Category: Christmas Day

Christmas: The Original Defiance Campaign

CMM, Cape Town / / Christmas Day

Friends,

On 26 June 1952 the Defiance Campaign against unjust laws in SA was launched. Until then in South Africa it was the largest non-violent resistance campaign with more than 8 000 people going to jail for defying apartheid laws and regulations.

Defiance Campaign Volunteers signed the following pledge:

I, the undersigned, Volunteer of the National Volunteer Corps, do hereby solemnly pledge and bind myself … to participate fully and without reservations to the best of my ability in the Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws. … “

Elizabeth Mafekeng and Mary Thipe were two Defiance Campaign Volunteers. Elizabeth Mafekeng was born in 1918 in Tarkastad. Living conditions in her birthplace forced her to leave for Paarl in the early 1930s. Mafekeng left school at the age of 15 to support the family. Her first job was at a “canning factory where she cleaned fruit and vegetables for 75 cents a week”. She married a fellow factory worker in 1941 and joined the trade union in the same year. She became a shop steward and then served, between 1954 and 1959 “as President of the African Food and Canning Workers Union (AFCWU) and branch secretary in Paarl”. Mafekeng was known as “Rocky” among the workers in Paarl. A striking woman, she always began ”her speeches with a song or two, singing in a clear, rich and well-organised voice”. Her speeches were “fiery, militant and witty.”

In 1952 Mafekeng participated in the Defiance Campaign and the South African Congress Trade Unions’ (SACTU’s) 1957 ‘Pound a Day’ Campaign. In 1955, she skipped the country without legal papers to represent the Food Workers Union at a trade union conference held in Sofia, Bulgaria. She was met with police brutality upon her return. In 1959, the Government banished her from Paarl, to a remote government farm in the Kuruman district. Her banishment papers said it was ‘injurious for the peace, order and good administration of Natives in the district of Paarl’ if Mrs Mafekeng remained there. She was given five days (later extended to twelve) to say goodbye to her family, make arrangements for their care, (and) wind up her work … There was, of course, no trial, no public hearing and no possibility of appeal.

She refused to take her 11 children to that desolate place. On the night of her deportation the union leadership organised a large number of workers to bid her a safe journey. She got onto a train and started waving farewell and then quietly walked through two coaches and jumped off the train unnoticed. Rather than being banished to Southey and to “a future of nothingness,” Mafekeng fled to Lesotho with her two-month old baby, Uhuru, and sought refuge at a Roman Catholic Mission at Makhaleng. She was granted asylum and lived in a two-room home with her nine children in the small village of Mafeteng. With the unbanning of the liberation movements in 1990, she returned to Paarl. The FCWU built her a home in Mbekweni Township in Paarl. Elizabeth Mafekeng died on 28 May 2009, at the age of 90, due to ill health.

Mary Thipe was born in 1917 in a village called Ramhlakoane in the Matatiele district. She later moved to Umkhumbane and joined the liberation struggle in 1952, the year of the Defiance Campaign. She was arrested, detained and banned for five years for her political activities.

Thipe took part in the 1959 Potato Boycott – a consumer boycott to end the slave-like conditions of farm labourers in Bethal (Mpumalanga). She was involved in the Cato Manor Beer Hall March in 1960 – a women-led national campaign of boycotting municipal beer halls because their men were drinking sorghum beer while their children and wives starved.

Her activities attracted the wrath of the police. She was put under house arrest for 10 years which meant she could not attend church services, funeral services of her loved ones and was not allowed to be in the company of more than three people.

Every Monday morning, Thipe was required to report at the Cato Manor police station. This did not stop the security branch from harassing her even in her house arrest.

She had trained her children that each time police came in the middle of the night, they would wake up and stand behind her. She had also trained them to look at the police in the eye and not flinch. When one of her grandsons went into exile, the police intensified their terror on Thipe and her family. When the police threatened to find her grandson and kill him, she retorted by requesting that they bring his head back to her. She refused to show fear and flinch at their threats. In 1986 the police used a gang which was known as the A-team to burn Thipe’s house down. Thipe died of a stroke but not before voting for what would be her first and last time in 1994.

All information about Elizabeth Mafekeng and Mary Thipe are from South African History Online.

– – –

Now, long before Elizabeth Mafekeng and Mary Thipe volunteered to solemnly pledge and bind themselves to participate fully and without reservations to the best of their ability in the Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws, there were two others who shared their spirit of defiance, as well as their first names. The Gospels tell us that the Spirit of God had come upon Elizabeth and Mary, and what is the Spirit of God if it is not the Spirit of defiance against all that is unjust in the world?

Christmas is the original Defiance Campaign against inequality and injustice: Divinely inspired, complete with surprising strategy… subversive recruitment… angelic agitation… stabled safe-house… star-guiding civil dis-obedience… shepherding allies… all set to song – Mary’s Redemption song… that still sounds: Won’t you help to sing / these songs of freedom / Cause all I ever have / Redemption Songs…

May the courageous lives of Elizabeth Mafekeng and Mary Thipe give us insight into the courageous lives of Elizabeth and Mary of long ago.

In grace,
Alan

 

 

Welcome the stranger

CMM, Cape Town / / Christmas Day

December, 25 2019 Alan Storey: Christmas Unwrapped
[Matthew 2]

 

Grace and peace to you

As we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ today, we are reminded of the journey the pregnant Mary and Joseph had to make on a mission to meet with the requirements of their Home Affairs Department at that time, to be part of the census process.

They too must have suffered from much discomfort and displacement; with no close biological family structure to support them. We are told that Mary had her Baby Jesus and I want to believe that during this birthing and tiring time, someone reached out to assist her. Someone who was loving and kind to offer her the gift of hospitality and to tenderly wipe her brow.

