From the staff room

MONDAY REFLECTIONS
KORMILDA COLLEGE STAFFROOM
29 APRIL 2013

I was gobsmacked some months ago to the reaction in this staff room when I inadvertently used a dirty word. I refer not to one of those colourful and sometimes (when it suits police) even illegal anglo-saxon verbs that used to be an unacceptable part of human discourse but which are now, I am told, mere filler words (or, technically, “discourse particles”). Iam referring to the dreadfully chilling and obscene D-word.

In a remarkably prescient book The Denial of Death, published nearly 30 years ago, Ernest Becker argues that this topic has become the most terrifying taboo of all. Where once our obscenities almost all referred to either bodily functions – evacuative or reproductive, or were belittling sacred language (words such a ’zounds, ’strewth, or the various variations of God, Jesus Christ and so on) – now the D-word surpasses all others, revealing our deepest anxiety.

I suggest that in what Nicholas Lasch called our “culture of narcissism” the deepest fear we have is the knowledge that we will die – that the centre of our solipsistic me-centred universe will one day cease to be. To our ancestors this was, and to our Indigenous neighbours this is, de riguer. To us it is an unspoken terror, so nowadays we never die. We pass or pass away, we go to the other side, or in flippant moments we may cark it, pop our clogs, or in good Shakespearian terms shuffle off this mortal coil, but we refuse to die, and we refuse to let our loved ones die. (Ironically though, once they have “passed from sight” we care little for their physical remains, bulldozing graveyards, as Philip Adams pointed out last weekend, with what once was called gay abandon.)

Christianity has made many concessions to schmaltzy social religiosity, so it too has by and large forgotten that at the heart of its task is the proclamation of a brutal symbol of executions and death – or a symbol of brutal execution and death. Christianity of course professes that this brutal “no” to existence is not the final word, and that the Creator breathes a new “yes” into human experience, but not before the brutality, the obscenity, of death. Even Christianity these days, though, often sidesteps the brutality of death and prefers instead to float off into the sky with angels, so that our loved ones become part of an amorphous “out there”, lost and meaningless amidst the endless stars, enjoying a fluffy time with Jesus without closing the door that needs to close before we depart.

Even literature and the teaching of literature has been afraid to face reality. Perhaps the only literary figure really to face mortality was Louis Ferdinand Céline. He was prepared to face mortality far more than was the better known Jean Paul Sartre. Sartre had enough problems of his own, for, for all his existential angst he was less willing to embrace real death than his existentialism suggested. Instead he spent life chasing the glorious French substitute “la petite mort”. No: Céline faced death with brutal honesty – he was, after all, a GP by training.

If you haven’t heard of Céline it is no surprise – too hot to handle, this French GP-come-novelist has as far as I know appeared on few if any tertiary, much less secondary reading lists. It is, as Alan Bloom noted in his acerbic The Closing of the American Mind, precisely Céline’s brutal honesty, stripping away the veneers of human existence, that has kept him off academic reading lists. But in his Journey to the End of the Night he travels deep into human mortality, the sword of Damocles that hangs over your existence and mine every moment of every day. He acknowledges Death as few others have done since biblical times – more even than John Donne, though I doubt Donne would deign to merely pass away.

I intend to die. Not now, I mean, but when my turn comes. I intend to be dead. I will disinherit and haunt anyone, especially any of my innumerable offspring, who believes I have merely passed away. I will endlessly cite Monty Python’s Dead Parrot scene at them until they go stark raving sane and face at last the fragility of their own, your own, and my own existence. And less you think this is all no more than a tangential rant, I suggest that as educators we should all, in rites and words, be at the very forefront of communicating the truth of human existence to those in our care.

ANZAC Thoughts

ANZAC DAY REFLECTION: KORMILDA COLLEGE
BERRIMAH, NT
ANZAC DAY (25th APRIL) 2013

To risk or ultimately lay down one’s life is the ultimate act of courage. Yet sometimes, long before that, there is the courage to speak. We are challenged by it perhaps from the very moment we leave home for our first day at school. When this child is lonely or being picked or otherwise wronged, it takes courage to speak out for them or even to them. The peace for which our forebears fought is not only an over there, back then kind of thing, but can begin in our very own lives.

“True peace”, said Dr. Martin Luther King, jr., “is not merely the absence of tension, it is the presence of justice.” For many years, if not for ever, we forgot that. When our forebears risked and sometimes sacrificed their lives for peace, coming home maimed, traumatised or not at all, Martin Luther King’s struggle for justice was still many years in the future. His words, though, are timeless.

