Lucky Bear

To Paint the World with Love

2009-05-29T10:13:00.000+12:00

We painted Jesus a lot when I was in Sunday School. In that little back room of the hall our teacher with the long flowing skirt gave her pupils brushes. We splashed and sloshed, dabbed and dotted, browns and blues and lovely reds.

Jesus always had long hair, like my older brother. He was invariably a blue-eyed blond, like most us. No one even thought he might look Semitic. He had long robes like the vicar, a kindly face, and was patting sheep.

Our pictures though were far from stereotypical. With broad brushstrokes Palestine was transformed into a green and pleasant land with lots of red boulders and purple trees. The sky, God’s domain, was indigo and silver, with pink cherubs dotted about.

We drew one another into the scene. We drew our teacher there too. We drew God and Jesus, who were sort of one and the same but different. We drew the pictures and the pictures captured us. The median was the message, and the median was fun.

As I’ve grown older I’ve continued to draw Jesus, though usually these days with words. Every church I’ve been a part of and every Christian I’ve met have also drawn Jesus. We continue trying to paint pictures that are true to our knowledge and experience as well as our hopes and dreams.

Sometimes in church he’s up there in the stained glass with a crown on his head and a far away look in his eyes. Sometimes he’s down here in the wine we share and in the children’s corner. Sometimes he’s in concepts profound but hard to apply. Sometimes he’s in talkative visitors who are hard to get away from. We find Jesus both where we look and where we least expect.

The church of my childhood painted a kind and benign Jesus. Apart from the gender he was like the Queen of England going round smiling, doing apolitical good deeds, and living in heavenly splendour but still mixing with commoners. We could come to church without shoes and leave with paint on our clothes. Jesus didn’t mind. Why anyone would kill him was mystifying. His death was just a random act of violence.

The church of my teenage years painted the cross in the centre. Rather than his death being a random act of violence it was a deliberate God-inspired scheme to save us from being bad. Like in Harry Potter the blood of the innocent willing victim [Jesus] would magically rescue us from the consequences of cosmic evil. We came to church with bibles under our arms and left with enough hope to survive a week in the jungle of adolescence. Jesus was our best friend, and sometimes our only friend.

The church of my twenties painted Jesus in revolutionary colours. Jesus had done a course in structural analysis and knew all about racism, sexism, and indigenous land rights. He was the protester par excellence, carrying in his body and soul the pain of the oppressed, living and dying for the cause. We marched with a cross, saw the inside of courtrooms, and heard policemen lie. Faced with injustice and punitive power we learnt to pray simply and silently. Some things are too deep for words.

These days I am part of a church that paints Jesus with a broad progressive brush. Jesus identified the human tendency to fix our God ideas and morality in the concrete of certainty. Jesus cracked and broke through that concrete in order that both new insights and innovations might be included and marginalized and oppressed people treated justly. This iconoclastic church is a blaze of vibrant and often contrasting colours, a wild and beautiful place… yet hardly restful.

The life of Jesus seems to me to be bigger than any single interpretation of that life. It is a painting bigger than any one canvas. His Spirit cannot fit in any one church or every church combined. The plurality of Christian experience points to the mystery that Jesus is among us while also beating in other hearts and in other places we haven’t heard of. Tolerance and intellectual modesty are therefore important when trying to know Jesus.

All these churches I’ve mentioned have this in common: they promote the ethics of empathy, compassion, and courage. These are the things that Christians really have in common, just as colours, brush, and canvas are the things that painters really have in common. The barriers of history, culture, theology, political, or national differences should not obscure for Christians our unity of purpose. Simply put that purpose is to splash and slosh, dab and dot, until the world is painted in love.

A prayer in gratitude to Richard Holloway

2009-05-22T13:44:00.001+12:00

We hold in our common heart and mind: our whenua, our communities, our whanau…

The giggles of children…
The sighs of animals…
The smells of kitchens…
The flicker of a smile…
The incense of our gratitude perfumes the air like frangipani at dawn

The cries of the little ones…
The fear of the beaten ones…
The grief of the wounded ones…
The brutality of the powerful…
The tears of our empathy water the pohutukawas of our resistance

The beauty of holy space…
The prayers of the pious…
The transcendence of music…
The passion of the committed…
The embers of our courage are blown by the spirit of outrage to ignite hope

Gratitude, empathy, and courage… may we uphold and be upheld by these… and hold out our open, wounded, and weary hands to others.

Amen.

Speech to UNITEC Graduates

2009-04-08T10:11:00.002+12:00

The following speech was given last night in the Auckland Town Hall to the graduates of one of Auckland's universities [UNITEC]. The faculties represented were Design, Performing and Screen Arts, Social Practice, and Sport.

Tena koutou te whanau o Unitec. Tena koutou e Hare, e Ted, e Rick. Tena koutou nga manuhiri. Nau mai, haere mai. Kia ora ra. Ki nga iwi e tau e.

Today is a day to feel good, to celebrate, to congratulate yourself, to thank your long-suffering support team, and to thank and for most of you to say goodbye to the academic staff. Today is a day when your tenacious support team feels proud of you, proud of what you’ve achieved, and quietly relieved it is finished.

What’s it all been for? “Well Glynn,” you might say, “It gives us a ticket – access – to a place and type of work that will hopefully stimulate, challenge, and pay us. The ticket indicates to society that we have the skills necessary for this stage in our chosen profession.’

I’ve spent time in four tertiary educational institutions. There’s very little in the way of facts or formulas that I can still remember from those days. What I can remember is now intellectually, and probably morally, redundant. I did get four tickets that have been useful. Yet much more importantly tertiary education gave me five little pebbles.

The first pebble is a love of learning. Learning is for life. It is to be enjoyed. One of the greatest gifts you can give to children, students, or trainees is your infectious love of learning. So, never take a job (if you can possibly help it) where you don’t think you are going to learn anything.

The second pebble is a rigour in your learning. Devise for yourself and your colleagues critical peer interaction. When you meet once a month for a coffee and catch up with the gossip, think also about another type of meeting when you’ve all read the same journal article and corporately critique it. Education is like tuning a violin. In time a violin goes out of tune, and sounds awful. You need to work out ways to keep your violins (your education) tuned, and don’t think your employers are always going to do it for you.

The third pebble I call a bullshit detector. There is a lot of suspicious smelly stuff out there that gets passed off as true, good, and wholesome. Use your nose, the one with the sense of smell your tutors and you have been developing, and then have the courage to name it for what it is.

I heard a story the other day that exemplifies what I mean. There was a school board in Tennessee in the heart of the Bible belt, which was wrestling with whether or not to introduce a foreign-language curriculum. After heated discussion, the debate was brought to an end by one board member who declared: “No way! If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for my boy.”

Religion has a long history of being used as a vehicle for prejudice. But hopefully as you heard this story your bullshit detector was ringing loudly. Although you might not know the three languages Jesus could speak, you might have hunched that English wasn’t a language in 1st century Palestine!

The fourth pebble that tertiary education gave me is the value of taking time to think. A business that has employees rushing around all day, performance measures that relate to the number of tasks completed, and a fixation on monetary outcomes is on its way to a crash. That business is not taking time to listen. To listen to its employees, let alone its customers. It is trading in what it knows, rather than listening for what it doesn’t know. It is focused on certainties, rather than making time to grapple with, and marvel at, the large uncertainties.

The fifth and last pebble is to know what is at the heart of your vocation. Vocation is a big picture word, and I’m now going to make, as an outsider, an educated guess about the heart of your vocations.

Design and Performing and Screen Arts seem to me to be about the power of beauty and the imagination. They are not about designing something or entertaining people – those are by-products. They are about creating beauty – of structure, space, movement and screen – and evoking the imagination. These feed our souls. They touch something deep within us. Your skills and sensibilities can create a grace-filled space in which hurt can be held - sometimes even healed – and dreams can be born.

So when you are labelled by your status in your industry – apprentice designer, chorus line dancer, coffee collector… somewhere way down the totem pole – just remember that what you really are is a creator of beauty and a catalyst for the imagination, both of which nourish the world’s soul. And base your confidence and authority in that self-perception, not in your pay or position in the industry.

The heart of the vocation of Social Practice is people and their communities and what makes them flourish. It is about connectedness, and how to restore it when it’s lost. It’s about walking with people, sharing kai, sharing pain, laughing, weeping… and using your self-belief to create the conditions for others’ self-belief to emerge and be emboldened.

So when you are some junior social worker or trainee manager, remember that it isn’t about money (though money can help), nor is it about forms and papers (though they too can be helpful), nor is it about pleasing your superiors (though we all somewhat do it), but at heart its about a way of connecting with people that encourages and builds communities of self-belief, respect, and hope.

The realm of sport, coaching, and the management they require, also has a vocational heart. My guess is that it’s to do with integrating mind and body, and minds and bodies with their environment. In spirituality we would call such integrating ‘building a unitive consciousness’.

Let me give an example. I once saw eight 14-year-old boys in their season of rowing defeat that school’s Senior 8. The Senior 8 were all 3 or 4 years older with significantly superior skills, strength, and stamina. What the group of 14 year-olds had was their minds tuned to their bodies, and their minds and bodies tuned to each other. It was phenomenal to watch. They only beat that Senior 8 once though, but oh the glory of it. The unity of mind transcended the limits of the body to achieve the remarkable.

Sport is not only about bodies, and skills, and winning. That’s just the surface stuff. The heart of it is fostering a oneness of mind, body, team, and environment. That oneness brings with it a vitality and deep satisfaction, which can then be woven into the whole course of people’s lives.

So 5 pebbles: love of learning, and a rigorous pursuit of it; a nose for detecting dubious information and alerting others; the art of taking time to think; and knowing the heart of your vocation.

I call them pebbles because there’s an archetypal mythical story (which is code for saying it didn’t actually happen but its important anyway) about a young boy David who challenged a giant Goliath to a duel. And David chose five pebbles as his weapons.

There are values, thinking, systems, and structures – sometimes of Goliath proportions – that are opposed to the values within your professions. There are those who will seek to reduce beauty to utility, to reduce art to entertainment, to reduce social practice to sweeping up the messy bits discarded by fiscal and economic policies, and to reduce sport to medals, cups, and television. There will be pressure exerted upon you to conform to narrow definitions, to curtail your ideas to fit within blinkered plans, to prioritise obedience to the budget over the freedom of the imagination and the good of the community… These Goliath manifestations have the capacity to squash and demean and destroy anyone who gets in their way.

The mythic story has David acting on behalf of and for the good of the many. I’m old-fashioned enough to believe that those who are blessed with the resources of mind, and sometimes capital, have a responsibility to use those resources on behalf of and for the good of the many.

The mythic story also does not extol so much the power of the pebbles, but the courage of the one who carried them. They won’t do you much good unless you are the intestinal fortitude to use them. So be strong, be tenacious, and be brave. And be prepared to bear the cost for your courage.

In the end David only needed one pebble. A little can change a whole lot.

Kia kaha.

Letter from Isabelle. No. 16

2009-03-06T12:46:00.002+13:00

Dear Revd Glynn,

How did God make the world?

Love, Isabelle.

Dear Isabelle,

As I think you know by now I don’t believe in a god who is a super being, who makes things and breaks things, and who determines how and what things happen. In times past many people did believe in such a god. They prayed to such a god for fine days and wet days, and they believed that this god considered their prayers and answered either yes or no or cloudy.

Today there are some people who still believe in such a god. ‘Evolution is a theory that is wrong’ they say. ‘God made the world in 7 days’ or something like that.

Then there are people who don’t believe that god has anything to do with making the world. Solely by evolution and chance the world has come to be.

Then there are other people, probably most Christians actually, who believe in both evolution and god making things – working together you might say.

What I believe is a little different from all those. Part of what I call god is a creative energy, a spiritual energy, which is within and around living creatures on our planet. That creative energy is a part of the ‘making’ of the world.

You could think of it like baking scones. You put in the flour, butter, cheese, salt, baking powder and milk, and then stir. The milk and the baking powder react together, creating a new ‘energy’ when in the oven, that makes the scones rise. Try making scones some time without the baking powder and spot the difference!

That spiritual creative energy, best called ‘Love’, is what makes life worthwhile and satisfying and rewarding.

Your friend,
Revd Glynn

Isabelle Theology

2009-02-12T15:13:00.001+13:00

Dear Revd Glynn,

Where is God's house?

Love Isabelle.

Dear Isabelle,

We understand a house in two ways. Firstly it is something physical. It is a building with roof and walls, that is situated usually on a piece of land [some people's houses are boats!]. Secondly it is something in which people live. The house becomes a extension of their personalities. My daughter, for example, has a bright pink room - and she is a bright pink girl!

Now, as we've discussed before God isn't a human-shaped being. God doesn't eat, sleep, and go to the toilet like we do. God is a power we can't see. The best way we have of describing God is as 'the power of love'. So God doesn't have an address - like 1 Grace Street, Faraway, Heaven. God doesn't have a physical house to come home to, stretch out the legs, have a warm milo, and read a nice book.

However 'the power of love' does have places it calls home, places that are an extension of love's personality. Sometimes churches are experienced as a home for the power of love. Sometimes a very saintly person is thought to be a 'home' for the power of love.

The Bible talks alot about the human heart. Not the physical one that pumps blood around the body, but the imaginary one where love, kindness, and tolerance is thought to reside. If God, 'the power of love', has any house then it is the human heart that makes room for love, forgiveness, justice, and peace.

Love,
Revd Glynn

Soul Discovery

2009-01-25T07:42:00.000+13:00

Learning how to operate a soul takes time. ~Timothy Leary

We are cared for and loved
We follow and are rewarded
Yet we do not know our soul
Until we stand alone, believe and act alone,
And know both the joy and cost of it.
Then Holy Wisdom, as of old, takes our hand
And we dance.

The New Year Party

2008-12-30T14:32:00.000+13:00

One of the things about Jesus both in his teaching and social practice was that he liked parties. Time and again his stories end with a party. Time and again he is found with society’s desirables and dregs happily mulling life over around the dining table.

His critics noticed. ‘The people are suffering and yet you are celebrating?’ they sneered. ‘Mr Jesus, how can you be pious and party?’

They had a point. Jesus lived in Galilee, Palestine. It had been invaded by the Roman Empire and its greed some years before. Taxation was heavy. Most people lived on very little and were pressured to pay more. Resistance was brutally suppressed. There seemed little to celebrate.

This December in New Zealand there also seems little to celebrate. The pre-Christmas lay-offs featured. As the discretionary dollars dry up so does tourism. So do many consumer goods industries. Staff Christmas parties were downsized. More insidious and destructive however is the daily diet of ‘it’s going to get worse’.

In the time of Jesus there were other prophets who went around telling people a similar message. ‘It’s only the start of bad things’, they’d say. These prophets advocated belt-tightening, prayer, and hope that a God somewhere off the planet would come and rescue them.

Jesus, seemingly uniquely, had a confidence in the basic goodness of a God who was close at hand and close to the heart. It was an irrational confidence. Yet from that confidence emanated hope. It was a quiet assurance that all would be well even when everything looked so bleak.

There are many people who can look back over this year and recall heartache, tragedy, and pain. The deaths of the six students and their teacher in the flash flood at Mangatepopo. The abuse and murders of children like Nia Glassie and Jyniah Te Awa. The little publicised suicides that have been steadily increasing since the downturn in the financial markets.

Having a party to celebrate life when times are tough is not a crass act of denial but a tentative act of faith. It is not ‘eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die’, but eat, drink, and be merry for today we are alive. It is getting together in the faith that no matter how desperate things seem the spirit of life is stronger still.

This New Year I hope we will not fix our minds on the over-consumption of beverages, or the resolutions we vainly hope to achieve. I hope we will not be bewitched by the usual talismans of success and our inability to acquire them.

Instead I hope we will quietly take stock of the good things in our lives. Many of us have relationships with partners, parents, children, or friends that nourish and sustain us. Many of us live close enough to walk or drive to a beach, or a forest, or a hilltop. Many of us can listen to nice music, watch a sunset, or admire a beautiful piece of art. Many of us are spiritually sustained by what we call ‘God’. We need to quietly take stock and be thankful.

Gratitude is a discipline. Irrespective of whether we in good health or not, been successful or lucky or not, or are rich or poor or somewhere between, gratitude is something we can choose to nurture within. We can then choose to share our sense of gratitude by giving to others.

A Special Christmas Present

2008-12-24T15:22:00.001+13:00

The whole thing of getting and giving presents, Christmas stockings, et al, isn’t really in the Bible. What is in the Bible though is living a generous life –
inviting people to share a meal with you,
helping someone who is in need,
being kind to strangers
giving to others

The origin of Santa Claus was this European bishop called Nicholas. Probably the best known story about him is when the poor tailor couldn’t afford the money necessary for his daughters’ weddings [he had 3 daughters!]. So Nick, quietly so no one would notice, climbed to the top of the tailor’s roof and dropped a bag of gold down the chimney.

Nick was generous. The tailor’s daughters were grateful.

Nowadays at Christmas time it seems most people want to be a tailor’s daughter and receive a nice present; and not many want to be a Nick – giving and getting nothing in return.

This year I received a special present when a group of people came and gave their time helping me move house. Apart from feeling very grateful it made me feel like helping others in similar circumstances.

Walking in the Woods with God

2008-12-14T19:28:00.001+13:00

A friend of mine in Canada, his name is Tom, shared this story with me:

A man wants to take his children out to the woods to experience nature, to enjoy creation and find a connection to God in it. He and his kids walk through the woods with the kids talking and stomping in streams, breaking dead sticks, kicking the leaves on the forest floor. Birds scatter at their approach and there is no other wildlife to be seen. The man, on several occasions, admonishes his kids to stop making so much noise so they can enjoy the sounds of the forest. The kids try but they just can't do it for more than a few seconds at a time. The man becomes increasingly frustrated and returns home with his kids feeling angry that the connection he sought and wanted to share with his kids couldn't be found. He tries this several times - hoping that, this time, the kids will be able to be silent and enjoy the sounds of nature. Each time he is frustrated and eventually gives up on his quest to encounter God in creation with his kids present. The walks continue. Then, as he is walking with his kids, talking and crunching and splashing their way through the woods he realizes that God has been screaming at him the whole time - through the conversations with his kids, the time together, in the splashing in the streams, in the crunching of the leaves and, yes, even in the scattering of the wildlife as they approached. The surprise of God was that God was present the whole time, just not where
the man was looking.

Tom ocams.razor@gmail.com

Letter from Isabelle: Is Jesus alive?

2008-12-09T11:16:00.001+13:00

Dear Revd Glynn,

Is Jesus still alive?

Love from Isabelle.

Dear Isabelle,

The answer is no and yes. Let me explain.

Jesus was born about 2,012 years ago and he died about 1,979 years ago. He was a real man, made of real bones, skin, and flesh and blood. When he died all that real bones, skin and stuff died too. There is no real flesh and blood Jesus hiding in heaven or anywhere else.

However there is more to us, and more to Jesus, than just bones, skin, and flesh and blood. The most ‘real thing’ about Jesus was his love and his vision for how he wanted life to be. That ‘real thing’ lived on in his followers after he died. That ‘real thing’ still lives on in people who try to love as he did, and try to make the world a place similar to his vision.

This is what many people in the Church understand by the word resurrection. It wasn’t that the real bones, skin and stuff of Jesus came back to life and continued walking around in Palestine for the next so many years. Or that the real bones, skin and stuff of Jesus continues walking around on earth or up in the clouds somewhere. Rather resurrection is a way of talking about how the real love and vision of Jesus lives on within his followers, and sometimes even within people who aren’t his followers but love anyway.

Glynn

On the subject of angels - Scene IV

2008-11-16T07:36:00.001+13:00

One of the things we know about Jesus and about the stories he told was that hospitality was important. The simple meal was spiritual. Unlike a number of the religious thinkers of his day it wasn’t so much what you ate but your attitude towards those you ate with, or to be precise those you refused to eat with. Jesus practised an open hospitality refusing to let the social, political, religious rules governing who should socialize with whom, govern the tables he sat at. In the minds of many he opened himself to disease, to heresy, to spiritual impurity, to violence, and to the damnation of his soul. It is hard to get our 21st century minds around the foreign parameters of 1st century Palestinian culture.

To follow Jesus is to be hospitable enough to be uncomfortable. Sometimes this means giving up your ‘seat’, your place of privilege, for a guest while you perch on the edge, uncomfortable and inconvenienced.

When I was a child my grandparents had a custom of always cooking enough so that one more person could sit at the meal table. You were never sure just who might turn up and need some food. There was always an angel, whether prince, peasant, or pauper, who might need entertaining.

On the subject of angels - Scene III

2008-11-04T14:59:00.002+13:00

‘Goodness’ can be used to describe pleasure. A meal superbly cooked, served on the verandah, with the company of old friends and a slow sunset receives the accolade. As do other pleasurable pastimes and events.

Such goodness is a sensation. It is pleasure. Goodness is trust in friends. Goodness is letting the beauty of earth envelope our soul. Goodness affects our being. It is all around us and it is spiritual, or should we say ‘angelic’.

I have a friend who watches a lot of sport, of all varieties. He looks for those moments when the blend of fluidity, skill, and magic takes ones breathe away. Those moments for him give substance to the word good. They are wonderful to watch. For those of us who have participated in sport we also know those moments. They keep us turning up to practice. There is a grace of movement that affects us spiritually.

Yet there is a goodness that transcends these sensuous and often spiritual moments of pleasure, friendship, beauty, movement and skill. There is a goodness that seems to be just beyond us, offering a bigger all-encompassing horizon. Occasionally we catch a glimpse of this among us. Like a light that comes on only for a few seconds it leaves us with the sense of potential. In those glimpses we sense a bigger, more generous world where everything might still be possible. This is goodness that lifts our vision as we imagine what society could be.

On the subject of Angels - Scene II

2008-10-28T07:00:00.001+13:00

Edward Burne-Jones the artist once wrote: “The more discoveries science makes the more angels I shall paint.” His mission was to offset the negative influences of technology through the positive power of art. Of course science also can be creative and life-giving, and art can be destructive and life-sapping. But artists don’t like to acknowledge that.

As a theological thinker I find his angels more interesting. In the popular imagination angels are white-winged creatures, carrying bows or messages, well supported by the Christmas card industry. The Bible dispenses with the wings and has them purely as messengers. Note that a messenger of the Divine can also be a human being, or in Balaam’s case an ass. They don’t need to be invisible human-shaped demigods.

Burne-Jones uses angels as symbolic of transcendent goodness. When a piece of art is so outrageously attractive it eclipses a nearby machine that is the work of an angel. When a piece of music penetrates into the recesses of our soul it is the work of an angel. When a graceful action touches the mediocrity of our day and lifts our spirit that is the work of an angel.

On the subject of Angels - scene 1

2008-10-26T12:04:00.001+13:00

There was an old social worker I knew. She had fostered and cared for countless numbers of children. Although she was a gentle soul the words her son said at her funeral have stayed with me: ‘She cared enough to be angry’.

There is an anger that destroys the soul and there is an anger that fuels it. There is a flaring anger that leads to violence and destruction and there is an ember anger that fires the engine of change. The latter is stoked with compassion.

The old social worker didn’t just pick up society’s rejects she sought to challenge and change the causes of rejection. She was angry that the priorities of profit took precedence of the priorities of alleviating poverty, and she did something about it.

One of those children at the funeral called her ‘my angel’. By her actions she held out to us all a way of being both good and spiritual and challenging.

Another accolade that struck me at that funeral was that ‘She was humble enough not to give in’. Acquiescing to another’s power or the power of bureaucracies, while at times expedient, is not beneficial to the ‘little ones of the earth’ from whence the word humble derives. Sometimes the only way to be true to the earth, and be true to the collective good of all, is to stand against the arrogant assertions of others.

Lucky's silence

2008-10-25T12:26:00.003+13:00

Hi everyone,

I'm aware that I've been rather silent recently. There have been three main reasons for that which I'd like to share with you.

