Incredibly rugged beaches

Lots of Oostburgian stuff on this website as of late, but this isn't a shot of the west side of Lake Michigan, the cold side, where I grew up. That beach seems insignificant when compared to a whole gallery of beaches in Olympia National Park, so wide and rough the camera can't get it all in. That's where we were for a while, and it was beautiful.

Looks like this most all the time, the waves coming all the way from the other side of the Pacific Ocean--rough water, pounding surf. If it spends a late afternoon calm and placid, I didn't witness it. It just seemed to be always this rough.

Looks like this from even farther back (if you can, get up close--there's people down there).

The word, I suppose, is rugged--"the seacoast at Olympic National Park is take-your-breath-away rugged." Not for sissies, and not for wheelchairs. Even though I couldn't get down there, I could shoot the edges of the most rugged beaches I've ever seen.

Since wheelchairs don't run well on beach sand, I didn't get too far on those rugged, rugged immensely open spaces, but that doesn't mean I didn't love 'em--so wide, so deep, so, well, ruggedly gorgeous.

The only space at all comparable, at least that I've seen, is the beaches on the Frisian island Terschelling, which looks out toward the North Sea, the place my great-grandparents lived 150 years ago. In both places, when you stand at the far edge and look toward the seam of land and water, you can't help but realize that getting to the water requires some gumption. It's a long, long ways. 

I used to love the Lake Michigan beaches close to home, but they are nothing like this, so I tried my best to take at least something of their ruggedness home with me, everything I could get into the camera, which happened to be my phone.

Rugged place, but, oh, so gorgeous, on a sunny day in mid-September. 

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven. . .”

 It seems to me that this isn’t the first time I’ve typed in that word as a title.  If I go back to the first psalm, first meditation, I’d see it there, as well.

The word—and what it suggests—remains a treasure.  I don’t think you have to be a believer in Jesus Christ’s redemptive work to aspire to the riches the word suggests.  I doubt anyone’s ever done a poll, but my guess is that a multitude of those who spend their nights at what America calls “gaming,” they too would love to be blessed, in their case by what they’d call luck. 

But Dame Fortune, in her ancient medieval garb, looked like Sandra Bullock as long as she was smiling. When she’d turn, she’d morph into Phyllis Diller.

I believe—and I may be generous here—that everyone from Pope Francis to the last week’s serial killer would most likely want, more than anything, to be “blessed.”  I do too.  A considerable number of us, like Jacob, would fake IDs to get it, if we sensed we were in the neighborhood of blessedness.  To be blessed is a condition that most of us believe we know only because its pursuit dominates our dreams.

Not long ago, we buried a man named Henry.  He was devout, but never, ever self-righteous, always courteous and loving and considerate.  I visited him once in the wing of the hospital, when his wife of sixty years was close to death, very close, I thought.  He spoke to her and read to her, even smiled at her as if she hung on his every word.  Maybe she did. 

If those who knew him 24/7 ever saw another side of Henry, I don’t think I’d like to know.  But I’m enough of a Calvinist to believe he was probably capable of something other than the grace that radiated from his presence as long as I knew him.  I’m sure he carried his own inner demons, fought his own battles. 

When Henry knew his death was imminent, he wrote a note to his children that all travel costs his geographically dispersed family would accrue for his funeral should be paid before anyone looked into his estate.  By profession, he’d been a Professor of Business, and that little note on the bottom of a sheet of paper was scribbled by an accountant.  But it was also the act of a man who knew he’d been blessed and understood that his role was to do likewise.

I bring him up only because it seems to me that, through our lives, most of us know very, very few people to whom we might affix the description of “being truly blessed.”  Henry was one of those.  And I’m blessed—as all of us were in this community—to have known him.

But how do we get blessed, if, in fact, being blessed can be somehow obtained?  Is there something I can do, or is it simply a gift, like grace itself? 

Psalm 1 begins with the same word as does Psalm 32, but then it describes the condition of being blessed by illustrating how the blessed among us conduct their lives, what they do and don’t.  Psalm 32, people say, is more of a how-to, a maschil, a sermon psalm.

 Consider its ways and be wise.  Consider its ways and be blessed.  Follow its instructions, if indeed you—or I--can.              

Morning Thanks--for reading

I'm not at all sure what caused hundreds of extra readers over the last week to tune into Stuff in the Basement. A couple of days before leaving for the Pacific northwest, , I decided to run that Oostburg piece. I worried it might be too exclusive--I mean, all that Schaap stuff and all that Oostburg stuff--and not a sermon, nary a sermon to be found. 

