Three kings? Not even one
any more. Royalty
has gone to ground, its journeyings
over. Who now will bring
gifts and to what place? In
the manger there are only the toys
and the tinsel. The child
has become a man. Far
off from his cross in the wrong
season he sits at table
with us with on his head
the fool’s cap of our paper money.
– RS Thomas, ‘Epiphany’, in Collected Poems, 1945–1990 (London: Dent, 1993), 363.
While browsing through David L. Edwards’ 664-page Christianity: The First Two Thousand Years (1997), I noticed that it was not until page 599 that New Zealand even rated a mention (which is fair enough), and even then very little ink (113 words) was spilt (which is, I guess, understandable in such a volume). But the bromidic summary is unforgiveable, and it’s hard to believe that this was written – and published – in the 1990s!
‘The history of Christianity in New Zealand is not unlike that story [of Australia]. Here the original inhabitants were the more ‘developed’ Maoris who arrived from Polynesia and the intruding British were settlers who acquired their land (after stout resistance) by treaties which were formal although unequal; these agreements were subsequently broken. American and Asian influences have so far been less strong than in Australia, Man has been less able to damage islands much smaller but more fertile and more beautiful, and the position of the churches is stronger. However, although relatively conservative New Zealand is in significant ways postmodern. The days when missionaries hoped for a nation of Christian Maoris without settlers are distant.’
Now I consider myself a very generous and fair reader, but with this kind of drivel it’s hard to understand why Edwards bothered mentioning New Zealand at all.
Here’s the ever-captivating and sapient Marilynne Robinson being interviewed by William Storrar, Director of the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, on the topic of doing theology and on writing theology:
The traditions of artistic expression and of Christian faith are richly intertwined. Artists help us to see differently. They draw attention to the order of things, and to their disorder. They help us to see the world’s beauty; they present us with its simplicity, and confront us with its tragedy. Now and again the work of artists becomes something more. Like all human gestures toward the truth of things, the work of artists can become an instrument through which God calls for our attention.
Attentiveness to God is also the task of Christian theology. Theology is, simply, a mode of attentiveness to the self-disclosure of God, and a striving to see the truth of things in light of that self-disclosure.
A group of us here in Dunedin are organising a conference and exhibition which will bring together artists and theologians to foster this intertwining.
The conference and exhibition are premised on the conviction that artists, theologians and people of faith have things to learn from one another, things about the complex inter-relationality of life, and about a coherence of things given and sustained by God.
The aim is to bring painters, poets, musicians, indeed, artists of all descriptions, together with theologians, and with people of faith, to explore a particular theme; can there be repair? Can there be a mending of the world, wounded as it is by war, by hatred, by exploitation and by neglect. We have chosen the Hebrew phrase ‘Tikkun Olam’ – to mend the world – to signal the conference theme, and to pose the question: Can there be repair? Can art and can theology tell the truth of the world’s woundedness and still speak of hope? Can poetry still be written after unspeakable tragedy, a concerto played, a brush taken up? Must it be written, played, or taken up, perhaps more than ever?
We invite you to join us in exploring this theme.
Conference Dates & Place
29–30 July 2011. Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership, Knox College, Arden Street, Dunedin.
Conference Speakers
The theme will be addressed by a range of speakers including Professor William Dyrness, Professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary, California.
Exhibition Dates & Place
An exhibition of work that picks up the theme of the conference – To mend the world: Tikkun Olam – is also being organised and will run for a week over the period of the conference.
Invitation to Artists
Artists are invited to participate in a group exhibition to be held at a Dunedin gallery. Information about submissions is available here.
More information on both the conference and exhibition is available here.
Only a calendar would start the day by talking about a new year,
the walls know damn well this isn’t the start of anything new.
Outside, as ever, the clouds blow past, light as hair,
and the wind rattles the windows with the same hands.
March and April will come, and eventually
a day will fill you with its endless hours;
along with the sky and the blown clouds
it will fall into your hands and your house.
Sometimes you catch your face at night in a mirror
obscurely filled with aging—
a faded envelope with unbroken seal,
stuffed always with the same script.
Every day is new and a jubilee,
but pain is a long way off ,
and of the celestial trophies
the only one in your possession is the evening star.
