Tightened zippers?

As we journey into Advent our liturgical readings will take us deeper and deeper into portents and portents of portents, into the surreal and the potentially scary. As we go home in the evenings (or perhaps as we walk out the  door if we have our smartphones attuned to media feeds) we will receive news reports of  portents and portents of portents, taking us into the surreal twilight realms of the potentially scary and even apocalyptic.

Back in another pocket of time, another apocalyptic moment, when (as I said recently in a sermon) Khrushchev and Kennedy were glaring at each other across the Bay of Pigs,  civilization was also dwelling in a twilight world, under the potential shadow of a nuclear winter, waiting with bated breath and tightened zippers.

Tightened zippers? Bob Dylan memorably wrote at the time

You’ve thrown the worst fear

That can ever be hurl’d

Fear to bring children

Into this world.

They were dark times and there really was a sense that procreation of new generations should be off the agenda, that this was endgame in Orwellian times, and humanity was subsiding into the deepest of doo doos.

Dylan himself has produced nearly as many children as I have since then, so I guess he overcame his sense of apocalyptic despair.  Yet we would be fools, as our pockets vibrate with the latest news from Aleppo or Fotokol, not to wonder what world we are giving our tamariki and mokopuna. Is there a future, either in terms of clashing religions, ecological destruction, or economic collapse?

The weird and wonderful biblical language of portents and portents of portents, or earthquakes and famines and insurrections, is not about Syria, Turkey, Russia, no matter what the idiot fringes of Christian distortion may proclaim. It is about ever thus and ever will be thus, from the time the first amoeba crawled out of the primeval swamp until the time the last human dodo, alone and frightened, curls up in a foetal ball beneath a dead tree.

But it does not end with that. It ends with hope, ends with the radical in-break of an unimaginable New Heavens and New Earth, of Hope with a capital H. Another prophetic (and love -struck) song-writer writes of having “self deception tattooed like a flag across my back / holding hands with war-mongers I feel I’ve been betrayed.” That is what our brothers and sisters who set out in hope to flee apocalyptic scenes may feel—and what any of us could feel one day if our small safe worlds were to turn to custard and to bombs. “I advertise the scars of middle classness like a shiny piece of junk mail” continues that prophetic vision of Greg Arnold. If our small comfort zones of routine and sameness, nostalgia and myopia were all we were to cling to then the readings of the next few weeks would be no more than a clanging gong or a clashing cymbal.

If though our comfort is based in the radical promise of Jesus, present in word and sacrament, reaching out to us from God’s eternity future, then we can look our descendants in the eye, however scary the world becomes (and it will) and whisper the words of Jesus-hope: “I go before you into Galilee.”

 

Remembrance, Because God ...

We Will Remember them ...

No-one in their right mind glorifies war, and we like to think we are in our right mind. Nevertheless this Sunday, at Ormond and the Cathedral, we will join cathedrals and churches around the world, we will remember those who died and those whose lives were unalterably changed by the war that changed the face of the world; we will hold them before God in prayer and song, in spoken words and in silence. We will hold in the presence of God our uncles, aunts, parents, siblings, those we knew or knew of, and those no-one remembers. We will do so because God ...

As Christians we are caught between the Already and the Not-Yet. We believe that in the mysteries of the Resurrection God's final defeat of sorrow and suffering, injustice and death was achieved. Yet in every war, in every newscast, in multitudinous conversations we hear of sorrow and suffering, injustice and death. As we remember those who died in the unimaginable horrors of 1914-1918, 1939-1945, and indeed every war and every injustice (and let us not forget Māori and Pakeha alike, all who died in the injustices of the land wars of Aotearoa New Zealand) we do so clinging to a strange hope that their death was not the end of life, because God ...

On Sunday we will sing hymns and say prayers and break open the word with these complex mysteries in mind. We will do so not as a people without hope but as those who cling tenaciously to the glorious hope of resurrection in Jesus Christ, that injustice, suffering and death are not the final word, because God breathed resurrection even into the death of God.