I guess I'm thinking that a really great sermon can make something concrete and lasting out of a volatile mixture of scriptural truth and the war-torn spirit we carry from life's experience. I've never considered myself a preacher, despite writing hundreds of pieces that have almost always contained a rather obvious moral tone, even called "devotionals." But I know the difference between "preachin' and singin'" as James Russell Lowell once explained about himself and his work. I've always considered myself a singer, not a preacher. 

That having been said, the huge Oostburg essay is a ton of singing, and I couldn't help but wonder how all of that Schaap identity stuff would be taken by the people who sat in the pews that night. You walk into church, and it's full--you can't help but think you're going to get a good timber-shaking, knees-knocking, rip-roaring sermon.

No sir and no ma'am. This Schaap guy basically set out to lecture the bunch on history and squirrel a way through it with his own boyhood and family saga without a real live homily at all.

I needed to show them how Oostburgian the guy in the blonde pulpit up front really was, how when my Mom and Dad got hitched, it was thoroughly a downtown Oostburg event--Dad from the parsonage on the north side and Mom from the blacksmith shop across Main, nary a half block between 'em. 

The numbers have floored me. My guess is that some Oostburgians got wind of that speech getting some air time long, long ago, passed the news around at Judy's (the cafe, not my sister), and enlisted a ton of locals to follow it alone. No single day has topped 300 readers, but they've been close, and who knows but some who've read some early chunks might just return for another piece of anniversary cake.

Whoever you are, I hope, deeply, that it was worth your trouble to wander out here to the prairie and follow along.

Honestly, I'm deeply thankful.

Oostburg CRC 150th birthday -- vii

Just one more thought.  

In those years we lived here—1980-82—I wanted my kids to see my dad on his knees, trowel in hand, wanted them to sense something of the oddly-hallowed ground where their own unknown great-grandparents had been laid decades ago. That’s why I took them along to Hartman cemetery. The experience didn’t charge them with respect, not in the least.

From the edge of the hill where the cemetery stands, you can still see the belt of lake water run straight as a ruler all along the horizon to the east. Freshly-tilled farmland patched meadows stretching into the woods that underline the seam of lake and sky.                        

The cemetery grass that day was freshly cut, the stones shiny in the soft yellow dusk of an early spring morning, and the whole place seemed to them little more than a playground they'd never spotted before, a schoolground obstacle course--at least a couple hundred different solid shapes in straight rows, perfect for climbing, even riding along like stone ponies.

But when they started in on leap-frog, I finally collared them. I tried to explain how such merry-making simply wasn't in good taste in a cemetery, but they didn't really understand, but they could just as well have been listening to a stone monument. So I settled them down—or tried to. “No more of that,” I said, and they looked up at me bewildered.

"Sometimes you get to wonder where all the faithful people have gone--men like Johnny Luteyn," my dad once told me, years ago, as if it were an editorial. He was feeling his age. "People like John Luteyn were powerful saints."

But I also remember what I was thinking in the middle of my father’s very serious lament. He knew this old man Luteyn in ways that I didn’t. To me, John Luteyn was simply an white-haired gent who sat in the same church bench every Sunday, maybe the last man in the church who could sing the Psalms in the Dutch language.

To my father, it may have seemed there were no more John Luteyns. To me, a whole generation behind, there still were. In fact, my dad is to me what John Luteyn was to him, and so were others in Oostburg CRC—men and women of real faith.  To some of you, maybe Norm Mentink.

All of which makes me think that perhaps I was wrong in chewing out my kids all those years ago in the Hartman cemetery for their graveyard game of leap-frog. It may not have been in good taste, what they did—but in spirit, it was just fine and to the point.

I hope and pray that my own children and grandchildren know the comfort and strength of the faith       their grandparents knew. That's at least part of the reason I brought them along to the graves of their great-grandparents.

It's not a game really, but it is a kind of leap-frog we all play.  Those people we respect for their devotion, their industry, their strength of character--for their faith--are themselves monuments who stand in our minds as stone-strong testimonies of belief and blessed assurance.

But those men and women are there to leap too, because once they are gone we do not stand still and lament forever the fact that they we’ve been left behind. We don't stand in the shadow of a tree that's been felled. Following the straight-and-narrow for 150 years of history doesn’t mean never turning corners. Life goes on. Only God Almighty is the great I AM.

