Dassies Bounce

Fin

2008-08-09T11:35:00.001+02:00

I'm bringing the Bounce to a close and am tentatively establishing a new blog. You can subscribe to this new one too but you will NOT automatically be subscribed to it if you currently subscribe to the Bounce. Visit the blog here.

Quiet Time

2008-04-12T22:31:00.002+02:00

Some have asked why Dassie has been so quiet of late. It occured to me that I could have posted an explanation, but I'd rather not.

Dassie will be away for a while...

Confused allegiance

2008-02-15T14:12:00.003+02:00

If you have broadband and a strong stomach check out this video. Thanks to Nick Carl for sending it to me.

I know well how the Bible can be used to justify almost any cause but it still stuns me when I see something like this. That anyone could think that Jesus would condone the atomic annihilation of a people boggles my mind. There is a strong Zionist Christian movement in South Africa too, though it often is subtler than what is portrayed in the video.

Many Jewish people including most of the Hasidic community and an international group called Not In My Name refute the equation of the Israeli state with the Jewish people. That God would need the re-establishment of Israel as a nation state as a pre-requisite for creating heaven on earth beggars the imagination – what kind of superficial, anthropomorphic idea of God is that??!!

Of course, nationalism creeps insidiously into the minds of faithful people everywhere, stealing people's loyalty for the state. Our education department here in SA is proposing a pledge that children should say at school. Most people don’t seem to have a problem with that but the chances are that if something like this is adopted that it will become more than a nice idea but rather an obligatory test of belonging to the right crowd. It is inevitable that something created to inspire nationalist fervor will be used to establish the boundaries of belonging. Will parents, teachers or students be allowed to abstain from the pledge – probably – but at what cost to themselves?

Jesus required no pledge: “Let your yes be yes and your no be no.”

Lent

2008-02-11T00:27:00.000+02:00

[The illustration of Phoebe’s microchip comes from a sermon by Leonard Sweet.
The rest of this sermon was inspired by an article “Thy kingdom come: living the Lord's Prayer” Christian Century, March 12, 1997 by N.T. Wright as well as “Testing That Never Ceases” Christian Century, February 28, 1990, p. 211 by Fred Craddock]

Some of you have met Phoebe, the smallest member of our family. She is a fox terrier with a fierce personality that is sometimes hard to rein in, despite our best intentions. We decided to invest a small amount in her safety in the event that she gets lost. For a once off fee the vet injected a tiny microchip under her skin, which contains Phoebe’s history including our contact details. Most animal rescue facilities including the SPCA have scanners, which will pick up the information contained on the chip and help the staff track us down and return her to us.

Now that Katie (3 years old and human) is a part of our family and I am starting to wonder what happens when in her teenage years she asks to go with her mates to Galaxy… gosh! – wouldn’t it be nice to have one of those chips on her! Or even better, one of those teeny weeny cameras that unobtrusively monitor people or the GPS unit that tracks a car’s movements and even how its being driven…

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to track our children? It borders on the ridiculous the extent to which we are now able to do that, but it is ridiculous. For one thing, what happens to inculcating trust? And for another, each of us knows how ingenious we are at avoiding detection, lying even to ourselves. We know that no surveillance is actually going to prevent someone doing bad things.

“There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.” Mark Twain

Truth is, if you are tempted, good! Not that giving in to temptation is good. But all too often I hear people complaining about being tempted. Temptation in itself is not a bad thing. It implies that the person has risked living life according to a discipline. That takes courage.

And what’s more, temptation is indicative of our power. The story of Jesus’ temptation is not told to demonstrate Jesus’ weakness, but rather his strength; so too with all of us. We are only ever tempted to do that which is in our power to do. So, the extent to which we are tempted is an indication of just how much power we have. How ironic that we often complain of being weak in the face of temptation!

If you are tempted: good!

Anyone who is being tempted is taking the difficult course of self-control which teaches one the intrinsic power each of us has been blessed with. Temptation is a learning experience. It is for this reason Jesus was led into the desert, not by the devil, but by the Spirit.

An engineer built a bridge and then had an engine drag a huge load and park it on the bridge for a day. An apprentice asked the engineer: “Are you trying to break the bridge?” “No,” replied the engineer, “I’m trying to show how strong it is.”

Why do Christians engage in the discipline of Lent? Why is self-control important?

The prayer Jesus taught us, makes the call for God’s Kingdom and Will to be made real on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus made the radical claim that this world can change and become heaven.

Each one of us has very little control over our environment. We cannot change other people’s minds, or prevent them doing whatever they choose. We cannot control the weather or when we will die. But we can control ourselves. We can discipline our own desires and manage our own attitudes and prejudices.

Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

Christian spirituality is not meant primarily for individual transformation. That is only the beginning. We believe Jesus was the first infection of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth – an infection that is slowly taking over the world.

Our personal discipline and transformation has the power to change the world.

Maybe this Lent, you might want to consider giving up electricity. Every news bulletin I see these days decries the failure of Eskom and the crisis our blackouts have plunged South Africa into. The usual blame game goes nowhere and solutions seem far away.

Eskom delivers unsustainable energy to a country that increasingly uses electricity without thought for the consequences. This is like any consumptive addiction. It is destructive and blaming one’s pusher doesn’t deal with the problem. We are addicted to thoughtless consumption.

Christians in South Africa could easily give up having the geyser on all day and the lights on in the part of house they aren’t actually using. Seems a small price to pay. The inconvenience of having to be disciplined might teach one to appreciate how important this resource is and why it is so important that we move to renewable forms of energy.

South Africa is the region’s biggest supplier or electricity and our present crisis may well result in these countries no longer having power. For SA the blackouts are an inconvenience – if an expensive one – but for our neighbours they could spell catastrophic disaster. Surely Christians in SA can do more than complain about why Eskom has failed us???

We want all people to have equal access to the power to make life beautiful: clean water, electricity, education and so on. In order to make that happen, we all have to share sustainable resources in ways that ensure our children can also benefit from such life-affirming systems. That ideal begins to be realised in our personal self-discipline.

“Dear God, this little bit of earth which is my body I make available for a little bit of heaven. Teach me to tame my addictions and prejudices that all may come to enjoy what I do.”

Here here!

2008-01-31T10:06:00.000+02:00

Please read this blog from John Minto: "Open Letter to the President of South Africa" Thanks Gavin for the link...

It is hard not to become cynical about the last decade of so called transformation. I have just finished reading Ismael Beah's "Long Way Gone", a memoir of his stolen childhood as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone. While the accuracy of some of the chronology is disputed, I think it is still worth a read and reminded me of the resilience of ordinary people’s vulnerability – something wealth and power ignore.

Dark Vader

2008-01-30T11:53:00.001+02:00

Thanks to Marc The Chizzel for sending this. (Author unknown)

Our father who art in Eskom
powerless be thy name.
Thy kingdom badly run
thy power undone,
in Jo'burg as it is in KZN.
Give us this day our half-baked bread
and forgive the trespassers
who shoot us dead.
Lead us not into a dark nation
but deliver us from load shedding.
For thine have no kingdom
no power nor electricity,
for now and foreseeable future.
Amen

Fishing for People

2008-01-30T08:55:00.000+02:00

Read Matthew 4:12-23

Have you ever found yourself sitting in a room with a loud clock ticking? When you have something interesting and engaging to do, you forget that the clock is ticking and after a while don’t notice it at all. If, on the other hand, you are bored, the ticking clock can be very irritating. This illustrates the difference between two kinds of time for which the ancient Greeks had two different words: Chronos and Kairos.

Chronos gives us “Chronology” in English. It is boring time. Each second is identical and meaningless. Time drags on endlessly. Time can feel like a prison. When one is awake at night worrying about the next day, the bedside clock seems to stay motionless.

Kairos time is interesting time. In 1985 during some of the worst years of South Africa’s Apartheid past a group of church leaders wrote the “Kairos Document” which criticized the Apartheid State and attacked the theological underpinnings of the Apartheid heresy. It was a decisive moment in history. Within a year thousands of signatories had made this document one of the most important church documents ever published in South Africa. It was called Kairos because it recognized the moment in history that was pregnant with possibility and hope but that needed decisive action.

That’s what Kairos is all about: powerful meaning and critical decision. When last did you have a Kairos moment in your life?

Another kind of Kairos time is our devotional time, refreshing time; for me that’s walking on the mountain or riding my motorbike.

How many of you reading this enjoying fishing? For those of you who do, fishing can be Kairos time because it is time to pause and refresh oneself, to reflect on life and even make decisions that are not always possible in the humdrum of life. Chronos time is not good for making decisions about life the universe and everything.

For me fishing has always been more like Chronos time: sitting on my bum, waiting for something to happen (usually not catching a fish).

For the fishermen in our story today, fishing was Chronos time, but not for the same reason as it is for me. Fishing in those days was hard work. Not only that, Peter and his colleagues lived at the bottom of the feeding chain that was the Galilean fishing industry. This is not so different from industries today where those who do most of the work receive the least benefits from the industry. Read Sarah’s description of what these fishermen faced everyday.

