Recent Comment from Newsletter & Worship

From the Minister

Rob F.
[ photo of Rob F. ]
There is something about Spring that makes me want to walk in the warm sun and get closer to the world about me. The snow on the mountains beckons, the hills are shining, the sky’s that particular blue that sings with delight, the birds are singing new songs. The world is alive with a sense of “God” that echoes within us — Spring!

As I watch the blossom swell and burst I’m also aware of the fragility of Spring. When the winds come, as they do, the blossom drops all over the place, and soon enough it’s replaced with leaves, and in some trees, fruit. Nothing lasts is the other Spring tune. September means that this year is moving past with speed. A reminder to make
sure I don’t fritter precious moments away.

This morning I opened the latest Touchstone newspaper that comes into the Parish porch. Within it were two things that caught my eye.I’ve been preoccupied with the future of St Ninian’s — with how we might become a place of spiritual nourishment — much like the bird I can hear singing outside the office right now. There’s a letter by Marg Schrader, a past moderator about her L’Arche community experiences. She writes of an eclectic group of people at the Open Night of Prayer reflecting on four questions. ‘Who is God?’, ‘What is the divine?’, ‘What is sacred for you?’, ‘How do you pray?’ These are basic questions for us to ponder too, and to begin to share our responses. We’ve often had conversations about the ways our understanding of God has changed and developed over our years.
These four questions offer a framework for your reflection.

The second eye-catcher for me was an article by Mark Gibson called ‘Deep connexion — a way to transform the Church for mission’. Mark writes of the necessity to rediscover the intimacy of the local. The outward being of church arises from the inward movement that seeks to heal the broken connections of humanity. Again, it’s a reminder that church and effectiveness are grounded in relationship that is deeply exploratory of faith and spirit. As we create community where there is a depth of relating, a welcoming of
strangers and a compassion for those who struggle, we come closest to being Christian, I think. Once we get past faith as a series of right ideas about God, and find ourselves doing Christianity, we are linked to the roots of our faith again. And in so-doing, we find the purpose of St Ninian’s. A congregation our recent visitor Mark calls “vibrant” with not a young person in sight! It was a new concept for him, and it seems often for the wider church too. Growing a church of “older people” seems to me to be an admirable thing to
do. But maybe that’s because I’m...  !

Arohanui,
Rob

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Forest Affairs

A book Review by Dorothy Huntjacket picture

“FOREST AFFAIRS” is a title with a double entendre for a novel with two main themes

The affairs of a family beset by stress and lack of fulfilment and the impact of changes in the management of the forest adjacent to the village where they live are the main themes in Roger Keey’s latest novel, “Forest Affairs”.

The author is well equipped to write about forestry development having been involved in research into drying technology for timber for many years and taking a lively interest in a local forest near his home in Hanmer in North Canterbury. He states in the Author’s Note at the beginning of the book. “This work is one of pure fiction.” This applies to the setting in the township of Waiwera and the forestry company New Zealand Pinelands. Readers, however, can be grateful for his involvement with a trust concerned with maintaining the public values of a large plantation forest, as from this background he writes with an authentic voice about the importance of public access to the forest near Waiwera.

The central character in the novel is Dave Spencer, a forester who gained a degree in forestry with first class honours and was satisfied to return to Waiwera and be employed in a management role in the forest that has meant so much to him all his life.

When the forest is sold to a companY which views the forest as a source of immediate income without any concern for its future health and growth, Dave is faced with a clash between his old loyalties and a job where he must abide by the views of the new forest owners.

The management meetings held in the new forestry company are described in some detail and with a degree of realism which appears to be drawn from the author’s own ex~rience. Meaningless smooth talk is used to gloss over changes which the long-term members of staff would find difficult to accept.

For me the narration of the family’s day to day life is made much more interesting because the author skilfully weaves into the story a number of issues which impact on the lives of many New Zealand families, such as the clash of values between generations, changes in values when commercialism predominates over earlier
policies of conservation, stress in marriages, and changes in rural townships.

Among Roger Keey’s diverse interests are sketching and painting the rural landscape, and it is with an artist’s eye that he vividly describes scenes in the forest.

I enjoyed reading this novel and have continued to think about the issues raised which have relevance for so many New Zealanders at this time.

“Forest Affairs” can be obtained from Moniclare Press. P0 Box 31 080, Christchurch 8444 at a cost of S25 — S4.50 for postage and packaging. Orders can be emailed to: r.keey@xtraco.nz

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Moments

by Mark RobinsonMark

Moments may seem to disappear, we only have them for a short time, but thank God moments last in our memories and we are able to remember. My time at St Ninian’s was full of moments. It was a
time that is a true blessing, and full of moments that I want to hold and to share with others. It was a time when I met with complete strangers, who I now call good friends.

Good friends not only because we shared a memorable communion, or conversations around the kitchen table or wonderful meals at dinner and lunch, but also because of the warmth and ease with which I was welcomed into St Ninian’s and into your homes.

There were many important conversations and experiences that I was engaged with, but certainly of great importance to the church here in the UK is the conversation about the lack of young people in
many of our churches. A congregation that lacks children and youth was generally seen as heading toward stagnation, with no real futare, but not so here at St Ninian’s, where the lack of children and young people is not viewed as a problem.

At St Ninian’s I saw a vibrant people, alive with plans for the future and worshipping in the full context of the environment. The images and ideas used in worship come from all around, from the mountains to the city streets. The work in the community and together as church, have all led to a form of church that is refreshing to see. St Ninian’s has a vision for the future and is actively working to realise that vision. I was totally engaged with everyone I met and spoke with, all helped to make my placement enjoyable and worthwhile. I
have learned much. I am inspired.

While I am happy to be home, the time at St Ninians seemed to go too quickly. The month seemed to have disappeared, almost as if I were not actually there, but when family, friends and colleagues ask for full details of my trip, the moments come back to me and I am happy to talk about my experience.

What I have learned from you at St Ninians will help inform my future ministry I am certain that I will remember each and every face, every voice and hopefully every name. I cherish the moments, enjoyed Kiwi
humour and all that Fve seen. Thank God for moments, they only come around in what seems to be fleeting bursts in time, but they make lasting memories Thank you St Ninian’s.

Mark Robinson

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Forgiveness

Forgiveness is often misunderstood, often treated cheaply. We use the words of the Lord's Prayer most weeks, forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.
'Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors' is the literal translation of the standard Lord's Prayer as found in Matthew 6:12. Releasing debt was a common image for forgiveness. The image of debt is helpful in considering the meaning of forgiveness. When someone is in our debt we have power over them. To forgive is to give up power. Forgiving is a form of giving. We no longer hold something back in our relationship with someone. Notice that we use words like 'hold' in expressions like, 'hold resentment'. Holding back is destructive for others and for ourselves. The movement of the gospel reflects the being of God. God created: God gave. The giving is also seen in the coming of Christ. It is a giving that goes the whole journey,. even to the cross. It is the losing of protected life, the refusal to be devoted to a false self which keeps people at bay. It is a generosity which sets the cat among the pigeons, because it defies the arithmetic of deserving. Forgiveness in this sense is relational. Too often it is reduced to 'sorry' without restoration, without reconciliation.