On an unrelated note, spare a moment to rejoice in the work our young families have done with the Community Garden. Already it is beginning to produce, and however small the crop maybe it is a reminder that we care for those who are not as fortunate as we are. Take time out to have a look (pull a weed), eat a lettuce leaf, and rejoice to in the work of Amy and Jennifer Whyman who completed the gospel proclaiming sign: "Go in peace: eat your fill."

 

 

on cling wrap and guns

It’s time these Pokes woke up, for there is much to poke. Originally I had intended for them to be a place to replicate the sort of sometimes acerbic, sometimes playful commentary I used to make first in the Central Western Sunday paper in central New South Wales, then in Allan Reeder’s Market-Place across Anglican Australia. I thought I’d reproduce my pew sheet commentary for a wider readership (if anyone clicked by). Perhaps I still will, and perhaps this will be a place for more astringent comment still, though I will never quite reach the skills of Georgia Lewis’ The Rant Mistress or robyncadwallader’s Write in Pencil Only. I note, too, Robyn’s far less narcissistic title! Still, it’s time this sleeping microbe re-awoke, so that my penmanship is not spent merely on Broken Moments and its long and potentially soporific homiletic.

So here I am, in downtown Loveland, Colorado, attending a conference that has been illuminating mostly for the wrong reasons but illuminating nevertheless, muttering profanities about stewed US coffee, observing snippets of the Great Hegemonists’ kulcha, and preparing once more to engage on the micro On The Road adventure that so far (pre-conference) took me from Chicago to Denver via Presho (as you do), exposed me to the Badlands and Wall Drug (and I could tell you which was badder, which was more devoid of goodness, in my books)and Mount Rushmore, and which will now hurtle me across the I80 back to Chicago.

US sport (though thanks to mine hosts I did manage to watch the All Blacks annihilate Les Bleus) has bemused me, US cuisine fattened me, and did I mention US Coffee? US politics has frightened me, US geography exhilarated me, and ironically my 700+ song shuffle has taken me again and again, 90% of the time, back into the voluntary hegemony of US colonialism. Well: except for “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep.” That was British. Don’t ask.

I won’t even go into the complexities of a society which wraps its apples (at least in this motel) in cling wrap for fear of salmonella contagion, but allows children to carry guns, presumably as part of the well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State. Nope, I won’t go there, because I want to get out of Loveland alive, and who knows when I might want to visit Presho once again?

So the sleeping microbe has stirred, and while you’ve escaped most of my ruminations on the delights of downtown Presho, South Dakota (a town that after some thought reminded me uncannily of Augathella in south-west Queensland), I will now surface more regularly, with whimsy and acid, to titillate the pixels of your iWorld (or execrable alternative).

Sclerosis of the Kiwi Heart?

The news of the increasing refugee crisis and catastrophe that is emanating from Europe and Australia, as well as the hardening of heart that is represented by the Trump campaign in the USA, should be interpreted by Christians as deeply demonic.

The Hebrew and Christian Scriptures make plain the responsibility of God’s people to open radical love and hospitality to strangers and wayfarers, the refugees and homeless. It is not an optional extra but an imperative deep from the heart of the embracing, welcoming creator God. Across the Ditch the attitude of the Australian Federal Government, incarcerating human beings on off-shore islands in a complex and costly (just fiscally, let alone in terms of  human costs) campaign of “not my problem” should have every Christian in that country bearing placards in revolt, initiating non-violent protest at every possible opportunity. Some are; it was heart-warming to see the Dean of Hobart amongst those risking arrest in a protest staged in that city.

Across the hemisphere the Christian communities are being put to shame. Iceland, one of the top 10% atheistic nations in the world, has just seen radical subversive action shaming its government: when the Icelandic Government announced it would take 50 refugees from Syria, activist Bryndis Bjorgvinsdottir began a Facebook campaign to encourage her fellow citizens to raise their game. Last time I checked 11,000 Icelanders had offered to open their homes. Statistically around 10% of those attend church regularly.

I was in Australia when the Howard Government there perpetrated its lies about “children overboard,”  and later turned the Tampa away from its waters on the stated basis that it was carrying 438 mainly Afghani refugees (this despite the wonderful impact Afghanis had had on the history of Australia). I was deeply proud of Aotearoa New Zealand, when we accepted over 150 of those refugees. Perhaps, like Britain’s Battle of Britain, it was our finest hour?