When Jesus called Peter and the others it was a Kairos moment: an opportunity to leave the Chronos time of drudgery and worry behind them.

It is interesting the metaphor that Jesus chooses to use in calling them. They will now become fishers of people. If someone was offering you a new life, why use the old life as a metaphor for the new? Rather a poor selling strategy. But it worked. Clearly these fishermen had had enough and were looking forward to change. Jesus offered the hope of the change and the freedom to realize it. But perhaps hidden in his metaphor is the reality that the Freedom Jesus offers is not like the freedom offered so often in various worldly frameworks…

There is something really important about this freedom that Jesus offers that is not always fully appreciated by Christians. It seems to me to be hidden in the metaphorical use of fishing when Jesus calls the first disciples.

Firstly, all fishing is hard work. Fishing for people would be no less difficult and confounding as fishing for fish. The only difference would be the result. The one kind of fishing supported the grinding machine of the fishing industry and hence an oppressive society that crushed the spirits of ordinary people. The other kind of fishing promised real systemic change, dignity and freedom.

Secondly, Christian freedom is not individualistic freedom. Most of the political philosophies of human history have sought human freedom as an ideal, though sometimes human freedom has been restricted by the freedom of others, particular those who end up with more freedom than the hoi polloi. For most westerners human freedom is chronically individualistic and sadly reduced to the freedom to consume.

Christian Freedom is by no means individualistic and can sometimes appear to be anything but freedom. Christian Freedom is intimately connected to relationship. One cannot be truly free without others. And so while Christians have often been at the forefront of freedom movements, they are also the first to sacrifice their own freedoms. Take for example those who take vows of obedience and chastity yet work tirelessly for human rights. (The same example is found in many faith traditions incidentally – think of the Buddhist monks who were recently killed in Burma).

So too we find a strange contradiction in Paul’s writings to the churches of the ancient Mediterranean. Take for instance the place of women. On one hand “there is neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, man or woman” (Galatians 3.28) but women should not speak in church and must wear head coverings. What we are reading is the result of a long process that is not recorded in writing in the Bible but attested to by other sources as well as the logic of the end result. Paul feels the need to curtail the agitation of the women in his congregations because they are aggressively claiming the freedom he has proclaimed in the Gospel!

Some have argued that Paul was unaware of the consequences of the freedom he proclaimed. On the other hand, if Christian freedom is intimately connected to relationship it seems more likely that Paul is concerned with social transformation and sees revolution as counterproductive to that aim. Revolution makes enemies of former masters. Transformation makes equal friends of former enemies. There is an inherent danger in the freedom that the Gospel proclaims, in that people once oppressed may take what is legitimately theirs but at the expense of reconciliation.

Christian freedom is more about “freedom for” than about “freedom from”. We are certainly free from all forms of oppression and indignity but we are freed primarily so that we can bring freedom for others – especially those who are our enemies.

Jesus, our supreme example, had a legitimate claim to the Kingship of Israel – one he could have taken had he allowed the fermenting revolution to explode on the night of his arrest. But he chose not to take what was rightly his own. He did this because revolution simply replaces one evil with the next. Transformation calls on oppressed and oppressor to make the difficult journey of reconciliation together. For this he was prepared to die and did.

Fishing for people is indeed profoundly difficult work; much harder than any other life pursuit. Like the disciples though, it seems to me so much more rewarding than remaining part of the system. Give me Kairos over Chronos any day!

Burning Bush

2008-01-15T10:20:00.001+02:00

History will record the Bush era as a watershed moment in human history. I just hope we have more history to record...

WHAT'S YOUR CONSUMPTION FACTOR?
By Jared Diamond [Author of Guns, Germs and Steel]

"The population especially of the developing world is growing, and some people remain fixated on this. They note that populations of countries like Kenya are growing rapidly, and they say that's a big problem. Yes, it is a problem for Kenya's more than 30 million people, but it's not a burden on the whole world, because Kenyans consume so little. (Their relative per capita rate is 1.) A real problem for the world is that each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. With 10 times the population, the United States consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does.

"People in the third world are aware of this difference in per capita consumption, although most of them couldn't specify that it's by a factor of 32. When they believe their chances of catching up to be hopeless, they sometimes get frustrated and angry, and some become terrorists, or tolerate or support terrorists. Since Sept. 11, 2001, it has become clear that the oceans that once protected the United States no longer do so. There will be more terrorist attacks against us and Europe, and perhaps against Japan and Australia, as long as that factorial difference of 32 in consumption rates persists."

Read more in this article here.

Tuning In

2008-01-15T10:10:00.000+02:00

A friend sent this to me and I couldn't resist posting it here...

You are on a bus, when you suddenly fart. Luckily the music is very loud. Everytime time you fart, you time it with the music. When you go down the bus towards the doors, everybody is throwing dagger looks at you, and you suddenly realize... that you have your MP3 player on you ears!

Zebra found

2007-12-23T10:38:00.000+02:00

Jurgen made this video of our friend.

Finding Zebra

2007-12-19T01:03:00.000+02:00

By now, most of you know that I regularly run with a zebra on the slopes of Devil's Peak. Jurgen and I have decided to befriend more of the zebra's kin with carrots. This morning we couldn't find the one that likes us and these ones weren't interested in our carrots. Maybe we didn't have enough carats.

Intelijent debate

2007-12-19T00:59:00.000+02:00

I wish I has something intelijent to say about the future of the country but I didn't see this one coming: Zuma is president of the ANC.

Brandan is having a field day with cartoon material from the farce at Polokwane. I think this one says it all:

Number 9

2007-12-16T10:40:00.000+02:00

I am a 9 on the enneagram. Google it, if you don't know what that is. Here is Garfield in classic 9 mode.

milestones

2007-12-16T10:38:00.000+02:00

the previous post has a really bad unintended pun that has me laughing uncontrolably... i wonder if milestones are worse than kidney stones.

Poo

2007-12-12T01:39:00.000+02:00

Funny how simple things make a parent's day...

Yesterday, after a busy and stressful day, I was gratified by Katie's passing another major milestone. While I was busy in the kitchen she made her way to the toilet, pulled off her pants and her nappy, got onto the toilet and did a poo - all by herself! I heard her in the bathroom and went through to find out what she was up to. When I saw her on the toilet, I assumed Yvette must have helped her, but Yvette was on the other side of the house. Katie did it all by herself - a most impressive little girl.

The world might be completely mad, but my daughter can poo. Life is good.

Sacredise

2007-12-12T01:12:00.000+02:00

John van de Laar and I met a long time ago when I was beginning my spiritual search. He and his wife, Debbie, offered their home and wisdom at a time when I was asking some difficult questions about my future.

In my travels I drifted away from them and was reunited many years later. Now we are colleagues and each of us is working on the fringes of the church where the Spirit of God seems to blow most tempestuously – it’s an exciting place to be with a handful of intrepid sailors!

John has written an excellent book called “Food for the Road” and a CD of his compositions, both of which you can order from his new website. Have a look at the website while you’re at it. If you are anything like me, it’s easier to digest ideas in bite size chunks and you can subscribe to John’s regular newsletter from the site – it’s well worth it.

The Sacredise website and ezine offer resources and inspiration for worship and spirituality. If you need something to help you create a worship event or if you are looking for an interesting perspective on spirituality and issues of the day, I highly recommend John’s work.

I personally have admired John’s work because he integrates the art of worship and personal devotion with the critical thinking required of someone who takes the Gospel of Jesus seriously. That is not an easy task. I, like many, tend to be better at using the Gospel to reflect on the world around me, but not very creative when it comes to integrating that into worship or my own spirituality. Other’s seem very diligent and conscientious about creative worship and/or personal piety, but lack the edge when it comes to the interface at the church’s threshold. John is one of the few people whose example I look to help me find the balance.

Oh, and he’s a really good musician and worship leader. If you can get him to lead a worship seminar or take a service at your church, you’ll be blown away. I have enjoyed watching him weave some of the complex contradictions and cultural diversity of this continent into an exciting blend that grows one beyond the bounds of the conventional. That’s Gospel stuff anyway you look at it!

So check out Sacredise…

The Child I Was

2007-12-12T00:26:00.000+02:00

Brenton Prigge wrote the following poem. It's an image that plays in my imagination a great deal of late. You can see some of Brenton's composition at http://www.newhymn.com/

The child I was
saw the whole wide world
an endless opportunity
for adventure and discovery
with friends who laughed and boasted...
and every bruise was a badge of pride.
Now my bruises are my shame
and I fear the laughter of friends.
I could do with less adventure
and easier discoveries.
Perhaps the child did not yet know truth...
or perhaps I have forgotten it.

Oliver or Lindiwe

2007-12-08T11:12:00.000+02:00

OK, so Yvette is pregnant again. You'd think we'd learn our lesson. This time round, I'm a lot more aware of the consequences so I'm savouring life now and enjoying the 4 hours of solid sleep I still get a night, not to mention the 30mm of bedspace.