Reconciliation and restoration of relationship is the heart of forgiveness. And it is the heart that counts, not the head. For an apology is not forgiveness. Forgiveness is a process of reconciling the hurts that are done, absorbed and lived with in such a way that all parties are able to move on. But not to forget. Forgiving and forgetting are not helpful mates in this process.
A Jewish writer, David R. Blumenthal, in an article on repentance outlines the process he understands to be behind forgiveness. It is a 5 step process which can be entered into at any place, but all five steps must happen for forgiveness to be present he says.

The first is recognition of one's sins as sins. "Recognition of one's sins as sins" is an act of one's intelligence and moral conscience. It involves knowing that certain actions are sinful, recognizing such actions in oneself as more than just lapses of praxis, and analyzing one's motives for sin as deeply as one can. It also involves realizing that such acts are part of deeper patterns of relatedness and that they are motivated by some of the most profound and darkest elements in our being.

The second step is remorse - not thinking, but feeling. Remorse brings up feelings of profound regret, sometimes of feeling trapped. Sometimes remorse is yoked to deep anguish or despair - remorse can bring deep shame, and regret, and be a motivation to approach the problem of mistrust that has arisen.

The 3rd step Blumethal writes is desisting from sin - in other words, changing our behaviour to stop doing whatever it was that caused the breakdown in relationship. Often, when an apology is given, behaviour doesn't change. The ruts are deep, and so we can easily fall back into the past behaviour patterns. The process of forgiveness requires a reflection and a determination to change. Until there is evidence of behavioural change, there is nothing to base being forgiven on.

The 4th step is restitution where possible. It's not always possible to put back what has been taken. It's not always possible to put right what was made wrong. Damage is often psychological and can't be fixed by a replacement policy. But forgiveness requires an act of restitution of some sort - material where that's what's required, or reputation, or sometimes the acknowledgement that the other needs space away from us to recover without pressure.

The 5th step is confession - owning before God that remorse is real and taking responsibility for our part in the breakdown in relationship. Blumethal notes that in religious practice there are prayers of confession and rituals of cleansing. But there is also the personal aspect of the heart of each person acknowledging before God that things have gone astray.

Forgiveness, in other words, is a process, not just a small action however meaningful. In community it is a vital process because the reality is that we each do things to each other, sometimes unwittingly, that make hurts and destroy relationship. The process of forgiveness enables us to reflect and to re-engage with each other and with God in ways that bring healing and wholeness. So when Jesus turns to someone and says, go in peace, your sins are forgiven, this is not a light or trite thing. It is a declaration of restoration, that the lost are found, and that as Luke puts it in the story of Zaccheus, salvation has come to this house today.

There are 2 parties in a forgiveness process. The agreement comes as the two parties enter the same emotional investment. Without empathy forgiveness becomes impossible, and gets diluted to apology. Empathy creates the holy ground of each understanding the other at depth, and being able to give room for a new start. It is an encounter of deep emotion, a meeting of more than minds, a meeting of the heart. It takes courage and humility both. It requires a contrite heart and a listening heart. And it needs the resolve that the hurts absorbed will no longer be called to mind. They cannot be forgotten, for that trivialises what has happened. The outcome of offering forgiveness and that being received means that the events which led up to the hurts are put to one side, and a choice is made to leave them there. The worst thing is when we say to someone, Oh it doesn't matter. Because it does.

Thomas Tewell writes "Every one of us comes to a fork in the road. We can either walk down the road marked resentment and retaliation or we can walk down the road marked gratitude and grace. It is a matter of focus. If we focus on the wrong that someone has done to us, we will never forgive them. Author, David Augsberger says, "If we wait until someone deserves forgiveness, forget it! That's not forgiveness." Frankly, the only motivation for forgiveness is gratitude. It is only when we realize our gratitude for the many times that God has forgiven us that we can forgive others. In the text from Matthew, Jesus was teaching Peter that forgiveness is beyond calculation. Peter focused on the number of times he has to forgive someone according to Jewish law. But Jesus taught Peter and us that forgiveness can't be quantified. It is a grateful response to God's grace."

The world needs a mature understanding of forgiveness as process not action, and needs a people of God who live lives of such gratitude that forgiveness is a way of deep life. 70 times 7 indeed.

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Prayer: many things to many people

Worship is public prayer: words used by one
to spark the thoughts of many.
Worship has a flow - beginning with gathering us all up from our many places to one place, then thanksgiving, confession, and
later prayers of intercession as we focus on the world
we are part of.

We pray on our own too: all sorts of things happen to us, and in us. We initiate lots of things, find ourselves in many situations.
We pray to whatever or whoever we know as God.

Christianity over the past century or so has articulated two broad streams of understanding this. On the one hand there is
prayer as withdrawal and silence. Quietness and solitary. Perhaps this is best summed up in the words found in many churches
built in the 1950s and 60s: "Be still and know that I am God."
On the other hand there is the understanding found in the line of a well known hymn: each kindly deed a prayer. Activism. By
our love we are known. Prayer is kindly action.

The two streams are not exclusive of course. The life of Jesus embodies them both. The Gospels picture him moving from
place to place, healing, surrounded by others, teaching, telling stories, being with friends, eating and drinking with strangers, and
always seemingly busy in his haste to show and tell people about the way God wants them to be. On the other hand, the
Gospels also tell us that early in the morning he would go to a quiet place on his own where he prayed.

How he prayed, or what he prayed is not spelled out. The clues come in what we know as "The Lord's Prayer." This is probably
the most well-known prayer in our tradition. When his disciples said, John taught his disciples to pray, why don't you teach us,
the reply is, when you pray say "Our Father..."

Prayer is the life line we have with God. More than words, it's the deepest expression of our connectedness to God, each
other and our world. Prayer is like breathing. It's sometimes easy to think prayer is us saying things, aloud or in our minds.
But many writers affirm that prayer is listening, clarifying, wrestling, acting, resting, beyond words and with words. Prayer is the
heart throb of faith. It assumes God, however we might understand God, and it assumes we are connected to God. Prayer is
not just about sitting still. Sometimes I pray best on the move, walking through the streets, walking the hills, or mowing the
lawn. At other times listening to music, or even sprung from seeing something on TV.

There is no right way, no wrong way.
There is us, God, and the connection between them called prayer.
And if we want to pray but can't, that's prayer too.
The inarticulate babblings of our heart.
The deep expression of our nature.
Prayer is our life.
Our life is our prayer.

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Pilate's Question

Acts 9:32-43, .John 10:22-30


If you are the Christ - tell us plainly. He answered "I did tell you, but you didn't believe." In a way that gives us all the issues of religion in a nutshell. I want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And then as Pilate asked Jesus "and what is truth?"

