February 2, 2014

John Bluck

Candlemas Waitangi     Luke 2:22-40

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

There are places around this country, empty places now, where the spirit of hopefulness still hangs in the air, palpably, physically, like an aftertaste in your mouth. It lingers, because great things were meant to have happened there, long ago.

Port  Albert is such a place, just west of Wellsford. A great city was to have been built there, a 150 years ago. Now it’s a boat  ramp and  an empty mud flat. Jackson’s Bay is another place, south of Haast. A model village was planned there in the 1860’s. Now a few fruit trees remain on the edge of an inhospitable and dangerous beach that only crayfishers use.

And up the  Grey River to the north, hidden in a remote valley near Reefton is the town of Waiuta, up until 1951 a thriving gold mining settlement with its own hospital, bowling green and swimming pool, now a deserted ruin, slowly being swallowed by the surrounding bush.

All these locations could have been great places, had the gold not run out, the tides run differently, the soil been better, or even if a government ever found the courage to spread economic growth around the country, rather than letting it amass in Auckland.

The temple in Jerusalem was a great place, where the life of Israel was defined and framed by rituals and the hope of Israel was symbolised. It’s not surprising then that the parents took Jesus there after he was named and circumcised, and the rites of purification were performed and a sacrifice of doves was offered. Doves, because Joseph and Mary couldn’t afford a lamb which would have required them to have land and money.

But even with only doves to offer, it was a great moment for Jesus and his family to be in the temple, the most important building in Israel, the shrine that held a nation’s hope.

A shrine like the Lincoln Memorial, Westminster Abbey, the palace of Versaille. We don’t have the equivalent in Aotearoa. The Treaty House at Waitangi? The now destroyed cathedral in Christchurch? The Skytower? I don’t think so.

We know from bitter experience that it’s a dangerous thing to pin a people’s hope in a  building or a place, and certainly not before that hope is realised politically  and made secure, which is why the Jerusalem Temple has never been rebuilt, yet, though an alliance of messianic Jews and American fundamentalists would like that to happen tomorrow, just as a group of Christchurch campaigners led by Jim Anderton would still like to rebuild the ruined cathedral in the square.

And we know that this gospel reading is not a call for a rebuild. Because by the time this story was written down, the temple has been destroyed by the Roman military, as punishment for rebellion. The hope in this story is not about physical restoration but spiritual incarnation. The promise that in this boy Jesus, God is about to do something remarkable.

Spectacular though the temple was, on its elevated platform that dominates the city, ironically its occupied today by a mosque, this is not a story about architecture or real estate.

It’s about inspiration, in this case of two venerated leaders, a priest called Simeon and a prophetess called Anna. They recognise in this boy brought before them, the one they had been waiting to meet all their lives. The hope they see in Jesus is overwhelming beyond words, and so they use the hallowed language of Messiah, the one in whom we see what God might be like, the one who will demonstrate what God’s justice and love and mercy might mean in practice, here and now.

What is God like, how would God act, who would God hang out with? Look to this boy as he grows and talks and travels. Watch this space.

The building, the rites and rituals, are necessary because we can’t tell these stories in abstraction. They have to start somewhere, take some physical and human shape. God always needs a physical address, a location, a body, in order to be heard and understood by people like us. God is never an idea, an abstraction. You need a temple or a church or two, or a mud flat or an old mine, preferably not a new one, as a place to find God in, to find hope from.

The issue is whether the hope endures, even when the building is long gone and the place is forgotten. That’s what the cardboard cathedral in Christchurch is all about, why the descendents of the Port Albert settlers held a sesquicentennial last year and still call themselves proudly the Albertlanders.

And why the ghost town of  Waiutu would be a great place for the Labour Party and the Greens to work out their mining policies together preferably well before the election campaign heats up.