Firstly, I've spent a lot of time this year writing liturgy. Liturgy when its written for a congregation needs to involve considerable consultation. As such a liturgy takes about 6 months - beginning with writing and sharing that writing via email with a group of 6, then sharing it in public forums, then sharing it with theologians, then writing music for it, and finally trialling it with the congregation and inviting feedback over a two month period. This year I've initiated and crafted two. The current one is found here [following the notices for the week]: http://www.stmatthews.org.nz/images/UserFiles/File/WH%20&%20Pew%20Sheet.pdf

Secondly, I've spent a lot of time over the last three months bringing to conclusion a negotiation with our neighbour, the Auckland City Mission. They are wanting to do a major redevelopment of their site [a $70 million redevelopment] to enhance their services and offer new ones. Between our church and the Mission is a carpark that belongs to us. We have been negotiating to lease that carpark site to the City Council in order to transform it into a park whilst keeping a small portion [250 sqm] on the road front for a cafe/administration building. You can see a model of what is planned here: http://www.missioninthecity.org.nz/

Lastly, Lucky's time has been occupied caring for his wife who has fractured her back.

I have been writing sermons and a few other things which you can access through www.stmatthews.org.nz I'm currently working on a piece that is supportive of the Revd Ann Holmes Redding of Seattle who will shortly be defrocked for the crime of being both a Christian and a Muslim.

Blessings to you all,
Glynn

'King' Crow

2008-08-22T13:02:00.002+12:00

Steve Crow is right out of the Bible. With his ‘Boobs on Bikes’ parade in Auckland he’s styled himself as the wily David out to slay the Goliath of Auckland City Council and anyone else who dares disagree with him. And like King David of old he’s a great manipulator of public opinion.

There are ongoing debates in our society about the public displays of human flesh and sexual expression. The line that we consider permissible regarding nudity is somewhere between the latest swimwear fashions and nothing at all. With sexual expression that line is somewhere between kissing and copulating. In any ordered society there is always a line which the majority wish their government and councils to maintain and enforce.

Crow wants to cross the line. He calls himself the ‘King of Porn’. His product is pornography. To promote and launch his Erotica Lifestyles numerous porn stars, employees of Crow and his ilk, bared their chests down Queen Street.

There is also an ongoing societal debate about pornography. Pornography reduces sex to enhanced bodies and actions, whereas most adults consider sex in terms of love and commitment. This debate also has some gender demarcations. Generally speaking women see a connection between pornography and violence. And generally speaking men don’t.

As with nudity and sexual expression, our society via the Office of Film and Literature Classification draws a line about what is pornographically permissible. It also sets an age classification. That Office has no jurisdiction over Crow’s public street performance.

Yet undoubtedly King Crow’s parade, this year featuring scorpion tanks, is theatre. Political theatre. Crow knows he’s crossing the line of public decency and knows he can’t lose. His goal is to publicize his product. A mass arrest of the offending exhibitors, for example, would have helped his publicity even more.

Of course he argues that it’s not about his product but rather ‘freedom of expression’. In a culture that values pluralism kiwis are loathe to curtail freedom or invoke censorship. Yet he is manipulating the virtue of liberty for his own ends. Should his freedom to promote his product take priority over the freedom of others who are offended by it? What are the limits to diversity? Should his sense of taste be allowed to sour the public palate? Should we even have a discriminating palate?

To argue that topless porn stars should not display their silicon in public is to run the gauntlet of being called a prude, a religious moralist, a feminist, or politically correct. Every critic can easily be boxed and thus dismissed. The Auckland City Council was damned if they acted and damned if they didn’t. He’s crowing all the way to the bank.

The biblical story of David and Goliath is a piece of manipulative royal spin-doctoring. It was designed to tell King David’s followers he really was the big man. King Crow is trying to do the same.

blue day god?

2008-07-31T14:06:00.002+12:00

it’s raining again
the damp seeps into my soul
not much good
hap’ning today
feeling fat, tired, and cold
winter blues
even the coffee tastes bad.

most religions have
a god who will lift you
when you are down
a friend when you’re in need
a divine rescuer.
god is a shot of spiritual caffeine
who makes you feel good.

is there a blue day god out there?
you know one who
is sitting beside you
drinking cheap whisky
bemoaning the world
and feeling like crap…
one who feels as ugly as you?

or does god just do
happy cheer up
caring
hold your hand
pray for you stuff,
and poems like this
are heresy?

A Visit to Hagia Sophia

2008-06-15T20:35:00.001+12:00

Hagia Sophia, the Church of Divine Wisdom, is one of the great gems of the world. It holds a special place in architectural and Christian history. The original church was built by Constantine in the 4th century CE but was destroyed by fire. In the 5th century the second church was built but that too was destroyed. In 537 under the patronage of Emperor Justinian I the current church was completed. Two geometricians Anthemius and Isidore led a team of 7,500 architects, stonemasons, bricklayers, sculptors, and mosaic artists who amazingly finished the building within five years – and drained the treasury. Never again would the Byzantines construct such a grand edifice. For nearly the next 1000 years it was the greatest church in the world, and the largest domed building in Europe. In 1453 when the Ottomans conquered Istanbul they converted it to a mosque. In the mid 20th century it was turned into a museum where Christians, Muslims and others can come and admire its past glory.

For the last twenty years I’ve wanted to walk inside this building. I’ve wanted to feel its presence and awe. I’ve wanted to imagine the great preachers of the past who have proclaimed the sovereignty of God and critiqued the political powers of the day. I’ve wanted to say a prayer inside it, giving thanks, remembering, and hoping for a future that honours our Christian past and improves on it.

So it was with some surprise and unease that the building did not stir my soul. This architectural masterpiece, gem of history, and nursery of Christianity did not inspire me. Something was missing.

Maybe I should have paid more attention to the sign outside. It called the building a ‘museum’ - a place that was about the past, not the present. It felt like visiting a graveyard where tourists come to admire the architecture and beauty of the gravestones but know or care little about those buried there. The visitors are certainly not related to the dead.

It was relationship that was missing. There was no community who cared and prayed in Hagia Sophia. Even in St Peter’s, Rome, that glorious tribute to Vatican power, where like Hagia Sophia the tourist trains rumble through by the minute, there is a living community that imbues the building with a sense of religious devotion. Although as a Protestant I am no admirer of much Vatican-think, I do know a holy building when I’m in one.

Is a church building without a community of faith no longer a church but a museum, a mausoleum? It felt that way. The two-decade-old scaffolding that cuts the nave virtually in half speaks volumes. No community of faith, Christian or Muslim, would live with that. They would find another way to care for their building. Restoration has to serve the faith community, not vice versa.

I think for the sake of its soul Hagia Sophia should not have left the embrace of either Christianity or Islam. Of course it would have been wonderful if these two great religions could have shared it. But they haven’t and look unlikely to. Therefore it would be better if Hagia Sophia reverted to being a mosque rather than continue as it is today. Its better that this great Church of Christendom has a praying community than remain a tombstone of past religions.

And who says that the Christian God isn’t listening when a Muslim prays?

Post-General Synod Reflections

2008-05-18T07:09:00.001+12:00

Lucky is back in his usual habitat, enjoying the cubs, and answering lots of questions from other bears about General Synod.

Here are a few post-Synod reflections on the whole experience:

The venue, while opulent, had its limitations. We stayed on floor 20, ate on floor 17 and met in conference on floor 16. At one stage I didn’t walk outside the building for two days. The conference room was also just barely big enough. If environment affects not only the way business is conducted but also its contents, the Church was cooped up and cut off.

There was nothing spoken or decided that will make the front page of any international religious newspaper or magazine. Rather there was a lot a confirmation of previous decisions and directions.

In particular the Synod confirmed its ‘three-as-one’ Primatial arrangements. While the threesome reflects the power sharing between tikanga that is important to model, there are concerns that internationally it will decrease our power [having a different person to represent us every third meeting] and it will lead to a less than forthright critique of our Church and society [as evidenced in this years Primatial charge to the Synod].

The episcopal structure of the Diocese of Waikato was confirmed. This is two bishoprics [regions] joined by a common administrative arrangement. Each of the two bishops is Bishop of Waikato. We have our first co-bishop arrangement. Maybe a world first?

Regarding episcopal structures, the General Synod also passed legislation allowing for the appointment of a coadjutor bishop. This is where a bishop announces his/her intention to resign, the diocese elects a successor who is second-in-charge until the resignation, and then the coadjutor automatically becomes the diocesan bishop. The implication of this legislation is that if Auckland Synod wishes we could have an election for a coadjutor before the end of this year.

Regarding issues of the international Anglican Communion and homosexuality, the General Synod largely expressed its previous directions. It affirmed that there is a diversity of opinion within our Church, that we need to keep talking, that we don’t think there are reasons we should walk away from the Communion, and that most of us don’t think a Covenant is necessary. In the ‘most of us’ category, it was particularly powerful to hear a strong unanimity of pro-gay opinion from the Maori Church. Polynesia’s opinion was more mixed. In the Pakeha dioceses Waiapu and Dunedin were clearly pro-gay, Auckland, Christchurch, and Waikato mixed, and Nelson and the current Wellington leadership against.

Lucky 'fesses up

2008-05-15T08:18:00.000+12:00

I wish to thank the Liturgical Commission for their work in continuing to slowly mark in legislation the variations to the Great Thanksgiving that the whole Church can currently accept.

I am among those who write liturgy that is quite different from what the whole Church can accept. Indeed speaking in this forum of this subject is somewhat akin to a 21st century novelist sharing their work with the Shakespearean Society, when the Shakespearean Society has the power to censor.

Thank you too to tikanga Maori. The principle of the intent of the inherited words is helpful to some in my tikanga too. It encourages local variation. One of the great examples is the Te Reo Maori translation in the New Zealand Prayer Book of “We are all in Christ” – “Ko te Karaiti te pou herenga waka”. Te Reo pictures Christ as a mooring post and we in wakas.

“Intent” is very helpful in our passion to be a mission-focused Church. Our liturgies are one of our faces to a world that knows little of Christ. Too often the language of the past makes liturgy unintelligible to newcomers, and I might add many regulars. So parishes like ours, in order to preach Jesus, take license with liturgy. We prioritize mission ahead of liturgical compliance with tradition.

I hope and pray that the words we say with our lips and believe in our hearts will have the ability to communicate our truth to those who have never heard it.

Lucky moves a bill

2008-05-15T08:17:00.000+12:00

“Mr President,

This bill seeks to regularize and affirm what is commonplace in many parishes. While it is usual for marriage services to be conducted in church buildings or customary places of worship, there arise from time to time good pastoral and missional reasons for the service to be held elsewhere.

On the one hand, for example, I have taken a service in a home where the grandmother was dying. On the other hand I have taken a service in the grounds of Larnach Castle. The latter venue, like a number of wedding venues in Auckland, was chosen not just for its beauty and ease of having the reception 10 metres away. Indeed it is not as simple as assuming that the couple want somewhere ‘pretty’ compared with the local parish church which mightn’t meet such expectations.

Larnach Castle was chosen because, like for many couples or one half of the couple, they had some disquiet about having a wedding ceremony in a church. Many people believe they can only have a ‘church wedding’ if they hold to the beliefs and doctrines of that church. Despite attempts by clergy like me to assure them otherwise they often feel hypocritical coming into a church for this one time in their lives. It is often a big enough step to have a cleric involved in their wedding ceremony.

This is what I mean by missional reasons. Weddings outside church buildings are opportunities for clergy and other licensed ministers to share by their presence and language something of the truth and inclusiveness of God’s love and grace. It is in a sense the church going out to people. I think there is something deeply moving about representatives of the church being invited to participate in witnessing the expression of committed love between two people and naming it as a window into God.

Marriage is the only sacrament for which a venue is legislated. The Eucharist can be celebrated anywhere. Baptisms are sometimes done in other places, notably hospitals. Ordinations have been done in other places, for example nga marae. Holy Unction is nearly always done outside a church building. Confessions are be heard anywhere. Although not a sacrament, funerals frequently take place in other settings. Of course God too is not confined to ecclesiastical buildings, although some have tried.

There is an increasing trend in our society for marriages to take place in venues that aren’t exclusively religious. Our present Anglican rules discourage this. Some clergy ask their bishop for permission although strangely it doesn’t seem to be required.

There are often practical drawbacks with other venues. The sound quality is usually wanting. The acoustics for music are usually dreadful. After one bad experience I stipulate that there will be no wedding service if alcohol is served immediately prior.

However there is one huge advantage in an outside wedding. The couple, whether acknowledged or not, have identified a place that they think is sacred, just as their love is sacred. That provides the priest with the opportunity to talk about sacred things, about God, and about how spirituality can be nurtured.

St Matthew-in-the-City is an iconic neo-Gothic building to which some 70 couples come for marriage or blessings every year. Many of those couples seek us out via the internet and make their decision based on our theology rather than just our architecture. Still, there are many couples for whom crossing the threshold of a church building is too much, and yet they still want a priest involved.

I would ask this Synod to consider favourably this amendment proposed by the Diocese of Auckland and standing in my name.”

Lucky does process

2008-05-13T22:00:00.000+12:00

It’s hard to keep a bouncy bear down. Yep, you guess, he popped up again this morning at General Synod/te Hinota.

“Mr President, please pray tell, what plans are in place to engage critically with the six politicians visiting us this evening?”

Yes, that was the programme. In this election year the Synod wanted to engage with our parliamentary parties regarding poverty, health, education, and housing.

Three hours later the bear got an answer. We were to listen to each politician for 20 minutes, leaving a grand total of 10 minutes at the end for questions.

Lucky pulled at his ears trying to clean out a twig or two. Did they really say “10 minutes??”

Well, sometimes a bear has to do what a bear has to do.

“Mr President, I move the suspension of Standing Order 10 [F] to discuss over the next two hours what we think the issues facing the nation are, collect our thoughts, and present those thoughts to our guests prior to listening to the upcoming political prattle.”

Lucky got lots of backslaps and was suddenly popular.

And so it happened. This preparation should of course have taken place months ago. The result tonight however was better than nothing. And, so he was told, the bear saved the company face. It’s nice to be appreciated sometimes.

One thing Lucky Bear can always spot is a great royal cock-up.

Lucky takes a stand

2008-05-13T05:42:00.000+12:00

“Members of General Synod/te Hinota,

There is a question of justice.

Mindful of our Bible Study this morning of the Parable of the Good Samaritan and where our location might be in the story, I speak as one responsible for an inn - an inn where the beaten, the Samaritans, and even wayward priests, Levites, and the odd lawyer come to enjoy a pint or dram, and receive some comfort or challenge.

Our inn, St Matthew-in-the-City Auckland has for a long time now been both the home and a symbol of hope to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities, and we have been privileged and at times daunted by the responsibility to speak out.

We have a deep anger and profound disappointment in the way the International Anglican Church has treated Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire for the so-called sin of being true to who he is and daring to love another man. That anger is compounded by the silence of so many church leaders both at home and aboard in publicly declaring unequivocal support for the justice struggle for the gays, lesbians, and their families.

We do acknowledge and give thanks for the bishops, priests, and laity some of whom are in this room who have stood beside, ordained and blessed gays and lesbians in relationships. Thank you for your courage and solidarity. May justice one day come, even in the Church.

Our Anglican Church has heard from those with opposing views to St Matthew’s and who are hurt, angry and wish to walk away. And of course those views hurt us at St Matthew’s, as no doubt ours do to them.

There are some among us who also wish to walk away and join those who already have.

However most of us at the inn, after another round, are sticking with the Church, for better or for worse, as our gay and lesbian ancestors and saints have done throughout the ages.

This is not just an issue of church polity or unity but an issue where marginalized communities on the periphery of church life are waiting to hear whether justice is being compromised by how we Christians read the Bible.”

Lucky supports the Diocese of Waikato

2008-05-13T05:39:00.001+12:00

They’re a little different in Waikato. It’s a rural diocese with far too many theological conservatives. It’s got two distinct regions and two nice bishops – one the boss and the other the second-in-charge (2IC).

Well they want to model Episcopal partnership. The boss and the 2IC want to share the job. They don’t however want to split the diocese into two and replicate all those lovely boring and expensive diocesan structures. Instead they want a catamaran: two hulls [one in each region] with a minimal and shared structure linking them.

Their motivation is mission. They want to have their bishops close to the people, enabling mission, rather than stagnating in committees and buried in canons. It sounds good to Lucky.

It didn’t sound good to Christchurch. They do conservatives of the bigoted variety down there. Their bright idea was that anything innovative like this should in the light of international Anglican unrest be sent out to the wider Communion for consultation. The norm they said was ‘One bishop, one diocese’. This was a ‘treasure’ and not to be tampered with.

Lucky was having a quiet vomit under his seat after hearing this. But he composed himself, girded his loins with a little something, and once again addressed the microphone:

“What comes first: mission or the structures to support mission [like episcopacy]? Structure has for too long taken priority over and curtailed our mission. The reason that structure was so fluid in the New Testament was because mission was so strong. The church is forever muddling up the cart and the horse. It is mission that leads structure, not the other way round.”

The Waikato table gave Lucky an appreciative grin, and later at the bar paid for Lucky’s fluid requirements.

Lucky goes into committee

2008-05-10T21:45:00.001+12:00

It’s hard work being a bear. I had to sit still nearly all day and listen to the boring deliberations of church leaders concerned for good order. Good order needs to happen of course. All that good order is preferable to bad order, or unjust order, or ‘oops-we-forgot-about-that’ order. It’s just that I’m a bear who likes to play, and laugh, and create… Oh well, maybe I can crash a party tonight or something.

We sat around circular tables in diocesan groups and have our diocesan opinions canvassed. The lawyers talked too much – their concern with words seems to override any awareness of the somatic effects of their tones. I think there was one or two laughs, although I can’t remember any jokes.

Mind you some of the language in the papers was laughable. How about this one: ‘the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd’. When the Church resurrects a Greek word from the first few centuries CE you know you are in trouble. ‘Catechesis’ is a dumb way of saying ‘a learner’s guide’. This particular guide for the about-to-be-educated was called the Good Shepherd. Again relevancy to contemporary culture has never been the Church’s strong point. There are no shepherds or sheep in downtown Auckland and we’d like to keep it that way. For the biblically minded Jesus was a carpenter not a shepherd. Yes, he once used the language in a parable, a made up story, to illustrate his point. In downtown Auckland we don’t need carpenters either – they tend to be in the ‘burbs. Made up stories, like mayoral speeches or newspaper editorials, though are part of our life.

As a bear I dream of the day when the Church will make up some new stories about Jesus and us. He could be the ‘good bear’ who tells the hungry cubs and their parents where the honey is. Or he could be the ‘good hunter’ who only shoots us with a camera. As a downtown bear JC could be the good barista who knows what we want before we enter the shop. Or the good parking warden [if that’s not an oxymoron] who only puts tickets on the cars of rich people.

Another language thing today in the General Synod was the promotion by Wellington Diocese, and most of the UK Anglican apparatus, of ‘Back to Church Sunday’. Lucky immediately thought of all the ways that church is backwards including its marketing department. The promotion of course assumes that once upon a time you went to church. Most of my friends at the café and on the street haven’t. Then again do you really want some of those who left church to come back? You know the bossy bank manager who was trying to create a new fiefdom? Or the organist who couldn’t play for peanuts but thought she could?

I think I will need to download some more stamina before tomorrow,
LB

The soul's search for contentment

2008-05-03T07:16:00.003+12:00

the track was hard on the heart
but good on the soul
altitude limited oxygen
silence and splendour were inhaled

the soul can be enlarged
or retracted
it can be be stretched
or shrivelled

beauty does it well
so does love
the best however is
giving without gain

fists and words can wound
so can hate
the worst however is
binding with no release

the soul can soar when
uplifted by generosity
but until it loosens bindings
it will not know contentment.

Question from Isabelle: Jesus

2008-04-15T12:22:00.003+12:00

Dear Rev. Glynn,

Why is Jesus special?

Love from Isabelle.

Dear Isabelle,

Although I think there are lots of reasons Jesus is special, there are three things that stand out for me.

Firstly, he broke the rules. In his culture and religion there were lots of rules about who could eat together, talk together, and hold hands. Jesus made a point of eating, talking, and touching with all the people he shouldn’t have. He didn’t believe in the rules that kept people from each other.

Secondly, he believed the most powerful thing in the world was love. Out of all the things in a religion it was love that was holy. When people love each other we see something of God.

Thirdly, he believed that each person, including Glynn and Isabelle, are precious, wonderful and worthy of dignity and respect. No human life is worthless. Every person, even the meanest, is one of God’s children.

Glynn

just surfing

2008-04-14T17:31:00.004+12:00

sometimes when I'm feeling bored I go surfing. a bad place to start is by googling my name and around page 6 or so hitting the blogs of people rubbishing me. although i'm not so sure its me - cause they either spell my name wrong or give me a sex change. mind you maybe its just that my critics can't read!?

i'm slagged off firstly by the rightwing catholics, then by the you're-wrong-i'm-right evangelicals. they even have a some good sites [good as in technical]. then in my surfing I occasionally come across a Blinkley Baptist Church in North Carolina. the senior pastor quoted a large chunk from SMACA :

http://www.sitemason.com/files/hYEa2c/08_03_16%20The%20Peril%20and%20Power%20of%20Prepositions%20DCL.pdf

it kind of makes up for all the shit if you know wat I mean.

off to find a decent wave,

glynn

[n.b. my name has 2 n's. and no i'm not bloody sensitive about it!!!]

the photo by the way is me chilling out reading some byzantine history in the back of a campervan. now those guys really did heresy big time

A Chocolate Easter Egg

2008-03-22T19:33:00.000+13:00

For those of a sweet bent, Easter is chocolate. Chocolate eggs rain down upon us.

The association of eggs with Easter comes not from Christianity but paganism. Eggs, like bunnies, symbolised the Spring hope of fertility that new life will come again despite the harshness of winter. Christians however weren’t stupid – they could recognise a good thing. Chocolate eggs were too good to pass up.

Eggs though are encased in shells. They are containers, holding goodies within. In time they crack open to allow the chick to come out and grow up. A container and its contents are quite different.

At Easter time in church there is a lot of make-believe language. A dead Jesus coming back to life, stones being rolled away, bursting out of hell’s prison, victory over death…

This old familiar language, like a fairy tale, is the container, the shell of Easter. But it isn’t its contents.

The content of Easter is the belief that Christians hold that love is stronger than hate, and hope is stronger than despair. Love and hope is seen in the changes in people’s lives.

Easter isn’t about believing in the literal words of an old fairy tale. It’s about seeing lives changed, joining that movement that wants to colour the world in love and joy.

Now back to the chocolate…

Seven deadly sins given a makeover

2008-03-14T09:54:00.000+13:00

The Seven Deadly Sins have been given a makeover. Out goes sloth, and in comes pollution. Out goes greed, and in comes poverty. Out goes envy, and in comes drugs. The Vatican in revising Pope Gregory’s 6th century menu has gone contemporary, eco-friendly, and socially just.

Yet before the makeover artists get to work maybe all Christians should pause and consider the sin business. The appropriation of the traditional sins by Hell’s Pizza says more than clever marketing. As most teenagers will tell you Church statements on sin are not to be taken seriously.

It would be better if the Churches gained some integrity by humbly and publicly confessing their own ‘sins’ – those barriers erected over the centuries that make it difficult for 21st century people to relate to the notion of God.

First on the list would be Christianity’s penchant for equating faith in God with believing in impossibilities. Like virgin mothers and dead men coming back to life. Does faith really require us like Carroll’s Queen of Hearts to believe ‘six impossible things before breakfast’?

Related to this is Christianity’s long history of deprecating the insights and wisdom of science. Remember the ridicule and worse suffered by Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin. The Church has consistently been dismissive of any inquiry or knowledge that contradicts its own hegemonic worldview.

Third on the list would be the club. The Church has reduced faith in God into a club. To belong not only do you have to behave but also you have to believe the right things. Its members have been defined as ‘right thinkers’ or orthodox, and it’s non-members as ‘wrong thinkers’ or heretics.