– Günter Eich, Angina Days: Selected Poems (trans. Michael Hofmann; Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 13.
‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only’. – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.
Best books
Theology
Biography
Ministry
History
Cooking
Poetry
Best albums
1. Officium Novum by Jan Garbarek & The Hilliard Ensemble.
2. The Age of Miracles by Mary-Chapin Carpenter.
3. Foundling by David Gray.
4. Scratch My Back by Peter Gabriel.
5. Sacrificium by Cecilia Bartoli.
6. Women and Country by Jakob Dylan.
7. 100 Miles From Memphis by Sheryl Crow.
8. Great and Small by Butterflyfish.
9. Downtown Church by Patty Griffin.
10. No Better Than This by John Mellencamp.
Honorable mentions: All Delighted People by Sufjan Stevens; The Age of Adz by Sufjan Stevens; Leave Your Sleep by Natalie Merchant; Go by Jónsi; April Uprising by The John Butler Trio; The Promise by Bruce Springsteen; The Astounding Eyes of Rita by Anouar Brahem; American VI: Aint No Grave by Johnny Cash; San Patricio by The Chieftains & Ry Cooder; In Person & On Stage by John Prine; How I Learned to See in the Dark by Chris Pureka.
Best films
1. How I Ended This Summer
2. Winter’s Bone
3. Abandoned
4. The Infidel
5. Shutter Island
6. Boy
Overrated films
Worst films
Best TV shows
1. An Idiot Abroad (Series 1)
2. Rev
Some Personal Highlights
Not sure why (although holidays and extended daylight may have something to do with it), but December seemed to be a month in which I knocked over a bucket-load of reading, listened to a tonne of music, and enjoyed more flicks than usual. Here’s my exploits:
Reading:
Listening:
Watching:
Brewing: Sumatra Mandaling
Drinking:
‘… the Kingdom of God, which is not solely of this world, is slowly coming closer to being more clearly figured in this world … we who are not saints are caught up, not by God but by the logic of our choosing to delay sainthood, in a combat we keep thinking is new (or even Modern) because of the novel shapes and pressures it keeps presenting, a physiognomic struggle between those who somehow accept grace and those who bear the distorting strain of trying to block it off, to act without it or against it. This, I think, rather than the usual superficial divisions between Right and Left, Black and White, religious and irreligious etc, is where the real lines are drawn … But when I come to meditate on topics such as grace, I don’t finally trust myself to talk about them in prose. For the important stuff, I need the help of my own medium of poetry, which can say more things’. – Les A. Murray, A Working Forest: Selected Prose (Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1997), 146–7.
Advent II: ‘The Waiting’, by RS Thomas
Advent III: ‘Advent Calendar’, by Rowan Williams
Advent IV: ‘The process of Your coming’, by Karl Rahner
Advent V: ‘The sign of God is powerlessness in the world’
Advent VI: ‘Gift’ by Marion Armstrong
Advent VII: ‘The Man Who Was a Lamp’, by John Shea
The latest edition of One the Road, the journal of the Anabaptist Association of Australia and New Zealand, includes a helpful piece by Michael Buttrey titled ‘12 ways to prematurely write off Yoder: Some common misconceptions about Yoder’s ‘Neo-Anabaptist’ vision’. Buttrey identifies the twelve ‘misconceptions’ as:
1. Yoder believes Constantine corrupted the church.
2. Yoder thinks that there was no salt or light in the medieval church.
3. Yoder hates Luther, Calvin and the other magisterial Reformers.
4. Yoder has a low view of God’s sovereignty over history. Or:
5. He idolizes the early church.
6. Yoder inappropriately sees Jesus’ earthly life as normative.
7. Yoder fails to deal with the Old Testament, especially the wars of Joshua.
8. Yoder’s pacifism inhibits any effective witness to the state, especially regarding war.
9. Even for Christians, Yoder’s pacifism is impossible, or at least irresponsible.
10. Yoder advocates separation from the world that ‘God so loved.’ And:
11. Isn’t Yoder a ‘fideistic sectarian tribalist’ like Stanley Hauerwas?
Here, Buttrey writes:
These common accusations seriously misunderstand Yoder.