The hope that Jesus holds for the world, that Simeon and Anna saw so clearly, leaves us stuttering for words to explain.  Simeon chanted a poem instead, and we’ve been singing it ever since. It’s called the Nunc Dimitis and it’s attracted  more marvellous musical settings than most of us have had hot dinners. Because it does something musically, that eludes us verbally, way beyond  the theological vocabulary of Judaism.

How do you translate the hope for the world that is held in the Jesus story?

The answers to that question from really holy and devout people are worth listening to. The Mother Teresa’s, the Bishop Tutu’s, the Simeon’s and Anna’s of today. Have you seen those BBC programmes about great art  hosted by Sister Wendy whose faith radiates through her commentary, or the New Zealand documentary called Gardening with Soul, that follows 90 year old Sister Loyola Gavin , armed with secateurs and walking stick, around her Island Bay garden.

All of these answers start with something physical, like an orphanage or a campaign against apartheid, or an art museum or a garden, but the inspiration lies in a person who is able to glimpse the hope God holds and hold it out to us, fresh minted, vivid, accessible now.

The magic happens when God’s hope is broken out of its shell of ritual and religion, venerated buildings and  traditions, held so tightly and protected so carefully that no one outside can enjoy them.

Last week I saw a pilot video of what could be a film about the hope the missionaries held out to Maori back in 1814. Such is the prejudice against that early missionary movement that we’re struggling to celebrate it at all in this 200th anniversary year. Our church has invested minimal money in marking this year that gave us the church we enjoy today. Nationally we’re spending peanuts and St Matthews has no budget item for it yet, either. Originally it was a Maori Church – Te Hahi Mihinare, led by missionaries and Maori catechists who promoted, translated, distributed the Treaty of Waitangi we take a public holiday to honour this week. Then it became a settler church with a constitution that we took a century and a half to get around to rewriting to give Maori a place a stand again.

The film which might never be made unless someone is willing to write the cheque for $35.000, would tell the story of the hope these missionaries brought with them. It’s a hope of a society where Maori and Pakeha could live side by side, and increasingly in the same bed, with justice and mutual respect, without killing or eating or robbing each other, without legally stealing or illegally confiscating land, or destroying forests or poisoning the water, or raping the sea.

This hope is utopian, visionary, it uses the language of the kingdom of God, the new reign of justice and love. The thesis of the filmmaker Matthew Hand, who is a recent arrival in New Zealand, is that the progress we have made, however halting, towards that vision for Aoteaora, is hugely indebted to the legacy of those first missionaries, and unlike anywhere else in the world.

Try and convince TVNZ to tell that story. Or the New Zealand Herald.

Until that media conversion happens, we have to get on with telling this story of hope ourselves, as church, as guardians of that legacy.

Our problem is that we tend to tell the story to ourselves, in a way that makes it hard to hear for anyone outside buildings like this.

In bolder, braver days, the church did try to be more visible. The origin of Candlemas, the day in the year set aside for this story of Jesus being presented in the Temple, is that hundreds of candles were lit to symbolise to the light held out to all the Gentiles which is another way of saying all the world. And people loved this symbolism of candles so much it quickly became a major feast day, even for people who didn’t go to church much, often, hardly ever.

In this bicentennial year, on this Waitangi Day, will we dare to talk  confidently about the legacy of hope that the missionaries entrusted to us, and will we dare to translate that legacy into just and loving action, to bring an end to child poverty and abuse, to promote a living wage and affordable housing, and an economy that shares its successes? In this election year, will we look for candidates willing to be accountable to and respectful of this legacy we hold?

To do any of this means we need to know our story and be proud of it, repentant as well because it’s conflicted story, about broken people struggling to do their best, failing as often as they succeeded, but always holding onto the hope that God would stay with them and light their way and keep a candle burning.

This Candlemas, this Waitangi Day this week, needs hopeful people trusting the story of how God has brought us this far by God’s grace. St Matthews is no temple, but it isn’t a bad place to have as a way station on this journey of faith.