In addition Christianity has deemed that some non-members lifestyles and beliefs are so appalling that not only are they to be excluded they are to be vilified and persecuted. Those vilified include gays, lesbians, independent women, Jews, and Muslims.

Christianity has long had a fixation with sex, seeing it as the source of evil. Any sexual behaviour or indiscretion outside of what it considered normative was particularly condemned. The message within the Church’s own tradition that sex is God-given and beautiful has been submerged beneath waves of fear.

Sixth on the list is power, clergy power. Rather than seeing its leaders primarily as facilitators of spiritual inquiry, Christianity created a priesthood that time and again exercised a level of restraint over the community that had little to do with love and grace, and lots to do with status and control.

Lastly, there is the notion of sin itself. The Church turned sin into a business and reaped significant financial rewards. Lashings of guilt, confession, and penance were doled out. It served to bring people down rather than lift them up. It sought to make people dependent and fearful, not independent and fearless.

Rewriting Pope Gregory’s list will not absolve the Christian religion of wrongdoing. While it is fixated on sin Christianity will not address the spiritual needs of our age. Instead the Church needs a makeover.

We need a humbler Church: one that is willing to learn and change; one that understands faith as a human spiritual journey; one that is not fearful of new truths and doesn’t seek to control them; one that values all people regardless of behaviour, beliefs, and background; one that values justice and freedom; and one that is mindful of its power and uses it wisely.

This is a Church whose thinking won’t be reduced to pizza.

Heart of a Leader

2008-02-28T23:04:00.002+13:00

1 Samuel 16:7: “But Yahweh [God] said to Samuel, “Do not look on one’s appearance or on the height of one’s stature… for I do not see as mortals see. They look on the outward appearance, but I look on the heart.”

It’s a great verse for the ugly, fat, and impotent! Power and looks are something that we are all meant to aspire to and never quite be satisfied with. Wouldn’t it be great if Hollywood chose its stars on the state of their hearts?

The context of the verse though is leadership – it is part of the ‘Rise of King David’ legend. And it is still as relevant today in the context of political and church leadership as it was when the biblical writers first ascribed these words to God.

As you may recall Saul preceded David as king. He was the first king of Israel. Saul had not aspired to kingship. He had considered himself the ‘least of all people in Israel’[i]. The prophet Samuel and Yahweh the God had other ideas. Saul was to be the solution to the Ammonite and Philistine problems. They were persistently pesky neighbours. The former he dealt to, the latter he tried to but failed.

It is maybe not surprising that when victory seemed elusive that the writers turned against King Saul. This is standard political behaviour – failure to produce results is not tolerated for long. Consider too that they were writing in King David’s time and needed to explain Saul’s demise and why the mantle of Yahweh’s favour was transferred to David. The authors portray Saul as fated to fail: exhibiting bouts of unrestrained violence, obsession with control, irrational jealousy, and, behind it all, military impotency. The troubles of this emergent monarchy were psychologically transferred onto its leader.

Leadership often attracts such response. People then and now psychologically project their fears and hopes onto their leader. If he or she does not act decisively, deal to the enemy, or exhibit some other way of being strong, the populace reject him or her. Leadership unfortunately is frequently the art of appearances. It is often hard, as is the case currently with the U.S primary contest between Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama, to see beneath the appearances to the substance and character of the leader.

Our story today has the prophet Samuel, the same who anointed/appointed Saul travelling to Bethlehem intent on anointing/appointing someone new. Samuel is acting rebelliously to bring Saul’s kingship to an end. So he goes with the alibi of making a sacrifice to Yahweh. The people however are not fooled [v.4], they know what his mission is and are very apprehensive.

Samuel gets instructions to check out the sons of Jesse and discern who is destined for power. Starting with the eldest, who would naturally have primacy, Samuel works down the male members of the family. Yahweh whispers to the prophet not to look on their height [read military prowess] or their good looks. Yahweh is interested in male hearts.

Of course after this anointing of David the royal apologists write up David as having military prowess, as shown in the slay-the-giant saga, and as being handsome. Goliath comments on how tanned and handsome David was [NIV 1 Samuel 17:42]. It seems that although the Divine might look at the heart we humans quickly forget about hearts and concentrate on leaders’ power and appearance.

It is somewhat unnerving to consider how relevant a passage of Scripture written in some 2,500 years ago can be to today. I think it behoves us to spend a few minutes contemplating what might be involved in heart leadership.

Firstly, heart leadership involves compassion. The roots of compassion are important. The leader must deeply sense that they are special only because everyone is special. The leader must not think they are uniquely talented and chosen in a way that makes them look down on others they or associates deem to be untalented and unchosen. Leaders need to have a strong sense of solidarity with all humanity. When the people hurt they must feel that hurt.

Allied with this is the humility to accept the gifts that others bring, and the realization that one person doesn’t have it all. People need a leader who makes them feel part of a team, an enterprise. A leader uses the word ‘we’ often. A leader depends on the strengths of the team, and vice versa. A leader is not the only person in the eye of the camera. There is nothing bad about needing each other. The myth of the self-made, self-contained man or woman needs to die on the humble altar of acknowledging our need of each other.

The power of a heart leader is that of influence not authority. I think theology has something to teach us in this regard. I believe God is like an animating spirit of love that works through people. This spirit of love has a power - but it’s not the power of armies, wealth, and empire. It is not the power of control. It is instead the power of a changed heart, a forgiving spirit, and a fearless hospitality. This is not the power of coercion, violence, or manipulation. Therefore it is seemingly not all that strong at all. But it is the power of self-giving love that I believe and hope has the strength to endure beyond every despot, and every inflated ego.

A heart leader must have the courage to risk being unpopular. My colleague Clay has a metaphor about earning and spending poker chips. A leader earns chips [goodwill] from his or her constituency as he or she works for them, building trust and respect. There comes though a time when a good leader will spend the chips – namely ask the people to follow him or her even if they disagree with them. I think the recent passing of the law curtailing the convention of smacking children is a good example of both major parties choosing to do what was right rather than what was popular. I long for the day when vicars and bishops will spend their ‘chips’ and support social changes that the majority of New Zealanders may be uncomfortable with. Goodwill needs to be spent for the betterment of the marginalized.

Lastly a heart leader needs to call us beyond our own needs and wants. Most leaders today seem to be managers – ably, or not so ably, managing budgets, people, projects, and expectations. In a diverse and cosmopolitan society political practice quickly becomes the art of management. People, like the media, are problems to be managed. Appearances and power need to be maintained.

Leadership however is different. It offers people a vision of joining with something bigger than themselves. Something so big every barrier is broken, every prejudice challenged, every person embraced, and every heart expanded. When faith, hope, and love are reduced to membership cards of an elite club we have lost the big picture. Real faith is the courage to risk, real hope is the energy of making dreams come true, and real love is self-giving generosity. These don’t belong in any club or party. They are wild and free.

I hope in this year of elections that those who aspire to leadership will know the importance of compassion, the importance of solidarity with all, the importance of the need of others, the importance of the power of love, the importance of the courage to risk, and the importance of calling us to something bigger than ourselves.

As Jesse’s sons were paraded before Samuel the Hebrew verb ‘to see’ occurred repeatedly. The focus is on how one sees when choosing leaders. There is always the temptation to see what is on offer, what is exceptional in appearance, what meets accepted standards, what is impressive, what is beautiful, what seems secure, appropriate and fitting. But in God’s eyes such things are irrelevant. The prophet Samuel courageously seeks out more alternatives. It is the heart that is at stake – the heart of the leader and the hearts of the people.

[i] 1 Samuel 9:21

Dear God I Don't Want To Be Saved

2008-02-27T18:08:00.001+13:00

Dear God,
All things considered life is very good.
So, without sounding ungrateful,
I don’t want to be go to heaven,
I don’t want to be rescued,
and I don’t want to be saved.
If that’s all religion is you can keep it in a church.

I do though want to be part of something big.
Something much bigger than me.
Something so big that every barrier is broken,
every prejudice challenged,
every person embraced,
and every heart expanded.

If faith is only for the faithful,
if hope is only for the deserving,
and if love is only for the lovable,
then they are worthless, glittering imitations.
For real faith is the courage to risk,
real hope is the energy of dreams
and real love is the essence of divinity,
wherever, and among whomever, they are found.

So God,
shape with me, don’t break with me;
make with me, don’t take me;
join with me, don’t redeem me.
Let’s risk, dream, and love together
joining hands with believers and unbelievers,
the saved and unsaved,
the pious and the pagans…
for life is very good.
Lets make it better.

Keeping the Balance

2008-02-22T13:01:00.002+13:00

A parable by Paulo Coelho:

“A certain shopkeeper sent his son to learn about the secret of happiness from a wise man. The lad wandered for many days and finally came upon a beautiful castle. It was there the wise man lived.

Rather than finding a ‘saintly’ man, though, the lad, on entering the main room of the castle, saw a hive of activity: tradesmen came and went, people were conversing in the corridors, a small orchestra was rehearsing, and there was a table covered with mouth-watering food. The wise man conversed with everyone, and the boy had to wait two hours before it was his turn to be given the man’s attention.

The wise man listened attentively to the lad, but told him that he would have to wait to hear the secret of happiness. He suggested the boy explore around the palace and gardens and return in two hours.

“Meanwhile,” I want to ask you to do something”, said the wise man, handing the boy a teaspoon that held two drops of oil. “As you wander around, carry this spoon with you without allowing the oil to spill.”

The boy began climbing and descending the many stairways of the castle, keeping his eyes fixed on the teaspoon. After two hours he returned to where the wise man was.

“Well,” asked the wise man, “did you see the Persian tapestries that are hanging in my dining hall? Did you see the garden that took the master gardener ten years to create? Did you notice the beautiful parchments in my library?”

The boy was embarrassed, and confessed that he had observed nothing. His only concern had been not to spill the oil that the wise man had entrusted to him.

“Then go back and observe the marvels of my world,” said the wise man.

Relieved the boy picked up the spoon and returned to his exploration of the palace, this time observing all of the works of art on the ceilings and walls. He saw the gardens, the mountains all around, the beauty of the flowers… Upon returning to the wise man, he related in detail everything he had seen.

“But where are the drops of oil I entrusted to you?” asked the wise man.

Looking down at the teaspoon he held, the boy saw that the oil was gone.

“Well, there is only one piece of advice I can give you”, said the wise man. “The secret of happiness is to enjoy all the marvels of the world, but never to forget the drops of oil on the teaspoon.” [1]

The wise man in the parable is familiar with some of our realities. He is busy with multiple demands!! He is not a ‘normal’ wise man. Usually in stories the wise are in a serene state, seemingly unimpeded by demands and expectations. Furthermore the wise are quite detached from wealth and live in poor surroundings. Neither is the case in this parable. The question is therefore posed: “How does one remain wise while living with responsibilities and possessions?”

The lad who is seeking happiness undergoes the teaspoon test twice, and fails both times. The first time he is completely focused on the oil. That teaspoon symbolizes his inner world. He tries to engage with the outer world, the wondrous world he meets in the castle and its grounds, but can’t shift his focus from his inner world.

The inner world, the soul, certainly needs to be cared for. This is the place where the ground of love is prepared, where dreams take root, and where hope is watered. Yet when the inner world becomes one’s sole preoccupation it leads to self-absorption.

In churches we sometimes get people who are totally engrossed with their own spiritual journey that they overlook - sometimes purposefully - the world around them. Their faith is all about them and God. They nurture that teaspoon to the detriment of everything else. They begin to believe the teaspoon is everything.

The second time the lad undergoes the test he is alerted to the outer world. He generously and hospitably welcomes new thoughts and feelings. But in doing so he overlooks his own soul.

The outer world is noisy, busy, and demanding. It is also often colourful, interesting, and exciting. It wants our attention. Indeed it wants our adherence to the latest product it’s peddling. These products are often good, and so we go along.

I had a friend who lived almost solely in the outer world. He was gregarious and welcoming. I imagined him running a great pub. He listened to and discussed life with all and sundry. But I was never sure whom I was talking to. Was I talking to him or to the person he was last talking to? Did the spinning merry-go-round of his life have a centre? Or was it all spin?

“What does it profit a man or woman to gain the whole world and lose his or her own soul?” [Mark 8:36]

The parable reminds us to the importance of both the outer and inner world. It reminds us of the importance of our interaction with the subcultures and issues of our time and the importance of our own soul. It reminds us that neither can be dispensed with.

[1] Adapted from Coelho, Paulo The Alchemist, New York : HarperCollins, 1998, p.32-34.

Camping with Mormons

2008-01-23T17:52:00.000+13:00

Summer time in our family means camping and the beach. Each year we get out the tents and other essential paraphernalia, load the surfboards and sunscreen, and head north. We are what some call ‘rough campers’ – preferring the relative peace of an isolated paddock, enjoying the blessed absence of electricity, and tolerating long-drop toilets. The thought of cuddling up in some campground with a host of others doesn’t appeal. This year we were invited to pitch our tents on land belonging to a local Maori family, and inevitably we got to know them and their whanau. They were Mormons.

Now I must confess that I’m not too knowledgeable about the Church of the Latter Day Saints. I’d heard of Joseph Smith, his exclusive interview with an unknown angel, and his ability to write America into the Bible. I’ve read an article or two and shooed a few clean-cut Utah lads off my doorstep, but I’d never really sat down, talked, and eaten with them. Generally I try to avoid those of a fundamentalist bent.

Over the two weeks of our camping holiday as our kids played and swam through lazy days there were lots of opportunities to talk and eat. The grandfather was the paramount chief of the area. I meet three of his children. They all worked in helping professions – one a teacher in a bilingual unit, one running therapy groups in prisons, and one with Drug and Alcohol education. There were lots of aunties and cousins who came by. The Maori sovereignty flag flew above the campsite.

Three things impressed me. Firstly their spirituality was integrated with all they did. It seemed that their culture and how they appropriated their religion affirmed the best in each other. It was no surprise that the family were heavily involved in helping people both in their work environment and at home. Given that spirituality is also integral to all I do we shared a rapport that in many ways transcended our theological differences.

Secondly, the absence of alcohol was refreshing. I am increasingly conscious of the negative effects of alcohol in our culture and the rapid rise of alcohol abuse among young people. I would love New Zealanders, including churches, to voluntarily abstain from alcohol consumption for a year in order to experience life without it. In many places new forms of socialising would have to be tried. This family we met are proving it can be done and life can still be very enjoyable.

Lastly, as we talked about politics, culture, and religion there was a refreshing lack of defensiveness and little determination to convert me. They were interested in my perspective. They certainly didn’t have a fundamentalist rigidity about them. When I chided them about the absence of female clergy and their views about gay couples, they would smile but not avoid the issues.

Later one auntie confessed, “We’ve never met anyone like you.” I thought I’d never met anyone like them.

The Star of Christmas

2007-12-24T14:11:00.000+13:00

Most mornings when I open the doors of the Church there are people sleeping in the porch. They are people who sleep rough and live rough. The porch offers some shelter from the wind and rain.

One morning as I greeted the two whose slumber I had disturbed we fell into conversation. They told me they were travelling. They’d come from down South. They told me they were following a star. They also told me they were on a ‘mission from God’.

I smiled. I thought I might find out back some camels wearing dark glasses. They weren’t smiling though, they were dead-certain serious.

There is a biblical admonition to not discount the insights of those labelled foolish. I wondered whether I was missing the reality of what these sojourners could see. Street dwellers’ reality, albeit affected from time to time by substances and illnesses, offers its own wisdom. Just as my reality, albeit affected from time to time by work and worry, offers its own wisdom too.

I asked the two travellers a little more about the star and the direction it was pointing in. They told me: ‘Stars don’t point’. They also told me, with an eye of suspicion, that it was their star and I needed to find my own. The conversation ended shortly afterwards.

But the point was taken. I, we, need to find our own star, our own guide, into the mystery of the night.

Jesus was the real star of Christmas... http://www.stmatthews.org.nz/nav.php?sid=322&id=798

Who is a lucky bear?

2007-12-24T14:05:00.000+13:00

Poor Lucky. He didn't expect to be quite so busy this week. What he thought was a rather mild article [2 posts back] has generated all sorts of reaction - mostly good. The latest was a full page interview in the Sunday Star Times with a quirky journalist. Well he didn't seem quirky at the time, but some of his projections are a little strange! On the whole Lucky was please with the article and all the bits in the inverted commas he did actually say. Note though Lucky's mum told him afterwards that in Lucky's youth his mum attended Church more than 'intermittently'. Get your facts straight Lucky!

Anyway, here's the article: http://www.stuff.co.nz/sundaystartimes/4334783a6442.html

Being a Troublesome Priest

2007-12-20T15:50:00.000+13:00

My article last week in the NZ Herald [copied in full on my posting below] has elicited some extraordinary responses and name calling. One fellow Anglican priest, Michael Hewat, wrote a feature article in the same newspaper giving his understanding of Christmas. I note that like my article his piece has little to do with the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke. In other words he too is elaborating upon and interpreting the original story. I've re-printed the first part of his article and given the link if you wish to read it all.

Another critic was Garth George, a conservative regular columnist for the paper. Garth's black and white theology is well known and makes most Christians I know cringe. I have also reprinted part of his article and given the link.

Michael Hewat writes:

Christians have got used to the Christ being squeezed out of Christmas by secularism, consumerism and more recently inter-faith PC-ism, but now we are told by the Anglican Archdeacon of Auckland, no less, that Christians must accept that like it or not, Christmas is about more than Jesus.

Glynn Cardy avers approvingly that Jesus is now displaced as the reason for the season. He concludes his Herald Advent message by calling upon all people to celebrate the values of generosity, caring, togetherness and hospitality, values which reflect Christianity but also transcend it, embracing a borderless spirituality.

It's not that I have any quibble with the values he upholds, but I do not like the idea that Jesus is no longer the primary reason, or reason enough, for celebrating Christmas.

I like the idea even less when it is peddled by a senior cleric. My only consolation is that the same cleric argued in the same column last year that Jesus was conceived when Mary, his mother, was raped. He's not to be taken too seriously.

Jesus' place in the Christmas story, however, cannot be taken too seriously - and not only for reasons of faith. Reason itself requires it. As Mr Cardy himself admits, the supposedly universal values which he extols are seldom - if at all - found unadulterated in our society, even at Christmas time.

Generosity is marred by greed, guilt and debt. Hospitality falls prey to inter-family conflict and alcoholic excess. Feasting can be an occasion for calorie overload, and the goodwill of the Christmas season simply underscores for many their grief, isolation or purposelessness in life. Simply calling upon people of whatever faith, culture, or background to celebrate these values does absolutely nothing to empower them to do so.

On the contrary, it highlights their inability to do so, even once a year. It was precisely to address this problem that God sent his Son Jesus into the world.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/topic/story.cfm?c_id=500818&objectid=10482893

Garth George writes:

I have written often at this time of the year of the reason for the season - the birth of Jesus Christ, Son of Man and Son of God - whose arrival among mankind was the beginning of the greatest story ever told.

This year I have read on this page with amusement and a measure of perplexity the ramblings of that troublesome priest Glynn Cardy, and go along with Hamilton vicar Michael Hewat that Mr Cardy is not to be taken seriously.

The Cardys of this world invariably poke their heads above the parapet at this time of the year (and again at Easter) to reveal how their Christian beliefs have been derailed somewhere along the line.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/466/story.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10483333

The Season Is About More Than Jesus

2007-12-15T23:39:00.000+13:00

Whether Christians like it or not Christmas is about more than Jesus. Jesus might have been ‘the reason for the season’ but now the season is about more than him.

There is a lot of buying. Buying presents for family and friends in preparation for the big parcel-ripping day. Buying calorie-laden food and drink for that day too. Buying gifts to thank colleagues, employees, employers, and clients at the year’s end. Buying too a little soul satisfaction by giving to a favourite charity.

Generosity is one of the great things about Christmas. The Santa myth, at its best, encourages people to think beyond their needs and themselves. It invites them to give, to share what they have, to think of others, and to try to help. When a neighbour bakes a batch of muffins and passes them over the gate with a piece of plastic holly attached, the neighbour is also passing over goodwill and helping build a street into a community. This is not to be underestimated. Any religious festival that brings people out of their self-orientated worlds into contact with their neighbours – those they know and those they don’t – is a good and sometimes life-giving thing.

At its worst the Santa myth is despoiled by consumerism, the messages that ‘love’ requires one to buy despite the cost. It’s too easy to just blame shops and advertisers for this. We all have to live with the tension of limiting our purchases to fit with our means and develop the skills to repel the false ‘gods’ of materialism.

There are however a number of people in New Zealand for whom Santa is oppressive. They don’t have the money to satiate Santa. They try to do what they can, often incurring debt. If it’s not bad enough struggling all year to try to meet normal household expenses, Santa comes along to inflict guilt, hardship and a retreat into mind-numbing substances like alcohol. Getting intoxicated at parties can sometimes be a way to escape the pressures of Christmas.

The biggest pressure for many though is not Santa but the happy family myth. There is a good reason some families only come together once or twice a year – it is hard work. There are often unresolved tensions, past grievances, and personal dislikes hidden behind the veneer of the ‘happy’ family. Everyone tries to be on their best behaviour yet sometimes, often with alcohol, the façade falters and that Christmas is forever etched in memory.

Yet for lots of others family is what is precious at Christmas time. It is the coming together of cousins and grandparents, of whanau from overseas, of new-borns and new partners. It is playing cricket in the backyard, eating till you’ll pop, and visiting the cemetery to put flowers on great-granny’s grave.

Food plays a major part in our Christmas communion. We give gifts of food. We dine with workmates as we part for the break. We offer hospitality to others, and are offered hospitality in turn. We feast with our families, and live off the leftovers for the next week. Food connects us with each other. We also try and imagine that at least on this day of the year everyone is tucking in, and feeling blessed.

The whole gift-giving industry has very tenuous Christian links. Yet the generosity shown in welcoming friends and strangers was central to Jesus. Santa is ready prey for those wanting to buy and have others spend. Yet caring for the needs of all especially the least was central to Jesus. Family togetherness is not a reality for many. Yet the health and wellbeing of our social systems has always been important to followers of Jesus. Feasting can be an occasion for calorie overload. Yet it also can be the means by which we open our tables and sometimes our hearts to others.

This Christmas whatever our faith, culture, or background lets try to celebrate the values of generosity, caring, togetherness, and hospitality. These things reflect Christianity but also transcend it, embracing a borderless spirituality.

Christmas Greetings

2007-12-12T13:55:00.000+13:00

Dear Revd Glynn,

I hope you have a good Christmas.

Love Isabelle.

xxxxxooooooo

Dear Isabelle.

May your Christmas stocking overflow with what you need
May your Christmas guests overflow with satisfying joy
May your Christmas heart overflow with boundless love

Love,
Revd Glynn

A Pastoral Letter To The Rich

2007-12-06T07:46:00.000+13:00

1. As any broker will tell you, there is a difference between price and value. That which costs a lot might not have a lot of value. And conversely what has value might not cost much. When price and value are considered synonymous we stray into the error of assuming that porsches are more important than primary teachers or wars than peace.

2. I’m a spiritual broker, and frankly wealth stuffs up the arteries of the spiritual heart. A moderate amount tastes good. The trick is to learn to curb our appetite before it acquires a prominence in our lives that leads to spiritual death. Today such appetite is extolled as the driver to success. The monks of old called it greed.

3. It is no blessing being poor. Those who think otherwise have never been there. Poverty by means of the cocktail of anxiety, violence, and depression can also destroy the spiritual heart. Escaping poverty involves more than having money, though money helps. Critical to escaping is having a friend who believes in you.

4. Don’t believe the hype that says you earned your wealth. Give credit where it’s due. What your parents, schooling, race, gender and culture gave and give you is very significant in predisposing you to financial success. Luck is not insignificant either. Hard work does not excuse a lack of humility.

5. Don’t believe the hype that equates wealth with wisdom. At the nub of wisdom is the ability to be happy irrespective of success, wealth, and relationships. Too many people make their happiness conditional upon their assets.

