Ringing out our thanks with a bell from Kuching for Saint Matthias Chapel and the people of Sinar Baru

Presenting a new church bell to Father Jeffry Renos Nawie, Saint Matthias Chapel and the people of Sinar Baru

Patrick Comerford

The life of a parish priest in the Diocese of Kuching is busy and demanding, as we found out in the past few weeks, as the Revd Dr Jeffry Renos Nawie took us on a number of whirlwind tours of his parishes and neighbouring churches covering vast areas south of Kuching.

Father Jeffry is a former principal of Saint Thomas’s, the Anglican diocesan boys’ school in Kuching, and has a doctorate in education. After he retired, he worked as the diocesan secretary in the diocesan office close to Saint Thomas’s Cathedral, and served at weekends in Saint George’s Church, Punau, on the fringes of Padawan.

Today, he is the parish priest of Saint Augustine’s Church, Mambong, which was designated a mission district six months ago (26 May 2024) by Bishop Danald Jute of Kuching.

Saint Matthias Chapel, Sinar Baru, about 21 km south of Kuching (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

The newly-designated mission district, near Padawan and Siburan, includes six other churches or chapels: Saint Francis, Petag; Saint Alban, Sitaang; Saint Monica, Bangau; Saint Edmund, Tabuan Rabak; Saint Clement, Patung; and Saint Matthias, Sinar Baru. In addition, he also takes some weekday services in Saint Thomas’s Cathedral, Kuching.

Charlotte and I visited the first six of his churches and chapels in one day. However, it was not until the end of the week that we got to visit Saint Matthias in Sinar Baru, after a morning visiting Semenggoh Wildlife Centre to see the orangutans.

Sinar Baru is a small village about 21 km south of Kuching, and the drive took us through Kota Padawan and Kota Sentosa. If it had been possible to continue driving south, we have reached the border with Indonesia within another half hour and crossed the Equator an hour or so later.

This is a lush tropical area in the highlands of Sarawak, in the heart of the Borneo rainforest and jungle. The village of Sinar Baru or Kampung Sinar Baru is a mainly Iban village in a predominantly Bidayuh area, with about 400 villagers and 62 households.

The altar and sanctuary in Saint Matthias Chapel, Sinar Baru (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Last year, the Public Works Department handed over a new community hall to the village chief, Ngui Nam Chiew. The second phase will include an expansion of the hall, electricity and water supplies, and an additional carpark. Sarawak Heritage Council is organising craft workshops for the villagers, who are also planning a mini-library and baking classes.

Sinar Baru is close to the Semenggoh Wildlife Centre, just 3.5 km away, and less than 1 km from the Rajah Charles Brooke Memorial Hospital. The hospital began almost 100 years ago as a leprosarium or leprosy rehabilitation centre, built in 1925 for people from Sarawak, Sabah, Brunei and Indonesia diagnosed with Hansen’s Disease.

The hospital has been a public out-patient general hospital since 1974, serving a wide range of patients. Leprosy has been eradicated in the area, but some of the original residents remained, although they had been cured, because over the years they had become isolated from their communities and unable to look after themselves.

Inside Saint Matthias Chapel, Sinar Baru (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Saint Matthias is a newly-built church in Sinar Baru. There had been a wooden-built church in the village for generations, but when the landowner asked for the site back, a new site was donated and the new church was built in recent years.

As we met and talked to the parishioners of Saint Matthias, they told us of how they found the site and built the church. All they needed now, they told us, was a bell.They were praying and hoping for one that would be heard throughout the surrounding countryside, calling people to church on Sundays. They had a bell tower, but no bell.

Later that morning, as we visited Saint James’s Church in Quop, we heard how Bishop Francis McDougall wrote to friends in England appealing for bells for the churches being built in Sarawak in the 1860s: ‘I hope you could persuade some good people to bring them. Bells, we must have.’

One of the people who responded to his pleas was the banking heiress Angela Burdett-Coutts (1814-1906), who donated the silver and nickel bell to the church in Quop. It is said locally that she wandered deep in the jungle and that whenever she lost her way she relied on the toll of the church bell for the Angelus, ringing at 6 am, 12 noon and 6 pm, to find her way home.

Preparing for prayer and worship in Saint Matthias Chapel, Sinar Baru (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Back in Kuching that weekend, Charlotte and I wondered whether we could find or source a church bell for Saint Matthias Chapel in Sinar Baru. It was our first wedding anniversary that weekend, and we thought about the possibility of a thank-offering and how it might be another way of ringing our wedding bells a year later.

