior minister for these five years, and I believe that this year has marked the 20th year of his ordination to the ministry. These retirement years have not been entirely idle time for me. In addition to some supply preaching in churches of this state, and at a couple of places abroad, Catherine and I have been with churches in Hawaii on an interim basis four times, and we plan to go again for a time this coming winter. It has not been an entirely new experience for us, since my first two regular pastorates, before coming here, had been in Hawaii.

Perhaps not all of you know of an interesting connecting thread which joins our church here to Hawaii. You are aware, of course, that our Baldwin Memorial Chapel has on its wall a painting of distinctively Hawaiian flavor, and that the chapel was built and dedicated in memory of Henry Perrine Baldwin II and Henry Perrine Baldwin III. It was given to the church by Mrs. Baldwin and her family in order to honor the memory of those two men, father and son, who were direct descendants of two missionary families in Hawaii.

At the end of the first decade in the 19th century, a Hawaiian lad who was approximately 16 years of age saw the American square-rigger ship Triumph at anchor in Kealakekua bay on the island of Hawaii. He decided to swim out to the vessel where the ship’s master, Captain Brintnall, welcomed him aboard. Since the lad was interested in going abroad, he and another Hawaiian youth became cabin boys. After months of sailing about the Pacific, they finally returned to the ship’s home port in Connecticut. The lad’s name was Opukahaia. Since Hawaiian names were awkward for the captain to pronounce, Brintnall had called that boy “Henry” and the other Hawaiian lad “Thomas.” The boys became eager to learn many skills, but particularly they were anxious to learn how to read and write. That seemed to them the obvious key to understanding much of the learning which they could see that the captain’s people had. There was no written language in Hawaii at that time.

Henry Opukahaia came under the influence of students at Yale College in New Haven, some of whom tutored him. Yale’s President, the Rev. Timothy Dwight, befriended Henry and took him into his own home for a time. Opukahaia found that he was particularly befriended by Christian people who were kind to him and concerned for him. Originally destined to become a pagan priest in his native land, he became attracted to Christ through the lives of these fine folk among whom he lived. At length he himself became thoroughly and ardently Christian, and made it his main aim to return to Hawaii as the first Christian missionary to his own people. He attended a school for his preparation and was almost ready for his return venture when he became seriously ill with typhus fever. At first, great hopes were held for his recovery. But he weakened and, at length, died in February of 1818. His body was buried in the church cemetery at Cornwall, Connecticut, by sorrowing members of the Christian community, and several of his young countrymen.

In the eight or nine years that he had lived, studied, and spoken among the churches of Connecticut, Henry Opukahaia had made such a deep impression that there was very soon a movement to send Christian missionaries from New England to Hawaii. A movement had begun, only a short time earlier, to send missionaries as far as India. Now there were a number of young couples ready to go to Hawaii to carry the Christian gospel and culture to Henry’s people. They included clergymen, teachers, a printer, business and agricultural folk who could be of assistance to the Hawaiian people in improving their whole being.

The brig, Thaddeus, took the first company of missionaries on the long and tortuous 7-month voyage down the South American coast, and around treacherous Cape Horn, reaching Hawaii in 1820. Others followed. Many at home in New England felt unable to volunteer for missionary service but volunteered to supply financial, material and spiritual aid and support to the young people who did go. The missionaries were given a remarkably comprehensive commission -- nothing easy, but most challenging. “You are to open your hearts wide, and set your marks high,” they were told. “You are to aim at nothing short of covering those islands with fruitful fields and pleasant dwellings, schools and churches; of raising up the whole people to an elevated state of Christian civilization. You are to obtain an adequate knowledge of the language of the people; to make them acquainted with letters; to give them the Bible, with skill to read it --- you are to inculcate the duties of justice, moderation, forbearance, truth and universal kindness; to do all in your power to make men of every class good, wise and happy.”