First, Yoder’s context was one where he was urging traditionally quietist Anabaptists to realize they had a social ethic and witness to society, while simultaneously calling activist Christians to realize they need not abandon the gospel and take up the methods of the world in their impatience to get things done. Ironically, Yoder has often been taken more seriously by theologians and political philosophers outside his tradition – such as Stanley Hauerwas and Romand Coles – than those on the ‘inside.’
Second, Yoder has no desire to divide the church further. Indeed, in “The Kingdom As Social Ethic” he deeply objects to the labelling of radically obedient groups as sectarian, for they had no intentions of separating themselves:
[Such groups] have called upon all Christians to return to the ethic to which they themselves were called. They did not agree that their position was only for heroes, or only possible for those who would withdraw from wider society. They did not agree to separate themselves as more righteous from the church at large. (85)
Third, Yoder is fundamentally not interested in withdrawal or separation from society. In “The Paradigmatic Public Role of God’s People,” Yoder agrees with Karl Barth that ‘what believers are called to is no different from what all humanity is called to. … To confess that Jesus Christ is Lord makes it inconceivable that there should be any realm where his writ would not run.’ (25) Of course, those who seriously see Christ’s commands as normative for all tend to be called fideists or theocrats. Yoder is neither.
Yoder is not a fideist because, unlike most realists, he sees the gospel as having a truly universal appeal. Christian realists typically assume that the gospel is inaccessible and incomprehensible to all other groups, and so it is necessary to use a neutral, ‘public’ language to oblige non-Christians ‘to assent to our views on other grounds than that they are our views.’ (16–7) Indeed, it is not Yoder but his critics who tend to think that their faith is fundamentally irrational and its public demands must be set aside for that reason. This reverse fideism is not surprising, however, given how modern liberal democracies understand religious groups and language.
Further, Yoder is not a theocrat, because he does not call for the violent imposition of the gospel, which would be an oxymoron. Rather, the challenge for the church is to purify its witness so ‘the world can perceive it to be good news without having to learn a foreign language.’ (24) Christ’s universal lordship obliges the church to make great demands of the world, but by definition, the gospel witness is a process of public dialogue, not coercion.
In short, the best word for Yoder’s understanding of the church’s witness to society is that of model. Consider some of these potential imperatives for civil society Yoder derives theologically in that same essay:
This sketch is almost a political “platform,” and hardly separatist. But for Christians with typical approaches to politics, Yoder’s call for the church to be where God’s vision for society is first implemented and practiced is an enormous stumbling block. It is yet another irony that realists are so often closet quietists: they see the only choice as being between transforming society and letting it go its own way. Yoder, however, asks us to obey Christ even if no one else is interested – although he trusts that the Kingdom will advance if the word of God is faithfully witnessed and embodied amid the powers and principalities of the world.
12. Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas are the same.
You can read the full piece here.
While writing a lecture on the Lord’s Supper, I’ve been reflecting on some interesting images which, each in different ways, invite us to think again about what the Church might be up to when it engages in this particular proclamatory performance. Here’s a few that struck me:
They came over the snow to the bread’s
purer snow, fumbled it in their huge
hands, put their lips to it
like beasts, stared into the dark chalice
where the wine shone, felt it sharp
on their tongue, shivered as at a sin
remembered, and heard love cry
momentarily in their hearts’ manger.
They rose and went back to their poor
holdings, naked in the bleak light
of December. Their horizon contracted
to the one small, stone-riddled field
with its tree, where the weather was nailing
the appalled body that had asked to be born.
– RS Thomas, ‘Hill Christmas’, in Collected Poems, 1945–1990 (London: Dent, 1993), 290.
