Meeting Jesus Again in the books I have read 2010

This year started out as a sabbatical year - from church commitments. For all sorts of reasons, some clear and immediate, some more complex, some even convenient once the decision was made, my wife and I needed a break.

We decided to visit around churches, and we did. We visited mostly Anglican congregations, but also visited the Trinity Uniting Church In the City for a couple of their special services during the year.

We also decided to take retreats. We did some at New Norcia - Lent, the Easter Triduum and Advent - and some conducted by the Dayspring Community in Mundaring - one a silent retreat and the other reflecting on the wisdom of the Desert Fathers.



We always felt that in conjunction with these retreats we took holiday weekends away which we did in Yallingup and Albany twice, each of which were times of renewal and life.



There is a litany in the Passover Seder that in the Hebrew is called Deyanu or "It would have been enough" in which the salvation history of the Exodus story is recounted and as each individual event is recalled - the pillar of smoke and fire, the manna, the water from the rock etc - the community recites Deyanu - it would have been enough. As I have recounted each of these things above, I feel like I could have said Deyanu - it would have been enough. "But wait!" as they say on TV. There was more.

I got to read lots of books this year - well lots for me, anyway. I read some new Crime Fiction, which is my favoured fiction genre, the most memorable "The Ritual Bath" by Faye Kellerman which gave some insight into a modern orthodox Jewish community. I also re-read many old favourites of the genre - Kerry Fisher's "Phryne Fisher Mysteries", Donna Leon's "Brunetti Novels" all set in Venice, and Andrea Camilleri's "Inspector Montalbano" Series set in Sicily. And I watched DVD episodes of "Nero Wolfe" and "Hercule Poirot" which, like the Phryne Fisher novels, were set in the Art Deco period of the first half of the 20th century.

But, perhaps more significantly I got to read some really good non-fiction - soul food of the best kind. I will outline them here and I trust that my potted version of each might arouse your interest to read something that you have not already read.

SABBATH - Dan B Allender
Our weekly Home Group has been practising Sabbath for over a year now - beginning our weekends with a Sundowner light meal, debriefing our weeks with each other and then engaging in a Lectio Divina Meditation followed by an Examen. Thus I found that I had already made the move that Dan was calling for - a move away from the idea of Sabbath as a REST to the idea of Sabbath as a CELEBRATION. The focus is on delighting in God through four elements - sensuality, ritual, communal feasting and playfulness. His is a call to experience Sabbath as a day in which you receive and extend reconciliation, peace, abundance and joy.

I MET GOD IN BERMUDA - Steven Ogden
In some ways this work by a colleague of my seminary days is rather heavy going. He is trying to engage with those moderns for whom traditional language about the faith is no longer meaningful. He takes as his beacon-lights the works of Karl Rahner and Paul Tillich with a focus on Incarnational spirituality - something that fits well with the existentialism of the current generation - "If it works for me then I am on that team." I liked it, my wife did not.

THE FIRST CHRISTMAS - Marcus J Borg & John D Crossan
This was the first of three of Borg's works that I read this year. I found that the historical parabolic herneutic that is introduced in this work has brought about a paradigm shift for me. It has given me a vocabulary for things I hadn't quite grasped because I did not have the vocab.

Two ideas stand out.
The Birth Narratives are Overtures of the whole Gospel that is to follow adds wonderful layers to the literary structure of the narrative; and
Parables as Subversive Stories that are challenging both the religious and socio-political structures of the day.

SOUL SURVIVOR - Philip Yancey
I read this book after my wife read it on our silent retreat. She found in it a framework for understanding and re-framing some of the struggles we went through in arriving at our Sabbatical year. What I found most interesting, apart from discovering the pain and anguish Yancey had struggled through in his quest for a faith that worked, was his ability to intertwine his own journey of faith development with the biographies or his working with the people who are the focus of each chapter - people like John Donne, Martin Luther King Jr, Dostoyevski, Ghandi, G K Chesterton and Henri Nouwen to name a few. The stories were inspirational in their own right, but when intertwined with Yancey's own faith journey they took on new layers of meaning.

MEETING JESUS AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME - Marcus J Borg
The Jesus Scholar's attempts to peel away the layers of theology and tradition found in the Biblical Narratives we now have is always going to ruffle some feathers, with accusations of 'watering down' and 'explaining away' vociferously shouted within conservative circles - "How we love our texts as they are."

Early on in this work, Borg provides a basic sketch of the Pre-Easter Jesus in which he says firstly it is impossible to ascertain whether Jesus thought of himself as the Messiah or Son of God. The Pre-Easter Jesus, he said, "pointed people away from himself to God". He also says that it is also unlikely that "Jesus expected the supernatural coming of the Kingdom of God as a world-ending event in his own generation."

He then goes on to identify four things we can actually say about the manner of Person this Pre-Easter Jesus was. He was a Spirit Person who demonstrated an experiential awareness of the reality of God. He was a Teacher of Wisdom, whose parables and aphorisms sought to teach an alternative and subversive wisdom. He was a Social Prophet along the lines and after the traditions of the prophets of ancient Israel. He was also, and undeniably, a Movement Founder seeking to renew and revitalize the Judaism of his day.

I found these ideas to be quite liberating as they enabled me to think of Jesus in much more realistic human terms, because so long as we add the gloss of divinity to the humanity of Jesus the Incarnation is diminished.

EUCHARIST WITH A SMALL 'e' - Miriam Therese Winter
A small tract really, although it runs into nearly 150 pages, but its central thesis is that the idea of EUCHARISTIC PRESENCE over which the Church has fought semantic battles for millenia should not focus on the bread and wine of the Eucharistic meal but rather on the gathered community. There is where the PRESENCE will be found. A very helpful contribution to the debate from a Catholic scholar.

THE NAKED NOW - Richard Rohr
I find Richard Rohr much more difficult to read than listen to. However, in this book he offers in a sense some reassurance - that the enlightenment so many are seeking in the West as they explore other religious traditions has been present in Christianity from the very beginning. It is obviously informed by the Franciscan and contemplative traditions that are part of Rohr's own life but it's genious, as a book is that Rohr includes some appendices that provide 8 practical exercises in exploring what he has been writing about.

THE HEART OF CHRISTIANITY - Marcus J Borg
Borg begins this book with a discussion of an earlier paradigm of Christianity that seems, somehow, to no longer satisfy many in the Church. As a way of addressing this he begins to articulate what he calls an "emerging paradigm" - one that is based on observation as much as theorising.

In some ways this has created a paradigm shift for me, but it is more likely the case that he has given me a systematic vocabulary for things I had already been thinking about. The chapters in the second part of the book were, for me, magnificent examples of reframing such big ideas as being Born Again, the Kingdom of God, Sin and Salvation and the place of Christianity in an age of pluralism.

ADULT FAITH - Diarmuid O'Murchu
My most recent adventure was with this book. As I spoke to colleagues at work, I sometimes referred to it as the latest bit of Heresy I was reading, because he makes some claims about life and faith and the church that are "right out there", so to speak. The idea that has struck me most profoundly is his assertion that the stability of our political and ecclesiastical systems is dependent on a kind of co-dependency by which the few people with real power are dependent on the passivity of the masses for them to retain it, and the masses have passively accepted that the elite few are really the best to do this stuff.

O'Murchu is writing a call to people of mature faith to beak down that co-dependency and live a faith that is authentic and free.

His chapters all open with a theme statement and conclude with a summary of the points addressed in the chapter - makes for easy reading.

So, that has been my year of theological reading. I hope that this inspires you to read a bit more and in areas that will feed your soul.

Christmass is upon us.

I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.

Charles Dickens



No sermon to preach this year - in fact no responsibilities at all other than to meet with God's people on Christmas Eve and celebrate the true Christmass.

I attended an Advent Retreat over the weekend of Advent 1 at which we discussed the speeches associated with the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke. It was good to bring these words to the fore right at the beginning of the season. The one thing I got out of that exercise was to notice the highly stylised form of the texts which emphasised again that we have there not an historical narrative but a theological reflection of what the Authors' believed was the beginning of the meaning of the Christ story.

We all think we know these stories so well because we hear them year after year, but it is surprising when you look at all the texts together in one go, so to speak, to find little details you had forgotten about (sometimes making you think "I never heard that before.")

