Art and Identity - Canvas As Country

A Portrait of Australia - With Important Bits Missing - Glenn Loughrey, 2017

Matthew 28:16-20

 

Today is the Sunday closest to Ascension Day and also National Reconciliation Sunday. An interesting juxtaposition maybe, but one I would suggest, poses some interesting questions for us individually, as a church and as a society.

Colonisation of Australia, as it did through out the world, brought with it the evangelical fervour to convert those who lived in the colonised countries to the state religion.  In the case of Australia this was, initially at least, Christianity as promoted by the Church of England. And this was essentially predicated on the verses we read in today’s Gospel.

The impact of such fervour continues to reverberate down through the ages in the experience of indigenous people. In conversation indigenous people often ask me why they should trust the church? Desmond Tutu writes, “When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.” This was the experience indigenous peoples on all continents shared.

 

Matthew’s Gospel is a powerful passage, a passage that brings power, and promises power through the giving of the Holy Spirit. Like all power, it is a double-edged sword. It all depends on how it is used. Way too often it has been used to damage people, places and creatures in the urge for control.  Having everyone believe what you do ensures that you bring him or her in under your control. Belief systems are powerful moderators of peoples behaviour and the inappropriate or literal interpretation of these words from Matthew’s Gospel have been responsible for the justification of poor behaviour by the church.

 

Not only by the church, but by those whose sensibilities have been influenced and informed by the church. Present policies of paternalistic politics in this country continue the conversion of indigenous people, not to a specific faith, but to a specific religion – that of secular capitalism and consumerism. Much of the policies governments and others follow are designed to assimilate indigenous people into the world of individual work, consumption and home ownership. Policies such as the Northern Territory Intervention, the subsequent Closing the Gap policy and individual items such as the indue debit card quarantining income and limiting individual responsibility and the drive to include indigenous people in the constitution have continued the idea of conversion. This time the conversion is to consumerism and making disciples for the corporations to continue to rack up profits.

 

Now these are harsh words for a passage of scripture empowering the disciples to go into the world and engage with those whose worldview is different to theirs. They are harsh words as we consider the significance of the Ascension of Jesus as the releasing of the power of the Holy Spirit into the world. And we must remember that the damage done by literal and colonial interpretations of these words have nothing to do with the Holy Spirit.

 

These words challenge us to receive the Holy Spirit and to listen to her activity in the world. It is about walking abroad in the world and listening to creation in all its various forms and responding out of compassion and respect to bring about wholeness in our lives, the lives of others and in creation.

 

The baptism we read about is not a branding as in the branding of cattle, of ownership and control, but a baptism into the Father, Son and Holy Spirit – the wholeness of the Godhead. It is a baptism of unity with all that exists for all that exists finds it beginning and end in the Source of all being – God. This baptism we are asked to conduct is the shared inclusion in the forward whole-ing of all that is, was and ever will be.

 

Baptism is a partnership with the Spirit of the Christ set loose in the world, whole-d up in places, peoples and events we do not expect or cannot imagine as her dwelling place. In the lives and practices of indigenous people whose understanding of the spirit have been honed and experienced over many centuries before we in the western world encountered the incarnated Christ.

 

Too often we have demanded that people who have been baptised turn their backs on their own traditions and spiritual experiences without consideration of the impact of such an action. Other times we have attempted to appropriate ideas from ancient spiritualties and redefine them within our own faith traditions and understanding. Neither is appropriate and neither is the call of Mathew’s Jesus. He is calling for a deep and respectful dialogue which brings about people who are disciples committed to the core tenets of his teachings – unconditional love and respect for all that is, was, and ever will be – the love which respects others and joins in the process of whole-ing for all.

 

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

This passage is one of the most difficult statements Jesus is given to say. It is all open to interpretation and is often reduced to a legal and theoretical framework designed to ensure people remain faithful to a particular world view depending upon which tradition of faith you belong. It is why we struggle with equality of gender and marriage, of poverty and riches, of race and culture, of faith and religion. Our interpretations of Jesus teachings defines what we believe this should all look like and results in a simple tick sheet of who is in and who is out.

Yet this is one of the most inclusive statements in the Gospels. Go into the world, listen to the Spirit and join with others in the journey into wholeness for all through mutual love and respect. This is the sense of the aboriginal concept of deep listening to country which Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr calls dadirri (and other mobs have different names for) – the deep mutuality of dialogue with all that exists.

This passage challenges us to stop our incessant urge to convert people to our world view and begin the difficult but necessary task of listening deeply to others, people, places and creatures, so that all as the off spring of the Godhead can live in harmonious wholeness.

How do we do that here, in this place? Is it our expectation that all who enter into this place must share our own particular view of faith, liturgy, music and worship? Is it our view that all who enter here must fit the model that we have been comfortable with? Are we indeed listening to hear what the spirit is saying to the church or have already decided what is being said and we do not need to listen anymore? Do we actually go out into the world surrounding our beloved church and actually engage with those who are in such a way that we begin the journey wholeness with them or are we just happy to meet here once a week for our own personal benefit?

I suspect there was some of this in Jesus’s statement to the disciples. I also suggest that the coming of the spirit is not just for our sake, but for the whole world. You know, God so loved the world, and all that stuff. Amen 

On The Mountain Top

Matthew 17:1-9

When I was growing up on the farm I learnt early that various farmers had daily practices that they did regardless of what was happening around them. I also understood that while these practices were not the practice of every farmer they each did something similar.

