Believing in a rational world

 

SERMON PREACHED AT WOODFORD HOUSE GIRLS COLLEGE
HAVELOCK NORTH
A EUCHARIST OF REMEMBRANCE

 

Reading:              John 6:37-40

 

Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away; ³⁸ for I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. ³⁹ And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. ⁴⁰ This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.’

When someone that we know as John wrote down a whole lot of Jesus sayings and wove them into the book we know as “John” or the “Fourth Gospel” he did so because he wanted his listeners (for such they were) to encounter the awe and the mystery and the hope and the joy that he had encountered in loving and serving one the Romans felt was no more than a crucified crim, but who he and his companions though had in some mysterious way overcome that most horrendous of deaths, not by not dying, but by dying and rising again.

Of course in a scientific rational world in which we love we know that dead friends don’t come bopping back a few days later. We are human: we wish with all our heart that they could or world, but the silent space they leave behind remains silent, the empty chairs and empty tables remain empty, and the ache of a human heart goes on. In our world we readily mock silly people who talk to their imaginary friend and hope things will get better.

Actually they did when John was writing, too. They didn’t really think that loved ones came back and sat at the table where we last saw them, even then. They weren’t dumb. Yet something had changed for them, and it was something so powerful that they were prepared to die for it. They felt that in the experience of worshipping and loving and serving the now unseen crucified, dead Jesus – and sceptics then would refer to them too as silly people who had an imaginary friend – in loving and serving and worshipping this person (that few if any of them had actually ever seen) they found supremely powerful hope. They found hope for themselves. They found hope for their friends – friends who they had shared life and love with but who now were dead – and they found and felt hope for their world.

They remembered Jesus talking about something called resurrection, and they felt his presence so powerfully in their worship and in getting together to pray and eat and sing that they began to understand what he had meant. They came to believe passionately that sadness and loss and even death were not the end, though they remain a passage through which they and we and those they loved and those we love must pass. They came to believe, against all the cynicism around them that even death was just a parenthesis, a break in transmission, a kind of brutal loss but yet one which would not end the experiences of love and fellowship.  People then talked about silly Christians and their Imaginary Friend, but slowly the compassion and the love and the hope the Christian community demonstrated began to attract others, too.

Sometimes in our rational world it’s hard to believe all that stuff. And yet every now and again I experience something so uncannily irrational, so utterly powerful in its rumouring of a life beyond the merely here and now, that I cling as those first Christians did to this weird thing called Christian belief. Through three and a half decades now it’s seen me through some pretty interesting times, and given me powerful experiences of love and hope and joy along the way. So I guess I get what those first Christians were on about as they remembered their loved ones, hoped for them in Christ, and dedicated their lives to believing in Jesus.

Da'esh and the compassion imperative

Last week Assyrian priest Fr Aprem Pithyou, of the Ancient Church of the East in Wellington, challenged New Zealand to take on refugees displaced by the atrocities currently escalating in the Levant. I am not quite a pacifist, but I am no fan of the George W. Bush approach to international relations, either. To be honest I’m not sure what the political and military response should be when a terrorist group act in the way Da’esh are acting. I suspect they are hoping to provoke a western ground troop reaction, hoping that will garner further sympathy from Sunni governments, and that this heightened sympathy will translate into increased military aid to their aims.

As it happens I doubt Da’esh will succeed in that outcome, and they have probably pushed too far too fast even by the standards of Sunni-favouring governments. International Islamic leaders have spoken out against their atrocities, and the major Arab nation most antagonistic to the West, Iran, is a Shi’ite nation alienated and angered by Da’esh executions of Shi’ite believers. Nations such as Nigeria or Morocco, potentially sympathetic to Da’esh’s Sunni claims, are likely to be the melting pots of dangerous but disorganized hatred rather than responding as unified political and military units.