I read Marcus Borg's book "The First Christmas" and found that it brought the narratives to life for me in new ways. We are so used to harmonising the two different stories into one that we neglect to give thought to the possibility that there might be reasons for the differences. "Reading each as a separate narrative and paying attention to the details of the texts enriches these stories and adds greatly to their power." (Borg, p.23)

Borg lays the ground for seeing the Birth Narratives as a literary form of the musical "Overture", a word derived from the French ouverture meaning the opening part "that serves as a summary, synthesis, metaphor, or symbol of the whole." (Borg, p.39) The form and the themes introduced in the Birth Narratives by Matthew and Luke reflect the later form and themes that are explored in the Gospel as a whole. This fact illuminates our understanding of otherwise incidental features of the narrative.

Borg also sets out to demonstrate that many aspects of the narrative are actually quite subversive, and intentionally so. Matthew's declaration of Jesus as "King of the Jews" was a direct challenge to Herod the Great who claimed that title to himself. Luke's various declarations that Jesus was the Son of God, Lord, saviour of the world, and the one who brings peace was a direct challenge to the Roman Imperial Cult by which these titles were intrinsically Caesar's. (Borg, p.37)

Borg brings his work to a conclusion that reflects themes of that work with which I began this post - Charles Dicken's story "A Christmas Carol". For him the Christmas story can only be understood in those three tenses - past, present and future. All three are interdependent and intertwined - we look back at what happened in the past, we seek to experience the incarnation as a present reality and we wait in anticipation an even greater fullness of God's presence among us in what we call "The Second Coming".

In my reading and retreating one phrase stood out. A statement by the 14th century German Mystic Meister Eckhart who said "Unless Christ is born in you today, what happened in Bethlehem is irrelevant." I am inclined to agree. What do you think?

Victoria & Tasmanian C of C Theological Education Review - Update

After my recent rant about the political machinery of the State Council of Churches of Christ in Victoria and Tasmania, and the wonky (the Reviewer admitted his bias when he presented the report to the Council) review they sponsored into the state of Theological Education and Ministerial Formation in those states, I have had some feedback that needs to be reported on.

While the Board of the College accepted the Review, as commented to me by the CEO of Churches of Christ (are they a corporation or something, that they are led by a CEO?)and the Reviewer, their view seems to be that the Review was so flawed that most people dismissed it. This is not to say that the College has not taken note of any of the matters raised by the Reviewer. In many ways they thought the Review was caught up in identifying matters that had already been dealt with in recent times and some much longer ago, and the term used to me was that it was a bit like a "rear-vision mirror view."

I have been assured of two things which I want to share with you.

1. The College is simply getting on with the business of doing well what they have always been doing, with good student numbers and improving relationships with the Churches. By this comment, the practical and pastorally supportive approach to ministerial training in the context of an academically rigorous program of study is affirmed as continuing to be a feature of the College, as indeed it was when I was a student there thirty years ago.

2. The appointment of Andrew Menzies as Principal is not so far out of bounds as I was suggesting earlier. Andrew's ministerial background has been within the Baptist church as was the case for Greg Elsden when he was appointed Principal, and there is much to commend Tabor College as an academic institution standing alongside CCTC in the preparation of people for ministry in the church.

So, there are, in the view of those I have had contact from, good times ahead for CCTC, not least because they have the determination to simply continue doing the business they have always done well - namely prepare men and women for the challenges of ministry in local churches in the 21st century.

Theological Education & Ministry Formation in Victoria

I was recently made aware of a review of Ministerial education for Churches of Christ in Victoria which seemed, upon close examination, to actually be a hatchet job on my theological alma mater.

My wife and I are no longer in ministry in Churches of Christ, and in fact were ordained for ministry in the Anglican Church in 1998. Such a change may disqualify me from making credible reflection on the report recently presented to the Vic-Tas Conference Council, but in just the same way that when people migrate to other countries than the place of their birth retain a strong affinity with their "homeland" I, on the recommendation of my Archbishop, took my Churches of Christ heritage with me into the Anglican Church and retain my affection for the faith community that nurtured me. So I feel I may have some qualification to make comment.

I have taken some interest in the general drift towards a non-denominational conservative evangelical ethos across the nation, so far as Churches of Christ is concerned, and have often wondered at the propensity of congregations to call as their ministers people (usually men, I notice these days) who have not history or schooling in the particularities of the history and witness of Churches of Christ. A decade or so ago, it was the case that fewer than 40% of the ministers serving Churches of Christ congregations in WA were trained in a denominationally linked seminary or done any further study to gain that denominational ethos. Why should it be surprising then, then that as a people Churches of Christ no longer knew what they stood for - unless you had come to the view that all that stuff was now archaic or an anacronism in a modern world?

Your report may closely reflect the political realities of Churches of Christ on the Eastern seaboard, but as a first-time reader, I could not help but feel that not only did the terms of reference pre-determine the outcome of the review, your own language in writing the review reflects a tendency towards the outcomes - what a surprise.

Three issues that were not well acknowledged by the report came to my mind:

* The liberal theological stance of CCTC is a matter that the Conference of Vic-Tas has wrestled with since the College began in 1908. The Author would have witnessed the frequent villification of Principal Lyle Williams in his day. The preamble draws attention to this as a general phenomenon yet the recommendations seem to persue an agenda by which it is hoped this "gap between churches and theological colleges" can be eliminated.

* And it seems to me from my own experience as a graduate of the College that they have a long history of seeking to remedy the general criticism in your preamble of seminary education as cloistered and academic. Much effort has been put into ensuring that graduates are well prepared for the practical realities of the ministry they are preparing for. This did not compromise the determination to develop good faculties in critical thinking. Perhaps the commendation of the SFE program and some other aspects give this issue some credit.

* Finally, the College has been the bastion of preserving and promoting the theological and ecclesiastical heritage of Churches of Christ that was vouchsafed to us all by the Cambells. This has been done out of a conviction that we will lose our way into the future if we do not know where we come from.

One thing that did surprise me about the review was that the author relied almost entirely on data gathered from the respondents to a survey and interviews. As a social scientist I would have compared that feedback with any of a whole lot of demographic data that could have been obtained from various sources (Conference Handbooks and NCLS data) in order to assess whether the sample is representative on other criteria. For example, the number of people in solo vs team ministries in the sample could have been compared with data from the Vic/Tas handbook of all member congregations. Similarly, the sample could have been compared with the whole population of ministers for whether or not they graduated from a Churches of Christ seminary. Finaly, in this respect, the claim in the Excursus on p.19 that larger churches are less likely to be led by a denominationaly trained minister along side data from your own churches could have been compared with actual data. To what extent is the claim made consistent with the reality in your states?

Two more minor details are worthy of my attention. On p.24 in evaluating ministry training, I wonder to what extent the claim in the last sentence of the paragraph - "It is in the practical areas of ministry relating to leadership and management that graduates felt under-prepared." - is consistent with the data. The table on that page simply identifies Church Administration/ Magement as the area with the lowest rersponse "Satisfied or Very Satisfied" - quite a different piece of data than an indication of being "under-prepared".

Secondly, on p.29 a dot-pointed list summarising findings regarding CCTC made reference to four significant strengths in the program of ministerial training at the College, but three seem to allude to unfounded negative impressions -

* reference is made to "charges" - where are these referred to elsewhere in the review, and who brought the charges? And on what basis is it concluded that the College encourages so-called liberality of thought without a care for the good or ill consequences of it? Yet the "charges" are "sustained."
* the observation is made that CCTC graduates are more likely to preside over smaller congregations with the implication that their liberal theological views are the reason for this, but with no basis or data to back it up;
* and given one of your later recommendations, the observation that CCTC graduates "are more likely to value academic rigor, endoresement and ordination" is also an implied criticism that is lacking in explanation as to its meaning.

Finally, I would like to offer some reflections on the Recommendations, not least because I have some concerns about many of them individually. My first issue with them, though, is that while the so-called PURPOSE of the review (Terms of Reference p.45) is to obtain a broad-ranging assessment of the ministry training and formational needs of the states into the future, yet the the almost monocular focus of the recommendations on macro and micro reform of CCTC would suggest either that the review has failed, or that it was executing another agenda - as one of my colleagues put it "A hatchet job".