Baby is due in July next year and we're not sure of gender yet, so name suggestions would be helpful. I like Oliver for a boy and Lindiwe for a girl.

Katie is trying to get into Mommy's tummy, I guess to meet the new sibling. Gosh, poor girl, she's in for a rude awakening! For the moment, she' looking forward to Christmas and the arrival of Aunty Kathy and Bomy (actually Pomy, but she can't pronounce that properly...). We're all going to the Eastern Cape together for a family road trip.

Criminal Conjunction

2007-11-30T10:00:00.000+02:00

Found this guy on the net a few months back when I googled my name. Hope he doesn't get hold of my ID number too...

Revealed

2007-11-28T00:34:00.000+02:00

"In what way are we to take seriously the authority of Scripture? When read within the perspective of a Scripture that speaks everywhere of a God disclosing Godself through human experience, our stories become the medium of God’s very revelation."

- Luke Timothy Johnson

Damn - have to do something about that stash of porn.

Christ the King

2007-11-26T09:50:00.000+02:00

Read Luke 23:32-38

My fiftieth year had come and gone
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded coffee shop,
An open book, and an empty cup
On the marble table top.

While on the shop and street I gazed
My body for a moment blazed,
And twenty minutes, more or less,
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed, and could bless.

- Yeats

Have you ever had a moment of brightness like the one Yeats describes where you felt surrounded by peace and beauty? They are infrequent, precious moments. Perhaps it’s been a while… perhaps you long for another…

Jesus had a moment of Light on the mountain of his transfiguration. Just as for anyone who isn’t a movie character, Jesus’ moment was followed by descent to the mundane; work to be done. His moment was not a climax but an anti-climax. The climax of his story – the crescendo of his life – is his enthronement: his crucifixion.

Luke’s ironic portrayal of Christ is honoured in the lectionary by using this reading for Christ the King Sunday – the last Sunday of the year. Pilate, the ostensible but illegitimate ruler of Israel, presides over the treason trial of the legitimate King but cannot make the charge stick, giving way eventually to political expediency in order to get rid of the sticky problem Jesus presents.

Leonard Sweet points out the most acute irony: it is Pilate who preaches the first sermon of Christianity. He writes the notice displayed above Jesus’ crucified head: “The King of the Jews”. It is a sign that hangs in every sacred Christian space for thousands of years to come.

Christianity however has had an ambivalent relationship with that irony ever since. Many times Christians have tried to soften it or tailor it to their own expediency. In so doing the irony takes yet another twist as Christ the King is dethroned in a coup of the Christian heart!

I want to look at the challenge that the Christ the King presents to us as disciples as well as the coterminous temptation we sometimes choose to hear in each challenge.

Firstly, Christ is King of our lives. We speak of the goal of spiritual maturity as Christ enthroned in our hearts; ordering our lives’ priorities according to the values of the Kingdom. This relationship is one of forgiveness for personal sin and the redemption of our estranged relationship with God. In our story today we hear these themes as the criminal crucified with Christ asks to be with Jesus in paradise and Jesus grants him this grace.

The temptation here is to leave Jesus as the centre of our personal lives, restricting Jesus reign to personal morality and the “vertical” relationship between individuals and God.

Secondly, Christ is King of heaven. This is an idea we readily assent to for we affirm that Jesus is God. The transfiguration confirms this. In our story Pilate is unable to find a charge worth prosecuting against Jesus. Here was a man that was like any other of a long list of messiahs all claiming to usher in the Kingdom of Heaven. None of them was a threat to the might of Rome. The Essenes were like that; they believed in a messiah who would one day come and usher in the end of the world so they hived off on their own to the dessert to await his coming. The Romans couldn’t have cared less.

The temptation here is like that which the Essenes succumbed to: regarding this world as insignificant compared to the coming Kingdom. This world becomes so insignificant that one eventually doesn’t do anything about changing it.

So we need to be reminded of the third realm of the Christ the King: Christ is King of this earth, here and now. Christ is more than King of our hearts, limited to the personal. Christ is more than King of an idealised world to come. Christ is King right now of this planet, despite evidence to the contrary.

Robert Bly, in his book Iron John, deals with similar themes in his exploration of masculinity in mythology and fairy tales. All three realms are important for developing a healthy imaginative spirituality: the sacred King, the inner King and the earthly King.

The sacred King is the idealisation of power decisively exercised for good – a force larger than us that demands and deserves our allegiance; the experience of transcendence that lifts us up to a glowing perspective beyond the limitations of our circumstances.

The earthly King is represented variously in the political heroes of our own time. For some generations this King is absent as no heroes are available. Given the succession battle in the ANC, one wonders what future generations of South African’s will have as role models of the earthly King…

Surely for Christians, the model of the earthly King is always available for here is one who encapsulates in person and imagination both the sacred and the earthly King in one person: Christ the King.

The inner King is our innate human desire, so alive and present when we are born yet diminished and stunted in adults. Babies are very clear about there own desires – they feel them acutely and express them immediately without inhibition. But the stunted and broken Kings of the adults in their world consume a much larger and more powerful space. Through deliberate and circumstantial neglect adults can frustrate the infant King which has no protection. Eventually the baby learns to ignore or suppress the King inside. But the King cannot be killed and comes back eventually in some distorted form or rallies a cry for help later in life.

It seems to me that the first step in the spiritual journey must be to take that infant King seriously. The season of the infant King’s birth is upon us; a time to reflect on the King within. Bly encourages people to start with small steps, small desires to simply listen to them, let them be without judgement.

When we are able to run our tongue over the rough and sharp edges of the teeth of our hunger we begin a journey that not only can heal us of our own juvenile wounds but also deepens our empathy for others and makes us less prone to judge others.

The birth of the infant / inner King invites us on a journey through which we may reach transcendence, a moment of light. The infant and sacred King contained in the person of Jesus calls us to relate our human desires and our most sacred values to the enrichment and betterment of this earth.

Married to the past

2007-11-13T00:04:00.000+02:00

Read Luke 20:27-38

And check out what Sarah and Bill have to say about this passage before you read my stuff.

Little Suzie comes home one day and tells her mom about Snow White: how Prince Charming saved her from death with his kiss. “You know what happened then?” asked Suzie. “Yes,” replied her mom, “They lived happily ever after.”

“No,” said Suzie, “They got married.”

We think of marriage as this static institution – something we think all people should aspire to. Most societies see marriage as the foundation of their respective cultures. So important is this institution that many will defend its integrity with all their might accusing those who question it of being heretics, terrorists or even devils.

Yet it is interesting that marriage is by no means a static institution and, furthermore, Jesus himself joins the ranks of those who questioned his culture’s assumptions about marriage and family.

Looking at today’s passage we see just how much marriage has changed and just how much Jesus undermined its importance.

Looking at the enmity between Sadducees and Pharisees I am reminded of the divide between conservative and liberal Christians today. At the risk of being overly simple in drawing the parallels, it seems to me that much of what passes for popular Christianity today bears a great deal of resemblance to the Sadduceean emphases of Jesus’ time.

The Sadducees had a more limited view of scripture than their Pharisaic cousins. For them only the Pentateuch was scripture. The Pharisees enlarged their scripture by including the prophets and other bits and pieces. This allowed the Pharisees a great deal more freedom in innovation: particularly in making the Jewish faith accessible to the commoners by wresting control of the faith from the Temple elite and putting it firmly in the hands (or hearts in point of fact) of ordinary people.

The resurrection was one such innovation designed to help people deal with the apparent contradiction between what they might read in Proverbs and their own lives. Proverbs often counsels its readers that the wise and faithful will prosper when in fact most people experienced the very opposite - and still do. For the Pharisees, resurrection offered the hope that in the life to come, justice would be served.

The Sadducees, finding no justification for this belief in their Bible, attacked this Pharisaic innovation. Hence their clever question to Jesus. Jesus comes back at them on their terms, using the portion of the Bible they held in common (remember that Jesus was a Pharisee). He points out the conversation between God and Moses where God is referred to as the “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” These are dead dudes, so the implication is that they must still be living in some sense.

Jesus is very naughty here. Instead of respecting the text, looking for its inherent meaning, trying to discern the intention of the author, he instead overlays it with his own meaning, reading into the text a meaning that surely was not part of the original author’s intention! At university this would have meant an F in an exegesis exam. But Jesus gets away with it because how can you argue with this logic… The Sadducees can’t very well assert that in fact Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are definitely dead and buried.

Furthermore, Jesus does not get caught in the logic trap of the Sadducee’s argument about resurrection. Instead he simply undermines the importance of marriage. This is revolutionary stuff. He suggests that marriage and consequently, family, are of no ultimate concern. Marriage was even more important in Jesus’ society than it is in western culture today so this suggestion must have sounded shocking even to Jesus’ fellow Pharisees.