We might ask whether a united military response to Da’esh will achieve anything but more hatred. Logistical and military support to Turkey and the Kurds is the best response, but leaders like Obama have access to far more information than I do, and even Key may know a thing or two I don’t. If he is merely chest-beating (the Thatcher technique, perfected in the Falklands) then he deserves total scorn, but I cannot yet be sure of that.

What I am sure of is that Fr. Aprem Pithyou is right. Whether or not we spend tax-payers’ dollars on SAS involvement in the Levant, we should be spending money to host the refugees, the must vulnerable of God’s people. Fr. Aprem has pleaded for a far greater international (and NZ) response to the growing humanitarian crisis now no longer limited to Syria but across the Plains of Nineveh, as fierce northern winters approach. Many of the refugees have fled at gunpoint, leaving everything.

Many of those fleeing are Christian, and while this should not alter our compassion it reminds the xenophobic in our communities, especially amongst the NZ Christian right wing, that this is no mere bleeding heart wish, but a gospel imperative.

Let’s spend more energy and money on compassion than on militaristic chest-beating or pissing contests. Let’s open our hearts to the needy—and probably be surprised at the talent and rich diversity they might bring.

 

“Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep”

THOUGHTS FOR RE-PITCHING THE TENT

SESSION THREE: THE CHURCH BUILDING

Luke 4:16

When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read.

In New Zealand. post Māori renaissance, we might read this verse as “When he came to Nazareth, where his whakapapa was …”. The Greek conveys the sense not only of growing up but of immersion in a culture, not such chronology but Story. Luke, who has interests in establishment religion, wants his audience to see that Jesus is a pious Jew, however rebellious, and that he is from Nazareth – ko Nahareta tōna iwi. This was presumably because, despite the inconvenient business of having to be born in Bethlehem in the interests of prophetic fulfilment and Herodian politics, Jesus was known as a Nazarene. Some of you will be aware that, in scenes reminiscent of Nazi Germany, ISIL/ISIS/IS activists are painting the Arabic symbol (ن) nun on the doors of Christians, who they refer to as Nazarenes after the hometown of our founder.

Luke is keen that Jesus is seen as having a place of belonging for th4\e sake of civic authentication, but portrays Jesus also as peripatetic, and therefore as (as James K. Baxter put it of the Spirit) “blowing like the wind through a thousand paddocks.” Luke walks a fine line between Spirit of Place and having what the author of Hebrews refers to as “no lasting city.”

To the Jews of Jesus’ time place was critical – and the place de la place was the Temple. But by the time Luke was writing the Temple was gone, and the synagogue was the only remaining place of meeting. I can think of no similar transition in pakeha kiwi history. All that was safe and trustworthy and eternal was gone, and the temporary was all that was left. Personally some will have experienced a house fire, when all that seems stable is lost, but there are few comparable experiences otherwise. For the Christians of the Levant that is not true. For refugees everywhere that is not true. All is transient.

As for Muslims today, Second Temple Judaism developed a dual-strand sense of liturgical space. The Temple was the centre of engagement with God. The synagogue, or place of gathering, existed alongside it around Jewish communities, as a place where ten or more might gather to pray. This roughly parallels the place, respectively, of Mecca and mosque today, but only roughly. Christians have no equivalent, though Jerusalem itself (pre fall), cathedrals and holy shrines sometimes fulfilled the place in medieval practice. The permanent became symbolic only, and a balance was struck between apparent permanence and actual transience. At the time Luke was writing the balance favoured the transient, but as the second coming was pushed back, and as Christianity was concretized, until WW2, the permanent began to dominate the narrative.

But in either type of space, temporary or permanent, the koinōnia, the sunaxis (which is the same word as synagogue and as synod), the breaking open of the word, anamnesis and the sending out into God’s world continued.