6. Ask most dying eighty-year-olds what they wished had had more of and they will say ‘time with loved ones’. That’s the hope of rich and poor alike. Money and success usually won’t buy you time; it will buy you more money and success. Poverty doesn’t buy you time either, it just brings misery. To get time you need to trade in the money, success and misery.

7. Time is a spiritual concept. The Greeks helpfully distinguished between “chronos’’ chronological time and “kairos’’ the right moment. We need to create right moments. Or, as is more often the case, be spiritually tuned so that we are receptive when the right moment comes along. Those who aren’t tuned will miss or stall.

8. You can trade in your money to buy chronos time. You can get a little beach place, bury your blackberry, and take long barefooted walks. You can keep this going for a quite a while catching up on family, novels, and sleep. But eventually the novelty will wear off and you’ll be hankering to get back to work. For meaning hinges on work. Next thing you know you are in the suit, in the car, on the cell phone, in a rush. You missed because you weren’t spiritually tuned.

9. Such tuning is not easy. There is pain involved. The Greeks had a word for this too: ‘kenosis’ self-emptying. In the search for meaning we need to re-order our lives, removing things we have become addicted to and trying to live without them. It isn’t a case of having a ‘balanced life’. Some things are just plain bad.

10. A heart thrives on and generates love. It pumps the oxygen of kindness, tolerance, and compassion through the body and the body politik. As the song says we are made for love. Yet, as the songs also say, we continually screw up, making choices that destroy friendships and the fidelity love needs. Work, instead of being the expression of love, becomes the expression of our need for success. We have got those big three – love, work, and success - out of sync. Dangerously so.

11. Most businesses talk about work and success. They don’t usually talk about love. They don’t talk about it because they haven’t figured out how it is related to work and success. They’ve been duped that love is a private thing, a home thing, something that happens after hours. They haven’t configured in this key motivational ingredient and spiritual necessity in human happiness.

12. “To whom much is given much will be demanded.’’ It’s an old phrase and not helpful when used to induce guilt. But it is a reminder to those of us who are considered rich to use what we have in knowledge, wealth, and wisdom to make the whole world a better place. We affect each other on this planet. We can’t afford to only look after those who are close to us, because the impact of those who aren’t can irrevocably destroy the future.

We’re in this together,
Glynn

Mum, is God up in the sky?

2007-11-19T15:04:00.000+13:00

My friend Celia Caughey has written a delightful little book for children and their adults introducing them to the wisdom of the great spiritual disciplines - particularly Christian and Buddhist. The book is called "There's Lots of Love" and will be published in the next month or so. Details of it will be on the St Matthew's webite www.stmatthews.org.nz Here's a little poem of Celia's that I enjoyed this morning:

Mum, is God up in the sky?
Do you think that he can fly?
Does he have a long white beard?
Is he someone to be feared?

The mystery some call God
May be found inside your head
Don’t go searching far and wide
Search your own heart instead.

Think of electricity
That makes the dark turn bright
So energy flows through you
Tune in and see the light.

Simply Good

2007-11-15T12:44:00.000+13:00

"In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer" Albert Camus

+ There is a serenity to be found in some of the simplest of pleasures. I am sitting outside at 6.30 a.m., looking at the trees, with a cup of coffee in one hand and the morning paper in the other. I hear the birds and some distant morning traffic. Closing my eyes I listen to my heart and it is peaceful.

+ Table-tennis in the garage is always a boisterous affair, deliberately so. Here young verse older can tease, laugh and compete. There are two lessons I want to teach. Firstly that fun is something you determine and then create. Secondly the real triumph of any game is the mutual enjoyment. The desire to win always needs to be kept in check, lest its destructive force is unleashed.

+ I try to laugh every day. I therefore need to put myself in the company of or communication with people who are as seriously twisted as I am. That takes discipline, but is manna to the soul. It helps too to know authors that are similarly twisted. Today it is Christopher Moore.

+ In the office it is the trickster who contributes more than she or he knows. The ability to release laughter into the common atmosphere is a divine gift, sowing the possibilities of hope and transformation. Churches in particular need lots of pranks – just to piss the pious off, and remind us what piety is.

+ With age comes the ability to enjoy rich, strong flavours. Insipid food and beverages lose their appeal. It’s great to see kids progress from cheddar, to Colby, to Tasty, to Stilton. I wish their theology would too. Usually they try the cheddar equivalent then give up on cheese.

+ With strong flavours too comes the realisation that a little is all that is needed. A dram of Glenfiddich can last a whole sunset. When you get stuffed on anything – food, drink, or religion – you miss the beauty on the horizon.

+ Enjoyment is not always assisted by money. Big toys can lead to big stress, and big maintenance. Bigness is also part of the illusion that the grand is always preferable to the simple. A car will give you the pleasure of arriving quickly. A bicycle will give you the pleasure of feeling the wind. Walking will give you the pleasure of noticing the flowers. All are pleasurable, but some cost more. Generally the more it costs the worse off your heart is.

+ Beauty is the artists’ gift to the city. These gifts stimulate our eyes and imagination, and goddishly invite our souls to be transported beyond the ordinary. Sculpture, in particular, offers us the vulnerability and intrigue of three dimensions, inviting touch and reflection. Sculpture is the foil to utilitarian design, suburban routine and soulless consumerism.

+ Working downtown it is important to misplace your diary and cell phone, walk out and get lost at least once a week. In the world of noise and demand we need a silence break, or we will break. That’s why it’s important for churches, art galleries, and large book stores to be open in the city – for the quiet. It is a prayer to walk from noise to silence. Our souls simply need it.

When We Disagree With Jesus

2007-11-15T09:27:00.000+13:00

I was reading Luke 20:27-38 this morning. Luke and/or his Jesus make some claims in this text about heaven – namely that there is no marriage, plenty of angels, and is only for “the worthy.” The interesting thing of course is that many Christians, like me, don’t believe what Jesus/Luke believed.

I’m agnostic about life after death. I hope there is, but my faith isn’t shattered if there isn’t. I am though very sceptical about a heaven for “the worthy”. Determining who is “worthy” has always been a political game. At its best the Church has said that’s God’s call and God’s call alone. However, the Church being the institution it is can’t resist the temptation of judging others. It has damned anyone and everyone who doesn’t fit with the beliefs, morality, or authority structure of the ruling ecclesiastical elite. I personally think that if an afterlife exists everyone is going to be there. For some that will be heaven, for others it will be hell. As for angels… I really like angels, I just believe in literal metaphysical messengers.

If we don’t believe what Jesus and/or his editors believed does that make us non-Christians or heretics? When it comes to Jesus are some of his beliefs optional for us? Did he get it wrong about some things?

Let me sketch some things about the historical Jesus. Firstly, he was Jewish. He was a Jewish rabbi no less, of the Pharisaic tradition - albeit a liberal critic within Pharisaism. The idea of his followers departing from the Jewish faith would have been anathema to him. Jesus’ editors, and the writings of Paul, try to disguise this inconvenient truth.

In a similar vein I think it would be a mistake to imagine that Jesus saw no difference between Jews and Gentiles. The story of the Syro-Phoenician woman where Jesus says to her, ‘Why should I take the Jewish children’s food and throw it to you Gentile dogs?’ indicates some of the common racial prejudice that existed. Whilst Jesus was inclusive for his time and culture, to assume he was without prejudice is a statement of conjecture.

Thirdly there is his maleness. Although he was critical of the patriarchal family and the denigration of those who transgressed the purity laws, to say he was a believer in the equality of men and women is a fanciful reading into the text. Again, like with his relationship to Gentiles, in his time and place he crossed cultural and gender boundaries, and thus modelled for us an imperative to do likewise. But he was not your non-sexist, mutuality-committed, pro-equality male that we fathers all want our daughters to marry.

Then there is his theology. Jesus had a personal, male god whom he called daddy. Further this anthropomorphic deity lived above the clouds, in the top tier of the universe, called heaven. The second tier of the universe was the earth, and the third hell. We might like to imagine that he thought of these metaphorically, but I doubt it. Jesus also believed that he was going to ‘come again’ during the lifetime of the disciples. Of course as a good Jew he wouldn’t have had any truck with the Trinity, or the great schemes of sanctification that involved his literal blood making God accept and love people.

Some of Jesus’ theology we might resonate with and some we might be repelled by. A personal daddy god doesn’t do much for me. A three-tier universe doesn’t literally exist. Jesus didn’t come again during his disciples’ lifetime. However the complicated formulas of the Trinity and sanctification devised in the first four centuries of the Church don’t do a lot for me either.

Can I then still call myself a Christian?

I find the description of Jesus by the writer of Hebrews [12:2] as the ‘author’ or ‘pioneer’ of our faith helpful. The Jesus of history was a trailblazer, an exemplar, and a model for us. However as with all authors and pioneers of radical social change thought we need to be selective about what we wish to emulate. He wasn’t perfect. The love he preached and lived in his context might have been, but in our context revision is needed.

This is where the writer of the 4th Gospel is helpful in telling us that the Spirit of Jesus will lead us into all truth. ‘Spirit of’ as distinct from ‘the man’. Truth was not fixed in 1st century Palestine. It was not fixed in a male Jewish rabbi. It is something that continues to unfold as we engage with the Spirit of God in our context in the light of what he taught.

Choose Which Road To Travel

2007-11-13T11:34:00.000+13:00

The Bible has long been used as a barrier to prevent gay and lesbian people feeling beloved of God and welcome in the Church. Using verses in particular from the books of Leviticus and Romans Church authorities have condemned homosexuality.

However scholars in the 1970s and 1980s looked again at the texts. They found that none of the passages addressed the permissibility of consensual committed love in a same-sex relationship. Rather most of the passages were concerned about the violation of hospitality, rape, and pederasty. The texts were written within a patriarchal culture obsessed with purity. It tried to regulate for example what went into and out of the body, the latter including menstrual fluid and semen. Wasting semen was a crime whereas sleeping with multiple wives, concubines, and prostitutes was not.

These scholars also noted that Jesus made no reported comment on homosexuality. He was though critical of the patriarchal family, and what that institution did to those it rejected. He also talked about the importance of love and how we treat one another.

Conservative scholars have tried to counter these arguments. In short they argue that because the Bible is silent on committed same-sex relationships does not mean it permits them. The Bible endorses a heterosexual perspective, albeit within an ancient patriarchal context that most today would not want to wholly replicate. They think the Church needs to be very careful in how far it deviates from the literal words of various biblical texts.

In the end, I believe, it comes down to us making a choice. We can choose to follow a God who wants us to conform to one particular way of being human, as defined by heterosexual norms. This God stands opposed to the direction of Western democracies as they seek to acknowledge the human rights of all their citizens. There are a number of biblical passages and preachers that will endorse this choice. Or we can choose to follow a God who in the name of love breaks through the barriers of prejudice and leads us on the road to justice. There are a number of biblical passages and preachers that will endorse this choice too.

Making a choice regarding biblical texts and moral direction is nothing new. The 16th century reformer, John Calvin, a man not known for his liberal tendencies, was faced with a problem. The Bible’s unequivocal denunciation of usury, i.e. earning interest on money, was preventing the economic development of Europe. Whereas originally these texts were framed to stop the poor falling into debt-slavery, they were in the 16th century preventing people from borrowing to finance enterprise. Calvin reasoned that although these verses made sense when they were written, times and understandings had changed, and the texts needed to be ignored. Further he regarded the moral principle of equity as taking precedence over these biblical texts.[i] In other words Calvin, the great pioneer of Protestantism, and champion for many modern-day conservatives, blatantly disregarded the clear teaching of Holy Scripture and gave preference to the principle of equity.

We need to have the courage of Calvin today to set aside biblical prohibitions that stand in the way of people flourishing. This was the same courage that Jesus showed in setting aside biblical texts regarding the Sabbath, women, lepers, tax-collectors, dining, and adultery.

We need to choose which road to travel. There is a narrow conservative road that requires conformity to one understanding of Scripture and faith. You won’t have to think too much – it will do it for you. This road denies that any other road is Christian.

Then there is a broad highway littered with churches and bishops that is designed to keep everyone happy. In the name of unity dissension must be avoided. It is risk-averse. It tries to be tolerant. Those who don’t fit with the majority however are discounted.

Then there is the difficult road to justice that St Matthew’s is travelling. On this road unity does not precede justice, but follows it. On this road the Bible does not precede truth, but serves it. On this road God’s will is not frozen in the 1st century but is unfolding among us. This is the road that I and many of my predecessors have chosen. And we still have a long way to go.

[i] I have drawn upon an article by Alan Billings http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=39331

Lunch with Bishop Gene

2007-11-06T12:43:00.000+13:00

Last Saturday I dined with Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire and his partner Mark. They are in New Zealand on holiday. It’s not often one is privileged to have lunch with a famous person.

Gene has a big infectious smile and is very gracious when talking about those in the Anglican Communion who make life difficult for him. He is very committed to the Church – which I suppose is obvious when you remember that he was ordained wearing a bullet-proof vest!

He told us about the documentary “For the Bible Tells Me So” in which he features. See http://www.forthebibletellsmeso.org I cried when I watched the trailer. The movie tells the Bible story in a way that affirms God’s love and embrace of gay people and their relationships.

I sat next to Gene’s partner Mark. The American House of Bishops has a strong spouse’s group who have warmly welcomed Mark into their midst.

I gave Gene a gift on behalf of St Matthew’s. It’s a little greenstone Manaia. The Manaia is traditionally depicted with the head of a bird, the body of a man, and the tail of a fish – representing sky, earth and sea and the balance between them. It is said to protect the wearer from evil. It’s also controversial. It seemed the right thing to give to Gene.

Mustard Seed Church

2007-10-31T10:10:00.000+13:00

Instead of the club understanding of Church Jesus offered the parable of the mustard seed: “The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed that a person took and sowed in their garden. And it grew and grew and became a great tree with large branches so that the birds made nests in it.”

The power of this parable relies upon us knowing some basic botany. The mustard plant is an annual that grew wild in Palestine. Pliny, that great Roman observer, writes: “It grows entirely wild … when it has once been sown it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it.”[i] It was, in other words, a weed. It was the oxalis of the ancient world.

In the parable the person plants the mustard weed in their garden. Apart from being a stupid thing to do [think oxalis], it violated the law of diverse kinds in Leviticus 19:19. This law was designed to maintain order and separation, keeping plants in their proper place and not mixing them. Normally mustard was sown in small patches on the edge of a field. It was prohibited to plant it in a garden because it would result in mingling. By planting it in the garden, the planter makes the garden “unclean”. The mustard seed grew, and grew, and grew … as weeds do.

Jesus was inviting his hearers to imagine God’s reign to be very different from their religious club. The Jewish purity regulations were a result of needing club boundaries. All clubs need boundaries in order to create safe cultures, delineating insiders from outsiders. Jesus however was saying that God violates boundaries, violates biblical principles, disregards common botanical sense, and makes a mess of good order.

Jesus could have likened God’s reign to a cedar of Lebanon that grew tall and strong with many branches, capable of holding nests for many birds.[ii] In the great tree of the religious club all birds, read people, could find a home.

Mustard seeds don’t grow into great trees with branches. They grow into shrubs, with a maximum height of 1.2 metres. It takes a lot of digital re-imaging, or G.E., to make mustard into a large tree. Jesus was either botanically challenged or was deliberately mixing it up. The lowly, virulent, and problematic mustard can hardly be mistaken for the lofty, virtuous, and powerful cedar. Indeed his audience was probably smiling at the thought. What was Jesus trying to do in stirring his metaphors?

Jesus often did the reversal thing, trying to turn people’s thinking upside down. Consider, for example, the man beaten on the road to Jericho. The hero of the story is the unclean and despised Samaritan. The reign of God is meant to be mighty, exalted and significant, like a cedar. The mustard seed though is proverbially small, despised, and insignificant. Yet in the topsy-turvy, upside-down mind of Jesus, God is seen clearest of all in the small, despised, and insignificant.

There is disorder contained in the mustard metaphor. The reign of God is not like the Auckland Botanical Gardens were everything is carefully laid out, well tended and watered, named and admired. The reign of God is not orderly, where people all have allocated places and behave themselves. Rather the reign of God is like oxalis. It crops up all over the place, despite our best efforts to keep it out. Just when you had that patch of garden looking great, up she pops with her little yellow flowers.
It didn’t take long for the early Church to try to domesticate the breadth and wildness of God’s reign and call itself the Kingdom of God. Constantine made an empire out of it. All theistic religions have a tendency to want to own God and declare their institutions are God’s creation. Jesus in his day was trying to help his Pharisaic colleagues to broaden their thinking, see the divine in the weeds as well as the cedars, in the impure as well as the pure, and above all not to imagine that they could domesticate God.

[i] Pliny, Natural History, 29.54.170 [LCL, 529].
[ii] Ezekiel 17, 34, and Psalm 104.

The Morning Club

2007-10-19T11:35:00.000+13:00

Sometimes a children’s story contains a great truth:

“Grasshopper was walking along the road. He saw a sign on the side of a tree. The sign said MORNING IS BEST. Soon Grasshopper saw another sign. It said THREE CHEERS FOR MORNING. Grasshopper saw a group of beetles. They were singing and dancing. They were carrying more signs.

“Good morning,” said Grasshopper.

“Yes,” said one of the beetles. “It is a good morning. Every morning is a good morning!” The beetle carried a sign. It said MAKE MINE MORNING.

“This is a meeting of the ‘We Love Morning Club’,” said the beetle. “Every day we get together to celebrate another bright, fresh morning. Grasshopper do you love morning?”

“Oh yes,” said Grasshopper.

“Hooray!” shouted all the beetles. “Grasshopper loves morning!”

“I knew it,” said the beetle. “I could tell by your kind face. You are a morning lover.” The beetles made Grasshopper a wreath of flowers. They gave him a sign that said MORNING IS TOPS.

“Now,” they said, “Grasshopper is in our club.”

“When does the clover sparkle with dew?” asked a beetle.

“In the morning!” cried all the other beetles.

“When is the sunshine yellow and new?” asked the beetle.

“In the morning!” cried all the other beetles. They turned somersaults and stood on their heads. They danced and sang.

“M-O-R-N-I-N-G spells morning!”

“I love afternoon too,” said Grasshopper.

The beetles stopped singing and dancing. “What did you say?” they asked.

“I said that I loved afternoon,” said Grasshopper.

All the beetles were quiet.

“And night is very nice,” said Grasshopper.

“Stupid,” said a beetle. He grabbed the wreath of flowers.

“Idiot,” said another beetle. He snatched the sign from Grasshopper.

“Anyone who loves afternoon and night can never ever be in our club!” said a third beetle.

“UP WITH MORNING!” shouted all the beetles. They waved their signs and marched away.

Grasshopper was alone. He saw the yellow sunshine. He saw the dew sparkling on the clover. And he went on down the road.”[i]

Every community places boundaries around itself. It creates a sense of identity and belonging. It delineates between insiders and outsiders. Even the most inclusive community in the world has boundaries. The art of inclusion though is to recognize that your community does not have a monopoly on truth, love, God, beauty, and knowledge, and neither does any other community; and to keep the boundaries you have as porous as possible so that the challenge and love of God may freely flow through.

The beetle club had created meaning and borders around their enjoyment of the morning. Their allegiance to their club identity blinded them to the truth that was beyond their borders.

[i] A. Lobel, Grasshopper On The Road, London : Windmill, 1979, p.8ff.

Question from Isabelle: Where are devils?

2007-10-19T11:30:00.000+13:00

Dear Father Glynn,

Where are devils?

Love Isabelle.

Dear Isabelle,

I think devils are found in the imagination. Sometimes they are in people’s dreams. Often they pop up in story books – story books are of course imagination put into words and written on paper.

I don’t believe devils actually exist. No one has ever seen a devil. We know from history that the idea of devils has developed in stories. In some periods of history people thought they were real, and lots were afraid of them.

I don’t even believe they are in hell. I think the whole idea of an actual place called hell is highly suspect. It was thought up in the days when people believed in God living in heaven above us and the devil living in hell beneath us. Nowadays we know that we live on a round planet. Beneath us is earth and rock. Above us is sky, space, stars and other galaxies.

God is the name we give to the powerful love often seen between people who seek the best for each other. It's a love that can even heal us. People who try to destroy that love live a ‘hellish’ life. Hell is a state of mind and existence that rejects love and delights in hatred.

Kind regards,
Glynn

It’s a tough time to be a conservative.

2007-10-09T14:55:00.000+13:00

It’s a tough time to be a conservative. Despite all that moralistic fervour, those righteous admonitions, all the pointing of the fingers at secular humanism and bankrupt liberalism, the numbers don’t look good. New Zealand is not about to become a Bible-believing nation any time soon. The crowds who swim to the latest Pentecostal preacher and get hooked also seem to tire after awhile and break free. Attendance in mainline denominations is at best static, with a few exceptions here and there. Certainly there is no second coming for biblical morality and church going conviction.

In Anglicanism the great conservative thrust over the last decade has been to claim they are the majority, they are the true stewards of biblical correctness, and any unrepentant loving gay or lesbian who has the audacity to show up in Church needs to be exorcised. Conservatives chose homosexual relationships as their line in the sand. ‘Bashing gays,’ they reasoned, ‘is sure to win us the day.’

And for a while it did look like they were winning. The Archbishop of Canterbury got confused between management and leadership, and sank into the mire of the former. The Primates took to themselves power to punish dissent, though it was never theirs to take. The Anglican Consultative Council, while showing more backbone than most, seemed to succumb to Episcopal bullying.

Even in little old NZ the conservative stench breezed in. Vicars threatened to resign because of what was happening overseas. Some bishops developed supple spines keeping those vicars in ‘the family’. Lots of consultation was called for. Not mind you with disaffected gay and lesbian Christians who were once again being clouted by bigotry, but with those poor hurt conservatives who always want religion to make them feel good. Bishops paused before ordaining anyone who was gay.

The reassuring thing however about conservatism is that given time, and enough rope, it will hang itself. Slowly and surely the Anglican world is waking up to the ugly reality of the bigotry it has been trying to accommodate.

Consider the tone of recent editions of Church Times that barometer of English purple opinion. No longer are the Americans being vilified as imperialistic innovators who take no notice of anyone else. Now, after Archbishop Rowan has finally visited them, they are being spoken of as conciliatory and reasonable.

The ludicrous situation of three African Provinces competing with each in a race to ordain the few renegade American bishops is being exposed for the sham it is. How a bishop in Pittsburgh is meant to be accountable to a Primate in Nigeria is anybody’s guess – though ‘accountable’ is not what is in mind. Power and money is.

The murderous Bishop of Harare has used the climate of anti-homosexuality to further his own ends. Despots count on the absence of backbone, and their ability to spread fear and mistrust. Hopefully the leadership and lawyers of his Province will deal to him as best they can.

Wycliffe Hall, the evangelical training college in Oxford, is also reeling from its own Machiavelli. Their principal has successfully caused the resignation of over half his staff, public condemnation from former principals, dismay from moderate evangelicals in general, and the substantial inflation of his salary package. Amongst his incredible actions is the appointment of a Vice-Principal who does not believe women should teach men! The Council to whom he is accountable are at best displaying a predictable lack of intestinal fortitude.

Maybe however the biggest atmospheric change afflicting conservatism is the slow awakening of that patient tolerant beast called Middle Anglicanism. For at the end of the day the conservatives have chosen to vilify someone who is everyone’s neighbour. And they are vilifying him or her because that neighbour has chosen to commit him or herself to another in love. ‘Neighbours’ and ‘love’ are two words at the heart of Christian faith. There is something deeply counter-cultural to Christianity in advocating the theological and political crucifixion of a neighbour who has dared to love another.

As I say, it is a tough time to be a conservative.

An Offensive God

2007-09-20T09:52:00.000+12:00

Drag artiste Queenie Aotearoa dances a tribute
at the death of fellow artiste Shane in St Matthew's this week.