Truth and plain speaking, it turns out are slippery eels. The whole possibility that truth is absolute and knowable by everyone in the same way has been exploded into fragments over the past 50 years or so. Fragmentation of truth and what is knowable bas had a huge impact on how we understand whatever we call God. It may well be a huge contributing factor to the loss of religion in the west, and it certainly is a factor in the rise of individualism which has helped the spirituality movements along ~ it is acceptable these days to believe many things or none. What is less acceptable is to assume that we must, or can, all believe the same things in the same way?
This isn't too much of a problem usually for us or anyone else, until a group decides that it will enforce a particular understanding as the orthodox one, and that all others must fall into line with it, or leave the fold for other pastures. The church has many ways of excommunicating folks who think aloud differently.

But the church's grip as society's arbiter of what is truth has long gone. The trouble for us is that the church held on to it so long that we are tainted still by the backlash of folks discovering that what the church taught us about God was not absolute truth after all, but the orthodox thinking of the day. Last year I was asked to take a retreat for the leaders of a rather conservative parish. I asked them to make a Lego construction of being church. Three small groups beavered away for the allotted time and when we looked at their final display all were different the explanations offered significant differences. Several understandings about church were at work every Sunday. But then the conversation became really interesting as we unpacked the experience of discovery further. One person, who had said little up to that point, suddenly had a eureka moment - it's not church we need to understand how we're different about, she said, it's God. We need to reinterpret what or who we think God is.

That indeed is the same question that Jesus got into trouble for - his picture of God, and the consequences of believing in his God were at such variance from orthodoxy that folks of the day struggled to make meaningful connections between his God, and theirs. It wasn't that they didn't try - they asked for plain speaking. Jesus told them plainly that they had all the plain speaking they were going to get, and they still didn't understand him. No-one is at fault here it seems to me. The trouble is what these days we call paradigms. Paradigms are the base concepts we use to understand the world and how things fit together. My paradigm of family life is the one that my kids have inherited from me. My paradigm of God is likewise what others will have perceived in the ways I speak and act. Sometimes we have a paradigm that works well for everyone at the same time - democracy for example is a paradigm of the way a society can work for effective community. Our country has bought into it along with the rest of what we call the western world. But it's only one idea - it's not an absolute truth. Other countries don't use it, and prefer dictatorships as their effective paradigm - not all dictatorships run their country the way Nigeria is run. We see lots of difficulty with the suggestion that dictatorship leads to effective government, just as those who look at democracy as a crazy way see only difficulties in that. There are many who have come to understand the issues in Fiji as a clash of two paradigms of effective government - western democracy they say, is not the best way for Fiji. Dictatorship may not be it either, but there is a "Pacific way?"

The problem for those of us who hold strongly to one paradigm as the final arbiter of what is true, is that it's almost impossible for us to be open about reflecting on paradigms which are quite different. Wars have resulted from such difficulties in understanding. Iraq may well be another case where the west's democratic paradigm does not fit another cultural commmunity in the same way as it does for us.

So our religious thought has always operated in paradigms that we often thought were the truth. These are getting us into trouble often as folk talk past each other when they want to talk about God. The paradigms are often so different that the language used obscures any chance of conversation between say, a liberal, progressive understanding and a fundamentalist one. How can we have a conversation with someone who has no way of entering my world view, or me enter theirs. It doesn't work as long as we misunderstand the relative nature of truth. The same issues arise when meeting up with those who say they have no belief - atheistic tendencies are as dogmatic as Christian ones. However, we are beginning to make progress I think, when we allow for dialogue and rethinking of what till now have been seen as unshakeable truths - things like interpreting the crucifixion of Jesus in other than victim for the salvation of the world terms. The doctrines of the atonement have been seen, not as working paradigms, but as the only truth and therefore incapable of reinterpretation or debate. To question those was tantamount to heresy. Many folk left the church as they felt they had to leave their brains at the door and pick them up afterwards.

For us, at St Ninians, as we ponder what shape we might become as church in our future, it is around these things that I'm coming to see we can be a place of exploration without fear. To ask the questions, to live the questions, is to live with the energy of God present, not in words, but in spirit. When the statements of classical Presbyterian practice were being created, they were living in that spirit too, but over time the words became cemented as unshakeable truth. The trouble with that is that when the truth is shaken there's nothing left. And that's not helpful either. The church, our congregation at least, has a future only as we live the questions in our understanding of God.

For among those questions are some certainties about our faith too - we are called to be a gifting community of compassion and justice. We are called to hospitality, and to discover how to love those for whom we have no affection. Our faith in God is about this world and it's relationships, all of them - the earth's processes and human societies. We are called to reflect on life, not to blunder our way through it. We are called to be hopeful, and to live a hope that when we pray your kingdom come, we won't get in the way by toddling off on our own tangents. And somehow, as part of the Christian tradition, we are called to try to make sense of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus whom many called the Christ, who taught about something he called the Kingdom of God, and others followed on what they called "The Way." It will be as we engage with our questions and live them out that St Ninians come close to being a church of the 21st century I believe. We've already started doing that. Our winter time I hope will be a time when we engage these at some depth, and along the way discover what I would call community where all are welcome at the question-mark of life. Will you join me?

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Jesus' Way: to Include, not to Exclude

Mark 9:38-50

I've often wondered why it is that human beings are intent on taking sides against each other. At its most extreme we have the wars that are part of human history. Sometimes a period of peace breaks out, but then normality resumes with another round of bloody fighting. On a domestic scale we find sometimes that there is personal disagreement spilling over into entrenched for and against positions, sometimes leading to what has been called domestic violence, sometimes resulting in the rupture of relationship and separation. Taking sides with an intention to prove another wrong, and me right, seems to be part of the human ego, built in to us from birth.

So we shouldn't be surprised to find today's Gospel reading nestled in the centre of Mark's Gospel. "We saw someone exorcising evil spirits - using your name Jesus, but he's not part of our group. We told him to stop." John is exercising the normal human response to those situations - either you're in here or you're not. If you're in, you're OK. If you're not, you have no right to borrow our good name. In literature it's called copyright. In business we find registered trademarks and patents to protect intellectual property. For good reason as we see it. But when it comes to being religious, the ins and outs are particularly vicious.
Whether it's Sunni and Shiite Muslim groups in Iraq, Sikh and Hindu in India or Presbyterians at General Assembly, it somehow seems more shocking that we should be lining up in order to disagree with each other. This is not mild disagreement. There's a sense in which this is like John in the passage from Mark - if you're not with our point of view, you're against us. In other words, there are only two places to stand. With us, or over there. Now this is fundamentally different from Canterbury playing Auckland. After the game at Jade Stadium, even the most loyal supporters of their side will have a beer with the supporters of the other team and claim that rugby was the winner on the day. However, when religious groups fight, it seems to be that they have forgotten a fundamental principle of religious belief - "Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another" as Jesus puts it.

