YEAR 12 BREAKFAST (28.02.13), KORMILDA COLLEGE
A THOUGHT OR THREE BEFORE YOUR WEETBIX
I was recently told that I don’t make enough of the opportunities I am given, when you students or even the staff are a captive audience, to force the message of Christianity down your throat. In fact I find the notions of a captive audience or of force-feeding – whether of caged animals or of impelled human beings – abominable. I have much self-consciousness about the role of a chaplain in students’ lives: the god-botherer is about as popular as a dentist, and to most of us both more avoidable and more risible (and if that last word is unfamiliar then it’s time your vocab reached further).
In fact I think I, in the first place, over-estimate the degree to which Christianity and its representatives are disliked, and in the second place probably share many of the points of concern of the disparagers. The failings of Christianity and its representatives – or of any religion and its representatives – are legion. So too are the failings of banks (squeezing every last cent from customers to please shareholders), armies (torture, rape and pillage in the name or peace-making), sports clubs (cultures or drug abuse), even boyfriends and girlfriends (betrayal, misunderstanding, emotional yo-yo-ism). On the whole though, we put up, benevolently or less so, with banks, armies, footy clubs and boyfriends or girlfriends. Believe me: as a religious insider I resent the failings of my institution (the Church) and the Religion it represents (Christianity) as much if not more than most here, though I have perhaps more dedication to the founder and foundation of my faith than some.
So – since it’s the twenty-first century and since at least the nineteenth century this option has been more user-friendly and un-prickly – perhaps I can speak of spirituality? And if I could define that loose and fluffy term, perhaps I can define it as living with an awareness of life-beyond-self. We may focus our spirituality on hugging crystals, on embracing non-self, on adoring saints, on serving the State, in creating a better world for our children – at this point I can say “whatever.” At this point I can just commend – given the opportunities in life you and I have been given – at the very least living for others, making that which is not you more important than merely living for self (deconstructing the infamous ad that referred to “the most important person in the world: you”).
In this spirituality – for now – I do not exclude what I would call “apneumatology”, the belief in a greater-than-self that does not include unscientific and irrational belief in “spirit”, or pneuma. It is worth noting though that the Greek and Hebrew words that are translated “spirit” – not only in the Judaeo-Christian tradition – are simply words for wind, breath, air, and few of us would deny their existence. As someone who has sat often with people as they die I know only too well the difference, sometimes barely discernible, between breath and no-breath, between being alive and being no longer alive, being dead. But let’s just stick with the religious sense: I respect greatly those of you who so not believe in “spirit”, and live in a purely and wonderfully mechanistic universe.
I suggest though, that for all of us life lived solely for self, life lived without living for others, is life mutated, truncated, cheated and abused. Life lived to the full is life that reaches out and embraces and enhances the lives of others. I would even suggest that our lives are a bit like the ubiquitous onion: the further we reach out from our centre, the more we allow our lives to reach from self to family to friends to peers to strangers and even to enemies, the more we are becoming fully human. I suspect we all fall short on that trajectory somewhere, but the truly great people reach right to the very edge of the onion-layers, living to benefit the lives of absolute strangers, even enemies. The Bhagavad-Gita tells the story of a previous life of the Buddha, where, confronted by a tigress too weak to feed her children, he sacrificed his own life so the mother and cubs could draw strength from his blood. To life for others, I suggest, is to truly live. Jesus of course also said something like that, and his followers – like me – believe that he embodies that in his every living and dying moment, even if we fall well and truly short.
Turn to our preferred media though, and role models of such a life are woefully short. Psy’s “Gangnam Style”, Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunctions, Anne Hathaway’s breasts, Ben Barba’s personal problems: all these will generate far more interest than anything remotely encouraging living for others, and it was ever thus. But do we need to live that way, obsessed with self and obsessed with fame? Can we rise above it and live for others (which is not to say, incidentally, that one or all of Psy (or Park Jae-sang), Janet Jackson, Anne Hathaway or Ben Barba don’t live to benefit others – just that it’s not what they are in our consciousness for). We have few role models that inspire us to reach through the onion skins of our existence and live for others, though arguably Angelina Jolie may be a significant exception (as, equally arguably, the Princess of Wales may have been for another generation).