Today we have become timid in our imaging of God. We think it is radical and risqué to even call God ‘Her’. Our images of God as loving and inclusive do not do justice to the God Jesus painted who is offensive to the keepers of the status quo, religious or secular. Indeed the concepts of God as transforming love or divine energy unless earthed in risky imagery and stories are a diluted insipid version of the offensive God Jesus was shoving into the faces
of his opponents.

We also need to rethink our vision of inclusive love - not that tolerance, justice, and understanding between peoples, races, religions, genders and orientations is an unworthy goal. Yet the vision often has an underlying premise of us the powerful letting the powerless in, or us the powerless wanting the powerful to invite us in. To use the image of an all-inclusive dining table with us all sitting around together, we need to ask where this table is located, and who has set the menu.

Or put another way, where and with whom is this offensive God? Remember the parable of the lost sheep, and the one after it with God as a sweeping woman. This God leaves the 99 well-feed and respectable church and business leaders, and goes AWOL. This God of Jesus doesn’t do normal, or expected, or civilised.

This God could be found on the banks of the Brisbane River three weeks ago when a group of gay friends grieving a young man’s death threw high heels into the water. God threw one of Hers in too.

This God was blowing raspberries at the back of a meeting of the ruling council of the Northern Irish Free Presbyterian Church when they ousted this week their founder Ian Paisley for his tolerance of Gay Pride marches. She also danced for joy that such a dogged hardliner as Paisley could change, albeit a little.

Will we turn and face this offensive God overcoming the objections of grumblers, and the grumbling inside ourselves?

Hell Just Froze Over!

2007-09-13T10:34:00.000+12:00

Sometimes a piece of news really stuns you. The following article by Tony Grew [pinknews.co.uk] on Sept 10th had that effect on me. I have reproduced the first part of it below. It is also a wonderfully hopeful article. If such a persistent and vicious hardliner as Ian Paisley can show tolerance then anything might be possible.

Ian Paisley, the First Minister of Northern Ireland, is to step down from the leadership of a church he founded 56 years ago.The veteran politician has come under pressure from members of the Free Presbyterian Church over gay rights issues. The fundamentalist Christian sect has been outraged that Mr Paisley and other members of his Democratic Unionist Party have ignored their objections to government financial support for Pride marches. Mr Paisley, 81, became the head of Northern Ireland’s devolved administration in May, after decades of opposition to power-sharing with the province’s minority Catholic population. Before the administration had taken office a Free Presbyterian preacher demanded that a new government minister block a grant to Pride, calling it a "celebration of sodomy."

Families, Unity, and Growing Up

2007-09-01T14:47:00.000+12:00

One of the pervasive metaphors in the Anglican Church is that of a diocesan family with a daddy in charge. Occasionally these days there is a mummy in charge, but not at present in this country.

I have been at a national Anglican three-day conference on hermeneutics. I am suspicious that the family metaphor is driving the agenda. There seems to be a desire that we discover and name [via study of the Bible] our familial connections, and find some central points of agreement while acknowledging our many peripheral points of disagreement. Unity then lives on despite the diversity. It is a grand modernist scheme that has prevailed in Anglicanism for many decades.

As one born within the post-modern meta-narrative my problem with this scheme is that the children have grown up. Their relationship to daddy and each other has changed. They don’t need the daddy like they did before. They don’t heed the daddy like they did before. Daddy is welcome to his views, but they don’t have to coincide with theirs. Daddy hasn’t the power he used to. Some children regress into modernism, and some daddies encourage it. But more and more we are all growing up, accepting that we live in a plural world and joining together periodically for various issues.

Likewise the adult children now have an adult relationship with their siblings. Sometimes they get on well, finding commonalities and supporting each other. Sometimes they don’t, travelling different paths and finding very little in common. The latter experience is not a sign of failure or of dysfunction. Indeed it can be a sign of maturity.

I have mostly grown beyond the desire to try and convert evangelical Anglicans to my views on life, faith, and homosexuality. I recognize they have chosen a different path. I will publicly state my views and expect them to state theirs. If a daddy bishop aligns with an opposite viewpoint to me then of course I will publicly disagree. But I won’t expect to mute the bishop, nor do I expect him to try to mute me.

The phrase “the Anglican view” is so broad on many issues as to be almost meaningless. It makes as about as much sense as saying “a Christian view” or a “New Zealand view”. In the postmodern world we know that all views are conditionally shaped and relative, even if we believe in absolute truths and eschatological justification.

I’ve heard what I’m articulating described as ‘each sitting in our small corners’. Well in my schema there are no corners. We are part of an interconnected global network with free and fast information. We are making choices all the time. We are joining hands with friends and yesterday’s enemies on today’s issue, and finding a different set of hands to bond with on tomorrow’s. We are trying to follow the impulses of the living Christ in building a world of justice, joy, and peace.

Family reunions are okay, especially when family trusts and the like have to be dealt with. It’s good to catch up with each other. But we need to be cautious about trying to create or present ourselves as a unified family when it is nobody’s reality.

So let’s get on with the justice, joy, and peace, wherever we are.

Does God Change?

2007-08-31T09:39:00.000+12:00

Dear Rev Cardy,

I'm sure you’re aware that God does not change but stays the same- yesterday, today and forever. God does not change, we change.

Tom [UK]

Dear Tom,

One thought you might like to consider: when two people are in love, and grow in love, the love will inevitably change them. You don’t stay the same when you are loved. If God and I are ‘lovers’ is it not possible that not only am I changed by the relationship but also God?

Glynn

Harry Potter and Satanism

2007-08-23T13:20:00.000+12:00

The following is an exchange with a person concerned about Harry Potter and Satanism. She inserts a lengthy dated quote from a pastor opposed to Harry Potter.

In the light of your recent sermon posted on the website about your lack of belief in Satan, I wonder what you make of this? Thanks, Rose.

FOR YOUR PRAYERFUL CONSIDERATION

With the latest mania of Harry Potter, we all need to be warned about the last days of witchcraft mention in 1 Tim 4:1. Christian parents or otherwise that let their children read and watch this garbage cannot blame them if they end up in the occult. This is the most evil thing I have laid my eyes on in 10 years... And no one seems to understand its threat. The Harry Potter books are THE NUMBER ONE selling children’s books in the nation today. Harry Potter is the creation of a former UK English teacher who promotes witchcraft and Satanism. Harry is a 13 year old wizard. Her creation openly blasphemes Jesus and God and promotes sorcery, seeking revenge upon anyone who upsets them by giving you examples of spells, rituals, and demonic powers. Let me give you a few quotes from some of the influenced readers themselves: "The Harry Potter books are cool, 'cause they teach you all about magic and how you can use it to control people and get revenge on your enemies," said Hartland, WI, 10 year old Craig Nowell, a recent convert to the New Satanic Order Of The Black Circle. "I want to learn the Cruciatus Curse, to make my muggle science teacher suffer for giving me a D." [A 'muggle' is an unbeliever of magic.] Or how about the REALLY young and innocent impressionable mind of a 6 year old when asked about her favourite character: "Hermione is my favourite, because she's smart and has a kitty," said 6 year old Jessica Lehman of Easley, SC. "Jesus died because He was weak and stupid." DOES THIS GET YOUR ATTENTION!! If not, how about a quote from a High Priest of Satanism: "Harry is an absolute godsend to our cause," said High Priest Egan of the First Church of Satan in Salem, MA. [Since 1995, open applicants to Satan worship has increased from around 100,000 to now...14 MILLION children and young adults!] Still not convinced? I will leave you with something to let you make up your own mind. A quote from the author herself, J. K.Rowling, describing the objections of Christian reviewers to her writings: "I think it's absolute rubbish to protest children's books on the grounds that they are luring children to Satan," Rowling told a London Times reporter in a July 17 interview. "People should be praising them for that! These books guide children to an understanding that the weak, idiotic Son Of God is a living hoax who will be humiliated when the rain of fire comes, ...while we, his faithful servants, laugh and cavort in victory."

Hi Rose,

I read the material above as you requested. Frankly I am very suspicious of the source. The author does not give specific references for his J.K. Rowling quote. Searching the net there is only one July 17th Times article on Harry Potter and it’s from 2005 and the quote above is not in it.

My family and I have read all the Harry Potter books and thoroughly enjoyed them. They promote values of loyalty, friendship, telling the truth, and breaking the rules for a greater good. I think these are biblical values. The books are set in a fantasy world of wizards and spells. There is no mention of Satan, the Devil, Jesus or God. Fantasy is a well-known genre that has wide popularity today. No doubt some will try to understand the books in a literal manner and indulge in potentially harmful practices like Satanism. To ban Harry Potter [or some similar draconian option] makes as much sense as banning the Bible because it promotes sexism, slavery, and homophobia.

Kind regards,
Glynn

Questions from Isabelle - why is God there?

2007-08-15T16:53:00.000+12:00

Dear Father Glynn,

Why is God there?

Love Isabelle.

Dear Isabelle,

I think we’ve talked earlier about the location of God – the ‘where’ question. We talked about God not just being ‘there’ but also ‘here’, and ‘in here’ and ‘over there’ and ‘far far away’. Again if we think of God like love there is no limit to where love might go or be.

But I think your question this time hinges on the word ‘why’. ‘Why does God exist?’ or, in my language, ‘Why does Love exist?’ There are a range of possible answers. Maybe it’s because we need God/Love. Maybe it’s because God/Love needs us. Maybe it’s because God/Love has always been and the real question is why we exist. Maybe it’s because loving and living and hoping and dreaming are knitted together and can’t be unraveled. Just like God and us.

Here’s hoping,
Glynn

Life in the City - Known By Name

2007-08-14T07:44:00.000+12:00

I am slowly getting to know my downtown neighbourhood and the patterns of those who live and work here.

As I habitually look at people’s faces, rather than the pavement or shop windows, I’ve noticed that I’m beginning to recognise my fellow inhabitants. There is that young Asian woman with the bright orange handbag. There’s the old guy who has probably spent the night in a bus shelter. There’s the bank employee who goes to the same coffee shop I usually frequent.

Auckland has some 1.5 million people. Downtown, as you might expect, is the most densely populated part of the city. Some 5,000 people live within 300 metres of the church. What I didn’t expect was to begin to recognise people, like you would at a village store.

There is some impressive community-builders downtown. Like the McGregor Brothers café in Wellesley Street. James and Tom offer a good product, and serve it with grace and finesse. Yet other cafés and restaurants do the same. The difference is they make the effort to learn their customers' names. When you consider that from 7 a.m. on there is a queue of coffee junkies lining up for a pre-work fix, learning names is no small feat.

Similarly there is the Tiki Boy café on Ponsonby Road. As I walk in the door there is always a holler: “Hiya Father Glynn”. Preston tells me that if he has served a person three coffees and doesn’t know their name he is failing in his job. Jene and Preston have also created their own café ethos. It’s a fun, joking, clowning atmosphere. While the McGregors offer fine china, the Tiki Boys offer stunts on bikes.

What I’ve noticed is that I will walk past, and drive past, other cafés that actually have better coffee and food in order to go somewhere where I’m known by name. And its not just where I am known but its where others names are announced too, and relationship encouraged. Its what in times past a local village pub might have offered. Or a church.

The Basis of New Zealand Anglican

2007-07-26T13:11:00.000+12:00

When the Archbishop of Uganda recently said that the basis of his Church was the authority of scripture, the seeds of the martyrs, and the historic episcopate I was struck by how foreign it all sounded. I think the Church in New Zealand has been deeply influenced by an egalitarianism that is wary of the consolidation of hierarchical power. One of the gifts, for example, I think the evangelical movement has given many of us is this sense of egalitarian, priesthood of all believers, unmediated personal relationship with God. Secondly, this Church has been deeply influenced by the spirituality of the tangata whenua [i.e. Maori], the earth on which we stand, and the struggles for justice around land and culture. The third basis I would say is innovation. It’s the make-do, no.8 fencing wire, create-our-own-solutions approach. We bring together our tradition, our scripture and hermeneutics, our peoples and our compassion and we make solutions. Sometimes of course we get it wrong – but more often than not I think we have got it right.

A short history of Satan - Part 1

2007-07-25T11:00:00.000+12:00

Satan hasn’t always been about. He seems to have popped up around the 6th century BCE. In the Book of Numbers and Job Satan appears, not as an evil seducer, but as one of God’s obedient servants – an angel who has an adversarial role. Note the Satan was a role.

As a literary device Satan’s presence in a narrative could help account for unexpected obstacles or reversals of fortune. Take the story of Balaam – a man who had decided to go where God had ordered him not. Balaam saddled his ass and set off, but in Numbers 22:22 “God’s anger was kindled... and the angel of the Lord took his stand in the road as his Satan” – i.e. as his adversary or obstructer. In the Book of Job Satan likewise has this adversarial role – with God authorizing Satan’s testing of Job.

However, around the same time as Job was written [550 BCE], other Biblical writers began to use the concept of Satan to explain division in Israel. 1st Chronicles suggests that a supernatural foe had managed to infiltrate the House of David and lead the King into sin.[i] Zechariah depicted the Satan inciting factions among the people. These writers paint the Satan as sinister and the role begins to change: from Satan as God’s agent to Satan as God’s opponent.

Four centuries later, 168 BCE, internal conflicts within Israel are even more acute. The problem was how to accommodate the cultural and religious traditions of foreigners who now lived in Israel. Some promoted tolerance and integration, others the opposite. Following the Maccabean Revolt, when foreigners were expelled, the internal divisions remained extreme. Separatist groups emerged who used the concept of Satan to demonise their Jewish opponents. Satan was not just the enemy without [foreigners] but also the enemy within [fellow Jews]. These separatist groups also constructed stories of Satan’s origin – one of the more common ones being that he was a princely angel who through lust or arrogance fell from grace.

Of course other Jewish writers tried to stem the tide of racist and religious xenophobia. Daniel, for example, while concerned about ethnic identity never uses Satan language to demonise his opponents.

[i] I Chronicles 21:1.

In answer to Tim - Devil contd

2007-07-17T13:46:00.000+12:00

Tim has written a comment following the post regarding Isabelle's question about the Devil. This is my response:

Dear Tim,

Sometimes it is difficult to know where to start a conversation when two people are approaching the same subject so differently. It is always tempting to say “I’m right and you’re wrong”, but that doesn’t assist mutual understanding.

I’m reminded of a story about a young man coming to a well known spiritual teacher. This young man knew his Bible. He not only could quote it, he followed all its commandments. Yet the young man was still not happy. The teacher listened patiently and then, guessing that the young man had considerable wealth, told him to cash it all up and give the money to the poor. The teacher’s advice wasn’t in the young man’s Bible! Yet it was where the young man would find happiness if only he could thwart his love of money.

Tim, you state that the Bible is a book from God. I would say that it is a book that points us to God. For God’s wisdom takes different forms and shapes depending on circumstances and culture - just as it did with the rich young man. It is not the words of the Bible that we are to worship, follow, and obey. It is God, whom the Bible points to that we are to worship, follow, and obey.

You go on to infer that my dismissal of a literal devil is proof that my understanding comes from the devil. I think you need to be careful in labelling the arguments of your critics as from the devil. It is unfortunately a way, well-attested to in history, of plugging your ears to truth other than your own.

There are a number of things in the Bible that are simply not true. The Bible taken literally says, for example, that woman was made from a man’s rib, and that women need to keep silent in church. The Bible contains dietary prohibitions regarding pork, shellfish, and the like. The Bible has God incinerating people from the skies, usually the author’s opponents. Every Christian will work out what parts of the Bible they will adhere to and what they will overlook or dismiss; what bits they will ascribe to the culture and thought forms of the authors and editors and what bits are timelessly relevant. To literally adhere to every word of the Bible would lock you into the 2nd century world of when the last epistle was written, and therefore deny the existent and power of God in the last 18 centuries.

Tim, I would also caution you about assuming whose names are in the ‘Book of Life’. You assume that Isabelle’s isn’t. Whatever you believe about judgement, the Christian tradition is very clear about who is the judge – and it’s not you, or me.

If you wish to read further about the devil can I commend to you Elaine Pagel’s book The Origin of Satan. It traces the history of the Satan/devil idea through antiquity, the biblical books, and into church history. It is a sobering read. Demonizing one’s opponents, other Christians, and Jews, was a precursor to inflicting pain and death. It is a dangerous path and does not lead to life.

Peace,
Glynn

Questions from Isabelle - Devil stuff

2007-07-11T16:07:00.000+12:00

Dear Revd Glynn,

What are devils? And what do devils do? What do devils eat? Do devils babies come from eggs or do they not?

Your Friend
Isabelle.

From Mum:
P.S. Isabelle had a dress-up day at school today, and one of her friends came as a devil. Hence the questions.

Dear Isabelle,

There has always been goodness in the world, and there’s always been evil. Usually when we think about evil we think about a really bad person who might have, for example, killed or hurt a lot of people. But sometimes evil is bigger than just one person or group of people. We call that an evil system. About 65 years ago the Jewish people in Europe were nearly all killed – some 6 million people died. It happened in Germany. While there were a few evil people who thought up this horrific idea, lots of ordinary Germans were involved in it coming about. The evil was bigger than the people involved.

Back in the time the Bible was written some people talked about this idea of an evil system by making an imaginary creature to symbolize it. So like Ronald McDonald symbolizes McDonald hamburgers, the devil symbolizes evil. And like Ronald is just an actor dressing up [there is no real person called Ronald McDonald], so there is no real person or being called the devil.

However we humans always like dressing up and having fun. And dressing up as the bad guy is particularly fun. Our imagination has dressed devils in red, with horns on top, a tail behind, and a pitchfork in hand. At parties we go around and mischievously prod people with the pitchfork! Devils at parties eat what everyone else eats – though they usually have pepperoni and barbeque sauce on their pizza! I haven’t heard about them having babies – they’d probably have to grow up first.

Evil of course is deadly serious, and devils you meet at parties can be seriously funny. There comes a problem when the two are mixed together. If a person who has done evil acts starts being called a devil then people can start treating him or her as less than human. It is very dangerous to our soul, and to the safety of all, to start treating anybody as less than human.

Kind regards,
Glynn

Questions from Isabelle - Why is God called God?

2007-07-10T12:37:00.000+12:00

Dear Revd Glynn,

Why is God called God, if God is love?

From Isabelle.

With a mum postscript:

P.S. Isabelle heard me on the computer, and this was a bit muddled with sleepiness. I think the translation is "Why is God not called love, instead of God, if God means love?" Confused? I am!

Dear Isabelle,

I love your questions!

Words called nouns name an object that we can see – like t-r-e-e names that thing with leaves and branches outside my window. The word G-o-d though names something we can’t see. It names a spiritual power that flows through people’s lives. That power is within, beyond, and between us. It is something we experience, like feelings, but can’t be proved scientifically.

Christians believe that the main feeling and evidence of that spiritual power is love. Sometimes we might meet a person who is so full of goodness that it seems that while she or he is with us that spiritual power called God is with us. This was the experience of people who knew Jesus. He was stuffed full of God.

Some people want to call that spiritual power a ‘Him’ or a ‘Lord’. They make G-o-d into a noun. I prefer to think of G-o-d as a verb: a flowing, moving, loving force. Sort of like the power that lights up the bulb rather than the light bulb itself.

Kind regards,
Glynn

Questions from Isabelle - what does God do?

2007-07-05T12:02:00.000+12:00

Dear Revd Glynn,

What does God do?

From Isabelle

Dear Isabelle,

As you probably guessed by now I would put the word ‘love’ into the question instead of the word ‘God’. So the question would read ‘What does love do?”

Here’s a little list that is by no means complete:

1. Love tucks me into bed at night, listens to the good and bad things about my day, and gives me a kiss goodnight
2. Love encourages me to think about what is good for others. What does my brother/sister need, and how can I help?
3. Love is the joy I feel when playing in piles of autumn leaves, throwing snowballs, making sand sculptures, or running into the sea.
4. Love is joined to wonder – that feeling I get when starring at the stars on a cloudless night.

Another way of saying all the above is that God comforts and encourages us; God urges us to think about the needs of others; God joins us as we play; and God excites us in wonder.

Of course, particularly with no. 1, God has the human face and heart of your mum or dad.

Kind regards,
Glynn

Questions from Isabelle - how does God make water?

2007-06-28T08:18:00.000+12:00

Dear Revd Glynn,

How does God make water?

From Isabelle

This letter from Isabelle contained a postscript from her mum:

P.S. We have tried to explain the scientific theory, with atoms, molecules, electrons and things sticking together (like magnets!), but we wish Isabelle to explore other ideas as well. She has a very inquisitive mind and is always asking rather searching questions. We would appreciate it immensely if you are able to reply to this email, and no doubt future ones.

Dear Isabelle,

There are some things in this world that are made – like biscuits and television – and some things that just are there – like rain and ponies. Science can tell us what rain is made up of – all those molecules and things – and how ponies are born from their mothers, but science can’t really tell us how they are made. It’s not like someone sat down and designed and drew rain and ponies, and then made them. Some people when they don’t have an explanation from science say God made them. Well, God is the power of love that flows through the universe. God is not a Santa who sits in a workshop and designs and builds things. So the short answer to your question is that God didn’t make water – just like how love doesn’t make water.

Kind regards,
Glynn

Go to Hell, straight to Hell

2007-06-26T11:00:00.000+12:00

I was at breakfast with some friends when I was asked about hell. Not the pizza company that bears the name, but the celestial Dante version.

I told them the story of an Australian friend who in the rarified air of Sydney Anglican thelogical debates had to bite his tongue and quell his urge to either laugh or cry when listening to hellish debates. On one side were the snuff brigade - instant incineration. The snuffers were the 'liberals'. On the other side were the spit roasters - continual torment. They were the 'conservatives'.

My breakfast companions, being well-travelled, also had horror stories to share on religious nonsense. Such stories would be hilarious if only some people didn't believe them and subject others to them.

The conversation concluded with a question to me: "What do you think Glynn about heaven and hell?"

"Well," I replied, "if there is a heaven we are all going to be there. For some it will be paradise and for others it will be hell."

p.s. for those who haven't visited Mr Deity yet - check out their version of hell.
http://grouper.com/video/MediaDetails.aspx?id=1826735&ml=o%3d12%26fpl%3d68726%26fx%3d&

Questions from Isabelle - how was God made?

2007-06-24T06:21:00.000+12:00

Dear Revd Glynn,

How was God made?

From Isabelle.

Dear Isabelle,

Some things have no beginning and no end. Not many things, but some things. Like infinity. Like space. Like love. These things just are. Love is not born when a mother has a child. Love is there already, like a bulb in the ground, and bursts into flower when the child is born. God is like infinity, space, and love. God was never made, or can be unmade.

Kind regards,
Glynn

Questions from a 5 year old - Seeing God

2007-06-21T20:55:00.000+12:00

One of the joys in life is engaging with an inquiring mind. As a priest it is a privilege to receive letters from children. What follows is a series of letters from Isabelle, a 5 year old, and my attempts as a 47 year old to answer her questions.

Dear Revd Glynn,

Why can't we see God?

From Isabelle.

Dear Isabelle,

Some people understand God to be a powerful man stuck up in the sky. I don’t. I think God is best thought of as love.

Love is, for example, something like the feeling between you and your mum. You can’t see that feeling but you can feel it. That’s what God’s like. You can’t see God but you can feel God, and God feels like love.

Another way to think of God is to imagine God is like the wind. Again you can’t see God but you can feel God’s effect. Being blown by an invisible force is both exciting and scary. Just like God.

Kind regards,
Glynn

Winter Time

2007-06-15T05:56:00.000+12:00

As the leaves continue to fall, denuding the trees, may the pressing demands of our lives likewise drop to the ground and be blown away. These demands can absorb so much of our life and light, fooling us into thinking they are so important.

Winter time is a season for the soul. It is time to draw on the inner life, on the reserves within, rather than on our bright personalities, skills, or relationships. Foliage without does not compensate for strength within.

It is time to sit down, mull over wine, and breathe slowly. There is a season to speak, and there is a season to be in the silent company of one. There is a season to write for others, and a season to write for your self. There is a time to feed the world, and a time to feed your soul.

