Pudding first?

  

It rolls around every 1548 songs or so, and sends shivers down my spine. “How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?”

I wasn’t cool enough to be a Floyd fan at the time. Of course I owned Dark Side of the Moon, and (probably with some chemical enhancement) oohed and aahed to the sound of a circling aeroplane and its scream-laughing souls (or at least that’s what I heard on “On the Run,”) and sneered at the kerchunk of cash registers on “Money.”

I was older, happier and unenhanced when The Wall came out.

But I went through a brief period when I swallowed the Kool-Aid about demons sneaking out of vinyl. Thanks for nothing, Bob Larson. I broke my copies of a Kate Bush, a Joe Walsh, and a Jethro Tull, then decided,

a)      they were too hard to break, and

b)    what the [add initial letter of your choice]?

 

Besides I was busy pretending to be intellectual by then, reading Marx, Joyce, Fanon, Hesse.

Reading.

Pretty sure I never understood them. But if Bob Larson, who wrote a book about demons sneaking out of vinyl records, had been reading instead of listening he would have had even more apoplexy than he did. Does? Tearing books up is so much more difficult than snapping vinyl.

So … I was only vaguely aware of The Wall when one track from it, “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2),” smashed the airwaves. I was in a painting gang and a uni student at the time, and it came on the radio often. “We don’t need no education,” the kids chanted. I wasn’t sure. I was kind of enjoying my education. I was pretty sure neither Kate Bush nor Frantz Fanon was trying to control my thoughts. 

Maybe just make me think? But not think too much, up my painter’s ladder.

Many years, holy moly, decades later I began to think about the poor old school master’s (yes: master’s) tortured cry: “How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?”

How many assumptions dwelt deep in my psychological DNA? Though almost twenty years younger than Pink Floyd, I too had heard the chant of the school master. “How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?”

Or versions of it. How can you have sex if you’re not married? How can you enter a church if you’re gay? How can you attend an elite school if you’re Māori?[1] Oh … and a woman has no right to choose, when raped, tricked, manipulated into unwanted pregnancy?

To my shame I heard them all. And stayed silent. Or repeated empty slogans.

Dear God, they were far more demonic than a Kate Bush song about “The Man with the Child in his Eyes.”

For heaven’s sake, Mr Larson, Kate Bush was 13 when she wrote that, and not heavily into devil worship.

Or Jethro Tull opining “In the beginning Man created God …”. For heaven’s sake, Mr Larson: Ian Anderson and his mates were humans on a journey, entitled to explore the meaning of the universe, surely?

In my sermon last week, posted on this blog and my other one, I referred to what I called “the demonic distortion of Christianity that is Christian Nationalism.”

That flag covers many things. Distorted Christianity – distorted and therefore demonic, anti-God – which sees a nation’s flag as equal to or more important than the Cross of Christ, the compassion of Christ, the inclusive welcoming manaakitanga of Jesus.

Which sees “thou shalt not” as a bigger message than “come.” Which waves easy flags.

It’s easy to point at a pregnant woman and say “sinner” (and forget that not many pregnancies are the result of parthenogenesis).

It’s easy to fixate on forms of sexual encounter that don’t match our preferences and condemn them with a few sloppily chosen passages from our scriptures. It’s easy to decide Black Lives Don’t Matter, because … well … fear. 

It’s easy, too, to say that international aid is some kind of squandering frivolity, socialist plot, fraudulent waste. It’s harder to face up to the reality that the moment it was cut mothers and children began to die in the Umpien Mai refugee camp on the Thai-Myanmar border.

It’s harder to care.

Do Refugee Lives Matter?

Scripture shared by Jews and Christians alike say God cares. Does God, if there is one, care more for American Christian Nationalism than for dying mothers, for children, 13,000 kilometres from Mr Trump and Mr Musk’s desk?

The school master of The Wall was wrong, and no doubt deeply frightened. But sometimes we must see where the fears come from.

It’s easy to decide you can’t have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat. It’s so much harder to decide whether that really is the will of a welcoming God, or just a truculent assumption based on laziness, privilege, entitlement, bigotry.

