Evening Sermon for 9/11 11 September 2011

Readings:

Matthew 18:21-35; Exodus 15:1b-11, 20-21       

Were you disturbed by the reading from the Hebrew Scriptures tonight?  I certainly was – and I hope you might have been too.  I hope we all listened carefully, wondering how, on this day – or any day – we might pay attention to what the Spirit is saying to the church, even as we hear words of celebration at the slaughter of one’s enemies?

It’s September 11 2011 – ten years on from 9/11 – how do we, as Christians, speak about this tragedy?  This evening’s readings offer two different approaches – both owned by our Judaeo-Christian heritage:  the story of a God, who is on our side, drowning our enemies ... and the story of a man of God, who teaches us to turn the other cheek, to offer love and healing – and always, to forgive and forgive and forgive....

Our stories of faith invite us into the occasions of our own life when we are faced with choice – choices of how we will react in the face of fear, terror and oppression.  Is our only option to return violence with violence; will we delight in the vanquishment of those who have hurt us; or will we respond with openness and forgiveness – even when we have been hurt to the core of our being? 

Some of you may know of Etty Hillesum, who lived for only 29 short years in the middle of last century; a vivacious, sharply intelligent young woman, who had that magic ability to light up the world wherever she went.  Like many such lively people, she also lived with occasional bouts of depression.  Very self aware, she thought of herself as “‘a small battlefield’ where the problems of her time were being fought out.”  As she came to understand herself – and her faith – she seemed to welcome these difficulties, believing “we should all make ourselves available for those struggles.  We should accommodate them, pay attention, care about them.”

What Etty wanted to do more than anything else was to write – “it drove her mad that she didn’t even know the words to describe the colors she saw.” [1]  But increasingly, in 1941-Amsterdam, what she found she had to pay attention to, was the way her life – and the lives of so many other people – “were being complicated … by the fact that they were Jews living within the tightening noose of [Hitler’s] Third Reich.”[2]  Her writing demonstrates that spiritual practice can be developed in the midst of much joy – and also, when our lives are overturned with incredible suffering. 

I wonder what Etty would have thought of our reading from the Hebrew Scriptures tonight? – a reading taken from her religious tradition (although she and her family were not particularly observant Jews).  What would she have thought of this – one of the founding legends of the Jewish people – the rejoicing of the drowning of the Egyptian enemies?    She writes in her diary: “the problem of our age [is ] hatred of Germans [which] poisons everyone’s mind. ‘Let the bastards drown, the lot of them’ – such sentiments have become part and parcel of our daily speech and sometimes make one feel that life these days has grown impossible.”[3]

Things haven’t changed - life continues to be impossible for vast numbers of people on our planet.   It doesn’t take much imagination to think of all the groups that might be candidates for drowning in the Reed Sea – along with those Egyptians of long ago.  Not just the Germans; those who lost loved ones at Pearl Harbour would probably want to drown the Japanese; and those who experienced the bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki would want to drown the Americans.  Today, some Australians might want to drown asylum seekers – Americans might want to drown Al-Quaeda, - some Libyans would rejoice if Gadaffi were drowned. We could go on and on – ‘letting the bastards drown’ might seem too kindly a way of treating some people.

On this day, when we remember that one option is to turn to hatred, declaring whole countries part of an axis of evil – that one option is to act unilaterally and pre-emptively against any nation thwarting the imposition of a particular way of life on them[4] – that one option is to claim God is on ‘our side’ – Etty’s writing reminds us it doesn’t have to be this way – there is an alternative.

Etty writes “suddenly, a few weeks ago, I had a liberating thought which surfaced in me like a hesitant, tender young blade of grass thrusting its way through a wilderness of weeds: if there were only one decent German, then he should be cherished despite that whole barbaric gang, and because of that one decent German it is wrong to pour hatred over an entire people.”

