In The Absence of God.

Three of the Survivors of The Sandakan-Ranau Death March.

Writing a Good Friday sermon is difficult. The violence, injustice and incredible cruelty of the incident is overpowering. The machinations of those involved to maintain power and control, to manipulate those in charge to do their bidding and the fear-full failure of those who followed Jesus is almost impossible to accept. We struggle with the pain of this event and, perhaps most of all, the sense of abandonment experienced by Jesus – by both God and those whom he had lived amongst.

 

John presents Jesus as assured and confident throughout both his Gospel and this event. He is the symbol of one who has unbreakable faith in God. Jesus is depicted by John as an icon to be grasped as the standard of faith for all within the Johnannine community in their battle with tradition and society. On the cross there is none of the brokenness of Gethsemane and the cry of despair we find in Mark.

Even the words ‘It is finished’ (19:30) signify Jesus has confidently completed the task given to him, to make the Father known[1]. While it is often linked to the atoning for sins as if Jesus is saying: I have made the sacrifice of my body which I came to make on behalf of creation, this is not John’s point. This would certainly be the way the author of Hebrews would read it[2], but it is not John’s emphasis, nor is it mine. Instead the focus is Jesus’ faithfulness to the Father’s commission revealed even in the face of suffering which despite the confidence is real[3]. The effect is to reveal love and expose hate and so offer a new beginning. [4]

What a challenging mission this was and is. It cost Jesus his life. It cost the one who was there at the beginning of creation his being in this world, and revealed that being as the Christ of the Cosmos.  It cost beyond measure, the cruelty was beyond pain and was achieved in great silence and deep stillness.

It was the silence of being laid bare without the comfort of the felt presence of God or those who were close to him. Even if people were there, there is a deep silence in suffering separating the one suffering from all who attempt to be present. It is deep, private, harrowing and uncommunicable. There is no way anyone else can understand the depth of our personal suffering, what ever it is and how ever it manifests itself.

 

The danger is we may try and emulate the response of John’s Jesus and find ourselves unable to be as iconic, stoic or faithful as John portrays it. I doubt that that was the reality.

In 2010 I walked the Ranau to Sandakan death march for the first time. This was the march at the very end of the Second World War the Japanese army forced 2,434 prisoners of war to undertake. Only 6 survived and they men who escaped. When we walked the track we did so for a soldier who died. Mine was Padre Harold Wardle-Greenwood. He was a brave and compassionate man who cared for the dying in his group of 50 on the March. Yet, Lynette Silver writes “Harold Wardle-Greenwood had comforted the dying and disconsolate for so long that he was now broken physically and spiritually. He had lost his faith in a God who, he believed had forsaken them. Indeed,” Silver continues, “it would have taken a man of superhuman faith to have believed such death and suffering was God’s will”.

In 2012 I walked for Padre Thompson. As I sat on the top of the hill where Thompson died, I had little doubt that if it had been me that I too would have felt completely abandoned by God. The hill, even for a well fed well rested reasonably fit person was a challenge, coming after several days of walking through the intense heat, the suffocating humidity, the rain and the unceasing red gluggy mud sticking to your boots. For men who had had no nourishment, were sick with a range of debilitating illnesses and lugging twice their body weight in equipment, it must have been hell only punctuated by the sounds of shots as the guards shot another soldier and rolled them over the edge.

This was suffering that could have been avoided if appropriate action had been taken when it was planned. It was suffering that was covered up and forgotten about for over 40 years. This was suffering that was real and needless. This was suffering of the deep silence only Jesus could share for only the suffering of Jesus on the cross is able to replicate the abandonment these men felt. Keith Botterill, a survivor, comments they kept going in the hope that someone would survive to tell their story. 6 men fulfilled that hope.

John portrays Jesus as confident in God to glorify him for his faithfulness unto death, yet I wonder if that is exactly how Jesus felt? Would Jesus have been disappointed if the situation had been resolved and he had continued to live and be in the world? Would it have been a failure if the Jews and the Romans had recognised the mission of Jesus and changed their way of being?

