Our Father who does what?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 17 / TENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
(28^th JULY) 2013

 

Readings:        Hosea 1.2-10

                        Psalm 85
                        Colossians 2.6-19
                        Luke 11.1-13

 Amongst the many characteristics of Luke’s writing is an extra emphasis on the centrality of prayer to the life of a follower of Jesus. Prayer itself is mystery, and I will never attempt to define it, only, however poorly, to practice it. I have no rational words to describe this, one of the most ludicrous yet essential of Christians’ (and others’) activities, yet for those of us who seek to follow in the footsteps of the Nazarene it is almost what writers call a sine qua non, a ‘without which then not at all.’ To make matters more complex I do not think there is a right or wrong, but rather a complex web of ways to pray, and as Luke records Jesus’ own teachings at this point – and does so with quite striking variations from Matthew’s record of the same or a similar moment, he certainly does not establish any one rule or pattern of prayer.

 

To pray is to participate in mystery (though that in itself is not welcome in some quarters of a rationalist society). Matthew records his version of this teaching on the practice prayer as being a part of the great Teachings or so-called Sermon on the Mount, and sees prayer as a matter for deep privacy. I too tend to see it that way, and, except for the rituals of public and liturgical prayer (of which more in a moment) tend to mumble my prayers in private, far from the eyes of those around me. Others see prayer as an act of witness – let’s be honest: I’m not very good at whatever that is, either! – and I suspect Myers-Briggs or similar might tell us a whole lot about those differences in taste. Nevertheless, whatever our personality, prayer seems to be a dimension that can take us beyond the smallness of ourselves and connect us to greater dimensions.

 

So what is prayer? It seems to me to be many things, but at the very least it is the beat of the butterfly wing of faith. Some of you may know the chaos theory that the beat of a butterfly’s wing may be the catalyst that starts the greatest storm. Chaos theory, dismantling the certainties of a mechanical, clockwork universe, warns us that – within logical guidelines – anything can happen. The butterfly’s wing does not cause a tornado: it may however influence the events in ways we can never ascertain. Can our prayers in the same way influence the heart of God? While prayers for, for example, Syria or for the boat people often seen to reverberate around an empty universe I see enough signs along the way to wonder if that is really so. As a dear parishioner of mine in a previous parish was fond of saying, the time-span of divinity is infinite, and who is to say which beating butterfly’s wing brought down the Berlin Wall, released Mandela from Gaol, or will one day beat swords into ploughshares?

In my days as a Pentecostal and later as an Anglican evangelical it was fashionable to look on the formalised prayers of liturgy as empty mouthings – vain repetitions was the preferred phrase. One might equally respond that the Lord-Lord really-really-just-Lord construction of much extempore prayer is an equally vain repetition, and I’m sure both forms can become no more than the banging of a tin drum. God, on the other hand is I suspect not so interested in form as in intention, and there is no Hogwarts style right formula to win the ear of the divine.

Nevertheless, what is prayer in applied terms? Is prayer, as I sometimes say self-mockingly, only possible when we have a book? Of course not! Is it possible only when it is extempore, without a book, with or without suckings of breath and repeated Lord, Lords? Well, no. Is prayer possible only in tongues? Is a quick ‘lord help me’ or ‘lord, remember Joe’ a prayer? Well, yes: all these are prayers. The great mighty acts of liturgy, the rousing ecstasies of Pentecostal praise, the inarticulate shedding of tears over the body of a dead or dying child, performance of the sign of the cross, or the wordless or maybe thought-accompanied lighting of a candle: these are all prayer, and there is no wrong or right, as long as the doer of the prayer or prayer-thought is directing their butterfly wing into the heart of God.

For me the great strength of liturgical rites – and they were a part of Christian practice from the moment of the conception of Jesus – is that they are collective, representative, bringing together the thoughts and “unthoughts” of the saints throughout space in time, particularly at times when I can find no words to overcome my shortsightedness or my own ocean of feelings. But they are not the be all and end all of prayer, and whatever we point in the ‘direction’ of God will do in times of need. What in fact this prayer of Jesus, in either Matthew’s or Luke’s rendition, does emphasize is the accessibility of God – just beyond our sight, just where we direct of heart in times of our need or the need of others. “Abba”, says Jesus (not uniquely, for the psalmist used a similar construction centuries before). Abba: intimate friend, parent, care giver, hear the prayers and longings of my heart, spoken and unspoken.