We made inquiries with Ho Nyen Foh, a tinsmith shop in Bishopsgate Street, one of the streets running between Carpenter Street and the Main Bazaar in Kuching’s old Chinatown.

At first it seemed like a difficult if not impossible task for a tinsmith. But as we talked he remembered how he had an old brass bell that his father had left at the back of the shop. It had come from England, and it may have been a school bell or a ship’s bell. He was unsure of its origins and, uncertain of its usefulness, he had kept it away for many years.

It was the right size, it was the right time, and it was the right occasion – and, yes, he would be happy to hold it for us over the next few days. He had held onto it all these years, and now it was going to find an appropriate home.

We returned with Father Jeffry to Sinar Baru and to Saint Matthias Chapel after the weekend to present the bell to the parishioners. It was our small way to say thanks to people of Kuching for their hospitality and to say thanks for the blessings of the first year of our marriage.

The original site of Saint Matthias Chapel, Sinar Baru (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Daily prayer in the Kingdom Season: 24, Sunday 24 November 2024, Christ the King, Sunday before Advent

‘Crown him with many crowns’ … three crowns in a window in the former Saint Mary’s Church, Lichfield (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

We are in the Kingdom Season, the time between All Saints’ Day and Advent, and today is the Sunday next before Advent and the Feast of Christ the King. It will be good to back again at the Parish Eucharist in Saint Mary and Giles Church, Stony Stratford, later this morning, when I reading one of the lessons and leading the intercessions.

But, before the day begins, I am taking some quiet time early this morning to give thanks, to reflect, to pray and to read in these ways:

1, today’s Gospel reading;

2, a short reflection;

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;

4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.

The mediaeval carving of Christ in Glory in the canopy at the West Door in Lichfield Cathedral (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

John 18: 33-37 (NRSVA):

33 Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’ 34 Jesus answered, ‘Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?’ 35 Pilate replied, ‘I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?’ 36 Jesus answered, ‘My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.’ 37 Pilate asked him, ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’

Christ the King at the centre of Charles Eamer Kempe’s window, ‘The Tree of the Church’ (1895), in the south transept in Lichfield Cathedral (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Today’s reflection:

Today is the Feast of Christ the King and the Sunday next before Advent (24 November 2024). Many of us may remember this Sunday from our childhood as ‘Stir-up Sunday.’ It was a play on words: the traditional collect in the Book of Common Prayer on this Sunday, the last Sunday in the Church Year, invited us to pray:

Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people;
that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works,
may of thee be plenteously rewarded;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

This was, of course, the time of the year that mothers and families began to stir-up the mixture for Christmas cakes and puddings, ‘stirring up’ the mixture that played on those words about ‘the fruit’ as they went about their good works.

The Christmas decorations, including trees and lights, are up in the streets and the shops in Stony Stratford and Milton Keynes. We are still a full calendar month away from Christmas Eve, but for some time now the Shopping Centres would have us believe Christmas has arrived as shop owners and traders try to breathe a festive air into our lives.

Despite the lights and the late nights, Christ is at the heart of Christmas, and that waiting for Christ, anticipating Christ, should be at the heart of the Advent season, which begins next Sunday (1 December 2024).

Advent is the season of preparing for Christmas, and in the weeks before Advent we even prepare for Advent itself, with readings telling us about the Coming of Christ.

We have made Christmas a far-too comfortable story. It was never meant to be, but we have made it comfortable with our Christmas card images of the sweet little baby Jesus, being visited by kings and surrounded by adoring, cute little animals and hosts of fluffy white angels. The reality, of course, is that Christmas was never meant to be a comfortable story.

Christmas is a story about poverty and about people who are homeless and rejected and who can find no place to stay.

It is a messy story about a child born surrounded by the filth of animals and the dirt of squalor.

It is a story of shepherds who are involved in dangerous work, staying up all night, out in the winter cold, watching out for wolves and sheep stealers.

It is a story of trickery, deceit and the corruption of political power that eventually leads to a cruel dictator stooping to murder, even the murder of innocent children, to secure his own grip on power.

But these sorts of images do not sell Christmas cards or help to get the boss drunk under the mistletoe at the office party.

That is why – in these weeks before Advent – we have readings that remind us what the coming of Christ into the world means, what the Kingdom of God is like, and how we should prepare for the coming of Christ and the coming of the Kingdom of God.

Marking the Sunday before Advent by crowning Christ as King helps us to focus on Advent from next Sunday, and Advent is supposed to be a time and a season of preparing for the coming of Christ.