When we differ in the church it is shocking because so much of the veneer of being Christian is getting along with each other without rancour. Paul wrote his letters to the Corinthian Church in response to a group in more than mild disagreement. This led to the famous Love is patient, love is kind passage. But the veneer of difference is just that - a veneer over a common core. The common core is that while we may well differ in our fundamental understandings of how scripture came to be scripture, what its authority is, and what the place of Jesus is in modern thinking, - still even with those, we are facing in the same direction - towards God. It's not a case of one group taking God any less seriously than another group. We fundamentally agree from all viewpoints that God is God. And therein lies something which seems to me to get forgotten in religious debates of the current Presbyterian sort. If God is God, then even with all our side-taking and arrogant assertions that we are always right, and therefore anyone else is always wrong, even with that, there is the possibility that we are all wrong. Such a possibility places us in a different position with those who work differently from us. If we agree that we can all be wrong, there is a salty conversation possible about how to proceed in the caution of exploration, rather than the assertion of certainty.

The episode with Jesus and John interests me in that there are two quite different ways of dealing with the same issue present. John wants to assert that if they are not with the in group, even though they are using Jesus' name, they are really out. However Jesus' take on the issue is that if they are using his name, they are in, even if they're not part of the group of his disciples. John could be summarised as saying jf they're not for us, they're against us. Jesus however takes the point of view that if they're not against us, they're for us. Jesus' stance is fundamentally inclusive rather than exclusive - it's about allies and finding connections with others rather than focussing on differences.

Such an attitude to each other enables things to progress. The thing about intense disagreement in religious circles of every sort is that there is seldom any sense of today's Gospel. If we use the name of Jesus, we are on the same side, no matter what we may disagree on during the journey. Yet, there is so little allowance for this that not only is conversation almost impossible, but there is antagonism amongst those who are all seeking to look for God. Rather than sharing the search, we are slaying each other with tenuous certainties, assuming that truth is found in exclusive quantities. The Gospel should alert us to the dangers of making such assumptions that we have a stronghold on truth. Mark has the motif of blindness and sight - where the blind e the ones who can see and those who claim to be sighted are shown to be blind. The parable of the last judgement that Matthew tells is even more pointed - the sheep and goats are separated all right, but are unaware of how come they turn out to be one or the other - "When did we see you hungry or naked?" they ask.

If it is part of our human nature to find opposing each other a "strategy for living," it is certainly not one which our biblical tradition, no matter how we understand it, leads us to. Paul, writing in the very early days of the faith, has to deal with many situations of disagreement. His way forward is always to counsel peaceful relationship which does not gloss over the hard areas of disagreement, but he always appeals to the fact that no matter how life is seen, there is always God underneath us towards whom we are facing. And in that we find the saltiness of peace - for while we were yet sinners, writes Paul, Jesus showed a way called the cross to reconcile us to each other and to God. That, for Paul, is the bottom line. Jesus is in all, and above all, and under all. Human disagreements about what God is like or what God intends, are subordinate to that focus. Community in the church is hard won; it is not always easy to sit alongside those with whom we struggle to understand a point of view. We prefer to have homogeneous communities where we're all the same. But the church is not like that. We are given each other, differences and all, and must get on with it - "it" being to walk the Way of Christ together. Indeed, the church may be the place where we find the most intense disagreements which serve to shape our life together, not to throw us into splinters.

When John comes to Jesus asking for confirmation that he was right to stop someone exorcising demons in Jesus' name, he does not get the support he might have expected. For Jesus, the way is to include - not exclude. To find the point of commonality and build on that, rather than focus on a difference that is arbitrary. As we ponder our own responses to the decision of General Assembly last Friday, we would do well to find those commonalities - God is God. We are humans. We might all be wrong! We are all facing in the same direction if we are walking The Way. So let us walk in the salty places of peace.

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"Does not Wisdom Call...

...and does not Understanding raise her voice?" (Proverbs 8)

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Jill too has the same trouble - work work work, and life gets tedious don't it. In the wars they called it R & R - rest and recreation. In the hymn we sing it's God's recreation of the new day. Recreation is re-creation. Sometimes.

I love that passage about wisdom from Proverbs. Wisdom was there from the beginning. An equivalent of the Holy Spirit. But whereas the Priestly poem of Genesis 1 presents the image of the Spirit brooding over creation like a hen, Proverbs gives the image of a parent delighting in a child, a mutual delight.

The image of God and Wisdom as a woman who delights God ends with a positive affirmation of humanity and of creation. Such a positive image has been rather hard to hear in the church over the years, but it's being recovered as we rediscover the meaning of delighting in God, and God delighting in us. So much church teaching has been devoted to the duty of loving God. And so generations have wondered how they can hold their heads up. We were once taught that no matter how good we were, we were never good enough. We must strive for the perfection of eternity. The problem was that for most who heard these messages, their lives were by no means bad. So it was a struggle sometimes to reconcile not feeling bad about oneself, with the notion that we must be going astray and in need of severe repentance. To sit down when tired and knit, or read a book in the middle of the day often gave rise to feelings of guilt - there must be something more worthwhile to be doing. Doing, doing doing. And all the while, in the back of our minds was the search for what we were doing wrong. Duty gave rise to guilt so often.

Much of that thinking was reinforced by the heavy dependence in preaching on Paul's letters, and the doctrine of atonement - Christ died for your sins. The crucifixion of Christ, sometimes the joyous resmrection of Christ tended to be the focus of much writing and preaching over the past few centuries. My Scots Calvinist forbears were brought up on it. Wesley, with his insistence on salvation for all was part of a movement towards an understanding of God based on God's grace rather than God's judgement, but even Wesley, a product of his times, concentrated his attention on the death of Christ as the major focus of his religious expression.

The last few decades has seen a change taking place. We are recovering the life of Jesus. Instead of focussing on atonement for the sinful nature of being human, there is the recognition that Jesus was about healing and teaching that there was a Way to follow to God. The Gospels picture a lively man wandering round having a good time, getting into trouble for eating and drinking at parties with the wrong folks. He seems to take the endless religious rules rather lightly and instead points out the reasons for them being there - the spirit not the letter of the law. It all helps build up an emerging recovery of what has been hidden for too long - that humankind is the delight of God, and that our nature is to reflect that delight.

Re-creation is a vital ingredient of that discovery. Once we toss away the notion that just because we exist we are estranged from God, and recognise that we are actually living helpful, and not very sinful lives most of the time, we can recover a sense of wonder and awe at the infinite goodness of creation and of each other. We can recover the sense that we are faces of God to each other. But along with that, we need to understand the importance of recreation.

Jesus, our model of life, and our Way to God, was a busy man. Not just the walking hither and yon, but the calls on his life and time and energy and skills were constant. The temptation to be always available must have been enormous. But Jesus was no minister of religion. He had a "rhythm of life with a powerful beat". And that's the point of re-creation - to restore rhythm and balance to life. To restore a right relationship with ourselves, and our creation, and in so doing, to restore the right relationship with our God, creator who delights in the goodness of that creation.