She goes on, “that doesn’t mean you have to be half-hearted;  on the contrary, you must make a stand, wax indignant at times, try to get to the bottom of things.  But indiscriminate hatred is the worst thing there is.  It is a sickness of the soul.  ….  If things were to come to such a pass that I began to hate people then I would know that my soul was sick and I should have to look for a cure as quickly as possible.”[5]

And so, she sets out to live out – and to reflect on – what it means to affirm the inherent meaning and beauty of life without ever turning away from the full depravity of what was going on around her.  Her spiritual practice was intense as she sought to be “an unblinkered witness to history” without giving way to hatred.  When she was eventually incarcerated, Etty found that “if she could look straight into the eyes of the eight-months-pregnant wife of an epileptic man who was being transported to Poland, and if she could then look that same day, and just as unwaveringly, into the eyes of the bully who was pushing him onto the train … and if she could then still swear that life is meaningful, then and only then, she maintained, would her words carry weight.”[6]

‘I try to look things straight in the face, even the worst crimes, and to discover the small, naked human being amid the monstrous wreckage caused by [humanity’s] senseless deeds’ she writes.  ‘I am no fanciful visionary… I try to face up to your world, God, not to escape from reality into beautiful dreams.’[7]

 “When Etty first began writing [her] diary, she described her desire for ‘a tune’: a thread, or medium – a calling that would make sense of her existence.  By the end, [as she heads, singing and smiling, towards Auschwitz and death] she has found it, and what she has found is so quiet it is almost intangible by ordinary standards.  Harvard Medical School psychologist Kaethe Weingarten calls it ‘compassionate witnessing’…. [that is, she made herself] completely available to another.  It means standing before ‘the Other’ with heart and eyes wide open, ready to hear them out no matter what.  By bearing witness to another human being who has endured terrible trauma, Weingarten believes, we can set them on the first steps towards being healed.”[8]

Etty wrote “we must learn how to … experience something pleasurable without trying to hold on to it, and we must be able to experience the most intense form of suffering without going to pieces or trying to pass it on to someone else.” [9]

A compassionate witnessing, at the Reed Sea, helps us see the multiple threads of pain and celebration interwoven.  When we witness with compassion, we hear the Hebrew Midrash suggesting that while the Hebrews celebrated, God wept because, "the Egyptians are [God’s] children too!" [10]  And 10 years ago, God wept in New York – but also God weeps in the ensuing and continuing violence in Iraq and Afghanistan. How might our world have been changed had the terrible trauma in New York been responded to with compassionate witnessing?  Just imagine how we might each contribute to the transformation of this world if we were to choose,, in our day to day responses to other people, not violence, not revenge but forgiveness and compassionate witnessing.

As we come to the Table, we are invited to pay attention to an alternative Way of living.    Here, we pay attention to and remember Jesus, who in the face of terror, violence and murder continued to choose forgiveness, love and compassion.  Here, we remember Jesus, whose broken body opens up a new hope-filled pathway into life, even in the midst of the pain of the world.  Here, we find Love and Life.  Amen

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[1] Carol Lee Flinders Enduring Lives 2006, p.41

[2] Flinders, p.45.

[3] Etty: A Diary 1941-43 translated by Arnold J. Pomerans, 1983, p.8.

[4] “Throughout history, nations and non-state actors have justified their wars with all sorts of rationalizations – territorial expansion, retaliation, protection, self-defense, and to spread their economic and political ideology.  America is no exception in this regard ... The thirty-three page [US] National Security Strategy of 2002 .. praised American democratic capitalism as the ‘single sustainable model of national success’ and ‘right and true for every person in every society.’  We would export our way of life ‘to every corner of the globe,’ said the NSS and we’d act unilaterally and pre-emptively against any nation that tried to thwart us.  Needless to say, some countries didn’t like such hubris.” Dan Clendenin “National Tragedies in Light of Spiritual Truths: The Tenth Anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks” www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20110905JJ.shtml

[5] Etty: A Diary 1941-43, p.8

[6] Flinders, p.78.

[7] Flinders, p.35.

[8] Flinders p.89.

[9] Flinders p.90.