If I were to dig into my kite [basket] of role models I suggest four names immediately: Aung San Suu Kyi, Fred Hollows, Aye Net and Malala Yousafzai. There is a deliberate random nature to these. None, to the best of my knowledge, share my faith, because I do not want to give the impression that only a Desmond Tutu or a Mother Theresa is somehow legitimized as a bearer of justice and compassion. Only one is a male, and he, although not in the normal sense of the phrase, is a dead White Male – and a Marxist to boot (though Wikipedia describes him as a “self-named anarcho-syndicalist” – and a onetime seminarian. I have little doubt he achieved far greater impact on the world that I call God’s world by leaving seminary and perhaps faith behind him. The other two are hardly household names: Aye Net, of whom I had not heard until this week, is a Burmese activist stepping into the shoes of Aung San Suu Kyi in what SBS News called a “David and Goliath battle over one of the world's largest copper deposits”, standing up to a government determined to desecrate village lifestyles and natural environments in the search for profit. Malala Yousafzai is the young Pakistani Muslim girl who took a Taliban bullet for the crime of fighting for the rights of Muslim girls to receive an education. Other names come to mind: Benny Wenda, Gabrielle Giffords, Donald Mackay, Maximillian Kolbe: these are not household names, but each has lived and some died reaching out beyond the onion skins of their immediate lives to touch and transform for the better the lives of those around and beyond them.
Therein dwells the challenge for us. We have an opportunity because we have an education. Will we seize life’s gifts to live only for us and those we love, or will we reach beyond our skin of the onion to, as Jesus put it transform the unjust and painfilled world we live in?
Wednesday 27 February 2013
Friday 8 February 2013
Death of God?
SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY (10th February) 2013
Readings: Isaiah 6.1-8
Psalm 138
1 Corinthians 15.1-11
Luke 5.1-11
It can be (and has been) said that there is a fundamental selfishness that dwells at the heart of Christianity. This selfishness is sometimes said not to dwell for example, at the heart of Buddhism, in which the human soul journeys on to the discovery of its own unimportance and ultimate non-existence. Nor does it stand at the heart of the best forms of atheism: by this I do not mean the atheist-chic posturing of those determined to slaughter faith as a minor social inconvenience, a calling to account of those who do not want to be held accountable. I mean those for whom the dreams of a benevolent God have died, and who soldier on doing their best in a universe that has no friends. These are brave souls, and dwell I believe at their best very close to the God I believe in and they don’t. I think always of the late Fred Hollows, though if you Google “altruistic atheists” you will find delightful tales of those who wish, for whatever reason, aim to execute God but continue at varying degrees of personal cost to emulate the very best of human goodness in a universe without God. I admire them, and know that often they will do far more good in this world than I will – Fred Hollows certainly did.
I think too of figures such as the Jewish Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel, for whom the possibility of a God all but died with Wiesel’s friends and family in the gas chambers of the execution camps. It was Wiesel who narrated the terrifying scene of the execution of a child on the gallows: as the child hanged slowly dying a voice cried out “‘Where is God now?’ And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is He? Here He is – He is hanging here on this gallows...’” For a Jew there is no execution of God Incarnate, as there is for Christianity, and the search for meaning to the word “God” has led Wiesel to spend a lifetime placing God on trial for his desertion or even persecution of the Chosen people. For a Christian, at least one taking seriously the presence of divinity on the Cross of Golgotha, it is possible to say that even God has entered into meaninglessness ... and yet risen again into meaning.
In reality it is probably true to say that Wiesel struggled through immeasurable pain to find in the end a God beyond human questioning, a God who may even need human absolution for the obscenities of creation, fall and suffering. The credibility of Wiesel’s struggle is unparalleled, and his tenacity in holding to at least some belief in the continued possibility of God despite the horrors that he witnessed is tribute to the indefatigable determination of the sparks of hope in a human heart. For many, though, all hope died in the concentration camps – and I do not only mean for those who died. For many who lived, all hope died, and who can blame the owners of those hearts?
