The Romance of the Cross in Hawaii 2/1/42
Scripture: Matthew 28: 16-20
Text: Matthew 28: 19; “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations....”
Behind the center of the city of Honolulu lies a hill, an ancient volcanic cone, called the Punchbowl. At the top of that hill is held each year a service highly symbolic. It is Honolulu’s Easter Sunrise service, one of the first and best known community Easter services of the world.
On Thursday of Holy week, a large white cross, 30 feet in height, is created at the summit of Punchbowl. Each night for the rest of the week, from dusk to midnight, powerful army searchlights play a beam of white light on the cross. The cross can be seen from most sections of the city. Sometimes, on a drifting cloud over the mountains back of the city, the giant shadow of the cross is projected by the searchlights’ beam. When that happens, one, with a bit of imagination, can almost feel that he has seen the symbol of Christ’s supremacy projected throughout eternity.
Early on Easter morning, long before the dawn, people begin climbing to the summit of Punchbowl. Some walk up the steep, rocky paths, through the brush and around the cactus. Boy Scouts are on hand with a long rope to help, and with flashlights to show the path. Others drive their cars as near the summit as possible, and walk the remaining distance.
By the time the dawn has streaked the eastern sky, over the sea and the mountains back of Diamond Head, four or five thousand people have gathered and are either standing or seated on a grassy slope just beyond the cross. As the sun rises over the ocean’s horizon a trumpet fanfare is sounded and a joyful service in recognition of Christ’s resurrection is begun.
This service is a Christian Service. It is a union service in which all Protestant denominations are invited to take part. Methodists and Congregationalists, United Brethren and Baptists, the Salvation Army and the YMCA, and many other Christian groups are represented. It is an inter-racial service. The speaker may be a “haole” (as the Hawaiians often call the white man.) The prayer may be offered by one of the younger ministers of oriental ancestry. Often a speaking choir of uniformed Hawaiian Boys from the Kamehameha Schools will read the scripture in unison.
It is a Community service under Inter-Church Federation auspices. Financing is underwritten by a considerable number of Christian, community-minded people. The army has donated the illumination, and the National Guard has given permission to use its rifle range for parking. Police handle traffic of the slopes. Boy Scouts assist them, help on the trails, and maintain a first aid tent for the few who always become faint after the hard climb. Power companies, and radio stations cooperate. A merchant provides a loudspeaker system. All of this means a remarkable, unified cooperation to make vivid each year the glory of the Resurrection at Easter dawn!
The cross has been in Hawaii barely 122 years. That is a short time in history. But it is there to stay!
One who has lived in the Hawaiian Islands for any length of time, and has loved them as most residents love them, remember with deep appreciation Mark Twain’s words. He wrote of Hawaii as - “the loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean.”
Said he, “No alien land in all the world has any deep, strong charm for me but that one; no other land could so longingly and beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a life time as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same. For me, its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surf-beat is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud-rack; I can feel the spirit of its woodland solitude; I can hear the splash of brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.”
Such are the rose tints in one’s spectacles as he remembers the lovely things about Hawaii! There are other colors, much less attractive, but why should I paint them in just now?
These islands were once populated entirely by Polynesian people. Probably they were visited by a Spanish explorer in 1555, but they remained unknown to the world at large until the English explorer, Captain Cook, discovered them in 1778.
The next 42 years after Cook’s discovery of Hawaii saw turbulent changes. For one thing, they were brought together, for the first time, under the rule of one sovereign, Kamehameha the Great.
Less fortunate was the arrival of all sorts of people, whalers, beachcombers, fugitives from justice, most of whom had hung their consciences on Cape Horn as they came around into the Pacific and subscribed to the theory that there was no God west of the Horn.
The Hawaiian primitive religion had been closely associated with a rigid system of tabus. The godless whites disregarded the tabus, or course, and seeing that they escaped harm, the Hawaiians also, in increasing numbers, broke the tabus. Having gotten rid of their primitive restraints, there was a general, and very nearly disastrous moral let down among these native people. For many years their race was badly decimated by this deterioration in character and by the diseases brought there by the white man to which the Hawaiian physique was not accustomed.
