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Tag: Australia Day

  • Colonies of grace and communities of reconciliation

    Epiphany 3C / Australia Day
    Christ Church Cathedral, Grafton
    27 January 2019

     

    [ video ]

    At first glance those readings do not have much to do with Australia Day.

    Of course, they were not chosen for their relevance to our national day, but are simply the readings set for the third Sunday after the Epiphany.

    Each week the liturgy team has the task of seeing how the readings intersect with our lives as a faith community and as a civic community. Robert is selecting anthems and songs that engage with the readings while also expressing our story of faith. And the preacher seeks to tease all this out in a way that provokes us to deeper thought and more faithful action.

    The process is the same every week, but this time the focus is on Australia.

    Mixed messages

    This is a more complex challenge than usual because the relationship between religion and the nation is complex and at times contested.

    As Anglicans, we have our own history in all this as well, and that complicates the task when we try to think clearly about the intersection of national identity and Christian faith.

    There have been times in history when this was an easier matter.

    Our first reading comes from when there was no separation between religion and national identity. Nehemiah has summoned the entire population of the province of Yehud in the time of the Persian Empire. They are about to hear a big chunk of the Bible read out in a language they no longer spoke, and then they are obliged to accept those texts as the basis of their national life together.

    Religion was closely integrated into public life, and the ruler regulated religion as a tool for staying in power and keeping people in their place.

    Fast forward about 400 years and we come to the scene in the Gospel reading as Jesus reads from the prophet Isaiah in the synagogue at Nazareth. The public sphere was still regulated by empire, but Jesus was launching a religious reform movement that will eventually subvert the Roman Empire and every other empire that would follow it.

    As his most influential interpreter, Paul of Tarsus, would write about 20 years after Easter:

    There is no longer Jew or Greek,
    there is no longer slave or free,
    there is no longer male and female;
    for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)

    Like everyone else in the ancient world and up until very recent times even in the West, Jesus lived in a world where your nationality mattered very little. What counted most was the empire that controlled everything.

    Allegiance to the empire was expressed in religious terms. The emperor was understood as a manifestation, an epiphany, of the gods. The emperor was your Lord and your saviour.

    The ancient Jews were mostly exempted from emperor worship, but the Temple in Jerusalem was required to offer sacrifices for the empire and its emperor every day of the year.

    Jesus’ axiom—give Caesar what belongs to Caesar and give God what belongs to God—reflects the complex dynamics of life under the empire.

    So, to paraphrase Jesus, what do we give to the nation, and what can we only give to God?

    Beyond the wars of religion

    140 years before the First Fleet landed in Botany Cove these questions were resolved for many Europeans in the Treaty of Westphalia. That treaty—which remains unknown to most people—has largely shaped our experience of religion in a society that is essentially secular.

    Indeed, while we tend to think that we enjoy freedom of religion, in fact the Treaty of Westphalia was about freedom from religion.

    After 80 years of war between Catholics and Protestants, Europe was exhausted and the solution was a treaty that limited religion to the personal and private sphere, while insisting that all citizens exercise their rights and their duties without regard to each other’s religion.

    So, for example, as an Anglican government official, I could no longer discriminate against my Presbyterian neighbour when he applied for a permit. And the Catholic working in the Post Office could not refuse to accept my mail. In our public life within civil society, religion was banished to the private realm of personal choice and family life.

    This mindset was at the heart of the new colonies being established in this ancient land.

    The evils of religious wars and sectarian conflicts were to be avoided. There would be no established religion. When the constitution was drafted for the Commonwealth of Australia, the new parliament was banned from making any laws to promote or favour one religion over another.

    We live in one of the first explicitly secular societies in human history, and that means we need to rethink the mission of the church to the nation and within the nation.

    The Church in the public square

    We find ourselves closer to the situation of Jesus than to Nehemiah.