The rest of us may well stand in Hartman Cemetery or Oostburg’s, south of town. We may stand there or here in celebration of 150 years of faith, but it's always time to move. It's September, and yet another church year has already begun, a whole new round of Bible studies and catechism, and huis bezoek.

Like it or not, we must all jump up and over what’s come before us just like the kids, push ourselves up on the strength of those cemetery monuments and then vault over and even beyond in the firm conviction that the Creator of Heaven and Earth was, is, and forever shall be here beside us on the land and in the woods of this beautiful lakeshore.

 The good news of the gospel is forever the same. It’s an old, old story, and it goes like this: He loves us. 

That’s it, isn’t it? Jesus loves me, this I know. 

Oostburg CRC - 150 years - vi

The second World War put people back to work, but it also brought men into war.    First Orange City had as many as 40 men in the armed services at a time during World War II. I don’t know the totals from Oostburg, but there must have been close to thirty. In fact, in the front window of the parsonage, right downtown, there were five stars, meaning five children gone to war. Reverend Schaap—my grandpa—lost his wife in 1943, my grandma, middle of war, to a lingering illness. She was just 61. I have letters that he wrote to family—here and abroad—that witness to his Calvinist faith and his stoic grief.  Both of them too are buried in Hartman cemetery.

My dad went to the Pacific.  I found this picture in the bible he toted back then. My mom would be angry for a year if she knew I had it up there.

Mom had two babies during the war, two babies when Dad came home on a train in Milwaukee. She told me she got anxious about just how to greet him, and how he would react. He’d seen Judy, but not in two years, never seen Gail. How would he act—would he pick up Judy first, or the daughter he’d never seen? Should she greet him first? 

What did you do? I asked her. “Finally, I just decided to go alone.” I love that story, told at both my kids’ weddings. But I know very well that she wasn’t the only young mom who went through the same decision-making when a dad who’d been gone to war finally returned.

I’m a “baby boomer,” a massive generation created when my father and hundreds of thousands of others, dozens in Oostburg CRC, returned from World War II and started families. My dad built a good chunk of his own house himself and worked in Oostburg for Gilson Manufacturing, where a factory, among other things, turned out cement mixers affordable by the millions of men building theirs.

I was born in 1948, Sheboygan Memorial Hospital, the third child of Calvin and Jean Schaap, and I lived, for as long as I remember, at 714 Superior Avenue.

Here's the three of us what we called “our back porch,” a slab of concrete. I was baptized in the downtown Oostburg Christian Reformed Church, by my grandfather the preacher, who had only recently retired. He lived with us, I remember, but he died in 1956—and I don’t remember him, except as a grouch.

He was a strong proponent of Christian education, as were my parents. The Christian school began the year I was born, I believe, so I attended—I was close enough to walk home for lunch. Often, I made my own—I must have eaten a thousand boiled hot dogs—because Mom was giving piano lessons at noon, to people who probably still worship here. I still love hot dogs.

    Mom lost a sister in the very first years of the Christian School’s operation in a freakish accident in thick lake fog. They were going to Milwaukee in weather her parents told her was dangerous. In that pre-seat belt era, she was thrown into the windshield and sustained injuries that took her life while no one else in the car was hurt. Gertie Dirkse was one of the first teachers in the brand new Christian school. Starting a new Christian school was no picnic; Oostburg people went to war. I can’t help but wonder how my own parents--dear, dear Christian believers--felt about the death of their sister so quickly into the life of that school.

 In eighth grade at Oostburg Christian, at the end of a long Friday, I took out a slip of paper, stuck it into my mouth, let it get wet and soggy, then whipped it up against one of the big windows on the south wall, where it sat like a monster. That was what we did. I wasn’t the first, and I likely wasn’t the last.

But I got caught. And a man named Phares LeFever, our neighbor, in fact, shook his head angrily. “You did it?” he said, pointing at me. “You did it? You—a Schaap?”

It was the worst thing he could have said. I hated him for it. It was entirely unfair for him to say something like that because he wouldn’t have gone after any other kid in the room in the same way. “You—a Schaap?”

But it was also the best thing for me. I don’t doubt that some educational psychologist would say it was an awful thing to say, but when I went home that night, angry as sin, I came to realize something I’d never really thought about—that, in a way, I am not my own because I belong to something bigger than I am, not just a family of Mayors and Pastors, but a bigger family. I wasn’t just "Jimmy"—I was something far less and far, far more.

