July 26, 2020

Peter Lineham

Social Service Sunday     Romans 8:26-28, 35-39     Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

JASPER CALDER AND THE CHOIR

It was the last few weeks of World War One, when Auckland was overwhelmed by the influenza epidemic. The vicar of St Matthew’s Rev William Eugene Gillam, who had done distinguished service as a chaplain on troop ships in the first three years of the war was out of action, very ill, and the curate, who was holding the fort in the fashionable church, had thrown himself into the needs of the community, volunteering on the emergency ambulance service. Not surprisingly, he came down with the flu himself, and in the terrible first week of November, services were cancelled at St Matthew’s. Out of his heroic work, Calder was idolised by the poorer members of the congregation, and when Gillam finally announced his resignation, they mounted a petition that Calder might succeed him. The key organisers of the petition were the choir. When the appointment of the vicar of Hawera was announced the choir walked out, and its leading singers stuck with Calder in all of his latest ventures. It is from this controversial split that the City Mission was born.

Jasper was unashamedly a populist. He loved success, he loved a crowd, he fed off adulation. He was “the chief”. His first concern was never with social concern.

He got on the wrong side of Bishop Averill who led the diocese of Auckland for 25 years. – Quite an achievement when his father was William Calder the long-time vicar of All Saints Ponsonby.

His sports services at Grey Lynn. His casual comments about gambling. Then his willingness to allow others to campaign for him to be vicar of St Matthew’s when he was serving as curate there. The choir went on strike.

There is no real evidence of social concern at that point.

He then is brought in to run the evening services at Holy Sepulchre late in 1919, and in the light of the St Matthew’s experience preaches a sermon on the need for church reform (to curb the power of Bishop Averill) and is immediately dismissed by the vestry.

His idea to form a city mission comes out of this. He supposedly ran it past Averill on the afternoon he left for the 1920 Lambeth Conference.

There was a lot of concern at that time that the workers were losing contact with the church, and the Methodists increasingly looked at social issues. The Anglican Diocese of Auckland was also concerned, and their social issues committee was active (although its solution was probably the temperance one.)

Jasper Calder probably had little awareness of these issues. He stumbled into them.

He began with services in a movie theatre, using a dance orchestra. It was all hearty fun entertainment religion.

Other – for example the Dock Street Mission of this church, and the various Methodist Missions – were quite active. But Calder soon discovered that the pastoral work of his mission tended to focus on men appearing in court on petty charges, and he found himself confronted with need.

THE CITY MISSION CHANNELLING SOCIAL CONCERN

It could be argued that for many years the City Mission as a result was based on ideas of charitable aid rather than justice. This approach has, of course, haunted the church. Appealing to our desire to do something, the agency is also helpful to get the poor off the streets and make the city safer. But it never had a holistic approach to social justice, and certainly not a consistent Christian view of social justice. Consequently, it has always been vulnerable to pressure from the secular government and city council for whom it is a convenient body.

Yet it is still a Mission, and as I ended writing the history of the Mission I was increasingly worried about why it was still called this, and what should, be distinctive about the social services of the church. But there I ran into a problem.

THE FOLLIES OF SOCIAL SERVICES SUNDAY

The Anglican Church in New Zealand recommends that parishes set aside one Sunday a year for social services Sunday. But that is about where it ends. For no denomination is more confused and directionless on social services in the community than the Anglican Church. It is not that the church does nothing. From very early on the church established most of the first orphanages in New Zealand, and today the scale of its social services is almost certainly larger than what anyone else does. (The Catholic Church may once have been larger with its huge number of people in religious orders, but that is a shadow of its former scale.) But the problem is that it remains a series of random services, operating very independently. In the Auckland Diocese, the ATWC, the City Mission and especially the Selwyn Foundation are huge operations, but they struggle to cooperate with each other (and the Selwyn Foundation would not even let me look at their minute books even though they branched off from the City Mission). There is or was a Commissioner of Social Responsibility for the whole church, now replaced by a Three Tikanga Social Justice Commission, but it just has Michael Hughes, General Secretary of the church as its interim chair.

The reason for this is that there is no clear social vision in Anglicanism. There have been attempts to organise such responses. At the end of World War One the Auckland Diocese like the Christchurch Diocese, attempted to set up a board for social responsibility, but effectively never got beyond temperance. Then in the 1970s and the 1990s there were attempt to create an overarching structure in this diocese, but the big organisations ensured that it had no power. Things are better in Christchurch, where all the agencies respond to a single Missioner, and in Wellington, where old people’s provision is under the City Mission, but without a shared value system or policy, none is really possible. Even the city missions have very little cooperation. This is in striking contrast to the other churches. However the Presbyterian organisation with its formidable national organisation effectively disaffiliated from the Church and Methodist and Catholic social services have struggled with resource issues. And the heart of the problem for Anglicans is there is a general feeling that the church ought to be doing more, but no coherent theology of social engagement. During the Depression, when many other churches gained this, Anglicans remained astonishingly cautious. The Church has it clear left wing elements (strong among clergy) and right wing elements, dominant among laity, who get concerned when anything other than a charitable model is proposed.

Now we might have got further in thinking of a model of social responsibility with the appropriate readings for the day. However it is emblematic of the problem that I am working from these unpromising readings. Still there is something to learn.