    As a Cathedral we seek to serve our local community, whatever people’s religious identity, but we do not endorse our current constitutional arrangements over any other. We do not prefer republics to monarchies. We do not support one political party over another.

    Each of us will have our own opinions about all those matters, but as a church we have little to give to Caesar and we do not seek to impose our beliefs on the nation nor its parliament.

    As citizens in a democracy we can act individually and collectively to promote particular causes, but as a church we interact with the nation on another level.

    So what do we bring to the table this national day?

    We do not seek privilege and power.

    But we do speak for justice and we do seek to serve.

    Again, we find ourselves closer to Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth than to Nehemiah in the square by the Water Gate in Jerusalem:

    The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:18–19)

    Our role is not to legislate or even to enforce.

    Our role is to be agents of God’s love in every part of Australian life.

    The Spirit of the Lord has come upon us (do we really believe that?) … We are anointed to bring good news to the poor … We have been sent to proclaim release for captives (those in detention centres?) … We have been sent to proclaim recovery of sight to those who cannot see the way ahead … We have been sent to let the oppressed go free (welcoming asylum seekers?) … We have been sent to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour

    We are not just to talk about good news, freedom, new vision, liberty and blessing. That would be far too easy.

    Our mission is to be a Cathedral community where people find hope, meaning, freedom, acceptance, inclusion, healing, a helping hand, a listening ear, and a caring heart.

    That is our gift to the city and to the nation on this Australia Day weekend.

    Imagine how we can transform our city and indeed the nation when the churches of this land embrace God’s call to be that kind of community. No longer religious rivals, but colonies of God’s grace and communities of genuine reconciliation.

  • Rainbow faith in an ancient land

    Australia Day Service
    Grafton Cathedral
    28 January 2018

    australia_day1

    Over this holiday weekend it is timely to reflect on what it means to be Australian, and especially what it means to us as people of faith.

     

    Goodbye to privilege

    We can start by acknowledging that the days of privilege are past.

    While religious faith continues to be protected and respected in our society, Christianity no longer enjoys the status that it once had. That is especially true of the Anglican Church, as social changes have necessarily meant that our percentage within the total population would decline.

    We now find ourselves as one church among many, and one faith among several.

    That is no bad thing as monopoly feeds arrogance, and privilege tends to corrupt.

    We have seen the dark side of that privilege revealed in the plain light of day by the careful work of the Royal Commission into the sexual abuse of children in church institutions. That religious institutions were not the only places of abuse is no consolation. It reminds us deeply we failed to bring our distinctive Christian values to bear on the important caring ministries in which we were involved.

    We share and reflect the failings of other individuals and institutions.

    But we also claim a different set of values, and we aspire to a higher level of genuine care, modelled on the practice of Jesus himself.

    So let’s set aside any hankering for past privileges, and focus on how our faith might inform and shape our citizenship now and in the future.

     

    This land

    What does it mean to be in this place, rather than somewhere else in the world?

    Every place is both beautiful and special, but this is our place.

    It is an ancient and distinctive land, with animals and plant life that are quite remarkable in their own right.

    The challenge of the Jewish exiles in ancient Babylon becomes ours as well: How do we sing the Lord’s song in this strange land? But we reframe that slightly, so it becomes: How do we sing the Lord’s song in this ancient and unique place?

    How do we express our faith with an Aussie accent, crafting words that come from our experience rather than words borrowed from ancient Palestine or Medieval Europe?

    This is essential work, but it will not be easy.

    One aspect of the challenge is seen in our religious calendar.

    We observe Christmas, a celebration of the coming of Light at the darkest point of mid-winter, in the middle of summer. And we wonder why everyone is at the beach and not in church? We sing of dashing through the snow, as we head to the coast and slap on the sun screen. Here in the Great South Land, we are singing the Lord’s song in words that derive from the northern hemisphere. Category error!

    Even more out of sync is our celebration of Easter, the ancient Spring festival, in the middle of Autumn. We have mortgaged our copy of the Lord’s song to the calendar of another place, and our lyrics clash with the reality of what is happening outside the window. We talk of new life, as the leaves turn brown and fall to the ground.