So, to the actual recommendations, if I may be afforded the privilege of commentary:

1. The appointment of Dr Andrew Menzies as Principal was neither "a break from past traditions" nor, in the view of many of my colleagues, "a positive move". Former Principal, Dr Greg Elseden came from a Baptist tradition but shared his theological education with many CCTC graduates, through the ETA, and was a champion of the distinctive witness of Churches of Christ. It was not a surprise, then, when he moved on from the College that he toook a ministry position in a Church of Christ in South Australia. However, Dr Menzies' former position as Chairman of the Board of Tabor College and his other ministry experiences seem from this vantage-point entirely disconnected from Churches of Christ.
2. Regarding the purpose of CCTC, and I am not fully aware of what it means for CCTC to be a "partner department" of the Vic/Tas Conference, I think it is innappropriate to refer to Vic/Tas as "the parent organisation". Nothing could be further from the truth. I concede that there may be room for collaborative discussions that might bring a closer alignment between the purposes of the College and the needs of the states, but it must be remembered that CCTC serves a wider consitituency than Vic/Tas Churches of Christ.
3. Renaming the College? Yes CCTC is cumbersome, but it declares very clearly what it is about - the Churches of Christ Theological College. While the former name had some ambiguity as to its denominational ownership, it had an historical connection that was worthy of its day. Is it thought that people really believe that the departure from the name "College of the Bible" heralded a departure from its solid foundation of biblical scholarship? Is that what is behind the concern about changing the name?
4. Recommendations about Leadership Expectations, I think, is evidence of the pervasive influence of management-speak within the church, and it is, I believe completely contrary to Gospel Values. As an anecdotal observation I offer the view that those I know in business and the church who have done specific graduate study in the field of LEADERSHIP demonstrate a complete inability to work in teams and are so ego-driven that they leave behind them, in business and the church, a huge toll of damaged human beings, the collateral damage of their turbo-charged egos. The first recommendation on p.39 - Local Church Governance - identifies a significant stumbling block of a different kind in achieving this goal.
5. The curriculum comes in for some commentary and recommendations on your part. I wonder why a program of ministerial training should seek to reduce the studies in pastoral care (something fundamental to pastoral ministry) and replace these with studies in leadership. Perhaps some Old Testament Biblical studies could be jettisoned for the sake of LEADERSHIP studies.
6. Integrated Theological Studies - I am not sure what the review is really alluding to here. I suspect the proposition is borne out or a reframing of old questions concerned with a perceived lack or relevance and practicality. Since in other places the review seems to mark CCTC rather well in this area, I am not sure of the point.
7. The Classroom - it has been the bane of higher educational institutions for generations that those who may be best qualified academically in a field do not necessarily have the requisite skills to impart that expertise effectively in a classroom. Yet Higher Educational institutions continue to gradute competent and functional practitioners - I suggest that the same is true for all seminaries, regardless of denomination. The suggested remedy for this, I should think, falls within existing practices of the college. I teach at VOSE seminary here in Perth and at the end of each semester course I teach feedback is sought from students that address the three dot-points you have offered. I would be surprised if the CCTC was not also involved in this cycle of continuous quality improvement as well. However, the suggestion of spilling all staff positions at the college, presumably not including the Principal, is unnecessarily threatening - we all know what it means when it is said "all current staff be encouraged to reapply for their positions." The spill is a mechanism to get rid of pre-determined staff withou going through due process of performance management.
8. Public Relations - the image that is portrayed by any institution through its PR machinery is dependant on three things: a. its own mission and vision; b. its goals around market-share; and c. the resources it makes available for the task. I think the review may have identified some issues that need to be addressed by the college, but in the end it will all depend on these three things.
9. CCTC Governance - if the context of this review is a community of churches that is vague about its denominational identity and direction, how is the recruitment of non-CCTC graduates and new-comers to the denomination going to strengthen the Board? Or is this meant to to be an educative process for those new-comers so that they could discover the merits of a denominational identity?
10. Post-Graduate Studies - the review mentions ACOMs MA in Leadership Studies but says nothing of the existing post-graduate courses offered through CCTC. The Grad Dip Min is an ideal starting point for any from outside the tradition and the MMin and MTheol courses all provide pathways to discover more about ministry.
11. Local Church Governance - Could I suggest that in respect of the issue of a failure of leadership in the church, this recommendation is far more responsible than anything the College may or may not do? So long as this "Democracy gone mad" (as Bill Tabbernee sometimes called it) is left unchanged, ministers will continue to have their expertise and leadership stymied by local governance issues. Having said that, I am concerned about an emerging style of local church governance that places both power and authority almost completely into the hands of the Senior Minister and his own select group of elders - after all, the people have called him to lead, they should sit back and let him do so. This model may suit the turbo-charged egos I mentioned above, but it does not necessarily provide leadership. As has been said elsewhere, "if there aint no-one behind you, you aint a leader."
12. Ministry Formation/Endorsement - twenty years ago I persuaded the Advisory Board in WA to introduce a system of formation and endorsement similar to that in Vic/Tas. The focus of this was almost entirely on formation into the traditions and witness of Churches of Christ for those who had come from other traditions. There was similar resistance here to that described in the review, but I find it hard to understand the grounds for complaint. When I sought to join the Anglican Church I was required to attend regular formational sessions about what it meant to be an Anglican for nearly two years. There is nothing that prior learning by an "outsider" can do to diminish the demands of this. So long as you propose an open pathway for all-comers to take up ministry in your church, you will continue to lose sight of the heritage that you supposedly give witness to.
13. Ordination - I was surprised by the naivete of the question about ordination. Ordination has always been a function of the national body of Churches of Christ because of the view that those ordained were ordained for ministry in the whole church. (Remember I sat on the Federal Executive for a few years and my wife was a CCTC Board Member for a few years) I don't think it is a problem, really, for the state to organise ordination so long as the ordination is regonised across all jurisdictions. In WA, graduates from the many training pathways here, have the opportunity to be ordained, but the State organises the ordination on behalf of the National Council. Perhaps the same could be set up in Vic/Tas.
14. Recommendations Regarding ACOM - There is a long history, I believe, of attempts to facilitate better co-operation between CCTC and ACOM but it is my observation that these have failed for two basic reasons - a lack of trust between the parties; and a determination by ACOM to become a national college despite its lack of national jurisdiction. This empire-building passion of ACOM is something I felt quite personally in WA when I helped to set up the Churches of Christ Ministry Training Centre here. Without any consideration or consultation, just as we were seeking to implement a multi-pathway approach to ministry training in this state, including the use of visiting lecturers from both CCTC and ACOM, they set up an ACOM off-campus centre at the South Perth Church of Christ. This completely undermined the initiative we were taking but our system of congregational autonomy left us with no capacity to prevent it - and ACOM knew it. Having said that, I agree that it would be a good thing if this culture could be broken down and replaced with one of greater mutual trust. However, winning back trust when it has been broken is a very hard thing to do. My greater concern about the recommendations about ACOM in this report is that they reveal to me what seems to be the real agenda of the review. Indeed, given the author's past experience as an off-campus centre leader in Wollongong, I am surprised he didn't disqualify himself from conducting the review because of the possible perception of a conflict of interest. In crude language, the thrust of these recommendations seem to be to cut CCTC down to size and give ACOM free reign as a competitor in an open theological market.

As I mentioned above, the focus on CCTC in this review of Theological Education and Ministry Formation in Victoria and Tasmania seems to betray a pre-determined outcome for the review and for this reason, its significance will be diminished. Had the review given consideration to the many pathways potential ministry candidates choose to follow in their preparation for ministry in Churches of Christ and offered recommendations about ways to better integrate them with your traditions, then discussion of the contributions that both CCTC and ACOM could make to that end might have been meaningful. Instead, the review comes across very clearly as a means for straightening out CCTC - at last - and as a platform for the author to promote his well know views on leadership.

I trust you have taken the time to read through all this. Once I got started I felt I needed to address all those things that concerned me rather than trying to synthesise them into a few brief comments that had insufficient content to make them meaningful.

I would be interested in your response to the issues I have raised.

Advent - but what does it mean?

The first of four Sundays before Christmas Day marks the start of the ecclesiastical or liturgical year. We call the season Advent and the most common take on it is that it is a time of preparation for the celebration of Christmas.



My wife and I joined 12 others on a retreat at New Norcia this weekend to mark the beginning of the season, and the retreat director commented at our first discussion that while we give ourselves four weeks to get ready for Christmas, the retail sector of our community has been calling us all into readiness since the day after Father's Day - the first Sunday in September.