Yes, God was with Joseph and Mary on the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem and then of course while they were on the move, with the baby again, to Egypt because of a political decree.

Our Christmas journey with God is one that says: don’t be tied down by traditions and customs that limit and suffocate you. Ask questions that inform your decision-making process. Do these decisions bring life or death? Following the example of Jesus’ way of life demands that we pay attention to the present, to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with God. We are also reassured of God’s ever-engaging presence in every kind of experience. “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

We have been part of the suffering of our fellow sojourners together in sharing in the discomfort in our Gothic sanctuary. We give thanks to God for the experience of sharing and in the creation of new memories which will become a part of our church history. While at the same time, the pain and slowness of immigration reform in our country will leave a blight on the history of all the relevant authorities, who were loath to make decisions, regarding the welfare and treatment of all who needed help. Yes, we were required to make space, to sing new choruses in other languages which we enjoyed.

Our Scriptures remind us that we are not placed on this earth to be comfortable. God’s voice is heard when we are most uncomfortable through the desperate prayers that we pray, and this is hard because most of us long to be comfortable, to be accepted to belong, and most of all to be in control. We can all be included and this requires an openness and willingness to adapt, to adjust for the greater good of humanity and our community. I fully understand that it is very easy to judge, to be intimidated, and fearful and not to understand; but we are required in our spiritual relationship with Jesus Christ to embrace the values of inclusion, diversity, compassion and a sense of justice for our country and especially our continent Africa. We have to learn to come to terms with the requirements too of our Constitution and especially the fullest implementation of it. “Welcome the stranger in your midst! I am with you always”, says God.

In God’s scheme of things, nothing is a nuisance factor! We have been on an emotional roller coaster together with our African brothers and sisters, like their lives have been uprooted so have our roots been shaken. This has been a real wake-up call where we have had to interact and interface with the world right on our doorstep and inside our sanctuary. Yes, it has been uncomfortable. But also a reminder that the human condition is present with and among us all the time. While we had to worship God together as a community; through the courage, compassion and consistent theological integrity of our minister Alan Storey; our lives are the richer this Christmas. We have been exposed to a real object lesson; (and the word became flesh and dwelt among us) in our journey with the humanity of Jesus Christ, that the poor and displaced are always with us, regardless of class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, creed or problems. We are All God’s children.

This displacement has been a challenge and a gift for all of us as we make sense of our world and as we try to make a difference in God’s world. May God’s gift of the birth of his Son Jesus Christ, make us eager to be instruments of Hope, Peace, Love, Compassion and Justice in our community and our country. May the Spirit of Jesus Christ be born in each one of us today.

Jane Lawrence

 

We are utterly loved

CMM, Cape Town / / Christmas Day

Grace and peace to you

Christmas is about Jesus. And Jesus is about the Utterly-Loving-Creator-God’s determined desire for all of creation to know that we are utterly loved.

Like Edwin Markham’s poem: Outwitted
He drew a circle that shut me out –
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout,
But love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.

Christmas is God’s outwitting move – drawing the largest of circles that take us in. I hope that each and every one of us will know God’s loving encirclement today.

In this loving encirclement healing resides.

Knowing we live and move and have our being in God’s circle of love liberates us from the fear to love and be loved. And when all is said and done – to love and be loved is what each of us is born for.

We love because we have first been loved. We literally have to be loved into loving. This is the mission of Jesus: to love us into loving.

“Accepting Jesus” means accepting that we are loved…and thus lovable. We are saved from ourselves. “Following Jesus” means loving others as we have been loved…and thus loving. We are saved for others…especially those the world considers unlovable.

In loving encirclement,
Alan

Helpless God – help us

Helpless God as child and crucified,
laid in a cradle and cradled on a cross:
help us discern in your submission
not weakness but the passionate work of love.

You tell us you are poor in every age:
naked, hungry, and without a home.

Help us in your poor cradle of today
to see what is of you and what is not:
that suffering does not often save,
or helplessness redeem our sorry lives.
And so forbid us sing when we should weep.

Yet come to us and all of ours,
O child of Mary and of God,
in all the poor who saw you first,
and laughed with you, and heard you well.
And now run back from nowhere with their news,
to plant their seeds of hope in our dry ground.

~ Michael H. Taylor

 

Surrender to Love’s call

CMM, Cape Town / / Christmas Day

Grace and peace to you this Christmas morning!

As with the birth of any child, knowing their parents will help us to understand who they are. A baby’s earliest and most intimate influences can be powerfully determining of the whole of their life. Thus if we want to understand this baby Jesus – then we would be wise to get to know his mother.

Before Jesus is able to speak, he listens. Jesus listens to his mother Mary singing songs of radical economic transformation that will become for him the principles and purpose of his living and eventually be the cause of his dying. Mary’s song is not a lullaby but rather a wake-up call for the world:

‘My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,
for he has looked with favour on the lowliness
of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call
me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things
for me, and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who revere him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts
of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from
their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant people,
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our
ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.’

What enabled Mary to sing such a socially subversive song was that she had surrendered her life to Love’s call: “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Only those who fully surrender to the call of Love can sing such a song – not as popular rhetoric – but as a truthful expression of the desires of God’s own heart.

Mary is moved to surrender to Love’s call after she is convinced that “nothing will be impossible with God”. In other words, with God even an economy that forever favours the rich and exploits the poor can be turned up-side-down.

Baby Jesus learns from his mother about surrendering to Love. Baby Jesus learns that authentic loving restructures society in favour of justice for the poor. Baby Jesus learns to trust that though many believe the world will never really change for the good and for the least, that nothing is impossible with God.

Application of Mary’s song is one of the most desperately urgent tasks of our time – in our land and throughout the world. As soon as Jesus is able to speak he will call each of us to live out his mom’s song.

Grace, Alan