Because, despite the obscenity of Australia’s policies of off-shore processing, and the growing refusal there to allow media reporting on the shameful abuse of those behind razor wire, the rape, suicide and depression that are pandemic in the camps, nevertheless Australia rates more highly than New Zealand on proportionate intake of the world’s most desperate. Believe it or not, “Australia aims to host 4.7 times as many refugees per capita as New Zealand” [from a 2014 article by Murdoch Stephens, who leads Doing Our Bit, a campaign to double New Zealand's refugee quota and funding].
As a Christian community we should be  gnawing the ears of both (all) sides of parliament.

As a Christian community  we should be making conspicuous noise about the most vulnerable on God’s earth.  Though I am no organiser or politician I am hoping to get involved in action on this front in coming weeks.

Bong-smoking nine month pregnant teen-age mothers? Tut-tut.

Perhaps the most cutting edge mainstream media across the Ditch is multi-cultural TV channel SBS. Over the last few weeks it showed a short three part dokko entitled Struggle Street, exploring the lives of the urban underclass. Dismissed by some as “poverty porn”, and certainly risking the criticism of being voyeuristic, Struggle Street took the risk of taking the audience (by and large tertiary educated left-wing professionals, once dismissed by an Australian Prime Minister as “the latte set”)  into the quite unsalutary home context of those at the bottom of the heap.

The sort of homes Jesus would visit.

Obviously I can’t watch the programme this side of the Ditch but the gist is clear. SBS shows the lives of those who have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps,  turned their lived around, become wonderful examples of how hardship can be transcended. The response in the blogosphere was a collective outpouring of sympathy, of ooohs and ahhs of sympathy for those in Struggle Street until the final instalment. Then, when a clearly sub-functional family was shown wrestling with drug addiction, pregnancy, police-attention and all the ugly signs of life-gone-wrong, the blogosphere, twittersphere, instant-opinionspheres turned toxic.

What sort of home would Jesus visit?

Because poverty  is so romantic while it is all big picture, distanced, nuanced. When the reality of a bong-smoking nine month pregnant teen-age mother  becomes a reality, sympathy, empathy and compassion collectively expire.

Big picture compassion is tidy, sanitised and uplifting. Public statements, letters to politicians, hand– and hanky-wringing  public or private meetings sometimes achieve a little, occasionally achieve much, often achieve nothing. Significantly, if we can extrapolate from another culture and another time, Jesus was not overly known for attending strategic gabfests.

Jesus visited homes.

Weeping, grieving homes, about to be stoned victims’ homes, lepers’ homes, tax-collectors’ wealthy but hated homes.  I doubt Jesus blogged spewings of hatred directed at a bong-smoking nine month pregnant teen-age mother. I suspect he held her hand.

Or would have, had he been there. But, given that he has called us to be his hands and his feet, his body and his blood in down-town Napier,  from Maraenui to Poraiti [1] it maybe that he wasn’t. Few of us are comfortable when we are confronted with the image of God in a bong-smoking nine month pregnant teen-age mother. I include myself. I have a feeling most of us fall short of the glory of God when faced with the realities, rather than the romance, of poverty. Struggle Street is ugly.

[1] Locales chosen strictly on the basis of statistical income returns for the City of Napier, 2013.

skies of couple-colour

There are (well there are for me) moments in nature that take the breath away. The deanery spoils me: morning after morning the predawn light-show is beyond words beautiful, and because it is beyond words I shall not try. I am no pious dean, but there is no doubt there are moments when my gasp at the beauty of the rising sun becomes a stuttered prayer of thanks to God. For life. For the universe. For love. For beauty. “For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow.”

An afternoon 25 years ago on the Awhitu Peninsular. A recent walk on the beach at Aramoana in Otago. A desert moonrise in Australia or an ocean one from the Deanery (again). Cape Reinga, as the oceans clash (or nearby Tapotupotu, where once I camped with about 7000 mosquitos). Occasionally they are human moments: Salisbury Cathedral rising from the plains, St David’s Cathedral nestling in a hollow, and I’m sorry to say some of the great temples of Mammon: the Willis (formerly Sears) Tower in Chicago.  Or the beauty of a butterfly’s wing, a bird in flight, a riroriro in song, a haunting human-made musical passage (and yes, rock or classical, massiv or minimalist).