 

When I was with my Uncle Wally I learnt that after lunch was siesta time. We would lay down on the ground or the back verandah of the house and put our feet up higher than our head and go to sleep. It must have been a funny site with a man 6 foot tall surrounded by boys under 10 stretched out with their feet up on the log, hats over the eyes, arms crossed on the chest asleep, or at least pretending to be.

 

My uncles Alec and Alex didn't rest, they boiled the billy and had a cuppa and you just sat, didn’t talk and sipped your tea with your hat cutting the sun out of your eyes. This happened at least 3 times a day and, if there were machine or stock problems, you did it more often as you worked out the problem.

 

Peoples meditative practices are different but they are their own and they speak to the circumstances and experiences of life they shared with others. Jesus had a a spiritual practice that had little to do with the temple worship or liturgy, yet it was the vital rhythm of his life and he shared it with his disciples, his students.  They were used to this practice which is mentioned and alluded to again and again in the Gospels – Jesus went aside to pray and he sent his disciples away to do the same.  In these moments Jesus clarified his identity, his purpose and his intentions.

 

These weren’t moments of lightness and happiness, a mindfulness deigned for the 21^st century cult of the individual, but moments of great and disturbing challenge. His time in the desert after his baptism was not a time of beer and skittles, he was forced to confront his basic nature and find ways to seek wholeness through obedience to his inner urge for justice, compassion and respect for all, his commitment to the evolution of all creation to fullness.

 

Here on the mountain with his three chosen students it happens again. They go away at a critical time in his self-awareness and the developing trajectory of his life’s journey into confrontation with the power elites in his world. Together they share a deep spiritual experience. While the transformation, or as Thomas More a student of Merton's calls it, metamorphosis, is experienced physically by Jesus, it is shared with the disciples who were there.

 

This is important. We often decry the disciples for their seeming inability to get what is happening, yet the truth is they were deeply spiritual men whose spirituality aligns in moments like these with that of Jesus. It is also important because we are capable of and do experience such events for ourselves. The story of Merton shared in the pew bulletin is but one of a thousand such experiences ordinary people share with those on the mountain.

 

In the story of Jesus this experience is the turning point in his challenge to the political and spiritual systems ruling the lives of everyday people. Jesus has become aware that if he continues to challenge those in power he will face a confrontation he cannot win. He will die. Commentators suggest this is where Jesus turns his face toward Jerusalem fully aware of what the consequences will be but he has decided he will not have his life taken from him, but that he will proactively take charge of his destiny.

 

We may read this passage and the story of Jesus as the programmed death of God’s son for the redemption of sin, an inevitable train wreck we already know about before the opening credits of the movie roll. Yet I suspect Jesus would have come and died even if there had been no apparent fall in the Garden of Eden. Why? Because Jesus is the complete expression of the Creator being called God and if creation is to reach its fullness it must do so through the actions of Christ, and by a surging towards wholeness in Christ.

 

The Transfiguration is that moment when Jesus realises he has, if he is to succeed and bring about redemption for the world, to go to Jerusalem and run the risk of dying a harrowing death. If he is to live a life of integrity he now must come down from the mountain and move into the most critical stage of his life. It is one thing to decry the violence in the world, it is another thing to challenge violence through making it your own.

 

It is easy in our world to go on social media, turn up at street rallies and sign petitions and believe we are in fact challenging the system and its codified violence. Are we really doing anything at all to stop the violence around us? Have we actually felt what it is like to experience the violence of the system and to have no choice but to die, little by little, because of it? Often our words and our presence is safe, heard and seen only by people who share our passions but not by those who experience the implications of the issues we say we stand against.

 

Jesus could have been just like that. He could have travelled the country all his life shouting at the system and been able to justify such an action. Yet he chose not to. His integrity ensured that he was prepared to die for those affected by the system, by the evil which rules by dint of the rampant ego self in the corridors of power.

 

He did what he said. He showed us what integrity looked like and said here is your means of redemption. Come down from that moment of high spiritual awareness and engage at the depth of humanities pain, it is here you will find yourself and find that you are capable of living and dying with integrity.

 

Coming down from the mountain Jesus reminds the disciples of the rule of the road, what happens on the mountain stays on the mountain. Those who have had similar experiences often find it counterproductive to tell others. They simply don’t get it. They weren’t there. Secondly, experiences as deep as this can be misunderstood and cause problems. They’re mad, they’re dangerous, and they’re deluded. Jesus could afford none of these responses by others, even the other disciples.

 

Some one once said, if you have to tell people you are a Christian, you’re doing it wrong. Jesus doesn’t talk about his moment of truth, he acts and brings about redemption through integrity.

 

For us, the task is the same. We are responsible for our actions and to ensure our words and actions bring about redemption for ourselves and others.  Living with integrity will transform us and the world. When we take our relationships, our commercial practices and our engagement of society seriously they become a means of redeeming the world in which we live.

 

That’s what Jesus did and it seems good enough for me.

  

Violence and Sanity

John 18:1 - 19:42

Lopping trees was a daily task my father did to feed his sheep. He didn’t use grain but used the resources of the box, mountain oak or kurrajong to sustain his stock through hard times, or to simply augment their diet. Nature provided all he needed to care for his stock.

 

He would swing the axe into the tree climb up, take the axe and repeat the process until he was where he wanted to be. When he was in the right place, where the best branches were he would begin to cut sufficient only to feed the sheep below.