Two things strike me as important arising out of this:
God speaks new meaning into new times, innovating the Gospel for each new age.
God sees each person as much more than merely their family heritage.

I have referred before to NT Wrights idea of the Bible being like a 4 act play in which the fourth act is being written in the present. While the first acts already written are important for background and formation of the plot and values of the play, it is the present act that is of greatest significance. So too with the Bible which can be said to be the basis upon which the current story of God’s Kindom unfolds but cannot be held as more important than the unfolding drama of God’s action in the present.

Like the Pharisees, and indeed Jesus, we are called to understand the scriptures in their context, but to innovate the values and message we find there for a new age so that the Gospel remains alive to new situations.

It is telling that the Sadduceean movement died shortly after the first century AD. The Pharisaic movement by contrast continues in both the modern Jewish and Christian faiths - both of which have proved highly adaptive to new times, despite those who have tried to hold them back.

Just as the faith is larger than its heritage, so too are the people who hold to it more significant than their heritage. While people then and now see themselves as a product of their family heritage, God sees us as much more. I can see my family as an excuse for my lack of imagination, my stunted ability. I can see my family as the reason for my existence, an investment in the future, my one basket holding all my eggs.

Or I can see myself as God sees me: a father, brother, friend and son to a thousand more people than can ever be my blood relations. I can see the scope of my family, the range of those who I care for and who care for me as far beyond the boundaries of my limitations. I can enlarge my horizons to the full breadth and length, height and depth of God’s love…

Back to Suzie and Snow White: perhaps the fundamental problem with marriage is that every age has tried to attach sexuality to its limited perspective on the truth. So a previous generation may have made marriage all about cementing family birthrights and political ties or of ensuring control over procreation. Our current age, with its infatuation with romantic individualism has attached marriage to the values of romantic comedy – with tragic consequences. Religiously our “family values” entrench the idea of the heterosexual, often patriarchal nuclear family. While this seems very attractive it ignores the fact that most families do not conform to these standards yet often function more healthfully than this ideal.

Jesus’ idea of marriage and family seems to have been more prosaic. Marriage and family were seen by Jesus and the early Christians as temporary states of being that would soon be terminated by death or the second coming of Jesus. So marriage had no ultimate significance as an institution through which society may be transformed or even preserved.

However, marriage could be seen as a good place to practice Kindom values. Paul calls women to submit to their husbands but calls husbands to love their wives as Christ loves the church – i.e. mutual submission with the man (the dominant member) called to become a servant – sacrificing self for the beloved. Thus, the fundamental construct of procreative control in a patriarchal society becomes the principle means by which the early Christians practice their discipleship by inverting power relations!

Similarly the Christian view of family becomes radically expanded to include all God’s children, such that one cares for the stranger as if that person were one’s own brother or sister.

What might such a radical notion mean in a supposedly Christian dominated country like South Africa? Surely if the Christians took this seriously the state would not have to worry about the flood of orphans everyone predicts… Alas, the Sadducees may not be so extinct after all. I hear calls for “family values” and “back to the Bible” and all about the world slowly descends into hell for want of the care of the sleeping Body of Christ.

Let those who hear the Good News in new ways rise up and take their sisters and brothers in.

Ghosts and Saints

2007-11-11T02:55:00.000+02:00

Ghosts and Saints

Can you remember a scary movie from your childhood? I remember watching Dracula and being so scared I couldn’t face the TV screen. I had to watch it in the reflection off the dark windowpane at the opposite end of the living room. Occasionally I would block my ears so I wouldn’t hear the terrible scary music.

When the movie was over I was all alone, my family having gone to bed before the movie. I crept through a dark house trying not to step on the creaky floorboards. When I got to my bedroom I remembered the boogie man under the bed and paused at the bedroom door, wondering if I could leap from there to my bed and get under the covers before the boogie man grabbed my leg. I took a few paces back and ran with all my might, launched off at the door, landed in the bed and swept under the covers.

As I lay there quivering I heard a voice – Yvette, my wife – saying: “What on earth is wrong with you, Greg!?”

Scary movies can still get me…

With more and more South Africans celebrating Halloween, and more and more South Africans complaining about Halloween not being a South African holiday I wondered what all the fuss was about and read up a little. Thanks to Jim Harnish I learnt something really interesting about Halloween…

Halloween used to be an ancient Celtic festival celebrating the god of death, Samhein. Celts would gather around fires all night scarring one another with all things ghostly and ghoulish.

When St. Patrick (or at least the legend of St Patrick!), the first missionary to the Celts in Ireland, arrived he took it upon himself to do what few missionaries have ever done as successfully as him: allow the Gospel to infect the culture of his new home. Instead of seeking to convert the Celts to Christianity by giving up their culture, he sought to find aspects of Celtic culture that already had elements of Christianity in them so as to celebrate Christ’s already present nature in their midst.

The Celtic cross, a cross with a circle drawn around the centre, had its pre-cursor in the design in the side bar of this blog where a tiny cross is visible at the very centre.

Where the Celts prayed to the sprits of trees and animals and the sea in order to placate them, St. Patrick encouraged the Celts to worship the creator of nature who needed no placating. The Celts retained a deep connection with nature and many of their prayers reflect a deep devotion to the God of nature.

Legend has it that St. Patrick repeatedly helped the Celts move from fear to celebration and this was certainly his contribution to the festival of Samhein. Christian Celts celebrated All Saints day on November 1, the day after Samhein’s Festival. Slowly but surely the festival of death was transformed into “Halloween” or “Hallowed Eve” – the eve of All Saints Day. From the fear of death to the celebration of the saints of old, St Patrick helped liberate people from the Ghosts of the past in order that they might celebrate the Saints in eternity.

I think of my own ghosts. I think of the ghosts I meet in the lives of those who come to me haunted by their past regrets, failures, shame and traumas. I think of the ghosts in my congregations: habits, prejudices that keep us stuck in old ways. What will it take to be free from these ghosts?

I am reminded of the idea of the “wounded healer”: that the very thing that imprisons us can become the gift we offer to the world. A woman abused as a child finds healing for her past and becomes in turn a healer for other abused people.

This requires a lot of soul searching, talking with a trusted counsellor or friend but we affirm that eventually it is possible to be free, and more than that, to offer our wounds as healing gifts to the world.

Think of someone who in your life has been a saint – someone who helped you understand your faith in a new and powerful way. Make no mistake, at some point they probably struggled to make sense of their own past, their own pain. They would have had to confront old ghosts. It is probably because of this struggle that they were able to be a saint for you.

Halloween and All Saints Day is a celebration of the power of transformation: that the very same ghosts of our past can make us saints. Go, confront and befriend those ghosts…

life stitches

2007-10-19T10:26:00.001+02:00

young lovers seek perfection
old lovers learn the art of sewing shreds together, and of seeing beauty in a multiplicity of patches

from a poem written on a scrap of paper seen in the movie "how to make an american quilt"

Love's Recovery

2007-09-18T10:34:00.000+02:00

Sitting with a friend today over one more cappuccino I was touched by the knowledge that what I experience in life is not new nor am I alone. I know this, but it is so often difficult to admit that I am like everyone else: prone to the same insecurities, the roller coaster of life, the tensions and potentials.

The last few years I have come to a place of peace in my pursuit of intellectual integrity while at the same time my soul has been increasingly disturbed by the seemingly vast dissonance between my life commitments (my loves) and my affection for everything other than these commitments. I find my energy rebelliously directed in every direction except that which I always thought I most desired. Paul talked about something to that effect didn’t he…?

In a word(s): mid-life crisis.

Principally I have felt this in my commitment to the church and Yvette (although I have also felt it in so many other lesser loves). While the church will mostly not notice – it will be here long after I am gone - I am pained by the effect my vacillation has had on Yvette, a most patient and loyal friend and lover. Other’s have noticed too and felt sadness; sometimes fear; a few have quietly - wisely - rejoiced…

I would have liked to avoid all this, but I see now that this storm is critical to my future health and vitality, not to mention all that it holds for those who might need the gift, which God would give through me.

The one thing I wish is that someone I respected would have admitted as much when I was younger, to take the scandal out of what I inevitably would face. So I put this on record here, at the risk of offence. The details are not for this space but know this: it is the storms that teach us, not fairer weather and what is more, the storm is not endless, nor is it hopelessly un-navigable… but it is unavoidable.

This storm consumes me. It is difficult sometimes to see beyond its blustering false hope and choking terror. And yet I hold the hands of those who travel with me and sometimes they hold my hand when I cannot hold theirs. I pray that I will discover a new way of being in love with all that I have given myself to - in love with this beautiful life I have.

Something new is emerging, something at once frightening and joyful. I would not have had this possibility had it not been for the people who love me and hold me even when I cannot or will not hold them.