Happy Christmas to all readers of Per Crucem ad Lucem. Here’s PT Forsyth singing his constant song, and reminding us again of why today the Church might sing Joy to the World, and of the ‘wonders of [God’s] love’ :
‘Without [the] cross and its Atonement we come to a religion of much point but no atmosphere, much sympathy and no imagination, much kindness and no greatness, much charm and no force—a religion for the well-disposed and not for the rebel, in which we love our neighbour, but not our enemy, and not our Judge; a religion for the sensitive, but not for the world. When the world-cross goes out of the centre of religion, religion in due time goes out of the centre of man’s moral and public energy. The public then goes past the preacher because he is not strong enough to arrest and compel them. He has too much to say and too little to tell. He hangs to his age by its weakness, and not by its strength. He does not reach its soul with such gospel as he has. The pathos of Christ takes the place of his power. We canonise the weak things of our Christian world in our haste for rapid success with the many. Religion becomes too aesthetic, too exclusively sympathetic, too bland, too naturalistic. Our very Christmas becomes the festival of babyhood, Good Friday the worship of grief, and Easter of spring and renewal instead of regeneration. To use the old theological language, under an obsession of culture and its pensive delicacies we become dominated by the passive obedience of Christ instead of His active. We treat the cross as a passion only, instead of a principle, or as a moral principle instead of a decisive deed. Christ becomes a pathetic, tender, helpful and gracious figure rather than a mighty … But the great dividing issue for the soul is neither the Bethlehem cradle nor the empty grave, nor the Bible, nor the social question. For the Church at least (however it be with individuals) it is the question of a redeeming atonement. It is here that the evangelical issue lies. It is here, and not upon the nativity, that we part company with the Unitarians. It is here that the unsure may test their crypto-unitarianism. I would unchurch none. I would but clear the issue for the honest conscience. It is this that determines whether a man is Unitarian or Evangelical, and it is this that should guide his conscience as to his ecclesiastical associations. Only if he hold that in the atoning cross of Christ the world was redeemed by holy God once for all, that there, and only there, sin was judged and broken, that there and only there the race was reconciled and has its access to the face and grace of God—only then has he the genius and the plerophory of the Gospel. If he hold to Christ as this head, then, whatever views he may hold on other heads, he is of the Gospel company and the Evangelical pale. Only thus has he a real final message for the age. Only thus is he more than one that has a lovely voice and can play well on an instrument for the ages’ pleasure and its final neglect’.
– PT Forsyth, The Cruciality of the Cross (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), 27, 73–4.
Halden Doerge’s latest post, The impotence of the liturgical year, is well worth reading. And why I have neither the time nor the inclination to give a full response, I did want to post just a few of my initial reactions. To publish one’s thoughts on-the-run, as it were, is always a somewhat dangerous thing to do in blogdom, but what the salami; it’s close to Christmas, and my responsibility-guard is down.
What Halden wishes to affirm needs to be affirmed: that Advent and the Church’s liturgical calendar as a whole is, properly conceived, about God and not about a fascination with or idolatry about liturgical time per se; that God in his freedom may meet us like he did Zechariah, i.e., while ‘going about the usual liturgical practices of [the] calendar’; we ought not presume that God in his freedom will meet us like he did Zechariah, i.e., while ‘going about the usual liturgical practices of [the] calendar’; that the liturgical calendar functions as something like an icon insofar as we are invited to look through rather than at it, etc., etc., … So three or more cheers for Halden. Halden may also be right when he suggests that some of the claims made by ‘liturgical enthusiasts’ for the efficacy of calendar observance are exaggerated and often appear to lack any empirical testing (I think that the Bible calls this ‘fruit’; the Bible also encourages us to look for such). While I confess that I’ve never actually met such enthusiasts (I haven’t met most people), it is probable that in a world where people can get excited about watching synchronised swimming that some such people do exist.
But I want to defend the claim, made by Hauerwas and others (there is some irony here for it was Halden, among others, who inspired me to read Hauerwas again after some years of neglect), that living in a deeper awareness of the story of Jesus and of the Church does, in the freedom and grace of God, ‘do’ something. Specifically, it trains us. It immerses us into a gospel-forming rhythm. And that is precisely something that the Church’s calendar encourages (rather than ‘does’) too. Like praying the Lord’s Prayer, or fasting, the Church’s calendar calls us into the river with others and watches to see if we are learning to swim in it yet, or otherwise. It does not turn us into liturgical automatons. Again, it trains us. It trains us in the way of ordinary gospel-posture. (It seems significant to me that the bulk of the Church’s time is ‘ordinary’). To claim that keeping Church time ‘does’ something is different to claiming that such time-keeping has some kind of magical power, something akin to a superstitious understanding of baptism articulated by some (in less enlightened times than our own ;-)). The former is to say something about the way that faith understands God’s way with us; the latter is simply atheistic.