I grew up in this church, listening to four different preachers

There was no Christian High back then, and when my dad suggested I could board with someone in Waupun, I wasn’t interested. So I’m an OHS grad, one of those who spent far too much of his time and strength in sports. But it was a good experience. When I went off to college, I just wanted to be a coach.Right here in Oostburg, between the Onion River and Lake Michigan, I had a wonderful boyhood.

 But that was the late 60s, a difficult era for families and a church. I got radicalized by a war I thought wrong in Vietnam. My parents didn’t like my criticisms, but that was true in families throughout the church and the nation. World War II values didn’t look good in beads and bell-bottoms.

I left Oostburg and have lived, for the most part, in Iowa. Whenever I’d come home to visit in those years, I’d attend, with them, and often go over to the parsonage where a group of honest-to-goodness adults would have adult Sunday School. It used to get a little heated in that basement because people didn’t want to listen to their hippie kids, but I remember always feeling good about being there, never being repulsed or not tolerated. It was, at the time, church at its best, I think.

And that’s just about all I know about Oostburg and Oostburg Christian Reformed Church, all, at least of any historical value.

Oostburg CRC v

 

Nothing changed the church or the nation like the events begun in August of 1914, with the First World War. It took three years for the United States of America to become wholly engaged in “the Great War,” but when finally, troops shipped off to France, war itself changed the nation and the Oostburg Christian Reformed Church like nothing else because for better or worse, it was now officially and powerfully vital for a Dutch bunch to become American. Old Highway 32, I believe, was named after one of Wisconsin’s most tried-and-true World War I divisions.

Ninety-four Sheboygan County Doughboys never returned from “the war to end all wars,” probably half of them victims of conflict, the other half of various forms of influenza that became a world-wide epidemic

One of them, as I’ve already said, was my Great Uncle, pictured here with is brother-in-law and my grandpa Dirkse, Harry, the blacksmith who ran a gas station when farm horses disappeared. Note the downtown Oostburg CRC behind them on Center Avenue, a mud road, that sports horse rails.

Grandpa’s wife, Edgar’s sister, my Grandma learned to recite the Heidelberg Catechism, but, she told me, giggling, in the Dutch language, a language she couldn’t really understand. I tell that story because nothing changed language like the First World War, when one CRC soldier wrote home that he was angry about the fact that, when on the battlefield, at night he understood the whispers coming from the German trenches better than the English of his buddies from New York City or Alabama. When boys like that came back, they were conscious, maybe for the first time, that they were Americans, not Hollanders.

Gerrit VerVelde, 25 years old, a private in the 59^th infancy, was killed in action near Marne, Argonne Forest, almost 100 years ago today, September 30, 1918  And look what I found in an old Sheboygan County book.

    By the time the Thirties came around, things had changed substantially, even though I’m sure Oostburg CRC still fought about language. There were, of course, bigger problems—the American Depression affected city life and farm country. In Oostburg, no one had any money.  

    My paternal grandparents moved here, Grandpa into the pulpit, in 1932, the worst of times.  

    That’s my father on the far left. He passed what the catechism used to call “the age of discretion” here in Oostburg, his adolescence, and, obviously, married an Oostburg girl, who grew up across the street from the parsonage, right downtown.

 My grandmother Schaap wrote her relatives about the town in a simple but loving hand.

    The preacher’s family was poor, but then so was everyone else. My father claimed there really was no salary to speak of, no money coming in; but what helped the family along was vegetables and meat and canned goods from farmer families, church members. Food would be left on the parsonage porch by people who cared but didn’t need to be identified.

Both mom’s and dad’s families, during the Depression, were less than a block from the railroad, which meant getting hit up by hobos hitching rides, hither and yon, throughout the country, most of them looking for work, all of them looking for something to eat.

    Across the street and down the block from the parsonage sat the blacksmith shop/gas station. In the height of the Great Depression, Grandpa Dirkse would come up the stairs to the kitchen some nights, sit over a bowl of soup or a slice of bread with cheese, put his head in his hands, and cry. My mom was just a kid, but no kid forgets her father’s tears.

There was no money, period. Farmers would come in for shoeing or to get their shares sharpened, or for fuel oil, and look at him sorrowfully. They couldn’t pay. His dilemma was profound. He couldn’t go on without an income; his family wouldn’t be fed. But neither could he turn down what the farmers needed or their families wouldn’t eat. There were no bucks in big empty leather wallets.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 127

 

“May those who pass by not say, 

"The blessing of the LORD be upon you; 

we bless you in the name of the LORD."