Just an educated guess, based on (at least) two great faith traditions, but I think God cares a whole heap more about dying children and disproportionate numbers of black lives prematurely curtailed, about mothers dying of backyard abortion, than about what consenting adults do with their genitals and which books children read in a school or public library.

Christian Nationalism, and the power-mongers using it to feather their nests, are demonic. Anti-God.

Sometimes pudding is compassion. Sometimes insisting on meat first is no more than a flag of self-righteousness.

 (Woke? Me? You betcha)

Edited to add: in an attempt to put some money where my "mouth" (keyboard?) is I am delighted to link to  a gogetfunding campaign established by my brother, John 

---

[1] Thinly disguised, that was often a debating topic. 

where the light gets in: YOU

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

Thematic - not seasonal. Taken May 2018

and ST PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

ORDINARY SUNDAY 5 (February 9^th), 2025

 

READINGS

Isaiah 6: 1-13

Luke 5: 1-11

 

So many themes run through these readings – even as we operate under a reduced number of them! – and it’s kind of fitting as I climb back into the saddle after unexpected down time to lay a few themes down. Briefly!

The greatest theme here is that of the gentle, persuasive love of and patience of God. In the two passages we have, the calling of Isaiah and the calling of Simon Peter and the gang, the word of God is invitation, not enforcement. It is not the language of a big stick, but of compassion. “Let me show you a more excellent way” as the Apostle Paul puts it in Corinthians.

In a hymn we’re not having today– (you wouldn’t expect me to be that organized despite a new year!) – we find a beautiful expression of God’s invitation:

“O Love that will not let me go,

I rest my weary soul in thee.

I give thee back the life I owe,

that in thine ocean depths its flow

may richer, fuller be”

Too often we portray our Christ as waver of sticks and builder of barricades. “Thou shalt not.” Be who you are not before you enter here. While I’m not a believer in stickers on churches that engage in forms of virtue signalling, I believe our task is to be, as the Isaiahs and Peters were called to be at cost – walking advertisements of God’s Manaakitanga.

God’s unending, timeless welcome: come. Come to me all you who are weary.

Perhaps in the liberal end of the church to which I subscribe – as you’ll see in what I’ve written on the Isaiah passage (***see below***), and discussed online in the Gospel passage – I err too far to the obviously sociologically disadvantaged?

Years ago, David Sheppard, Bishop of Liverpool (and useful batter for England) described it as a “bias to the poor.” Or as Bishop Budde put it more recently, reminding the world that poverty otherness are vulbnerable places to be;  “… for some, the loss of their hopes and dreams will be far more than political defeat, but instead a loss of equality and dignity and their livelihoods.”

But Mr Trump and Mr Musk are welcome here too.  I live in the top tiny per centage of the world’s wealth and power. I am judged too. I am a Cisgendered Caucasian male. I am judged too. That’s why (though this is counter Mr Trump) we, in the old language, “acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed by thought, word, and deed.”

We say sorry. We aren’t who we should be. We say, again with Paul, “what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do,” and, “I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.”

We are called to do better, and it is a lifetime of learning and stumbling and learning. I’m pretty boring but there’s plenty of scorch marks and stumbling in my story. I do not share Mr Trump’s demonic belief in self-perfection. I have much to say sorry for. Not least my wealth, my status in the 3%, a rich Christian in an age of hunger,” as Ronald Sider put it years ago.

Yet for all my failings, perhaps our failings, we are called to be a tithe, a 10%, a remnant in the world who dare to believe in the hope and the love and the light of God, seen in Christ. Who dare to believe that neither my sin nor the sin of the world we live in is the final word on existence, even in an age of catastrophic global warming and the collapse of the world’s biggest empire.

We are called to be a sign, however flawed. And there will be some who pass through our world and even through our own small lives, who we never forget as signs of love and hope and faith. And that will always involve compassion and active work towards justice towards those most disadvantaged.

No matter what the demonic distortion of Christianity that is Christian nationalism might say, acts and programmes of compassion such as Black Lives Matter, such as Bias to the Poor, such as compassion and justice for the wretched of the earth, are not an optional extra for those of us who are called to be bearers of Christ.

