A whispered prayer for MH370

One can barely imagine the psychological trauma being experienced, as I write this (Wednesday), by the loved ones of those on board Malaysia Airlines MH370. As is always the case in these terrible situations the desperate search for a media scoop leads to changed stories hour by hour, and anyone awaiting news of an intimate would be less than human if they did not clutch at every tiny sliver of hope amidst the conjecture. A drowning person genuinely does clutch at straws (to the extent they may drown a would-be rescuer). It’s human.

Some of you may have undergone similar terrible experiences to some degree. Almost all of us who were in New Zealand on November 28^th, 1979 remember the way in which sketchy details of the Erebus crash were released as the hours went on, yet the wait for discovery of a wreck that night lasted only a few hours. MH370 has now been missing several days, and rumours are abounding.

While the contemporary use of the word “closure” has been around since the early fifteenth century, the word has taken off in popular psychology in the last decade or so. For those awaiting news of MH370 there neither can nor will be closure for a good while yet, and I’m sure your thoughts and prayers are with them, as mine are. Closure is the least we can pray for, now.

But what when prayers remain it seems unanswered? I’m sure I prayed the night of Erebus. I certainly whispered a prayer when I first heard MH370 was missing. I pray frequently for the people of Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Palestine, and the list goes on until my prayers stutter into apparent nothingness. Is this but wasted breath?

There is a part of me that whispers (and spoke out loud at our Wednesday Study Group) that it may well be that situations could be so much worse without us stuttering what I call the “butterfly wing” of prayer. That of course is unprovable, in rational terms, but for those of us who choose to believe six impossible things before breakfast it may have some significance.

But—albeit equally unprovable—I think there is another dimension. If our God, the God of Jesus Christ, is the God of Easter, and if Easter and Good Friday are inseparably linked, then the Resurrection Hope is greater even than Erebus, or MH370, or God help us Syria or Sudan or the myriad hell holes of human experience. This of course would be cold comfort—probably—it I were fleeing chemical weapons in Syria, or fleeing the extreme hatreds of Sudan, but it is the very heart of all we say and do and believe as Christ bearers. “No” is not the final word. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is not the final word.

Into the darkness of the world’s pain we are challenged to keep on whispering Christ-light. It’s not a rational thing. Rational on the other hand can be so passé, and so hope-denying in times of deep despair. It’s sometimes hard, but I’ll stick to the irrational hope in a resurrection greater than death, and continue to whisper prayers for all those devastated by the loss of MH370 somewhere between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing.

 

Farewell and thanks for the conscience

News this week of the death of Pete Seeger, American activist and singer-song writer, left me in a place of introspection. Seeger (“We Shall Overcome”, “Turn, Turn, Turn” and innumerable more songs) was, more or less, the last of the generation of prophets that inspired the generation of prophets that inspired my generation. Okay: that’s a long daisy chain, and in any case, I’m hardly in the same prophetic league as the singer-songwriters, but we all live in our own shoes, and I guess as a stormy adolescent these were the voices that spoke to my angst, and I hope a spark or two remains in my belly.

Seeger never ceased to prick the conscience of the West. As my generation marched against the Springbok Tour we sang Seeger. Some years later, as we joined massive (but toothless) peace marches in Australia, we sang Seeger. Student protests since Seeger’s heyday have become more and more self-centred and obscure, a sort of devaluation of his remarkable and tenacious vision, but his songs will continue to be sung wherever human hearts long for a more just and equitable world in the face of human corruption and evil.

Seeger’s commitment to justice never failed. His belief in the labour movement in the 1940s, and ’50s, the anti-war movements of the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s and ’90s and … the  fight to clean up the Hudson River in recent decades, his battles against the corrupt and Neanderthal House Un-American Activities Committee … these were courageous battles against popularism, corruption, inhumanity and the dominant paradigm of selfishness. These were fights that put most of us to shame. Where most of us have stayed frozen like a possum in the headlights, Seeger actually had an impact on the world’s thought. His performance on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at Obama’s inauguration may not have ushered in the Reign of God, but it was a symbolic reminder that we’ve come a long way since the dark days of J. Edgar Hoover.

