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Tyndale University presents a series of recorded chapel services from Tyndale's very own faculty and guest speakers.
Good morning, everyone. Beautiful worship. Today we're going to be having a special guest that I'm going to introduce in a moment, but I just want to acknowledge that yesterday was the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and it's an important thing for us to be able to stop for a moment sometimes when we can go throughout our year, sometimes these things are not prevalent in our minds. It's not something that continually stays in our minds. Considering our history in Canada and to acknowledge certain things in our past for us to just consider is a good thing for us to pause for a moment and doing that. And so today, as I read that the land acknowledgement, I think it's important especially today for us to be able to to think about this, not just the words and for us to kind of go through the ritual of it for us to actually lean into this so. I'm going to start by reading this land acknowledgment. For thousands of years, the Greater Toronto area has been the traditional land of the Huron Wendat and Seneca and most recently the Mississaugas of the Credit River. It's part of the dish with one spoon territory, a treaty between the Anishinabe, Mississaugas, and Haudenosaunee that committed them together to share the territory and protect the land. Other indigenous peoples and nations have subsequently entered this territory in the spirit of peace, friendship and respect. It is on these lands and in the spirit that Tyndale seeks to engage in its work. And it's important to know that this land acknowledgment was developed specifically for Tyndale University in 2018 under the guidance of elder doctor Terry LeBlanc, and in consultation with individuals from Six Nations and the urban indigenous community of the Greater Toronto Area. We acknowledge that our campus is located on traditional indigenous lands and those of us connected to this community gather, work, and study in the context of this history, it is our privilege and responsibility to partner in this journey to reconciliation, sustaining a safe, welcoming and informed place of learning for everybody. So today we have the the privilege and the honor to be able to have Jonathan Markel, who is going to be sharing with us today. As you can see, this is not the traditional way that we would have here right now, but this is a beautiful representation of the culture. So Jonathan Markel is from the Tyendinaga Mohawk territory and is the lead singer and director and song writer of broken walls. Broken walls is a faith-based indigenous band and he just came on from tour, right? You're just touring and he just came from last night to come here with us to be able to do that and his songs and his music has impacted so many people for healing and he's also an ordained with indigenous Messengers International and we are honored to have you share with us. I'm just going to begin this time with a word of prayer and we'll go from there, OK. Lord God, our creator, we we worship you. We praise you for who you are and all the things that we sang here. We just want to acknowledge you and welcome you in this place. We come to you today with humble hearts, knowing we fall short of your glory, the same glory that fills the skies and covers the earth. We acknowledge the beauty of your creation. And feel the air inside our lungs yet today. We come to you with contrite hearts, acknowledging the division within our communities. We repent from our pride and ignorance and ask for your Kingdom to come on Earth as it is in heaven. Today we seek unity, we seek reconciliation, we seek peace, and we ask for your hand today to be upon Jonathan, as he shares with us, bless him abundantly. And we ask this in the Holy name of Jesus and all people say Amen. Let's, let's welcome Jonathan. To the stage.
Goa. Thank you. It's good to be here. Our traditional greeting Speaking of traditional. What is traditional? Well to me, this is traditional my rattle. My guitar. My flute. My drum. These are the things that. So many years ago were taken away from us. Because they were called heathen. But today I hope to show you how beautiful these things can be used to worship God. And so I want to start out first by doing a a protocol and this protocol is called Indian giving. An Indian giving is not what you might think, but the slur that came against indigenous people here in Turtle Island in North America. Was that our people would give and take back. When the truth is that Indian giving was truly something that was far deeper than that. Our people group and our culture said that Indian giving was when you arrive at a place where you're just beginning a relationship, you always come with a gift and you as a leader extend that gift to the person that is in charge or the person that has called you to come. And so the old elder spoke to me and he told me Indian giving is vital for this modern world for us to be able to realize that we have to build relationship with one another. As I looked this morning across the front and saw all the different beautiful cultures that were represented. It was lovely and I loved the song and I loved how it was brought in a good Western way. And I wonder. How beautiful it can be when we can do that through the expression of our cultures? And so I've been a I guess you'd say a cultural rebel for 30 