It is strange how nature has us stand naked in winter shivering from the lack of protective foliage. All those bright accessories have fallen away. Our life has diminished. Our space has withered. Our growth has slowed. We feel vulnerable.

We wish the winter would move on. When will the new possibilities, fresh vision, and dynamic relationships spring forth? Can’t nature hurry up? After all there is a world to save and timetables to meet.

Prayer goes at its own pace. We think we are in control, but the prayer I’m talking about has a mind of its own. It takes its time and disregards mine. It giggles when I’m trying to be serious, and is sombre when I’m trying to be sociable. It is as elusive as the morning mist, and often as silent.

The leaves have all fallen now. The cold has come among the trees. The mist descends most mornings. There is aloneness, nakedness, and longing. Yet hidden away, beneath the bark, respiration continues.

I stand still in the park, leaving the dog to her antics. I try to breathe with the trees, feeling their wisdom, and trying to glean a little. Winter is soul time.

Lucky goes Video

2007-06-08T15:57:00.000+12:00

Lucky is trying his hand at a new media (for him). He has just made his first YouTube video. In it we see and hear Lucky's view on baptism.

Bare Earth, Bare Feet, Bare Soul

2007-06-08T15:38:00.000+12:00

“There is a considerable difference between walking on the beach with shoes on”, he said, “and walking with shoes off. The latter enhances the spiritual feeling.” I was listening to a radio interview with a gentleman who runs a charter boat in Fiordland. He didn’t want to get too explicit about what he meant by spiritual, and acknowledged that many people would pooh-pooh the idea. He concluded, “When you walk barefoot, with an open heart, on a beach or in the bush, something happens to your spirit.”

I’m reminded of Moses’ experience in Exodus chapter three. Confronted with the power of the extraordinary and mysterious he felt compelled to remove his shoes. The baring of his feet mirrored the baring of his soul. It symbolized removing a layer of protection, thereby increasing his vulnerability. Receptivity to the spiritual often involves a degree of vulnerability.

Vulnerability however did not inhibit Moses from disagreeing with the Divine. Vulnerability is not submission but the willingness to meet the metaphysical stranger. Sometimes we wrestle with and are wounded by this stranger, this God-of-the-mist. Sometimes we greet the stranger as the breaking dawn. Otherness can be both threatening and redemptive.

As I listened to the radio I mused about those experiences where the spiritual power embedded in the earth penetrates through protective layers into our very souls. I thought about the smell of dripping Urewera bush, the tingling sands of Bethell’s beach, the crescendo of crashing West Coast waves, and the song of a joyous Tui dipping its head into flax nectar. The power of smell, sight and sound mingles with mystery, vastness, and beauty. Indefinable heaven touches our earthly feelings, if we let it.

These spiritual feelings, these exchanges between heaven and earth, are not just about nature giving and we receiving. We are invited to participate, to enter into the wonder and magic of this power, and even into its longing and pain. This spiritual interaction can be thought of as a song. But the universe doesn’t sing and we passively listen, nor is it an invitation to blend into a celestial chorale. Rather we are invited, like with a jazz ensemble, to improvise in our own creative way.

There is, like with Moses, a call to us. The spirit song is not passive, detached from the potency and sufferings of planet earth. It calls firstly to the pain within us. The gentleman in the radio interview spoke of clients breaking down in tears. The spiritual power reaches out to us and we can feel both our alienation from it and our yearning for it. Sorrow and hope combine like a love song.

Secondly, the song calls to our power. It calls to that determination within us not to be overwhelmed by the demands of the dollar, the pressure of performance, and the commitments of family and community. It calls to that fighting spirit lodged in each of us – a spirit that longs to see harmony restored in and between people, and between the planet and its population.

Lastly, the song calls us to transcend our own needs for the needs of the whole. There is a piece of countercultural Jesus Zen that goes: ‘To find yourself you must lose yourself.’ We are reticent to lose ourselves, especially when so much of our Western world is geared to improving and fulfilling ourselves. We are reluctant to let go of what we want in order to consider the wants of all. Yet the paradox is that by transcending our personal desires we actually find the fulfilment we wanted all along. Unless more of us begin to care about the whole the world will go to pieces.

We begin by travelling to a place apart, taking off our shoes, feeling the vulnerability of both ourselves and the earth, listening for the call of the spirit song, and then wrestling with its meaning. Bare earth, bare feet, bare soul.

Parliamentary Prayer

2007-06-02T12:26:00.000+12:00

In 1840 New Zealand, due to the wisdom of both government and church leaders, chose not to have an established religion. They did not want one branch of Christianity to be unfairly privileged. The parliamentary prayer has remained as an anachronism as New Zealand has changed into a society of many cultures and many faiths.

The current parliamentary prayer, while commendable for trying to curb self-interest and promote altruism, is a 19th century Christian product. The inclusion of antiquated words, like ‘Thy’, is insulting. By continuing to use such language it is inferred that Christianity is merely a religion of the past, of tradition and history, and is to be valued as an artefact rather than as a vibrant and life-changing contemporary faith. Indeed many of those in favour of the current parliamentary prayer argue that they want to retain an historic custom. It seems they want to preserve Christianity like a fossil from a bygone age.

There is a concern expressed in the current religious diversity debate that tolerance towards the perspectives of other faiths or none will lead to a diminution of the Christian faith. On the contrary I think tolerance can be understood not as a wimpy, ‘anything goes’ attitude, but as a vigorous engagement founded upon intrinsic respect for other human beings.

Every faith in New Zealand needs to be robustly proclaimed by its adherents. More education and public debate on religious matters should be promoted, not for the purpose of finding what we have in common, but for the purpose of learning to live together in this multi-faith society. I’m not going to dumb down my faith, or shut up when it’s too controversial, and I don’t expect proponents of other faiths to either.

While not compromising our heritage of human rights, particularly freedom of speech, destructive militant fundamentalism of whatever variety needs to be watched. However I suspect that extremism might be avoided more by allowing each faith the freedom to practice and proclaim its teachings, and by providing opportunities for public discourse, rather than by giving preferential treatment to Christianity.

We Don't Need Preferential Treatment

2007-06-01T15:19:00.000+12:00

Parliament is not a house of prayer, and nor should it be. Politicians of course, like the citizens they represent, are welcome to pray individually how they wish. In Parliament however a corporate prayer indirectly endorses a religious view of the world and can be understood as divinely inspiring, and thus sanctioning, decisions. The parliamentary prayer subliminally co-opts Christianity as a handmaiden of the State. It is better for the health of each to keep separate.

Christianity doesn’t need preferential treatment. It doesn’t need privileges that aren’t available to other faiths. The understandings and insights of Christianity don’t need to be validated by any government; they are well able to stand on their own merits. We Christians don’t need parliament to use a Christian prayer. Our faith is not so weak as to be diminished by other faiths and other prayers. Likewise our faith doesn’t need to be shored up by the erroneous declaration that this is a Christian country.

In the history of Christianity the relationship with governments and ruling powers has been a mixed blessing. When a government adopts a religion as it’s favoured or only brand inevitably that religion is forced to make compromises. The ability of the Christian faith, for example, to critique regal injustice has often been compromised by the royal privileges it’s been consuming. For a religion to have power and wealth does not necessarily mean that faith will flourish, often the reverse.

Separation of church and state is not an atheistic idea dreamt up by those who wanted religion marginalized. It was an idea actively promoted by Christians who heeded Jesus’ warnings about the corrosive nature of power and wealth, and who were familiar with their history. Getting into bed with governments is not good for Christianity. Having Christianity with favoured status would also provide a precedent for the future when another religion might oust Christianity from its place of privilege. States with embedded religion usually oppress religious minorities.

Jesus healed illness not disease

2007-05-22T14:31:00.000+12:00

I believe Jesus confronted the deep social, political, and theological illness of his society. This illness isolated and excluded those who were sick, different, and foreign. This illness created segregated poolside communities, dumping grounds for the tainted, Bantustans for the disabled... Jesus spent his life shooting holes in the philosophical and theological rationale that under-girded such segregation. He sought to bring the powerless to the powerful in order to question the nature and distribution of power. He sought to bring the labellers of illness to those so labelled in order that labels were lifted from the backs of the excluded. Jesus physically challenged and confronted the system of oppression.

Those who believe Jesus was a faith-healer who cured people’s disability have a problem. They have to believe that God physically intervenes to cure some and not others. This belief, however, apart from being irrational and immoral does not critique society at all. The disability is the man’s problem, not the society’s. The cure is fixing the man, not society. ‘There is nothing wrong with society,’ say the advocates of Jesus the faith-healer, ‘What is wrong is the man’s disability’. They paint Jesus as a healer of individuals, not a revolutionary out to change the world. He’s safer that way.

Jesus’ challenge to the lepers and disabled he met was to walk into confrontation. Following him wasn’t going to be all nice, safe, and predictable. It was going to be awkward, hard, and scary. Instead of sitting safe amongst the excluded waiting for some Benny Hinn, Jesus asked them to get up, and hobble along with Jesus into the so-called clean and able community and to challenge their prejudice. They weren’t going to be welcomed there. Sure they might find a few allies but generally they were going to be labelled anarchists, parasites, and told to go far away.

Did Jesus Heal?

2007-05-17T07:11:00.000+12:00

Medical anthropology distinguishes between a disease and an illness. A disease is between me, my doctor, and a bug.[i] Illness is between me, my family, neighbours and society. Disease refers to the physical effects; illness refers to the social effects. AIDS then, for example, is both a disease - a bug affecting the individual, and an illness - how society relates to that individual.

Jesus healed illness by refusing to accept the ritual uncleanness and social rejection that accompanied disease in his time and culture. He forced others to either reject him from society or to include the diseased within it as well. He aligned himself with the outsiders in order to challenge the whole power structure of insider/outsider relationships.

I don’t believe that God endows particular people with the ability to go around laying their hands on those who are sick, disabled, and terminally ill, in order to instantaneously and supernaturally heal them. I don’t think that Jesus supernaturally healed diseases.

However, I do think there are people who by nature are therapeutic, and Jesus was one of them. I also think there is a lot about medicine we still don’t know and so-called alternative medicine should not be dismissed out of hand. Further, I think that prayer is often helpful and can affect both physical and social healing. There is still a lot of unknowns and mystery around healing.

On the other hand I am aware that people who are sick, and their families, are very vulnerable to charlatans and religious quackery. I am very sceptical about the antics of religious faith-healers, like Benny Hinn who has a billboard down the street. They invariably fail to answer why some are healed and some are not, and why some experience so-called ‘healing’ at the time and then regress shortly afterwards. If we believe that God is love, consistently wants the best for us, and can suspend the natural laws of the universe to effect that, then one needs to ask why some of the most loving and saintly people never heal and continue to suffer, and why some of the worst rogues seem to get a miraculous reprieve.

Benny of course, like many infamous faith-healers believes that God requires that he live as opulently as possible, including having a $49 million jet.[ii]

[i] Crossan, J. D. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, San Francisco : Harper, 1989, p.81
[ii] For further reading exposing Benny Hinn’s teachings search http://www.deceptioninthechurch.com/bhinn.html

The Great Easter Deception

2007-05-11T08:31:00.000+12:00

Like in the parable of the fire-maker, the first post-resurrection Christians found the liberating spirit of Jesus wonderful, enlightening, and world changing. However, in time, other Christians, especially some in positions of power, found it frightening. They wanted to restrain and control the Jesus spirit. They were anxious that people would take courage, turn the world upside down, and thus upset the way things are. They were anxious that their power would be reduced.

So what some leaders did was take the metaphorical language about sacrifice [that had been around awhile] and applied it definitively to the Easter stories. They turned Jesus’ death into a once-for-all blood sacrifice to cleanse us of our alleged sin. Instead of the forces of injustice killing Jesus all of us so-called sinners were responsible. His death was de-politicized. If it weren’t for our sin, so the story was re-told, he wouldn’t have had to die.

Jesus was now no longer the confrontational revolutionary prophet but a self-sacrificing lamb. Good Friday was not the Romans killing off a pestilent rebel but the assisted suicide of the forgiving martyr. Easter Sunday was not the days of new hope, determination, and resistance congealing among his followers but a 40-day power display in order to show the benefits of having Jesus forgive us.

Like in the story of the fire-maker, the religious elite believing that the spark of life, hope, and power had to be controlled turned Easter into an apolitical gratitude ritual. The elite wanted the fire-maker’s followers to feel grateful for what the fire-maker had done. The fire-maker had given his life. The fire-maker had given his life for their lives. The fire-maker had come back from the dead to prove it. The followers should always remember this and be grateful. And hopefully they’d forget how to make fire.

The Eucharistic meal, Holy Communion, was also subverted, turning it into a remembrance of Jesus’ forgiving love rather than as a challenge to take up the task of breaking open prison doors. The political status quo is quite happy to tolerate a religion of forgiving love. However a religion that is bent on literally setting captives free is both a problem and a threat.

In the parable of the fire-maker there are two villages with very different perspectives on the world. They have different understandings of fire, religion, and governance. In my experience of the Church there are two rivers. One is a river of life that flows through me, sustaining me, and challenging me to love and to liberate. That river has as one of its sources the resurrected spirit of Jesus. The other river is a river of guilt, cleansed by the blood of Jesus. People are warned that if they don’t drink from this river they will not have life.

Two villages. Two rivers. Two theologies. Our choice.

What the Church did to Easter - Part 2

2007-05-08T15:06:00.000+12:00

“I’ve got a river of life flowing out through me…” goes the song, “opens prison doors sets the captives free…” The tune gets inside one’s head, and the theology isn’t too bad either. The truth of the resurrection is found not so much in a historic time and place but in the present reality of breaking open prison doors and setting captives free. Jesus is risen when we break the chains of oppression. Jesus stays dead when life and liberty are locked up.

In Anthony De Mello’s parable, the fire-maker is the Christ figure bringing light and warmth to those without. He is not concerned about personal glory but simply wants to share what he knows with others. In the first village, once he has taught the art of fire, he disappears. He does not want to patent it, profit from it, or use it to exercise power. Such was Jesus’ approach.

However in the second village the leaders know about power. They think everyone is competing for it, and therefore the stranger is a competitor. The knowledge the fire-maker has fuels his popularity and threatens their own. So, in the time-honoured tradition of weak people in leadership they turn on the stranger and dispose of him. The leaders then create a new religion out of his memory, while making sure people forget the radical way that could bring light and warmth to all.

De Mello’s parable is a critique of religion’s propensity to protect itself from new insights, especially those outside the elite’s control. Bad religion spins the stranger into a sinner or a saviour rather than takes seriously anything revolutionary the stranger did or said. Bad religion is not good news for the powerless.

What the Church did to Easter - Part 1

2007-05-06T07:27:00.000+12:00

The Parable of the Fire-Maker by Anthony De Mello

After many years of labour an inventor discovered the art of making fire. He took his tools to the snow-clad northern regions and initiated a tribe into the art – and the advantages – of making fire. The people became so absorbed in this novelty that it did not occur to them to thank the inventor who one day quietly slipped away. Being one of those rare human beings endowed with greatness, he had no desire to be remembered or revered; all he sought was the satisfaction of knowing that someone had benefited from his discovery.

The next he went to was just as eager to learn as the first. But the local priests, jealous of the stranger’s hold on the people, had him assassinated. To allay any suspicion of the crime, they had a portrait of the Great Inventor enthroned upon the main altar of the temple; and a liturgy designed so that his name would be revered and his memory kept alive. The greatest care was taken that not a single rubric of the liturgy was altered or omitted. The tools for making fire were enshrined within a casket and were said to bring healing to all who laid their hands on them with faith.

The High Priest himself undertook the task of compiling a Life of the Inventor. This became the Holy book in which his loving kindness was offered as an example for all to emulate, his glorious deeds were eulogized, his superhuman nature made an article of faith. The priests saw to it that the Book was handed down to future generations, while they authoritatively interpreted the meaning of his words and the significance of his holy life and death.

Caught up as they were in these religious tasks, the people completely forgot the art of making fire.

Entombed Theology

2007-05-04T07:23:00.000+12:00

The seduction of living in the tomb is that the conventional God is there too. You can sit in your comfortable grave clothes and talk to the God who is the same yesterday, today and forever. You can sing “Our God reigns”, soak up the acoustics, and feel all holy. You can memorise verses that affirm that God as the way, the truth and the life. It’s all very nice in the tomb.

Out of the tomb however it is not nice. The God of liberation is not a pleasant puppet you can sing to and feel all holy with. God, like truth, is bigger than our experiences and projections. Even our convictions are tempered by the disturbing thought that maybe God isn’t on our side. Out of the tomb we discover that people are complex, life is complex, and God, like love, manifests itself in a variety of forms and relationships. God is out of our control.

Trapped in the grave, the churches have invented all sorts of theological nonsense. In the desire to keep God small, predictable and safe, a plethora of so-called miracles have been manufactured to suit the pre-modernism of the entombed mind. There’s a windup literal devil - he’s the bad guy. There’s a literal seven-day creation – nothing is impossible when you create your own truth. There’s a literal virgin birth - fairyland doesn’t have to follow any biological rules. Here supernatural miracles happen in the wink of the eye, without even using a wand. Even the dead literally come back to life depending on what’s on the barbeque.

When churches only talk to themselves, those who agree with them, and their marionette God, it’s not long before tomb reality becomes the only reality.

The God of the Risen Jesus however is very different. This is a God of whom we need to be afraid. This God breaks open our tombs. This God disturbs our thinking. This God allows niggly questions to visit us in the small hours of the night. This God drives prayer from our lips and peace from our soul. This God blows us into the furnace of unrest, change, and freedom. This God compels us to shred the trappings of death and break free of the grave.

This is the God we celebrate at Easter.

Escaping From The Tomb

2007-05-01T11:03:00.000+12:00

We live in a time in the history of the Church when a great deal of entombed thinking, and its accompanying solidified structures, are being broken open by people who want to be free.

A photograph taken of the Auckland Synod in the 1950s, compared with a photograph of that body today, is remarkable for two things – the number of ties, and the total absence of women. Those were the days when old white men were in charge. Autocracy was the norm, paternalism was expected, and accountability was negligible. In many parts of Anglicanism, let alone other denominations or religions, this pattern continues. It is a pattern of oppression.

Since the 1970s in Aotearoa New Zealand we have been trying to exhibit a form of leadership where women and men, laity and clergy, form partnerships; where power is both transparent and accountable; and where those without power have avenues of redress. This is a journey. It doesn’t happen overnight. Mistakes are made. Systems can easily turn sour. But we have travelled a significant distance from the oppressive structures and thinking of the past.

I once told my children that it wasn’t so long ago that teachers caned pupils. They looked at me incredulously. ‘Oh Dad you’re making up stories again!’ My children have no experience of the violence that was endemic in New Zealand High Schools. Similarly when we come into contact with the hierarchies of the English or Central African Anglican churches we are incredulous. We can’t believe that ecclesiastical feudalism is still alive.

The walls of the tomb are solid rock. They have been there for generations and have the word ‘immovable’ scrawled upon them.

Of course the political and social structures affect, for better or for worse, the theology. Where the male is God, God is male. Where the hierarchy is God, God is hierarchical. Where the all-powerful are God, God is all-powerful. ‘Convention, comfort and civility’ disguise autocracy, sexism, and oppression.

On the other hand however where God is more below than above, more feminine than masculine, more dirty than clean, more uncontained and surprising than restrained and boring… there is hope, change, and justice to be found. The tomb-breaking God chooses the foolish, the weak, the rebels, and outsiders. Truth is not the sole preserve of powerful men, nor the wisdom of what’s always been.

Are our prayers, worship, preaching, and theology entombing us in yesteryear or inviting us to break free? Is worship emancipating? Or are we slowly being seduced by the formulas of old, pickled and placed with the other preserves on the shelf, there to collect dust and wait? Are we cementing convention or stimulating change?

Breaking Free

2007-04-22T13:12:00.000+12:00

Last month was the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire. Every year for 18 years William Wilberforce brought a motion to the House of Commons seeking the end of slavery. And every year, save one, he lost. He rallied against a trade seen as fundamental to the British economy. Wilberforce defied the silent consent of bishops, the Church, the common interpretation of the Bible, and of course the polls, in order to be faithful to the simple truth that all were created equal and deserved to be treated the same.

The story of Wilberforce’s life, coming soon in the movie Amazing Grace, is one of choosing between Gods. Choosing between the God of his upbringing – a God of convention, comfort, and civility – and between the God who gripped and drove him – a God of justice and change. Wilberforce followed a God who led him into unpopularity and vilification.

‘Convention, comfort, and civility’ is a description of the grave. The grave is a solid tomb, with solid boundaries, and a solid door. It’s thinking is found in churches, clubs, pubs, and parliaments. The grave protects the insider. The clothes the grave provides are secure, warm, and comforting. The décor might be plain, but it’s predictable. The outside world is repulsed. Inside certainty is assured. The grave is safe.

Resurrection is not primarily a past event that happened once upon a time in a Jerusalem cemetery. Resurrection is a present event, a way of talking about the challenge to leave the deadly mummified structures and thinking of the past and to live in the spirit of Jesus. It is about breaking free. It is about justice and change. And it is not safe.

Abandoned by God

2007-04-19T14:35:00.000+12:00

The wind is one of the metaphors that I use when trying to explain the limitations of an intimate deity. Like God you can’t see the wind but you can feel its effects. God blows where it wills. God can’t be wrapped up, domesticated, or walk hand in hand with us. God is more than relational metaphors. Unlike a loving parent, sometimes the wind abandons us and we are left bereft and alone.

Abandonment is a spiritual place that many have ventured into. “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” Jesus cried from the cross. Abandonment is to wake up in the morning to an empty universe, and to go to bed at night with no comforting presence. Abandonment is when prayer is meaningless, and worship no better. With any and every call to God there isn’t even an engaged signal – just an eerie silence on the end of the line. This is the valley of the shadow.

If you are not at the place of abandonment, then be thankful. And be gentle with those who might be experiencing it.

If you are in the valley of shadow then remember those rules many of us learnt as children about being lost in the New Zealand bush: Don’t panic. Don’t run. Don’t let fear or depression overwhelm you. Stay still. Fretting will not help. Light a little fire if you can. If you are with others huddle together for warmth – for you body and your soul. And trust, as the Jewish mystics say, that the Hidden God will be seeking you.

None of the great spiritual traditions of the world offer simple solutions to the question of abandonment by God. At best they offer a series of stories or metaphors that in part contradict one another. There is no one answer that will fit every time.

So here is another metaphor I sometimes use when trying to make sense of abandonment. I talk about God as journey. God isn’t the destination, or the road, or the travelling companion, but the journey itself. God is the different places we come to, places of joy and serenity but also of pain and despair. The valley of shadow is therefore a place within God. It’s a place that we arrive at sometimes through no wish or failing of our own, sometimes through the connivance of others, and sometimes through our own stupid fault.

The cross was Jesus’ place of abandonment. The sky, on cue, darkened. Pain and death resulted. His crucifixion was seen as a political and religious necessity by the powerful, and totally destructive and pointless by his followers. Whatever you believe about Easter Sunday one thing is clear: Jesus’ didn’t carry on living, growing old with Mrs Jesus and having grandkids. His death was real. His pain was real. His abandonment was real. The God that he had lived was gone; and until we take that seriously we will not begin to fathom Good Friday or to understand our pain.

The Problem of Good Friday

2007-04-11T08:54:00.000+12:00

I often talk about God as transformative love - a powerful and compassionate energy that surrounds, infuses, and transcends our existence. Jesus understood God as a personal force, ‘Abba’, which embraced the excluded and championed the ostracised. This personal force was therefore both contentious and upsetting for those who liked societal arrangements as they were. However for those who were on the margins of society this force was surprising and liberating. ‘Love’, ‘compassion’, ‘freedom’ and ‘inclusion’ are all words that point to the power that operated through Jesus and impacted on their lives. That power we call God.