I once listened to the melody of a song that fed my melancholy. I did not listen to its words, but today heard those words for the first time. In my storm, they have become the tenacious whisper of sunshine:

During the time of which I speak
It was hard to turn the other cheek
To the blows of insecurity
Feeding the cancer of my intellect
The blood of love soon neglected
Lay dying in the strength of its impurity
Meanwhile our friends we thought were so together
They’ve all gone and left each other
In search of fairer weather
And we sit here in our storm and drink a toast
To the slim chance of love’s recovery

There I am in younger days, star gazing
Painting picture perfect maps
Of how my life and love would be
Not counting the unmarked paths of misdirection
My compass, faith in love’s perfection
I missed ten million miles of road I should have seen
Meanwhile our friends we thought were so together
Left each other one by one on the road to fairer weather
And we sit here in our storm and drink a toast
To the slim chance of love’s recovery

Rain soaked and voice choked
Like silent screaming in a dream
I search for our absolute distinction
Not content to bow and bend
To the whims of culture that swoop like vultures
Eating us away, eating us away
Eating us away to our extinction

Oh how I wish I were a trinity
So if I lost a part of me
I’d still have two of the same to live
But nobody gets a lifetime rehearsal
As specks of dust we’re universal
To let this love survive
Would be the greatest gift that we could give
Tell all the friends who think they’re so together
That these are ghosts and mirages
All these thoughts of fairer weather
Though it’s storming out I feel safe within the arms
Of loves discovery

Thank you Indigo Girl’s for your anthem in my soul-saving crisis.
Thank you friends for cappuccinos, books and humour.
Thank you wise elders for insight and acceptance.
Thank you church for my freedom.
Thank you Yvette for anchoring me in my discontent.

Indeed, with all of you in my life, I am as close to a trinity as any person can be. We are indeed universal dust.

Table Manners

2007-09-03T02:16:00.000+02:00

Read Luke 14:1, 7-14

This story about Jesus’ encounter with the stringent table manners of his own culture reminds me of a story I heard once of a young, western man who travelled to a foreign country – I think it was somewhere in the east. He was to stay with a local family for some months and was at pains during his welcome meal with the family not to cause offence. His mother had taught him to finish whatever was set before him so that’s exactly what he did – neatly polishing off every morsel and leaving his plate empty save for his utensils. Having satisfied himself, he was dismayed as the mother of the household piled his plate high again with a helping equal to his first. Not knowing how to politely refuse this generosity, he found himself having to finish this plate as well, which he did. Having cleaned his plate once more – this time with great difficulty – he was again shocked to find the mother replenishing his plate with a fresh helping as generous as the first two! It turned out that in the culture of his host family anyone who emptied their plate was politely asking for more food!

Table manners are something we take for granted, until we are inserted into a culture where we do not know the rules. It is exhausting having to learn a new set of rules. It is an indication how much energy we spare ourselves being able to take certain things for granted because they are simply the done thing. But sometimes the rules need to be examined because they are also habituated means of manipulating and controlling people.

Stanley Hauerwas once commented that people do not have values – second hand cars have values – people have habits, attitudes and practices.

Much of what passes for civilised manners is in actual fact a very carefully worked out system of economics which helps us assess the value of a particular person to us.

It may be easier for us to see this in first century Palestine where the rules were stricter and strange to modern, individualistic cultures, but they functioned in the same way that our manners function today.

Jesus’ parable this week is another one of those parables often confused as being an indication of what the Kingdom of God is like, when in fact Jesus does not preface this parable with the words “The Kingdom of God is like…” If we take this to mean that what Jesus is reflecting on here is not the Kingdom but the world in which he lived, the parable takes on a more authentic meaning, especially in the light of his following teaching.

We need to understand firstly the importance of place at the table. Take for instance the Dead Sea sect that gave us the Dead Sea Scrolls. It seems they practiced something of an annual review of all members of the community. Based on one’s religious performance you would be graded and placed in a strict hierarchy within the community. The result of this was most keenly felt at group meals where people could see where you were sitting. A demotion would have been catastrophic.

For first century Palestinians the arrangement of people at a meal communicated their station in life but it also reinforced that station. In a highly communal society one’s station was a matter of life and death as it meant access to the stuff of life.

Jesus is reflecting common wisdom of his day based on the table manners of his culture. If you placed yourself at a lower station one could guarantee a very pleasant demonstration of one’s higher status when the host bumped you up a station or two. This is sensible economics - something all of us can understand: how to get what you want as cheaply as possible.

Jesus then makes an invitation to his followers, that when we have a meal we should invite those who cannot repay us in kind. He is inviting us to cultivate friendship’s not based on what may be gained from the relationship, but purely for gratuitous offering of ourselves.

What a shocking invitation.

At our wedding Yvette and I had a terribly difficult time sorting out the seating plan for the bridal table as we had to manage our respective familys’ varying political beliefs as well as troubled relationship history. We never got it completely right and anyway disaster struck long before the bridal table could ever be an issue. A significant family member pulled out of the wedding at the last minute taking many guests with him so that we were left with about 15 seats to fill and a day to find the guests to fill them.

On the day of our wedding, we’d made no progress but we let it go and tried to enjoy the day as best we could. A friend of ours, Lizeka, who was attending her first “white” wedding arrived at the reception with a taxi load of her friends from Khayelitsha. In Xhosa culture this is perfectly acceptable table manners for a wedding! There were just enough new arrivals to fill the vacant seats at the reception. Lizeka’s taxi of friends ended up making our reception the best party we’d ever had.

My wedding taught me to let go of some of the rules and expectations I have about how things ought to be. I learned a valuable lesson that day about the opportunities there are in venturing beyond my cultural assumptions.

If I am honest, much of what I count as friendship is really a carefully calculated transactional economics designed to further my own self-interest. How can I get the best for myself out this or that relationship? While friendships are almost always mutually beneficial, the fact remains that it is for my benefit that I entertain relationship at all.

It would be grotesquely immature to pretend that friendships are not fundamentally about self-interest. And this is not a bad thing. But I worry when I find that my choices seem to reflect very little else – very little grace.

I am particularly in danger of this in my closest relationships. It is much easier to keep a careful internal record of all the things I can reasonably expect Yvette to do for me, to get grumpy and self-righteous when these expectations are not met; than it is to love her for just being Yvette, to allow myself to be loved just because I am lovable. Jesus is inviting me to let go of the daily merry-go-round of working out who should be doing what and start loving graciously, abandoning myself to the simple joy of loving for love’s sake.

I am also in danger of becoming an economist in my relationships when I forget to cultivate friendships with those less fortunate than myself. John Wesley believed that the most important spiritual discipline was “visitation of the poor.” He believed that the orientation of the world was always loaded in the direction of the wealthy so that we all look to those who are richer than ourselves for wisdom and teaching. A Kingdom spirituality necessarily must turn this around – not so that those who are wealthy may give to the poor (though this may be a fortuitous outcome) but primarily because the wealthy have much to learn about God and life from the poor. Jesus is inviting me to seek wisdom and meaning amongst those whose lives are harder than my own, who benefit from less privileges and take less for granted.

Lesson from Bono

2007-08-16T00:30:00.000+02:00

(Thanks to Steve L for sending this to me some time ago.)

"Harry Belafonte is one of my great heroes. He's an old-school leftist and holds on to certain principles like others hold on to their life. He told me this story about Bobby Kennedy, which changed my life indeed, pointed me in the direction I am going now politically. Harry remembered a meeting with Martin Luther King when the civil rights movement had hit a wall in the early sixties: [impersonating croaky voice of Belafonte ] "I tell you it was a depressing moment when Bobby Kennedy was made attorney general. It was a very bad day for the civil rights movement." And I said: "Why was that?" He said: "Oh, you see, you forget. Bobby Kennedy was Irish. Those Irish were real racists; they didn't like the black man. They were just one step above the black man on the social ladder, and they made us feel it. They were all the police, they were the people who broke our balls on a daily basis. Bobby at that time was famously not interested in the civil rights movement. We knew we were in deep trouble. We were crestfallen, in despair, talking to Martin, moaning and groaning about the turn of events, when Dr. King slammed his hand down and ordered us to stop the bitchin': "Enough of this;' he said. "Is there nobody here who's got something good to say about Bobby Kennedy?" We said: "Martin, that's what we're telling ya! There is no one. There is nothing good to say about him. The guy's an Irish Catholic conservative badass, he's bad news." To which Martin replied: "Well, then, let's call this meeting to a close. We will re-adjourn when somebody has found one thing redeeming to say about Bobby Kennedy, because that, my friends, is the door through which our movement will pass." So he stopped the meeting and he made them all go home. He wouldn't hear any more negativity about Bobby Kennedy. He knew there must be something positive. And if it was there, somebody could find it.