"A time of expectant waiting" is a common definition, and some years the selected Scripture readings have a strong emphasis on the Christian anticipation of the Second Coming of Jesus some time in the future.

Our retreat director drew our attention to the many speeches that make up the narrative of the period leading up to and shortly after the birth of Jesus. This made an interesting approach - a new perspective because we were focussed on what people said rather than the narrative of events.

Thus we considered the texts of the Benedictus - Zechariah's response to the birth of John the Baptist - the Magnificant - Mary's response to the realisation that both she and Elizabeth, her cousin, were pregnant by divine intervention - and the Nunc Dimittus - the response of the old temple prophet Simeon to seeing the baby Jesus when he was brought to the Temple for Circumcision. In these texts we found a wonderful linkage between the old and the new, the Hebrew Salvation History and the newly emerging Christian Salvation History. It was a feast of ideas enriched by great works of art , ancient and modern, that depict the events.

One gesture of anticipation and getting ready that is part of our household tradition is the raising our of our Christmas Tree and generally bestowing on the whole house the feel of Christmas. All sorts of Christmas decore has been collected over the years and these are arranged around the house, scattered in unexpected nooks, ready to surprise a guest who thought they had taken in all the Christmas stuff we had.



Right at the end of our retreat, Dom Michael, who was not leading the retreat, but who was present for all our sessions, was reminded of a statement from an 13th Century German philosopher and mystic Meister Eckhart who said that unless Christ was born in us today, what happened in Bethlehem was irrelevant. I think this is the little gem that will stay with me this advent, and to think it was almost a throw-away line right at the end of the retreat.

Hope you have a good one.

Hagiography

One of my blog-readers asked me what my thoughts were about St Mary of the Cross - "What is the Anglican view of saints?" she asked.

Well Hagiography was never my strong suit, and coming from little non-conformist Christian group into the Anglican church only a few years ago, I perhaps am not really qualified to speak about the topic.

The Roman Catholic Church clearly has everything to do with Saints very much under control. They are quite happy for all believers generally to be referred to as saints as made clear in the Bible, and when referring to the Communion of Saints understand that all those we love who have gone before us belong there and that we will one day join them.

They also allow for the possibility that those who die for their faith - as martyrs - will be immediately elevated into the highest place of presence with God and so are Saints and most valuable intercessors on our behalf to Almighty God.

There are some heroes of the faith in particular geographical areas who lives have been so significant that the are declared to be Blessed and as such a "local saints" for that region. For some time Mary MacKillop was referred to as the Blessed Mary - she had been Beatified and was Australia's local saint.



But a special next step was required for her to become a specifically honoured Saint for the whole of the Church. On the basis of the verification of two miracles of healing that were the result of requests in prayer to Mary to intercede with God to bring about healing, Mary was not only Beatified, but also Canonised and made a saint for all the church. These healing miracles demonstrated the power of Mary's intercessions and indicated her closeness to the Almighty. So now she is to be referred to as St Mary of the Cross.

I know that many protestants have difficulty with many aspects of this business and some even dismiss it as "Popeish" thereby relegating it to irrelevancy at best or heresy at worst. One of the biggist sticking points is praying to the Saints asking them to intercede for us. "We only pray in Jesus' Name. Going directly to him avoids the need for the intercession of Saints."

When I joined the Anglican Church some 15 years a dear priest friend helped out with the idea of praying to saints with a very simple analogy as well as clear theological reasoning. “What happens when you die?” he asked. Well, I suppose you go to be with God. “You believe in life after death?” he asked. Yes of course. “so when someone dies they are still alive, with God?” That’s right. “So, when you are worried about something, do you ask your friends to pray for you?” Of course, silly! “Why not ask your friends who have gone before you to God – died, that is – to pray for you as well?” That was all I needed.

So it is that Anglicans include prayers of thanks for those who have gone before us in their weekly intercessions, sometimes asking them to pray for us.

However, while Anglicans seem to have no problem with the great company of those who have been "Sainted" by the church over nearly 2000 years, honouring them on set dates each year as in both Catholic and Orthodox traditions, Anglicans seem only involved in the recognition of local Saints, and this being done on a Diocesan or Provincial basis. Here in Western Australia the Rev'd John Wollaston was promulgated in 1984 by the Bishops of Bunbury and North West Australia as well as the Archbishop of Perth as our Provincial local saint.

I don't know why they don't go in for Canonisation, but I am happy to raise my misgivings about the process. The most significant concern I have about the processes by which the Roman Catholic Church determines if a dead Godly person should be venerated as a saint is their very narrow definition of a miracle. It seems, and I might be wrong, that they are only concerned with miracles of healing. If I were to pray to St Mary of the Cross to alleviate my anxiety over my work situation, for example, and if, as a result of her intercession to God on my behalf, I could say that I was much less troubled than I had been before I asked her to pray for me, would that not be just as much a miracle? Or If I had asked her to intercede with God on my behalf so that I might obtain a certain thing or position, and it came about, would that not also be a miracle? The miracle of medical healing may be definitively verifiable, but I think they have simply made it too hard for themselves.

According to the Roman Catholic Church, Canonisation is a double statement – about the life of the person and also about the faith of the people who are alive at this moment. They are as much a part of the canonisation as the person who is being recognised.

When declaring a saint the Church looks at:
1.The life of a person. It looks at what the person did, how she reacted to the events of life, what people wrote and said about her, what she wrote or said herself. For a martyr the Church looks at the death of a person and considers the reason for the death and the circumstances surrounding the death.

2.The question of continuing devotion. When the person died did the people keep the memory alive? Is the person still alive in the faith of the people? Is her life continuing in the people?

I think all of these things can be ascertained without reference to a miracle of healing. What is important is the dynamic of the person’s remembered life in the community of believers today.

I am very glad to honour that saints of the church as dictated by our calendar. I am also inspired by particular saints to whom I pray – St Barnabas is my hero saint because of his nick name “Son of Encouragement” a nick name I aspire to be worthy of myself.

The Gospel according to Harry Potter

What stories do you know that try to explain what happened at Easter?

One of the truly greats is CS Lewis’ children’s story, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. There are many elements to it, but the one idea that grabbed me the most was that while the White Witch thought she could defeat Aslan the lion by killing him. But the resurrected Aslan explained to Susan and Lucy “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there was a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only until the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.”



This reflects very strongly the Substitutionary Theory of the Atonement that is evident in some of our Thanksgiving Prayers; but the idea that grabs me about this explanation is the thought that “Death itself would start working backwards.”

This creates a beautiful image of the way that when we become a Christian, when we are “born again”, then the effects of sin in our lives are turned backwards as we walk with Jesus becoming more like him every day.

Another story that gives some insight into what is happening at Easter is, believe it or not, the final of the Harry Potter stories – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows¬ – has a great Christological theme to it.

Death and immortality have been constant themes throughout the stories. Harry Potter’s parents are killed by Voldemort and Voldemort is obsessed with a quest to gain immortality. This is the ultimate threat to life as we know it, so as the series of stories draw to a close Harry Potter discovers that there is only one way to actually and finally kill Voldemort, and rid the world of his evil power – but that task would inevitably lead to Harry’s own death; he was to allow Voldemort to kill him, to not defend himself, but that in this event Voldemort’s power would be extinguished forever.



There was a deeper law that even Voldemort did not understand that meant that Harry’s ability to love others overcame all of his power to kill, and that in giving his life for those he loved, he found life.

This was not a Substitutionary sacrifice as Aslan’s was, but it resonates with a deep truth we understand about Jesus and his death. Jesus said long before he died that we would only find true life if we were willing to give it up. Dying to self means rising to new life – and it is in this new life that we find ourselves increasingly possessed by the mind of Christ that our will, our purpose becomes indistinguishable from Christ’s – Christ lives in us!

I think I failed!!!

Unusually, I went in to the city for church today. A friend is "director of music" for a CBD Uniting Church and today they wove their liturgy around the music of his jazz trio. The music was fantastic - and what was most delightful was to see the foot-tapping and sheer joy on the faces of old people as they sang traditional hymns with a swing.