All these and myriad more will hint to me of the majesty of creation and its Creator. They won’t, however take me to the Cross, of which Paul writes so eloquently in this week’s slice of his struggle-correspondence with the Corinthians (1 Cor 1:18-25). The riroriro will take me to awe, but not redemption. Nabucco’s “Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves” will take my heart beyond the clouds, Vaughan Williams’ “The Lark Ascending” will take my heart above the clouds (and Meredith’s poem ain’t bad, either). Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel” (we use it on Maundy Thursday) will place my heart in my mouth.  Dylan’s “With God on Our Side” or “All Along the Watchtower” or Jewell’s “Foolish Games”  or … or. .. Or. And so on.

Taste is a funny thing. I have Australian Indigenous friends for whom western music is blah, but the vibrated drone cycles of the didgeridoo (or more accurately, the mandapul, at least in the  Yolŋu languages in the regions I was recently living: “didgeridoo” was a derogatory balanda— = pakeha—term) are a foretaste of heaven. I get that. I’m not sure I get vuvuzelas though.

But none of these will take us to the Cross of which Paul was writing. In many ways not even the great Passions (Matthew or John) of Bach or the Passio of  Pärt will, though they may take our focus crosswards. The great twentieth century theologian Karl Barth was right: the Cross in all its foolishness must always be revealed, not gleaned, and it is the Cross alone that takes us to the heart of God’s eternity.

 Benedictus


It startles.
Not in unpredictability –
      of chronology at least.
Kairology, perhaps?
Nor even unexpected grandeur.

Ginger, first, to the east.

Westward hues of violet, indigo –
      blue, too, I guess.

To the east: ginger.

Exploring, licking surface of
      drought burnt earth.
Silence blankets. No cough
     disturbs this drama. No fly,
no breath of wind. Silence.

Ginger melts yellow, licks further,
kissing gidgee tops, gnarled survivors.

Teeth even dare not chatter
until divine breath and obedient angels bid.

Unlikely herald: a far-off wagtail chatters.
Still further magpies answer. Ubiquitous both.

Benedictus benedictus benedictus

Day breathes.



FARRARS CREEK (QLD)
29th June 2004

outback dawn

In our living and in our dying

The name Kayla Mueller has not yet fully emerged into our consciousness as the face of  martyrdom, but it will. Or should. She was the victim of Daesh brutality, presumably execute but certainly killed in their custody, last month.  There is much ink at the moment serving both to remind us of her bravery and to suggest that she was deeply foolhardy, but youth (which most of us have long left behind) was ever thus, and the sheer bravery of this young woman should not ever be forgotten.

More recent even than news of Kayla’s death has been news of the cynical execution of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians. I personally have elected not to see Daesh’s videos of the execution or these martyrs, believing that to do so both plays into Daesh’s propaganda programme and risks that peculiarly Western voyeuristic sin of merging tragedy and entertainment. That sin, for me first highlighted in a 1985 book called Amusing Ourselves to Death, is a tragically western sin. It has come to mean that, en masse, we can no longer differentiate between the blood spattered screens of Hollywood and the blood spattered screens of television news. (Judging by debates raging even on my own Facebook page about Fifty Shades of Grey, which I abhor, we are confused about questions of violence and sexual entertainment, too). On the other hand it is a valid argument that sometimes we should witness brutal realities of human barbarism, to remind ourselves that we are not quarantined from humanity’s propensity for evil.

Humanity’s propensity for evil? I shall be emphasising during Lent that it is my and your, not some abstract “humanity’s” propensity for evil that we must address, as we, in the words of the Ash Wednesday rite, “turn away from sin, and be faithful to Christ.’