When the psalmist wrote the words "he restores my soul", look at the images that surround those words- "resting in fields of green grass", "leading to streams of peaceful water." When the mass of needy humanity around him weighs down Jesus he goes off to re-create in a lonely place. Often he takes all night, praying. By himself Re-creating himself, restoring his soul, his energy to enable him to continue doing what he does - his time of healing and restoring others to health and to right relationships with God. At times he even turns his back on need, and moves off. There's only so much we can do.

How we re-create ourselves is an important issue for us. Restoration of our soul happens in many ways for each of us. Sometimes it's taking time to smell the roses, at others it's a cup of coffee with a good friend, at others it's riding a quad bike through a mud patch, or painting, or photographing, or writing, or reading, or needlework, or watching sport, or playing a game, or swimming, or wood turning, or model-making. Actually, the list could almost be endless. What's important is not the activity, but the effect on us. Recreation is recreation if it achieves the restoration of soul for us. And we will achieve that when we enter our restoration time without guilt, without feeling like this is a sneaky moment of life when we should really be doing something else more worthwhile. Shoulds and oughts are part of our life, duty is sometimes very important, so is being there for each other. But never at the expense of our soul - our creative centre that delights in the world and its creator. Elizabeth O"Connor tells a story of a woman who comes to an Indian market and sees the most exquisite bowls. She has a friend arh6fne who owns a craft shop. They would sell so well at home she thinks. So she asks the craftsperson. How much is that bowl? 20 rupees, he replies. She thinks, my that's cheap, so she asks, and if I order fifty how much each. 60 mpees, she is told. But if I order more I think they should be cheaper not dearer. Ah but madam, if I have to repeat myself so often it would damage my soul and for that you would have to pay.

Creativity comes in many forms. None is better than another. There is no hierarchy of creativity. It's not about what we're good at, it's not even about what we might prefer to be doing at times. It's about restoring the right balance to our life. The recovery of delight is one of the most wonder-filled things I can imagine. The picture of Wisdom being God's delight, and dancing about in a creation that is God's delight, among humanity who are God's delight is a reminder to me that re-creation is what will sustain each of us. What would it take for each of us to wake up each morning and affirm the words of proverbs for ourselves:

"I was at his side, a master craftsman,
delighting him day after day,
ever at play in his presence, at play everywhere in his world, delighting to be with humankind."

What does it take to look at who we are, and say to ourselves.
"God delights in you, and me!"

It takes a rethink. It means putting down a heavy God, and it means playing with creation to restore our soul. We know how to do it. We call it recreation, crafts, art, - we might not use a sandpit, but as adults we play with these things and create a life where we are back in balance again. We don't have to be good at it, whatever good means and whatever it might be. The sole criterion is that it restores our soul. And that brings us to the heart of being close to the God who delights in creation - yes, even us. Wow.

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Jesus in the Wisdom Tradition

Reflections on 1 Kings 2:10-12, 3:1-28, Ephesians 5:15-20

The whole question of God is by its nature rationally silly. Which is why rationalists can live without God. God cannot be argued into existence because then it's possible to argue God out of existence. God is not self-evident on the surface of our 21st century lives. There are many who are with Nietchze when he propounded that God is dead. As a notion of many things, God has probably never lived. And if we take the Bible seriously as sacred text for showing us how folks have understood God's dealings with the universe, humanity and everything, we begin to discover that folk have always had a certain uncertainty about the nature of God.

Karen Armstrong's writings show a clear development in the way people thought of God. Early on, in many cultures there was the development of the God who was a warrior, who would send thunderbolts down on all those with whom God was displeased. Therefore it was important to keep up the sacrificial appeasement of your God to ensure providence would continue. Armstrong maintains that this began as a reflection of the reality of inter-tribal warfare. Along with this was the observation of the way nature was cyclical- so whole religions began to evolve around a dying and rising God with its associations with fertility and sexual reproduction. Many religions have such a mythic underpinning, including the motif found at the heart of Christianity, although the sacrificial atonement there has other beginnings.

But, Karen Armstrong also points out that a religion which is based on appeasement begins to pall. Rituals become deadened. The priests who were in control of the rituals controlled the nature of the myths that explained and sustained life. But those can become tired dogma. Appeasement is based on fear of consequences - the Deuteronomic understanding of Yahweh worked like that - obey the commandments in order that you will live a long and happy life because that is what God wants.

The trouble is that God became removed into the sky - the invisible God controlled remotely but could not ever be appeased. Religious observances easily became stylised and more abstracted from everyday experience. Wars were fought over the supremacy of territorial Gods - my God's bigger tha.l1 yours. Yahweh in the Hebrew tradition was the God of God's not the only God. When you were defeated in battle, the cause was either because your God was pathetic in respect to your enemy's gods, or you had done something terribly wrong which justified dire punishment.

God became remote and did not answer the religious question - what is the meaning of my life, not in theory, but in practice - how do I live my life in such a way that expresses meaningful values rather than appeasement and fear. Is it that the one with the most toys wins? That feels unsatisfactory, because it's a selfish way to live. In the end a life based on me me me is unattractive - humans are created with each other in mind.

So the more God becomes removed from the everyday, invisible, and seemingly remote, the more it is possible to remove God from the everyday. God becomes an idea or an ideal. A set of ultimate values representing the highest good. In other words, reflects the aspirations of humanity at its best. A human construct without the need for any real sense of the divine. Many people understand God in this way these days. A feature of our times is the way in which a uniting myth has disappeared. In a pluralistic society we probably will not ever recover one uniting myth. Now we have many to consider alongside each other. Pluralism allows us to reconsider what we mean by God in ways that we haven't had to before.

What begins to happen in some respect at least is that the sense of the immanence of God, the sense of God present in the everyday, gets moved into the transcendent God - the God removed into space. Which allows some strange thinking to emerge too - the Russian cosmonaut, for example, who said God didn't exist because he had never found him up there. There is a tension in all religions about this immanence - transcendent possibility. God is not one or the other, but found in that tension - close and remote all at the same time. Paradox is at the heart of religious expression - which is one reason that a rationalist explanation tends to fall on deaf ears for many people who have a close experience of what they want to call God.

In the middle of all this, is the wisdom tradition - a tradition of sayings that are practical, ethical, and often mystical, but what they have in common is that they relate to the question of living a good life in the here and now. They are value-laden. They are pragmatic. In the Hebrew tradition Wisdom became personified as a woman. Wisdom was an expression of God, in some ways similar to what the Christians would later call the Holy Spirit as part of the Trinitarian tradition.

"Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him." (Proverbs 26:12) These sayings are found in collections like the book of Proverbs, some of the psalms, or in extended books like Tobit or Ecclesiastes. The Wisdom writings often don't have any overt reference to God. Yet they form the basis of much of Jesus' sayings too. And of Paul's writings: "If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat: ifhe is thirsty give him water to drink. In doing this you will heap burning coals on his head" _ Paul, quoting proverbs 25:21-22. Jesus gives parables of wise and foolish people.