We are in one of history’s apocalyptic eras. There have been many before and there may be many again. But these are the times when the hard work of faith becomes super-critical. We are called again and again to open our hearts to the light that we encounter in following and in worshipping the Jesus who is revealed to us in scripture, tradition, liturgy, and reason.

May God help us to be bearers of light.

 

 

 

ON ISAIAH's CALLING:

Isaiah 6: 1-12 

This famous passage is what scholars call a calling—a phrase that you may have encountered if you have been a part of a “local shared ministry” or similar faith community. Unusually the Isaiah narrative puts it some way into the prophet’s story, but that can remind us that every journey differs. It’s representative of your encounter with God and mine: we are here, and, whatever the Richter Scale of our faith, this is where God has called us, encountered us this day.

But, annoyingly, having been poked by God, we don’t get to sit down and sip a cold beer and expect all to be hunky-dory. This is where the going gets tough … (and yeah, you may know the rest of the ad? But if we are the tough who get going, it is the Spirit within us who provides the tough: be step forward in Christ).

To what? I say it again: not all beer and skittles. In this passage Isaiah makes it clear it’s not going to be popular path. Late in Isaiah the prophet makes clear, whether we like it or not, that ours is not a path of popularity. Actually he makes it clear that it a pretty darned woke path, because, sorry to those who don’t like it, but God is rather woke:

Is not this the fast that I choose:
    to loose the bonds of injustice,
    to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
    and to break every yoke?

Justice for the hurting and vulnerable is a theme we will hear much of in coming weeks. And it has nothing and everything to do with politics (US or NZ) and it has nothing and everything to do with following Jesus. We are called to be the 10% remnant who proclaim it and live it.

 

His Bobness Unknown.

 

(The picture is of Dylan’s childhood home. Or not)

It was always going to happen. As a Dylanfreak (or Bobcat), even if not a film buff, I was always going to go and see “A Complete Unknown.” 

What a masterstroke the title is. It embodies all the ironies and ambiguities of Dylan’s life, at least as we can know it. Like the Scorsese documentary film “No Direction Home” the film takes its title from one of Dylan’s most iconic works, “Like a Rolling Stone.” The song is on the album “Highway 61 Revisited,” close to the period with which this brilliant biopic closes.

It is a sensible and frequently used marker for one of the great shifts of Dylan’s life, when he, symbolically speaking, “went electric.” He did. And he didn’t. He has and hasn’t “gone” many things.

Unlike Scorsese’s 2005 documentary, “A Complete Unknown” does not strive to embody so-called “historical accuracy.” Historians, and no doubt film makers (of whom I know less), have long since realised that such accuracy is impossible.

James Mangold and his colleagues tell a representative narrative of Dylan’s life. They start with his arrival in Greenwich Village. To do so is to preclude analysis of the years in which Dylan grew up in the small and, by American standards, isolated mine belt town of Hibbing.

Dylan’s unpretentious family home still stands, more or less unchanged from the 1940s and 50s when he grew up. Several years ago I stood outside it and listened carefully as it told me nothing.

It learned well the methodologies of its guest.

It is possible to sleuth around a handful of publicly accessible stories and glimpses of Dylan’s early life. They add nothing to the interwoven contradictory glimpses he has permitted through his lyrics, other writings, artwork and behaviour. He remains a complete unknown. Psychoanalysis of the spicks and the specks that he permits us is fruitless. Get a life.

The film masterfully captures this. It waives away the unattainable. Dylan’s family and first attested girlfriend, Echo Helstrom, to whom he perhaps alludes in his enigmatic memoir Chronicles: Volume One, don’t feature.

The infamous 1966 “Manchester incident,” when a lapsing fan cried “Judas” is reset in the USA, placed a year earlier, the male transformed to a female, and Dylan’s reasonably emphatic response loses an F-bomb.