[10] R U M O R S # 518; Ralph Milton's E-zine for people of faith with a sense of humor;   September 7, 2008

Sermon for 11 September 2011: Guest Preacher, Prof. Liam McIlvanney

Last week, I attended Otago’s wonderful Polyfest at the Edgar Centre, to see my son Caleb perform a number of traditional Tongan and Samoan dances with his Pasifika group. This week sees the launch of Dunedin’s Celtic Arts Festival, a month-long celebration of Scottish and Irish music, literature and dance. It’s heartening that the city can celebrate its dual heritage – Pacific and European – through these events.

This week is also designated ‘Land Sunday’ in the Presbyterian lectionary, and the theme of ‘land’ – being forced from the land, colonizing a new land, remembering the old land – certainly shaped the experience of the Scottish settlers of Otago, as it has shaped much of the art and literature celebrated in our Celtic Festival.

In 1943, the great Scottish Modernist poet Hugh MacDiarmid articulated his own vision of the land:

It requires great love of it deeply to read

            The configuration of a land,

            Gradually grow conscious of fine shadings,

            Of great meanings in slight symbols,

            Hear at last the great voice that speaks softly,

            See the swell and fall upon the flank

            of a statue carved out in a whole country’s marble.

In these lines, from a poem called simply ‘Scotland’, MacDiarmid imagines a relationship to the land, defined not in terms of legal possession, or economic exploitation, or political jurisdiction, or military occupation. It’s a relationship of intimacy and deep understanding predicated on love. That we might not simply own or buy or sell or farm or mine or defend but love the land: this is the revolutionary message of MacDiarmid’s poem.

For much of Scotland’s modern history, however, such a loving relationship was precluded by the divisive and traumatic politics of land.

The clearance of Highland straths and glens in the nineteenth century, when a new commercial ethos supplanted the old clan structure of common ownership, and chieftains became landlords, evicting their tenants to make way for more profitable Cheviot sheep, has left lasting emotional scars. We might speculate that a folk memory of the Clearances may well have accompanied the Reverend Donald MacNaughtan Stuart, the first minister of Knox Church, a Gaelic-speaking Highlander from Kenmore in Perthshire, on his arrival in Dunedin in 1860.

The Highlanders were not the only Scots to have their relationship with the land shaped by dispossession. In what historians now call the ‘Lowland Clearances’, the small tenant farmers and cottars of the lowland farming counties were driven from the land, as landlords enclosed common ground and drove up rents, consolidating farms into large commercial ventures in a process euphemistically termed ‘improvement’. The tenant farmers of Ayrshire and Galloway, no less than the clansfolk of Assynt and Golspie, were the tangata whenua of Scotland. Among their number was Robert Burns, whose statue stands in Dunedin’s Octagon. Evicted from the family farm of Lochlie, the Burns family found temporary refuge on the farm of Mossgiel, a name with a certain resonance in this part of the world.  No doubt this family memory of dispossession accompanied the poet’s nephew, the Reverend Thomas Burns, when he came to Dunedin in 1848 as one of the founders of the Otago settlement.

One of the myths of the Scottish Diaspora is that most of the emigrants came from rural backgrounds. In fact, most Scottish migrants, especially in the decades after 1860, came from the town and cities, like the great conurbation of Glasgow. At the turn of the twentieth century, the city of Glasgow was in its pomp. The Glasgow International Exhibition of 1901 celebrated the city’s position as the Workshop of the World and the Second City of the British Empire. But for the inhabitants of the Second City, the statistics tell a different story. 700,000 people lived in three square miles of Glasgow’s city centre. 70 per cent of the city’s families lived in two rooms or fewer; a quarter of the city’s families lived in one-room dwellings. 98.2 of the city’s homes were rented, often in the kind of slum tenements and ‘rookeries’ that made Govan and the Gorbals bywords for misery. Glasgow’s rate of infant mortality in 1901 – the year of the Great Exhibition – was 149 per thousand live births.