Ultimately, though the Lord’s Prayer is a useful liturgical prayer, and all liturgical prayers have value as they lead us into the collective experience of praying, rather than individualistic efforts, perhaps its greatest benefit is as a template for all our prayers. The respect with which it approaches God is tempered by the knowledge that God, though not a “mate”, is accessible to us, and we do have access to the divine ear. The prayer dares to dream of a “not yet”, and invisible dimension of justice and equality which we cannot see reflected in our viewings of the world (on earth … as in heaven”). The prayer asks God to sustain in us a faith and hope that will transcend - - not protect, but transcend – all trials and sufferings that we might undergo (not least by keeping us embedded in a community of fellow-travellers-in-faith).  He prayer exposes us to the risky and countercultural business of forgiveness, by which our lives grow in the Christlike image to which we are urged as followers of Jesus.

Above all though the prayer takes us out of the smallness of our perspective and invites us into the eternal perspectives of God. That is not so bad a place to learn to be, however hard it may sometimes seem to be.

TLBWY

Kerouac, Bergson, God: the Doppler Effect of school

MEDITATION ON THE COMMENCEMENT OF A SECOND SEMESTER
KORMILDA COLLEGE, DARWIN
22nd JULY 2013

Opening Prayer

God our Creator
you gather us
from many different places and cultures
to live and learn and grow together.
Bless our school community
and all who teach, study, learn and serve
in this place.

Grow in us
your Spirit of wisdom and courage
that we may make the most of the joys and the challenges of this day,
and of every day to come.

Inspire us
through the example of Jesus,
to help one another shape
a world that is beautiful and strong,
and a tomorrow that overflows
with justice and kindness.
Amen.

Reflection

Some of you will know that I am an addict of driving. It’s hardly unique to me, but the road, not exactly endless but hopefully long, not necessarily winding but whatever terrain dictates, is my preferred metaphor for human existence. Of course it has been a metaphor for life since long before the time of Jesus, probably since the first amoeba climbed out of the swamp with their Satnav perched on their dashboard (distracting them, I should warn, from the real primary task of navigation, though that might be another matter), but I probably first engaged with it as I pretended to read the novels of Jack Kerouac during my teenage years.

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life wrote Kerouac. Amen, I gasped breathily, using a word I refused ever to voice in school chapel services but which I found paradoxically appropriate when reading the so-called (and self-named) beat poets. Or perhaps it was Joni Mitchell, and particularly her “Coyote” and “Refuge of the Roads” (amongst other songs) that implanted endless highways and by-ways in my soul.

For me within the road of life the real world of driving was, alongside one or two other activities, the pinnacle of human experience. Which is why I have just driven down to Sydney and back … 60 hours of wheels turning with the occasional bout of sleep in the back seat and endless is my idea of heaven coffee (though for other than addicts like me the coffee is undrinkable from Mount Isa to Katherine: the only worse coffee I have experienced was in US diners).

This may not be your idea of heaven. (Perhaps it may also mean I can claim the gig on tax as research, as it now forms the basis of my reflection for the beginning of a new semester). Nevertheless, here we are, on the road, reflecting on our jobs in which our primary role is to nurture others, nurture our successors on the road that they, too will travel, and indeed are travelling already.

Funnily enough, if we were to read the set reading for the day as I did at this gig this time last year on my first day in the school we would find Abraham setting out on a road to a desert: the desert perhaps more than anywhere else is the place I encounter the breathings of the divine. The desert though is a place we cannot stay, and tomorrow our main game begins once more. Still, Abraham, the great mythical patriarch, may have something to say to us:

Genesis 12:1-9

The Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’

 So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram, and said, ‘To your offspring I will give this land.’ So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord. And Abram journeyed on by stages towards the Negeb.

 Scientists among you will know far more than I do about the Doppler effect. Do not expect from this arts graduate a scientific analysis, but it provides a powerful metaphor. Usually applied with reference to sound or light waves I suggest it applies also to life-waves. I suggest too, since we are a school that teaches philosophy, that the much-forgotten Philosopher Henri Bergson might help us here, for although he doesn’t, as far as I know, speak of “time-waves” this kind of Doppler effect on the timeline of human lives is exactly what we are on about. You and I – all of us – are in the business of “life-waves” and “time-waves”, and in particular the life waves and time-waves of young humans. For better or for worse, as we look back on our lives, those in the educational sector (not just our teachers, but all school staff) are, after our parents and siblings, amongst the greatest single area of influence on the formation and direction that we have taken. Like the Doppler effect (yes: that is to say the “observed frequency equals velocity of waves plus velocity of the receiver relative to the  medium, all over the velocity of waves plus velocity of the source relative to the medium, all multiplied by the emitted frequency”, for those who care) the impact of our influence over young people’s lives is extended, swollen as it were in the passing through, disproportionate (here perhaps the Doppler metaphor breaks down) to the passing rate of time. There is a moment in time when we have the responsibility to nurture the potential in the lives of the children in our care, so that they can in turn midwife the very best future imaginable for times ahead that many of us will never see.