Do I digress? I began by speaking of the selfishness that is often seen to dwell at the centre of Christian faith. So much Christianity is lived at the “I am saved and therefore I will go to heaven” level of belief. Perhaps almost all Christianity is lived at that level – except by those theologians who have for whatever reason done away with the hope of resurrection either of Jesus or of we lesser human beings. Though I did that, too, for a while, but only in an ivory tower: now I cannot believe in a gospel that finishes with my death or the death of someone who I love. When I stand at the grave of a child I want to know that God’s ability is bigger than death’s ability. A God whose love is severed by death is not much of a God, and I would join the atheists if that were all Jesus offered.
But if my adherence to faith is no more than an insurance certificate for my own post-death existence, perhaps a dose of religious anaesthesia to overcome my own fears of suffering or death or non-existence, then my faith is fairly pathetic. Pathos is okay, to a point: we’re all trapped in vulnerability and angst. But do we stay there, out four score years and ten? When I was a child I thought as a child, says St Paul, not long before our passage. But later in 1 Corinthians 15, in a poetic tour de force to which this passage is a prelude, while Paul dwells on some sort of personal resurrection, his greater concern is far more. It is about accepting the call, accepted by Isaiah, accepted last week by Jeremiah, accepted by Simon Peter and the other disciples, accepted by Paul, and presumably at some stage by you and by me, but accepting that call as an invitation not to live for self, but to live for others. It was that dimension that was absent in the lives of the Corinthians. It is that dimension that is often missing in my own life, and perhaps in yours. That is why we say “sorry” to God again and again, and plead the grace of improvement in our small lives.
Enough, for now: we journey towards Lent, the big forty-day-sorry-saying. Perhaps it’s merely a practice for that moment Paul wrote of last week, when we see God no longer through a darkened glass but face to face. Certainly, whatever our experience of “call” – not a word I like because of its implications of voices in the night, but one I shall have to use nevertheless – despite maybe our experience of “nudge”, we are enmeshed with the doubters and the triers and the honest struggling rejecters in a journey towards the eternities of God. What that means I do not know, but I know it means I am called to do my best to live my life – with altruistic atheists and Buddhists and all the other seekers after meaning and truth and goodness – not for self but for others. To that journey we are called and on that journey we will struggle and from that journey we will enter into the magnificence of God’s future – a future not just ours but for all God’s creation
TLBWY
FRED’S PASS (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY (10th February) 2013
Readings: Isaiah 6.1-8
Psalm 138
1 Corinthians 15.1-11
Luke 5.1-11
It can be (and has been) said that there is a fundamental selfishness that dwells at the heart of Christianity. This selfishness is sometimes said not to dwell for example, at the heart of Buddhism, in which the human soul journeys on to the discovery of its own unimportance and ultimate non-existence. Nor does it stand at the heart of the best forms of atheism: by this I do not mean the atheist-chic posturing of those determined to slaughter faith as a minor social inconvenience, a calling to account of those who do not want to be held accountable. I mean those for whom the dreams of a benevolent God have died, and who soldier on doing their best in a universe that has no friends. These are brave souls, and dwell I believe at their best very close to the God I believe in and they don’t. I think always of the late Fred Hollows, though if you Google “altruistic atheists” you will find delightful tales of those who wish, for whatever reason, aim to execute God but continue at varying degrees of personal cost to emulate the very best of human goodness in a universe without God. I admire them, and know that often they will do far more good in this world than I will – Fred Hollows certainly did.
I think too of figures such as the Jewish Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel, for whom the possibility of a God all but died with Wiesel’s friends and family in the gas chambers of the execution camps. It was Wiesel who narrated the terrifying scene of the execution of a child on the gallows: as the child hanged slowly dying a voice cried out “‘Where is God now?’ And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is He? Here He is – He is hanging here on this gallows...’” For a Jew there is no execution of God Incarnate, as there is for Christianity, and the search for meaning to the word “God” has led Wiesel to spend a lifetime placing God on trial for his desertion or even persecution of the Chosen people. For a Christian, at least one taking seriously the presence of divinity on the Cross of Golgotha, it is possible to say that even God has entered into meaninglessness ... and yet risen again into meaning.