UNPROMISING PASSAGES

These are unlikely passages for Social Services Sunday, and of course they were never meant for this purpose. However, we might note the following:

The Mustard Seed

The Kingdom of Heaven is consistently compared to a slow process.

The smallness of the seed was noticed by Diodorus Siculus and Antigonus of Chrystus. Actually there are smaller seeds but this was the one that was proverbially tiny.

It is a tiny seed growing to a bush – indeed quite an invasive bush since it grows so easily, says Pliny. Moreover, here it is in a field rather than a garden as in other gospels. The case of micro credit. The small and humble has great potential. Deliberately this is not a cedar of Lebanon, and nor are the fully grown bushes much in themselves but they would sure fill the garden.

The mustard seed tells us that the kingdom is hidden.

And perhaps this is the story of the City Mission, small but persistent.

Why is the Kingdom so insignificant? The tiny mustard seed, the 4 m plant rather odd for the garden. (We would worry if birds sat on out carrots). Ae the bird symbolic of the Gentiles – probably.

The kingdom of heaven starts in an unpromising way, but the verdict needs to await its full growth.

The Yeast

The kingdom of heaven does not come with an approved label but with an inner potency. This is a homely image although the quantity goes beyond this. It seems to be about 50 lb or 22 kg. In this case this is the village breadmaker.

But Leaven is slightly disturbing as an image for the kingdom. “Common, uneducated fishermen and farmers, carpenters and women, tax collectors and disreputable characters – it would all seem rather distasteful. But God is like that. He takes distasteful characters and transforms them, and then transforms society through them.” (Matthew 13 in BST).

Note the scale of the cooking operation in the yeast parable. So it compares to the other parables of growth. The dough is folded over and over and slowly (and she can’t see it) the goodness is spread.

The kingdom of heaven has immense value and demands total commitment to it. Perhaps in the devotion of some of those women workers in the City Mission much less noticed, the matrons, the wrappers of food parcels, the library books deliverers, the Waiheke camp workers.

But perhaps also it is the lives of the people mixed up and inspired by something from outside, the leaven.

The Treasure in a Field

Imagine how many people have trampled across this field and had no idea what lay beneath them.

The poor man finds the treasure by accident. Rabbis very clear not that finders are keepers (although they have a right) but ensured by the purchase.

Palestine was rumoured to be full of buried treasure from the centuries of invading armies. The man finds the trunk but does not want to draw attention by digging it up.

The morality and indeed the legality of the man who found treasure in a field then buying the field at its ordinary price is very dubious and that is part of the shocking element. And how can one buy the things of God? But it is what he had to sell that is striking.

Now one colourful expositor suggests that the burying is precisely about the hiding of who we are and by works of mercy and generosity living the values of the kingdom. But that is so directly contrary to the light under a bushel that it cannot be correct. That sounds like the kind of special pleading that the City Mission tries to pretend that it is not a mission of the church.

So where might we discover this treasure? Presumably anywhere. It is in the field, and the field is the world.

In essence this is about the totality of commitment, embracing far more than expected in order to possess the treasure.

The Pearl

The rich man finds the pearl, and this was perfection. It is the powerful appeal of perfection.

Notice that this is a deliberate search unlike the accidental finding of the treasure.

Somebody complained to me that there is no sense in this decision. The one pearl and the many pearls have equal value. But this misses the aesthetic desire of the one perfect pearl, which every collector would know. Oh to possess the first edition of Shakespeare’s first folio or Darwin’s Origin of Species. Or the original Authorised Version of the Bible. And at various times this focused desire to make a difference has focused the social services hugely, but then they have run into the problem that Christians and in particular Anglicans, have not been all that committed to the social work. Will the church make any costly decisions? Or will the need to build a cathedral or protect failing parishes, take away our sense of mission. And could it also be that social services are sometimes set against other aspects of the mission of the church, when really there should be a sense of a single, united, purposeful desire to express God’s desire for the world to be loved and embraced and touched.

The Net

The kingdom of heaven touches and catches up all sorts. But the real quality of what has been caught and its real value will take time to see.

The parable along with the parable of the weeds does seem to deal with the persistence of evil. We need to be careful about seeing this as the anticipation of the failure in the church. (What Augustine called the corpus permixtum). More likely it is the presence of evil in the world and the purpose of God to purify the world.

The bad fish would have been non-kosher fish (fish without fins).

The further aspect is impatience. We want to see God act now. This is about God at work slowly, quietly in an inner fashion.

Think of the huge influence of the City Mission.

The net shows God will bring all things into judgement. Judas.

Perhaps in the dragnet we should notice the emphasis on all kinds of fish. People say this is unliely but this is a dragnet hauled between two boats.

Actually I think it is that latter parable which appeals to me in the present context.

This tells a great deal about the City Mission.

Conclusion:

Renewing our Concern for the World as Christians

My sense is that rundown churches are quite happy to do quite a bit. But the people who really make a difference are there volunteering at Tre Heata or in the opportunity shop, or working through the prison ministries, or touching the refugees and the orphans both here and throughout the world. And in the end, surely we need to be renewed in the mission of Jesus himself since that day when at Nazareth he took as his text

18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives

and recovering of sight to the blind,

to set at liberty those who are oppressed,

19 to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour.” [Luke 4:18-19]

I think only then will our mission as a church have a coherence and less institutional defensiveness.