 

I mention Bergson. He is a largely forgotten philosopher today because he is not rational, sensible, scientific or empirical. He believed and taught that time is what we perceive it to be. Forget the ticking of the clock. The ticking of the clock says that we will have considerably less than 220, 898, 482 seconds – that would be a full, every moment of seven years – to influence our young charges’ lives. We have a gobsmack less time than that: the figure is, if we have one subject’s exposure to a child for say 30 weeks of each of seven years,  an opportunity of a mere 693,000 seconds. In that time, assuming their full concentration and ours, we needs must inculcate in them enthusiasm for the subject that we love, tools to explore and utilize that subject, and a few other life skills besides. It was the theologian Paul who said “all have sinned and full short of the glory of God” – at the very least, if we don’t take on board the Judaeo-Christian doctrines of God and sin, we must acknowledge “all fall short of the potential of 693,000 seconds.”

Bergson, though, said that time is not the ticking of a clock. So does the Judaeo-Christian doctrine of time, incidentally, because it argues that all time is pregnant with the Doppler effect of sacred potential. But let’s leave that for a moment: perhaps we might all instead remember a teacher who changed the potential of our own lives. I remember a class teacher when I was a ten year old who destroyed any potential I ever had in mathematics when he demolished my confidence by bawling me out in front of a class for a close but wrong answer to a maths problem. I was proud of my answer, to be so close, but rather than fine tune my performance he destroyed in a moment my embryonic love of his subject, and I have floundered at anything resembling maths ever since. But I remember too with thanksgiving my fourth form (year eight) English teacher who inculcated in my sprouting soul a love of the written word, a love that has stood me in good stead long after he died, on and out to this day forty years after he introduced me to a love of sentences and clauses, paragraphs and phrases, rhyming patterns and rhythms. The Doppler effect of these two men (they happened to be men) was immeasurable, and yours will be too. No matter your role in the educational community (for I remember kitchen staff, boarding house staff, grounds and medical staff with similar Doffler proportions) their impact was immeasurable (like sacred time).

Some of you will believe in the God I believe in, the God of Jesus Christ, others will not. But I suggest to us all that, if we are truly going to nurture in our charges the values and beliefs we address in our school mission, in the lives of our students, we dare not do it on our own. We are, if we are to be part of the Doppler effect of education, enmeshed in a bounden duty to enlist the support and teamwork of those around us, to dwell in the greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts movement of a school community. Perhaps we might learn even to whisper in our hearts our recognition of the need for a power far greater than we can imagine or comprehend, far greater than rationalism, far greater than mere human ability, the power that Judaeo-Christian and many other philosophers call Spirit, and the power that Christians believe is ultimately revealed in the remarkable Doppler effect of a humble, justice-proclaiming man who lived in Nazareth two millennia ago.

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life” wrote Jack Kerouac. The road ahead of the children in our care is life, too. Let us hope and even pray that the Doppler Effect we have on these lives may lead them into strong, wholesome futures that in turn lead them into a future filled with the realization of their own and humanity’s potential. For so great a task it is no shame to ask the help of a power greater than our selves or our small imaginings!

And of course, this chaplain wouldn’t be who he is if he did not leave with one final song to shape your thoughts on the Doffler effect of your vocation: do not expect the profoundest of complex lyrics, but perhaps more than most this song takes you into the depths of human potential: take time to listen and then go with God into the demands of this day and the remainder of this year.