 Luke 9:57-58

As they were going along the road, someone said to him, ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’  And Jesus said to him, ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’

 Very few people actually offer apparently spontaneously to follow Jesus in Luke’s account – this and the following exchange are the only occasions. Perhaps it is reading too much into it, but perhaps the offer is in a sense an attempt to remain tightly in control of the “offerer’s” life: I will maintain the terms on which I serve God and gospel. At any rate, both “offerers” appear to strike a stumbling block: priorities. Scholarly insight suggests that both “offerers” were effectively procrastinating: “I will … when I am good and ready.” By the time of Constantine’s reign early in the fourth century the holes and nests had come to take precedence over spontaneity, freedom and itinerancy, and as roots of temporal permanence (a deliberate oxymoron, because even then most thought acknowledged impermanence) and mendicant ministries were pushed to the fringes of experience. Even the monastic life slowly reverted from the eremos to the monastery, and slowly became magnets for capital and stability.

Huge cathedrals emphasized the dominance of the structure and the permanence of faith over the life-experience of the individual: builders and architects and benefactors rarely saw their work to completion, so they were not necessarily Ozymandiesque monuments to self-importance (“look on my works ye mighty, and despair"). The Lisbon earthquake of All Saints’ Day 1755, with its subsequent fire and tsunami began to change all that: amongst a myriad other monumental buildings the quake destroyed the Lisbon Cathedral, the Basilicas of São Paulo, Santa Catarina, São Vicente de Fora, and the Misericórdia Church, along with up to 100,000 lives. Permanence – and the protection of God, were irrevocably called into question.

The cathedral tradition was not destroyed, and the iconic survival of St Paul’s in London in the blitzkrieg of World War Two became a symbol of resilience, but the hold of the Big and Presumed-Permanent weakened. Ironically the not unrelated revolutions of the 1960s, the Beatles revolution ("Six Days that Changed the World") arguably instigated by the contraceptive pill, and its pious cousins the charismatic movement and the liturgical renewal movement that emerged from Vatican II, drove the focus further still from the Big and the Presumed Permanent: for better and for worse the immediate and the personal came to dominate narratives of faith.

The Son of Man stepped down from the Grand Extremes of the Universe to become the clown of Godspell. At the potentially higher end of popular culture Kendrick’s “Shine Jesus Shine” and Pink Floyd’s nihilistic “Another Brick in the Wall” became anthems of, respectively, joy-filled faith and faithless anarchy, but each had the potential to slide rapidly from meaning to vacuity by overuse. At the sugar-pop end of instant gratification the more empty-headed “Open the eyes of my Heart x 8”,[1] or the commercial and vacuous “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” became dominant expressions of nothingness.

Somewhere out on the fringes though there was another voice: hand in hand with the vacuously sentimental, there grew consciousness of the Divine in the Everyday, the centrality of the symbol of the agape-meal, the treasuring of silence, all tempered with the observation that the symbol is not the thing. Instead of representing the permanence of God by building an edifice removable only by calamity, we learned that there is greater permanence that has neither hole nor nest, which neither collapses in an earthquake nor disappears in a hangover: silence and stillness and reverence for eternity refocused on bread and wine and water, on minimalist sound and wordage; under Jewish emphasis on the white space between the words and ironically Buddhist emphasis on the sounds of silence, the sacredness of simplicity and silence reasserted itself, and a new understanding of the Son of Man with no-place began to emerge. In philosophical culture this was most spectacularly represented by Nicholas Cage’s three movement “Four minutes, thirty-three seconds”; in liturgical culture by the minimalist chant of Jacques Berthier and even the composition of Arvo Pärt. In ecclesiastical architecture and interior design it was represented by focus on the simple and unadorned yet eternal elements of  bread and wine in the midst of a transient, passing people, us.

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[1] “Open the eyes of my heart, Lord/Open the eyes of my heart/I want to see You/I want to see You/Open the eyes of my heart, Lord/Open the eyes of my heart/I want to see You/I want to see You/To see You high and lifted up/Shinin’ in the light of Your glory/Pour out Your power and love/As we sing holy, holy, holy/Open the eyes of my heart, Lord/Open the eyes of my heart/I want to see You/I want to see You/Open the eyes of my heart, Lord/Open the eyes of my heart/I want to see You/I want to see You/To see You high and lifted up/Shinin’ in the light of Your glory/Pour out Your power and love/As we sing holy, holy, holy! (Repeat two more times). ” Paul Baloche, 2000.