I elected not to watch the execution of the Egyptian Coptic martyrs, but have been moved to the core of reports that speak of many of them praying as they met their death. At one level this is a deeply visceral response to brutal and imminent death. But it is also a deeply profound response, a deeply profound witness to resurrection hope, to the Easter message towards which we will travel through a few light privations these next six weeks. In an aggressively rabid atheistic world those simple and terrified mutterings of prayer are a powerful message. God was whispering even in that deepest horror of human inhumanity.

On Ash Wednesday Bishop Andrew Hedge spoke of Lent as practising penitence, practising readiness to encounter the powerful and no longer invisible presence of God in our own death. We are unlikely to encounter the horrors encountered by Kayla Mueller or the 21 Coptic Christians, but many of our sisters and brothers face that daily.  May we embrace them in our Lenten praying. May we pray also that our lives be decreased in clutter and increased in God, so that we may embody those simple hymn words of Roberto Escamilla, and revisited by John Bell, “in our living and in our dying we belong to God.”

 

Where Afric’s sunny fountains?

In the post-Enlightenment era, as Europe became (seemingly) invincible and (seem ingly) great on the back of scientific discovery and method, the God of most church practice became increasingly removed from the grot and squalor of everyday experience.

The God of art became a massive human form, remote and with accentuated muscularity. The God of theology became a champion of national law, (“law ‘n’ order,” in fact), a conservative God who kept the poor in their place and the rich in theirs. Much though we love our national anthem I suggest that it was this God who was expected to defend New Zealand in Thomas Bracken’s words to our anthem, and to save the monarch in Britain’s equivalent. (Australia avoided a god in its anthem, rejoicing in a larrikin spirit of youth and freedom instead).

 

God became an aesthetic God, beautiful and remote and His (definitely His, with a Capital H) Kingdom became a glorious Romantic idyll. Much of our hymnody and choral music reflects this too, with the now thankfully forgotten “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” perhaps the most lamentable example:

 

From Greenland’s icy mountains, from India’s coral strand;
Where Afric’s sunny fountains roll down their golden sand:
From many an ancient river, from many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver their land from error’s chain.

If I am harsh on this era in writing and preaching  it is because that god of beautiful tropical idylls was brutally silenced by two world wars. The God of "dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori" died, as Wilfred Owen told us bitterly, in the first gas attack of World War One, and has stayed dead.

Theologians, artists, hymn-writers and others are slowly rumouring a different God. Black theologians like James Cone in the USA have been trying to tell us for years that the real God of Resurrection was found in the painfilled experience of their oppressed slave-ancestors, and hymned in the negro-spirituals far more effectively than in our great Victorian  Eurocentric hymns (however beautiful they might be) and canticles and anthems.

 

So if your dean bleats on and on from his soapbox (as he has been accused of doing) about a crucified God who is accessible to and biased towards the poor and the simple and the unsophisticated, it is because that bleat is a gospel imperative.  That is why we journey through Lent, that is why we allow vulnerable children to lead (as much as we are allowed) our worship, that is why we look to simplicity, rather than glorious aesthetic majesty on our journey: “For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?"

 

Let's go fly a kite, Mr Key

I rarely take a political line in my role as Dean (or any ecclesiastical role). I spent too many years in Melbourne where I saw the damage, all but irreparable, that was done when the Roman Catholic Archbishop Daniel Mannix took a stand against Communism in 1954, splitting the Labor (sic) Party and condemning the Left of politics to the wilderness for thirty years.  As a side-effect of his action he raised much public ire against the Roman Catholic Church, so that it, too, was marginalised in many social circles. Clergy for Rowling was small bacon compared to Mannix’s venture into politics (though just three years ago I was asked to take the funeral of a man who had never revisited a church since Clergy for Rowling).

This is not to say I will not speak out on issues of political significance, whether they be the politics of left or right. I have long muttered about the rights of West Papua to independence (a cause vigorously ignored by govern­ments of Left and Right), about homosexual law reform and its successor marriage law reform, about ecological and economic issues and about others matters of social justice.

But when I find Prime Minister John Key suggesting that he might use taxpayer money to bail out SkyCity’s $140+ million shortfall in building a convention centre I am almost – almost – at a loss for words. Mr Key, if media are to believed, has indicated that Sky City’s calculation has left them with two alternatives:

Option one would be to say to Sky City, 'Build the convention centre exactly at the price that we all agreed, on the conditions of the deal that we agreed', but it would be smaller I think than we had hoped and less attractive.