This helps to answer a current phenomenon. I've noticed that many people are becoming used to the idea of Jesus as a wise man whose collected wisdom is often found in anthologies of wisdom writing - alongside Toaist sayings, or Confucian, or Islamic, or Hindu. Such books of holy wisdom are found in many bookshops and on lots of shelves in homes. Jesus the Way is a man who offers people helpful insights on how to live a good life. For when any notion of God has become problematic for people, the impulse to be at our human best remains strong. Therefore we are on the lookout for words of wisdom which will offer insight to follow as we try to do that.

This is a long way from traditional church understanding of Jesus as the one who died for our sins - the atonement theology of traditional Christian thought. I'll explore that with you at another time. Jesus as a holy and wise man is one whom we can look to for insight in the great questions of life - how can I be most fully human? What is the point of my life? Jesus as the wisdom speaker and actor gives practical living clues which relate to how to deal with wealth, power, and relationships. He helps with prioritising competing possibilities - choose the creative just way. He helps us make a particular sense of suffering. He offers a Godsense that is found as we walk with his ways. These are all things folk both need and want. How is it that anthologists of wntings from sacred traditions h:we understood the wisdom of Jesus better than the church has? Because they are not lumbered with all those years of traditional understanding. I noted a few weeks ago the remark by someone in a group I was taking who expressed the thought that maybe we need to re-understand what we mean by God. One step in this is to begin to re-read Jesus in the light of what the sacred writings called the Gospels show us - a man who offered hope through the wisdom he said and did - a way to live a life of value in the here and now that somehow expresses eternal values. When Marcus Borg called one of his books "Meeting Jesus again for the first time", he effectively sets out a charter for what we might well do as we bring our lives alongside the life of the one called Jesus of Nazareth whom the church later called the Christ - the anointed one of God the one who calls us to be people who seek wisdom, and live valued lives. Jesus the wise one. He is the core of our tradition, offering water and bread to the hungry and thirsty. Wisdom for living - now I think many would want that!

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Stories of Faith

Since I went to university forty years ago, three little books have made a deep impression on our culture: Bishop Robinson's "Honest to God"; Rachel Carson's "The Silent Spring"., bringing the earth's crisis to public notice. The third one was by Thomas Kuhn, an American philosopher. It was called "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." In it, Kuhn introduced the idea of the paradigm shift.

Until Kuhn wrote his book, popular ideas about truth had been divided between two camps - with not much common ground between them. On one hand were those who thought of truth as delivered by revelation from God through religion; on the other were those who thought that science had all the answers that mattered.

Kuhn's focus was on the latter type of knowledge. It wasn't that scientific knowledge was incorrect, he wrote, but rather that it was probably not as certain and final as some thought. The prevailing idea of science at the time was that it was a build-up of truths. Each piece of knowledge rested upon what had gone before. None made sense without what had already been established.

In that sense, science could be seen as similar to religious knowledge. Christian doctrine, is also built upon the past. Stories of faith in the Bible make up the body of what human beings know about God's work in the world. Today's reading is a good example, leading as it does to the idea of the "Out-of-Egypt-Bringing" God.

Kuhn saw beyond the received wisdom about science and realised that far from being a build-up of knowledge, it is better seen as a series of revolutions which replace the received wisdom of normal science. These revolutions don't destroy past scientific findings. Rather, they put them in a totally new context in which the scientist's world view is changed for ever.

Kuhn pointed out that there are always some puzzling aspects of the received knowledge of existing science. Certain anomalies appear regardless of how widely certain methods and solutions are accepted. They are often merely pushed aside as inconvenient or of little or no consequence to the broader paradigm.

But then someone takes notice of the anomalies and tries to explain them. That is exactly what Copernicus did. The standard model of the universe for 1400 years had the earth in the middle. Astronomers kept patching up Ptolemy's cumbersome model that accounted for the observations. Copernicus simply threw the whole model out and started again with the sun in the middle. He began a "paradigm shift." That happens all the time in all fields of knowledge. A well-known business story illustrates it: A marketing consultant was asked to solve the problem of reduced sales of a popular brand of toothpaste. Having agreed a hefty fee, he listened carefully to the pros and cons of branding, marketing, tube design and taste - to name but a few of the many factors brought up. His answer was paradigm-breaking: "Make the hole bigger". With one stroke he had penetrated past all the received paradigms of the debate.

That is how knowledge progresses, Khun said. This means that the Church may find itself unable to adapt its doctrines to a world that sees reality in a radically different way.

The only alternative to paradigm shifts is to insist that Christian teachings are effectively cast in concrete poured 1500 years ago, and so are unlike any other forms of human knowledge. Christian truths can't be changed significantly because they depend on once-and-for-all revelations direct from God via the Bible or Church authorities. A view like this rules out any paradigm shifts in religion. But if shifts in the Christian world view are ruled out, a great gulf appears to open up, slowly or quickly, between Christianity and all modern human thought.

It is now clear that the changes in world view that began in the Enlightenment, and continued over the past three centuries, have fundamentally changed the way the world is perceived. At present this cultural paradigm shift embraces a minority, mainly in Western cultures. But it is rapidly spreading around the entire planet. Karen Armstrong sums it up. The culture of the West is

"... an essentially twentieth-century movement ... which has since taken root in other parts of the world. The West has developed an entirely unprecedented and wholly different type of civilization ... [which] has changed the world. Nothing - including religion - can ever be the same again. All over the globe, people have ... been forced to reassess their religious traditions, which were designed for an entirely different type of society." [2]

Thus we begin to see human knowledge as a vast system. Its patterns are constantly changing - rather like a kaleidoscope. Science according to this model is not an assembly of paradigms which rules all others, but only one amongst many. The universe of all paradigms is an inter-linked web, in which all understandings and world views constantly affect each other.

And that is why doctrines and dogma are so unconvincing to young people today. Eternal verities do not fit with the way they think. Far more effective are the stories of faith: Not only the ones in the Bible, but others we tell; stories of faith, of conflict, challenge, of growth, love, whatever. Movies are main way young people get their religion today. They generate the myths that influence and guide people today: the whale riders and star wars, the matrix and the Truman Show, and the Bridges of Madison County. The stories of the patriarchs, Joseph, Jacob Moses and the escape from Egypt guided a culture for centuries. Today we add the stories of Brother Roger, of Ghandi, Mandela, David Lange, and "Once upon a time when grandma was a little girl..."

Kuhn has helped us see how human thinking progresses: new paradigms not rendering older ones false, maybe rendering them less useful by changing the way we perceive. So for example in religion the old analogies of kings and lords with which religious language is shot through, while still having a place, seem archaic in an age of democracy. New analogies, new stories, new hymns are needed to communicate in a brave new world. We can stay with the old one, and softly fade away. Or we can keep on thinking, engaging, challenging, and developing the faith. That's what I hope we do.

Notes

[1] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, 1996

[2] The Battle For God, HarperCollins, 2001

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"O Ye of little faith": Faith and Reason

(Matthew 14, 22 - 33: Jesus walks on the water.

In the 17th Century, a period of history we call the Enlightenment, Western culture discovered reason as never before, In the West, faith was under attack as never before. Even the circling planets were subject to its rule, thanks to Isaac Newton: Addison's hymn sums it up:

"In reason's ear they all rejoice, and utter forth a glorious voice,
forever singing as they shine, "The hand that made us is Divine."