 

One day he approached a large box tree, two fulsome cuddles round. Strong and powerful in appearance and full of good branches. He swung the axe sideways into the trunk and the tree gave forth a menacing sigh and cam crashing down at his feet. With one blow of the axe, what appeared to be strong and able to live forever, crashed in a heap on the ground.

 

A closer inspection showed it was rotten at the core just waiting for the right incentive to give up the ghost.  Fortunately his faithful dog and horse were not underneath it when it cam down.

 

Good Friday is the day the human project of violence, power and oppression came crashing down. In a few short hours, from dawn till mid afternoon, what had looked invincible fell to the power of obedience and compassion in the life and death of Christ. Death, a synonym for a life violently opposed to a relationship with God, lost it’s battle when Jesus was prepared to live his life to the full, even unto an unjust and cruel death on the cross.

 

Jesus did not avoid the consequences of compassion for all of creation, the consequences for calling out injustice and the machinery of death, be that in the shape of the military economy in power in Jerusalem, or the politically greedy who were manipulating the system for their own wealth and power or the religious leaders who were benefiting from the conflict in the system.

 

Jesus subsumed the violence into his own experience and shared the experience of all those who had been crucified before him for daring to challenge Rome or simply been caught for the crime of survival. Jesus took into himself the violence that was present in those watching and calling for his death.  He understood human beings as having the capacity for great violence and heard it, felt and died from it.

 

For the more, the most challenging part of this story is the crowd, ordinary citizens of the city, mums and dads, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, adults and children, all calling for Jesus to be crucified.  They were loving to their families, caring for their neighbours, observant of religious rules and rituals. They were active community members and would have been seen, in other places, as good people.

 

Yet here they are, calling for the physical destruction of a fellow Jew, a man who had done so much good and had spoken up for them. They wished him a violent death.

 

It is not sufficient to say it was mob think, peer pressure or the manipulation of the crowd by those in power. These were  sane, thinking people, people able to manage their own decisions and emotions, how come they gave it up so easily to resort to violence? These were sane people.

 

Perhaps this is the scary bit. We understand ourselves to be sane and deny our propensity for violence. In fact we deny even the possibility that we too can resort to violence so powerful it crucifies others. Our decisions, words, actions, ideologies are well thought out and sane. There is no way how we think or act is capable of the same violence as the Romans, the crowd, the Nazis or ISIS. Yet..

 

Thomas Merton explored the case of Adolf Eichmann, the leader of the Gestapo who led millions to their death. Merton writes:

 

One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing.

If all the Nazis had been psychotics, as some of their leaders probably were, their appalling cruelty would have been in some sense easier to understand. It is much worse to consider this calm, "well-balanced," unperturbed official conscientiously going about his desk work, his administrative job which happened to be the supervision of mass murder. He was thoughtful, orderly, unimaginative. He had a profound respect for system, for law and order. He was obedient, loyal, a faithful officer of a great state. He served his government very well.

 

You may say this was an extreme case. Is it? The recent declaration of imprisonment for those who protest the use of their land for CSG and coal mining by the NSW Government, the treatment of children in detention, the increased spending on weapons of destruction for our military, the destruction of the environment for coal power and more, speaks to our willingness to use violence as and when it is necessary.

 

The increase of bullying, domestic violence, street violence, gun violence, road rage speaks to the  level of violence sitting just below the surface in many of us. AN hour in front of the tv at news time will have us locking every window and door and arming ourselves to protect what is ours! The language of politics, brought into sharp focus by the US elections, but not restricted to that country reminds us the capacity other wise sane people seem to have for violence.

 

 

Merton goes on:

The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous……….

The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is itself meaningless. A man can be "sane" in the limited sense that he is not impeded by disordered emotions from acting in a cool, orderly tier, according to the needs and dictates of the social situation in which he finds himself. He can be perfectly "adjusted." God knows, perhaps such people can be perfectly adjusted even in hell itself.

 

The challenge for you and I this Easter is to face the violence within ourselves, to open Pandoras box and take a good long look what is lurking within. It is a dangerous thing to do for we may be forced to realise that the violence in the world also has its home in us, our language, our expectations, our ideologies, our demands.

 

Good Friday is the result of sane people taking sane decisions and enticing good people to follow them. The outcome? The horrific death of the only truly good man. Are we the sane people participating in similar decisions and actions which condemn innocent people to a lifetime in detention centres, to be caught in inhumane living conditions and to be brutalised for our supposed safety?

 

Our does Jesus death save us? It saves us from the illusion of innocence and, if we are willing, wrests the power of violence from us so that we truly can live a non-violent life of obedience and compassion, just as Jesus did. Amen 

Peace Is Our Responsibility

Luke 3:1-6

 

In 1962 Thomas Merton wrote the following an an essay in the Commonweal journal entitled ‘Nuclear War and the Christian":

 “We are no longer living in a Christian world……..Today a non-Christian world still retains a few vestiges of Christian morality, a few formulas and clichés, which serve on appropriate occasions to adorn indignant editorials and speeches. But otherwise we witness deliberate campaigns to eliminate all education in Christian truth and morality. The Christian ethic of love tends to be discredited as phony and sentimental. It is therefore a serious error to imagine that because the West was once largely Christian, the cause of the Western nations is now to be identified, without further qualification, with the cause of God. The incentive to wipe out Bolshevism may well be one of the apocalyptic temptations of twentieth-century Christendom. It may indeed be the most effective way of destroying Christendom, even though man may survive. For who imagines that the Asians and Africans will respect Christianity and  embrace it after it has apparently triggered  mass-murder  and destruction of cosmic proportions?  It is pure madness to think that Christianity can defend itself with nuclear weapons. The mere fact that we now seem to accept nuclear war as reasonable is a universal scandal.”