It is worth us remembering that some of our forebears who fought and died for peace in Europe in World War One, and in other centres of war since, were not even considered eligible to vote in Australia until after 1968, half a century after the events of Gallipoli. It is worth remembering that the descendants of some of those who fought and died at Gallipoli, while now entitled to vote, still have a far lower life expectancy, far lower earning capacity, far greater expectation that their children will die prematurely than most Australians. It is worth us speaking out when we see wrong in our nation and our communities. It takes courage to speak out for justice.

“True peace is not merely the absence of tension, it is the presence of justice.” “True peace is not merely the absence of war”, we might say, “it is the presence of justice.” If we are truly to honour the sacrifice made by those brave Australian and New Zealand soldiers at Gallipoli, if we really care, then you and I must do everything in our power to make our country not just a lucky country but a fair country, a just country. That begins by not just loving and caring and fighting for those we like and those we look like, but for justice for those don’t have much, for those who come on leaky boats, for those who, statistics say, may not live long and prosperous lives, wherever and whoever they are.

Lest we forget.

Conversions of thousands and nukings of the naughty

SERMON  PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER (21st APRIL) 2013

Readings:       Acts 9.36-43
                       Psalm 23
                       Revelation 7.9-17
                       John 10.22-30

Can I confess that I have spent many years dreading readings from the Book of Acts? I was probably honest enough to admit that this was likely to be a reflection far more on my lack of some dimension or other of faith than of a failure on Luke’s part, but I just could not get my head around Luke’s triumphalism. It seemed even a little unfair: every time some character in the Book of Acts opened their (normally his) mouth in the service of the gospel hundreds or even thousands were converted. People leapt, like our Dorcas, back to life from death, others were nuked unceremoniously for doing the wrong thing, and the Paul of Acts seemed (and dare I say it is) a very different character to the more earthy, feisty Paul that I encounter in his letters. No: I’m afraid Luke’s second volume didn’t cut it with me, and I tended to dread the Easter season with its long slabs of Luke-Acts triumphalism.

The Book of Acts depressed me. I have been a reasonably devout and faithful Christian, but when I preach no thousands fall to their knees, and if I am to be honest, I doubt if my words have converted anyone. Certainly I have not raised anyone from the dead, and by and large if a snake in a fire bites me I stay bitten. I haven’t actually tried nuking anyone but I fear it would meet a similar lack of dynamic spectacle. I am by the standards of the Book of Acts, an abject failure.

At least one strand of Christianity, best represented by the Brethren Chapel tradition, has overcome this problem by a special doctrine that came to be known as “dispensationalism”. The laws of nature were effectively suspended by special dispensation granted to the evangelists during the apostolic period, but following the closure of that time the work of the Holy Spirit ceased to be so dramatic, and all reverted pretty much to the normality of your experience and mine once more. Pentecostalism, of course, and the wonderful signs and wonders theology of John Wimber and his followers scorned this approach, and maintained that signs and wonders continued to follow their proclamation of the gospel. All I can say is that it has not been my experience (and I have no quantifiable methods by which to measure theirs).

Actually I’ve always held to a pretty much symbolic reading of Acts, and I kind of stick with that still. But the fact is I simply can’t ever know what happened in the experience of the first Christians: all I can know is that the power of their experience of the Spirit in the early church was so great that Luke’s words had a deep veracity for them, and that nothing about the rising of Dorcas from the dead was inconsistent with their own powerful experience of the risen Christ in worship, fellowship and prayer.

I wish I had such faith, but I suspect at that point it is the even more lurid imagery of the Book of Revelation that has something important to tell us. Some of you will have heard me on this before, but as the churches for whom John was writing experienced increasing persecution he over and over again comforted them with the powerful experiential knowledge of the presence of God, drawing them forward into a future beyond even the deepest suffering, a future that was safe because it was and is the pace of the victorious and all-conquering God. It is my deeply held belief that Christians in the western world will be increasingly called upon to hold tenaciously to this hope as a world that has long been benevolent or at worst complacent turns to custard around them.

And yet there is a disconnect for us as we read the John or Revelation,* too – and not only in the disconnect between his apocalyptic symbolism and our staid Anglo-Saxon private piety. For John it is precisely the experience of suffering that assures him of the presence of divine victory reaching into his life and the lives of those around him. Suffering, to John and to other New Testament writers, is the corollary of believing; if I believe but cruise nonchalantly through life, they almost suggest, then it is questionable whether I have believed in the first place (see, e.g., Acts 5.41, 9.16, 14.22). This hard equation has not been the experience of western Christians in recent centuries, but the question is raised whether it is precisely into that kind of New Testament world that we are slowly being drawn by the unsettling energies of God.