years. Because I believe. When I first. OK, I'm gonna go back to Indian giving first. I'll get into that and that's going to take me on a ride here. I'm going to call my brother George up. George is the one who contacted me by e-mail and and we struggled to have a conversation for a month, but it didn't work out because I was on the road. I was touring. We just we just toured and played in Winnipeg and all across coming back from Winnipeg to this direction and. Anyway, I want to do Indian giving with you. I want to open with a a gift and I've got 2 gifts here. I've got like a a circle, circle which represents life and it's made out of sweet grass which is something that also represents purity and and clean being clean in your spirit. And so it's something my niece made. And then. I want to give you a copy of our latest album this album is called The Call of The Drum and on the cover was my good friend Brian Bright Cloud, a Chiricahua Apache, and he recently died and I asked him can I use your image for the cover of my album and he was. He cried and he said that you would do that but pretty cool looking guy, isn't he? Yeah. And so. By the way, my white T-shirt does have a coffee stain right here, just in case you're wondering if that's what it was and I was going to wear my nice shirt there, but I wanted to show my humanity. So anyway. There you go, brother. This is me saying it's an honor to come here to Tyndale. Thank you for calling me, and welcoming me to your community. So you know, I gave my heart to Jesus in 1985. I'm a Mohawk. I was living in Hollywood, CA. And I was a heavy metal singer. And I was there to seek my fortune as a heavy metal rock artist as a rock artist, and my father was a missionary to indigenous people. So I grew up travelling from village to village to village and seeing the deplorable conditions that our indigenous people in Canada live in, highest rates of suicide, highest rates of infant mortality, highest rates of alcoholism. Our children; One out of every two native children still in Canada live in abject poverty. Our children are struggling just to survive in some of our communities across Canada. Our education system has really failed in our northern communities and you know we'll have a village with a school that has 900 students, have 3 graduates in one year. Because there's so many suicides in those communities that everybody is weeping and mourning and their ability to fight disease and everything is so low that they're rampantly struggling with disease and lack of support. And these kind of things have put us in a really difficult situation. But I'm here because I want to make you aware of that here at Tyndale so that you can begin to pray that God will begin to open your eyes so you can see the struggle and the hardship that our people go through, but I'm going to start all of this off right now with just some sweetness for you, a little bit of Maple syrup. This is called the Mohawk wind flute, and I make wind flutes and I sell them. I've made 602 wind flutes so far.
That's not one of the things you usually hear in Western church. And I'm going to sing a song for you called our prayers. It's the first song in the album that I just gave you, and it's a song that talks about the prayers of our people prior to the coming of the white man. Got you.
So in 1985, I met Jesus. And I saw it for a church. You know, I went from church to church to church looking for, and because I was. Actually, I'll tell you really quickly. I was living in Hollywood. Life had gone downhill. I was opening for all kinds of big bands, but there was this loneliness. There was this empty spot in my soul and my spirit. I was missing something and I began to lose my desire to live. And so this one day. I decided that I had made a plan and I was going to take my life. But right before I did, I remembered something my father said to me before I left Canada to go to California. Of course, my dad was totally against me going, a missionary, you know and everything. And he looked at me as I climbed on the bus in Belleville ON he said “Jonathan, Son, when your backs against the wall and you have nowhere to turn, call out on Jesus” and I can remember looking down at him on the ground as I'm standing up on the steps of the bus and I went “I don't need Jesus”. 2 1/2 years later, I'm sitting in my apartment and I'm writing this song and I figured this would be my final song in my life and it would be the greatest Blues song ever written because I was the most lonely, the most broken that I'd ever been in my life. And so I sat there and I began to write this song. And when I played it back to myself, it made me feel worse. So it was probably a great song. I crumbled up the paper and I threw it in the garbage and I started to cry. And then those words that my father said to me “when your backs against the wall and you have nowhere to turn and call out on Jesus” and I put my face in my hands and I said “Jesus help me.” As I cried. And then the phone rang. You'll never guess who it was. It was my father's or don't get Neha. He was listening the whole time, waiting for the Holy Spirit to tell him. He called, said “son, I'm coming to see you. I'm coming to California to see you.” I said “Dad, you don't want to see me.” And I said, “what made you call me at this time?”, he said “Your brother” my brother, who is absolutely one of the greatest sinners I know. Drinks and drugs and everything. My father was talking to him that day