 

Last week, at the Church of England Synod in England, the church accepted that armed intervention is inevitable in the Middle East refugee crisis. The Guardian reports:

“The Church of England has effectively backed military intervention by the UK government in Syria by unanimously passing a motion which implied support for the use of armed force in establishing safe routes for refugees, with the personal endorsement of the archbishop of Canterbury.

Armed action was “almost inevitable” in response to the crisis in Syria, Welby said. The forces that were driving people to become refugees needed to be confronted, he added.

The motion, proposed by the bishop of Durham, Paul Butler, called on the government “to work with international partners in Europe and elsewhere to help establish safe and legal routes to places of safety, including this country, for refugees who are vulnerable and at severe risk”.

Welby told the church assembly that it needed to recognise the implications of the clause. “Let us support the motion, but do so utterly realistically about its implications,” he said.

The motion – passed by 333 votes, with none opposed and three abstentions”

 

And now Britain is at war with ISIS.

In todays Gospel Luke introduces John the Baptist and his call for repentance and Baptism. This Old Testament style prophet, a ‘replica’ of Isaiah’, recognises the crisis his world was facing and calls for radical action to be taken. What was that radical action? Personal accountability for the state of relationships in the world.

 

Luke makes it clear just how dysfunctional the world was by taking care to meticulously detail the time (In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius,), the key players who were recognised for the manipulation and brutality of each other and those under them (when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene,) and the complicity of the Jewish hierarchy ( ²during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas).

He then places John as a prophet, an outsider, who is not in cohorts with the world, but is aware of God and the role God wants each of us to play in bringing peace to the world, as the spokesman for the new world order - (the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. )

Peace in the world is not a world without unrest, but a world in which unrest first finds its answer in our unwillingness to maintain or feed the violence, thus ensuring it continues. If we continue to feed it, the crooked ways of humanity, even the crooked ways within ourselves, will continue to wind there way into the hills and high places of violence, war and hatred.

Peace in the world is not the sole task of God. John continues the voice of the prophets, institutes a radical pattern of repentance and baptism, putting the responsibility on all humans (flesh) in the world and points to The Way (Jesus) this will be achieved.

Peace is not the sole responsibility of Jesus, his birth, life, death and resurrection. Peace is what we do with that. Unfortunately while the church continues to be embroiled in scandals or in visible and damaging conflict and in-fighting at the local level, we do not contribute to peace, but to unrest.

Peace is found in actions bringing down those in high places, unwinding the corruption and power of those committed to violence in all its forms. These actions are to be peace bringing and non-violent. No where does Jesus advocate a violence response, that would simply have ensured violence continued.

Peace requires we seek and find ways to personally untangle ourselves from the patterns and structures which are committed to maintaining unrest in the world – political parties, big business, the weapons industry and more. Perhaps finding out how businesses operate, where they source their products, how  they make their money, where is you retirement money invested and more. We then can make decisions on who we support through our purchases for example.

The announcement this week that the founder of Facebook and his wife are giving 99% of his fortune to charity over his lifetime has been applauded. Yet it comes with strings attached and carrying much baggage as Devon Maloney of The Guardian website points out:

 

Simply by creating and overseeing the world’s largest social network and one of the most influential corporations on Earth – by gathering and selling untold amounts of data under the protection of inscrutable legal jargon, by implementing shaky harassment and reporting policies that permit certain kinds of abuse, by employing 68% men and fewer than 50 black people in a company of more than 10,000 employees (to say nothing of the unholy spectre of gentrification) – Mark Zuckerberg himself continues to reproduce the inequality he and his wife are taking aim at with their pledge.

 

John the Baptist, and Luke the Gospel writer, make it very plain. What we are waiting for is not a baby but the Way and the Way requires that we engage in deep self reflection, shed our baggage through repentance and become baptised in an active role in building a new world for all. While the repentance is personal, the Baptism is communal and unless we begin to walk this Way, peace will always remain elusive.

 

Thomas Merton warned in 1962 we were sowing the seeds of future war by our actions in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. We are now reaping what we have sown. It is time to “‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” To ensure “⁵Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill made low, and the crooked made straight, and the rough ways made smooth;” so “⁶all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’”

 May Christmas 2015 see the beginning of such peace in our world. 

Do We Need Saints Today?

Sunday was All Saints Day, the day we remember those who are no longer with us and whom we remember for that which they shared with us. In the Christian mind we particularly think of those who have been designated saints, examples of the life of faith lived out here on earth. Some are remembered for great deeds, others for dying a martyrs death and still others for strange and peculiar reasons we find difficult to understand. But they all lived an earthly life, not unlike ours, and all have something to share with us.

It has been noted by some that we no longer need saints and we particularly don't need to name our churches after saints. Apparently, St Oswald, you are no longer of value to those of us fighting our battles of faith on the battlefields of everyday living. Yet, we live in age where we need saints more than ever, no matter how obscure they may seem to be to a wired, consumer society.

The reason?

'Then Jesus told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.'

