Edmund Anscombe at Otago University

Photos by Mart the Rev

As mentioned earlier in a blog, my great grandmother's brother was an architect. One of this masterpieces was the archway at the University of Otago where I earned degrees in Arts & Theology in the 1980's.

New Thing in the Presbyterian Church

Sally Carter a colleague, alerted me to the relevance of a quote another colleague used in a presentation to Christchurch Presbytery this last week… it comes from Albert Einstein and seems pertinent to what New Thing (an emerging group in the PCANZ) is trying to be about.

“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them’ - Einstein

I think that our church especially how it goes about its life together in these days of diversity needs a new way of thinking – a stepping back. I think that this is what New Thing is attempting to explore… but it isn’t easy. Already some of the ways we address one another’s point of view in our discussion forums reflects the old skins we have grown up in.
How do we enable new ways of being the church in these diverse times that don’t diminish people and their way of seeing things, yet still hold to the integrity of the Christian faith?

I find it stupid that a modest majority from a gathering of 300 or so people can or should be determining what happens in the church where I minister in terms of who they can call into any form of leadership etc (The PCANZ General Assembly made a ruling in 2006). I’m with Albert in that I believe we aren’t going to sort this stupidity out by using the same systems that created the initial stupidity – what a deep hole we will end up with then!

Bono's Birthday

I know that the date above says I posted this yesterday - but in NZ we get the new day first and I write this at 1-45pm on 10 May. My friend Beck txts me every year on this day to wish a happy Bono's birthday.

He's got a year on me - he arrived on 10 May 1960. Anne's reading Michka Assayas' book Bono on Bono - conversations with Bono. It is full of so many good stories. One story we like is about his friend Guggi. Guggi grew up thinking that any presents he got for his birthday should be shared so he would turn up at Bono's house with half the present. Bono doesn't remember his own birthdays but well remember's Guggi's ones because Guggi taught him how to share.

What a good approach to life - anything we are given we share - the world could be changed with that kind of attitude!

Happy birthday Bono!

Most of the time it is person to person

Here's some of what I'm working up for Sunday...
We have been focusing the last few weeks on the changes in the early church where they discovered that the Spirit was calling them across some of the divides in their culture. Peter finds himself meeting a disciple of Jesus who is female, he accepts an invitation to stay at the home of Simon the Tanner (who touches the carcasses of dead animals and is therefore unclean) and then in a dream he is challenged to cross the greater divide – to go to the home of a Gentile – a Roman Officer, and there discover that God has been at work – and it is OK. All through these accounts is the common thread that the followers of Jesus were being called out – called out to go to where God was working. I have been arguing that these stories are important for our time in that it is no longer enough to expect people to have to come to us and fit in with us – we too are being called to be the ones who go to where others are – to cross the lines and cut across the boarders and boundaries that we have so often constructed and hidden behind.
There are all kinds of ways we might then follow these provocative texts up… the temptation is to come up with a list of what we can do now… 10 steps to a more effective church – 5 things that you can do to make a difference tomorrow… I can see the book titles already… I might even get asked to go on a lecture circuit!
But this is not a programme. Church is not a programme. Relating to people is not a formula and it is manipulative of people (and thus diminishing of them) if we just employ a tactic to get them in. Where is God leading us? I think the answer isn’t too difficult… love your neighbours. Be the person in your street who takes an interest in people. Be the one who invites people in for a cuppa. Be the one through whom others see that to be a Christian is ok, that to worship God is a good thing… be hospitable as God is hospitable… One thing I have come to learn is that the Christian faith has almost always been a thing passed on from person to person. Occasionally a big event happens – Pentecost Day, a Billy Graham rally – but most of the time, it is person to person. We don’t need fancy books and super-duper programmes… we just have to cross a few of the lines in our neighbourhoods. A bit of hospitality here and a bit of generosity there… not far behind there will be people’s deep questions and their innate thirst for God awakened… not far behind the loosening up of the defences is the fertile ground for God’s Spirit to speak and be heard.

The Stewarts of Warepa

Here's my great-grandmother on the Stewart side - Eliza who gave up a fairly straight-forward life in Dunedin as a painter to be farmer's wife and mother of seven. I think I can name them all... Gilbert & Eliza, Winifred, Grace, Alice, Nora, (I'll have to come back on this!) & Lloyd my grandfather. Lloyd was born in 1908 - he looks about 8 years old here - thus the picture was taken around 1916.

Alice McIntosh was the one I knew the best. She lived in Balclutha and was the last survivor in the family. Alice also painted (as did Nora) and I have two of them. Alice was a character who drove everywhere picking up hitchhikers and visiting the extended family. I attended her 90th birthday some years back.

Those who have been

This week the church youth group had a as our guests a couple who are into genealogy in a big way. The question 'who am I?' is addressed in part by how we have been shaped by those who have been before us.