Reason seemed to explain everything. Newton's laws could describe everything from an apple falling from the tree to the circling planets in the spacious firmament on high. So successful has reason become that other ways of knowing seem to us to be unreal. Faith is eclipsed as a guiding light in our broader Western culture. We are indeed, a people of little faith.

We have been emancipated from all manner of superstition and dogma: witch burnings and the like. But there is a down side. John Ralston Saul makes it clear in his book: "Voltaire's Bastards: the Dictatorship of Reason in the West." (Vintage © 1992)

"Reason," he says, "is a narrow system swollen into an ideology. With time and power it has become a dogma, devoid of direction, and disguised as disinterested enquiry. Like most religions, reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created."

Voltaire, and other 18th Century thinkers embraced reason with passion. They brought much good:

Voltaire was the first thinker to address the citizenry directly.
He was the first to embrace human rights causes.
He was an advocate of practical reforms to improve their lot.
He invented "public opinion".
He set forth six basic human rights - rights of the person, of free speech and a free press, of conscience, of civil liberty, of private property, and the right to work.

These were all quite new - and a massive threat to those who had their hands on the levers of power. But Voltaire was effective: "God is not on the side of the heavy battalions," he said, "but the best shots." Voltaire was a deadly shot.

So Voltaire was a key player in the rise of the Age of Reason - an age which is

dominated by elites,
organising society around answers, and structures designed to produce answers.
These structures have fed upon expertise,
and that expertise upon complexity.
In this system, people adept at manipulating words hold the levers of power.

Today, enormous elites carry huge burdens of knowledge. Their success story dominates our lives. Their power depends, not on the use of this knowledge, but on control of it. Their words complexify and obscure. So language has been pinned down and divided into a number of "feudal states: The feudal state of military language. Of political language. Of religious, of educational, of commercial language and systems. This kind of division and capture of language bars the citizenry from participating seriously in society. Until something suddenly explodes into our consciousness - the B.N.Z. bailout, the polytech scandal; the railways rundown, the power privatisation debacle, the airline troubles... each generating a knee-jerk reaction. Thus society lurches from issue to issue.

In short, the West's love affair with the ideology of pure reason has made us cripplingly dependent on process-minded "experts" ("Voltaire's Bastards", ie Voltaire's illegitimate successors), whose rational systems are bereft of both meaning and morality. Small wonder there is a clash with the Muslim world: Muslims see, and rightly fear, the onset of what we call "modernity." A system that leaves so many people in the western democracies feeling frustrated and disempowered. Today, our planet is the boat, and we, slaves to reason, are indeed, people of little faith, with our mindless experts at the helm.

We need to recover that broader view of reality that was eclipsed in the time of the Enlightenment. Mystical ways of knowing and being. Metaphorical ways of knowing. Ways of common sense. Ways of faith, of liturgy, of art. We need to restore faith alongside reason, to broaden and deepen our humanity. We as a culture need to recover vision, a sense of mystery, spiritual awareness, faith.

Those of us who comprise the remnant of Christendom have retained, to a degree, those other ways of knowing. But how do we make them real in the broader secular culture of today? We have been marginalised by that culture, which sees religion only as a personal optional extra for those so inclined. How does the spiritual dimension become central to our fragmented, pluralistic age? Can it happen today?

It is happening. We are already moving beyond the atomistic, Newtonian age. Beyond the view that we must "rise above nature," and "go forth to subdue the earth." An entirely new view is emerging. A new view, but really an old one, universal among the primal societies, where we begin to recover a sense of our dependence on the whole of the thin spun web of life on the crust of our little world.

And if our planet is the boat, tossed about by the decisions of this or that mindless elite, we need again that vision of the Christ-figure, bestriding the waves of cynicism, amorality and rhetoric thrown up by those elites that dominate our world. Thomas Jefferson said that men by their constitution were divided naturally into two parts: those who fear and distrust the people, versus those who identify with the people and have confidence in them. Our culture has put the fearful ones at the top. They in their power structures, ("Feudal states" as I called them) always think the consciousness of the citizenry a danger which must be lulled, then channelled towards the inoffensive through language, mythology, sport. and infotainment. Jesus is of the other type, identifying with his people, confident of our ability to be people of real faith, trusted to make critical decisions. That is how we must learn to be. Leaders of this Christ-like kind raise our consciousness: Ralph Nader in America, Mandela in South Africa; and above all, Jesus, making us aware of the world of values, the spiritual world, the caring, interdependent world, emerging strongly now, a world of faith, and a world of real hope, and a world of unconditional love. Amen.

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Expanding Horizons of Hope

Remember the old priest Zechariah's prophecy at the beginning of Luke's Gospel: "God has raised up a horn of salvation" And John's prophecy: "and all flesh shall see the salvation of God?" (Luke 1:69, 71, 77; 2:30, 3:6). Today's story brings to completion Luke's account of salvation. The story of Zacchaeus is the final mention of tax collectors in the gospel of Luke and the story climaxes with Jesus proclaiming that the salvation promised in the early verses of Luke has finally come even to this most outside of outsiders. In the gospel of Luke there is nowhere that the realm of God will not reach.

Decades earlier, Habakkuk the prophet had called for the promise of God to be written large enough for a runner to read. God's goodness and universal grace will surely come and the righteous will, like the prophet standing on the rampart, continue to look for the salvation of God. And I guess we in our time also need to look wide for the promise of God's grace and blessing. Some would see it only in the narrowest of terms. Perhaps in our time the greatest challenge to that broad view of God's inclusive love that Luke arrives at, is that which stems from the thinking of an Englishman born in 1800: John Nelson Darby. He studied law at Trinity College Dublin , but then was ordained as a curate in the Church of Ireland. But he was not comfortable with ordination and joined a group who rejected it - the Bretheren. In the 1840s he founded a breakaway group called the Plymouth Bretheren who embraced his remarkable set of ideas which we call "dispensational premillenialism." Let me unpack that a little.

"Premillenialism" draws on the book of Revelation and some other places and states clearly and simply what is not clear and simple - that Jesus will one day soon return to establish a kingdom that will last 1,000 years. "Dispensational" adds to this belief that human history consists of several periods during which human beings live under different sets of laws and criteria for salvation. We are now in what Darby called the "church age" - the sixth dispensation, marked, by apostasy and the erosion of Christian values. This period will be ended by an event called "The Rapture" when all saved Christians will ascend into the sky to meet Jesus and to be safeguarded from the Great Tribulation - a time of violence and death which will end when the seventh dispensation comes - Christ's triumphant return for a thousand year reign and the Last Judgement of humankind.

There is no clear Biblical evidence for this view of things. Many of its interpretations of obscure Bible passages are fanciful to say the least, with no recourse to scientific method or critical historical scholarship. But it was to gain great traction for two reasons. One was Charles Darwin. His theory of evolution was viewed by many Christians with real alarm. The Bible said the world was made in six days and finally Adam and Eve were created. Darwin deduced from the fossil record that life had evolved over millions of years. For those of a literal frame of mind, this struck at the very core of their religion.