We need those who have faced the depths of despair and the heights of ecstasy in faith to dispel our fears and to give us hope for the future. Lazarus's circumstances reflects both the future circumstances of Jesus and the many who lived and died following in the steps of faith laid down by Jesus. Lazarus suffered illness and died. His family, particularly his sisters, suffered loss and grief in a particular way. Those who knew Lazarus also suffered. All harboured feelings against Jesus, specifically in relation to his tardy arrival and his failure to heal some one he loved and who loved him.

No amount of reassurance of a future resurrection or the suggestion that people who believe in him never die seemed to reassure them. These must have seemed like hollow words to all involved. One has to admire the faith of the sisters while noting the touch of anger in the comment relating to Lazarus being dead four days and that there would be a stench when they opened the tomb.

Like the sisters, we have a limited tolerance of those who give oft repeated assurances and seemingly inappropriate platitudes when we are facing tragedy, failure, loss - be it personal, financial or job, the failure of a relationship or more. Unthinking reassurance only seems to confirm that no-one else understands our pain, even worse, that this has never happened this way to anyone else before.

 

Yet that is partly what this story about - the reassurance that life, even the life of Jesus, consists of trying to remain human in the midst of the challenges being human brings us. Positive psychology and the happiness project encourages us to think that all can be smooth sailing and that we can so manipulate life to ensure happiness as an entitlement. The truth is much different.

And we need saints to remind us of our resilience and capacity to remain fully engaged with life and our humanity even when bad things happen to good people, including ourselves. Alain de Botton, in his book 'Religion for Athiests' makes the case that religion understands the predicament of humanity much better than secular people, atheists, and provides a multitude of saints to light the way when the positivism of modern thinkers fail us miserably.

Rowan Williams comments that Jesus came among us to join us in the muddle of being human and muddled through based on his relationship with what he understood of the character of God via silence and stillness and through the experience of those he encountered in the Jewish scriptures. He suggests that we are to follow such an example to ensure we muddle through as well.

We have the example of the saints in today's story:

• Mary and Martha who, in the midst of their grief and their anger at Jesus, remain faithful and hopeful;
• The disciples whose minds were befuddled by the tardiness of Jesus and the Unfathomable suggestion that Lazarus is in this state only so Jesus can display God's power; 
• and those watching who simply had no idea and went away struggling with the whole scenario.

We have the examples of:

• The Old Testament saints, many of whom were so deeply involved in the muddle of violent and unforgiving cultures and traditions we struggle to understand their relevance to us today;
• The New Testament saints who lived and died violently for simply believing in the kingdom of God as lived out by Jesus;
• The many exemplary people who have recognised the spirit of God loose in the land and dared to live, speak and challenge the church and society simply based on their faith in Jesus.

Each of us will have a saint or saints who speak directly to us in ways which give meaning and purpose to our lives. For me these include Francis of Assisi, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Vincent Lingari and the unrecognised workers for reconciliation and justice in our country. These are all people who have laid down a framework of hope and possibility which has allowed me to muddle through.

Some have saints who are close to home, people such as a loved one, family friends, teachers or work colleagues, someone whose example provided a light for our feet in times when darkness was all around.

Now we must remember saints are not perfect people, even Jesus was late arriving on the scene for Mary and Martha! Saints are often saints because they persevered despite moments, and sometimes more than just moments, of terrible decision making, errors of judgement and passion. King David, Peter, Merton, Day all had disasters, some we would feel it would be impossible to comeback from. But they did. Perfection is a modern day requirement which has no place in the life of a human being muddling through with Christ.

Why do we need saints to day more than ever? Because today we need to recognise that life is more than just a little difficult for the majority of the time; that happiness is a fleeting interlude between skirmishes; that the only true optimist or positive psychologist was Murphy when he wrote his famous rule, 'Anything that can go wrong, will', and muddling through as a human is more important than being perfect (whatever that is).

Our children need to understand this regardless of their age as do our teachers, coaches politicians, and most of all ourselves.

A quick look at the saints in our lives will affirm just how much we need them. Amen

Speaking from Exile

He was in his early teens. A fine looking young man struggling to find his way in a white world, often accused of crimes he had not committed, we worked together to overcome the injustices that came his way. When he was 10 he filled a bathtub with water, poured in a bottle of White King bleach, and climbed in. He wanted to be white like all the rest of the kids in his class. He was a young man in exile.

 

Sometime later I was working in the funeral industry and visited the mortuary at Mt Isa hospital. A man had been placed on the slab for forensic examination by the GMO; a blood stained white sheet covered his body.  Freezer doors weeping on one wall, a pile of torn decrepit clothes absent-mindedly flung on the untidy bench as a brief reminder of a life once occupied, and the half closed screen door, all spoke volumes about the place in which we stood. The man was an aboriginal person who had been sleeping on the highway, run over by an eighteen-wheel road train. While it might seem trivial to say his body was badly damaged, it is impossible to know just how much unless you had witnessed the results. Remarkably his face was unmarked.

 

Standing there, I  experienced being in the tomb with the dead Christ, standing on the edge watching as people performed the necessary routines. I knew I was witnessing a scene that would change my life forever. And it did.

 

I struggle to understand why people sleep rough on the road in the path of the ubiquitous semi-trailer. What sense of hope do these people have, or indeed, is hopelessness the only gift our society gives them?  Here was a human being who did not deserve to die in such a violent manner.  Here was someone who had at some time in his life dreamed dreams, held hopes, loved another and possibly fathered and raised children. Where had all that gone, and what part did the dominant culture of our society, including the church I am apart of, have in his decline? Here was the image of Christ crushed into death, not simply by the truck, but by the failure of society to engage and include him. He remained in exile.