In reality it is probably true to say that Wiesel struggled through immeasurable pain to find in the end a God beyond human questioning, a God who may even need human absolution for the obscenities of creation, fall and suffering. The credibility of Wiesel’s struggle is unparalleled, and his tenacity in holding to at least some belief in the continued possibility of God despite the horrors that he witnessed is tribute to the indefatigable determination of the sparks of hope in a human heart. For many, though, all hope died in the concentration camps – and I do not only mean for those who died. For many who lived, all hope died, and who can blame the owners of those hearts?
Do I digress? I began by speaking of the selfishness that is often seen to dwell at the centre of Christian faith. So much Christianity is lived at the “I am saved and therefore I will go to heaven” level of belief. Perhaps almost all Christianity is lived at that level – except by those theologians who have for whatever reason done away with the hope of resurrection either of Jesus or of we lesser human beings. Though I did that, too, for a while, but only in an ivory tower: now I cannot believe in a gospel that finishes with my death or the death of someone who I love. When I stand at the grave of a child I want to know that God’s ability is bigger than death’s ability. A God whose love is severed by death is not much of a God, and I would join the atheists if that were all Jesus offered.
But if my adherence to faith is no more than an insurance certificate for my own post-death existence, perhaps a dose of religious anaesthesia to overcome my own fears of suffering or death or non-existence, then my faith is fairly pathetic. Pathos is okay, to a point: we’re all trapped in vulnerability and angst. But do we stay there, out four score years and ten? When I was a child I thought as a child, says St Paul, not long before our passage. But later in 1 Corinthians 15, in a poetic tour de force to which this passage is a prelude, while Paul dwells on some sort of personal resurrection, his greater concern is far more. It is about accepting the call, accepted by Isaiah, accepted last week by Jeremiah, accepted by Simon Peter and the other disciples, accepted by Paul, and presumably at some stage by you and by me, but accepting that call as an invitation not to live for self, but to live for others. It was that dimension that was absent in the lives of the Corinthians. It is that dimension that is often missing in my own life, and perhaps in yours. That is why we say “sorry” to God again and again, and plead the grace of improvement in our small lives.
Enough, for now: we journey towards Lent, the big forty-day-sorry-saying. Perhaps it’s merely a practice for that moment Paul wrote of last week, when we see God no longer through a darkened glass but face to face. Certainly, whatever our experience of “call” – not a word I like because of its implications of voices in the night, but one I shall have to use nevertheless – despite maybe our experience of “nudge”, we are enmeshed with the doubters and the triers and the honest struggling rejecters in a journey towards the eternities of God. What that means I do not know, but I know it means I am called to do my best to live my life – with altruistic atheists and Buddhists and all the other seekers after meaning and truth and goodness – not for self but for others. To that journey we are called and on that journey we will struggle and from that journey we will enter into the magnificence of God’s future – a future not just ours but for all God’s creation
TLBWY
Friday 1 February 2013
JFK, Lady Di, and a Cranky Apostle
SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY (3rd February) 2013
Readings:
Jeremiah 1.4-10
Psalm 71.1-6
1 Corinthians 13
Luke 4.21-30
What a surfeit of readings! Every now and again the lectionary throws us a vast feast of pivotal moments in scripture: the call of Jeremiah, which, along with the call of Isaiah and other prophets stands as a prototype of the touch of God’s hand on all our lives. The Psalm, which along with Psalm 139, reminds of the depth of God’s knowledge of every fibre of our being. The attempted assassination of Jesus which reminds us that, long before the events of the Passion, his prophetic proclamation of truth and justice was leading him into conflict with corrupt authorities, secular and would-be sacred alike.