The other boost to Darby's ideas was the development of what is called Higher Criticism. German scholars in particular began to use the new science of archaeology, and critical historical studies to show that the Bible was a much more humanly constructed document than had ever been imagined. It had been crafted from fragments of oral tradition, written records, stories and songs, all overlaid by layers of later commentary and interpretation - the product of over a thousand years of cultural evolution.

The reaction of people of simple faith to these alarming developments can be summarised on one word: panic! Particularly in the American mid-west, south, and west, where there was no "theological top" as it were - no trusted universities or centres of higher learning that could help people cope - the panic was to result in total rejection of the new knowledge by many. People were vulnerable to the seemingly literal, "old-time religion" that Darbyism claimed to be. In fact, there was nothing old about it. It was new. Evangelists like Dwight L. Moody spread its ideas far and wide. His musical sidekick Ira Sankey gave these ideas emotional appeal. Never before had the professed faith of so many Christians been so utterly at odds with the accepted scientific knowledge of their own day. Faced with the chance to embrace new knowledge and reason, American "fundamentalists" as they came to be called, chose instead to ally themselves with ignorance and irrationality. Today, twenty million Americans hold these views, as do millions more across the world. Less well educated Third World people are especially vulnerable to them, with their slick packaging and comforting "certainties." Their rigid views about the end of the world being near, and the return of Jews to Jerusalem where they will be converted to Christianity before Jesus returns, are dangerous in our current world situation. And 55% of members of the US. Republican Party hold these views.

A hundred years before Darby another very similar man began a very similar movement in what is now Saudi Arabia. Under the long Ottoman rule, the Arabian Peninsula had become a backwater of neglect and disaffection. Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab (1703-92) was born in the small town of Uyayna with an ultra-orthodox theologian father. You can bet he had a very strict religious upbringing. Ibn grew up and developed his religious ideas. He denounced prophet-worship, marked graves, and all non-Sunni groups. That was not unusual. But he added a brutal edge to his faith: belief in stonings, beatings, amputation, public execution. The year was 1740. He travelled through the region, visited Basra & Damascus to see firsthand the Ottoman slackness. His harking back to a "golden age" was pure fantasy. But it served a purpose. In 1744 he met a notorious bandit-emir, Muhammad Ibn Saud. They were made for each other. Wahhab provided the theology for Saud's permanent jihad of lootings. They soon conquered the whole peninsula, slaughtering Shia and taking Mecca in 1803. The Ottomans retook Mecca in 1811, but the British had their greedy eyes on the rich and ripe Ottoman Empire, so they, and later the Americans, backed the Wahhabis and enabled them to prevail: "Wahabbism - a mixture of rigid religion and political opportunism - became an instrument of the infidel. The British, then the Americans, used this unholy alliance to establish control of the oil rich Arabian Peninsula. Tariq Ali calls Saudi Arabia a "cleptocracy." And of course, the beliefs of Wahabbism are those underlying the extremism of Osama Bin Laden, the Iranian mullahs, and the Taliban.

And so today we have two dangerous fundamentalisms, head to head in asymmetric warfare - one using the terrifying weapons of a superpower, the other the suicidal and desperate weapons of terrorism. How do we expand the horizons of hope in a world such as ours, where people are driven by such fanatical views on both sides of the equation?

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Reflections

I'm reflecting not so much on my last year as minister at St Ninians (which has passed at great speed), but on thirty-six years in the ordained ministry.

My first assembly was in the First Church of Otago in 1968. Dr Ian Ferguson was Moderator. That was the year the Congregational Church joined the Presbyterian church en masse, bringing the large and vital Polynesian constituency into the church, which somewhat slowed the statistical decline that had by then begun across the denominations. I was one of a group of about thirty newly ordained ministers that year, suited and clerical collared, who were introduced to the Moderator. I recall the formal beginning of every speech: "Moderator, Fathers, and Brethren." The long debates, dominated by a few very vocal men. Sam Green, Mayor of Dargaville was a particularly colourful one. Others ranged from dour to, well, very dour. Women, youth, children, were absent. The church was a patriarchy and a gerontocracy. I guess parliament, boards of directors, Federated Farmers, trade unions, local bodies, lodges, school boards, and just about every other group with any power were no different. That's just the way it was.

Worship was the same. You took the whole thing from the central pulpit. I recall a friend describing his first "Pulpit Supply" as a student. Students were often called on to fill gaps in Otago parishes. The ones with transport were especially welcome. My friend had a motorcycle. He arrived at the church, unpacked his gown (somewhat crumpled) from the pannier, was shown into the pulpit by the elder. After the service, he went to leave, but found he couldn't. The ornately carved sanctuary rail had a gate, but the latch was so cleverly concealed in the latticework fence that he couldn't find it. He wanted to be friendly and greet people at the door. They didn't seem to expect that. So he hitched up his gown and vaulted the rail! Among the stony faces of the congregation as they left the church, he though he detected some twinkling eyes.

Now, at the other end of my ministry, things are different. The church may seem more diverse, democratic, and representative than it was then. The worship more informal, the dress more colourful, participation more general; but in fact the church's underlying theology is far more conservative. The diversity is welcome: women, young people, musical variety, ethnic groupings. But the appearance is superficial. At any youth rally or service that attracts more than a handful of kids, you won't hear anything that could not have been said by John Wesley or Dwight Moody over 100 years ago. Speakers of the calibre (or modernity) of D.T.Niles are just not heard at such events these days.

Thirty years ago the denominational seminaries such as Knox Theological Hall produced a range of ministers with a broad theological foundation. Today, most of the creative theological thinking is done in the Departments of Religious Studies in universities. Denominations take ministry candidates with qualifications, in the main, from bible colleges, and simply add a short period of "ministry formation." Thus we have much more fragmented denominations, and a dearth of ministers with any theological breadth. The Catholics, after decades of conservatism, are in an even more parlous state.

We have been thorough a time when internal issues have absorbed huge amounts of the church's energy: infant baptism, ordaining gays and lesbians, elders taking communion, ecumenical disagreement, church union. Since the Geering heresy trial, the forces of conservatism have steadily regrouped, drawing strength from the emerging charismatic and Pentecostal movements, networking and organising effectively to block progressive moves to become a more inclusive and open church which can speak to the contemporary needs of our culture. I think we need to move beyond those kinds of debates. They have deflected us from far more important issues: caring for creation, and helping the irreligious majority find faith within the contemporary world view, without having to revert to Medieval dualistic thinking.

In this brave new world, faith communities like St Ninians have a vital role to play, in mediating that Christ-like concern for all peoples, and for the world in which we all live, without the baggage of yesteryear which means nothing to most people today. Yet valuing and building upon our Reformed heritage to give a distinctive style of worship and Christian life. These are the imperatives for today. So go well, to serve a world whose religious needs are more pressing than ever.

- Ian.

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