So we farewell a prophetic voice—like that of Mandela not so very long ago. I personally thank God that there are still around us those prepared to stand in the line of the great Prophets, the Isaiahs and Jeremiahs and Hoseas and Amoses—and Jesus—who dare to speak with a voice akin to the voice of God. Seeger was 94, and that’s probably time to sing somewhere else. But thanks, big buddy, for singing, and for pricking the conscience of three generations.

Being Community: address to a Civic Service

The Napier Inner-City Churches, Roman Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian and Anglican, share in a covenant:

Believing that God is One, and there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism; that God calls us to be one in Jesus Christ by the power which the Holy Spirit gives; that we are called to hold together the rich variety of our heritage and of our ways of worship within the one Body; that we are called to venture together in work and witness for Christ, and to commit ourselves to each other and to serve our Church and our City, as we celebrate the presence of God working amongst us to make all things new.

 

When I asked Parish Administrator Margaret to email Deputy Mayor Faye White to invite her to speak at this service we received along with an acceptance a slightly unsettling warning that she had attended these things before and found them distastefully long! I asked Margaret to shoot an email back pointing out that we had done almost all we could to pare the service down, and that the remaining variable was the length of her address!

I lied! There was another variable, and that was the length of my address. However I have promised that I will not exceed four minutes, and one of those minutes is almost gone!

So: two things.

One: I believe most human beings cry out for community. We are not good at community, as disturbing statistics of suicide darkly remind us, and as the horrible tales of citizens crying out for help while on-lookers remain unmoved, the so-called by-stander effect, remind us far more often than we care to admit. Suspicion and hatred of the outsider, enshrined in government policy across the Tasman, but potentially little better here, remind us that we do hospitality only on our terms, and by and large commune with people only if they look like us, behave like us, and don’t mess with our economic or social convenience.

Two: At the heart of the Christian message, almost (but not quite) more powerful than the Christian messages of hope and salvation, is the entwined message of hospitality, community, and compassion. Throughout the Hebrew scriptures boring law after boring law and nail-biting narrative after nail-biting narrative tell the people of God to have compassion, exercise costly hospitality, and to be community in the image of God: “It is not good that a person should live alone” says the narrative of Genesis, so that “male and female” God created us, to live together, love together, practice justice and compassion together in the image of the community God, the inseparable community God, the earth-maker, pain-bearer, hope bringer Father Son and Holy Spirit God who emerges from the stories of our forebears in faith.

Three: okay I lied again: there is one more point. It’s no good talking about this if we do not do this community thing. As bearers of Christ we must be at the forefront of the wider community’s life, rumouring and better still practising the aroha-love, the agape-love, the inconvenient and costly love that is at the heart of God. This love must be at the heart of our mission if we call ourselves (or others call us) Christian. As Colin Gibson puts it: “we are many, we are one, and the work of Christ is done when we learn to live in true community.” Of course John Lennon had something to say too: “Christ you know it ain’t easy.” So we need the help of the Spirit of Christ if we are to be the community Christ calls us to be, ignoring John Lennon’s plea to “imagine there’s no heaven”, but nevertheless working to rumour a foretaste of God’s eternal heavenly community amidst the confusion and loneliness of earth.

We’re under four minutes, so perhaps I didn’t lie after all! Let us stand and sing not John Lennon’s but Colin Gibson’s dream of unity.

Bloody Stupid God-botherers

Matthew 1. 18-25

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’ All this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:

 ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel’, which means, ‘God is with us.’

When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

[NRSV]

There is much huffing and puffing in Western society about this passage, about its dissimilarities to the account in Luke’s gospel-account, and the absence of such a narrative in Mark (or John, but that’s different again). There is also huffing and puffing of the “shock horror, virgin birth narratives were common in the first century” type, and of the “aren’t Christians silly to believe this imaginary friend fairy tale stuff.” Beneath these critiques is an unspoken or perhaps unrecognized assumption that the early Christians (like their later counterparts) were really rather thick to believe this coddle-pop.

Balderdash! The early Christians weren’t particularly interested in the bio-mechanics of Jesus’ conception. They knew that “parthenogenesis” (virgin birth) stories conveyed deep truth about the ability of God (or the gods) to transcend human expectation. The early Christians were willing to risk their lives not for the arguments about Mary’s sexual experience, which is no-one’s business (as her son makes clear, later, when he reduces to silence those who would stone a woman to death for her sexual activities), but about the ability of God to create resurrection-hope and justice-hope and aroha-hope through the life that passed through her womb. Actually neither they nor I had any problem believing that the God who flung stars across heaven could create (new) life in a virgin’s womb, but the greater issue was that their lives had been transformed from darkness to light by their encounter in worship and fellowship with the child of that womb, the Risen Lord of Easter.