It kind of reignited my interest in my forebears. So far I have got the birth, death and marriage dates of the two generations prior to me (not that hard really) and I'm slowly working backwards. I don't know many of the names of my great grandmothers & g-fathers, but have some idea on a few of them. One of them has a little bit of notoriety - Eliza Stewart (nee Anscombe) was a reasonably talented painter. Half a dozen of her works are stored in the Hocken Library in Dunedin and she is listed in a publication and on the web. Her brother Edmund was the famous one - he was a significant New Zealand architect, designing many buildings (including churches) in Dunedin and Wellington as well as being the designer of the 1940 NZ Centennial Exhibition in Wellington and the 1925 NZ & South Seas Exhibition in Dunedin.

One of the delights of looking back was finding out (after she was named) that my daughter Hannah had a great-great grandmother with the same name. Hannah Dawson died in 1946, I'm off to find out where and when she was born and what her maiden name was.

Clare Short quote from Sojourners

I subscribe to the free weekly email from the Sojourners Community in Washington DC - this week's quote is from Clare Short, a British MP who resigned as Secretary of State for International Development over the U.K.'s involvement in the Iraq War... here it is:

"You can’t take the evil of slavery out of the world and abolish it without making the world more just. You will never prevent people living in bonded labor or from getting caught up in sex trafficking while they are so desperate that they have no other choice but to sell themselves. As long as we in the West crave ever more excess, we conspire in their desperation, exploiting it and make ourselves sick in the process."

A past interview with Clare Short can be found at http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&mode=printer_friendly&issue=soj0401&article=040121

Sunday looming

I've found my entry point for Sunday's sermon. Usually I only need the start and the rest unfolds... sometimes it is a thought, sometimes and image, sometimes a quote...

“…transcendence cannot be forced upon us. It doesn’t yell, doesn’t announce its presence with a bullhorn, doesn’t advertise itself on roadside billboards. There is nothing bullying about transcendence.
What it requires is noticing. Witnesses to transcendence don’t create transcendence. The transcendence is already here, or there. But in our hurry to get someplace else, we miss it. There is always more than meets the human eye. We miss a lot. We need friends who will grab us by the shirttails, turn us around, and show us what we just now missed in our hurry to get across the street on the way to the bank. We need friends who will tap us on the shoulder, interrupting our non-stop commentary on the talk of the town, so that we can hear the truth. We need witnesses to transcendence. Writers. Angels. [and Preachers!] We stop, we look, we listen.”
Eugene Peterson in Subversive Spirituality Eerdmans 1997 p42

I added the 'and preachers' but in the sermon I might also add 'and Christians' - a bit of salt and light.

The text is Acts 10 - the Spirit calling the early church through Peter to cross the lines and see the bigger picture, the ministry of God to all people, even Gentiles! One of the ways we might cross the lines in our community could be through pointing to the transcendence at work in the everyday of people's lives. How might we be more attentive to the transcendence?

Aerial view of Golden Bay (I didn't take it!)

Golden Bay images

I mentioned in another blog that I'd been to Golden Bay at the top of the South Island... here are two of my photos... Golden Bay Triptych & Golden Bay Sunset

Grace & Law

I found this on the naked pastor blog site... he does a few cartoons and this one is ironically true... churches seem to do better when they emphasise rules more than grace.

Maybe it is because the majority of people inclined to an institutional way of expressing their faith are like the idea of certitudes and rules... I'm a grace man myself... I'm inclined to think that God can work stuff out with people without my having to be too hard about defining the parameters or placing limits or making judgements.

I think God is in the door opening business while much of the church's expression seems to be about building walls and securing the doors and windows.

Frederick Buechner makes a good call on grace in his book Wishful Thinking... he defines grace in terms of God's generous unconditional love meaning for us that 'there's nothing you have to do, there's nothing you have to do, there's nothing you have to do.'

So often after I have preached God's unconditional love and grace someone comes up to me and says, yes, but... Why don't we just stop at yes and see what happens? I think that if people get the dimensions of God's 'yes' they will soon want to think about what kind of response they can make... I think God has a way of drawing that out of us without others having to take over as managers!

Ricky Gervais on bbc red nose day

I spotted this on a U2 news site... it pokes a bit of fun at some of the ways celebrities push causes... while still hinting at the worthiness of the causes...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-ia__1d_rM

A blessing

A Franciscan Christmas Blessing for Justice and Peace

May God bless you with discomfort... at easy answers, hard hearts, half-truths ,and superficial relationships.

May God bless you so that you may live from deep within your heart where God’s Spirit dwells.

May God bless you with anger... at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people.

May God bless you so that you may work for justice, freedom, and peace.

May God bless you with tears... to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation and war.

May God bless you so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, in your neighborhood, so that you will courageously try what you don't think you can do, but, in Jesus Christ you'll have all the strength necessary.

May God bless you to fearlessly speak out about injustice, unjust laws, corrupt politicians, unjust and cruel treatment of prisoners, and senseless wars, genocides, starvations, and poverty that is so pervasive.

May God bless you that you remember we are all called to continue God’s redemptive work of love and healing in God’s place, in and through God’s name, in God’s Spirit, continually creating and breathing new life and grace into everything and everyone we touch.

Source: "Troubadour: A Missionary Magazine," published by the Franciscan Missionary Society, Liverpool, UK: Spring 2005.