These were the conditions against which the great Gaelic poet, Sorley MacLean protested in a devastating short poem entitled ‘Calvary’, a poem that challenges the Christian Church for its impotence in the face of such misery: 

Calbharaigh                                                  

Chan eil mo shùil air Calbharaigh            

no air Betlehem an àigh                             

ach air cùil ghrod an Glaschu                   

far bheil an lobhadh fàis,                           

agus air seòmar an Dùn-eideann,             

seòmar bochdainn ’s cràidh,                                 

far a bheil an naoidhean creuchdach       

ri aonagraich gu bhàs.                                

MacLean’s own translation runs as follows:

Calvary

                        My eye is not on Calvary

                        nor on Bethlehem the Blessed,

                        but on a foul-smelling backland in Glasgow

                        where life rots as it grows;

                        and on a room in Edinburgh

                        a room of poverty and pain,

            where the diseased infant

            writhes and wallows till death

It’s a stark, angry poem, impatient with niceties of theology in the face of such human suffering. In the image of the dying child, MacLean brings together Bethlehem and Calvary, the manger and the cross; the baby writhing in its cot suffers a crucifixion, one repeated endlessly in the towns and cities of industrial Scotland. It’s a bitter indictment of a society, purportedly Christian, that can tolerate such slaughter of the innocents. 

Small wonder that those who fled such conditions for ‘God’s Own Country’ should desire, in the words of the Psalmist, to ‘live in the land, and enjoy security’; that   between the Dùn-eideann of MacLean’s poem and the Dunedin in New Zealand a dream should have arisen – the dream of the quarter-acre section, the house in its own plot of land, the vegetable patch to supply the household’s needs.

And small wonder that those who were forced from the land should continue to questions its ownership:

            Who owns these ample hills? - a lord who lives

            ten months in London and in Scotland two;

            O’er the wide moors with gun in hand he drives

            And, Scotland, this is all he knows of you!

Thus John Stuart Blackie in 1857. It would take another hundred years before another poet, Norman MacCaig, could ask the same question, and answer it with words not of hate or indignation, but of love:

            Who owns this landscape?

            Has owning anything to do with love?

            For it and I have a love-affair, so nearly human

            we even have quarrels.

‘Has owning anything to do with love?’ MacCaig’s almost naïve question takes us to the heart of the matter. It’s not that questions of ownership and dispossession are forgotten; rather they are subsumed in a fare more meaningful type of ‘possession’. Later in the poem, MacCaig returns to his question:

            Who owns this landscape?

The millionaire who bought it or

The poacher staggering downhill in the early morning

With a deer on his back?

Who possesses this landscape?

            The man who bought it or

            I who am possessed by it

We can detect in that last line something of the ‘Zen Calvinism’ that MacCaig jocularly identified as his creed. But we can also see a new dispensation, a wholesale reimagining of ‘possession’. It’s difficult to read MacCaig’s lines without remembering Jesus’ response to the Pharisees in Luke 17:

And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them, and said, 'The kingdom of God cometh not with observation. Neither shall they say, "Lo here", or "Lo there": for behold, the kingdom of God is within you.

And these two insights are connected. When you view the Land as something within you, something loved, it’s easier to extend that perspective to others. Love for the land. Love for your neighbour. Love for your enemy. It’s significant, I think, that one of the first major acts of the new Scottish Parliament was the Land Reform Bill of 2001, giving crofting communities the right to buy their land. But perhaps an even more far-reaching act of the Scottish Parliament was one not of justice but of mercy, even love: the freeing in 2009, on compassionate grounds, of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing. On the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, can we imagine a more hopeful, a more optimistic, a more loving gesture than this?       

W. B. Yeats said: ‘out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves, we make poetry’. I want to finish with a poem made out of the quarrel between two sides of Scotland’s Presbyterian inheritance. On the one hand, a celebratory vision that can see an everyday holiness in the natural world, and on the other, the old negativity. It’s by a Son of the Manse, Alistair Reid, and, like the MacDiarmid poem with which I began, it’s simply called ‘Scotland’:

                        It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet,

                        when larks rose on long thin strings of singing

and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels.

Greenness entered the body. The grasses

shivered with presences, and sunlight

stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills.