    The reality is that we cannot change the dates for Christmas and Easter, but perhaps we can make sure that we observe them with an Aussie accent.

    Much as I love and identify with the geography of Palestine, that is not our land. As Palestinians—whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim—have needed to find ways to speak of God and faith in their own accent, so we need to learn how to speak of God in ways that will resonate with our neighbours, our children, and our own inner self.

     

    These people

    And what does it mean to be among the people who share this place with us?

    Who are these people?

    First of all, we acknowledge the indigenous people of this land. We share this land with people whose ancestors have been here for 60,000 years. Let that number sink into our consciousness. 60,000 years.

    When literalists engage in the folly of adding up the genealogies in the Bible to calculate the age of the earth, or the dates of Adam and Eve, they come up a number of around 6,000 years. On the same timeline, they place Abraham—the so-called father of the faith—around 2,000 BCE, or 4,000 years ago.

    While such numerical games are meaningless nonsense in a universe that is 15 billion years old, there is a lesson to be learned.

    Christian fundamentalists claim with pride that our faith goes back to the time of Abraham, yet we live in a land with a human history stretching back 60,000 years and more.

    We have much to learn from the oldest continuous human culture on the planet. Yet we rarely pause even to consider what we could learn from them about singing the Lord’s song in this strange and marvellous land.

    That is going to change.

    The Cathedral will now be working with indigenous theologians to provide a space for what the Revd Lenore Parker, a local indigenous priest and poet, calls ‘big river theology’. I have no idea where that will take us, but I catch a glimpse of it in the art that transforms the Baptistery of this Cathedral Church. For sure we have much to learn about speaking of God in this place and among these people.

    Apart from our indigenous people, and similar to many of us, there are a great many other people around us whose roots lie in other places and other cultures.

    What an incredible blessing to live in such a diverse and multicultural community.

    As people of faith, when tensions arise between different cultural and ethnic groups—­as they always will from time to time—we will celebrate diversity, encourage openness, and refuse to join those politicians and other xenophobic forces that seek to promote fear and hatred so that they can divide and conquer our community.

    We celebrate the diversity of God’s creation, including the diversity of humankind.

    As church we seek a unity that goes beyond ethnicity, race, social status or gender. We value those differences, but we refuse to allow them to divide us from one another in the Great South Land.

    At least that is theory.

    The reality may be different as we look around and wonder why the faces inside this Cathedral are so similar to one another, and so unrepresentative of the diversity seen outside the Cathedral.

    This too must change. And it will.

     

    Towards a brand new day

    As I wrap up these brief reflections on being people of faith, Christian people, in this ancient land, let me quote part of the beautiful prayer by Lenore Parker that we shall use as the preface for the Great Thanksgiving Prayer this morning:

    God of holy dreaming, Great Creator Spirit,
    From the dawn of creation you have given your children 
    the good things of Mother Earth. 
    You spoke and the gum tree grew.

    In the vast desert and dense forest, 
    And in cities at the water’s edge,
    Creation sings your praise.
    Your presence endures
    As the rock at the heart of our land.

    The sunrise of your Son coloured the earth anew,
    And bathed it in glorious hope.
    In Jesus we have been reconciled to you,
    To each other, and to your whole creation.

    Lead us on, Great Spirit,
    As we gather from the four corners of the earth;
    enable us to walk together in trust
    From the hurt and shame of the past
    Into the full day which has dawned in Jesus Christ.

    Amen.

