Welcome to the John Mark Homer teachings podcast by practicing the way. This teaching was originally given at Bridgetown church in Portland, Oregon. As a part of the preaching the gospel series. There is a book on racial justice that you are not likely to find on any New York Times Best Seller list, but it is hands down one of my all time favorites. It's called hubie come home by Jay Raqqa from New Zealand, who is both a follower of Jesus and a Maori writer. In it, he tells the tragic complex and at the same time beautiful story of the interplay between the indigenous people of ataro, or as we would say, New Zealand, the missionary movement of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the multi generational trauma of colonialism. He opens with a story from a few years before the infamous James Kirk, who was most definitely not a follower of Jesus. Did I say Kirk cook? See, Star Trek right in there. Rusty, goodness, but you see that the nod there in Star Trek, right? Before he discovered New Zealand in 1769, there was a famous Maori tribal prophet or oracle who had a vision of a strange people with white skin coming on large ships. It was so vivid that he went around from tribe to tribe in the north and the south islands and to act out the coming Europeans. He made a basket and he put it on his head to mimic a hat. He cut apart a cloak and he put it around his legs to mimic Pence. He fastened a rock to the end of a stick and put it in his mouth to mimic a pipe and he brought this prophecy to the tribes, quote the name of their God will be Tom Roker to forgive me if you're a kiwi. Son who was killed. A good God, however, the people will still be oppressed. James cook made landfall and then left, but 48 years later, the first missionary arrived in New Zealand. But people had been waiting for decades to hear the message about this new good God who was the son who was killed. And the tribal chiefs, therefore, gathered a large crowd on the beach to hear it in person and on Christmas Day, 1814, the first missionary stood up on that soil to preach the gospel of Jesus, the son who was killed. The gospel alone set off a cascade effect in Maori culture. They renamed that beach, the gateway for the good news in the indigenous language. The missionaries first translated the gospel of Luke and then later the New Testament as a whole into the Maori language, the first indigenous translation in the southern hemisphere, and the gospel of Luke spread like wildfire throughout the tribes. Prior to the gospel, they were a warring culture built around this idea of blood vengeance you kill one of us, we kill one of you, tit for tat back and forth century after century with no idea when the next rating party would