Most traditionally minded Christians who pray to God as “Father” or Jesus as “Lord” would not generally dispute this understanding of God. They use “Father” as shorthand for God’s caring and protecting nature. Similarly “Lord” they would say is not a hierarchical militaristic metaphor but a way of talking about the primacy of Jesus’ love. ‘God is love’, as the writer of the Johannine epistles said centuries ago, remains the normative Christian understanding of the Divine.

The problem for both Traditionalists and I is Good Friday. On that day the Divine ceases to be love, we experience abandonment, and normative comforting theology is tsunamied. It is a day of disconcerting silence.

Some paint Good Friday as God the Father and God the Son working out a deal. “Look kid,” says Mr Deity, “if you want to save the world you got to do this suffering number. I’ll look the other way, and you just hang in there.” “Okay Dad”, says the kid, “I’ll try not to look sad.” Both are said to be acting in and out of love. Good Friday is just the pain before the gain.

The problem is that it doesn’t take much to figure the deal is morally bankrupt. Loving fathers don’t freeze their feelings and let their sons be tortured and killed. The means does not justify the ends. If God were all loving then God would have intervened. End of story. So either God couldn’t have intervened [not all powerful] or wouldn’t intervene [not all loving]. The cosmic deal doesn’t stand up to scrutiny when you have an anthropomorphic deity who is supposedly the final word on love.

Good Friday is vital in the Christian calendar because it challenges us to wrestle with the notion that God is more than anthropomorphic projections or metaphors of intimacy.

Washing Feet

2007-04-10T07:31:00.000+12:00

Who wipes up the kid’s mess? You know, when there is a cordial spill, or when mud is traipsed in? Ideally, so the family theory goes, ‘the one who made the mess cleans it up’. But you know and I know that ideals and theories don’t always work. Inevitably it comes back to Mum or Dad - or, in Jesus day, the servants.

Not that Jesus had servants. He wasn’t from the wealthy end of town. But, being the local popular healer [or was it just the novelty factor?] he seems to have got a lot of invitations to the homes of wealthy people. “Come in, Mr Jesus.” “Pleased to meet you, Mr Jesus.” “Care for some wine Mr Jesus?”

When one arrived at such a home the host would admit you and a servant would wash your feet. While this custom may seem rather nice to us the dirt and mud of Palestine was not particularly nice inside one’s house. People’s feet carried the world with them. The washing was a menial task, one that wasn’t popular among the servants, and therefore usually left to the least influential. One could imagine that a child, lowest on the pecking order, would get this task.

In the Last Supper account we are told that Jesus ‘knowing that he had come from God and was going to God’ got up from the table and began to wash his disciples feet. The preface is important. Knowing the end was coming Jesus wanted to convey and pass on the things that he considered essential. He chose to teach about leadership by ritually symbolizing their primary call to be a community of equals.

Jesus didn’t take up the towel and basin in order to show his humility. He didn’t need to. Nor was it in order to encourage those who would be leaders in the emerging Church to do menial tasks. This wasn’t about so called “servant ministry”. There was, and is, nothing glorious about being a servant – as many of us whose ancestors came here to escape the English class system know.

The foot washing was a demonstration of equality. The master [Jesus] is not greater than the servant [Peter, you, or me]. Neither is the reverse true – the servant is not greater than the master. The Jesus movement sought to encourage servant-less and master-less communities where people were brothers and sisters to one another and the only ‘master’ was God.

Leadership in the Jesus realm is not based on who is the greatest, or who is the most powerful or popular. Nor is the inverse true. Rather within the community of equals each person’s gifts and talents are accepted, nurtured, and used. These gifts and talents are God-given, and to God we are accountable as a community regarding their usage.

When choosing people to be bishops or priests I often hear “servant” language – that clergy should be involved in the menial tasks of church life and life in general. While all of us have menial chores to perform, and some of us [especially parents and workers in the hospitality industry] have more than others, I don’t think they are a prerequisite for leadership. What is a prerequisite is an attitude - an attitude that no task or person is beneath you; an attitude that the number of menial tasks doesn’t means you are better or worse than anyone else. In other words the leader must have an innate knowledge that they are fundamentally the same as anyone else – they are no better or worse. The leader will be given, or acquire, a degree of power. Power does not mean they are better, or worse, than anyone else.

Of course, there is a problem with power. When power comes your way the temptation is to think that you earned it, or it’s your right, or that you are somehow better than others. There are many examples of monarchs, politicians, bishops, business people, and clergy who have fallen into this pit. Maybe Jesus was aware of what his followers would have to face in the future, and he was trying to warn them.

So, the ritual foot washing of Maundy Thursday is a reminder to us all. It reminds us of our vision of Christian community, equals in the sight of God and one another, encouraging each other in our gifts and ministries. It reminds us who have positions of leadership that we are no better or no worse than anyone else, and at any time we may be called upon to serve God and our community in ways we don’t expect, even in ways we think are beneath us.

Going to hell

2007-03-25T06:38:00.000+12:00

There is an episode in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn where Huck is deeply uncertain if he should tell Miss Watson where her runaway slave Jim is located. His uncertainty is magically overcome when he realizes that the ‘plain hand of God’ requires that he turn Jim in. Everything he has learned in Sunday School, everything his mother drummed into him, points in that direction. He writes the letter of betrayal to Miss Watson, feels all clean and pure, and is able to pray. But then he thinks some more, thinks of his love for Jim and the laughter they have had together. He finally tears up the letter, says no to god, and declares, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”[i]

Welcome to hell! When your passion and commitment to justice, to doing what is right, leads you beyond the conventions of society and religion it won’t be long before someone damns you to hell. When you get to that place, be assured you’re not alone.

Sometimes in life we come to a chasm. Behind us is all we have known, including god, mother, and morality. Ahead of us is the unknown: godless, motherless, and immoral. And breathing deeply, letting the visionary within us feel, the fool within us act, saying no to fear and yes to courage, we jump...

[i] Adapted from Hamilton, W. A Quest For The Post-Historical Jesus London : SCM, 193, p.15.

Is God only manifested in a male Jesus?

2007-03-22T10:56:00.000+12:00

My understanding of Jesus being 'paramount expression of God' is at odds with those who would have no problem saying 'God is Jesus'. Jesus life might have offered a definition of Love/God but it didn’t limit it or constrict it. His life didn’t fence Love in, although some would dearly have liked it to. Saying ‘God is Jesus’ can be understood as limiting the vast, boundless, mysterious, energy of Love that courses through the universe and beyond to one man, in one place, at one time in history with all his particular male Jewish 1st century prejudices intact. This understanding shackles God to the texts and understandings of a period in time.

I can believe that after Jesus’ death the Love that flowed through him co-mingled with that great universal source of Love, and still does. I can understand too how the Church used pictorial anthropomorphic kingly language – ‘forever sitting at the right hand of God’ – to describe this mingling of love. I can understand it, but I wish they hadn’t.

I don’t think however that the limitless Love called God is solely manifested in Jesus. Surely the whole notion of sacred or holy Spirit is saying that the seeds of divinity are thriving within many people, including many who would not call themselves Christian. When the author of the 4th Gospel talks about the Spirit leading us into all truth, I understand that as an unshackling of God out of the cultural particularity of any person, age, gender, sexual orientation, knowledge, and politics and allow that transformative Love to re-emerge, to incarnate, in every time, culture, gender, orientation, and circumstance. Even to incarnate in non-human form.

In the 1980s Rosemary Radford Ruether asked a great unshackling question: “Can a male saviour save women?” Rosemary’s contemporary, Mary Daly, put it more provocatively: ‘If God is male, male is God’. For those who wish to eternally elevate, or beget, a 1st century male into the heart of God, is there any space for women? If the Godhead is masculine then those who worship will elevate the masculine, preferring even oppressive male leadership to female alternatives. If the Godhead is masculine it also becomes oppressive for all who don’t fit masculine hierarchical categories, including many men.

The transformative Love called God is not only known in the male Jesus. God is bigger than that. Love of course is manifest in women too, and a great many others beside. If we allow Love to be only sculptured by the words and actions of men, then the Love that is good news for all genders becomes distorted and misshapen. If Love is locked into the historical Jesus there is little liberation for any one who wants change.

The divinity of Jesus depends on your definition of divine. If you wish to consider Jesus as more than human – and therefore non-human - transforming him into a cosmic superman in the sky, then there are considerable flow-on effects including monotheistic integrity, solidarity with humanity, and the gender/culture of God. If however you understand the divine as transformative Love that is both transcendent and immanent, and Jesus’ life and actions as paramount expression of that Love - but not the boundaries of that Love - then Jesus is not more or less human than anyone else, God is not a Palestinian 1st century male, and we have the seeds of divinity within us.

seeds of divinity within us

2007-03-20T08:42:00.000+12:00

It is difficult to contemplate how Jesus is both God and human. How can a human being be the Supreme Being of the universe? How can that human God suffer? Some theological contortionists posit that Super Jesus voluntarily gave up his ability to feel no pain and command angelic armies to identify with us mere mortals. But any one who has a choice to end their torture and doesn’t is either masochistic or deranged. My reading of the Gospel story is that Jesus was not a self-flagellating saviour.

If however you begin the Jesus/divinity discussion like I do with a working definition of God as boundless and transformative Love the shape of the conversation changes. Instead of thinking about how Jesus could be a divine Supreme Being and a man, we can think about how the immense power and potential of transformative Love could be so prevalent in a person’s life that it defines that life. Athanasius had the Creator [Father] as eternally begetting, and the Son [Jesus] as eternally being begotten. One was the Source and one was the Expression. Cannot we think of transformative Love being source and its manifestation in Jesus being an expression?

I believe that in every person are seeds of that divine transforming Love. Some people water and nourish those seeds, and some don’t. Some people live out the results of that nourishing by loving and giving, generously and unreservedly. And some don’t.

There are plenty of seeds, wind blown or planted, that come into the gardens of our lives. There are seeds of greed, violence, and selfishness. There are seeds of kindness, hospitality, and justice. We have choices about which ones we water and which ones we don’t, which ones we weed out and which ones we fertilise.

The divine Love seeds are somewhat different from other seeds. They not only take water and nutrients, but they also give to the garden – enriching the soil, supporting other emergent plants, and perfuming the whole environment. Love is cultivated by the garden, and the garden by Love.

I think divine Love not only shone out of Jesus by his words and actions, but also was so powerful that his followers would later say something like: ‘When we saw Jesus we saw God, when we experienced Jesus we experienced God’. Transformative Love was so prevalent in his life that it defined his life and his life came to define Love. Not only was Jesus a billboard pointing to God, the very billboard was as if God was here appointing you and me. Still today Christians, me included, use the words and actions of Jesus to shape our definition of the very nature and essence of God. In this sense Jesus is unique.

Divinity - Athanasius and Arius

2007-03-12T16:57:00.000+13:00

Occasionally I am quizzed about whether I believe in the divinity of Jesus. It’s one of the tests of orthodoxy and some are keen to prove that I am outside its bounds.

There is a great history associated with this debate, not least the theological turf war between Athanasius and Arius in the 4th century. Athanasius, that fiery bishop of Alexandria, was of the view that Jesus had eternally existed and was both God and human. A lowly Palestinian carpenter, Jesus, was not only elevated into the heart of the mystery and magnificence of God, but also had always been there. God was not upper class, or class-less, but of the peasantry. This was highly contentious and revolutionary in a class-ridden society. The emperors, when they figured out the political ramifications, were not pleased and regularly banished Athanasius.

Arius on the other hand was concerned about preserving monotheism. He believed that Athanasian theology led to two Gods: the Father and Jesus. Further, deification politically removed Jesus from any meaningful identification and suffering with humans. The placing of a heavenly crown on his head beamed Jesus away from earthly solidarity. Jesus would be a chaplain to kings not a champion for the poor. In this Arius’ foresight would prove to be right.

In time Athanasius won, and we have the dubious legacy of the Nicene Creed. Unfortunately however the potential of Athanasius’s theology to bring down the mighty from their thrones, to relativize their power, and to lift up the lowly and meek was not realized. If the proof of the theological pudding is in how effectively it feeds the poor, we may have been better off with Arius.

The Oak In Aotearoa - part 2

2007-03-07T10:28:00.000+13:00

The Anglican Church Mission Society [CMS] egalitarian tendencies in turn gave rise to social concern and justice. One can think of William Wilberforce, for example, who was a great influence on Marsden. Wilberforce’s concerns included slavery of course, but also the treatment of animals, the literacy of children, and the control of vice. The concern for social justice in the 19th century was expressed in a very paternalist ‘we know best’ way. However that concern in time gave birth to the social work agencies of today, like our neighbour the City Mission, and the justice-centred political stances of our Church, as evidenced in the Hikoi of Hope and anti-tour movements.

New Zealand spirituality has long known, almost instinctively, the difference between power and wisdom. Whether someone was a Prime Minister, a Bishop, or a local Minister, their position of power did not make them wise. It was rather what they did and said. We expect of our leaders people who can understand us, regardless of their intellectual or business acumen. We expect too our spiritual leaders to be forthright in defending the vulnerable and criticising the powerful. Politics and religion have always mixed, but thankfully not always smoothly.

George Augustus Selwyn arrived here in 1842 having been consecrated the year before at Lambeth as Bishop of New Zealand. Like Marsden he brought enthusiasm, prodigious energy, versatility, and organisational nous to the task. His first visitation was characteristic. In six months Selwyn visited every settlement and mission station in the North Island; and he traveled 3,664 kilometres -1,900 by ship, 400 in canoes, 134 on horseback and 1,226 on foot. He spread the English broad-church notion that the Church was there for everyone; it was not just a club for the religiously minded.

Like the CMS Selwyn valued the participation of the laity, and their financial support. When the first constitution was drafted in 1857 it radically gave the lay representatives the same voting rights as the clergy. Similarly too to the CMS Selwyn had a paternal evangelistic and social concern towards Maori. He was critical of the Government’s land policy, and this infuriated many European settlers. His inclusive educational vision at St John’s, giving equal opportunity of education and spiritual nourishment to settler as well as to Maori, also provoked many settlers and even clergy to be quite hostile.

Selwyn was of the English broad-church tradition and not an evangelical. He introduced clergy to the country who represented a wide range of churchmanship. Though there were some fierce arguments, especially with the CMS, Selwyn didn’t seem to be threatened by difference. Amongst the clergy were men like Frederick Thatcher, John Kinder, and Arthur Purchas. The beauty of neo-Gothic architecture as seen in the Selwyn Churches and surrounding us here in St Matthew’s, and the sublime music of the English choral tradition were introduced. Painting, photography, poetry, medicine, geology… all were manifestations of the glory of God.

The spiritual gift is an appreciation of beauty wherever it is to be found. Whether it is architecture, music, movement, or poetry, our English heritage inspires us. It also challenges us to go on creating beauty in our worship, buildings, music, and language. Today that appreciation extends eclectically across our numerous cultures and art forms. Part of this gift of appreciation is realizing too that all learning is an opportunity to excite the soul with wonder and mystery.

The oak in Aotearoa, English Anglican spirituality in this land, is very different from England. A spiritual visit to the Church of England while initially inspiring with the architecture and music can soon deteriorate when confronted with the liturgy, elitism, and theological blindness one can easily find. The English people of course are wonderful; it is just that their past sometimes seems more a burden than a blessing, an encouragement to stagnate rather than be creative.

A spiritual visit also can awaken in us fresh appreciation of the gifts our English forbears in the faith bequeathed. They helped found a church that values beauty, imagination, and innovation; a church that delights in finding ways around problems – ways that include rather than exclude difference; a church that stands up to the powerful and criticizes them; a church that is broad; and that is at its best there for everyone – not just those for the morally and religiously sanctioned.

The oak stands beside the pohutukawa proudly on our soil, and justly so.

The Oak In Aotearoa - part 1

2007-03-06T15:54:00.000+13:00

Outside the rear of St Matthew’s are two trees, an oak and a pohutukawa, symbolising the two spiritual traditions, English and Maori, which continue to influence us.

The English Anglican spiritual tradition came to this land in the 1800s. For those early missionaries it wasn’t a matter of trying to replicate the Church of England in these green and pleasant lands. They sought instead to create something new and better than England, and dare I say they succeeded.

When the Revd Samuel Marsden, through the interpretation of Ruatara, first preached in Aotearoa on December 25th 1814 he knowingly, and unknowingly, brought gifts.

Marsden was an evangelical. He believed that by introducing Maori to the Bible and Prayerbook in their own language he would introduce them to God. Evangelicals believe in the power of the written word, and therefore put great store on literacy and translation.

The gift of literacy opens up for us the worlds of others’ imagination and reasoning. It is still, despite the dominance of visual media, the key to unlocking the boundaries of parochialism. Spiritually literacy can take us beyond ourselves, opening possibilities, challenging assumptions, and plunging us into the limitless God.

In the best of the evangelical tradition there is a touch of anarchy. If you give someone a Bible and say ‘discover God for yourself’, you are relinquishing control. The Church of England, like the State to which it is wedded, has been historically concerned about control. God was kept on a tight leash, only to be addressed by the theologically certified and episcopally approved. The Church Missionary Society [CMS], who backed Marsden’s venture, often kept the leash slack - except in moral matters. Allied to this disregard for rigidity, dislike of bureaucracy, and ambivalence about control, the evangelicals valued the participation of laity and clergy, women and men. The CMS had egalitarian tendencies.

The Anglican Church in Aotearoa New Zealand is today highly participatory, democratic, and innovative compared with Mother England. Partly this is due to the CMS influence, partly to Bishop Selwyn and his visionary model for the Church of England that he constructed here, and partly it is due to the many women and men, Maori and Pakeha, who have guided our Church since. Our theology, liturgy, and governance have been shaped not just by the traditions of old, but by what worked for us, what made sense to us, and what justice demanded of us. Is it any surprise therefore that New Zealand was one of the leaders in the quest for the ordination of women to the priesthood?

This spiritual gift I am talking about could be symbolised with a piece of number eight fencing wire. It is the kiwi ‘can do’ attitude. We make things happen, even if the imported components are faulty. What we care about is community, about helping our neighbours, and giving each other a fair go. If transplanted religion doesn’t quite fit with our cares, we modify the religion not our cares. We change the rules to fit the people rather than change the people to fit the rules. We value ‘what works’ rather than ‘what’s always been done’.

Mana and Manaakitanga

2007-03-03T15:24:00.000+13:00

It is a mistake to assume that spirituality is a sort of holy exercise that one does on Sundays disconnected from the rest of the week and the rest of life. In Maori spirituality, as in the best of the English tradition, spirituality is the holy art of weaving the connections between community and individuals, play and work, the happy and the hapless, the sacred and the secular.

There is a saying that Maori don’t meet to worship but worship when they meet. Although it is very much a generalisation, it points to the understanding of Wairua Tapu, the sacred spirit, permeating all of life. So when a meeting is about to start – whether it be on a marae, a school, or in home, or place of work – it begins with prayer. The karakia acknowledges that in all we do the spiritual is present. It acknowledges too that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.

One of the most well known Maori proverbs is ‘He aha te mea nui? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.’ ‘What is the most important thing? It is people, it is people, it is people.’ It goes to the heart of Maori understandings of community. The purpose and priority is the good of the people. The English notion therefore of striving for individual excellence and personal fulfilment is tempered by the Maori notion that the purpose of such excellence and fulfilment is to serve the needs of the community.

Regarding Mana. Earlier I interpreted it as ‘spiritual power’. It means a lot more than that, but there is no simple English translation. It includes self-worth, self-respect, status and identity.

The spiritual work of community is to build one another’s mana. The purpose say of a Church community, like us, is to build each individual’s mana. When arguments arise and hurts are voiced, the task of us all is to find solutions that build the mana of the other. Mana is more important than personal prestige and aggrandizement. As the proverb says, ‘waiho ma te tangata e mihi’ ‘Let someone else acknowledge your virtues.’ Let us be that someone else to one another.

Manaakitanga is the exercise of hospitality. It is symbolically enacted at every powhiri [welcoming ceremony]. The karanga [call], like the korero [speeches] that follow, acknowledge firstly the dead. The dead are part of the living, and shape us. By ritually respecting them and not ignoring them, we draw out their goodwill and remove the poison from any bad memories.
The korero acknowledges the whakapapa [genealogy], that is the linkages between past and present, between the hosts and the guests, and the simple truth pressing noses], and kai [food] follow. Music, physical touch, and the sharing of food are all spiritual tools for the building of community.

The poet James K. Baxter, once penned the following words about the discipline, difficulty and calling of hospitality [Manaakitanga]:

Feed the hungry;
Give drink to the thirsty;
Give clothes to those who lack them;
Give hospitality to strangers;
Look after the sick;
Bail people out of jail, visit them in jail, and look after them when they come out;
Go to neighbours funerals;
Tell other ignorant people what you in your ignorance think you know;
Help the doubtful clarify their minds and make their own decisions;
Console the sad;
Reprove sinners, but gently, my friends, gently;
Forgive what seems to be harm done to yourself;
Put up with difficult people;
Pray for whatever has life, including the spirits of the dead.

I am the river and the river is in me

2007-02-16T09:25:00.000+13:00

One of the interesting things about sitting in international conferences is realising you know more than one spiritual language. My spirituality has not only been shaped by the English Anglican tradition and its evolving manifestations but also by Maori understandings of life and faith. Often in international debates those of us thus schooled see issues with a ‘double vision’.

Outside the rear of St Matthew’s Church are two large trees – an English oak and a native Pohutukawa. Our environment nurtures the trees, and the trees in turn nurture others. Both trees also influence, shade and protect each other. English and Maori spiritualities are like those two trees. We have learnt and are learning to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of both ‘trees’; and being patient when they brush up against one another.

I want to name some of the aspects of Maori spirituality that have shaped and influenced me. In doing so I am interpreting aspects of a spiritual tradition that is essentially not my own. So I do it tentatively, conscious that it is my interpretation and not definitive.

English spirituality usually begins with the individual and then expands out to encompass family, then community, and then environment. Maori spirituality works the other way round. It begins with the land, then the community and family, and lastly with the individual within it.

The word for land is whenua. It is also the word for afterbirth. Traditionally your placenta was buried in the land belonging to your tribe. This land is an individual’s turangawaewae - one’s place to stand. It is the basis of one’s mana or spiritual power. The intimacy with the land is also expressed in its mythical name: Papatuanuku, earth mother.

Depending on the location of a particular tribe this intimacy with the land can also be expressed in terms of connection with a mountain or river. The people along the Whanganui River, for example, talk of their interdependence with the river in a proverb, “I am the river, and the river is in me.”

Unlike the common notion that land belongs to people, Maori understand people as belonging to the land. The idea of selling or polluting one’s ancestral land has therefore the same appeal as selling or polluting one’s mother. The materialist approach to land of ‘take, use, and go’, is countered by the spiritual approach of ‘give, nurture, and stay’. When a tribe has given land, for example when Ngati Whatua gifted nearly half the Auckland isthmus to Governor Hobson and the settlers, it is for the purpose of building relationship, for the good of both donor and recipient.

Maori spirituality is therefore, first and foremost, rooted in an intimate connection with the land and environment. It gives rise to an ethic of treating the earth and all that is sustained by her, gently and with respect. It is a mistake therefore to assume that the loss of land, as has happened repeatedly through the processes of colonization and neo-colonization, is primarily an economic loss. It is a spiritual loss.

Unlocking the Bible

2007-02-13T16:45:00.000+13:00

The other Anglican keys for unlocking the Bible are 'reason' and 'community'.

The rational-historical- scientific method is not an enemy of religion. Indeed it opens up for us many of the wonders of life and the universe. We are born with the capacity to think. Faith does not require us to switch off that capacity – even when it leads us to doubt our understandings of God.

A number of letters I received in opposition to my public sermon on Mary described Christianity as akin to a CD of indisputable truths. God had posted this CD from heaven. Our task is to load the disk and run it – but not to doubt the programme, try to rewrite it, or to question its source.

Contrary to this, I think that belief needs to resonate with our experience of life and spirituality; it needs to reasonably resonate, affirming but also challenging; and it needs to be publicly and corporately weighed and deliberated upon. Just because a 3rd century Church council proclaimed a belief and gave it the divine stamp of approval doesn’t mean that a 21st century critical reading of the Bible texts has to or does agree with that belief; nor that scientific advances in two millennia doesn’t negate many of the suppositions surrounding that belief; nor that that belief resonates with community of people committed to the propagation of transformational love [the community that I would call the Church].