 

Talking with the GMO I heard about indigenous teenage suicides. The method chosen spoke eloquently of the hopelessness experienced.  They simply tied something around their neck and on to a fence, sat-down and waited. What is our response or do we rationalize what happened as the life style choice of the individual? Exiled and disempowered.

 

I grew up in a town renown for its violence against local tribes. Visiting the library, reading newspaper cuttings and letters from the mid 1880’s to the early 1920’s, I realised the steps taken by my family to hide my grandmothers’ heritage was a strategy deemed necessary for survival.

 

My grandfather made my Uncle promise to keep my grandmothers indigenous heritage hidden. No one in my family speaks of it; her background is shrouded in mystery. There is only a mother who registered the birth some time later in a different town. No father is mentioned. She had the name of the family she was left with when the small aboriginal community from which Jimmy and Joey Governor, part-aboriginal men who killed 9 people during a fourteen week rampage in 1900, the year of federation, and who inspired the book and movie “The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith” came, were forcibly moved out west at the request of the white community. 

 

While it was our family secret, it wasn’t a secret to the locals. I grew up known as ‘Young Darkie’ or ‘Young Blackfella’; my friend, when angry, called me the son of a drunken bush black; another friends’ father told a group of classmates they could be friends with me but to remember where I came from. Bullying at school was never-ending.

 

My father lived in exile, caught between a world he knew and a world he never knew, growing more bitter and angry as the years went on. He acted out his violence through alcohol, directing it at anyone nearby, particularly his family and I as his eldest son. He was never able to reconcile within himself these two worlds even when he stopped drinking. It was bigger than him and his family. It was the internalised oppression of a people and country from which he was exiled.

These incidents are metaphors for the destruction of the primal spiritual essence of our people and symbolise the battle for the soul of our nation. Our people are suffering from the cumulative effect of internalised oppression giving rise to the situation we see in front of us. It will take imagination, humility and a drastic rethinking of our own lives and the way we find value and meaning in and for ourselves, and others before we will be able to reach out to those we continue to oppress. They, we, are living in exile.

 

Perhaps exile holds the key for the future. ‘Only when you are out of rhythm with the familiar do you begin to investigate and explore the possibilities. Exile is the place in which such an investigation not only can begin, but becomes necessary for both survival and renewal. It is the place where one is forced, as an individual and a community, to reflect on who or what is at the centre of one’s being.’ Both cultures are disconnected from their centre due to the violent history of our country, and in a very real sense, both black and white, are exiled from belonging. Homeless and exiled, the violence continues and can only find peace when we own such disconnection together.

Standing at the edges of the abyss, a place our country has teetered on for sometime, reveals both the emptiness and the fullness of our situation. Emptiness and fullness of place, time and country, language and symbolism, and myth and meaning in a land overflowing with mythic and creative possibilities as yet untapped. Both cultures have been reduced to a literal reading of the situation and are concentrating on solving practical and in your face problems – work, housing, education (all good things) but not that which will change the situation in the long term.

What will change our situation is the conversation from the edge, from exile. This is not a conversation for insiders on both sides, but for the outsiders, those whose voice isn’t heard in conventions, parliaments or peak body discussions. It is not about the pronouncements by high profile leaders or designated spokesmen and women. This is dialogue, the conversation between ordinary individuals, telling stories and sharing both knowledge and ignorance, informing pathways and possibilities. This conversation begins here with you and I, exploring experiences, questioning stereotypes, forming relationships and breaking down walls.

Thomas Merton suggests “The deepest of level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless ... beyond speech ... beyond concept.” It is sometimes called Dadirri by indigenous people.  Inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness. It is a 'tuning in' experience with the specific aim to come to a deeper understanding of the beauty of the other. 

It is listening and hearing, not just to what is said but what is not said, what is felt, what is hidden. This takes great imagination and risk. It takes time, and is not linear. It involves learning in depth, far removed from the head and the rational desire to solve problems.

It requires respect, the capacity to allow others to make the journey at their own pace and in ways we find uncomfortable and counter intuitive. It recognises others as our teachers and removes us from the responsibility of knowing everything. It recognises the reign of God as the companionship of empowerment and looks not for measurable results but fulfilled lives.

 

Merton, in writing to race activist Jim Forrest in the US in the 1960’s said; “Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”

Whatever we do in terms of reconciliation and engagement with indigenous people must keep this in mind. It is not about ideas or solutions, but people. Individuals of goodwill like you and I who are seeking a better world for all, can only do so in relationship with each other and those we share the future with. John Baxter, speaking at a NRW gathering said that reconciliation is relational – it happens between individual people, not cultures. For people driven by easy answers and quick solutions this maybe seen as doing nothing, wasting time and avoiding the problem.

It is the good news Jesus performed. He did little, he wasted time and, as far as the Zealots and others were concerned, he avoided the elephant in the room - the system. Yet he changed the world. We can do the same.  It can only happen through dadirri and communion, and it must begin tonight.

 

 

 

  

Pentecost - Being Christ in the World.