I cannot pretend to blend the readings into the theme of perseverance in faith – or perhaps I can, but only in passing. And, as a lover of Paul’s faith and theology I can hardly go past his
Hymn to Love. While this passage doesn’t quite drive to the heart of his soteriology (theory of salvation) it drives to the heart of his expectation of the lives of those who profess to follow Jesus, those who profess the Lordship of Jesus. If I have not love then I am no more than a clanging gong or a noisy cymbal. We need to hold this powerful attestation in tension with two other great Pauline statements: ‘all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’, and ‘it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’. The last two at least provide an escape clause when we are confronted with the task of preaching on love, painfully aware of our own human inadequacies. I will fall short, but by the grace of God may I be a vessel of God's love.
As it happens these come each from a different letter of Paul, each from a different context, each addressing a community with different presenting issues. We can be only too painfully aware that the community in Corinth had ceased to be a community of love – indeed a journey through the several parts, the several letters that we know as First and Second Corinthians takes us deeper and deeper into the Corinthians’ failure to exemplify even the rudiments of love to Paul and to the faith he lived and died for. The Corinthians, forerunners of much contemporary Christianity (perhaps much Christianity from go to whoa), had turned the way of the Cross into a form of entertainment, and were defending their own particular entertainment interests. They were as a consequence of this, wracked by schisms and interest groups. They were not a walking advertisement of the Way of Jesus Christ, and Paul was increasingly outraged.
Yet in his anger he turned not to destructive fury but a celebration of the greatest Christian challenge, the challenge to exemplify love. Scholars are divided as to whether he actually wrote I Cor 13, or was citing a hymn beloved of the Corinthians congregation. I see no reason to suppose Paul didn’t write it, but think scholars are right to believe that it was a hymn of creed that was at the heart of Corinthian congregational life. If it wasn’t then, it soon was, for, although the close of 2 Corinthians suggests that Paul was losing the battle for the hearts of the Corinthian Christians, the fact we still have this magnificent passage, and the fact that there are subtle allusions to it in the Book of revelation suggest that ultimately, perhaps after he had died, Paul’s passion won the day.
Which brings me to Diana, Princess of Wales. Just as for a previous generation the death of J. F. Kennedy was a defining moment, for many of my generation the death of the Princess of Wales was a defining moment, and many of us can say where we were when we heard of it (I was in Unley, Adelaide, coming home from church). Attempts to portray one as a great national leader and the other as a flawed product of women’s mags and paparazzi are doomed to failure. All have sinned and fallen short: both were human beings with great heart and vision and with great flaws.
But I will never forget Tony Blair’s recitation of 1 Corinthians 13 at Diana’s funeral a few days later. It was dramatic – even more than Diana’s brother’s vitriolic but strangely poignant speech. It was in a sense a little optimistic: Diana was not the epitome of human love. But nor am I and nor are you, and nor can any of us even begin to be unless we are invaded by the Spirit of Christ, and even then – and this sentence gats longer and longer – we will be flawed and fallible shadows of all that we are called to be. But that is our call, the heights to which we are called to aspire, of which we are bound to fall short, yet to which in the end , perhaps in a heavens and earth not yet seen, we will be transformed. It is after all in the same letter that Paul speaks of transformation from mortality to immortality, and, implicit in that, is the transformation from fallibility to an as yet unimaginable perfectedness.
But let us not run ahead of ourselves. In the meantime, like Jeremiah, we are the unworthy servants of a call in which we shall again and again fall short. Yet the God who knows our innermost being does continue, where we allow it, to transform us. We are called to surrender again and again, to receive Christ’s redeeming love again and again, to open ourselves up to transformation again and again. It is to that journey we recommit each time we make Eucharist together.
TLBWY
FRED’S PASS (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY (3rd February) 2013
Readings:
Jeremiah 1.4-10
Psalm 71.1-6
1 Corinthians 13
Luke 4.21-30
What a surfeit of readings! Every now and again the lectionary throws us a vast feast of pivotal moments in scripture: the call of Jeremiah, which, along with the call of Isaiah and other prophets stands as a prototype of the touch of God’s hand on all our lives. The Psalm, which along with Psalm 139, reminds of the depth of God’s knowledge of every fibre of our being. The attempted assassination of Jesus which reminds us that, long before the events of the Passion, his prophetic proclamation of truth and justice was leading him into conflict with corrupt authorities, secular and would-be sacred alike.