The last interpretative key is the community. Traditionally this has been called the Church, and it has expressed its opinion through councils, synods and bishops. I though am somewhat wary of limiting the community’s interpretation of God to groups of predominantly old, European men. The experience of God is the experience too of the young, middle-aged, the poor, women, and the marginalized. It is also the experience of people who don’t think of themselves as particularly Christian or religious. This is why public discourse is vital to the health of religion. Just because the papers are full of letters from people believing in a cosmic superman doesn’t mean that the public concur. Every day I am talking with new and unique visitors about God, and every day I am hearing that God as being, God as transformational love, connects more with their understandings and experience than a supreme being ever has.

Of course want Dean Randerson and me out of the Church. They don’t want anyone to challenge the smallness and irrelevancy of their God. And, in part, that’s why we stay.

Password: Jesus

2007-02-09T10:08:00.000+13:00

Right from the beginning Jesus was too powerful to fit comfortably into literary and religious constraints. It is no accident that four different and at times conflicting accounts of Jesus where incorporated into the canon of scripture. It is no accident that at various times in the Church’s history, when it has become bogged down with its own importance, power and piety, a small group of people, claiming inspiration from Jesus, have broken free.

A Christian needs to breathe in the stories and spirit of Jesus. She or he needs to let those stories radically affect how they view the world. When one group is proclaiming they are right and others are wrong, the Christian needs to think about Jesus - who usually took the unpopular position of leaving the game to stand with the marginalized. When one group is saying they have the truth, or the correct interpretation of God, then the Christian needs to remember Jesus who was usually highly critical of people who thought they had a monopoly on God.

Every Sunday in our worship we symbolically place great value on hearing the Gospel read. It is the Jesus story that is our interpretative key for understanding all the other writings of the Bible. If a text doesn’t measure up to the Jesus standard, then it’s not worth listening to.

We need to understand though that Jesus wasn’t faultless. He made mistakes – like when he ridiculed the Syro-Phoenician woman. His views were shaped by his context: male, Jewish, first century, Palestine. He would have been appalled to think that people would spend centuries after his death worshipping his literal words, as if words from the past have a sacredness devoid of context. He would though have been pleased to think that people would interpret his message of radical, inclusive, forgiving and self-giving love into their own time and day, and live it.

Jesus was an unrepentant iconoclast – smashing oppressive images of God. I think it is much more faithful for us to follow in his questioning, challenging, and confrontational tradition – even when we are in conflict with individual texts of scripture – than to try to replicate his worldview, moral code, and theological givens. We are called to be Jesus’ disciples, not his imitators.

Religious Experience and Sacred Writings

2007-02-08T12:41:00.000+13:00

Religious experience of course is as diverse as humanity. We are each shaped by our experience. As a 14 year old, for example, I remember feeling overawed and giving myself to that awe as I invited a Jesus-shaped God into my life. Of course God, that power of love, was already there; only I didn’t know it at the time.

It was a mystical experience. Friends encountered God similarly. Powerful feelings, circumstantial oddities, potent dreams, strange plays of light and sound, goose-bumpy tingles… all of which pointed to the wonder of something bigger than ourselves which was not to be feared but was a mystery that held us and strangely loved us.

It is not difficult to find books or conversations of people having similar numinous experiences. These experiences are not limited to Christians, much to the angst of some! Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, even agnostics, also experience the numinous – although they usually use a different vocabulary to express it.

To base one’s theology on these feelings can by vacuous. There are no theological tools or ethical direction offered automatically with religious experience. One needs to turn to other sources for that.

Some start to build their understanding of God by turning to sacred writings; in particular Christians turn to the Bible. To accompany my numinous experience as a 14 year old I was given a Bible and told to read and memorise it - which I did. I can still quote large portions of it off by heart. The premise was that if one knew the Bible, it would provide both theological construct and ethical direction.

I loved the Bible, and still do. I have read it repeatedly most days in the last 33 years. However the initial appeal in time wears off, unless one goes deeper, and then deeper again. To fail to bring all our whole self, including our critical and academic faculties, to our reading is to not take the Bible seriously. It makes me mad, for example, when a Christian minister insists on interpreting Paul’s writings about homosexuality as condemnatory of mutual same-sex relationships today, when the context and focus of most of Paul’s comments concern pederasty. Similarly it makes me mad when the Bible is used to support male hegemony, or anti-Semitism.

All sacred writings, including the Bible, are written by people. The authors are people with foibles, as well as insights. Communities and individuals have for centuries edited out the bits they don’t like, but thankfully have not sanitised it too much. Wisdom as well as folly are both present in the Bible.

Just because sacred writings are old does not mean they are right. Just because church councils have said they are inspired by God does not make them free from error or relevant to our world today. The Bible in the hands of a 14-year-old literalist can offer a map for inflicting pious condemnation, heterosexism, male chauvinism, slavery, and bigotry. And plenty have followed those paths.

We need interpretative keys into order to unlock the Bible and creatively find our way further into the mystery called God. Anglican Christianity offers three: Jesus, reason, and community.

Expelling the Cosmic Superman

2007-02-07T12:02:00.000+13:00

Well, it's been a long and lovely summer here in New Zealand. Lucky has been at the beach, doing his thing, chilling out and all that.

While Lucky has been playing the Auckland press has been having a go at our assistant bishop and dean, Richard Randerson. It is both sad and surprising that many of the writers submitting letters to the paper have little understanding of Christianity’s God. Dean Richard’s critique of a Supreme Being with anthropomorphic attributes has led to cries for his resignation.

I find theologian John Macquarie’s distinction between ‘God as a being’ and ‘God as being’ helpful. ‘God as a being’ reduces God to some sort of cosmic superman, with the power to control, create, love, etc. ‘God as being’ however points to the understanding of God as a transformational love energy that infuses our world.

The superman idea, which admittedly can be easily supposed from the traditional metaphors of ‘almighty’, ‘father’, and ‘lord’, is essentially idolatry. It makes God into our creation. It is about fitting God into our moulds, and keeping God there. It is a small God.

In the Bible this moulding of God repeatedly happens, and repeatedly the spirit of transformational love iconoclastically breaks those moulds. God is bigger than anthropomorphic constructs. It is easy to read the Bible and collect all the references to prove that supergod exists. It is also not that difficult to read the Bible and find the ongoing iconoclastic tradition. We need to expel the cosmic superman back to the Krypton of our needy imagination.

Christmas Thoughts - Santa

2006-12-23T14:02:00.000+13:00

It is a mistake to underestimate Santa Claus. He didn’t get a part in the Bible, but he’s sure a big part of Christmas.

On Christmas Eve there is a children’s service here. It’s one of the biggest of the year. Children and chaos abound, and the atmosphere is charged. We sing, we laugh, and we tell stories of cribs and candles and Christmases past. We also have Santa.

For years I’ve had trouble with Santa. No, it’s not the reindeer parking problems or the resultant pooh… it’s finding Santa himself. It takes a special person to don the red suit, and frankly some of them haven’t been up to it. There’s more to being Santa than sticking out your stomach, chuckling ‘Ho, ho, ho’, and answering smart seven year olds. But – and this is the interesting bit – Santa is never a flop. He never falls from the grace the children extend.

On Santa’s entrance – from the roof of course – the energy levels rise. Whatever he says is listened to. Whatever he does is received with rapt attention. The power of Santa is quite formidable.

Many people take a low view of Santa. He is paraded in every shopping mall in the country encouraging people to buy, and buy more. He doesn’t say, “Pay off that car you drive” or “pay that phone bill”. No, he’s saying buy new and buy now things we know we could do without. Santa is a slave of rampant consumerism.

Then there is the bribery brigade. “Listen boys and girls, if you aren’t good [read: do what I say] then Santa won’t come this year.” Santa’s morality is reduced to the suspect morality of these parents. Everything in life has to be earned. Including love. Including Santa.

Max, my neighbour, also takes a low view of what he calls “the Santa myth”. He objects to the portrayal of vertically challenged people merrily working in cramped sweat shop conditions. He objects to reindeer being used as promotional aids with no benefits accruing to the threatened herds of Northern Europe. He objects to an obese elderly man being given, firstly, license to enter any home or premise, secondly, a monopoly on the disbursement of gifts, and thirdly, an annual parade in his honour. Santa to him is a symbol of inequity.

The original Santa was, of course, a saint. Dear old wealthy Bishop Nic lived in the ancient city of Myra and gave generously to others. One story has it that an angel visited him one night and said, “Nicholas, you must take a bag of gold to the pawnbroker’s, for he is very poor and has three daughters. Unless they have a dowry, they will be sold into slavery.” Nic took the gold and rushed to the pawnbroker’s house where he discreetly dropped it through a window. Naturally, the parents were overjoyed; now their eldest could marry.

As you would expect in a good story this angelic visitation and discreet dropping of gold happened three times. But on the third and last drop the Pawnbroker, curious to discover the identity of his benefactor, locked all the windows of the house. Nic not being short of ideas climbed up on the roof and deposited the bag down the chimney.

It’s a story about sympathy for those in poverty, about practical assistance, and innovative delivery systems. It’s about compassion. It’s about shedding wealth. It’s about the virtue of anonymous giving – a virtue that in our modern world of sponsorship seems almost quaint.

Personally I take a high view of Santa, and not just to infuriate my neighbour Max [which it does]. I simply believe in Santa Claus. And, like most beliefs, it has been refined and tempered by experience, especially year by year sitting with children at Christmas and trying to explain in simple, precise language the meaning of life, faith, and flying sleighs.

There comes a time in most children’s lives when some of the mathematics of Santa seem insurmountable. Consider the number of children in this city, the quantity and size of presents, the dimensions of your above average sleigh, the distance from Auckland to the North Pole, the aerodynamic potential of reindeer… So, inevitably the questions arise: “How come…?” “How does he do that?” And, looking at me as though I was deranged, “Do you actually believe in Santa Claus?”

If the inquisitor is worth their salt they won’t stop there. “What about the down the chimney bit eh?” “Yep,” I reply, “I’m into it.” “Look Glynn,” my young friend continues, “our chimney is designed for someone who only eats lettuce. It has a metal pipe of some 20 centimetres in diameter. Are you telling me that Santa can squeeze down that?”

“Well,” I respond, girding myself for the challenge, “tell me how your favourite music group can sing their stuff through cyberspace, enter your computer, and morph themselves onto a CD for you to enjoy whenever? And you think a bit of chimney pipe is a problem?” Around now my young friend will roll their eyes, code for ‘my silence is not my assent’. Failure to appreciate the fertile imagination is as big a problem in our society as consumerism.

The better questions for the young inquirer to ask are about meaning. For Santa means giving. Giving to others. Giving to those we don’t know. Giving with no strings attached - including no reciprocating gifts.

Santa is about dreaming that nothing is impossible when it comes to helping and sharing. No elf, no chimney, no amount of snow, or consumerism, or cynicism, is going to stop it. This is why I believe in Santa Claus.

The Santa saga is more powerful than any factual findings by the geek who sat for three consecutive Christmas Eves with a telescope and camcorder on a rooftop. Santa inspires and encourages the best in humanity, the best in you and me – selfless giving to others.

Christmas is simple really: Give what you can and then some. Don’t believe in the barriers to giving. Set your imagination free. Dream of a world where all can have enough and be satisfied with it.

These are the gifts that Santa brings time and again, time and again.

Christmas Thoughts - Mary

2006-12-23T13:54:00.000+13:00

“With God all things are possible,” said the angelic Gabriel to a distressed Mary. Viewers of the recent movie Nativity might paraphrase Gabriel’s message: “With technology, cinematic license, and funding all religious fantasies are possible.”

Nativity is a marked improvement on its forebears, particularly in its portrayal of the repressive governance of Palestine and the patriarchal culture that impacted on women. However Nativity reminded me of a parish Christmas pageant, uncritically splicing the two infancy narratives together and using unbelievable tricks to explain the miraculous. Unlike the parish pageant though Nativity masquerades as history.

Liberal scholars have for decades told us that most of the supposed facts of the nativity are fictions. Angels, wise men, heavenly hosts, the census, Bethlehem… are all part of the story-telling craft, weaving meanings derived from Jesus’ life back into his birth. It makes for great stories, encapsulates great truths, but is lousy history.

As for the paternity of Jesus, these liberal scholars denounced the biological miracle thesis that Nativity went to some length to replicate. We all know that fertilized eggs don’t drop from the sky into wombs, despite what some in the Vatican think. Joseph, said these scholars, was the most likely father.

Scholarship has since moved on, now less concerned about history and more concerned about what the texts actually say. It makes no sense, for example, for both Matthew and Luke to sow doubt about Jesus’ paternity if Joseph was his actual father. The scandal that accompanied the pregnancy, as the movie Nativity showed, would have diminished if Joseph had owned up. Indeed the pregnancy of a betrothed girl by her fiancé was viewed as more positive than negative, for it was thought to guarantee children and ensure the male line.

Who then was the father? For those who like to use God, as the movie does, to explain the supposed unexplainable please note two things. Firstly, the words used by Gabriel “come upon” and “overshadow” have no sexual connotations. It’s not saying that Mary had sex with the Holy Spirit. Secondly, divine paternity and human paternity are not mutually exclusive. God is the power of all life. In other words, as with King David being called “Son of God”, it is possible to have human parents and still be hailed as of divine origin.

There has been growing acceptance during the last decades of the validity of Jane Schaberg’s work. Jane teaches at a Roman Catholic university. She posits that Mary was seduced or raped, a child was conceived, and that God owned, and declared as blessed, both mother and babe. When the Magnificat sings that God has looked with favour on the lowliness of Mary, and the Greek word for lowliness usually is translated ‘humiliation’[i], one has to ask how she was humiliated. Illegitimacy, despite the indoctrination of multiple Christmas pageants, is probably the answer.

You can read the rest of my article at http://www.stmatthews.org.nz/?sid=74&id=681

Further reading:
1. Schaberg, Jane The Illegitimacy of Jesus, Sheffield Phoenix Press 2006.
2. Summary of Schaberg’s work http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/book-sum/illegit.html
3. Reilly, Frank “Jane Schaberg, Raymond E. Brown, and the Problem of the Illegitimacy of Jesus” http://muse.jhu.edu/about/publishers/indiana
4. Spong, John Born Of A Woman: A bishop rethinks the birth of Jesus, New York Harper Collins 1992

[i] The word is used in Genesis 34:2, Judges 19:24 and 20:5, II Kings 13:12, 14, 22, and 32; and Lamentations 5:11. These passages all address rapes.

Christmas Thoughts - Shepherds

2006-12-23T13:51:00.000+13:00

There were some hands camped out in a paddock nearby, keeping an eye on their mob of sheep that night. Their eyes popped out on stalks when an angel breezed by and lit up the sky like Xmas-in-the-Park.

“Jeepers!” they said.

The angel replied, “Stop looking like a bunch of stunned mullets. Let me tell you what’s going down. Today in a one-horse town over the hill a kid has been born. No ordinary ankle-biter. Gonna turn the world upside down. You’ll find him wrapped in a blankie and lying in a feed-trough.”

And before you could say, “Gimme a break!” the whole sky was filled with more angels than Aucklanders in a traffic jam, and making just about as much noise.

When eventually the whole show had moved on, the hands looked at one another: “Reckon we’d better check this out.”

The Christmas story is more than a slice of ancient history. Its power reaches across time and culture to speak even in our language. It’s a story that can both comfort and challenge.

The country location of this angelic announcement was offensive. The appearance to the shepherds happened not in the holy temple in Jerusalem where religious, financial, and political power coalesced. Rather it happened in some unnamed rural setting, among people of little wealth.

The country location tells us that God’s business doesn’t revolve around the ‘Wellingtons’ or ‘Washingtons’. Nor is God closeted, and cosseted, in fancy Cathedrals, colleges or holy cloisters. God is out and about. God is not just in flash places, but also round the back, in the kitchen of life, among ordinary people, pitching in, using the tea towel, and having a natter.

In 1850 John Everett Millais, one of the English artists known as the Pre-Raphaelites, painted his Christ In The House Of His Parents. He tried to realistically depict the lowly life of a carpenter and his family – tools and wood shavings clutter the earthen floor.

The painting met with a storm of protest. Fancy the idea of Jesus living in such an unhealthy and primitive environment!! Millais threatened the boundaries of the class-structure still firmly embedded in 19th century English society.

The agrarian location of the angelic visit caused similar offence.

Shepherds were likewise offensive. While the word ‘shepherd’ may evoke Christmas card and nativity pictures of sandaled saints adorned in white headdress, caring souls with lambs tucked under their arms… the reality was otherwise.

Shepherds were a dodgy lot. Shifty. You wouldn’t buy a used camel off them – you might burn yourself on the bridle! They were known for their fencing, and I’m not talking about the sport or No. 8 wire. Maybe the words ‘crook’ and ‘fleeced’ originate from those times? Shepherds were social undesirables. In general they had the social standing of our tow-truck drivers or repossession agents.

The insertion of shepherds in the birth narrative alludes to the connection between the baby Jesus and the great King David, who was called from tending sheep to ascend the dizzy heights of monarchy. It’s the old poverty to power, or rags to riches theme. This little baby, born in a Bethlehem shed, was the one who would be great.

Yet the theme, as you read the whole gospel, works in reverse. The greatness of God, as seen in this baby and the adult Jesus, chooses to associate with marginal and undesirable people. Jesus was building an upside-down kingdom full of nuisances and nobodies. His vision was for a huge Christmas party, with plenty of good tucker – lamb, Pavlova, mince pies, joy, and laughter - to go around. A party where everyone, particularly those who were vulnerable, suffering in poverty, or despised by religion and society were made especially welcome. The sign on the door read: “Losers Welcome”. And the winners didn’t like it.

The shepherd story has a simple message really. God turns up in the most unlikely places and among the most unlikely people and saying the most unlikely things. You’ll probably find God round the back rather than out front, pulling weeds rather than pulling rank, looking grubby rather than looking grand. If God can visit shepherds God can even visit you, and just might.

If you go looking for God here are some hints: Firstly, avoid powerful people who think they can stuff God in their pockets. Secondly, don’t discount those in trouble with the law or who tell you about seeing white-winged apparitions. Thirdly, be mindful of the little things in life, like babies and animals. That which is small, local, fragile, and unpredictable is, in God’s upside-down scheme of things, often where hope is to be found.

Defying Sense

2006-12-12T14:26:00.000+13:00

You get some cents. But it also defies sense. Why should you receive money for teeth? Teeth aren’t recyclable or usable in a commercial sense. There is no economic reason for the recompense.

Jim, my friend, is also suspicious about the recompense. “Why,” he asks me, “must we mark each transitional stage in a child’s life with gifts? We give them gifts at birth, baptism, and birthdays. Money, money, money. Why can’t we value children differently than this? Isn’t the Tooth Fairy just a manifestation of capitalism: everything has a price - even teeth!”

There is some sense in what Jim says. Yes, we could try and close down the whole gift-giving industry putting the Tooth Fairy, Santa, the Elves, and hundreds of Warehouse employees out of work. We would also close down part of ourselves. The part that wants to give to others.

In Tooth Fairy thought the cents, the coin under the pillow, is undeserved. It is gift. It is not earned. The tooth doesn’t earn money. But the gift does acknowledge the pain of the past. And it is a vehicle for the giver to express practical compassion.

The role of Tooth Fairy non-sense is to help us live out and encourage each other in compassion, undeserved giving, and providing recompense for pain and hardship. Justice needs to be cultivated, and at some point needs to be about cents.

Simple Theology - courtesy of the Fairy

2006-12-01T13:54:00.000+13:00

There is a myth that most children discard somewhere around the age of eight: the Tooth Fairy. They write off the Tooth Fairy as nonsense. The cents gained from the story have been spent. It was good while it lasted. Now on to other things. It’s like a cell-phone with no battery: throw it into a baby’s toy box and forget it!

I like the Tooth Fairy. She or he performs a simple function, for no apparent reasons, inspired by no apparent motive, save to compensate children for the pain they have endured in shedding a tooth. The Tooth Fairy stands for justice.

There are many questions one could ask of the Tooth Fairy and her/his admirers. A seven year old interrogates his father:

“Dad, prove the Tooth Fairy exists?”
“Well, Johnny your teeth disappear from under your pillow and money appears.”
“I know. You do it.”
“So, you think I’m a fairy?”
“Ahhh.. Yes.”
“Well, I know it seems difficult to believe but the Tooth Fairy is bigger than me.”

And so continues the dance between logic and illogic, between sense and nonsense.

The more sophisticated seven year old moves the questions up a notch:
“Dad, what use does the Tooth Fairy have for teeth?”
“Dad, what’s the going rate for teeth and who sets the rate?” [I have yet to hear an adult-to-adult conversation on this one].
“Dad, why must my tooth go under a pillow? Why not leave it beside my bed? Why’s the Fairy into pillows?”
“Dad, why does the Tooth Fairy leave money?”

The last question, in particular, is one that, similar to the opening of a curtain, allows the world to be seen differently. The horizon starts to expand. The Tooth Fairy leaves money as an acknowledgement that children suffer pain. That such suffering is as unfair as it is inevitable. The Tooth Fairy is a mythic figure of compassion and justice.

Tooth Fairy theology, when you think about it, has some great advantages:

1. It’s simple. Teeth for money. Only a pillow required. No sophisticated belief system with creeds, clergy, and churches.

2. It deftly avoids the politics of dress, gender, body, and religion. Our imaginations shape the Tooth Fairy. S/he doesn’t need a historical, cultural context, or a pouncy red suit with matching beard and reindeer, in order to be authentic. S/he can just do their own thing: conservative or camp, trendy or trashy. The Tooth Fairy fits every size, every political persuasion. S/he is user-friendly.

3. The Tooth Fairy has a single message: practical recompense for pain.

'Servant Leadership'??

2006-11-19T07:25:00.000+13:00

The word “servant” or “serving” needs to be carefully used in relation to Church leadership. As a friend once said, “When I see cleaners, waitresses, and rubbish collectors becoming bishops and priests I’ll believe the Church has servants as leaders.” He has a point. ‘Servant’ has socio-political implications.

What do we mean in the Church by the word ‘serving’? Does it mean that our priest should be on every committee? I would say that reflects an inability to trust others. Does it mean that our priest knows every parishioner’s needs, and where possible attends to them? I think it is the vocation of every Christian to be a good neighbour and care for one another. By expecting the priest to do it we are neglecting our baptismal vocation.

I remember one vicar who for twenty years had a wonderful reputation among his parishioners. He was always there for them, always caring, always available. However in the 20 years he served that parish both his family and his health fell apart. He had succumbed to an uncritical understanding of ‘servant leadership’. There’s little chance that any oppressive government will crucify clergy like him because they’ve already laid down their lives for the Church!

Self-care is not optional. You live what you are. The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. If reality is solely your business or your Church then you have failed to understand what spirituality is and the importance of the transformative love called God permeating all of your life and relationships. I think a priest’s job description should be simply “To pray Jesus’ vision into being”. Period. But please don’t think I mean something passive when I use the word ‘pray’.

When you are, like me, a recipient of privilege (and it is a privilege to lead) you have the obligation to use that privilege and its power wisely. This is what ‘serving’ is. ‘Serving’ doesn’t mean necessarily doing the dishes. Often it is harder to make small talk with the dignitaries out front than pick up a tea towel out back. ‘Serving’ is about being conscious of the good fortune and grace bestowed upon you, and treating all others with grace and dignity as equals. The opposite is arrogance, which unfortunately is all too common.

The task of the Christian leader is to articulate a vision and to lead people in the transformation of society in line with that vision. Further, and intimately connected with this, is the ability to live and engender the spirituality that will sustain both the struggle and its outcome. This is how Jesus led. When he died he left others to manage. Thankfully some of them had the courage and tenacity to lead.