John 15:26 - 16:15

 

 

Today is Pentecost Sunday, the day of the breaking in and breaking out of the Spirit in the lives of all who live a life of love and compassion in Christ. To be en christos is to be empowered to live and love in a manner which challenges the accepted ways of the world. To, in fact, be Christ in the world. You. Yourself. No-one-else.

 

No longer is there a Jesus to turn to for direction, teaching, hope, advice and spiritual comfort. You are on your own. You are to speak as if you are Jesus and to act as if you are Jesus because, for John, you are. And you will experience life just as Jesus did. For you are mystically one with Christ.

 

John writes about the coming of the Spirit at a time when we associate Pentecost with miracles, speaking in tongues and other super-natural events, and yet that seems far from what John has in mind. No where in this farewell discourse does he mention the doing of miracles or speaking in tongues or ecstatic experiences s being the lot of the those he was writing, his community which was beginning to feel the wrath of persecution and the struggles of remaining faithful even within the synagogue.

 

One would have thought if these were to be the tools of a disciple’s life, John would have spoken strongly and clearly about the power available. He doesn’t. Instead he links the disciples lives and experience of life directly to that of Jesus and stresses that the Christ is now in them as God was in him and that is all they need.

 

Jesus is saying that even if I go away, the meaning I came to bring will not disappear. What I have done is to open to you a new understanding of what it means to be human. Trust it. Now that it has been opened, it cannot be closed again. Spong writes that Jesus continues with; ‘The spirit of truth, which proceeds from the father, will come to stand where I have stood.’

 

David Ewart suggests "Whatever else we may want to say on this day of Pentecost about the Spirit, it is important to notice that Jesus always refers to the Spirit as the Spirit of truth. And in John truth is always the way, the life, the light, the joy, the friendship."

 

Here we discover a mystical and mutual indwelling bringing into existence a new being in relationship. It is no longer one of authority but of indwelling friendship. It is a new way of engaging with the divine. The divine is no longer up there, beyond the clouds, but has entered life, your life, my life in the form of the very spirit of truth. This was the spirit we saw in Christ and now will be visibly evident in the lives of those who form the ‘body of Christ’. Us.

 

William Loader, of Murdoch University says, "Jesus is not left behind that we might soar into spiritual fantasy and relish the prospects of more magic and more religion. John promises no such flights and is silent about future miracles. The task of the disciples and disciples after them is to bear fruit, to let the seed sown in death rise to new life. Transitional events are minimised. What matters is life and love."

 

Our life and lives are transformed by the indwelling Christ. It is our actions, thoughts, experiences which become the visible presence of God in the world. Pentecost is not about the supernatural crashing into the world in the form of special effects and magic tricks, it is the empowering of ordinary people to do ordinary things so that extraordinary changes take place in people, places and things.

 

In the Anglican Church there has been a process for young people to take communion after confirmation. When I was a school chaplain I used to alternate the services with 2 out 3 services for the High School students being a Eucharist. Almost all of the young people had neither church background nor any religious education in relation to the sacraments. Yet when the invitation was given many would come forward to take communion. Fortnightly 25% of the 600 students did.

 

Some teachers and other clergy questioned to authenticity them taking communion. Yet these young people made a conscious decision to come forward as did those who decided to stay in their seats. For both groups this was not simply following the crowd but a deliberate act of the will.

 

And it was a truly Pentecost experience every time. They would look directly into you eyes as you distributed the sacrament, moving from bread to wine respectfully and deliberately. While they may not have been regular church attendees outside school, their reverential actions spoke loudly about a deep sacramental and mystical experience of God. They were experiencing being in Christ. They trusted what was within them and stepped forward in faith to receive.

 

John’s Jesus speaks to the ordinary person, saying I know what it is like to be a human who is different to those around me, to march to a different spirit. Jesus says I also know the spirit is sufficient for all your needs, not only your physical needs, but your need to make decisions, to live in a certain manner, to endure hardships and persecutions.

 

It is perplexing when we see the Spirit at work, and adults even Christian adults, respond with questions and doubts, unable to accept that God is at work in ways and in people outside of what we perceive as the normal spiritual way. We simply shut down Pentecost.

 

Here we sit amongst a community of people who are open to possibility. That is why they bring their children to ballet, make school lunches, run exercise classes. It is all about what is now and will be in the future. It is about awakening the spirit with in, going beyond the mind that is. It is the mystical ordinariness of the incarnated spirit of God alive in the daily activities of human beings.

 

In an experience known as the Louisville Epiphany, Thomas Merton expresses what this Pentecost event is, and it is no different to the first event in Acts.

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

 

We are challenged on this Pentecost Sunday to see the supernatural possibility in the natural, to see God’s spirit already at work in those around us and to find ways to engage and to be en christos with them. We are not to demand that they change or convert to our thinking but to find ways to befriend and to compassionately be one with them. In doing so we open up the miracle of Pentecost and bring about a new world for all. Amen’

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Jesus, Merton & Non-Violence - A Palm Sunday Reflection

(Mark 15:9-47)

James Hillman, a archetypal psychologist, wrote a book called ‘The Terrible Love of War’, exploring humanity’s simultaneous attraction and aversion to war. The chapters of his book have the following titles: ‘War is Normal’, ‘War is Inhuman’, ‘War is Sublime’ and ‘Religion is War’. He also suggests that peace is just an interlude between war, and can never be a lasting event, for to have peace there has to be a victory, someone has to lose. For peace to remain this has to reoccur over and over again.