and my father told him he was coming to see me, he said “I'm going down to see Johnny.” My brother said “Ohh you don't wanna go see Johnny like that” He says “you better call him first.” And so my father took my brother's advice. He got on the phone and he called me at the moment when I was ready to do the deed. I came back to Canada. I met Jesus shortly after that in a little church in in Florida. But I came back to Canada and realizing that I was going to leave that behind me, that the that the that the rock'n'roll was killing me. And I came back dedicated, wanting God in my life, wanting Jesus, wanting that love, needing to fill that lonely gap that was in my life. And so I was searching to find the place to be where I could find Jesus in the greatest possible way that I could, and I went from church to church to church. Looking for that Pastor who loved Jesus in the kind of way that I wanted to be like, and I found one in Kingston ON and this pastor. Just all you had to do was say Jesus and he'd cry, you know, he was like, so so in love with Jesus that merely the mention of his name made him made him want to weep. And I said that's the way I want to be. That's what I want because my people, I can go to my people. And bring them this kind of love. That's what they need. And so anyway, I started going to the church and the pastor asked me if I would become a worship leader. And I, I'm like I said “no. Well, I don't sing anymore. I don't sing. I quit singing because I'm just seeking God. I'm focused on God, cause singing was my God. It was my idol.” And so I started. He asked me if I would, and so I started leading some worship about 8 weeks into my time there, he said to me, “we need to go for a ride.” And so I went for a ride with him in the car and he pulled over to the side of the road and he said “I just have to tell you this.” he goes. “Jonathan, you have to give up your Mohawk heritage. In order to have Jesus.” I didn't understand. I was just a new Christian, but I didn't understand why I had to give up being who God had created me to be. It was very, very painful. And I looked at him and my eyes filled up with tears. I said “really?” He goes. “Yes. Mohawk are heathen people, and you need to adapt into. You need to adapt into the culture of Jesus Christ.” And I'm like. “You know, OK. OK. OK. Because most important thing to me was having God as the center, as Jesus is the center of my life.” And so I I for the next 10 years I sought God. I sang all the Maranatha songs. I sang all the integrity, Hosanna songs. I sang all the songs of the church, the hymns. Everything. And I I sunk myself into western worship. And then Elijah Harper decides to put on the Sacred assembly in Ottawa. And I get this call them knowing that I was a worship leader, knowing that I was Mohawk. Assuming that I was a Mohawk who wasn't ashamed of being Mohawk. And they asked me if I would come to sacred assembly and sing Amazing Grace in Mohawk. Ooh, time is flying. And. I said “no. I can't.” I said. And they said, “well, why can't you?” I said “because. I've been told that I can't follow Jesus if I accept my Mohawk heritage and I drum again.” And I was really confused and they said this is Elijah Harper. You know, Member of Parliament, one of the greatest native men in the country, asking you to come and sing Amazing Grace in Mohawk on the drum. How can that be so bad? And all I could think about was my church and all the people in the church and how they were going to reject me if I go and do the opposite of what, Pastor asked for. But I said yes. Because all the people that were going to sacred assembly were people in the Christian circles that I really admired. And in the non Christian circles that came were people that I really admired. Native leaders, Long house leaders, people from the Mishnah, Madewell culture, people all came spiritual leaders from across the country to form a think tank to try and resolve the issues of all this. You know that we make up a half a percent of the population in Canada, but we make up 30% of incarcerated people. If you think about that, if you think about those kind of things, you gotta ask the question why? And so Elijah Harper was asking the question why? And he wanted to get together at sacred assembly and figure it out. And so I got there. I was there on this one special night. It was between 4 and 600 people in the room, maybe a little bit more than what's here. And a room about this size, and I'm up. I'm sitting up about 3 rows back on the right side and I'm listening to this man named John Sanford, who is called the father of inner healing. He was part Osage. He was half native and. I don't know that he ever really embraced his native culture so much, but this ministry of his called Elijah was took off because of his inner healing and what God was giving to him. And he was talking and right at the very end of his speech he said there are walls of bitterness that are built in the hearts of the indigenous people of the world, he said. And these walls of bitterness must be broken. In order for healing to come. And this great big sack of potatoes came flying out of heaven and landed right on my shoulders. And it hit. These walls of bitterness must be broken. And I grabbed my pen and I grabbed my paper cause in those days, 1995, you carried a pen and paper with you if you were a songwriter. And I started to write. And here's the song I wrote. I thought I was going to forget that, didn't you?
