More hospitality, and other Monday notes

Well, it had to happen. Saturday afternoon we decided to go out shopping together, but I didn't want to bring my purse because I had all sorts of things piled onto & in it to take to church on Sunday. So I grabbed my wallet and nothing else - especially not my keys. I went out the door and started down the stairs, and Ron followed - without his keys, as it happened. As the door clicked shut he said, "Do you have your keys." "No," I answered. "Do you have yours." "No!"

Fortunately he had his phone, so we called the blessed Semiha. Half an hour later she was at the house with the card a locksmith needed to make a new key.

Meanwhile the neighbour across the street had seen us waiting forelornly outside the apartment. First he insisted that we take a couple of chairs and sit on them, and then he convinced us to come inside for a glass of tea. And that's where Semiha found us, sitting in the middle of an extended family from Antakya (mother, older sister and neice of our neighbour visiting for a wedding) drinking tea listening with minimal understanding to a spirited discussion on Turkey and the EU. Of course Semiha had to have tea, too, so the whole exchange took another couple of hours of her time, but it was kinda fun.

Given our limited memories, we're going to have to find a place to keep the spare key. Maybe our neighbour across the street would look after it for us. Hmmm.

Church on Sunday - I preached for the first time since leaving Creston. The gospel was one of my favourites: the landowner who paid the workers who worked an hour the same as the ones who worked a whole day. It's a good one for that congregation, which seems to be about half Turkish, many of them born Muslim.

St. John's doesn't make a special effort to convert Muslims. Its priest and most of its English-speaking congregation have a healthy respect for Islam in its healthier forms. But Atatürk's vision of the new Turkey was a secular, modern society, not tied down by Islamic tradition. As a result many young Turks have been raised essentially without religion, or with only the outward forms and not the inner meaning. They're trying to find something to fill the hole in their lives, and some of them end up in the Anglican church.

The congregation is a warm and welcoming one, and Father Ron, our priest, has developed a service that both Turkish and English people find comfortable. His Turkish is excellent, so he's able to preach part of his sermon in Turkish. The Gospel and the prayers of the people are done in both Turkish and English, and there's a booklet giving the Turkish translation of the whole service. Last week, when I presided but didn't preach, I found it quite unsettling at first to hear the congregation's responses coming back in two languages - but how good it is! Many of the non-Turkish members speak good Turkish and help welcome the new young people. And the rest of us - Ron and I, at least - are working at learning more. I'm looking forward to being able to do more in Turkish, but not just yet - my accent is too atrocious.