Which is a little surprising, because F-bombs are not a rarity in the film, or one suspects in Dylan’s verbal repertoire: plenty more reverberate through the film, and it was a powerful moment in the Dylan journey. “I don’t believe you.  You’re a liar,” snarled Dylan back at the heckler. 

“Play fucking loud,” he instructed the band, all on mic and clear to hear near 60 years later.

Actually he doesn’t swear that often at audiences, or even in songs. It was a moment and the only moment really that “A Complete Unknown” fudges. That and Pete Seeger’s infamously and near-universally misrepresented call to cut the sound.  

Joan Baez’s “You’re a kind of an arsehole, Bob,” makes up for it. Or “Asshole,” maybe? Did Baez say it? She could have. Justly. But so was she, really. And that’s a theme of the film, masterfully cached in a blink.

But Dylan’s early successes and failures, loves and losts, school reports and sporting achievements ... the interests and hobbies and moments of his childhood remain in this film a blank page.

Dylan described (Marilyn Monroe lookalike) Helstrom as his “Becky Thatcher,”  an allusion to “Tom Sawyer.” Dylan is Tom Sawyer. 

His next chronicled girlfriend, the better-known Suze Rotolo, becomes in his Chronicles a “Rodin sculpture come to life.” 

¿Que? 

He describes both, publicly at least, with words that befuddle. Alice-Dylan is behind the looking glass. Behind the shades that come on and off in the film. 

Through a darkened glass.

“A Complete Unknown” obfuscates Rotolo. Deliberately. She serves to highlight Dylan’s propensity to use those around him, particularly his struggles with fidelity, to friends or lovers, apparent throughout phases of his life. 

Dylan: running. Dylan, whose station wagon in real life allegedly has “world’s greatest granddad” stickered on its tailgate. Dylan’s Triumph T100 didn’t. Life changes. 

Rotolo is interwoven with Joan Baez. She is tortured by Baez. Records (including Dylan’s own) indicate the truth of that painfully clearly. All was not love and roses. 

Both were phenomenally strong women. Dylan needed strong women. Or didn’t. But don’t analyse his relationship with Betty, his mother. The evidence is absent. The film didn’t. Thanks be to God. 

The Baez relationship has always been a symbiotic relationship. Rotolo, it is often suggested, was the one great lost love of Dylan’s journey. Perhaps.

Dylan has outlived both Helstrom and Rotolo, and it is tantalisingly right that we will never know more. Baez herself has and continues to trade on, not necessarily malevolently, her tortured relationship with Dylan. 

Symbiosis: symbiotically exploitative. Symbiotically beneficial. Whatever. Neither of these occasional socialists, social idealists maybe, is poor. 

The phase of Dylan’s life following this film features Baez prominently, interwoven with the story of his marriage to music and to Sarah Lownds. But while that is a potential film in the making, and paradoxically a convoluted film already made, I doubt any of us will ever live to see it.

That convoluted film of that period, the one that does exist, is “Renaldo and Clara.”  “A film that no one is likely to find altogether comprehensible,” as a reviewer said at the time. Four hours long, shaky camera technique, and utterly execrable. Tantalising. Brilliant. Don’t watch it unless you are as crazy as I am (and it has been 40+ years since I last watched it).

So what does “A Complete Unknown” tell us about Dylan?

It tells us that we will never know anything but speculations, spick, speck, flotsam and jetsam, carefully controlled by Dylan himself, and remarkably well respected by the film-makers.

Dylan created a persona, not only by giving himself a new name, but by manufacturing a myriad, myriad stories about himself. Dylan ran from his stories, and ran from people, and ran from you, and bugger it, runs from me. Dylan becomes like the naked man who escapes arrest in the garden of Gethsemane – he alludes to that story in what I consider to be his best album, but that is a decade-plus beyond the reach of this film.

But, yes, he does allude to it. Often, in his lyrics. He becomes the one “betrayed by a kiss on a cool night of bliss" in the song “No Time to Think” on the album “Street Legal.” Google the cover of that album. Dylan peering out, appearing to ascertain the risks of the world around him whilst knowing he never can.

But we are back in the early 1960s in this film. Back when Dylan tried “to harmonize with songs / The lonesome sparrow sings.” That was never going to be easy. Sparrows fall. 