I understand that every time we come to the Lord’s Table, for example, which is where the entire Church story is enacted in concentrated form, we are offered training in how to live sacramentally in the world, to unearth its idolatries and to expose what William Stringfellow (in Free in Obedience) calls the ‘transience of death’s power in the world’. I agree that the training itself doesn’t, in Halden’s words, ‘just do it’, i.e., do the work in and of itself of making us more like the discipling community intended by the training ‘event’, but I’m not sure that the fault (if we are looking for such) here lies with either the teacher nor with the training manual. I think that Jamie Smith’s thesis, in Desiring the Kingdom, is basically right. To be baptised into the liturgical life of the community is to be immersed into its habit-forming practices, practices which are invitational, which are undertaken with a view to fostering transformation of both mind and performance, and have something like what we might call eschatological reserve or groan. In other words, they are the gift of the Spirit, and so bear the print of the Spirit’s hand. As one of my students put it to me recently, the Church is called to be ‘a foretaste of a community of right relationships’, not the kingdom arrived! This begs the question of how the Church’s observance of ‘real’ time prepares and directs one for life as it shall be: ‘For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known’ (1 Cor 13.12).
Or think of the Supper, the central act of the Christian community. As the community gathers around the Table, we are offered, among other things, training in how to forgive others. God creates koinonia around the Table in which, as Hauerwas and Willimon argue in Resident Aliens (sorry Dan but I think that Hauerwas has a point here, even if his response to you was less than satisfying), ‘even small, ordinary occurrences every Sunday, like eating together in Eucharist, become opportunities to have our eyes opened to what God is up to in the world and to be part of what God is doing. If we get good enough at forgiving the strangers who gather around the Lord’s Table, we hope that we shall be good at forgiving the strangers who gather with us around the breakfast table. Our everyday experience of life in the congregation is training in the arts of forgiveness; it is everyday, practical confirmation of the truthfulness of the Christian vision’ (p. 91), and it is an invitation to live as if the one who first appeared as a stranger at the Emmaus breakfast was serious when he preached the so-called Sermon on the Mount.
As a side note, Jaroslav Pelikan (in The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 4: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300–1700), p. 124) recalls an interesting point argued by Nicholas de Cusa. While de Cusa supported communion in only one species (bread), he linked Eucharistic practice with the health of the church. Pelikan summarises de Cusa’s position thus: ‘When the love of the church was at its peak, believers communicated often and under both species; when it was only warm, they received more rarely and by means of intinction; and now that it was merely tepid, they received even less often and under one species. Thus, “the usage was commensurate with the love of the church”’.
Perhaps it is no coincidence, afterall, that St Paul comes back to the Supper as he deals with the Corinthians and their train-wreck of a church. We either feast on Christ, or we feast on each other!
Few books have left their mark on me as deeply as Vincent Donovan’s Christianity Rediscovered: An Epistle to the Masai. One of the oft-recounted ‘episodes’ in the book concerns Donovan’s ‘conversion’ by a Masai elder who unmasked Donovan’s very Western (enlightenment) notion of faith as predominantly intellectual assent, ‘to agree to’. ‘“To believe” like that’, the elder said, ‘was similar to a white hunter shooting an animal with his gun from a great distance. Only his eyes and his fingers took part in the act. We should find another word’. He continued: ‘for a man really to believe is like a lion going after its prey. His nose and eyes and ears pick up on the prey. His legs give him the speed to catch it. All the power of his body is involved in the terrible death leap and single blow to the neck with the front paw, the blow that actually kills. And as the animal goes down the lion envelops it in his arms (Africans refer to the front legs of an animal as its arms) pulls it to itself, and makes it part of himself. This is the way a lion kills. This is the way a man believes. This is what faith is’.
Donovan’s response? Silence, and amazement: ‘Faith understood like that would explain why, when my own was gone, I ached in every fiber of my being’. But the Masai elder had not finished speaking to Donovan:
‘We did not search you out, Padri … We did not even want you to come to us. You searched us out. You followed us away from your house into the bush, into the plains, into the steppes where our cattle are, into the hills where we take our cattle for water, into our villages, into our homes. You told us of the High God, how we must search for him, even leave our land and our people to find him. But we have not done this. We have not left our land. We have not searched for him. He has searched for us. He has searched us out and found us. All the time we think we are the lion. In the end, the lion is God’. (p. 51)
Does this not go to the heart – and challenge some of our misconceptions – of Advent wherein we celebrate the coming of God, the lion – or, if you prefer Francis Thompson’s image, ‘the hound’ – of heaven among us? For all the time that we are focussed on our waiting, the lion is on the prowl, awaiting his own time to enact the ‘terrible death leap and single blow’ upon us, love’s victim. Clearly, Advent is his waiting too.