For us who may find ourselves in the midst of the silence of an absent God, are we expected to be as iconic as Jesus and plough on with unbruised hope? Is this a realistic ask of people facing a diagnosis of cancer for themselves or someone they love; for someone who has lost their livelihood and home; for someone who despite all their efforts are unable to work or get work; for those who are burying families due to the insanity of war; or those unable to be with their family because of incarceration?

Yes, John, you can hold Jesus up as a model but remember Jesus was human as well as divine and felt every abandonment by his friends, every lash of tongue and whip, and every hammer blow, just like those others who were crucified at the same time. He too would have felt submerged in the abyss of a silent God. 

Where does that leave us? Do we join with John and see Jesus the icon of suffering we are to emulate or do we to look beneath the story and see the struggle of a human being deeply broken by a death he would rather have avoided? How do we make sense of his and our suffering? How do we hang on when we are dying, in whatever form that particular death takes, and hope in hope itself.

We can appeal to the resurrection as the evidence of hope but is that always possible, or do we lose sight of Sunday while we are alone in Friday?

There are no quick answers. Yes, John’s Jesus shows how to grasp the hope but be not disappointed if you find yourself incapable of doing so. Jesus has already done it on your behalf for he is the only one who knows the depth of God’s silence you feel. Hang onto him.

Witchetty Grubs, Gumtrees and All The Saints

Luke 6:20-31

 

 

Today we are celebrating All Saints Day. The tradition of celebrating the saints and martyrs has been marked by Christians ever since the 4th century the Feast of All Holy Martyrs.

 

In 837AD Pope Gregory IV extended the festival to include saints, renaming the festival the Feast of All Saints, all who were martyred or who lived an exemplary life.

 

In recent times this has been widened to include everyone who is a Christian. We are all saints, in a biblical sense.

 

All Saints Day is a time to be thankful for all those Christians who have lived before us, whether they are officially saints or not. Some are the great teachers and prophets from history. Some are those who’ve taught and inspired us personally.

 

Some are our friends and family. We can thank God for their witness, and for the way they have transmitted the faith down the generations. We can learn from their lives. We can take time to be grateful for what we’ve received, and to recommit ourselves to follow in their footsteps.*

 

Interestingly, the reading from Luke’s Gospel takes us into a radical new place and challenges the narrow understanding of this day. In this passage Jesus moves from the narrow understanding of who was included in God’s economy and how that was to be defined.  He continues, as he has done repeatedly in Luke, to prefer the poor and to diminish those who would have seen themselves as belonging to the inner circle, the blessed, the rich, those with names and with power.

 

He instructs his followers to be inclusive even at the risk of personal recrimination and harm. He tells people to defy the accepted rules of engagement with others and to take it to and beyond the limits in place to make the intolerable tolerable. Soldiers, legally, could only make you carry their bags a certain distance so defy them and carry it twice as far and see what happens. Force the person to hit you with the back of the hand which was against law and practice. This is not about doing good, but about challenging the injustice inherent in the system.

 

Jesus takes it further and says we are to do unto others what we would want them to do unto us. This is an incredibly challenging statement. It is not a golden rule, it is a deep dark gold mine we are challenged to explore and to live. It is not about our relationships with those like us. It doesn’t even stop at simply celebrating saints who fit into our perception of life, faith and religion. It is not about our closed and isolated community but about the ever-expanding community of life on and beyond this planet.

 

Saints are not just humans, and especially not just humans who share our ethnicity, our values or our lifestyle. Saints are present in communities unlike ours, in peoples we fear and in the created world we continue to exploit.