But a remarkable things happened. In 1820, the brig, Thaddeus, after a voyage of five months, brought a pioneer company of 14 missionaries, led by Hiram Bingham and Asa Thurston, to begin Christian work in the Hawaiian Islands. These Christian workers expected to find themselves among a people bowing down to horrible idols and offering human sacrifices. They were prepared to risk life itself in a struggle against idolatry. Yet, by providential preparation, the idols had already been overthrown, and the Hawaiian people, in effect temporarily without a religion, were ripe for the reception of a higher, true religion.
How the missionaries happened to come at all is a romantic story. In 1809, a Hawaiian lad, Opukahaia, swam out to an American whaler, stowed away, and was taken to New Haven, Connecticut, by Captain Brintnall. There he attracted the attention of E. W. Dwight, Samuel Mills (of Haystack fame) and others who believed in the then new and romantic idea of foreign missions. The story is that Opukahaia was found sitting on the steps of Yale College crying because there was no one to teach his people.
The result was that he and 4 other Hawaiian youths were enrolled among the first 29 pupils in the Foreign School founded in 1817 at Cornwall, Connecticut. Opukahaia died a year later, but his work lived on in the band of 14 missionaries who sailed for the “Sandwich Islands,” as they were then known, on October 23, 1819.
These missionaries were no ordinary folk. Asa Thurston was a remarkable powerful Yale athlete with a spirit that matched his physical strength. All of them were thoroughly convinced of God’s guidance. None of them, men or women, expected to see their loved ones at home again on earth. The wives had accepted the marriage proposals of their husbands with full knowledge of their missionary purpose, and all of the struggle, sacrifice and consecration which it meant.
After the five month journey, these intrepid pioneers went ashore to live for a time in grass houses without floors or windows, to fight cockroaches and rats and (later) mosquitoes. The supplies of food were irregular; the beachcombers and dissolute sailors persecuted them and sometimes seriously threatened their lives. The health and moral welfare of their children, born in hardship, was always in danger.
(Hawaiians responsive). They stuck to it! They preached the gospel without compromise to any one. They disciplined many. Their commission had been to preach the gospel, and to help these people make green their fields. (Read the commission). Other missionary companies came until more than 100 had been sent out and more than $1,000,000 had been sent from America.
Results:
Written Language; print shop, printed Bible, text books.
Schools: by 1850 about 3 out of 4 could read his Bible,
newspaper, constitution and law, and ballot.
Manual Training.
By 1860, the American Board had withdrawn, and the Hawaiian Board gradually took its place.
(changed population, & political situation)
The modern missionaries and ministers live in comfortable homes (as do the native people also). The struggle for right living goes on.
The Hawaiian people are nominally Christianized (Congregationalists, Mormon, Catholic, Episcopalian, independent sects).
Other churches are there:
Catholics 7 years after Protestants
Mormons later (20 years or more)
Episcopal church December 1861
Methodist
Since 1860 the Congregational Churches of Hawaii are supported by Hawaii. The church has always been missionary-minded:
A. Missionaries and natives to Marquesas, Marshall islands
B. As white foreigners came, churches sprang up for them (one or two still bear name “Foreign”, as in Hilo.
C. Churches for Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean immigrants, Portuguese people. (Christianity in face of Oriental religions.)
The church has made little of denominationalism. (Dorothy Matsui)
It tries to bring together in common understanding and mutual respect the many peoples who make up the population of these Islands. They point the way to the rest of the world - Galen Weaver - “The Church of the Crossroads.”
The Islands, an integral part of the USA (not an insular possession) point the way to people of the whole world in this intricate and difficult problem of the races in learning to understand and live in the same world with each other.
The ancient command of the Lord, obeyed by a long line of mission-minded folk, is still the commission of Hawaii, as it is our commission: “Go ye therefore,” by your gifts, your understanding, your prayers, and perhaps your very self, “and teach all nations.”
------------
dates and places delivered:
Wisconsin Rapids, February 1, 1942
Episcopal Young People, Wisconsin Rapids, March 26, 1942