However, as we were going into the church via a wide stepped entry from the street front, I noticed a young man sitting on the steps beside a sign that said "homeless, anything you can spare will help". I didn't stop to see what his story was. I didn't offer him a feed from what we would all be eating soon for morning tea. But then neither did any of the locals.

I have been haunted by this for a few hours - sadly, I am sure this will pass - but it is sad to think of all those good church-people walking right past someone who is asking for help. He wasn't threatening in any way. He wasn't particularly grubby or noisy. But we, none of us, could take a little detour on our way to church and see what was his story. I think Jesus said something about this once in a parable - "When did we see you hungry or thirsty..."

Prayer - Bridging the Gap

Last night I led a small group of members of The Australian Association of Religious Education in a prayer service that was designed to be inclusive of diverse religious traditions.

The AARE has its major constituency among Christian religious educators, which is to be expected, but it has among its members people from the Jewish and Muslim faiths as well.

It occured to me as I was preparing for this service that prayer was a common element of all religious traditions and that in many respects prayer is at the heart of our understanding of how to bridge the gap between humanity and the divine.

When you look at the sacred writings of all religious traditions there are numerous exaples of written accounts of prayer as well as instructions about how to pray. The writings of the religious mystics of all traditions also centre on bridging that gap.

The thing that struck me was that there seem to be basically two appraoches to prayer that are common to all.

Firstly, there are word-based prayers that are usually petitionary - asking the divine to intervene in the affairs of humanity so as to create a particular outcome. Jews and Christians find numerous examples of this within the Psalter where some even cringe at the punishments God is invited to visit upon the wicked. Word-based prayers also function to make an intellectual connection to the act of praise and adoration to the Divine. In a geographic sense this form of prayer is about us sending messages to God.

The second approach to prayer goes beyond words - it is meditative or contemplative - and seeks to create a space in which the human-divine encounter can take place. For some this means contemplation in silence. For some it involves the repetition of a mantra. For some it involves physical activity. The objective here, though, is to see what God might want to say or reveal to us.

Both these approaches are, I think, vital to a healthy prayer life and relationship with God, regardless of your religious tradition. What do you think?

The Church is not a family business

American televangelists have been fair game for critics and cynics over the years, but there has been one stand-out, squeakie-clean example that seems to have survived the scandals - Robert Schuller of "The Hour of Power" fame.



Sent by his denomination to start a new work in southern California over 50 years ago, he began in a most unorthodox way, establishing a church in an old disused drive-in cinema in Garden Grove. One innovation led to another and the reach of his church grew beyond the local community in which it was situated. His ministry reached into my life some 30 years ago through "The Hour of Power", offering encouragement and hope through what were some very dark times in my work for the church.



Last month, the legal entity of the Crystal Cathedral filed for bankruptcy because they were not able to satisfy their creditors of their ability to meet their financial obligations to them. What went wrong?

In essence, I think just two things were ultimately enough to cause the momentum for this ministry to stumble. Most recently, the impact of the Global Financial Crisis has reduced all-purpose revenue for the ministry by 27% from 2008-2009, from $30m to $22m. While $22m seems a lot for a church to manage its affairs on, long-standing commitments have been predicated on higher levels of income.

However, I think the most crucial factor in the demise of this ministry was a failure in succession-planning by the founding minister Robert Schuller. Robert Schuller intended that his son, Robert (jr) should succeed him, but even though there were signs of disquiet as the younger Robert was being groomed for this role the plan was implemented and Robert Schuller (snr) retired. Not surprisingly, however, trouble fermented within the congregation and in 2008 - almost coincident with the GFC - the younger Robert resigned his position as a result of that conflict.

This kind of conflict saps the energy of any community and the decline in momentum always takes significant time to recover from. I feel very sad for the holders of the vision of that ministry but have equal confidence that they will come through this time - the challenge is to take from it the things that need to be learned.

Rev'd, the Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes, AC, MLC, formerly a Churches of Christ minister and then Superintendant of the Wesley Mission in Sydney, offers some observations about what went wrong, too - some of his comments are, in my view bordering on self-agrandisement, but they are worthy of consideration.

Having said all that,bankruptcy will not close the church. It will continue to exist and offer services in Garden Grove and around the world for many years to come. But hopefully this experience will enrich their wisdom about how to go forward.

I love the Messiah!

Its that time of year when choral groups all round the world are brushing up on their now familiar versions of Handel's Messiah.



I sing in one of the longest-running community choirs in Australia and I was struck by the instruction of my musical director last week to "engage with the text".

I have sung some of the choruses from this work before, but have never sung the whole work, and so it is taking a lot of concentration to keep my voice on the notes that belong to my part and not the sopranos.

But today, I turned on a DVD I have of the 250th Anniversary performance of this work. It was a great reminder of what it looks like when the choir's bodies as well as voices are engaged with the text. Vocal dynamic is one thing, but the face and body have to reflect it as well.



It is very easy for choristers to know the notes and get the musical dynamics right but when the recognise the significance of the texts they are singing it really does come to life in wonderful ways. It is not just good music - which it is. It is indeed the greatest story ever told.

I love the Messiah!

I love the music and I love my life which is centred on my relationship with the man about whom the music speaks.

How about you?

The Kingdom of God for the GLTB Community

Recently I took part in a thread of discussion on FB that was started by a Youtube Clip of Joel Burns, a Fort Worth City Councillor telling gay teens "it gets better". His speech of 12 minutes was during normal Council debate and was prompted by the recent suicide of a number of young high school boys and girls as a result of bullying about the sexuality.

Retired Baptist Minister, Rowland Crowcher, posts such things on Facebook from time to time, and the responses from his readers are animated to say the least. While the focus of Rowland's concern was a Christian response to the kind of abuse that occurs to young people that drives them to consider suicide, most contributors, myself included, weighed in to the debate as to what the biblical view of homosexuality was.

I think it is fair to say that I grew up in a Christian environment that understood homosexuality as deviant and so necessarily involving sinful behaviour. Since it was contrary to nature, as people often say, it must be bad and therefore sinful. And anyway, there are such clear condemnations of it in the Bible saying among other things that homosexuals will not inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.

The beginnings of my enlightenment on this issue was the presence of an openly gay man at the seminary in which I studied. In the late 70's it was indeed a brave thing for him not only to come out, but to begin challenging the church to seriously consider him as a ministerial candidate. Sadly, he had to leave that church and join another in order to have that calling taken seriously.

As I worked through the issues surrounding the empowerment of women in the church I think I developed a hermeneutical framework that enabled me to begin to reframe my traditional response to this issue. This involved the need to clearly understand the historical context in which the biblical references to homosexuality stood and consider how these might or might not apply to the situation we are in today.

I then read John Spong's work "Living in Sin" - in fact the mid-week study group of the church in which I was pastor at the time chose to use it as a framework for their weekly gatherings for a number of weeks. This work, I think, created the paradigm-shift necessary for me to start moving towards where I stand today on this issue, but further experience and the writings of others was needed to create the necessary refinement.

I think the next significant factor was when a member of my extended family made it clear to everyone that they were involved in a homosexual relationship. This scandalised everyone initially, and some thought it would not last long and then it would go away. But it did not go away, and it was interesting to see the members of my family gradually, and at their own rate, come to terms with this. This event, so close to home, caused me to form the view that political and eccesiastical protestations about the threat such relationships pose to the family and the marriage of a man to a woman were absolutely spurious.

I think also, that my experience of church over the past 15 years in which I have become aware of more and more deeply commited Christian people who are gay, many already in ministerial positions, and many in long-term stable and committed relationships, has caused me to question the assertion that homosexuality is sinful. Some Christians try to soften their position by allowing that sexual orientation is not sinful, but homosexual sexual activity is. This to me is an absolute nonsense. If one's sexual orientation was in fact how that person was wired, and if all God made was good, then it was unjust and cruel to condemn a homosexual person to a celibate life so as not to sin while allowing a heterosexual person to have the joy of an intimate relationship - without sinning.

Finally, up to this stage, I think that the hermeneutical approach of Marcus Borg has given me a framework that aligns my passion for justice and discomfort with the purity-code approach of many Christians by showing how frequently Jesus stepped outside the social and religious conventions to meet the marginalised and distressed face to face, welcoming them into his space.

The willingness of Jesus to talk to a Samaritan women of dubious marital status in a public space, to allow another woman to behave scandalously as she kissed his feet and anointed them with nard, to reach out to lepers and tax-collectors causes me to challenge all those who would hold up texts and theology to justify their shunning of homosexuals. Too often, Christians act as if they will be contaminated if they associate too closely with the ritually, or doctrinally impure.