And, indeed, as the events of Boston or Texas or indeed almost any community can tell us if we look and listen hard enough, suffering is never far beneath the surface of human existence. Boston or Texas reminds us how vulnerable human existence is, but so too does every notification of cancer, every knock on the door from the police in the night, every infarction of our own or loved ones’ overstrained arteries, not to mention the all but daily bomb blasts of Afghanistan, pakistan, or Syria. I spent much of the early part of this week trying to bring hope into a devastating context of sudden bereavement: our lives hang always by a slender thread, and if the Church is increasingly marginalised our threads may become more frayed and slender still. It is through this vulnerability that the voice of God calls us, or in the language of today's gospel-reading , the voice of the Shepherd calls us. Hold tenaciously to faith – or let faith hold tenaciously to us – and we will come through, though what that means is far beyond our understanding.

And it is precisely that hope that dwells at the heart of Easter faith: grasp God, and he will lead us through the valley of the shadow of death. So-called faith that dismantles that death-transcending hope is a parody: to resurrection faith we must cling and by resurrection-faith we must be clung to as we too journey through the valleys and into the fullness of Easter hope.

TLBWY

*My thoughts on Revelation will be published in my book, Babylon's Cap, to be published by Wipf and Stock later this year.

a (big) bunch of Easter thoughts

NOT SO MUCH A SERMON
 – A (BIG) BUNCH OF EASTER THOUGHTS –
VOICED AT THE CHURCH OF St FRANCIS
BATCHELOR (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER (7th APRIL) 2013

Readings:       Acts 5.27-32
                       Psalm 118.14-29
                       Revelation 1.4-8
                       John 20.19-31

If there were a method guaranteed to send me into paroxysms of depression as I was preparing, on a Sunday morning to make my way to church, it would be to ensure that I heard a popular Christian theologian and scholar discussing the contrast between “common Christianity” and its perspectives and his presumably more rarefied and intellectually satisfying deeper insight. Such was my encounter on the internet with, predictably, Marcus Borg this morning. Borg, a sort of populariser of academic discourse, and a highly effective communicator of his views, would be horrified to think that he was introducing a new Gnosticism to the world, but paradoxically that is what he and others like him manage to achieve. Embarrassed by the central truth claims of simple or common Christians they provide, by dint of their scholarship, a more real and honest knowledge of, for example, the true meaning of Easter and its stories of the resurrection of Jesus.

For some these scholars open a door to belief. I have several friends who tell me that writers and speakers such as Borg and Spong have helped them to believe. To be honest I am left uncertain what the belief is that Borg and Spong and others leave us with. That there was a man called Jesus, who had a band of followers. That he pricked the conscience of a totalitarian nation, and was executed for his troubles. That his band of followers thought that was sad and decided to keep his movement going. And that, thanks to a religious vacuum in the crumbling totalitarian state, their embellished stories about their leader became a, and later the new religion of the Empire and its successors. For a millennium or two.

The notion of resurrection was as strange, startling, mysterious and silly to the first and second century thinkers as it was and is to our own century’s thinkers. The suggestion that, frankly, people were a bit simple in those days and we are so much smarter is brutally paternalistic, patronising, and wrong. It is also deeply insulting to the martyrs and strugglers who maintained their faith under enormous duress, even sacrificing their lives for its integrity. When Paul wrote to the Philippians as they experienced times of persecution they were not sitting in a classroom experiencing a little bit of intellectual angst for their beliefs: they were risking and losing their lives. They were struggling to endure in faith, struggling to persevere, against all odds. For most of us, at the moment, the struggle to endure is little more than the tussle to get up on a Sunday morning, the tussle to believe a few things that seem a little intellectually “other”, different to the beliefs of most of our friends, and the for us largely mild struggle “to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

Which brings me to the Reformation, where, were it not for Marcus Borg, I planned to begin. Sorry about that!

Two of the great doctrines fought over by theologians, particularly since the Reformation, are related doctrines know by various names, but perhaps best known as “assurance of salvation” and as “Perseverance”. Basically the arguments revolve around whether a believer can in some way know that they are “saved”, not a word I like particularly, or whether they have to journey through life with a cloud of uncertainty about their “soteriological fate,” their “eternal destiny,” and so on. In fact they are arguments I care little for, for a plethora of reasons, and strike me as belonging in the same basket as the infamous and by and large misrepresented argument about the numbers of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. Personally I suspect God has more important matters to sort out. Syria comes to mind. And West Papua.

