Celebrating God's Word

     

I have watched cricket played on sunny evenings in Oxford and Cambridge in England, on equally mellow evenings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and Perth, Western Australia.

      But nothing beats the closing overs of a day’s play on the ovals of Kearsney College where the towering plane trees re-define the words green and quietness.

      Recently I learned that Kearsney can teach even those internationally recognizable venues a few things about celebrating school centenaries. Several members of my family have graduated from this boys high school, and I still have one grandson in eleventh grade there.

      But the centenary event I feel driven to describe wasn’t a cricket or a rugby match; a field-hockey or a basketball game; a swimming gala or a concert featuring the school’s widely acclaimed choir.

      It was simply a continuous reading in the school chapel (see photograph) of the entire New Testament of the Bible, starting at one o’clock one fall afternoon with the lighting of the centenary candle, a prayer, and a hymn, and going through until nine o’clock the next morning.

      Scores of readers came forward, most of them Kearsney boys speaking in English and Zulu, along with their families, including those living abroad and contributing online.

      The 10-minute segments were read by teachers, parents, girls from nearby “sister” schools, boys from a “little brother” school, parishioners from a neighborhood church, and the headmaster, whose creativity undergirded the project and who rounded it off by reading the closing verses of the Book of Revelation.

      The readers were free to use Bible translations of their choice—ranging from the poetic and rich figures of speech in the King James Version—”Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God” (Matt. 5:8)—to the conversational simplicity of The Living New Testament—”anyone who wants to, let him come and drink the Water of Life without charge” (Rev. 22:17).

      An eighty-something grandmother who had volunteered to read on the phone from Mystic in the US, was thrilled when told how a late summer mist had breathed through the chapel as the doors were opened for fresh air at 7 p.m. 

      “Even from a distance,” she said, “I knew that  nothing could obscure the power of the words that are shared so often in that chapel. The message never changes, yet remains fresh. Fulfilling God’s purpose for us.”

      The Kearsney readers shared her enthusiasm, describing the Bible-based celebration as a blessing and a privilege—a profound and meaningful experience. As one of them put it: “It was an amazing testament to God’s story at Kearsney.”

      Another young fellow, although exhausted, was still sitting in the chapel after he had finished reading at 2 a.m. When the school chaplain suggested he head back to his dorm for some sleep, he responded, “I’d like to stay a bit longer because I feel so close to God.”

      The chaplain herself lingered way beyond the planned finishing time. She said simply: “The initial hope was that people would remember God’s faithfulness to Kearsney through the past hundred years, and in that find hope in God for the next hundred.

      “Yet it became so much more. It was an extended community coming together in a season of isolation and social distancing, united in reading and hearing God, and finding they encountered God in the Word and in each other.”