Haere ra, Madiba

 

The cost of being dead is that we are made into whatever image those who survive us desire. I have sat through a eulogy or two in my time, but one of the first I ever heard was for a friend who died on my motorbike back in 1978. At least I think it was: the angelic creature who was laid to rest according to the celebrant bore no resemblance to the hard living, petty criminalizing, womanising, chemically enhanced friend I knew. Although I was an atheist at the time I swore I would never give a eulogy so false and empty—never expecting it would one day become my day job (though rightly or wrongly these days the celebrant doesn’t often give the eulogy). I swore too that the eulogy at my funeral would be honest: the trouble is I can’t do much about that one.

Nor could Nelson Mandela. He cannot control now what image he is recreated into. Saint? Socialist radical? Terrorist? Freedom fighter? I have  read those descriptions and a myriad more in recent days, as the entire world it seems (except North Korea, which has other worries) attempts to recreate Madiba in its own chosen image. We all do it: I like to emphasize Mandela’s faith and courage, but I bet when pushed he, like all prophets, could be unpleasant, cranky, doubt-filled: all the things we don’t want a saint to be. I suspect saints and prophets are the people we most don’t want to share or lives with: Mother Theresa, when once a woman was complaining to her about the person’s husband, replied “you should try being married to God.”

I’ve met a few genuine saints. The best of them made me feel bigger, better, more complete for their passing through my life: they focussed on me in such a way that I felt enriched, enlivened, invigorated. In many cases I never met them again. My life though had received new impetus, a new imprint of the breathings of God.

I have no idea what Mandela was like. I know though that he touched and transformed a nation that might otherwise have descended into brutality and bloodshed. Of course his legacy is not perfect: as I will often remind myself and you, we are as yet, as theologians liked to say, “caught between the already and the not yet.” The lives that pass through and enrich ours, whether we know them for ten minutes or a lifetime, are lent to us from God’s future, lent as it were to remind us of the magnificences of the eternities that dwell ahead, where lion shall lay down with lamb, and we shall learn war no more. In theological languages they are beatific glimpses, signposts to the road ahead.

I have no idea what Mandela was like. I know though that my life has been enriched because I lived in two centuries in which he lived. For that I am deeply thankful to God.

Bach, Belioz, Bieber

Justin Bieber is not necessarily a high rating figure in the discourse  (fancy word for “conversation”, but perhaps with a bit more implied) of a cathedral faith community. Bach, yes, Berlioz maybe, Bieber perhaps not. At the moment the 19 year old Canadian fading heart-throb might be briefly considering entering a monastery, though perhaps that is a long shot: devotion to the daily offices of prayer and indeed the rigours of community living have not to date been the hallmark of his public persona.

In fact at the moment, if my internet feeds are to be believed, it may be lawyers’ chambers rather than the monastery that most absorb his attention. A photo of him leaning over and lobbing a large wad of saliva on the heads of his adoring fans is currently viral in pixelland.  Bieber’s image minders (and, more ambivalently, Snopes.com) are in full swing assuring the e-world the event never happened, but no matter what they say there is a tsunami of opinion, however misguided, that it did. Spin is everything, of course, and we will never know.

Or care? Maybe not. The fame of the “legend in their own lunch hour” (with apologies to Barry Sheehan) of pin-up pop stars is by definition not long-lasting. Donny Osmond and David Cassidy are hardly household names these days (though Cassidy’s fellow Partridge Family character Susan Dey was the unrequited love of my life for at least a year). Some stagger through life from catastrophe to catastrophe, including premature death. Others, perhaps against the odds, seize their lives and make something less ephemeral out of their fame—Shirley Temple is one of the better examples of the latter. Who knows what spitting (or not) falling star Justin Bieber or twerking falling star Miley Cyrus will make of their challenged lives. We could do worse than to breathe a prayer for them.