Kings may not be a good role model for people living in modern democratic societies where the heads of state are elected. Nor are the models of kingship in history or in contemporary society so good. It is worth asking some questions:

What do you think a good king or a good ruler – a good president or good prime minister – should be like?

Without descending into party politics or party favouritism, how do you think a good ruler should behave in the interests of his or her people?

Do you remember how, as children, we would play games like ‘three wishes’? If you had to make decisions for this country – indeed, if you had to make decisions for the future of the world – what three priorities would rise to the top of your list?

In the second reading this morning (Revelation 1: 4b-8), Saint John writes to the Church as if we are gathered before the throne of God, and reminds us that God has made us a kingdom and made us priests serving God, mediators between God and the rest of humanity.

Christ comes again at the end of the age as judge and king, he is the beginning and the end, the Alpha (Α) and the Omega (Ω), the sovereign over all, the one who was, and is, and is to come.

The Gospel reading (John 18: 33-37), at the moment when Christ is on trial before Pilate, might seem a more appropriate reading for Holy Week than the week before Advent, a more appropriate preparation for Easter than for Christmas.

But at this stage, Pilate demands to know whether Christ is a King: ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’ (John 18: 33).

And he answers: ‘My kingdom is not from this world … For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice’ (John 18: 36-37).

Christ comes not just as a cute cuddly babe wrapped up in the manger and under the floodlights of a front window in a large department store. We are also preparing for the coming of Christ as King.

In this reading, Christ rejects all dysfunctional models of majesty and kingship. He is not happy with Pilate trying to project onto him models of kingship that are taken from the haughty and the aloof, the daft and the barmy, or the despotic and the tyrannical.

As he is being tortured and crucified, his tormentors and detractors still try to project these models of kingship onto Christ as they whip him and beat him to humility, as they crown him with thorns and mock him, and finally as he is crucified for all the world to see.

What sort of a king did Pilate expect Christ to be?

Indeed, what does majesty and graciousness mean for you today?

Do you remember how, as children, we would play games like ‘three wishes’? If you had to make decisions for this country – indeed, if you had to make decisions for the future of the world – what three priorities would rise to the top of your list?

If I had three wishes for my community, my country, my continent, my world, would they, in truth, reflect my own selfish interests and those of my own inner circle?

Or, in truth, would they reflect the values of Christ, the coming King whose reign is marked by justice and mercy, peace and love?

Would I be found among those who belong to the truth and listen to his voice?

John Piper’s ‘Christ in Majesty’ … the East Window in the chapel of Saint John’s Hospital, Lichfield (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Today’s Prayers (Sunday 24 November 2024, Christ the King, the Sunday next before Advent):

The theme this week in ‘Pray With the World Church’, the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is ‘16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence’. This theme is introduced today with a Programme Update:

Championing Justice, specifically ecological, economic, racial and gender justice, forms a key part of the mission of USPG. We stand with organisations such as the Anglican Alliance and Mothers’ Union in our hope to see women and men, girls and boys, living in just, equal and mutually supportive relationships, with each individual recognised as made in the image of God.

We support initiatives led by church partners. The Social-Economic Development of Women programme of the Church of North India launched in October 2023 to address gender inequalities, and promote work for rural women through entrepreneurship training and access to finance. The Anglican Council of Malawi’s three-year Gender Justice through Girls’ Education advocacy campaign seeks to improve retention and transition rates of girls in education as well as increase knowledge on sexual and reproductive health and rights.

16 day of Activism (25 November to 10 December) allows us to add our voice to all demanding an end to gender-based violence in every region of the world - we will continue to work with our partner churches and agencies to support this.

The USPG Prayer Diary today (Sunday 24 November 2024, Feast of Christ the King, the Sunday next before Advent) invites us to pray reflecting on these words:

We implore you, O Lord, to stir up the desires of your faithful people so that they will abundantly bear the fruit of their good deeds and be abundantly blessed by you. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

The Collect:

Eternal Father,
whose Son Jesus Christ ascended to the throne of heaven
that he might rule over all things as Lord and King:
keep the Church in the unity of the Spirit
and in the bond of peace,
and bring the whole created order to worship at his feet;
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

Post Communion Prayer:

Stir up, O Lord,
the wills of your faithful people;
that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works,
may by you be plenteously rewarded;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Additional Collect:

God the Father,
help us to hear the call of Christ the King
and to follow in his service,
whose kingdom has no end;
for he reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, one glory.

Yesterday’s Reflection

Continued Tomorrow

Christ the King in the reredos in the former Saint Mary’s Church in the centre of Lichfield (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org