Cicadas

It was the cicadas that won. The deafening, ear-vibrating fortissimo of the Australian forest cicadas was dramatic, but it lacked the subtleties, the rhythmic Morse of the trans-Tasman counterpart. It became a parable of choice: in your face juxtaposed against seductive invitation.

For twenty five years the various guises of a harsh red island held me captive, not entirely against my will, thundering an eremitic sermon of nothingness. While most in the wide red land clung to the coast I sought the dust storms of the center, the ferocity of eco-systems that told me only of my nothingness, that I was an intruder, and that my intrusion was as nothing in the vastness of an unconquerable land.

The cicadas’ crescendo counterpointed the harshness of the inland’s deathly silence. Nothingness is your being: dust you are and to dust you shall return. The cicadas crushed thoughtspace, obliterated identity, and taunted attempts to hymn the universe.

Awhitu… karanga tangata whenua

 

 WHANGAREI

5^th January 2007

Goodbye: go well

The recent controversy over the departure of Hamilton priest Michael Hewat and most of his congregation from the folds of the Diocese of Waikato-Taranaki has, as is usual in the media, glossed over complex issues.  Sooner or later all dioceses face these issues, and as fellow-travellers we possibly need  more nuanced view than the popular press provide.

For one thing, this is not goodies v baddies. Michael Hewat, who I suspect it is fair to say operates from a theological and pastoral perspective very different to my own, is clearly a person of strong principle. His particular line in the sand is a matter of biblical interpretation with which I disagree, but I admire his integrity.

Helen Ann Hartley is equally a person of principle.  Her particular line is one of canonical and legal interpretation, that is to say application of church law, and she too is absolutely right to draw that line. To belong to a denomination is one thing (many Roman Catholics do not toe the official line on such matters as birth control) but, in purely secular terms, to be employed by it is another: the contested Motion 30 of General Synod that has become the bridge too far for Hewat is now enshrined in New Zealand Anglican Church polity.

Of course I disagree with Hewat, which makes it easier for me to pontificate about these matters. Although I am fairly conservative in doctrinal matters, I have long been persuaded that a) marriage has ever been an evolving contract (monogamous “marriage for love” is a very recent development, and was greeted with considerable scepticism and opposition when it emerged as a practice in the Romantic era. For what it’s worth, in the Medieval courtly world adultery was considered all but a duty, not that I am recommending it!).

If that were the whole of the argument I might never have been persuaded. In the end though I was persuaded (many years ago, incidentally) when I saw the vast chasm between theory and reality, as gay men and women were forced to live lives of self-denial (fine, if its voluntary), deceit (double lives are never fine) and emotional torment. Perhaps it’s little more than a “lesser of two evils” argument, but I could not believe that God, on the basis of the highly poetic sentence that forms Gen 2:24, would condemn perhaps 10% of humans to incomplete and unfulfilled and lonely lives.

Which is not to ignore the opportunistic and un-edifying approach taken by those who want to marry their dogs, cows, sisters, or sanction paedophilia: there will always be idiot fringes adding grist to the mill of the thin end of the wedge argument. I’m not sure I have much truck for those who want to marry while dangling from a helicopter, either. The NSW judge who recently declared that incest should be legalised was not showing particularly advanced intellect.

In the end I want to mihi Hewat and Hartley alike. Hewat’s churchmanship is fairly reprehensible and un-Anglican to me, so I might at one level be glad to wish him gone. But I don’t dance on graves: I prefer to wish him and his flock well. At the same time I am deeply grateful that Bishop Helen Ann has recognized that any body must have boundaries, the church included, and there are times those boundaries of authority and discipline must be drawn.

A racehorse in an ecclasiastical tea cup?