 

For several years, I’ve been signing e-mails, notes, and even books with the word “blessings.”  I don’t remember when I started scribbling that in, but it was something I did thoughtfully. My father used to bray about the phrase “good luck,” largely because he thought—as does his son—that “luck” is something of a pagan word.  In my entire life, I don’t believe I’ve ever signed anything “good luck.” 

 

“Best wishes” always felt a bit too formal, something out of golden years of Hollywood—Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.  “May God bless you” is a bit pushy spiritually, and I’m just a bit timid about using the name of the Lord in a gesture of common courtesy or as seeming thanks for buying a book.

 

I stick with it because the single word “blessings” has just enough grace and just enough nature. It has an unmistakable religious foreground, but it’s not in-your-face. 

 

I think about the word whenever I use it.  I’m not trying to be saintly here, just honest.  When I sign a note “Blessings,” I swear the action is not knee-jerk or obligatory or just plain rote. 

 

But I don’t remember ever willfully not using that word either.  People I don’t know buy books, strangers I’ve never met and will not likely see again.  Yet, I’m sure I’ve written “Blessings” somewhere on the title page. 

 

Charles Spurgeon says Psalm 129’s “those who pass by” references an ancient harvest tradition among farmers, something called the seasonal blessing.  Once the crop was in, he says, farm laborers would visit each other for some kind of mutual blessing. If Spurgeon is right about this psalm, then I should watch myself, I suppose, because what the psalmist says is this: may those who hate Zion not receive even that blessing, because it is God’s blessing.

 

All of which brings us back to the question that hovers over this psalm and the other half-dozen or so others that contain such difficult “imprecations,” many of them more chilling than this one, against enemy evil-doers. It seems impossible not to hear Matthew 5, Jesus’s own words, as a sharp refutation of the imprecations of the psalmist:  "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'  But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.”

 

In my life, I know this—it is far simpler to side with Jesus and pray for those who seem enemies than it is to draw a sword and side with the poet of Psalm 129. 

But then, what I do I know of evil, of persecution, of crackling fires beneath your feet, of tortures and internment, of martyrdom?  Nothing, really. In a way, it’s easier to pray for one’s enemies than it is to have to go to war.

 

I think C. S. Lewis was right, even though much of his work emerges from the horrors of bombed-out England during the second World War, even though he knew persecution.  “The ferocious parts of the Psalms serve as a reminder that there is in the world such a thing as wickedness,” he wrote in Reflections on the Psalms, “and that . . . is hateful to God.”

 

Perhaps pluralism softens us, softens me. The gospel commands us to love, but it also commits us to vigilance.

 

Nonetheless, as I often say, “Blessings.”

Oostburg CRC - iv

 

Now, slowly, we’re coming back to Oostburg, a town healthily located between the tracks of the new railroad and the commerce of the lakeshore. It’s 1868, and there’s some significant foment among the godly because there are those who want to leave the Dutch Reformed churches—Oostburg and Gibbsville. Why?

I don’t know. If anyone were to try to discover the specific reasons, they’d have to read consistory minutes (they’re in Dutch), but then, trust me, ancient consistory minutes are generally filled with motions, not emotions.  

We do know that these men, 150 years ago, attended the very first meeting of the group who would eventually begin what we know today as the Oostburg Christian Reformed Church.

Why there was another denomination is easier to answer, although the reasons—more than 150 years later—may not be altogether convincing and had nothing to do, as I’m sure most of you know, with Christian education.

The birth of the Christian Reformed Church in America occurred in 1857, and, as historians generally agree, had specific causes: in worship, singing only from a collection of hymns, 800 to be exact; the importance of close communion--the body and blood (bread and wine) is only for the elect; regular--each Sabbath--preaching the catechism. Undoubtedly, there were more specifics, but these were biggies.

Perhaps the best, and quickest, way of understanding the birth of the CRC is by way of a summary given by Classis Holland way back in 1857.

    But if I may, let me speculate a little here, too. The True Dutch Reformed Church began by original immigrants more theologically conservative than their neighbors. My great-great grandfather, who was in all likelihood among ‘em, didn’t stay. By the time my Grandma Dirkse was born--his granddaughter, she was in the Reformed Church.

Thus, I’m going out on a limb here, but I’m guessing that the 1868 True Dutch Reformed Church, which became the Oostburg CRC was made up of the most conservative community members, theologically and ethnically, from the Town of Holland, often, but not always, the most recent immigrants from the Netherlands.