It was this lion, of course – this lion from whose generous bounty we live, gift after gift after gift; this lion who is the glory of the Father – who pounced on Mary, pulled her to himself, and made her part of himself. And it is Mary, perhaps more than any other biblical figure, who gifts us with how one lives under and inside a lion; i.e., who gifts us with how one lives the other side of our death. So her Magnificat, as recorded in the Book of Common Prayer:
My soul doth magnify the Lord: and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
For he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden.
For behold, from henceforth: all generations shall call me blessed.
For he that is mighty hath magnified me: and holy is his Name.
And his mercy is on them that fear him: throughout all generations.
He hath shewed strength with his arm: he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.
He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel: as he promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed for ever.
Time to reflect: Here’s the ‘Magnificat’ by Arvo Pärt, set to Cal Jones’ (Director and Producer) and Ralph Lopatin’s (Cinematographer) ‘Miracle on the Delaware’:
[Image: Gary Cutri]
Back in 2001, for the Feast of Corpus Christi, Herbert McCabe O.P., delivered a fascinating sermon on the Eucharist. It was titled ‘Human words become God’s Word’. It reads:
‘The eucharist is about the way we are with each other, about our unity. This is obvious from its shape, a ritual meal, an eating and drinking together, to say we share one life.
Now it is not just an ordinary ritual meal, but a sacramental ritual meal, because it expresses the mystery of our unity. It is plain that the eucharist is not a meal any more than baptism is taking a shower. It ought not to look like an occasion when hungry people come to eat and drink. It is a token meal, when something is said. The bread and wine are there for symbolism, not nourishment, though of course they wouldn’t have their symbolism if they weren’t food and drink.
A purely ritual meal in which all share a token portion of bread and wine is purely symbolic, a piece of language, a word. It is not because the eucharist is a sacrament that bread and wine become signs: they are already signs in a perfectly ordinary way. To see the eucharist as a sacrament is to see it as symbolic not just of our human friendship or of the human mystery within it, but of the unfathomable mystery within and beyond it, of community in the Spirit of God.
We cannot express this unity in the Spirit in the same signs with which we symbolise human friendship; they have to be transformed into a new language. We can attempt to express the depth of human relationships in human words, but they cannot adequately express our relationship in the Spirit. Only God can speak of God: to express this unity we need not just human speech but God’s speech. That is what it is for the eucharist to be a sacrament: what on the face of it are human words deepen into God’s Word, which speaks the unfathomable mystery of his love in which we share.
The eucharist is also the sacrament of the human body of Christ. The Word by which God’s love is made present amongst us is not in the first place words, but a human being of flesh and blood, not an idea about God, but the enacted life-story of Jesus of Nazareth. When we say God’s Word expresses our unity in the Spirit in the eucharist, we mean that language used for our love for each other is no longer just human words of bread and wine, but the divine Word-made-flesh, the real body and blood of Christ.
This is the difference between Catholic teaching and the idea that bread and wine are human symbols expressing what Christ does for us. Catholics say that this cannot be expressed except in God’s language; it can only be spoken by God’s speaking his Word, the bodily reality of Jesus. It is not just that our language is now used to speak of Christ, but Christ himself, the Word, is now our language: our words, symbolic bread and wine, have become Christ, the flesh and blood of God’s Word.
So while to one without faith we seem to be dealing simply in human symbols, we know that that is only to look at appearances. In reality it is the body and blood of God’s Word, his whole humanity, that is the sign of our unity in the Spirit. When we eat his body and drink his blood, we speak and hear God’s Word telling of our divine friendship, just as when we share human food we speak a human word of human friendship.
Finally, the eucharist is the sacrament of a body broken and blood shed. Jesus’ life-story was completed in his execution. His obedience to his mission to be truly human meant that we, the world, killed him. Because of the disunited world we have made, the Word takes flesh that is tortured and killed. The divine language and sacrament of our unity is Christ’s body broken and blood shed.
