20160904-martyrs-of-png-am-mthr-elaine-farmer

ARE WE WORTHY OF THE MARTYRS? SERMON: Christ Church St Laurence, 4 September 2016, Feast of the PNG Martyrs FULL VERSION FOR 1030 SERVICE TEXTS: Zephaniah 3: 14-20; Psalm 130; Romans 8:33-39; John 12:20-32 ____________________________________________________________ Jesus said, ‘Whoever serves me must follow me.’1 Today, we remember a faithful few who did just that in Papua New Guinea in World War II. They followed. They served. They died. Caught in the wrong places at the wrong time.

It is estimated that there were three hundred and thirty-three New Guinea Martyrs. Probably more; probably not fewer. The vast majority were Catholic. Twelve were Anglicans. Facts about them are fluid. Records are ambiguous or incomplete or missing or were never kept. There were deaths at sea. Deaths from wounds. Executions. Abductions.

Disappearances. Fates unknown.

Sangara, East Papua. 12th August 1942. Lucian Tapiedi. Axed to death.

Buna, East Papua. Days later, August 1942. Ten of Lucian’s companions.

Beheaded. Men, women, and a little six-year old boy. They kept him to the last. It is impossible to imagine what that little boy must have felt. Grownups who were his protectors falling headless and bleeding in front of him.

Grown-ups who should have protected him turning to kill him. What did he see in their eyes, this little boy whose name we don’t even know?2 A

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John 12:26

Probably the son of Tony Gors, assistant to Louis Austen, manager of a government coffee plantation near Sangria, and his [Papua New Guinean common law] wife, Louise Artango. Theo Aerts, The Martyrs of Papua New Guinea. 333 Missionary Lives Lost During World War 11, University of PapuaNew Guinea Press, Port Moresby, 1994, p.64

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Japanese soldier who was there wrote in his diary: “I turned away, for the sight sickened me”.3 The bodies were flung in the sea.

Jegarata near Buna, East Papua. August 1942. May Hayman and Mavis Parkinson of the Anglican Gona Mission. Stood by shallow graves and bayoneted to death.4 The lists, the stories go on. None of the Anglican New Guinea martyrs was ordered by their bishop to remain at their stations. They remained by choice, seeking safety with their people but not fleeing. Some claim there was no fear among them as war crept close, only foreboding and a strong sense of Christian duty5, but May Hayman’s last letter — unfinished and delivered nine months after her death — records ‘very terrifying and nerve-racking’ times. Alternately buoyant, matter-of-fact, innocently excited, and poignantly upbeat, she wrote of saying the Morning Office ‘while crouching behind a big tree after an overhead dogfight’.6 There is conviction in her words that God was caring for her and her fellow missionaries.

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice!7 Did the psalmist’s words come to these martyrs as certain death bore down on them? Were there also fleeting thoughts for May of the fiancé8 whom she would never marry? The children she would never bear? Or was there just the immediacy of the moment: horror, pain, death?

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Theo Aerts, The Martyrs of Papua New Guinea. 333 Missionary Lives Lost During World War 11, University of PapuaNew Guinea Press, Port Moresby, 1994, p.65 4 Theo Aerts, The Martyrs of Papua New Guinea. 333 Missionary Lives Lost During World War 11, University of PapuaNew Guinea Press, Port Moresby, 1994, p.65 5

Raymond Paull, Retreat from Kokoda, First pub. in 1958 by David & Charles Publishers, [later edition ?1996], and quoted in Alan Ramsey, ‘Last Words from God’s Soldiers’, SMH, Weekend Edition, August 13-14, 2005. No page given.

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From May Hayman’s last letter quoted by Alan Ramsey.

Psalm 130:1 8 English missionary, The Reverend Vivian Redlich. He was martyred on August 12, 1942, the day after May. 7

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We’ll never know. But to leave the stories of May and her fellow martyrs in Papua New Guinea at that point would be to dishonour them and all the dead who have fallen like shadows’9, sacrificed in the name of God throughout the ages — including Jesus. The real business today is not to dust off past deeds and wax sentimental about courage, devotion to duty, and lives ended too soon. It is to ask whether we are worthy of these martyrs, of May, of her beheaded fiancé, The Reverend Vivian Redlich, of Lucian Tapiedi, The Reverend Henry Holland, Sister Margaret Brenchley and of the others? And of that little boy. These few are icons for the hundreds of Christian martyrs who died in PNG, one corner of a world at war over power and supremacy in which one of the prizes was freedom.

Freedom was won but do we use it wisely? As individuals, as church, as community—are we worthy of the martyrs whose lives were stolen in that battle for freedom in Papua New Guinea?

Tough questions and heavy thoughts especially when you think of how we use the word ‘martyr’ in English. In jest. In mockery. With irony. There are the physical sufferers — martyrs, we say, to feet, or knees, or back or hips. We’re tolerant of that unless the complaints get too much! We’re less tolerant of the ‘self-proclaiming martyrs’ — Virginia Woolf’s good on them. Of one of her characters she wrote: ‘She sacrificed herself daily. If there was a chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught, she sat in it.”10 There is choice in those behaviours, but — where is love? And focus?