"Or the second option is to see if there's any way of filling that hole and to identify how big that hole is, and that's the process we're going through.”

I suggest a third option: SkyCity are an epiphytic (parasitic) organization who contribute to the destruction of the lives of those who cannot control their gambling. If out of the sheer monstrosity of their profits SkyCity can’t find a paltry $140 million then leave the tax-payer alone. It’s time SkyCity made a useful contribution to society, redress for lives sucked dry. They should pull out of the project and hand the vacant or under-developed block of prestige inner-city land to the Government. They in turn  should be duty-bound to give it back to the people: as a park. Green it over. Put a water feature in. Invite some birds to sing. Fly a kite, like Mary Poppins. Perhaps discretely place a budgeting / financial counselling centre there, but otherwise turn it to a park. Build space, build peace, build room for meaning and for the ingredients of truth so lamentably absent in public discourse.

There let human beings find peace and space amidst the chaos of commerce gone mad. At the taxpayers’ expense. I’d buy that.

 

"The cry goes up 'How Long?' "

Most of us are aware of the barbarous slaughter by Daesh this week of  young Jordanian Muslim pilot Moaz al-Kassasbeh. No words express the horror of this situation: that is precisely, if I can second guess Daesh, what these perpetrators of horror are attempting to orchestrate. We are meant to be horrified. Horror is a synonym of terror, and this is still a phase of the terrorism war into which we fell on September 11, 2001.

The picture is more complicated than that. As far back as the Fall of the Shah of Iran in February 1979, Arab and Muslim worlds were beginning to set about restructuring the arbitrary lines that had been drawn across the world by colonial powers. Long before that, in 1975, we had seen in the Oil Shock the power of the Arab world and its ability to bring what we now call the Global North to its knees. Whatever else we are seeing we are seeing the death throes of Colonial supremacy and nonchalance.

Nothing though, nothing excuses the deliberate manipulative horror of the execution of Moaz al-Kassasbeh and, previous executions, including Japanese journalist Kenji Goto. Al-Jazeera however note that the immolation of Moaz al-Kassasbeh is designed to take the horror of Daesh executions a step beyond the series of beheadings we have or heard of in recent months.

Daesh are not so dull that they did not realize that the immolation of Moaz al-Kassasbeh, young father, young husband, someone’s son, someone’s brother, would up the antagonism of Jordanian authorities. They wanted just that, we assume. Jordan has initially responded by executing would-be terrorist and suicide bomber Sajida al-Rishawi. There will be more blood-letting.

And more. And more. Blood begets blood and sin pricks on sin. Daesh knows but does not care how far these escalations will rise. They have seized the momentum and have the ball firmly in their court. They know the valleys and caves of the Levant well. It would be a brave person to say it in the field (I am unbrave, sheltering far away in a cosy office) but this cycle will break only when some Christlike breaker of hatred hammers swords into ploughshares, crying out “no more blood, no more blood.” That person will almost certainly die for her or his troubles, but only that and similar deaths will break the cycles.

We can pray. I think our prayers are likely to be stuttered, but they will be prayers nevertheless. There are injustices even in our prayers; I doubt many of us prayed fervently when US and UK troops were torturing captives in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, and for that may God forgive us. But we can pray now despite our past failings: that the family of Moaz al-Kassasbeh and the families of other victims may find comfort. That the cycles of hatred may be broken. That justice (for there has been much injustice) for the Arab peoples may be established.

What we must not do is be drawn into cycles of vengeful hatred. However hard it may seem we must not paint Daesh in monochromes of black, nor ourselves in monochromes of white. If Hinduism can teach us one thing—and it can do more that—it is the notion that we are they and they are us. If Paul can teach us one thing it is that we all have the propensity for evil, to cauterize the human conscience, to anaesthetize human decency. Let us pray, however we understand it, the maranatha: may God’s reign come, and may we in our tiny corner be vehicles of that reign of justice and peace.