I have my say - Part 1

Back in January, I was scheduled to do the morning devotions which are held Monday through Friday at 8:30 a.m., beginning of the school day.  All the themes and scriptures are determined by the College chaplain in advance.  First they gave me one date, then another date, and I had my opportunity on Monday last week.  They gave me the last 3 verses of Genesis with the theme for the month of February being "faith".  The subtheme for the week was 'faith and works', but I just sort of ignored the works part.  I also had to choose the hymns for the day.  I have heard them sing On Christ the Solid Rock I Stand, so I chose that to open the service.  I asked them if they knew All the Way My Savior Leads Me, and a few of the students opened the hymn book and began to work their way through it following the solfeggio.  They said they didn't really know it (actually I don't know the original melody either, just the Rich Mullins melody), but they would learn it as they went.  The Mizo people are very gifted musically.  Everyone plays an instrument and they all love to sing.

The pulpit is about like this.  I don't really want to take a picture inside the chapel here.  They are very reverent about it.  When people first enter and sit down, they close their eyes and are very still for some minutes.  When a 'special number' is part of the service, applause is forbidden.  The chapel here at the College is less ornate than the one in this photo, but this is the general relative height of the pulpit.

 I admit that I was quite nervous.  For one thing, they have a platform where the faculty sit on either side, a large desk in the middle for the 'chairperson' of the service, a lectern on the right and left of the desk for readers (segregated male and female).  And then there is this very high pulpit another half a flight of stairs above the platform that the preachers generally step up to.  I told them from the beginning that I would not be going up there, because it was not 'my tradition'.  This is a phrase they understand, even though they were in disagreement with me.  However, it is the general attitude here that people should be comfortable with what they are doing.  So I preached from the 'female' lectern.  The true reason I don't want to go up there is because I just don't think Yeshua would have walked up there.

I think I wrote my whole sermon the day it was assigned to me, but over the weeks until the day, I added to and refined it.  I wrote it out entirely and practiced it to myself, because the speaker is limited to 10 minutes.  I talked about how the lives of Joseph and Yeshua are parallel, how Joseph's Hebrew and Egyptian names figure into that, how the word for 'embalm' is related in Hebrew to the word for 'wheat', how Joseph had the faith to know that his descendants would leave Egypt some 200 years after his death.  I continually came back to the idea of resurrection and quoted the scriptures that assure us as believers.  I honestly don't know if anyone followed much of what I said.  They do not usually quote many scriptures from all over the Bible, but you know that I did.

I asked my Hebrew students the next day what they had understood, and they mumbled a few words about Joseph and faith.  It should also be noted that not many of the faculty were in attendance because there had a been a conference over the weekend and they hadn't returned yet.

I had also asked the chaplain if it would be okay if I said the benediction and could I say the Aaronic benediction.  Yes, he said, they are interested in all kinds of new things.

And that was how Monday went last week.  I managed to do everything in order, say my speech, although probably a bit too quickly.  Everyone really liked the benediction.