At secondary school I was often mesmerized by those glorious sweeping and irrefutable statements that spill unreservedly from the vocal chords of adolescents. Growing up on a cluster of isolated islands at the outer edge of a forgotten continent in the far-flung nothingnesses of an empty universe these claims were all the more irrefutable and thus all the more majestic.

“New Zealand breeds the best race horses in the world.” It sounded an innocuous enough statement, and certainly I had never seen a horse from any other nation win at our local track, so clearly the stament was definitive. From the krakatoa-esque eruption at my maths teacher’s desk it appeared he saw the world through a different set of lenses. There was a seismic shock centred on my town that day, and I quiver still at the memory of it. “It is,” Peter Irvine roared, “that sort of nonsense that that means you will never be a mathematician.” As it happens I had not made the statement, and the wrath that descended on the perpetrator of the misinformation struck me only on the ricochet: the entire class was treated to an oratory display worthy of Demosthenes. Statistically the claim was errant nonsense, and for the next several minutes the now long-forgotten oratorical misadventurer was subjected to a blast of mathematical demonstration that I doubt he would ever forget.

The glorious claim of a (now, in a global-village economy, faux-) kiwi soft drink manufacturer “world famous in New Zealand” has a more delightfully self-deprecatory tone to it. On occasions, visiting New Zealand or finding the drink in question in a specialist retail outlet on far-flung soils, the phrase would wring from me a rueful smile. The gradual eclipse of antipodean horses in that litmus taste of relative greatness, the Melbourne Cup, would demonstrate that, while New Zealand bred some pretty good thoroughbreds, so too did one or two other equestrian states around the world. Come to think about it, the long absence of the All Blacks from the coveted (in some circles) Webb Ellis Trophy would suggest that even the most seemingly safe of claims, that of All Black supremacy on the face of world rugby (which matters in some nations), was open to considerable debate, at least in those interminable years between David Kirk’s and Richie McCaw’s elevation of the trophy above the heads of an awe-struck crowd.

My humour then is stretched a little thin, then, when I hear stated or insinuated claims that New Zealand leads the world in any field. I am as proud of any kiwi of our little tin pot nation at the bottom of the world, and indeed my inability ever to escape its subtle siren call to come home  suggests that I have demonstrated as a choice rather than mere obligation in taking up my option to live on its shaky soils. But, while it has its moments on the world stage, and sometimes even punches above its weight, its glorious supremacy in most fields remains a quixotic narrative of its own imagining.

When I hear those claims being made for the life and attributes of the Anglican Church I fear there are even greater degrees of possibility of delusion. “Church” is not exactly a buzz word on either the world or the New Zealand scene, and, again, while the somewhat fringe dwelling Anglican community in Aotearoa may have many strengths, I suspect neither the world nor the ecclesiastical world trembles in awe or gasps in untrammelled admiration. The three-tikanga­ structure of New Zealand Anglican ecclesiology is admirable, but it is nor the Reign of God, nor even the apotheosis of pre-eschaton ecclesiology. It has strengths. It has weaknesses. To that extent it is a wonderful receptacle and vehicle of God’s grace. I am no expert on Icelandic Lutheranism or Tahitian Pentecostalism but I suspect they too have magnificent moments in which they reveal themselves as prolepsis of the reign of God, and I praise God for that.

Like many, I admire the 1989 New Zealand Anglican Prayer Book / He Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa­ (not least for its partially inclusive title), but amongst its jewels (compline and the house blessing services I would count as gems) it has many flaws (which may explain why it has become an optional extra or mildly formative reference in myriad New Zealand Anglican faith communities), and it is not necessarily the zenith of gathered (or “common”) prayer. At the risk of generating an ecclesiastical riot I suggest that some of the eucharistic prayers are wordily didactic, some of the congregational responses a little abstruse, the order of the Daily Office borders on bland, and the punctuation gives the impression, at times, of a communal experiment with a salt and pepper shaker.