Well, it turned out that Bobby was very close with his bishop. So they befriended the one man who could get through to Bobby's soul and turned him into their Trojan horse. They sort of ganged up on this bishop, the civil rights religious people, and got the bishop to speak to Bobby. Harry became emotional at the end of this tale: "When Bobby Kennedy lay dead on a Los Angeles pavement, there was no greater friend to the civil rights movement. There was no one we owed more of our progress to than that man;' which is what I always thought. I mean, Bobby Kennedy is still an inspiration to me. And whether he was exaggerating or not, that was a great lesson for me, because what Dr. King was saying was: Don't respond to caricature-the Left, the Right, the Progressives, the Reactionary. Don't take people on rumor. Find the light in them, because that will further your cause. And I've held on to that very tightly, that lesson. And so, don't think that I don't understand. I know what I'm up against. I just sometimes do not appear to."

From: Bono on Bono: Conversations with Michka Assayas p.86

IN SEARCH OF CONGO’S COLTAN

2007-08-15T02:08:00.000+02:00

By Mvemba Phezo Dizolele

Bukavu is perched high above Lake Kivu, gently encroaching on the placid body of water between Rwanda and Congo. Once known as the pearl of Congo because of its beautiful climate and mountains, the Bukavu I found last summer barely resembles the famed city I heard about as a child.

In the past ten years, South Kivu province and its capital city of Bukavu have been known for two things: insecurity and coltan. I came for both. In anticipation of the country’s first multiparty elections in four decades, I wanted to understand the potential effect of insecurity on the elections and learn first-hand the role minerals such as coltan play in fueling insecurity.

Four times the size of France, and as big as the United States east of the Mississippi river, Congo holds 80 percent of the world’sreserves of coltan, a heat-resistant mineral ore widely used in cellular phones, laptop computers and video games. The ore derives its name from a contraction of columbium-tantalite, the scientific nomenclature.

Columbium-tantalite is so vital to the high tech industry that without it, wireless communication as we know it would not exist. Refined coltan yields tantalum, which is used primarily for the production of capacitors, critical for the control of the flow of current in miniature circuit boards. Tantalum is also used in the aviation and atomic energy industries.

Even though it has been exploited for years, this mineral did not come to prominence among the uninitiated until the “coltan rush” of the late 1990’s. At the beginning of 2000, a pound of unprocessed coltan cost between US$30 and US$40 on the international market. By the end of the year, the price had risen tenfold to US$400.

The advent of a new generation of mobile phones, the upsurge of tech products, and the popularity of video games such as Sony Playstation 2 increased demand for the ore to unprecedented levels and drove prices to new heights. Hoping to make money, thousands of Congolese men rushed to the mines.

Insecurity welcomes me as soon I exit Bukavu’s Kavumu airport. On the way to town, we pass a couple of United Nations peacekeepers’ camps – South Africans, Pakistanis and others. On the rest of the road, we see the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo, known among the people as FARDC.

The FARDC does not inspire trust. Far from a typical army, it is a patchwork of various militias that fought each other not so long ago and still treat each other with suspicion. They idle at the market, smoke at the street corner or fight for public transportation with civilians. They are always armed, do not receive regular pay, and beg whenever they get a chance. Above all, they are hungry and mean. The FARDC seems to own the 35 kilometer-road to town.

The bad condition of the road mirrors the collapse of Congo’s infrastructure and reflects the failure of the State, which is unable to provide the minimum of public service. It takes over an hour to reach the center of town and I see no sign of coltan’s wealth. It is an old beat up city.

By the end of 2001, coltan overproduction and the subsequent decrease in demand drove prices down to their previous level. Adam Smith’s invisible hand did its job. A few international traders made a fortune and militia leaders stuffed their war chests and foreign bank accounts. Local miners, however, only had their dreams for trophy. Coltan perks had evaporated long before I arrived in town.

Bukavu mimics Congo’s problems. Like the country, South Kivu has unlimited potential, from its physical beauty to hydro-electrical capacity to human and natural resources. Yet, conflict, mismanagement and corruption prevent the region from benefiting from these riches.

“If you want to understand what has gone wrong in Congo,” says Thomas Nziratimana of the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD) and vice governor of South Kivu in charge of finance, economy and development, “You start with the way the country has been run so far. Despotic regimes cannot attract investors. They create tensions that do not make anyone feel safe to come and invest.”

Congo has had its share of dictatorships, war and civil unrest. From 1965 to 1997, the late Mobutu Sese Seko presided over a kleptocracy - a predatory regime that benefited a few members of the political elite, bankrupted the rich country and left its population in misery.

“In the past we have had a highly centralized system where everything went to Kinshasa, the capital, yet the provinces were very productive. This has continued today,” reflects Nziratimana. “Eighty-five percent of the income generated in South Kivu is sent to Kinshasa and nothing remains here, nothing.”

The kleptocratic culture did not end with Mobutu’s fall. In May 1997, Laurent-Désiré Kabila forced Mobutu into exile and became president.

A former pro-Lumumba guerilla fighter who had trained along side Che Guevara in the hills of eastern Congo in the 1960’s, Kabila launched his rebellion from South Kivu with the support of neighboring Rwanda and Uganda in 1996. Bukavu served as his rear base and suffered great damage in human and infrastructure terms during the fighting.

In the new Kabila regime power remained in the hands of a few cronies who amassed wealth for themselves à la Mobutu. A new millionaire class emerged overnight as Congo sank deeper into misery. In 1998, after Kabila fell out of grace with his backers in Uganda and Rwanda, these two countries invaded Congo in an attempt to overthrow him. A multinational war followed, with Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia intervening on Kabila’s side. Unable to unseat Kabila, Rwanda and Uganda chose to support a second rebellion in eastern Congo.

In 2001, following Laurent-Désiré’s assassination, his son Joseph assumed the presidency. The city did not recover from the suffering. Neither did the country.

The conflict partitioned the country. Supported by Uganda, Jean-Pierre Bemba’s Mouvement pour la Libération du Congo ruled over northern Congo, from east to west. Rwanda-backed RCD militiamen controlled eastern Congo for five years until a series of peace accords brought a transitional government in Kinshasa, which included leaders of various warring factions.

Rwandan occupation years also coincided with the coltan boom years. In fact, while neither Rwanda nor Uganda have gold, diamond or coltan deposits of significance, both countries have become important exporters of these minerals. A 2003 United Nations Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources accused both countries of prolonging the civil war so that they could illegally siphon off Congo's wealth with the help of Western corporations.

This second rebellion, which has claimed over 4.4 million lives, has made Congo’s conflict the deadliest in the world since World War II. Mineral exploitation was one of the driving forces behind the war and the proliferation of militias; some of these militiamen still operate in the region and control mining areas.

When I inquire of the people how to get to a coltan mine, I receive different versions of the same response. “It’s too dangerous out there,” they say. “There is too much insecurity. We advise you, ‘don’t go to the mines’.” For several days, I tried to arrange a trip to the mines and found nobody to take me.

My search eventually takes me to the city’s Ibanda neighborhood, to the backyard of a two-story house that someone converted into offices. Olive Depot is one of the largest coltan companies in town, but to my surprise, it is unimpressive.

Considering the publicity coltan has received recently in Western media, I expected a large processing center – an imposing edifice with complex machines and engineers barking orders to their foremen. Instead, I found the most rudimentary of processing systems, two dozen men working with their hands and playing with dirt like children. No one barked orders. They worked in silence, interrupted only by the sound of their own movements.

My attention turns to several men squatting down and playing with dirt – black dirt – in a medium-sized hangar. “That is coltan,” says my guide Alexis Mushaka, a metallurgical engineer.

“Are you joking?” I ask. That dirt in front of me could not be the highly-prized coltan, the bloody ore that fueled the conflict and the subject of several UN investigations. “No, I am serious,” Mushaka responds as he motions me to follow him to the hangar.

The men give us a quick look and return to their business. They are covered in dust, coltan. A couple of them sift through a large bowl of dirt and blow on the dust, which falls on their faces. It looks terrible. Most of them do not wear any mask. Neither do they wear any uniform. They also do not wear shoes, perhaps by choice. I do not ask. They work in silence and quietly listen to Mushaka explain the process to me.

“First, the négociant brings the coltan from the mine,” he says and points to a white sack of dark brown dirt on the floor. “He sells it here and then these fellows start the separation process.”

The process means the men in the hangar have to separate all impurities from the product itself. “Deep in that dirt is coltan or its sister products of cassiterite and wolframite,” Mushaka continues, “and they will have to find it.” The end product looks like crushed gravel.

He beckons me to the other side of the hangar where a man dressed in a tank top and shorts sits on the floor, working with two small piles of black dirt. “Look, he is holding a magnet in his hand,” Mushaka says. “He is separating iron from the rest. The bag of cassiterite comes with all kinds of other minerals. They need to get all of them out.”

When I ask the men what type of work contract they have, I learn that most of them have no contract. Every morning a large group of laborers lines up outside the compound’s gate and ask for work. Few are chosen and the rest are sent home. They make less than US$1 a day.

“If we did not have this job, we will have no work,” says one of them when I ask why they accept to work in these conditions.

The négociant’s situation is not much different. As the middleman, he is very much at the mercy of the depot. “They wait until their merchandise is processed before they are paid,” Mushaka explains when I ask how a négociant sells his load. “The tonnage they bring does not equate their pay. It shrinks quite a bit after the impurities are sorted out.”