Like the naked man of Mark’s gospel Dylan escapes capture.  He is the one who will never be imprisoned on celluloid, pixel, print or canvas. Dylan is (and I think this is no accident) the "the man in the macintosh,” of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Google!

Dylan has ferocious lawyers. Try citing his works in print and you will soon hear from them. But that too is highly symbolic. His two wives, Sarah and, later, Carolyn, remain tight lipped. His descendants likewise – though his son Jakob occasionally provides carefully vetted glances which tell us little.

This is the man who was hounded by A. J. Weberman, self-proclaimed garbologist who trawled through the songwriter’s garbage bins to find the meaning of a life disguised.

Dylan will always slip away. 

That is what “A Complete Unknown,” its outstanding cast and crew, capture sublimely. Dylan will never be the property of folk, or electric, political gospel or any other form of music or writing. Will never be owned by his producers and managers or even friends. He was the “property of Jesus,” he told us at one stage. But was he? Yeah, I reckon, but I am a universalist. 

Dylan was and is running endlessly. 

Dylan will always be, until and long after he isn’t, the m-dash between dates. Dylan will always be a captivating, infuriating inspirational complete unknown. Until there are no shades. 

a day after

A DAY AFTER THE WEEK BEFORE 

I hope, as I write this, I do not do so from my own political bias, which I prefer to keep out of my church-based writing and my preaching. Blind Freddy of course could tell what it is, though even Blind Freddy is not right all the time.

But as I tried to say an eternity ago in last week’s column, I have no understanding of economics. Pundits tell me that largely drove the US election outcome. Before an eternity ago (Tuesday) a lot of sources told me that those signs were good: better than in 2026 to 2020. The Democrats were clearly abysmal at getting that message across amidst the white noise of election fever (which seems to go on for four years in the USA). Ah well. What’s done is done,” as Lady Macbeth muttered. I support democracy, though in an ideal world I would probably support benevolent dictatorship. It saves a lot of money and stress, but sadly tends not to stay benevolent for long. Maybe Ataturk did?

So yeah, I don’t want to talk Right or Left. Democracy suggests both have strengths and weaknesses. Let’s not go there.

But I want to talk decency. I want to talk Christian witness. I want to talk Christlikeness. Even in politics. And I acknowledge, by and large we do it quite well in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Perhaps a little less so in the USA? By and large we don’t say things like “In two days, we are going to take out the trash …” and then name our opponent. (“Chris” covers both sides of our politics!). We don’t, however disingenuously, suggest guns should be pointed at our opponent, whether referring to firing squads or the theatre of war.

Having landed on the wrong side of the US equation this past week I must practice what I preach. Maybe I’m a drama queen? Maybe I catastrophise? Bluntly I am very scared of the next four years. But be that as it may I am faith-duty bound to pray for the leadership (because US leadership is world leadership).

But: benefit of the doubt, for now. Perhaps threats to “round up” illegal immigrants, despatch “the enemy within,” or that a special counsel should be “thrown out of the country” are okay? Maybe, if they are just rhetoric?

But wait: loose words are dangerous. They give permissions to those who are mentally unstable. We saw that on January 6th, 2021. “Stand up and stand by” excited some very dangerous people.

Many American Christians have moved into dangerous territory, alongside many Americans of every persuasion. As Christ-bearers we must pray for and support our elected leaders, until we mustn’t. And then, God forbid, if a time comes when a government becomes anti-decency, anti-human, anti-Christ, there’s a long and time-honoured path of passive resistance and non-violent action.

May that never happen, either in the USA or here. But it could.

 

  

a week before

SOME THOUGHTS A WEEK BEFORE THAT DAY

I am deeply aware of the pending US election. I don’t mean to be, and perhaps at a political and economic level it may not have a great deal of impact on Aotearoa New Zealand, maybe even less here in the deep south. I really don’t understand economics particularly. Some benefit from high interest rates, some from low. A bit like farming, really—how’s poor God supposed to sort out conflicting prayers? Rain, or shine?