     

     

     

     

  • Epiphany 3A (26 January 2014)

    Contents

    Lectionary

    • Isaiah 9:1-4 & Psalm 27:1, 4-9
    • 1 Corinthians 1:10-18
    • Matthew 4:12-23

    First Reading: Galilee of the nations

    The brief oracle from Isaiah 9:1-4 is chosen for this week because of its intertextual link with the passage from Matthew 4. That link is, of course, retrospective with Matthew finding in its ancient words a highly valued biblical “prophecy” that Galilee would be the location for a remarkable messianic event. This positive valuation of Galilee in Matthew stands in contrast with the southern antipathy to Galilee that we find expressed in the Gospel of John:

    When they heard these words, some in the crowd said, “This is really the prophet.” Others said, “This is the Messiah.” But some asked, “Surely the Messiah does not come from Galilee, does he? Has not the scripture said that the Messiah is descended from David and comes from Bethlehem, the village where David lived?” So there was a division in the crowd because of him. Some of them wanted to arrest him, but no one laid hands on him. Then the temple police went back to the chief priests and Pharisees, who asked them, “Why did you not arrest him?” The police answered, “Never has anyone spoken like this!” Then the Pharisees replied, “Surely you have not been deceived too, have you? Has any one of the authorities or of the Pharisees believed in him? But this crowd, which does not know the law—they are accursed.” Nicodemus, who had gone to Jesus before, and who was one of them, asked, “Our law does not judge people without first giving them a hearing to find out what they are doing, does it?” They replied, “Surely you are not also from Galilee, are you? Search and you will see that no prophet is to arise from Galilee.” (John 7:40–52 NRSV)

    Second Reading: Unity that transcends factions

    Last week the lectionary commenced a series of selections from 1 Corinthians, not necessarily Paul’s first letter to the community but perhaps simply the longer of the two collections of correspondence to Corinth.

    Despite the prominence of the Corinthian congregation in subsequent Christian imagination (due in no small degree to the influence of Paul’s surviving correspondence with this church), surprisingly little is known of the ancient city from archaeology. For a glimpse of what we do have by way of physical remains from this important city of ancient Greece, see the following selected links:

    In this week’s passage Paul is berating the Corinthians for their factionalism (what would he make of 21C Christianity with our entrenched factions and parties?) and appealing for them to appreciate their fundamental unity as devotees of Jesus Christ. The foolishness of a crucified god—the scandal (shock value) of that statement has been blunted for us by the passage of time—is held up as superior to their partisan claims to status relative to one another.

    Gospel: Jesus calls the fishers of Capernaum

    Fishing for Humans

    Meier has an extended discussion of the disciples in the third volume of A Marginal Jew [III,19-285]. One of the elements of discipleship that he considers is the initiative taken by Jesus in calling particular persons to be his followers:

    One striking trait, found in a number of different Gospel sources, is that Jesus seizes the initiative in calling people to follow him. Three clear examples are given in the Marcan tradition: the call of the first four disciples (Peter, Andrew, James, and John) in Mark 1:16-20; the call of Levi the toll collector in 2:14; and the (unsuccessful) call of the rich man in Mark 10:17-22. In each case, Jesus issues a peremptory call to follow him, a call addressed to people who have not taken the initiative of asking to follow him. (p. 50)

    Meier also notes that the promise to become fishers of humans is only made to Andrew and Peter; and is not extended to James and John.

    When he does turn to the question of historicity, Meier asserts that the term “to fish humans” [halieis anthropon] is sufficiently distinctive to be identified as a phrase deriving from Jesus:

    The exact phrase never occurs in the OT, and the metaphor of fishing for human beings (or using a hook to catch them) is relatively rare. When it occurs, it always has a hostile sense of capturing or killing human beings [n. 122 refers to Jer 16:16; Ezek 29:4-5; Amos 4:2; Hab 1:14-17]. The metaphor occurs at times in the Qumran literature, likewise in a negative context of destruction or judgment [n. 123 refers to 1QH 3:26; 5:7-8]. The metaphor of “catching men” is also found with a negative sense in later rabbinic literature. Thus, there is no real parallel to Jesus’ positive, salvific use of the metaphor in the Jewish tradition before or after him. (p. 160)

     

    Capernaum

    The small fishing village of Capernaum seems to have been the center of Jesus’ activity in Galilee.