The négociant who arrives while I visit the depot says most of the time he is in the red. When asked why he still deals coltan considering his losses, his response reflects what the average Congolese worker in any profession says. “If I did not do this, then what else?” he retorts. He makes US$1.59 per pound.

On the international market, coltan costs between US$8 and US$18 per pound. If anyone still makes any money with coltan, it’s the processing depot and the other dealers on the international market. The final product is exported via Kigali in Rwanda to the ports of Mombassa and Dar-es-Salaam where it is shipped overseas.

The coltan business underscores the failure of the State. Beyond a new mining code adopted by the transitional government, which imposes a high tax rate on businesses and investors, the government has not undertaken any serious initiative to formalize the coltan industry, as is the case with other resources such as copper, cobalt and zinc.

“There is an issue with taxes these days,” says Nzojusa Belembo, director at Olive. “During the RCD rebellion, there was an exportation monopoly through a local company called SOMINGL. Companies paid a fixed tax, regardless of the product price fluctuation. Everyone benefited.”

After a pause, Belembo continues. “It is simple. We have porous borders,” he says. “You can cross the river to Rwanda with coltan in your pocket. They offer better prices there. Our legislation encourages fraud.”

The visit at the Olive Depot did not prepare me for what I saw at the mines. Dug on the steep flank of a high mountain, Mushangi mines are located about 90 kilometers west of Bukavu. Driving as fast as we could on an arduous road, the trip took two hours.

The mines are 15 kilometers from the Nzibira area where several militias have operated, including the Interahamwe and the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda. The FARDC also has a post in the vicinity, which is not encouraging either. Insecurity required that we brought armed guards with us.

At Mushangi, a treacherous path leads to the mines where we find only a handful of adults. The mines are exploited by children of all ages, working in precarious conditions.

From sunrise to sunset, they toil in open pits with the most primitive tools and no protection from falling rocks and mudslides. They crawl through dark tunnels with no structural support.

In my travel across Congo, I have seen a great deal of suffering. Watching children crawl through those pits and tunnels tested my resolve. Ten-year old Bashizi tells me, “I do this hard work because my father is too old to support me.” He has been doing it for several months. “That is the only thing there is to do around here,” he says.

The children swarm around us, seeking attention and asking to be photographed. I snap several pictures as I speak with them and hear their stories. Through my lens, I see lost childhoods and broken dreams. Images from my own youth in a different Congo flash before my eyes when I push the button.

We ask 16-year old Baruti and his friends whether they understand where their coltan goes from Mushangi. “It goes to Bukavu,” they say. “Do you know coltan is highly prized in America and Europe? It is needed for computers, mobile phones and video games,” I follow. “No,” Baruti replies. Their world revolves around the open-pits where they spend seven days a week and make less than 20 cents a day.

One last question before we leave for Bukavu. It is three in the afternoon, and that is late to be out here. “Do you understand that the exploitation of coltan fuels the conflict in Congo?” I inquire. Baruti looks at me straight in the eye and answers, “If we knew that, we would no longer work here.”

Mvemba Phezo Dizolele is an independent journalist and writer who traveled across Congo in the summer 2006 on a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at
http://www.pambazuka.org/

Your Money or your life

2007-08-06T01:04:00.000+02:00

Read Luke 12:13-21

A man is walking down a street in Woodstock when he is confronted by a mugger, “Your money or your life!” There is a long pause, nothing is said. Eventually the mugger says impatiently, “Well?” The man replies: “Don’t rush me, I’m thinking it over.”

Normally when Jesus addresses issues of economics (about every 7th verse on average in the Gospels) he highlights the social consequences of wealth. Greed is bad because it deprives most people in society of living an economically viable life. On this occasion Jesus speaks to the personal consequences of wealth. Consequently, we have the opportunity to examine the wealth trap at its source – deep within our hearts. Not only does wealth deprive the have-nots of meaningful life, it also deprives the haves – but for different reasons.

If you want to find water in some of the wilder spaces of southern Africa, the best method is to trick a baboon into betraying its secret water supply. First you arrange a container with a small hole in it attached in some way so that the container cannot be removed. In the container place some baboon-enticing delicacy. The hole must be big enough for the baboon to get its hand inside, but small enough so that once the baboon has gripped the delicacy in its fist, its fist will be too big to be extracted. Thus the baboon will be trapped as long as it holds on to the delicacy. One can then approach the baboon and feed it salt. As long as the baboon is not sufficiently frightened to let go of the delicacy in the trap, it will consume the salt and continue to clutch its prize. Eventually the baboon will be desperate with thirst and once freed will make straight for its water supply. Run fast, and you will have water…

Humans are closer to baboons than we like to think. While we would not be so easily trapped by the monkey trick, we none-the-less trap ourselves in innumerable ways by the things we refuse to let go of.

The accumulation of wealth is an addiction like any other. When someone asked of John D. Rockefeller, how much wealth does it take to satisfy a person, he replied, "Just a little bit more."

The usual Christian response is to encourage people to serve others, but this can be another form of addiction. As Bill Loader puts it:

“There is a deep human anxiety about being worthwhile which reaches to the heart of the self. Many products are designed to sedate that fear. It is nevertheless real. The Christian claim that true contentment comes only in service is probably spurious. It is simply not the case that people without Christ are all very unhappy and vice versa. It is also not the case that we are to make ourselves happy through service. That is secular justification by works and becomes a tyrant for us and those around us - and those whom we ‘serve’.”

To overcome the wealth trap, Loader suggests that, “Sometimes it has to be a kind of Christian defiance which says: only in life towards God, a life participating in God’s life is peace. That will be a peace that weeps, knows anguish, sometimes does not know and does not have answers, but keeps believing in the worth God wants us to have and wants us to give and live towards others.”

I was running recently with a young man considering his future. He was asking tough questions about his life and what he would do with his skills and resources. We were running on Devil’s peak, just below the blockhouse. We came to a point at which we could either go up to the blockhouse and enjoy the view across the Peninsula, or go down to the reserve and run with the zebra and wildebeest in the reserve. I turned to him and said, “So what will it be: significance (pointing to the blockhouse) or life (pointing to the zebra)?” On that day we chose significance, but we also chose life. It was an exhausting run!

Sometimes the choices we have are not so clear and often significance and life seem mutually exclusive.

We are often tempted to choose significance: what people (and we ourselves) expect of us, the dream we have of our own greatness or the hope that we can change the world. Seldom does significance bring life. Life on the other hand can seem mundane, boring or downright terrifying. To engage with our own fears, other people’s traumas, the ups and downs of life exacts a high cost. But life always brings significance – though seldom packaged the way we would have hoped for.

When the person in the crowd asked Jesus to settle the inheritance dispute with his brother, we should fully expect Jesus to do so. Firstly, as a Rabbi, this is what everyone reasonably expected him to do – to use the common law of his time and his own wisdom to settle what probably was not a terribly difficult case. Secondly, Luke portrays Jesus as a judge in other places in the story, so why not here?

Yet Jesus himself says, “Who made me a judge or arbiter of over you?”

Jesus refuses to judge even when a judgement is clear. Yet we judge one another and ourselves to the point of driving our souls to desperation. Would that we would learn to value ourselves as God values us, that we may let go of the falsehoods we have become addicted to and that drive our desperate accumulation of false security.

I want to stop being a monkey.

Thanks to Sarah, Bill and eSermons.

Family Values

2007-07-02T10:58:00.000+02:00

Read Luke 9:57-62

If I were to ask how many people reading this blog come from “normal” families, I would not be surprised if very few said they did. I for one, have two dads and 5 moms. I would also not be surprised if, though all of us may express ambivalence about the health of our familial relationships, few of us would deny their importance in our lives.

So it is jarring to hear Jesus’ harsh words about family. “Let the dead bury the dead,” he says to the wannabe follower who first want to attend to his father’s funeral.

When his own family came to see him and he said, “My brothers and my mother are those who do the will of God.” he seems to have been irritated at their interruption of his ministry, almost as if he was telling them to get in the queue.

His most startling comment of course is this one: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”

Far from being the advocate of family values, Jesus is the very antithesis.

I am indebted to Sarah and S. Scott Bartchy for helping me understand Jesus words.

In first century Mediterranean cultures, patriarchy was the dominating paradigm. In fact, in Roman culture, fathers held the power of life and death over their children. While fathers seldom used it, it was none-the-less a right of a father to execute his child. Women and children were completely subservient to the father of the house.

Both sons and daughters were under their father’s control as long as their father lived. This included all one’s major life decisions, like work, marriage and so on. A father could even order his child to divorce his/her spouse.

This power of the fathers was central to Roman society and even the Emperor was called Father. Power was exercised through fathers. This patriarchal system was present in varying degrees and expressions throughout the Mediterranean.