 

Throughout history peoples of all backgrounds have sought to recognise God at work in their world. These cultures have discerned wisdom and insights both individual and universal, providing us with a web of spiritual and religious wisdom informing and expanding our own. To ignore such for an exclusive us only variety diminishes all of us. Thomas Merton, Henry Nouwen, Rowan Williams, Elizabeth Johnson, Sallie McFague, Pope Francis and many many others  have initiated and maintained communion with the saints of other faiths and practices in order to add to and affirm what they already know or suspect. So should we.

 

In the book of Job we read, “But ask the animals, and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you;” Other versions use the word beasts, a deeply primal and free expression of God’s creativity, full of the capacity to teach, mentor and lead us. They too fit the definition of saints and deserve to be treated in the way we wish to be treated.

Wendell Berry speaks eloquently of this communion of saints when reflecting on the cycle of life in forests and plains, swamps and deserts, and everywhere in the natural world we inhabit; “They die into each other’s life, and live into each other’s death…and this exchange goes on and on, round and round, the Wheel of Life rising out of the soil, descending into it, through the bodies of creatures”.

 

In this century science and our expanding universe asks us to let go of the simple anthropomorphic (human centred) understanding of creation and Gods economy (kingdom) and to come into a relationship of respect, compassion and justice – the way of kindness - with all whom we share this world with. We are to recognise the wisdom inherent in others of all ethnicities, faiths and backgrounds and to sit in the desert and hear the wisdom of the beasts and all that maintains our planet and our lifestyle.

 

Failing to do so will continue the process of destruction of peoples through senseless wars, embargoes, bans and bombs. Saints are dying in places like Yemen, West Papua, Aleppo,  Philippines, the Sudan, Burma, remote communities of Australia and Manus Island. Saints are being banned from bringing their wisdom here for the crime of wanting a better life. Saints, such as these, must be welcomed in our country or we fail the test of doing unto others.

 

Failure will diminish the incredible success of the theory of evolution by natural selection in giving us the immense diversity of thousands of years of refining creation. Within that process there are many saints, past and present, responsible for giving us sustenance, oxygen, and sustainability – trees, birds, fish, oceans, mountains and rivers not to mention bugs, mosquitos, flies, microbes and more. We rarely include them in our list of saints or in our prayers on all saints day, but they are there by default, central to the on going creation of our world.

 

On this all Saints Day we are asked to expand our worldview to include difference and diversity, to find a place in our religion for all who have been created in the image of God; meaning those with the capacity to create and continue to create the unbelievable, and for many of us, the unfathomable complexity of our habitat.

 

By doing so we will be challenged about our relationships with others including the creatures we share this world with. We will begin to see such as deserving to be treated, in the words of Jesus, as we wish to be treated. “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” We are to write this across all our transactions, relationships and interactions with those we share this world with, and this world itself.

 

It is recognising the sainthood of all things, not just selected humans of specific gifts and talents. It is recognising that we entertain angels, saints, in each and every transaction we participate in. Detainees, victims of war, dislocated refugees and first nations peoples around the world, practitioners of other faiths, old growth forests, witchetty grubs and more carry the wisdom we need to maintain and care for ourselves, others and this world.

 

On this All Saints Day let us take just a few moments to quietly remember all saints of all kinds now. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Love & War

³⁴I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. ³⁵By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

John 13:31-35

 

At a leadership conference for handpicked sailors, a lecturer from the ANU made the commented that the reported incidence at Abu Grahib prison by US military personnel couldn’t happen in the Australian forces because we were so well trained to behave otherwise.

 

After a moment of mouth open bewilderment, I spoke up and suggested that he was either being reckless in his confidence in our troops (us sitting in the room) or he was deluded into believing that we were, somehow, superhuman and therefore would not act irrationally or emotionally if the circumstances were right.  Both of which I knew from my understanding of myself to be possible.

 

On this eve of ANZAC Day, arguably Australia’s national day, let us keep an informed mind about war and those who find themselves involved in them. War is not rational, it is irrational. Killing others, especially your own, to achieve a politically ordained solution to an intractable problem is irrational. To ask people who find themselves in the midst of the subsequent conflict to act rationally is irrational. The war fought in our country for control over the land and its resources, the unnamed and unremembered war, was irrational. The wars fought on other shores for the political and power needs of others have been irrational. The wars we continue to fight are more so.