PLAY: Les Miserables: “Little People”

Lyrics available at http://www.allmusicals.com/lyrics/lesmiserables/littlepeople.htm

 

Boat people go home, said Jesus (or Bonhoeffer) never

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF St FRANCIS
BATCHELOR (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 16 / NINTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
(21^st JULY) 2013

Readings:        Amos 8.1-12

                        Psalm 52
                        Colossians
                        Luke 10.38-42

The writers of the gospels tended to provide near the beginning of their narratives a prism that establishes a perspective through which we as followers of Jesus are to see both world and gospel. John, for example, establish a prism of reception versus rejection of the one who is Logos, or Word of God, and we are challenged constantly to assess whether we are receiving of rejecting that which is the command of God in and upon our lives. For Luke the prism – and this is of course to over-simplify Luke’s creativity – the prism is that Magnificat that once formed the basis of Anglican Evening Prayer for countless generations:

He hath shewed might in his arm:
he hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat,
and hath exalted the humble.
He hath filled the hungry with good things;
and the rich he hath sent empty away.

Within the structure of Luke’s gospel telling there are then a series of what I would call “sub-prisms) at which point the scientific metaphor probably breaks down!) dominating the various sections of the story. Each of those though is consistent with the Magnificat: the human world of power structures is being torn down, the mighty cast down, the rich sent empty away.

This is not apparent as we turn on our media. The single biggest issues in our political thought are not issues for the poorest of the poor, who are the world’s outcast and refugees, except insofar as politicians seek to out-tough each other in their attempts to keep them from our shores. Luke tells us over and again that it is the poor and powerless in our midst who are the image of God: “whatsoever you do for the least of these my brothers and sisters”, records, strangely enough Matthew, rather than Luke. But it is Matthew that sees that the compassion of the Law, of Torah, rather than being jettisoned, must be exceeded by the Jesus-community. Even Kevin Rudd once wrote, citing Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that “We have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the reviled - in short, from the perspective of those who suffer.” Politician however, of all persuasions, appear to have short memories.

Amos had no time for short memories: “Surely I will never forget any of their deeds. Shall not the land tremble on this account …?”. Christian preaching in some quarters has often majored in the minors, so that renowned and perhaps infamous US influenced preachers in particular rail against changes to marriage laws, claiming that cyclones and earthquakes and wild fires are a sign of God’s wrath against a country’s liberal views on sexuality. Yet the prophets of the Hebrews rail not against sexual mores – though these too must always be scrutinized in our own lives – but against flamboyant injustice, against oppression of the poor and alienation of the outsider.  One wonders whether Amos would have more to say about Australia’s attitude to refugees or its broad though not yet official tolerance of a wide range of marital states.

So much that passes as Christianity, though, is no more than militant self-preservation. At its worst, even the promise of “eternal reward” or “eternal life” is no more than a trite sidestep of the fear of non-existence, and a holier than thou attack on those who do not share our faith. When the fear of change – and this is not to pretend that all change is ipso facto good, but neither to claim it is ipso facto bad – when the fear of change leads us to rant against the oppressed and the insecure then it is highly questionable whether we are bearing Christlight to the community around us. I do happen to believe in the eternal existence of the human person – but not, I hope, as a tragic act of preservation against my own non-existence, but rather a logical outcome of the promise of God revealed in the event of Jesus Christ, so that even the power of death is “torn down” from its throne.

Martha is a tricky customer. It could be argued that she is an example of servanthood, the very thing we as a diaconal people of God are called to: “brother, sister let me serve you”, as Richard Gillard wrote. Yet there is something wrong here: her service has become distraction: “Martha, Martha”, Luke records Jesus as saying. They are words of gentle reproach, for Martha has, in her servant role, lost her focus on the Christ-element. “Kevin, Kevin”, he might say, or for that matter “Tony, Tony”: in their search for political supremacy they are distracted to the extent that they have dropped the ball of Christlike compassion. It is the Christlikeness, not the political or culinary expediency, that is the issue.

For us, then, as Christ-bearers, we are challenged to asses our performance and our motivation. Do we, in the light of this passage (which follows hard on the heels of the Lukan telling of the tale of the good Samaritan) , demonstrate Christlike attitudes and values in attitudes, like Mary, in actions like the good Samaritan (let us recall that Mary as a woman and the fictional Samaritan as an ethnic outsider were both theoretical non-people in Jesus’ world), or are we like Martha and the priest and the scribe so embedded in our own holiness that we forget the values of the Magnificat, that it is the poor and voiceless who are the icons and even nerve-endings of God in our midst? I know I fall short of Mary’s higher call to dwell on Christ: I fear many of us do. I know I fall short in the challenging call to radical hospitality, extending Christlight to the most needy in and beyond our community. I fear many of us do. May we pray that we are and indeed our two main political leaders are transformed towards radical Magnificat standards of justice and love? I fear anything less leaves us as Amos’ “you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land.”

 TLBWY