Sargood House Chapel Service, 7 March 2010
Sermon: Jono Sullivan
Theme: Brotherhood
Just as one sheet of paper is nowhere near as strong a stack of paper, so one person is not as strong as a group of people. That’s what brotherhood is: a club, house or team of people who are stronger, efficient and more powerful as a group than they are as individuals.
Brotherhood has been around for thousands of years and was formed around tribal groups. These days it is more commonly formed around sporting teams or tight based communities like a social club or boarding house. I learnt of the Sargood brotherhood at my first House Rugby. In the Senior Final Sargood was a few major players short and they were facing Williams House, which had a dream team full of First XV players. Sargood’s brotherhood meant that everyone played for each other and backed each other up: they didn’t want to let a team mate down. Sargood won the final, which demonstrated their brotherhood.
Brotherhood is about sticking together through thick and thin, about putting yourself on the line to help a mate, brother or sister, as Willie Apiata did. I recently heard a story about a man called Pete Morgan. He was in the Air Force in World War II, flying B24s. In the first mission he flew as a copilot, returning from a mission over Germany, they encountered heavy antiaircraft fire. The pilot, navigator and rear gunner were killed. They were left with the bare minimum needed to fly the plane. One of the engines had been shot out and the plane was going down. It took all the strength Pete had to keep the aircraft straight. Pete was trying to fly the plane as long as he possibly could because they were behind enemy lines and the closer they got to the allies the greater their chance of survival was. The remaining engine was on fire and fuel was leaking. They thought the plane was going to explode upon landing. Pete managed to set the plane down in a corn field somewhere in northern France. It didn’t explode immediately, but everyone expected it to blow any second. Pete was so exhausted from flying the plane that he couldn’t run for safety. The crew could have just left Pete but they didn’t: they unbuckled him, pushed him out through the hatch behind the cockpit, and carried him away from the burning plane.
Brotherhood lasts for life. You’re not going to remember the times in class or the times in detention. You will remember the times with friends, the time they accidentally set the fire alarm off, or the time you got someone to eat cicada shells by telling him that they were full of protein and he would be massive if he ate them. You will only remember the good times with mates. In his book “Comrades”, Stephen Ambrose wrote about warrior called Crazy Horse who defeated an American Calvary army. Crazy Horse was friends with a fellow warrior called He Dog. In later life Crazy Horse did a lot of things that He Dog didn’t like, but because of the brotherhood they developed when they were young, they remained friends. The point of this story is that He Dog didn’t condone Crazy Horse’s actions, yet they still remained friends.
But there are also times when brotherhood can go wrong. There are times when you need to stand up and say that what your friends are doing is wrong, and you need to get out of the group. Take the Kahui family for instance. The children suffered terrible abuse and no one in the family stood up and said that what was happening was wrong, and so the children died. Part of being a brotherhood is standing up and speaking out when a brother is making a bad decision.
But when a brotherhood is at its best, we bring out the best in one another, stick up for each other, watch each others’ back, and keep a brother out of trouble.