The last suggestion is less fanciful than it might seem. These fantastical media creations are human beings, trapped in savage attention cycles that they feed on as fast as the media feed on them (the classic “symbiotic cycle” of destruction). They are humans—and while the media speculate on whether Miley Cyrus is bitterly angry with Jennifer Lopez (I wouldn’t know either of them if I tripped over them) we the public feed the frenzy by reading the magazines and watching the shows. Ultimately, when a media creation lies dead on the floor of a lonely motel room it is at least in some small part us, the entertained, the speculators, who have blood on our hands, for we fed the troll-demons that killed them. This is, in my books, what St Anselm meant when he wrote “you do not know how great a thing sin is.”

But, momentarily, the greater issue here is one of contrast. Bach, Belioz, Bieber … the world of Anglican liturgy and music, even of preaching and teaching has often ignored the ephemeral (temporary) and rejoiced in high culture—an Australian former dean and retired bishop referred to this as “salvation by good taste.” I defend high liturgical and ecclesiastical culture to the hilt, but it must always only ever be as a vehicle of deeper gospel truths, the truths of hope and redemption that can transform the most frightened human heart into a home for the risen Christ. The ephemeral is terribly—well, ephemeral—but never let us forget that it is to the Justin Biebers and Miley Cyruses, as well as the august and distinguished purveyors of high culture, that we are called to reach.

Liberate the Incarcerate

One of the many blessings of my new diocese (Waiapu, Aotearoa New Zealand) is the contractual clause that says clergy have two weeks “leave” in which to get house, home and life re-established after moving to a new position (or “cure”). Last week I took two of those allotted days to attempt to free my car, the first of two en route here, from the clutches of the importation bureaucrats. To be fair, I totally admire the work done by Customs and MAF—any heroin secreted in my glove box or crocodiles hiding in my exhaust pipe deserve to be arrested dockside.

Registration of imported vehicles is on the other hand a nightmare of Orwellian proportions (as it happens I am reading Nineteen  Eighty-Four). I carefully checked all available websites before committing myself to transporting the cars from Darwin, but could glean little. My removalists assured me it was a cinch: expensive, but a cinch. A chief wallah at Wellington’s Imported Motor Vehicle Industry Association assured me all was well and that my vehicles could be imported. Bring it on: I handed our cars over to disappear into the bowels of various ships.

Reams of paper, electronic and otherwise, see-sawed back and forth between Yours Truly, removalists in Darwin, removalists in Wellington, Customs, and MAF. Passports, ownership papers, compliance plates, VIN numbers and countless more were exchanged in glorious Technicolor, until last week I was told the first car had been released to Vehicle Testing Station Ltd. With glee I girded up my loins and, late on Wednesday, drove 300+ kilometres to Lower Hutt (via Raumati) to finalize the trans-ditch manoeuvres. I was armed and ready to replace a few damaged parts (windscreens and brake lights suffer the ravages of time), looking forward at last to driving my car home to Napier.

Not so. Vehicle Testing informed me that, although they had a copy of my proof of ownership and my passport, this was not enough. They had to see the originals. On Thursday I drove back to Napier, collected Passport and Proof, and made it back to Lower Hutt, ten minutes before closing. I drove back to my bed in Raumati for the night, 750 kilometres tired. All was well. Except that they forgot to photocopy said items. Back I went to Lower Hutt (I’ve always loved the Paekakariki Hill road …). They asked why I hadn’t researched my vehicle before I came. I told them I had and that the Imported Motor Vehicle Industry Association had told me it was fine. They said that no-one in NZ is authorized to give indications as to the viability of imports without eyeballing the car. I asked how, then, I was supposed to research viability—and they assured me it wasn’t possible, but I should do it anyway. I reached for my migraine tablets.

As it happens, and because I was so obsequious, they are granting me leave to import the vehicle … eventually. In a week or two, after they have stripped and checked it they will release it—at a cost—to drive alongside lowered hoon cars with nitrogen assisted clutches that scare the pants off all living things, alongside cars lowered so much they have to stop and drive diagonally over hedgehog carcasses, and alongside cars with flashing underbody lights. Fear not: I will one day drive my rather dull 4WD ute up Madeira Road. One day.

In the meantime MAF are very excited by one of our umbrellas, and many more days will be added to the 80 already past before our luggage finally arrives. And as for the other car …