Walking into town, I saw, in a radiant raincoat,

the woman from the fish-shop. ‘What a day it is!’

cried I, like a sunstruck madman.

And what did she have to say for it?

Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves

as she spoke with their ancient misery:

‘We’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it!’

The poet’s ecstatic epiphany is rudely shattered by the woman’s refrain. But the poet was right to give the nay-saying woman from the fish-shop the last word. If we don’t succeed in pushing through our fear and anxiety and hatred to a Christian ethic of love – love for the land, love for our neighbour, love for our enemy – then we will pay for it. Amen.

Professor Liam McIlvanney holds the Stuart Chair in Scottish Studies at Otago University and is an Elder at Knox Church, Dunedin.

Sermon for 4 September 2011

Readings:

Proverbs 8:22-31; John 4:7-15

“The church is not a building – it’s a group of people who follow the Way of Jesus.”  I’ve been saying that quite often this week[1] in the follow-up to our Church Council decision not to accept the bill for full replacement insurance on this beautiful building, should it be destroyed by earthquake.  Even though we love this building dearly, we know buildings are not churches.   The church is a group of ordinary people, seeking to live authentically human lives; loving God and neighbour.   In some ways that sounds so simple – so trite – and yet, we who try to be Christian, know that being the Church is deeply challenging.  Today, as we baptise and welcome another member into our midst, it seems timely to consider again what it means to follow the Way of Jesus.

This last week has been one in which the juxtaposition of two languages has grated and screeched across my consciousness. For much of the week, the language of insurance has competed for attention with the language of faith: “Act of God” “Peace of Mind” and “Bottom Line” shouted out against “following the way of Jesus”, “peace that passes understanding” and “living water making us whole”.   On so many different occasions this week, the Light has been hard to see through the cracks; as the language of control and power has done battle with words of love and life.   Perhaps unsurprisingly, at times these languages have become entangled.  It’s been an unusual week, in that some, who have little to do with the church, have struck up conversations with me in the street, in cafes and shops, about our stance on insuring this building.  Without exception, they’ve encouraged our decision, even if not fully understanding – but somehow they sense that the world, with its escalating reliance on deficits of both dollars and compassion, is going slightly mad.  Perhaps the church offers a glimpse of hope.

It’s been quite a week, during which I’ve seen some examples of extraordinary kindness and generosity emerging out of suffering.  However, I’ve also been hearing an increasing number of stories about people caught up in the intense misery caused by corporates, institutions and governments wielding power, exercising greed and refuting responsibility for care.  How, I wonder, is such untold misery happening when, within every corporate, every institution, every government there are people, individuals – many of whom would describe themselves as Christian – trying to be compassionate?  I wonder, have we lost our way?  Have we forgotten what it means to follow Jesus? 

In my questioning, I turn again to Elizabeth Johnson’s Quest for the Living God, where you might hear, sung in a different key, echoes of Leonard Cohen’s “Every heart to love will come – but like a refugee”.[2]

Johnson[3] writes about three young German theologians[4], who “grew up under the dark shadow of National Socialism, and experienced firsthand the devastation of war during their teenage years.  All studied theology at universities just getting re-established in ravaged postwar Germany.  [Here,] the issue of horrific suffering” challenged their faith.[5]  Using the Holocaust as the starting point for their theological study, they found a powerful model for exploring what it means to be Christian.

 One of the three, “Dorothee Soelle tells of her young years being ‘defined by hunger, bombing, coldness, and need.  Spiritually, [she wrote] it was a ruined landscape as well.’  During the war her family hid the Jewish mother of one of her classmates in their attic.  One of her older brothers was killed on the Eastern front.  As a young theologian she travelled to the death camp in Auschwitz, Poland, an unusual move at the time.  There, where so many were brutally murdered, she felt the theological ground silently shift beneath her feet.  Her classical Lutheran training and piety had been founded on the God of classical theism with all the ‘omni’ attributes: omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence.  [God, all-powerful, all-knowing and always-present]  After her trip she could no longer understand how theology could talk like that. ‘In the light of Auschwitz’ [she wrote] ‘the assumption of the omnipotence of God seemed a heresy.’  [It was] ethically offensive and impossible to believe.”[6]

For Soelle and her colleagues, the suffering they saw and experienced became the context for the light to break through – the context for them in which to understand who and how God is in relation to humanity – the context to understand what it means to be those who walk the way of Jesus.   