Among the early missionaries, not of the first company but a few years later, was a young physician, Dr. Dwight Baldwin and his wife. Another missionary couple was the Rev. William Patterson Alexander and his wife. They were to pour their whole lives into the missionary enterprise, and many of their descendants were to be a permanent part of Hawaiian development. “Our” Henry Baldwin was a descendant of both those missionary couples -- the Dwight Baldwins and the William Alexanders. Henry himself never made his home in Hawaii, nor did his father. But they were occasional visitors in the Islands and kept in touch with relatives there.

When I was a minister and some-time missionary in Hawaii from 1928 to 1940, before coming here, I was acquainted with Baldwins and Alexanders as supporters of the work in which I was then engaged. When I came here, I was delighted to find a family of the same connection in this church. Since I have retired I have found an interesting continuation of that thread woven into the tapestry of my own experience.

I think you may be interested to know that when Catherine and I went to the historic Imiola Church of Kamuela late in 1969, before our trip around the world, we found that Henry’s great grandfather Baldwin and wife had spent the first three years of their missionary service in Hawaii helping to get that mission at Waimea-Kamuela started and ready for the long, effective service there of the Rev. Lorenzo Lyons. At least 2, perhaps 3 or 4, members of the Imiola Church had made the pilgrimage of Opukahaia commemorating 150 years since his death and anticipating the 150th anniversary in 1970 of the Hawaiian mission.

Where we went two years ago, and again last winter, and where we expect to be this coming winter at Waioli Hui’ia Church in Hanalei, we find that Henry Baldwin’s great grandfather Alexander and wife were the ones who founded the first Christian mission there, and where they spent nine years of their lives. “Father” Alexander had preached to great crowds of native Hawaiians when he began his service at Hanalei in 1834. Hundreds, even thousands, gathered under a giant kukui tree to hear the preached word and pitched in with willing hands to build a church edifice. Alexander set his hands, as well as his heart and mind, to work. He built the fireplace for the first mission home or parsonage, still standing as a fine museum piece on grounds adjacent to the present church. On many Saturdays he served as a surveyor in the great Makele or land division provided by the King. The church which was erected under his direction, completed in 1841, with a low, ground-level belfry at the back, still stands and is used as a parish hall by the present congregation.

The Hawaiian population of Hanalei, and the membership of the Waioli church, is now small by comparison with the people of Father Alexander’s time. 35 to 40 people may gather for worship on a Sunday morning. The majority of them are of Hawaiian descent, but few of them speak the Hawaiian tongue in conversation --- I know of only 3 of those church members who claim to be able to carry on a conversation in that language. But some of it is used in each worship service. Of course I preach in English, read the Scriptures, lead responsive readings, make announcements, and join in the singing of hymns in English. But the Hawaiian choir sings some prayer responses in Hawaiian, sings an anthem in Hawaiian, and leads us in singing the Doxology in Hawaiian. Because of time differences, the worship services in Hanalei will be 4 hours later than our times here. But I think of those people at worship this morning under the present interim leadership of Dr. Mel Frank of LaCrosse.

When Catherine and I are present with the Hawaiian folk at Waioli Hui’ia Church in Hanalei, we shall again expect to sing the Doxology in Hawaiian:

“Ho-na ni ika Ma-ku-a man,

Ke Kei-ki me kaU-ha-ne no,

Ke Aku-a mau Hoo-mai-kai pu,

Ko ke-ia ao, ko ke-la ao. A-mene.”

Last April, on our last Sunday at Waioli Church, we were delighted to find Martin and Paula Schroeder, from our church here in Wisconsin Rapids, present with us there at Hanalei. I don’t think there is a chance that they could have learned the doxology in Hawaiian at one exposure. But I suspect they felt that we were all at worship. I realize that much of what I have said this morning, up to this point, is quite personal. But I want it to remind us of our church connection with the spread of the Christian gospel in one mission area, and with the continued witness to Christ in Hawaii by people, now, of many racial, national and cultural backgrounds. Hawaii is but one of the many locales to which mission money, interest, prayers, and Christian personhood have been directed. Our Christian Church mission is focused on needs close to our own homes and neighborhood, among certain peoples at greater distance in our country, and in most nations of the world.