This feast of friendship celebrates the cross. This friendship the world will hate and it belongs to those in solidarity with the victims of the world, and expects only suffering and death. The sacrament of love is also sacrament of death – Christ’s death through which we come to a new life in the love which is the Holy Spirit, in which we shall live for eternity’.
I am told that just before dawn,
there is a moment
when it is neither dawn nor night.
It is a blink after the dark
and a flash before the light.
It is promise of life held in an instant;
moving but not yet ours to see;
suspended between what was,
and what is yet to be.
We exist in this holy interregnum,
for the old is past, and behold a new day,
but not yet. Not yet.
In this moment between movements,
we strain and ache for the promised
joy that comes with the morning.
This is time between time,
a breath between days;
the rupture of epochs:
marking a border between the inauguration
and the consummation of all things.
Here, the Word whispers softly,
disturbing our sleep,
so that we might awaken
in the embrace of the son,
whose life is the light
that illuminates the world.
This is the moment when all is quiet
before creations sings.
A stillness heard so deeply
it is barely heard at all.
It is advent,
the silence
between notes.
Behold!
– Trygve David Johnson, ‘Advent’. A Poem written for Hope College Vespers 2010, Dimnent Chapel.
[Image: Flandrum Hill]
Christian World Service are sponsoring an exhibition of paintings by Christian and Muslim children and adult artists who live in Gaza.
Where: Knox Church, 449 George St, Dunedin, in the Gathering Area.
When: 20–22 December 2010, 3–5 January 2011. 10.00 am – 4.00 pm.
The exhibition will be launched on Monday 20 December @ 5.15pm with a talk by Mai Tamimi.
Enquiries: email or phone (03) 477 0229.
‘While (the Christian) vision is no longer the dominant one (in Australia), and may never have been, neither is any other at the moment. There is as yet no other vision abroad in our society which commands the same authority as ours does, the same sense of being the bottom line, the great reserve to be called on in times of real need. Many of the themes of the rallies are necessary problem solving and little more, and much in the spiritual supermarket is fair weather stuff, adjuncts to a prosperity which may now be vanishing. Unbelief, once a daring and rather aristocratic gesture, must now have exhausted most of its glamour; it is certainly no longer exclusive, or particularly rebellious. Much the same could be said of sexual indulgence, pornography and the like. Having by now surely lost most of its flavour of forbidden fruit, sexual licence has to justify itself in terms of whatever real satisfaction it can give; its utility as a bait to draw people out of traditional ways and beliefs, and if possible into new allegiances, must by now also be wearing thin. And it will be difficult at the very least, for the cult of unremitting youthfulness and physical beauty to survive in the era of aging populations which it has helped to produce. By now liberal humanism is as badly fragmented by dissension as our witness ever was, and its fiercest adherents are often covertly uneasy at its lack of gentleness, its readiness to force the facts and its desolate this-worldliness. Its unrelenting adulthood forces people onto the thorns of tragic complexity and the strange intractability of the world, and often when people who subscribe to it relax for a moment, their eyes are seen to contain an almost desperate appeal: please prove us wrong, make us believe there is more to it than this, show us your God and that Grace you talk about. We are more widely judged on our own best terms than we think, and more insistently expected to be the keepers of the dimension of depth than we find comfortable’. – Les A. Murray, ‘Some Religious Stuff I Know About Australia’ in The Shape of Belief: Christianity in Australia Today (ed. Dorothy Harris, et al.; Homebush West: Lancer, 1982), 25–6.
Copious media outlets this morning report that the U.S. Department of Justice recently filed a lawsuit against the oil giant BP and eight other companies over the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson said the government is seeking compensation for restoring the Gulf Coast region. She says,
‘ This is about getting a fair deal for the region that suffered enormous consequences from this disaster. And it’s also about securing the future of the Gulf Coast. Ensuring accountability strengthens our ongoing efforts to help Gulf Coast communities get their lives and livelihoods back on track. The government’s complaint seeks civil penalties against those responsible for the spill and will lay the foundation for securing what is needed to restore the Gulf’.
Anyone else see the irony here? If one was to write a book, perhaps an appropriate working title might be The (two) Stories of (two) Gulfs: on logs and splinters.
[Images from here, here, here and here]
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