April 18, 2010

John Salmon

Easter 2     Acts 9:1-6     John 21:1-19

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Introduction

The Easter season – these weeks between Easter and Pentecost – traditionally focuses on unpacking the Easter stories, as foundations for Christian faith.

But that’s really hard for someone like me… I’ve never been able to swallow either the “dead man walking” version of Easter Day, or the “he died for my sins” understanding of Good Friday. And the post-resurrection “appearances” we heard about this morning provoke all kinds of arguments in my mind…

So I ask, how can we be ‘church’ for people with a view like mine?

1. The ‘Progressive’ Dilemma

I’m telling you what you already know – as a congregation that speaks of itself as ‘progressive’, and aware of the work Glynn has consistently done on this, together with Clay and others. Yet I’m aware that it isn’t easy to be progressive in relation to central Christian stories like those of Easter, and at the same time remain a recognisable part of the Christian community.

I think it helps to keep aware of the dilemma. It’s one that many institutions find in trying to be relevant and connected: how to be in continuity with our heritage while being up-to-date and contextually relevant.

I’ve worried away at that dilemma all my ministry – and most sharply, perhaps, in theological education, with its aim of preparing people for church leadership in a changing world. Churches that dare to call themselves ‘progressive’, face it all the time. We certainly find that at St Columba in Grey Lynn…

How do we make use of the post-resurrection stories we heard this morning? How do we work with what we have received, be faithful to the core of that, and at the same time be contemporary, relevant to the thought-patterns and questions of our context? My view is that the key lies somewhere in the complex idea of remembering: how do we remember?

2. Remembering as Returning

One tendency – or temptation – is to think of remembering as returning – returning to certain key markers. I sometime speak of myself as a new kind of Anglican, a new kind of “C and E” – one that goes to church each week, except Christmas and Easter…

And the reason for this is that my experience in even quite progressive congregations shows a tendency to return to the symbols and liturgies that re-state the tradition around those celebrations.

The stories are told in the usual way, the old hymns or carols are sung, the liturgical patterns are repeated. The cross and the angels re-appear. Many of the accretions of church and cultural history return to the sanctuary for the occasion. The words of the liturgy continue to reflect old ideas and patterns…

We argue that we want to connect with people from the wider community who know and want these familiar symbols and patterns. I understand that: but there are other places – other churches – that meet the need for such a remembrance of return. Someone like me is re-alienated from the tradition by that act.

Another reason given, is that these celebrations and stories are so central to ‘being Christian’ or ‘being church’ that they have to be returned to and held on to. There’s truth in that – but this congregation, with its constant re-working of symbols and ideas and its radical billboards, is aware that the insights and issues of Easter and Christmas stories can be presented without the traditional word-pictures.

I do not believe the dilemma is well resolved by remembering through returning to the traditions just because that might be familiar, what people want, or what the church expects.

What’s progressive about that?

3. Remembering as Rejecting

Of course, we can be tempted the other way! Our remembering can be rejecting – we remember the tradition, all right, we remember the stories, their interpretations, the symbols and liturgies that have been built around them, but we reject those. We then move right way from the core stories and their message. Instead we focus on things like seasonal symbols – appropriate given the origins of a spring festival like Easter, but making a complete break away from Christian themes, if it’s all about autumn leaves and the dying of the summer.

There are times when I’ve been there. I’ve been part of groups (some that have met in this building!) that want nothing to do with anything from the tradition, but aim to build new stories, new symbols, new liturgies. In settings like that, today’s stories will simply be ignored… I have a strong empathy with that: there’s so much garbage in what we have been taught, so much twisting of the core insights, so much rigid ritualising, that it can seem irrelevant to hold to any of it.

Many who get to that point leave the church, and in order to find a way of helping them, we have tried to strip away everything we can’t believe or which seems hopelessly outdated. Yet few are really attracted by that, and any sense of ‘being Christian’ or ‘being church’ becomes very tenuous indeed.

I don’t think that’s not an effective progressive strategy either.

4. Remembering as Reframing

I’d rather we worked remembering, not the superficial stuff or the feel-good bits or the medieval interpretations or the 19th century liturgical formulations, but the deep-down insights and themes of the Bible and Christian ideas. I now consider the most helpful progressive response to the tradition-relevance dilemma is in remembering as reframing.

The tradition is not lost, we engage with it, we remember it at depth – but it is not returned to as a finished product, it is not told in the old familiar way.

Here we seek to talk about and ritualise significant human concerns and experience, like the Easter representation of ongoing suffering and of the renewal of hope and possibility – but without the cross or the empty tomb. Or the appearance to Paul is seen in terms of the deep shifts of insight we can experience as humans, and the stories about catching and eating fish as relevant to setting of goals and priorities.

We will tell the stories, but we re-tell them, too, so that we scrape off the accretions of old ways of thinking. We re-tell them, so our interpretations relate directly to our contemporary personal, social, and political lives.

Conclusion

Even progressives need to remember. Remembering in a way that keeps us in touch with our heritage while reframing that heritage for here, now, is – I think – the mark of a progressive Christian.