Just for a fun, let’s attend a funeral in Holland, NE, a place where Oostburg-ians homesteaded and created yet another Dutch colony. The furors that arose in their church life—and they never had a Christian Reformed Church—was turmoil over what may well seem like incidental issues. For instance, when funerals were moved into the church (and out of the home), there was a huge fight over whether or not putting dead bodies in the House of the Lord was right and proper and scriptural. Lasted for years, in fact, and sent some people packing. Quaint? Odd? Weird? Stupid?

That issue—the dead in the church—was the very first issue to come before the fledgling synod of the CRC.

There’s more. Way back when, if Christian Reformed grave diggers covered the sand they’d dug from graves with sod, they were blasted for their “wicked hiding of death’s horror.”

As long as she’s up there, let’s stay with funerals. When a CRC woman insisted on putting flowers on her dearly departed spouse’s casket, her church accused her of “worldliness.” 

In one congregation elders prompted a brawl by starting the process of church discipline against those who purchased fire insurance—for questioning the will of God. Another group nearly split over the question of whether or not elders when reading a sermon could stand behind the pulpit or a reading desk.

Some felt the wearing of a mustache was sinful. In another early CRC congregation, a young man was called before the church elders for whistling because someone thought whistling was signaling the devil.

It’s a part of our history that’s undeniably human. Often enough, truth and love go to war.

The Oostburg CRC 150th birthday - iii

    But there was also, among some of those who left (and those who stayed), the deep suspicion of evil, of worldliness, of, quite frankly, good people of Dutch descent becoming “American.” Many of those people thought your ancestors and mine were, well, liberals. Traditionally, Oostburg-ians, deeply pious, carried that piety and their bibles with them to the new country and quickly became suspicious of bad behavior anywhere near. Believe it or not, one of the founding fathers, a dominie no less, sold liquor in Cedar Grove.

But just as important was the dream that homesteading the Nebraska grassland would be a breeze because, with no trees to fell or roots to dig, the horrors of breaking ground on the lakeshore were over.

They were right, and dead wrong about relative ease. But that isn’t the story I’m telling tonight. For that, we need to go back to Holland for a time. Stick with me, because understanding the very first meeting of the Oostburg Christian Reformed Church requires some Dutch history. 

     I’m not at all sure of what motives prompted some men and women to leave the Oostburg Dutch Reformed Church, but I can take some educated guesses on the basis of Dutch Reformed history. 

Now, if your head isn’t spinning, we’re going thirty years back in time and putting Town of Holland, Oostburg, Wisconsin, and the new world in the rearview mirror in order to ship ourselves back to the Netherlands, the Old Country.  Let me put this in a context. 

 When Dominie Hendrik DeCock walked into his country church in Ulrum, Groningen, the Netherlands, the sanctuary was full. Right away, he noticed two police standing at the gate to the pulpit to make sure he didn't get in it--the pulpit that is. So the story goes that he simply stepped into an aisle and stood on a front pew to deliver a sermon on  Ephesians 2--"For by grace. . ." . My guess is you know the text.

That's me in the Ulrum church, maybe ten years ago. Just spoofing.

That afternoon the doors were nailed shut so no one could get in for the second service. Dominie Hendrik DeCock, undeterred, took to the horse barn, where those dozens who'd come to hear his sermon simply listened to him hold forth on the first q and a of the Heidelburg Catechism, right there amid the horses. The next week, when DeCock was hauled off to jail, Dominie Scholte, from down south filled the pulpit. He could do it because the parishoners at Ulrum knew him to be orthodox. That Dominie Scholte would, just 14 years later lead hundreds of Dutch immigrants to the plains of Iowa, to a place he called Pella.

It was the afscheiding, the separation, a church split, the departure of those who considered themselves the true church in rural Holland, circa 1834. My own ancestors were among them--not there in Ulrum, but among those who were convinced that the State Church had departed from orthodoxy, so convinced, in fact, that they left Holland.

In fact, the vast, vast majority of Dutch immigrants to America in the 19^th century were “separatists,” people who’d chosen to leave the State church for having departed from orthodoxy. And the vast majority of those were the kind of poor and needy that could be listed under Emma Lazarus’s poem on the Statue in New York harbor. It doesn’t hurt us to remember that, too.

But is that important? You’ll have to answer that question for yourselves, but you do need to remember that a church split is an important chapter of your and my history.