But I can speak of faith and spirituality. One candidate in the USA is seen by some to be God’s chosen servant. Hmmm. God operates on a “by their fruits you shall know them” basis. By “fruits” Jesus did not mean economic outcomes. I’m not saying Ms Harris is a card-carrying Christ-bearer. They are rare, too, in US politics, though Jimmy Carter was (and at 100 still is) regardless of whether he was a good president or not.

But a person who encourages Christian Nationalism, a dangerous distortion of the gospel (unfortunately all too common in Christian history), who boasts of philandering, who is a proven abuser of financial trust, and who has at best a cavalier attitude to truth (even more brazenly so than most politicians), is not God’s chosen servant.

Okay. I don’t think Ms Harris is God’s chosen servant either. Or Mr Luxon. Or Ms Ardern, or—I dunno—the list around the world goes on. Nelson Mandela was, perhaps? But I certainly think Mr Trump’s blatant manipulation of fundamentalist Christians in his country is deeply evil. 

Okay, I can’t speak for the economic outcomes of right and left in the USA ... or here. But I hope American Christians remain very vigilant, for there is a deeply demonic tsunami of belief that hugging a US flag, holding an upside down bible, marketing a bible (printed in China) renamed after oneself, with added inclusion of a national constitution … is in some way the gospel.

These are not the way of Jesus Christ.

 

 

on absent Ys

 Fascinating.

The two most inspirational orations I've heard in recent years have been by young women.

Amanda Gorman at Biden's kick-off.

Taylor Swift and NYU's Class of 2022 send-off.

(I haven't hear much oratory from Greta Thunberg, but she's inspirational too).

There's some great role models out there, especially for young women, and often in unexpected places.

On one of my granddaughters' birthday, and ...

despite ...

    toxic ocean sludge,

        equally toxic orange buffoon presidential candidates,

                balding and lethal dictators,

                    climate, ecological (and sociological) emergency,

                                you name it ...

there is great hope.

(Other sheep, not of my flock, comes to mind, and that's important too).

Here's to my daughters and granddaughters and the world they can midwife. (Hey, those with Ys are great too, but they must catalyze a different sub-plot)

the universe screams

 when the universe screams 

There are  no words  when faced  with horrors  like  those perpetrated by Lucy Letby in England. I somewhat wish that, like the mosque killer in Christchurch, her name were now being wiped from history. Such names are searchable, but why bother? No words can bring those infants back, nor erase the grief from those who loved them.

How do we speak of God in such a context? Extremely cautiously. Evil and holiness continue to coexist, and not one of us is immunized from the former. As with natural  disasters  or  accidents we can  improve our odds, but  the parents  of those infants  in the Countess of Chester Hospital took no risks beyond the risk of love.

God did not stop the evil machinations of Letby’s twisted mind. God will be present, named or not, as tears are wiped away, nightmares recede, as those who are grieving are held physically and emotionally by those who stand with them in their sorrow. God will be present eventually even in the aching void of those who have loved and lost (including Letby’s parents).  But the word “God” might not. Ever.

Yet  we who are Christ-bearers  must  speak  that  word, still. 

How?  How  after  any  brutal  tragedy? Natural or human-made. 

How?

I am a “Christian universalist.” I believe that no one ultimately stands outside the realms of the salvation won in the Christ-event. But Letby? Or Hitler? Sexual abusers and mass murderers (and any murder is one too many)? Where is God when Lucy Letby …? Where is God for the babies who cannot legally be named, where is God for their loved ones?

God?

Ultimately if there is a God (I happen to think there is) then that God must provide answers. In moments of sorrow I hope Letby will spend the rest of her life (a far better punishment than death) listening to the victim impact statements of those whose children she has killed, the statements she refused to  hear in court. Then,  post-life, post death, my  theology tells me, she must spend whatever “eternity” is, facing the horrors  she  has  perpetrated,  until at last she sees, acknowledges, cries “mercy” for those horrors, and looks into the infants’ and their loved ones’ eyes. Looks, and knows, and seeks at last the mercy only her victims can permit and God-in-Christ bestow.