So I sang that song. And I just stepped out of line. I wasn't a man under authority any longer because they asked me to sing Amazing Grace and Mohawk. And it really, you know. I really prided myself in being a servant who was obedient, but the Holy Spirit had just given me that song 10 minutes before and I knew I had to deliver that song. Past man's boundaries. And so I did. And on my right side, this lady, a white lady came up and put her hand on my shoulder and she said “I'm from Quebec.” she said. “I'm a pastor there” she said. “And I I come from a large Quebec family” she said. “And we discovered that our grandmother had Cree blood. And so we used to hide our grandmother in her name and our family. Because we didn't want anybody to know that that Cree blood polluted our good Quebecois French family veins.” And then she burst out crying. And she said “will you please forgive us for our arrogance and our attitude?” She said “I realize that the Cree people are God's children, please forgive me. Please forgive us for our attitude.” and 3rd row back on the left side. This girl stood up and she said “I'm denayer from the Northwest Territories.” and she threw her fist in you and she said “I forgive you.” And the place, you know, what happened? Everybody start going. Father. Father, please forgive us. Father, forgive us. Forgive us. And then for two hours. People came up residential schoo headmaster's daughter came up and asked for forgiveness on behalf of her family. And then I look in this native man comes walking up really slow all the way up the middle gets to the very front. Takes the microphone and said “I've always hated white people for what they've done to my people.” He said “But tonight I never wanna hate white people again. Will you please forgive me for my hatred?” And for two hours we stood and we listened to people come up and confess their unforgiveness and their offenses. And we had this time of crying and weeping. At the Sacred assembly. And I had already been booked to play in another native community in the north, in Quebec, and this was previous to me going to sacred assembly. So I was, you know, thinking. Ohh boy, this is so cool. I can play my drum again. God has put a sanction on that and it showed me that the drum was going to be the symbol of the restoration of indigenous people. So I'm just like woohoo super Indian then you know that looks white, right? So blue eyes, white skin. I'm English, Scottish and Welsh. And Mohawk and I've grown. I've lived on reservations all my life. But, you know, I was so excited. So here I am. I go up to Billy Diamonds Reserve with Skegness, Quebec and I, they have me there to do my Maranatha interpretations and my integrity Hosanna stuff, you know, but I got there and I started with that song and went. And the elders were going like this to me when I finished. And I came down and they said “You must leave our village. We no longer want to hear anymore of what you're bringing to us. Because it's not of God.” You see the very same message that I got when my pastor said you have to give up your Mohawk heritage was the message that has been given to our people across this land for century. I played in a penitentiary in South Dakota. Maximum security state penitentiary, all murderers and top capital crimes. And I did a concert to a group of inmates. And at the end, this tall Lakota man came up very handsome Lakota man and he says to me, I've always known Jesus is the way and I thought. Ohh great. Jesus is the way. Yeah, that's right. You got it, he goes “But I could never accept him.” I said “why?” He said “because they told me I had to quit being Lakota in order to have Jesus.” So what happened to me was not an isolated incident. What happened to me happened to our people as the Western culture came in and brought their denominationalism to our people. They said “You have to look like us and be like us in order to have Jesus.” When Jesus said sing a new song for I died for every tribe, every tongue, every people in every nation. Imagine what it's going to be like in heaven when our people are worshipping him through the expressions that God created us in. Imagine the glory. Imagine there are places that are doing it now. There are places where the worship the people all come as Filipinos. The people all come as Chinese. The people all come as African Ugandans. They come all different and they worship. And it is so beautiful. It feels like you're in heaven. And I was speaking to this one lady that was working at the Maru Cultural Center, and she. I'm talking fast. I'm trying to get as much in as, again, because I've done, my times over, I never even sang 2 songs. Maru Cultural Center. So staff at the place, not a Christian place, but it's a place where the world Christian gathering was held. And I walked over to her as we were leaving, and I said “so, what did you think of what took place here?” And she goes and her eyes filled up with tears. And she said “that was the closest to heaven I've ever been.” You know. I felt it was heavenly when this group of multicultural young people was up here singing. I was like, wow, I could get right into this. It's great. But that's just a piece of what worship is supposed to be. That's just a piece. I'm not dissing it. I loved it. And I love being a part of it. But there's so much for us to show you that our indigenous people have to offer the protocol that I did with George at the very beginning. When I give a gift that means that we can pass the trail together in peace. Because normally I come in and I'm ready to take over. Right. So I didn't want to beat George up. So I said I'm going to make peace with him right now. You know, I have a clink it brother. And when he comes in the room, he backs into the room because he wants to show you he's not coming to take anybody out. He's coming to bring love. So can I play one song? I'd play 16 if you want, but I know that's. Not. I've just finished touring all across Canada for we were in Winnipeg and then then a bunch of stuff in Toronto and just all over the place and we're seeing some really amazing things take place and and I'm really honored to come here and be with your student body and all of you guys. Can I just say this to you? How much I love you. And how much it is important that we embrace one another as brothers and sisters. I'm sure that's already a part of what you guys learn here, but going beyond ourselves and becoming a part of the family. Brothers and sisters, before I was a Christian, I used to mock Christians that called each other brother and sister. I thought it was the weirdest thing, you know. But once I got hold of Jesus and he got ahold of me. He showed me how important it is that we see each other as brothers and sisters. I've got so many songs to sing.
May the love of Jesus Christ abound here. May he bind our hearts together with chords of love that can't be broken. Could I just finish with a prayer in Mohawk, please?
Thank you, Lord. Thank you for all that you give us. In Jesus’ name amen.