As much as we are reviled by some of his premise, the longer I live the more I recognise the element of truth that sits under his ideas. Human beings are violent creatures. The world is a violent place. Watch the National geographic daily footage of animals eating other animals, floods, cyclones and more. The nightly news and the daily headlines scream violence.

I have seen my share of violence. Domestic violence in the house I grew up in, bullying at school, working the drug scene in the 70’s, as a prison chaplain to maximum security prisons and in my work with families and young people.

For 3 months I was posted to Broken Hill as a cadet Salvation Army officer and left on my own for a number of weeks as the officer in charge went on leave. In that time I stood on verandas restraining angry husbands as their wives and children hurriedly grabbed clothes and belongings and fled to a shelter. I remember begging a lady to leave her husband who used to abuse her every day. She said ‘where can I go out here?’ The perpetrator was in his 70’s.

In Brisbane I helped develop a community garden with a Sudanese man whose wife was the only member of her family to survive a massacre in her village.

I stood in the morgue at Mt Isa and saw an aboriginal man who suffered a death we hear little of in the city, but one that is not unusual out there. He had been run over by a road train while sleeping on the road. No-one stopped.

In the Navy we worked with numerous young men and women traumatised by the violence they experienced in the campaign to turn back the boat people. Like most veterans they suffered not only physical violence but a psychological violence which never leaves.

War and violence litter our world with blood. And we seem to need blood to give reason for the loss of innocence and the innocent. Our reverence for Gallipoli as the time when Australia came of age is tied directly to the blood of young Australians.

The Easter story is another story of blood and rightly or wrongly we focus on the death of Jesus as somehow being necessary to set us free from the failings of our own personal humanity. The story of Jesus’ death has been appropriated as a way to set us free from sin and the devil.

On Palm Sunday we are confronted with an option that stands against violence, war and blood, and if taken seriously, it will give us a new understanding of Jesus’ death. It is the option of non-violence. Jesus’s bases his life on the non-violent response to the violence of others, of nature, of political ideology and to those who oppress the people of the land he grew up in.

Palm Sunday ushers in the final confrontation between the way of power and blood, and the way of non-violence. On Palm Sunday we have Jesus riding into the city surrounded by his friends and others. He is seated on a young donkey, a colt. The people sing songs of exultation and lay down their robes and palm branches, the symbols of peace, on the road before him.

At the same time, Marcus Borg and other scholars suggest, there was a procession of a different quality going on on the other side of time. It was a show of military might and power by the Roman occupiers. Men on horses dressed in all their glory showing off the might of the Empire, the might which had and continued to subdue the locals. Ruthless and bloody.

Jesus’ procession mimicked what was probably an annual event at Passover and said loudly and clearly, violence is not the answer. There is another power and it is the power of compassion and acceptance, of love and respect, of hope and freedom. Its way was not to confront power with power, as many had hoped. Jesus reminds us, and those watching, that the act of violence only brings about more violence, as the Zealot’s and others were to find out a little further down the line.

Jesus journey from the last supper, through the garden of Gethsemane and through the Jewish and Roman legal systems and onto his death on the cross, exemplifies Jesus commitment to non-violence.

 What does this non-violence look like:

•  Thomas Merton, Catholic Monk and writer, writes:

“Christian non-violence is not built on a presupposed division, but on the basic unity of man. It is not out for the conversion of the wicked to the ideas of the good, but for the healing and reconciliation of man with himself, man the person and man the human family.”(Faith and Violence, 15) This is the story of the cross. Jesus was not attempting to convert humanity but to heal its wounds by exemplifying the non-violent option. His death said loudly and clearly, enough is enough. Violence has no part in the resurrection we are to live.

•  Merton goes on to suggest:

“ A test of our sincerity in the practice of non-violence is this: are we willing to learn something from the adversary?...” (24) Dialogue and engagement, not acts of defensive or aggressive violence are to be our performative response, although it does not rule out the possibility of the need to protect oneself, it does suggest that this is an option of last resort. 

•  Merton finally suggests, in line with what we see occurring in the face of Jesus’ committed resistance to the brutality of the political and religious world:

“Nonviolence is not for power but for truth. It is not pragmatic but prophetic. It is not aimed at immediate political results, but at the manifestation of fundamental and crucially important truth. Nonviolence is not the language of efficacy but of kairos. It does not say ‘We shall overcome’, so much as to say ‘This is the day of the Lord, and whatever may happen to us, He shall overcome.’ (Nonviolent Alternative, 75)

So what does have to say to us in a world that can, and has been, violent to others and us? How do we practice non-violence in our daily lives? How do we learn from those who appear to be against us? Where do we find the courage to wait on God throughout a difficult time and resist the urge to fight back? How do we ignore the mantra we hear everyday, if you don’t look after yourself, nobody else will, implying we have to fight for what we want? How do we change our mindset from competitive to collaborative, allowing us to work with instead of defeating others?

These are difficult questions for each of us to grapple with. There is no simple answer. We are called to do what as Jesus did – to trust the process and the one who is in charge of the process, allowing ourselves the luxury of hope and confidence, not in a successful resolution but in an outcome based on integrity and truth.

We know Jesus struggled a number of times through his life with the possibility of an unjust and painful death, the apparent failure of his mission. Instead of fighting to win he maintained the integrity of non-violence, showing us that there is another way. He gives us no blueprint to follow. Just an example lived out in dialogue with the same tensions we face everyday. His example simply says, ‘Remain faithful, God will overcome.’ AMEN