I welcome and celebrate the life in Christ that all who come to him experience regardless of their sexual orientation. I would dare to suggest that being homosexual is no greater indicator of one's propensity to sin than being straight is. We are all sinners. It concerns me, though, that homosexuals are accused of very particular kinds of sin associated with their sexual orientation.

We need to break down old ways of understanding our life together. Could I dare to suggest the following?

The Bible clearly affirms the sanctity of marital relationships, but I wonder if we could not change the view we have of the grounds for that sanctity. Traditionally we have held the view that this is because it is in a heterosexual relationship that procreation can happen, and that children can be brought up in a relatively safe and nurturing environment. Over time we have developed a whole field of theology and doctrine to uphold this view.

I have been wondering if these views have their grounding more in social, cultural and biological drivers rather than in divine intent.

In a scan of biblical history it is clear that the greatest abomination to God is infidelity. This applies as much to religious infidelity as to personal infidelity, both of which are referred to by the prophets and Jesus as adultery. The marital relationship was seen as an icon of the relationship between God and ourselves, but whereas we might be unfaitful to God, God can only be faithful to us. If this is the case, then a relationship of fidelity between two people, regardles of their gender, and regardless of their capacity to procreate, is something worthy of God's blessing since it is an icon of God's fidelity towards us.

I regret that the orders of my church do not permit a form of religious ceremony to affirm and bless the vows of fidelty a gay couple may want to make to each other. I regret that the politicians of our country have bought the lie that legal protection for gay relationships poses a threat to MARRIAGE.

The politicians and people in power in the church may continue to uphold barriers that create and encourage injustice towards gay people, but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord by welcoming into the Kingdom all members of the GLTB community who feel so called and we will march each year in the Gay Pride parade in solidarity with them all.

Who's in and who's out???

It is interesting to experience the way new translations enable you to see new aspects to familiar texts.

This morning I read from Psalm 87 as part of my regular cycle of readings for the Daily Office in the Anglican church, but instead of using my familar NRSV or the now hackneyed NIV I read it from the Litrugical Psalter of A New Zealand Prayer Book. It reads as follows:

The Lord loves the city
that is founded on the holy hill:
its gates are dearer to God
than all the dwellings of Jacob.

Glorious things are spoken of you:
Zion, city of our God.

"I the Lord will count Egypt and Babylon:
as among those who are my friends.

"The people of Philistia, Tyre and Ethiopia:
eash one is born in her.

"All shall call Jerusalem 'Mother!':
for each of them was born in her."

The Most high shall keep her secure:
when the roll of the peoples is written up
the Lord shall record,
'Each one was born in her'

Singers and dancers alike shall proclaim:
'In you all find their home.'

I was away last week at a Religious Education conference attended by Christians, Muslim and Jewish educators. One of the questions that naturally arose in this context concerned the exclusive claims that Christians and others have made about their religion, and in a workshop on the Old Testament theology of Creation the comment was made that Judaism was not an exclusive-ist religion. While Israel saw themselves as chosen they were to live in a world in which all peoples belonged.

The Psalm certainly reflects that view. It sets out by calling Jerusalem the Holy Hill that is most dear to God. God then declares the nations to be among his friends even going so far as to say of them that each one was born in "her" - a clear referrence to Jerusalem as God's Holy Hill. "All shall call Jerusalem 'Mother', for each one of them was born in her."

How extraordinarily generous of God.

I am moving gently towards a broader, more inclusive view of Christianity that seeks to reflect God's grace and mercy and sees the religious faith of others as a response to the same kind of, but different, revelation of God that we rely on within my own Christian tradition. Indeed, I delighted a week or so ago to visit a Franciscan Friar who was establishing a multi-faith house of friendship, under the patronage of the Roman Catholic Archbishop. While I was with him a Hindu guru arrived and invited us both to join him for chai at a local vegan resturaunt, driving us both there in his rather large, though old, Mercedes Benz. We were joined there by a local Buddhist adherant and between the four of us we discussed all sorts of things - the good and ill of this life.

Real Presence

I read a book recently written by a Roman Catholic Nun that was considering various aspects of the Communion or Eucharist as celebrated in churches all round the world.

It has always seemed ironic to me that the Eucharist, which was intended to be a symbol of the intrinsic community that exists between God and us and between ourselves, should have been at the heart of most ecclesiastical division over the centuries.



Words were invented and argued over to try and define the territory of the dispute - Transubstantiation and Consubstantiation were just the beginning - but at the heart of the debate was a response to the question "In what way, if any, is Christ present when we celebrate Communion, the Lord's Supper or Eucharist (whatever you may call it)?

Huldrych Zwingli wanted to defuse the whole matter by proposing that since the Church was engaged in an act of commemoration - "Do this in remembrance of me!" - there was no sense of presence necessary for a correct understanding of this question. This proposition took wide hold in protestant circles leaving Roman Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans and Anglicans to hold out for one understanding or another.



Medical Mission Sister, Mirian Therese Winter, in her recent book eucharist with a small "e" proposes a completely new way of considering the real presence of Christ when the Christian community is gathered to celebrate Communion. She wants to take up the gospel comment of Jesus that where two or three are gathered, there he was in their midst. This does away with the mystical/scientific dichotomy created by the linguistic debate of Transubstantiation and Constubstantiation which is generally a sturggle for most moderns, and it provides a way of considering the eucharistic event as having more significance than a simple commemoration in which nothing happens other than our own sentimental reminiscences.

I have always felt there was a dynamic and power in the idea of Christ being present when two or three are gathered together, and so this proposition resonates well with me. What about you?

When Christians say Religion is a dirty word

I have been party to some conversations recently in which I gained the distinct impression that religion and being religious was meant to be understood as something very negative. The interesting thing is that my conversations were not with atheists or secularists who sometimes regard being religious as having a mental illness. No these conversations were with Christians.

In the text and subtext of these conversations was the inference that anyone who participated in religious practices that involved ritual and symbolic gesture did so out of some kind of mindless aquiescence to what they have always done, or what their parents did, etc. These comments were made as sweeping statements that were meant to be applied to all such practices.

Sometimes such commentary is offered from pulpits in churches, even, and the implication is that the only legitimate expression of religious faith is spontaneous and a reflection of a personal relationship with the Divine. Any form of ritual practice or the repetition of forms of words that are in written form are a false expression of religious faith.

In musing over this I conjectured that perhaps the preachers wanted to tickle people's ears with the idea that "what we do here is good and what people do in other places, especially if it involves ritual and liturgy, is utterly suspect."

Along a similar vein, I have heard people speak very disparagingly of tradition in a religious context. One preacher recently describe TRADITION as "The Religious practices of the dead," and TRADITIONALISM as "The dead religious practices of the living." It seemed to me that the implication here is that there is nothing to be learned from those who have gone before us in the faith. I guess if such a proposition was put to the preacher he would say that was not really what he meant, given that he regards the sacred Scriptures, which are undoubtedly ancient, as a great source of inspiration and guidence for our religious practice, but you can't deny the negative implications.

The sad thing about such world views is that they are closed - closed to the possibility that anyone might experience their faith and religious life in a manner that is different from their own. The focus is in contemporary, personal, spontaneous, grounded in the here and now.

I have lived long enough and in enough different settings to come to respect that diversity of religious practice that makes faith meaningful for people.

I have been with people as they prayed the Rosary as a congregation, led by a priest, over and over through the Marian Hour.

I have sat with an ecumenical congregation of several hundreds in silent contemplative prayer for half an hour.

I have joined hundreds in a processional proclamation of the Gospel through the Stations of the Cross as we walked around a suburb.

I have been with people in the midst of ecstatic utterances and Holy Spirit experiences that I know many of them have done repeatedly, week after week.

I have anointed and prayed for healing in a simple ritual in my own church, month after month, and seen the power of ritual and symbolic gesture in the lives of simple folk as they reach out to touch the Divine.

Indeed someone recently pointed me to a blog with pictures from all round the world of Muslims celebrating Ramadan which is to finish today, I think, images of people praying fervently to their God in a religious practice that is indeed transformative of their lives.