I cannot pretend to blend the readings into the theme of perseverance in faith – or perhaps I can, but only in passing. And, as a lover of Paul’s faith and theology I can hardly go past his
Hymn to Love. While this passage doesn’t quite drive to the heart of his soteriology (theory of salvation) it drives to the heart of his expectation of the lives of those who profess to follow Jesus, those who profess the Lordship of Jesus. If I have not love then I am no more than a clanging gong or a noisy cymbal. We need to hold this powerful attestation in tension with two other great Pauline statements: ‘all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’, and ‘it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’. The last two at least provide an escape clause when we are confronted with the task of preaching on love, painfully aware of our own human inadequacies. I will fall short, but by the grace of God may I be a vessel of God's love.
As it happens these come each from a different letter of Paul, each from a different context, each addressing a community with different presenting issues. We can be only too painfully aware that the community in Corinth had ceased to be a community of love – indeed a journey through the several parts, the several letters that we know as First and Second Corinthians takes us deeper and deeper into the Corinthians’ failure to exemplify even the rudiments of love to Paul and to the faith he lived and died for. The Corinthians, forerunners of much contemporary Christianity (perhaps much Christianity from go to whoa), had turned the way of the Cross into a form of entertainment, and were defending their own particular entertainment interests. They were as a consequence of this, wracked by schisms and interest groups. They were not a walking advertisement of the Way of Jesus Christ, and Paul was increasingly outraged.
Yet in his anger he turned not to destructive fury but a celebration of the greatest Christian challenge, the challenge to exemplify love. Scholars are divided as to whether he actually wrote I Cor 13, or was citing a hymn beloved of the Corinthians congregation. I see no reason to suppose Paul didn’t write it, but think scholars are right to believe that it was a hymn of creed that was at the heart of Corinthian congregational life. If it wasn’t then, it soon was, for, although the close of 2 Corinthians suggests that Paul was losing the battle for the hearts of the Corinthian Christians, the fact we still have this magnificent passage, and the fact that there are subtle allusions to it in the Book of revelation suggest that ultimately, perhaps after he had died, Paul’s passion won the day.
Which brings me to Diana, Princess of Wales. Just as for a previous generation the death of J. F. Kennedy was a defining moment, for many of my generation the death of the Princess of Wales was a defining moment, and many of us can say where we were when we heard of it (I was in Unley, Adelaide, coming home from church). Attempts to portray one as a great national leader and the other as a flawed product of women’s mags and paparazzi are doomed to failure. All have sinned and fallen short: both were human beings with great heart and vision and with great flaws.
But I will never forget Tony Blair’s recitation of 1 Corinthians 13 at Diana’s funeral a few days later. It was dramatic – even more than Diana’s brother’s vitriolic but strangely poignant speech. It was in a sense a little optimistic: Diana was not the epitome of human love. But nor am I and nor are you, and nor can any of us even begin to be unless we are invaded by the Spirit of Christ, and even then – and this sentence gats longer and longer – we will be flawed and fallible shadows of all that we are called to be. But that is our call, the heights to which we are called to aspire, of which we are bound to fall short, yet to which in the end , perhaps in a heavens and earth not yet seen, we will be transformed. It is after all in the same letter that Paul speaks of transformation from mortality to immortality, and, implicit in that, is the transformation from fallibility to an as yet unimaginable perfectedness.
But let us not run ahead of ourselves. In the meantime, like Jeremiah, we are the unworthy servants of a call in which we shall again and again fall short. Yet the God who knows our innermost being does continue, where we allow it, to transform us. We are called to surrender again and again, to receive Christ’s redeeming love again and again, to open ourselves up to transformation again and again. It is to that journey we recommit each time we make Eucharist together.
TLBWY
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