Saturday, 13 September 2014

“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.




[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.

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