Becoming a monster

Showing a few people the Banksy art on the West Bank wall provoked a few comments... one of them, the strange irony that people who were once isolated and walled in (Warsaw Ghetto etc) were now walling others in...

I tracked this comment down somewhere...

"One year ago on 9 July 2004, at the request of the United Nations, the International Court of Justice in The Hague issued an Advisory Opinion on the legal consequences of Israel’s construction of a wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The Court made clear that the construction of the Wall and the settlements were illegal. The Advisory Opinion of the Court represents the most authoritative statement to date of the content and applicability of international law concerning Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. On July 10, 2005, the Israeli cabinet approved the construction of the Wall in Jerusalem and vowed the completion of the Wall by September 2005."

It reminds me of the despairing U2 line from Peace on Earth - "And you become a monster so the monster will not break you."

Crossing the lines

I'm working up for Sunday and looking at Peter's crossing the lines in Acts 9-11...

In particular the brief mention of him staying with Simon the Tanner and the colossal change that comes through the incident with Cornelius.

It has got me thinking about the borders we construct - for all borders are human constructs and while they might serve for a time, we generally end up serving them and sometimes dying for them!

Here's a quote I found:

Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera

And here is some art from an interesting person/s who has some done some quite wonderfully subversive, border-crossing streetart... more on Banksy can be found at http://www.banksy.co.uk/

The art on the West Bank wall is rather powerful!

Preparing for Sunday

I'm back after a week off in Golden Bay... more on that soon...
The text for Sunday is Acts 9:32-43, the healing of Aeneas and the raising of Tabitha. Here's a quote that has got me warmed up...

“Every community, every family, every congregation exists within certain settled, fixed arrangements of power and weakness, life and death. People are told that there is a divinely established chain of being, a fixed order in which we are to find our place and stay there. Tabitha is to stay home and let the men devise an affordable welfare system. Peter is to stay with his fishing nets and leave theology to the scholars, and Aeneas should obey doctor’s orders and stay in bed. But the Word comes to these people in the presence of those who, like Peter, come out among them and stand beside them. These miraculous events are subversive of the present order, for they announce a new age, an age where reality is not based upon rigid logic or cause-effect circumstances but upon God’s promise. Each miraculous intrusion is a sign that “If it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you” (Luke 11:20). Every time a couple of little stories like these are faithfully told by the church, the social system of paralysis and death is rendered null and void. The church comes out and speaks the evangelical and prophetic “Rise!” and nothing is ever quite the same.”
William H. Willimon in Acts Interpretation Bible Commentary 1988 p85-6

The empty tomb

Anne and I have moved to Christchurch where I am minister at St Stephen's Presbyterian Church in Bryndwr near the airport.
I'm having a go at getting back into the blogging business...
This time with a quote from material I am accessing on the web... It is based on the ideas of theologian Rene Girard. http://girardianlectionary.net/

The empty tomb is essential for understanding the resurrection, not because it announced the resurrection, but because it deprived those who were later to experience the resurrection of a cathartic religious ritual that might have substituted for it. The discovery of the empty tomb meant that Jesus' corpse and its resting place could not be made into a shrine and become the locus for a new religious cult. Had Jesus' tomb not been empty, the explosive force that scattered the gospel revelation out beyond the culture-world in which it originated and broadcast it to the corners of the earth might have been offset by the gravitation pull of a central shrine. Had the tomb not been empty, what Paul feared might have happened. The Cross might have slowly moved to the margins of Christian awareness and the Christian message. Christianity might have become what some have recently declared it to be: a philosophical affair presided over by a Jeffersonian Jesus full of wise and occasionally ironic sayings.
Given the significance of the empty tomb, nothing symbolizes Christianity's apostasy in history as perfectly as do the Crusades, that cluster of sacrificial convulsions that essentially brought "Europe" as a cultural phenomenon into existence. Pope Urban B launched the First Crusade by passionately imploring European Christendom to arm for the task of reclaiming from the infidel the sepulcher of Christ. This sacred mission remained the supreme rallying cry for all the subsequent Crusades. In other words, Christianity's most notorious revival of sacred violence involved a repudiation of the story of the empty tomb and a more or less spontaneous revival of the structures of sacred violence whose perversities the crucifixion had exposed.
[Excerpt from Gil Bailie's Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads (New York: Crossroads, 1995)]

South Island Snow from up very high

Look at that! We have had quite a week of it down south, but not in Dunedin on the right down low, green, clean and cold!

pacific highlander

A colleague who was a great influence in my working out whether I was being called to church ministry is Duncan Macleod - he now works in Queensland and has an excellent blog... http://www.pacifichighlander.postkiwi.com/
Have a look!

Audrey, Audrey, Audrey

I have been surprised to learn that other colleagues of mine share similar views about Audrey Tautou. I guess I am picking on her this week because she is the main 'thing' we can salvage from The Da Vinci Code, and thank God for that!
One colleague described her as "pretty smashing" another said "Let's cast off restraint. Let's live a little. what's her mobile number?"
Good healthy stuff given the impossibility of connecting with her (if Tom couldn't in the movie, who can?)
Well, I thought that until today... when the following photo came. Audrey - thanks, I didn't know you cared!