However, since I’ve mentioned them, the points of disagreement are roughly this: some argue that one can’t true know oneself to be, as it were, “saved” this side of the grave, and must continue to exercise a lifetime of meritorious works to ensure the ledger stays appropriately balanced. Opponents of this largely Roman Catholic view have argued that it turns “salvation” into something that we have to earn on our own merit. While they have a point, the opponents, largely Protestant, have often demonstrated such an utter disregard for issues of justice and compassion that there might, if the Jesus saying “by their works will you know them”, have to be some extra special pleading on their behalf if they are to receive the benefits of the salvation in which they stand so confidently.

The more nuanced argument tends to be one within the Protestant traditions: if a person professes Christ at some point in their life but subsequently lapses from faith, are they saved or damned? Do only those who persevere with a conspicuous, obvious faith to the moment of their encounter with God in death gain the laurel wreath of salvation that Paul writes about? If a person confesses faith but subsequently lapses was their faith ever genuine in the first place? It is once more an angels on a pinhead debate: Personally I don’t believe “salvation” is wrought by some individual confessional formula, but by Christ, and how he outworks the salvation of the world that he has achieved in the events of Good Friday and Easter are far more up to him than me or you or others who may engage in what are ultimately fatuous arguments.

These arguments and others like them have however done immeasurable damage to the credibility of the gospel we proclaim. Our churches are empty in part because our God is a rather demanding God and the effort to follow in the way of Christ is not altogether sexy in our post-modern era, if ever it was. But our churches are empty also because we spend an awful lot of time arguing over abstractions, and extracting one another’s literal or metaphorical toenails, over matters that really are utterly tangential to the core business of Gospel. I hesitate to add, in the light of my opening digression, that I so not see Resurrection as tangential to our faith. In any case I tend to take a Pauline approach: The person who can, by the Spirit of God, affirm that Jesus is Lord (I would suggest sometime between now and the impossible “end of eternity” will do) is pretty much passported through to the heart of God.

In the meantime our faith is undergoing creative crisis. In fact the Royal Commission of which I write elsewhere may be leading us into a deeper and yet more creative crisis. We need to be taken into a place of honesty, a place where we must confess our wrong-doings: for wrong-doings there have been. Confession is the place of new beginnings: where we have done wrong we must and God wiling will confess, and even make amends as best we can. But the Gamaliel principle remains: if ours is a movement breathed into being by God then we will be here tomorrow, rising from the ashes of our past mistakes and pray God never perpetrating abuse and destruction again.

Out of the ashes of our mistake God will call into being a new Church. Jesus summons Mary by name and that, in the rawness of her sorrow, is when she encounters him – going on to be the primary witness of the resurrection. Like all the disciples we as an institution and perhaps as individuals have made, or may have made, terrible mistakes. But where we can confess to our faults and pray the grace of God we can start again, regardless of the fatuous arguments in which we have for too long indulged. May God rise with us as he in Christ rose for us: and he did. Christ is risen: he is risen indeed.

 

TLBWY

Sexual Abuse and Royal Commissions

As the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse begins, we as a people of God should not only applaud its commitment, but should hold its commissioners and all involved in our prayers. We should note, for a start that, despite media implications, this is not just an investigation into the Churches, much less the Roman Catholic Church. While in my opinion Cardinal George Pell’s response to the announcement of the enquiry was little short of inept, he does have a point insofar as almost all media coverage of the Commission has included footage of Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral (of which Pell was once archbishop).

Nevertheless, where there are skeletons in cupboards they need to be evicted. No institution should be quarantined from the searching eye of the Commission (including the government’s own institutional bodies), and we as an Anglican Church should not only throw open our records to scrutiny, but ready ourselves for some severe and painful discoveries. Out of the Commission’s findings, pray God, we may in future serve more faithfully the task of proclaiming and enacting justice for the most vulnerable, justice that is at the heart of our gospel and at the heart of our God. It may be—and this was the case under similar scrutiny in Canada - that we are driven to our knees. So may it be: the gospel of Jesus Christ was never about the preservation of institutions but always about proclaiming love and justice. If we have, as it seems, done in many case a deplorable job then it is precisely time we did find ourselves on our knees, and the Commission might well one day be named as a great work of God’s Spirit.

So I encourage you to pray for the Commission, and pray for ourselves that we may be open, honest, and ready to learn from what may well be dreadful mistakes of our past. Any institution that covers up abuse is a home not of the cleansing healing Spirit of God but of the darkest realms of the demonic.

Michael