Their concern was particularly for the “wretched excess of affliction that occurs from injury that people inflict unjustly on each other en masse: grinding poverty and hunger, slavery, domestic abuse, rape, murder, war, genocide”.  And to that list, we might add today the rape of Earth and its resources.  Johnson reflects “This is harm that destroys [people] and their ability to love; it assaults their identity and violently extinguishes their life.  Looking back over the history of the human race,” she writes, “such suffering is a red thread that runs through the whole bloody tapestry.” [7]

That thread continues its run through our lives today.

We who have lived in recent times in middle class Aotearoa have oft times tried ignoring or avoiding such suffering.  We have lived our charmed lives in this so-called lucky country - not through any particular merit of our own (although we often kid ourselves that we have achieved it all by ourselves – and others could do just like us, if only they would pull themselves up by their bootstraps).   We have assumed we have a right to a comfortable life, which we manage tightly within our own control.  When the storm comes and the cracks start to appear, we try to maintain what we believe is our right; because if we don’t, we’re not sure how to achieve meaning; and when the cracks appear in other peoples’ lives, we’re not quite sure how to respond.  Elizabeth Johnson suggests that our attempts to avoid pain – our own and others – result in “boredom, stagnation, inability to experience intense joy – in a word, apathy”.  This state of being, she suggests, is particularly noticeable in young people today.[8]

In trying to shape their faith within the context of “massive public suffering and the middle-class attempt to ignore it, the young German [theologians] began to use the term ‘political theology’” ... theology that connects talk about God with what is happening in the city ... holding those who claim faith to be accountable in the public arena.   They criticised the narrow, private view of faith, which allowed churches to collude with Hitler and his regime. 

And, like those young people, we too, as people of faith, are drawn into the public arena, to speak into the places where we see economic, corporate and government policies robbing people of hope.

In developing their stream of political theology, the young Germans aligned themselves in the prophetic tradition, within which Jesus also lived and taught; a tradition highlighted in today’s Gospel, where Light comes breaking through a multitude of cracks within the multiple layers of oppression and abuse found in this story.  Into her deep suffering, Jesus offers the despised Samaritan woman not insurance, but assurance of a God who loved the loveless, even when their lives are shaken to the core.

 “Post-Holocaust political theology rediscovered a God of pathos deeply involved with the pain of the world.... a God who feels intensely: loves, cares, is glad, gets angry over injustice, urges, prods, forgives, is disappointed, gets frustrated, suffers righteous indignation, weeps, grieves, promises, pours out mercy, rejoices, consoles, wipes away tears, and loves some more.”[9]

This is the God within whom our discipleship is shaped.  In following the way of Jesus we seek to let go ideas of God that bolster our own need to be in control.  In being the church, the Body of Christ, we too become involved in the pain of the world, challenging the dark forces which cause suffering; offering, instead, hope to all people.  Today as Tracey is baptised – indicating her commitment to follow the way of Jesus – we acknowledge that we too walk this path in company with her and all members of the universal church – as together we seek to live in the Light and Love of Christ, whose people we are.

Lord Jesus we belong to you, you live in us, we live in you;

we live and work for you – because we bear your name.[10]

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[1]see, for example,  http://www.3news.co.nz/Dunedins-churches-struggling-after-ChCh-quakes/tabid/309/articleID/224189/Default.aspx

[2] Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”

[3] Elizabeth A. Johnson Quest for the Living God (2008).

[4] Jurgen Moltmann, Dorothee Soelle and Johann Baptist Metz.

[5] Johnson, p.53.

[6] Johnson, p.53-54.

[7] Johnson, p.55.

[8] Johnson, p.55.

[9] Johnson p56-57.

[10] “Lord Jesus, we belong to you” words © J.W. Kleinig, Together in Song 686