Certainly not on others. In his great play, Murder in the Cathedral, T S Eliot gets closer to describing a true martyr when his Archbishop Thomas a’Beckett says: ‘The true martyr is [the one] who has become the 9

Collect for the feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord, Janet Morley, All Desires Known, SPCK, London, 1994, p.28 10

Virginia Woolf, ‘Professions for Women’, The Death of the Moth & Other Essays, Harcourt Brace, New York, 1942, pp.236 (p. no. uncertain), quoted in Herbert Marder, Feminism & Art, A Study of Virginia Woolf,ˆThe University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 1972, p.47

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instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, and who no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of being a martyr’.11 Eliot’s Archbishop gets us away from sore bodies or victim complexes — and brings us to Jesus. Who said ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified’.12 With that John draws a line in the sand. Up to now, John dismissed threats to Jesus when he might well have come to grief by simply saying, ‘his hour had not yet come’.13 But now we’re moved forward. Jesus has entered Jerusalem for the Passover. Death is just ahead down a dark road. Was he afraid, as those commentators claim the PNG Martyrs were not? I should think he was. John has Jesus ‘troubled’ but resolute. ‘What should I say,’ Jesus says, “Father, save me from this hour”?14 Matthew, Mark and Luke’s gospels suggest Jesus would have preferred his end otherwise:‘My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.’ 15 But he had lost his will in the will of God, become an instrument of God: ‘... not what I want but what you want16 ... it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.’17 Martyrdom.

Whose deeds must have purpose and value beyond themselves. Enter some Greeks — probably converts and Passover pilgrims — into John’s narrative to deliver their one-liner, ‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus’.18 They are John’s icons, symbols for the world in search of meaning. We don’t know whether Jesus met the Greeks or not but — his response? ‘The hour has come’.19 He must now do what he came to do — make himself permanently available to the world. Which could not be through his life in 11

‘Interlude’, The Archbishop preaches in the Cathedral on Christmas morning, 1170, T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral 12

John 12:23

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John 2:4; 7:6; 7:30; 8:20

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John 12:27

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Matthew 26:39. See also Mark 14: 36, Luke 2 22:42

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Matthew 26:39

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John 12:27 John 12:21 19 John 12:23 18

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a small part of the world — Judea, Samaria and Galilee — leaving just local memories. It must be for all the world, for all time. The church for which John wrote had not experienced Jesus’ ministry directly and needed assurance that the word and spirit of the glorified Christ was available for them in their time. Our need is the same. We need to know there is more to sustain us than a few dusty ancient memories, that the word and spirit of Christ is present with us too.

Which brings us back to the PNG Martyrs. I think they understood this.

That a purpose worth dying for, if need be, could never be grounded in self-interest but only in Jesus’ words, ‘Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me.’20 That conviction made them instruments of God. Listen to what May Hayman’s fiancé, Vivian Redlich, wrote to his father from ‘somewhere in the Papuan Bush on July 27th 1942: ‘My Dear Dad, The war has busted up here. I got back from Dogura and ran right into it, and am now somewhere in my parish hoping to carry on, tho’ my people are horribly scared. No news of May, and I am cut off from contacting her ... I'm trying to stick whatever happens. If I don’t come out of it, just rest content that I have tried to do my job faithfully. Last chance of getting word out: so forgive brevity. God Bless you all, Vivian.” Within days he was beheaded.

‘That happy, youthful, gifted, gallant soul’ the Bishop of Papua New Guinea, Bishop Philip Strong, called Redlich. The bishop had seen what horror was approaching in PNG, and he’d written to his clergy: ‘We must endeavour to carry on our work. God expects this of us. The church at home, which sent us out, will surely expect it of us. The universal church expects it of us. The people whom we serve expect it of us. We could never hold up our faces again if, for our own safety, we all forsook Him

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John 12:25-26

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and fled, when the shadows of the Passion began to gather around Him in His spiritual and mystical body, the Church in Papua.’ They chose to stay.

Sangara May 11th, 1943. The war was over. Bishop Strong came to the mission where May Hayman and Mavis Parkinson were buried. A wooden fence had been built round the graves which were marked by two simple crosses bearing their names. The bishop [knelt] by the graves and prayed for their souls. The next day he offered a requiem mass and, standing by the graves, he said the burial service. He’d taken off his robes when a little boy approached whispering urgently “Lucian!” Lucian Tapiedi had been reburied in a grave beside the two missionary women. Bishop Strong wrote: “I robed again, and blest his grave and said some prayers for his soul in [the local language] … the burial service had already been said for him. We had … the fence extended to include his grave and a cross surmounted over it like to the others, so that the bodies of the three martyrs lay together …”21 ‘Whoever serves me must follow me,’ said Jesus. Following and serving Christ cost these PNG Martyrs their lives. It is unlikely to take ours. Were they caught in the wrong place at the wrong time? Or were they simply where God meant them to be? I don’t know but I do know it would be presumptuous to think they died that we might only celebrate noble example. We too are challenged to follow and serve Christ. And what would the answer be were we to ask those martyrs, Am I worthy of your death?’

May the Martyrs of PNG and all the saints pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, through Christ, our only Mediator and Advocate.

Amen (The Rev’d) Elaine Farmer Feast of the NG Martyrs, 4 September 2016

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Theo Aerts, The Martyrs of Papua New Guinea. 333 Missionary Lives Lost During World War 11, University of PapuaNew Guinea Press, Port Moresby, 1994, p.67

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