January 24, 2010

Glynn Cardy

Epiphany 3     Luke 4:14-21

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Jesus was a hit. He was the new phenomenon in Galilee, and the locals were proud. Then in Luke 4 he came home to Nazareth and read to them from 2nd Isaiah. Full of expectation the home-town crowd encouraged him to explain the text. They wanted to hear how he would cure their poverty, blindness and oppression.

In v.23ff Jesus doesn’t explain, but just mightily peeves them off. He describes himself as a prophet, like Elijah who though there were many poor in Israel helped only the widow in Sidon, and like Elisha who though there were many lepers in Israel helped only Naaman the Syrian. His audience was enraged. How dare he be a prophet for outcasts and Gentiles but not for them! How dare he assume that those who raised him, who nurtured him in the faith, were not worthy of his ministry! How dare the locus of his ministry be directed towards those who did not obey the God-given laws of religion!

The reading Jesus gave in the synagogue was not offensive – as most of the Bible is not offensive to Christians. It was rather the choice Jesus made about the direction of his ministry that gave offence.

Jesus was not a focus of unity. He was not kind and considerate of everybody. He seemed to favour those that the good Saturday-by-Saturday pious didn’t. He wouldn’t have made a good bishop, and nobody righteous would have elected him.

If Jesus had a PR advisor he could have done the whole preaching in the Nazareth Synagogue thing very differently. He could have begun by saying that God loved everyone – ‘you, me, them’ – and God had chosen people for various tasks. If it had been written by then [which of course it wasn’t] he could have used that Pauline body metaphor of us all belonging to each other. He could have helped them to see that he was their expression, their ambassador of God’s love to others. He could have worked them round so that they could have all affirmed each other and had a nice hug at the end.

Instead he got them offside. Like prophets of the past he wasn’t much of a crowd pleaser. He failed diplomacy school.

I was sent to Anglican diplomacy school in 1982. Yet it was then a school that had recently disregarded the Church’s subservience to unity and had embarked on a different path. 

Some five months before I started the Springbok Rugby team had toured New Zealand and met with fierce opposition. The country was divided, so too the Church. St John’s College, due to the actions of a number of students and staff, was seen as clearly aligned with the anti-apartheid movement. A number were beaten. Threats were made to burn the College down.

In the Church there were those opposed to the tour due to their desire to see the end of apartheid, there were those opposed to the tour due to the divisions it was creating in New Zealand, and there were those supportive of the tour due to their belief in sport being non-political.

While many opposed racist tours, including this Church of St Matthew, I’d be surprised if they were the majority. My guess is that the overwhelming rejection of the Government’s pro-tour stance by the Church was due to the divisions being exposed. The Church has a long history of being opposed to anything that exposes or creates division. Mostly it favours unity before justice.

I therefore arrived at theological college in the aftermath of one of the most visible contentious political protests this country has known. The priority of unity in the Church and nation seemed to have temporarily taken a backseat to justice for blacks in South Africa. It was extraordinary. 

In 1982 Maori land rights was the pertinent issue at the College. There was no Waitangi Tribunal, no legislation that enabled judicial assessment of past injustices back to 1840, and plenty of fear and prejudice. Bastion Point was still very much an alive issue. The settlement with Ngati Whatua O Orakei that we know today, that benefits not only the local iwi but the public of Auckland with a wonderful green space, was a long way off.

The so-called ‘celebrations’ at Waitangi were also a strong point of contention. Each year the Government tried to promulgate the myth that we were all one people whilst ignoring past injustices. Dignitaries gathered, the navy and band were there, and a Church service was held. Each year protesters gathered to refute the Government’s position and many Christians joined these protests.

In 1983 nine Christians were arrested for disrupting the Waitangi Church service. The circumstances seem almost comic today. An Anglican cleric, supportive of the Government and believing in the importance of unity, was primed to lead the outdoor service. Police lined up, shoulder-to-shoulder, down the pews looking for dissidents. Two young people, one of whom was Maori, were escorted out before the service begun on the suspicion that they might have been there to cause trouble. They’d done nothing but sit and pray.

At 3 minutes to the hour a group of six European clerics and laity stood up and began leading the service along the theme of repentance. The flustered Government-approved minister blubbered and directed the police, who led the six away. Later another unapproved cleric got up during the intercessions and offered a non-approved prayer. He too was led away. As were two theological students who had sackcloth under their clothes and sprinkled their heads with ash. I was one of them.

The weeks that followed provided a useful insight into the Church. While official Church statements had promoted justice for Maori, the arrest of the nine brought harsh condemnation from many religious quarters. It was as if the nine had created division in society. We were labeled anarchists, destructive of the unitive fabric of the nation.

Church unity is a by-product of following Jesus. When people work together, pray together, and suffer together for a common vision, then bonds are inevitability built. The vision comes first, then the commitment, and then the actions; a consequence being the building of unity. I suspect it’s similar for a nation.

When bishops, cathedrals, or clergy begin to describe their key task as building unity then alarm bells start to ring. Unity has taken the place of vision, or even worse unity has become the vision. 

Not so long ago a dean told me he wasn’t prepared to offer blessings to gay or lesbian couples because of his cathedral’s role in the unity of the diocese. He wasn’t prepared to act without the agreement of the whole diocese. 

A favourite verse of those who don’t want to do anything offensive is from First Corinthians where Paul talks deprecatingly about causing a brother or sister to stumble [8:13]. A conservative minority can, in this thinking, stall or prevent any change.

Bishop Jack Spong has been one critical of the Church's over-emphasis on unity. He says the priority of unity often supersedes the priority of truth. Truth however can be a fickle thing, and the basis for determining truth controversial. There are Christians, for example, who believe that Biblical truth condemns homosexual relationships as wrong and sinful. Others, such as me, would argue that the Bible is silent on committed relationships of equality between same-sex partners and, further, the Jesus movement was supportive of people and relationships outside of the heterosexual norm. 

Using the Bible as the sole standard for truth is therefore problematic. The wisdom, experience, and reasoning of the community are necessary. Yet still what is truth is not easily arrived at. It usually requires a choice to prioritize one or more values over others. Regarding same-sex relationships, for example, I prioritize the rights of a minority to enter into mutual loving relationships over the dominant tradition within Christianity of disparaging such relationships.

I would submit that to follow in the footsteps of the prophet Jesus one has to make choices, choices that have the strong possibility of putting one offside with the majority. Too often Christian leadership sees itself as maintaining the best of the past, sensitive to the needs of all the people, and being resistant to any change that will alienate support. This is the type of leadership that the institution affirms. It’s said to be caring. It doesn’t offend people. The altar of unity is very seductive. 

There are however a number of Christians and Christian leaders who walk a different, less trod path. They have chosen to turn their back on the vision of unity and instead, knowing their actions will be offensive, stand with the unpopular, the foreign, and the despised. The marginal are prioritized, not the mainstream. Many of the priests and laity of St Matthew’s have trod that path, and I too am proud to try and follow their example.