 

Why do we expect people who find themselves caught up in the big business of mass  killing not to behave irrationally on the ground just as those who are behind the scenes, governments, corporations and media do? Why do we elevate these young men and women to a level of sainthood they never sought and can never live up to?

 

War is abominable. Being caught up in it at the ground level is horrific and can never be forgotten. Society appropriates war and the outcomes of war for its own purposes, to give meaning to an event that was often a failure but was so costly it needs to be elevated to the spiritual to allow us to live with its memory.  This ANZAC Day it is worthwhile unpacking the fairy-tale and taking a peek at the legend for what it is, the disastrous plans of misguided men who were willing to sacrifice fellow men, women and children to feed their own political, economic and power delusions, be they on the shores of Gallipoli or on the plains across the states of Australia.

 

The truth is we live between betrayal and denial, between upholding our values and respecting others, between hate and love. In todays shortened Gospel reading Jesus gives the well recognised, oft heard call for love: “³⁴I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” In light of tomorrow James Hillman says we have tried brotherly love for 2000 years and it has failed, humans have an insatiable appetite for war.

 

It is interesting to note where John places Jesus command to love. Paul S. Berge notes, "In the midst of his betrayal by Judas and denial by Peter, Jesus calls the community to live in love with one another, a pattern expressed in his own life and death."

 It sits squarely between the betrayal of Judas who had, according to John, just left the room to carry out his dastardly deed; and the denial of Peter, the denial that abandoned his teacher and companion to face the foe alone. One does not hear this command and behaves badly, the other behaves badly even though he heard it. Both had been well trained and taught by Jesus. Both had seen the evidence of Jesus identity and mission. Both had participated in the various miracles and events, eyewitnesses to the capacity Jesus had for his fellow humanity.

 

Yet, when the bullets started to fly, they failed him spectacularly. One went over to the other side, deserted to the enemy and the either denied any involvement or knowledge and refused to stand up when he was called upon to do so.

 

Love, love in the style of Jesus is tough love. It is the hardest thing to do. To stay fully engaged in relationship with others and self in the midst of life takes a resolve only grace can give. We, like Judas and Peter, fail to keep this commandment, not just once nor 7 times, but 70 times 7. Regardless, it is a our cornerstone, without which we find ourselves slipping into despondency and permanent failure.

 

The new commandment is to love one another as I have loved you – accepting and respectful of all that goes to make up who you are. Jesus love for both Peter and Judas remains despite the disappointment. Jesus love recognises we are not perfect but that we do endeavour to live out his commandment.

 

In the midst of the chaos of life in the world, the chaos that sits with in us as we deal with the stuff that comes our way, and the chaos that arrives unscripted and unwanted to turn our rational world into an irrational world.

 

As we unpack the legend of ANZAC and all the wars fought either side of the Gallipoli encounter we discover people who stay true to Jesus’ call. They carry out acts of bravery, sacrifice, comfort and camaraderie with those they stand beside and those they stand against. They do the incredibly rational in the midst of the unthinkably irrational. They put legs on Jesus command in circumstances most of us would find impossible.

 

Jesus command is a command to love in tough circumstances and to love those who are tough to love, particularly ourselves. It is to exhibit such love without violence and to find a way to reconcile us to others in the midst of the irrationality of their circumstance and ours. It is how we engage with people who have hurt, isolated and alienated us. It is how we engage with those who oppress, control and incarcerate others. It is the way we get on with creating life in the midst of a society committed to death.

 

How do we do that? There are no 5 steps to success, but we do begin with a clear mind and understanding of who we are and what we are capable of. It then follows that we work to retain that understanding in all our engagements with others. Love is the capacity to retain our humanity and to ensure others retain theirs despite differences, conflicts and blame.