As I consider all these religious practices there is no way that I can think of them negatively; afterall often they are engaged in practices that I simply do not understand and so have not capacity to critique. When I have occasion to worship in such a context I try to see with eyes that understand what this is all about and a heart that is open to experience God even though I do not understand it.

I have learned to allow for the possibility that God and the Religious dimension of life is far greater than my own limited experience and knowledge. It enables me to be inclusive, respectful and far from judgemental. We are all on a journey into the presence of God and in this life we can only see these things partially.

Un-costed Giving

Jesus said some pretty radical things in his day.

Could you imagine, having been invited to a swank soirée by a locally prominent citizen, telling the host what Jesus told the host of a party he was invited to? I reckon it would be a conversation-stopper and a sure-fire way of getting your name off the "A-List".

First of all Jesus draws attention to the way people were jostling their way to the positions of importance at the party. They were headed for possible humiliation according to Jesus - better to draw back and have the host invite you up to the place of honour.

The he says to the host that rather than inviting his friends and family and wealthy neighbours to a party, presumably with the understanding that they will reciprocate with an invitation of their own, he should invite all those who were outcasts, the ritually unclean and those who most certainly could not reciprocate the invitation.

Bruce Prewer, in his reflection on this story, coined the phrase "un-costed giving" as a way to describe what he thought Jesus was driving at. He reflected on the difficulty even we in the church have in living up to this calling, so pervasive is the cultural norm of quid pro quo in our society.

It made me think of some of the people mentioned by Philip Yancey in his book Soul Survivor, people he had met and interviewed in his journalistic career or whose lives, through the books they had written, had been an inspiration to him. He told the stories of people like Martin Luther King Jr, Dr Paul Brand who did some magical surgery for people with leprosy, Robert Coles, a social scientist who discovered that the children of the poorest of poor int he world had a lot to teach us in the west about life and the important things, and Mahatma Ghandi. All these people gave of their own lives unstintingly for the welfare of others, often ahead of their own welfare. Theirs are remarkable examples of un-costed giving.

On Monday evening last, the ABC showed a Talking Heads episode in which Fr Bob Maguire was interviwed. Father Bob has been involved in three different charities over the years that have sought to help out the homeless and mentally ill in and around Melbourne. He was awarded an Order of Australia in 1989 in recognition of his inability to put a cost limit on his giving - indeed his Bishop has had to step in and take over some aspects of his work be cause Father Bob is not good at the costings; and that is the way it should be.

Father Bob in Melbourne would rank alongside the late Father Brian Morrison in Perth and Father Ted Kennedy in Sydney as thorns in the flesh of the establishment of the church for two very significant reasons - firstly they never drew the line about who to help and how to help them; and secondly they had no fear of stepping outside the normal avenues to do what needed doing.

The Roman Catholic church makes a big thing of the processes they go through to formally declare someone to be a saint - and we will see the climax of that process soon in relation to the Blessed Mother Mary MacKillop - but these three guys are true saints who understood every word of Jesus advice about un-costed giving.

But it does move ...

Have you ever had one of those experiences where something you were very familiar with and thought you understood turned out to be something quite different – even the opposite of what you thought?

We sometimes call such events “Copernican Moments” because they are about turning our world view upside down.

You remember Copernicus, don’t you?

He was an amazingly well educated man from the 16th Century – a truly Renaissance Man who was learned in philosophy and the arts, law and theology, mathematics and the natural sciences.

He was fascinated by mathematics and his observations of the night sky, and by his observation of the movement of both stars and planets and the application of his understandings of geometry he came to the view that the sun was the centre of the universe, rather than the earth.

Ten years after his death in 1543, an Italian was born, Galileo Galilei, who, with the help of telescopes that had just been invented, went on to refine the theoretical work of Copernicus and sought to demonstrate without a doubt that the Earth revoled around the Sun as did the other planets.

He began advocating these deveoplments on Copernican ideas in about 1616 but by 1634, just 100 years after Pope Clement VII had supported the ideas of Copernicus, Pope Urban VIII denounced Galileo as a suspect heretic who was teaching things contrary to the bible and whom he would excommunicate if he did not recant or renounce his views.

There are times, aren’t there, when the church really resists new ideas with an extraordinary amount of effort.

I think that Jesus was a bit of a trouble-maker in his day, like Galileo, but with the passage of time, we sometimes seem to forget that.

Almost everything he did and everything he taught was intended to be a direct challenge to the religious, social and political conventions of his day – no wonder he got it in the neck; well the head and the hands and the feet and the side, I should say, when they crucified him.

But I suspect some of you at least are thinking, “Jesus doesn’t seem to be that radical!”

The story of the Good Samaritan might help us all understand something very important about what it means to be a follower in the way of Jesus.

He’s Not Tame, He’s Wild
Are you familiar with the CS Lewis stories about the imaginary world of Narnia. Most people are familiar with “The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe” but there are six other adventures involving various of the key charaters from the first story.

Lewis did a wonderful thing in characterising the “Christ” figure in these stories as a lion. Aslan was the ultimate ruler of Narnia.

In one of the stories, the younger girl, Lucy, is talking to someone about Aslan. Lucy was describing Aslan in the most effusive and loving terms because she had met him, had trusted her life to him and loved him dearly.

Realising that Lucy was talking about a lion, she somewhat naturally asked “Is he a tame lion?” to which Lucy replied, “No, he’s not tame, he’s wild. But he is wonderful.”

There is an element of this kind of wildness in Jesus that I want to think about today.

Two Great Ideas in Israel
There were two great concepts that the religious system of Jesus’ day was built around – Covenant and Law – and the religious leaders of Jesus’ day had so tamed these concepts that they believed they knew exactly what to do to remain in God’s good books.

Covenant is essentially about being bound into relationship with another, and the Biblical narratives of covenant show God binding himself into relationship with his creationand with us his creatures.

But the Scribes took the idea of Covenant and tamed it into a mechanism by which you could get what you wanted out of God – someone once described it as a system of Requirements and Rewards by which if I did such and such, God would do such and such.

The ultimate example of this is “If I am a good person, God will let me go to heaven when I die.” But there are many more down to earth examples such as – “If I do all the things God wants me to do he will make me rich and bless all my family.” Or “If I pray hard enough, God will heal somebody I love.”

This creates a pretty tame approach to God, doesn’t it?

The Pharisees, on the other hand, took the idea of Law and turned it into something of a purity code. Purity is all about holiness for the Pharisees and it is important because they remembered a saying of Moses in Leviticus 19 that because God was holy, they should also be holy – and for them the pathway to holiness was purity.

Much in the Law was meant for the good of the community and to protect them but it was easily turned into a burden for most. The Pharisees, however, had set out to live their lives in such a way that they could say they they kept all these little laws (all 720 of them and the Midrashic interpretations of the) and so were a cut above the general hoipoloi. Jesus rightly described them as self-righteous.

So, in this context, Jesus tells a story.

The Good Samaritan
We have tamed this into a story about being a helpful neighbour – and that certainly is one layer of meaning in the story – but it is primarily a critique of the way of life that is ordered around purity.

Just look at the purity issues that are elemsnts of the story:

•The priest and Levite had purity obligations because of their role and status;
•Contact with the dead would defile that purity and the man is described as “half dead”; and
•The Samaritans were ritually impure because they repudiated the Temple monopoly on sacrifice and other rituals.

It is hard for us to imagine how outraged Jesus’ first listeners might have felt when he told this story. The only way to understand how Jesus is able to make the Samaritan the hero in this story is to realise that God values Compassion much more highly than purity.

A bit earlier in Luke’s Gospel he reports Jesus saying something very important. In the middle of a section of teaching by Jesus that is Luke’s equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount, just after he has exhorted his followers to love their enemies, and just before he wanrs of the perils of judgementalism he says something that is a restatement of that verse from Leviticus I mentioned earlier.

Instead of saying to his disciples that they needed to “Be holy because God was holy,” Jesus said “Be compassionate, just as your Father is compassionate.”

If you look as a whole at the stories Jesus told and the things he did, you will find that again and again he is challenging the purity-based system with a compassionate grace-based system. He touched lepers, the hemorrhaging woman, and the mad man in the cemetery. He challenged the sacrificial system when he came into Jerusalem and chased out the money changers and their animals.

No wonder people got mad with him.

Jesus was wanting to say that our relationship with God is not one of requirements and rewards, nor is it contingent on us complying with all the requirements of the purity code the Pharisees had established over the years.