    John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts (HarperSanFranccisco, 2001) devote several pages to a discussion of Capernaum in the First Century (pp. 81-97).

    The most salient features to note are as follows:

    • POPULATION: around 1,000 persons on 25 acres of land
    • BUILDINGS: none of the Greco-Roman architecture of a significant urban center: no gates, no defensive fortifications, no civic structures (theater, amphitheater, hippodrome), no public bathhouse, no public latrine, no basilica for civic gatherings or commerical activities, no constructed agora (market) with shops and storage facilities
    • STREETS: no sign of planning in layout of streets, no streets appear to have been paved, no channels for running water, sewage disposed on the site, no plaster surfaces, no decorative fresco, no marble of any kind, no ceramic roofs tiles (contra Luke 5:19)
    • INSCRIPTIONS: none from 1C or earlier have been found
    • HOUSES: used local dark basalt, crooked wooden beams, straw, reeds, mud. Poor quality of construction. No evidence of skilled craftsmen. Mostly single storeys and with thatched roofs (as implied in Mark’s version of Jesus healing a paralysed man). Several abutting rooms centered around a courtyard. usually just a single entrance.
    • BOATS: lakeside location supported a fishing industry, but town shows no evidence of wealth. The discovery of a 1C fishing boat in 1986 (during a drought that lowered the water level) confirms the impression of a community struggling to survive but with considerable ingenuity in making the most of limited resources.

    In one of his classic turns of phrase, Crossan describes Capernaum as “not a sought-after spot, but a good place to get away from, with easy access across the Sea of Galilee to any side.” (p. 81)

    The following poem by Gene Stecher reflects on the significance of this site as the center of Jesus’ activity:

    Capernaum, 1000 persons on 25 acres,
    Egypt/India trade route a couple miles off,
    Honorable locals do commerical fishing,
    Dishonorable locals do toll collecting,
    Didn’t take well to Jesus missionaries,
    same as Chorazin and Bethsaida.

    Impressive at assemblies, no scribal mush.
    Words grounded in personal authority,
    Formal teaching,
    Commanded action.
    A rise to fame [a price to pay]!

    Some guy with demons is making a commotion,
    Calling Jesus God’s Holy One.
    He wasn’t disappointed,
    But a huge struggle for the genuine self!

    Dare we be called Holy One,
    confronting both inner and outer demons,
    Rooted in the Ground of personal authority,
    how untried and unknown is this power?
    “Why are you so cowardly?
    You still don’t trust do you?” (Mk 4:40)

    The following articles may be of interest:

    • BiblePlaces – photographs and brief notes on the Capernaum ruins[1]
    • See Capernaum for brief notes on the ancient site of Capernaum.
    • Jesus Seminar – the Seminar voted Red to the proposition that Capernaum was a key center for Jesus’ activities in the Galilee, but the tradition has been developed and preserved in very different ways by each of the evangelists:

    – MARK constructs an artificial “day in the ministry of Jesus” stretching from 1:21 to 1:39
    – MATTHEW simply notes that Capernaum was the main location for Jesus, and then connects that with his theme of fulfilled prophecies.
    – LUKE develops a visit to the Nazareth synagogue in 4:16-30 as the opening scene of Jesus’ public ministry, with Capernaum simply the next stop on his travels.
    – JOHN also records a tradition that has Jesus and his followers staying for a period at Capernaum.

    Jesus Database

    Liturgies and Prayers

    Australia Day

    As January 26 is also Australia Day, some communities may wish to use a Great Thanksgiving Prayer that reflects Australian themes:

     

    Progressive Liturgies

    For liturgies and sermons each week, shaped by a progressive theology, check Rex Hunt’s web site

    Other recommended sites include:

     

    Music Suggestions

    See David MacGregor’s Together to Celebrate site for recommendations from a variety of contemporary genre.

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