Times have changed. Most of the mission work begun by our churches in countries abroad has grown up to the point where the churches and Christian enterprises of each country has largely been taken over by native leadership, and native support. But many of those fields still want, and need, the kind of helping hand and active interest that we can, and should, supply, with Christian teachers, ministers, doctors and nurses, agricultural experts, and so forth. It grieves me every time I hear that national, state and local church budgets for the outgoing mission of the church in Christ’s name are cut back and the work retrenched.

Conditions in Hawaii have changed with the years. The Polynesian Hawaiians are now in a minority amongst us Caucasians and Orientals and others who greatly outnumber them there. But Christian churches have sprung up in each group. And now there is considerable mingling of the races and cultures at worship and in Christian fellowship. The Christian church there has always been under fire of criticism by secular sources -- and still is! But it has had a profound influence in shaping the good that is in Hawaii.

It is so here! We are easily sobered and saddened by some decreases reported in attendance and membership among our churches. But the spirit of God-demanded and Christ-directed rightness is still the most hopeful thing in our whole civic life in this nation. With all of its apparent lacks and perversities and partial inadequacies, I still believe in the institutional church. It is the bulwark, the backbone, the support of all new Christian ventures. I pray for progress and success among Christian church people to make the church adequate. Jesus might well be saying to the church, as well as to each person of us here: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” [Matthew 5: 48].

We persons, and our churches, may be sinful (in our commissions and omissions and mistakes) --- we are sinful unless and until we be lifted by the grace of God. I admit that I get a little tired of having other people confess my sins. I need to do that myself before God’s throne of mercy and judgment. I get tired of hearing the church maligned or worse yet, ignored. But the church must make its own determination to be God’s instrument and Christ’s body and the holy, prophetic Spirit in the world!

We of this nation have been reeling in discovery at the revelations of wrongdoing in the high places of our body politic. We are alarmed, often angered, sometimes fearful of the evil that shows up not only in dark alleys and shoddy places, but in the high halls of civic responsibility. Evil - this kind of evil - is not new on the face of the earth. But it is the mess we live in and with which we must cope in our time. But it is a matter of encouragement that the standards which God-fearing people know to be right are being focused on our civil life, to remind us of what is right and what is wrong. And each of us needs the reminder to say and to do what we can say and do for the emergence and continuation of the right. As individual Christians we may not always completely agree together on what we believe to be a right course of action. We shall not draft any resolution, or adopt any program of action, here in this hour in this room.

But I suggest that each of us, as followers committed to the will of God as revealed in our Christ, may worship best in re-dedication to that will; in reaffirming our faith; in participation in the mission of Christ through the church wherever, near or far, people need to hear the gospel and to see it lived in us.

We need to be humble (not the kind of “humility” that proclaims itself in the spirit of the fellow who thanked God that he was the most humble person in his whole country!); but humble enough to seek, and receive, the spirit of Christ as it is revealed to us through God’s word and spirit, and in His answerings to our prayers, and as we observe and sense it in the lives of people around us.

In our occasional disgust at the ineptitude of some ecclesiastical leaders, and what we presume to call the hypocrisy of occasional church members; in our dismay and anger over the revelation of wrongdoing and evil attitudes in the high places of the civic body politic; in our awareness of the evil human nature that breeds acts and attitudes of criminal defiance of the right; we may be inclined to pray and shout, “O God, send us leaders.” In the words of our closing hymn: “God send us men whose aims ‘twill be, not to defend some ancient creed, but to live out the laws of Christ in every thought and word and deed.” It is a good hymn, to be sung with prayerful force at a time like this.

But I suggest that, at the close of our worship together here today, we also think another emphasis on the expressions of the hymn -- something like this: “God send us” -- people of mankind -- “God send me” - whose aim it will be not just “to defend some ancient creed, but to live out the laws of Christ in every thought, and word, and deed.”

Perhaps our worship here together can issue in a renewed commitment that can influence the health of the church as Christ’s body; that can carry His message all over the world; that can become the bulwark of the state and nation.

Amen.

Benediction:

May the grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ, and the never-failing love of God our Father, and the abiding, compelling presence of His Holy Spirit, be with each of us now, and remain with us always. So be it! Amen.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, November 11, 1973.