Because of his compassion towards us, God calls us all into an intimate and personal relationship with him that is founded fundamentally on grace and compassion.

This is why Jesus so often reached out to the poor and oppressed in society – these were the people whom society said were “cut off” from God’s mercy and Jesus said the opposite.

In the face of this, I feel really sad when I recognise how easily and how often the Church has fallen into the same pit as the Scribes and Pharisees.

I think that too often the church replaced physical purity with doctrinal purity and then had no qualms about executing thousands through an Inquisition or two, or excommunicating faithful people who had differing views.

And how often have you seen Christians following the idea that if they do certain things God will do certain other things – generally for their benefit?

A New Way
There is something very powerful in this call of Jesus to imitate God by being compassionate. Whereas purity divides and excludes, compassion unites and includes. For Jesus, compassion had a radical socio-political meaning. In his teaching and table-fellowship with all the wrong people, the purity system was subverted and replaced by a politics of compassion.

The Kingdom of Heaven is Like ...

When I begin the training for new CRE Teachers I usually lead a devotional thought on the Kingdom of Heaven based on the Kingdom parables we find in Matthew 13.

When we are involved in our own denominational and local church work our understanding of church very easily latches onto the idea of who belongs and who does not belong – as the most important thing. Church people, it seems to me, spend an inordinate amount of time determining who is IN and who is OUT. That is what the CREEDS are all about. That is what MEMBERSHIP is all about.

And it is very common for us to think of this as being all about THE KINGDOM OF GOD because surely, where we are, in our church, there is the Kingdom of God.

So, it comes as a bit of a surprise when we begin to rightly apprehend what these parables in Matthew 13 are all about. Let me recall them briefly to you.

The chapter begins with what we call “The Parable of the Sower” and this is the only one that does not begin with the phrase “The Kingdom of Heaven is like ...” But in the little interlude Matthew creates between telling us the parable and having Jesus explain the meaning of it, Jesus explains that he wants to speak to them in parables so that they might understand “the secrets of the kingdom of Heaven.” And in the explanation of the parable Jesus refers to the seed sown as words of the Kingdom.

So, in this parable, we see Jesus explaining that the words of the Kingdom will be broadcast freely for all, and, yes, the effect of them on people will be variable, but no-one is excluded from hearing it.

The next parable we call the parable of the “Weeds Among the Wheat”. The sower and the field create the image of the Kingdom here, and when weeds are seen to grow up among the wheat, in a sense contaminating the crop, the sower restrains his workers from the desire to decontaminate the crop by pulling the weeds up. The sower knows that purging the crop like this would actually undermine the viability of the wheat – it, too, would die.

The important idea in this parable is that the sorting of the good from the bad is something God would do at the end of time – the harvest – it was not something for us in the here and now.

Jesus then tells a number of very short parables – the Mustard Seed, the Yeast, the Treasure, the Pearl and the Net. Each begins with the phrase “The Kingdom of Heaven is like ...”

The Mustard Seed creates a great tree that can provide shelter for all the different kinds of birds of the air. A little bit of yeast in the loaf is enough to transform it (in other words the church doesn’t have to dominate the political system in order to transform society). The treasure in the field and the pearl of great price show the Kingdom to be something that, once found, whether by accident or as a result of a careful and exhasutive quest, one would be willing to give everything in return for.

It is the final parable, I think, that ties all these together, and is the one I draw my prospective teacher’s attention to.

“The Kingdom of Heaven is like a NET.” The story goes on to explain how the net gathers in all sorts of fish. The NET gathers them in – they are all in the Kingdom. But as with the Parable of the Weeds in the Wheat, the sorting out of the good and the bad is something reserved for the end of time, and for God’s angels in heaven. It is not something we should attend to in the here and now.

This clearly paints a picture of the Kingdom of Heaven as an INCLUSIVE place and a public school classroom must also be an incklusive place. But most of us don’t realise how radical this claim of Jesus was in his time and place.

Jesus, in his teaching and in his actions, challenged some of the fundamental ideas of the religious elite of his day.

The Scribes and Pharisees had created a religion based on two pillars – LAW and COVENANT – but these gifts of God that had been intended as a blessing had become a burden, even a curse, to the people.

Through the LAW they created a PURITY CODE by which people and things were all categorised as CLEAN or UNCLEAN and certain highly controlled rituals were necessary to transform UNCLEAN things or people into CLEAN things or people.

Reliant on the LAW these same people corrupted the idea of COVENANT from something centred on intimate relationship with God into a system of REQUIREMENTS and REWARDS – “If you do this and this and this, God will give you this and this and this.”

It was all very neat and mechanistic.

But Jesus challenged and indeed repudiated all these things – no wonder he got it in the neck.

Which brings me, at last (you probably wondering why did we read from Luke if he was going to preach on Matthew?) to the story we have in Luke’s Gospel that was read to us just now.

If you were a Jewish person of the first century hearing this story for the first time you would have immediately seen two very big RED FLAGS at which you would have been outraged.

Firstly, this woman was well known or visibly seen to be a person of ill-repute and touching her, or letting her touch you, would mean that you would be ritually unclean for at least a week.
Everyone knows this. Jesus should have known this.

But even worse, Jesus let her touch his feet. This was a very rude thing for her to do. Remember the story of Naomi and Ruth in the Hebrrew scriptures? Naomi told Ruth to go to Baoz and after he had eaten dinner, drunk too much wine and gone to sleep, she was to go and “uncover his feet” and lie there. When he awoke, Boaz would reasonably assume that “something had happened” that night and that he was now obligated to marry Ruth.

If the story were set in our time I guess the woman would embrace and kiss Jesus in the most passionate way possible in public.

BUT JESUS DOES NOTHING.

Now Simon, Jesus’ Pharisee host, recognised this straight away and his mind was racing with outrage, but he was too “polite” to mention it.

However, Jesus isn’t afraid to barge in. Just as the Pharisees often tried to trap Jesus, I think here Jesus traps Simon. His story of the money-lender and gratitude sets the scene for Jesus to gently scold Simon for his lack of hospitality which demonstrates that his efforts to live an exemplary and “sinless” life have actually diminished his capacity to love God – to be grateful.

Jesus then addresses the woman with these words – “Your sins are forgiven,” and “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” When some people retell this story the blend into it words from another story of Jesus with a woman “Go, and sin no more” but these words are not present in this story.

I find these words remarkable in our time, as much as they were remarkable in Jesus’ day. As well as adding “Go, and sin no more” most of us want to hear Jesus asking the woman to “repent of her sin” but these words are not present in the story and they outraged the first hearers of the story as much as they might outrage you, now that I have drawn your attention to them.

As you go through in your mind the stories of Jesus encountering so-called bad people – The woman from Samaria, Zacchaeus and others, and even the people in the stories he related like the Prodigal Son, Jesus never challenges these people to “repent” of their sin. We generally associate repentance with Contrition or being sorry for what we have done and determining never to do that again. In the Hebrew mind repentance is simply about “turning to God” or binding yourself into relationship with God. This is what has the power to transform the lives of the people in these stories – not the determination to BE GOOD NOW.

So, here is Jesus breaking all the rules, challenging people to think about old things in new ways – these are the treasures Jesus refers in that last story in Matthew 13.

And Jesus is creating a picture of the Kingdom of Heaven that isn’t quite what our template says it should be.

He sees the Kingdom of Heaven as an inclusive place, a place where all are gathered in, and where our place together is based on nurturing our relationship together with God, where God’s grace can abound and is celebrated. This is the place where transformation can take place, something that God wants us all to experience.

So, if we develop an approach to church that excludes people because we think they are not good enough yet, then we are preventing them from being in a place God needs them to be for that transformation to take place. So long as we don’t know the end of a person’s story we, none of us, can even hint at the possibility that they were IN or OUT.

We are easily inclined to creating all sorts of hurdles for people to go through to “get in” and to “stay in” but this story, and so many of the stories that are told of Jesus’ encounters with people as well as his teaching about the Kingdom of Heaven would suggest that we are called to a different way – a way that could lead to social and even ecclesiastical outrage – as we welcome all sorts, the “outcasts” of our day, to join us in the Kingdom of Heaven. We might even think it creditable to be regarded as a “friend of sinners, a glutton and a wine-bibber.”