Yet somehow I fear a variety of hubris has rooted itself in the psyche of this ecclesiastical community. The best race horses in the world? I recently heard a claim that one ministry unit was a shining example of collaboration that would infiltrate the consciousness and revolutionize the praxis of that unit’s region, its diocese, the national church and indeed the world. Whether the world that was about to be revolutionised by this ministry unit’s praxis was merely the Global North (or are we South in this downward spiralling edge of the eastern hemisphere?) or merely the ecclesiastical world I was unsure. I’m sure it was not merely the Anglican ecclesiastical world, for such a claim would hardly be worth making, and would set its sights far below the expectations and self-understandings of the orator. We breed, after all the best race horses in the world.

I tremble, for in my imaginings even posting these thoughts will generate such a storm of rage that the entire world will quake, and emperors and presidents alike will take sides on the finer details of eccentricity o Aotearoa. Alternatively, of course, the storm may merely spill over the edge of a teacup – or perhaps not even generate the beat of a butterfly’s wing and leave the tea unmoved. But when we become the summation and subject of our own adulation we do at times catastrophize. The new Aotearoa Anglican ecclesiastical praxis that was so lionized will, I suspect, remain a legend in its own lunch time, and Secretariat will remain the finest racehorse the world has ever known, even if not particularly world famous in New Zealand.

Sri Lankan refugees? What would Jesus do, Mr Morrison?

I am watching with deep distress the response of the Government (and Opposition) across the Tasman to the plight of the world’s most vulnerable, refugees seeking asylum. Since the middle years of the Howard Government neither side of politics has done anything but out-tough the other in response to refugees, playing off a perception in the community that waves of “bludgers” are crossing the seas, desperate to snatch Australian wealth from its rightful owners (who are, of course, in this narrative not the dispossessed Indigenous people but the Anglo-Celtic colonisers).

Lest this be seen as your too-Australianised Dean banging on about another country’s issues, there are New Zealand angles here. First, let it be said, that following the Tampa crisis in 2001 the response of the New Zealand (Clark) Government was exemplary, and the way in which New Zealand opened its hearts and doors to the refugees should have poured hot coals on the consciences of Australia. 150 Afghani refugees were granted NZ citizenship following that crisis. Eventually the Howard Government was forced to accept some as refugees, but did so reluctantly. Captain Arne Rinnan of theTampa was, in a snub to the Howard Government, named International Captain of the Year by Lloyds of London, even though his ship was refused entry to Australian waters.

On the whole New Zealand has been quarantined by distance from the refugees descending on Australia’s somewhat misplaced Christmas Island, 500 kilometres from Indonesia. From Christmas Island to Perth is a further 2,600 kms—and a further 5600 kms to the closest kiwi port (Port Taranaki, as kayaker Scott Donaldson could tell us). So far only one boat-load is known to have attempted that massive journey, and gave up at Geraldton, still some 420 kms north of Perth. There is some talk of refugees attempting to use the Pacific Ocean route, but the logistics remain huge, and a landing on the Hokianga or other west coast harbours could be fairly scary.

The Judaeo-Christian tradition however has some very stern things to say about obligations to refugees. So does International Law. The current performance of the Australian Government, particularly in attempting to hand 250 Sri Lankan refugees back to Sri Lankan authorities, is simply evil. As it happens, so far, the Abbott Government has been thwarted by its own High Court, but it is likely to find ways to circumvent their sanity. Sri Lanka reserves the right to imprison (and therefore potentially torture) Tamils who flee the country. Meanwhile mothers in “off-shore processing centres” are threatening suicide to save their children, and two Tamils have self-immolated rather than be returned to Sri Lanka. The primary ministers responsible for refugees are, incidentally, both professing Christians. They refer to the refugees as “illegals” and call the suicides “manipulation.” What would Jesus do?

I can only hope and pray that we as Christians in New Zealand speak out about the atrocities the neighbouring government are perpetrating (with Opposition collusion). I can only hope and pray that when the time comes for New Zealand to take its fair share of the world’s most vulnerable we do a better job, and that Christian voices are at the forefront of the demand for just and compassionate response. Let us hope our response to Tampa was not a one-off event.