 

Jesus lived such a paradigm into our imagination. We are to live that paradigm into the imagination of the world, starting right where we are. 

ANZAC Day

On this ANZAC Day, let us not forget the horror of war and let us abandon the talk of glory, sacrifice and heroes. Let us abandon the myth that death and mangled bodies, lost lives and fractured families is the foundation on which our country was born. A country born in blood needs blood to continue to give it meaning, the blood of soldiers, refugees and the indigenous.

It is time to get real and find a new reason for our being or we will continue to need war and blood as a sacrifice for our sins.

Emotional Event

(War In Afghanistan 2)

(A reflection on the dehumanised nature of the modern video war where people do not exist as victims but only as collateral damage)

I read in the paper

just a couple of innocuous lines

planted almost hidden

camouflaged amongst a battalion of words

the following

“… the 2000 pound bomb that went astray would cause ‘ a significant emotional  event’ for any one within a square mile…”

then it all became clear to me

war is not about death

people do not die in war

they only suffer emotional events

collateral damage

insignificant

unnoticed

not even counted as a statistics

they were not even there

like the poor

victims of the Great Fire of London

on the illegal immigrants

on September 11

not dead

not included

forgotten

ignored

somehow responsible for their own misery

yes death is a significant emotional event

for all human beings

especially when hit by a

rogue

wayward

homeless

2000 pound bomb

ANZAC DAWN SERVICE ADDRESS

This Dawn Service has its origins in a military routine which is still followed by the Australian Army. During battle, the half-light of dawn was one of the most favoured times for an attack. Soldiers in defensive positions were woken in the dark before dawn, so by the time first light crept across the battlefield they were awake, alert, and manning their weapons; this is still known as the 'stand-to'. As dusk is equally favourable for attacks, the stand-to was repeated at sunset.

After the First World War, returned soldiers sought the comradeship they had felt in those quiet, peaceful moments before dawn. A dawn vigil, recalling the wartime front line practice of the dawn 'stand-to', became the basis of a form of commemoration in several places after the war.

Today we come to share this moment with returned service men and women and I have been pondering why? What gets us out of bed before sunup to come and stand here and remember something that happened on a far shore in different century?

It's so long ago and so far away and for many of us it is just a story, albeit a gripping and tragic one.Yet we come, young and old, of all nationalities and faiths, to stand at this place and pay our respects for those who paid the ultimate price in a war which extracted an unmeasurable cost from the countries involved.

Why do we come? 
Do we come to remember the horror that is war? Perhaps. 
Do we come to worship heroes? They did many extraordinary acts but they would deny they were heroes and reject being worshipped as such. They were simply men and women doing what had to be done. 
Do we come out of a sense of national pride? Perhaps, but it is best we treat this emotion with great care as it can soon transform into nationalism, and in war, we have had enough of that.
Why do we come? Why do we stand to? I suspect it is out of gratitude - we are grateful for the sacrifice made by all service men and women in what ever war or conflict they served in, because by doing so they saved us from having to, they protected our lifestyle, they provided us with the freedom to be who we are today.

When we look around us and see what we have, what we have the freedom to be and do, what opportunities are there for us we are grateful for those who made it possible, for those who gave us our identity, ensured our culture and traditions and left us a legacy others are envious of.

What do they ask in return? 
That we stand to and practice gratitude in all of our relationships, contacts and dealings with others, those we share this country with regardless of where they came from or why they came here.
That we stand to and do all that we do at home, at school, at work everyday with an attitude that is grateful for the opportunity to do so; 
That we stand to and offer the opportunity for others to share in our gratitude by opening our country and hearts to those whose countries are unable to do so;
That we stand to and use every tool at our disposal to avoid war at all costs.

Why do we come? We come to say thanks digger,  thanks for having the courage to face the horror in your present moment and make room for our future. Thanks.

Lest we forget.