Patriarchy is not just a system that oppresses women and in the ancient Roman world this was especially true. Domination was the means by which men advanced in society. They learnt to dominate in their homes and exercised the lessons learnt there in the broader society in which they operated. Men, while benefiting from the system, were also victims of it. Roman society, and most Mediterranean cultures of the time were highly stratified and hierarchical.

When the young man who wants to follow Jesus says he first needs to bury his father, he is not talking about an imminent funeral. Rather he is saying, first let me see to my duties as a son, for I will only be able to follow you when my father has died and I am no longer under his control.

Jesus words, therefore are not necessarily an attack on families as such, but rather an attack on patriarchy.

Read Mark 10:28-31

Notice that “fathers” are left out of the second list. Jesus’ ideal society will not have fathers. He calls us out of a society in which power is exercised unjustly through the system of patriarchy. The new society cannot therefore continue to have such a system.

Matthew 23:9 (NRSV): "Call no man father on earth, for you have one Father--the one in heaven."

So, is Jesus anti-fathers? Surely not. He was a carpenter by the time he started his ministry and the only place he would have learnt this trade was from his own father as an apprentice. There must have at least some affection for his own dad. If Jesus had been anti-fathers, he would have had a hard time painting so convincing an image of God as Father if his own relationship with his father had been less than amicable.

In his prayer, the first two words describe the incredible intimacy he enjoyed with God, imagined as a paternal relationship: “Our Father…” (in Hebrew: “Daddy). But more than intimacy these words echo Jesus’ political attack on patriarchy. Our allegiance must be to one Father and no earthly system of domination exercised through fathers. Jesus opposed every form of injustice and was particularly careful about his relationships with women, such that he scandalized Jewish society.

What then is the appropriate relational attitude for Jesus followerstowards their own families?

Firstly, we recall that all people become our brothers and sisters by virtue of our common friendship and familial adoption into Jesus’ family. Every stranger is also family. And as much a family member as any blood relation.

Secondly, we are freed from duty in our relationships with family. We no longer have to relate to our family because society expects it of us. If our families are unhappy with the Jesus-choices we make, it is our allegiance to Jesus that comes first.

On the other hand, we are freed to love our family members. Jesus loves them and so we are called to love them. We are freed from duty, freed to genuinely love (rather than pretend). That means, that even those family members we do not get on with, we are called to love. We are called to love our enemies, even if they happen to be family members.

Far from giving us an excuse to dismiss our families as no longer important in the Kingdom, Jesus words remind us that our families become the place it is often the hardest to love as Jesus loves. For many of us, we would rather do the minimum, do our duty; do that which is expected of us. Jesus wants us to love generously, as much as he loves.

Family relationships surely must remain important in our discipleship, even if this importance is placed in a new, broader context of familial loyalty to all God's children.

God is more than two men and a bird

2007-06-03T00:30:00.000+02:00

(I've yet to find an accurate, undisputed credit for the title of this blog entry - I think it was a Catholic)

A stranger once phoned and asked for an appointment to see me. She wanted to discuss a matter of some urgency. At the appointed time, she arrived and, after some small talk, she got down to business: “The Spirit has told me that you and I are to be married.”

I didn’t deal with that very well…

Unfortunately, passages like John 15:26 - 16:15 - the lectionary reading for this Sunday - lend themselves to this kind of interpretation. Read William Loader’s comments about this passage to learn a little of where John was coming from. William makes the point that verse 14 is already a fence around the apparently “carte blanche” spirit. Nothing inspired by the Spirit today should be inconsistent with what Jesus would have done.

So, instead of running away and leaving the hapless spirit-led woman in my office to the secretary, I should have taken her on a journey to discover Jesus’ principles on healthy relationship based on loving actions that take time and energy. Hopefully this would have seemed at odds with trying to start a marriage on a whim – even if it seemed to be God’s whim.

The question of how we deal with so-called spiritual messages from God raises the interesting Christian conundrum of the Trinity, the idea that Divinity is three people… um… but actually only one. God the Spirit offers to us that which belongs to Jesus (vs. 14) who in turn is speaking for God the Father…

This idea of the Trinity is not biblical, which is interesting when you consider that those who are often the strongest advocates of the idea are also those who espouse the supremacy of scripture… Scripture contains, at best, vague allusions to the idea. Really the idea belongs to church history as Christians struggled with worshipping Jesus and yet holding to the first and second Commandment to worship God alone. The debate was resolved (apparently) at the Council of Nicaea, which gave us the Nicaean Creed and the Doctrine of the Trinity.

As usual, Wikipedia is a good place to start for an overview of the subject of the Trinity. Suffice to say, the history of the Trinity has been nearly as bloody as the Crucifixion, which is to say, we’ve kinda lost the point, haven’t we?

Most people are content to leave the Trinity to academics in the mistaken belief that only theologians are qualified to think about such a complicated thing. This is mistaken mostly because academics, by their own admission (mostly), are often the worst theologians; anyone who engages with the idea of God and tries to insert God’s stuff into their daily lives is doing theology; such a person is a theologian.

The way we think about god affects the way we behave in the world. The Trinity offers us not a test for orthodoxy – “whose in and whose out” – but rather a spring-board from which to launch new adventures in spirituality and social transformation.

We need to begin with humility: "Bring me a worm that can comprehend a man, and then I will show you a man that can comprehend the triune God!" said John Wesley

Whenever we attempt to understand something essentially incomprehensible, anything other than tentative pictures, is arrogant in the extreme. This is why it is so startling to see how the church has repeatedly divided over this idea throughout the centuries.

I want to share the one picture I have found most helpful in understanding the Trinity and use it to demonstrate how this idea can affect important transformation of my spirituality and the world in which I live.

Consider someone you know who might be sitting near you as you read this. Maybe it’s your mother or father, a sibling, a colleague. What else is that person to other people – husband, girlfriend, confidant, lover, playmate…? Every person is many things to different people.

My father does not cease to be somebody else’s wife just because he relates to me as father. I am at one and the same time a father, husband, brother, friend and a myriad of other things.

In the same way, God is many but one all the time. God is relationship and we who are created in God’s image are created for relationship.

Now an interesting consequence of this idea is that God is not limited by our imaginations. God can be mother as much as father, a sister as well as a brother, a teacher and a friend.

Perhaps your spirituality has become dry and lifeless and prayer has ceased to be meaningful. Is it possible your imagination has become stuck with a single picture of God, while the dynamic divine has moved on with the rest of your life? Perhaps it’s time to imagine God as mother, God as confidant, or even, dare I say… lover?

Our society doesn’t treat mothers fairly. Neither do our sisters, aunts, daughters or wives get much justice. How would relating to God as female change our own attitudes and indeed inspire us to change our society?

What does my discomfort with the idea of God as lover say about my sexuality? Do I really see my sexuality as something to be nurtured as a blessing from God? What is God’s sexuality? If God is both male and female, yet neither at the same time, who are we to exclude those whose gender is non-specific?

The Trinity has the potential to unlock whole new adventures in your journey with God. Perhaps it’s worth reading up about this rich tradition…

Pentecost

2007-05-30T01:08:00.000+02:00

Wind is one of those brilliant metaphors for God that affords one hours of playful theological speculation.

I have always loved Table Mountain. As a teenager I particularly enjoyed climbing up to the Table face overlooking the city bowl when a strong, hot North-Easter was blowing. This is the wind that presages a cold front. If it approaches the face of the mountain at the right angle the city bowl funnels it directly up the face. The wind is therefore concentrated into a vertical blast. Standing a few metres away from the cliff edge there is no wind. As you approach the edge you can feel the wind being sucked off the top of the mountain by the vertical blast. You can lean out into the wind and be held up by it leaning our over the cliff. We would try to find a rock with the right shape and weight so that when it was lobbed over the cliff it would hover.

God’s power has always been clearly demonstrated in the awesome power of wind: that something so insubstantial as air can hold a rock.

I also think of God as having a sense of humour…

In the Cedarberg there is a starkly beautiful peak called Sneuberg which is cold year round, if not always iced over. At the base of the peak is a small, basic hut and nearby is a long drop (latrine). The door of the latrine faces away from the peak but there has for many years been a large gap in the panelling at the back. In the evenings a bitterly cold wind blows off the peak and down into the valley below so that when (generally after a little nightcap) you take your bedtime constitutional, carefully cocooned in winter down, all sleepiness is blown to smithereens and one soberly contemplates being alive, very alive. The constitutional may or may not happen…

Then there are those hot sticky February days in Cape Town when the tar becomes syrup and the cement is hot enough to cook on. One longs for the healing balm of the South Easter. When it comes, it starts as a slight lilt in the air, just enough to make one’s sweat begin to cool. When it gets up a good speed it blows all the pollution away, clearing the city and air.

Sometimes the street children exploit the strange way eddies form in the city around the tall buildings. When the strong Cape Doctor swirls across the cobbles of Green Market Square it provides enough propulsion to send the lighter kids skittering across the cobbles in card board boxes.

The story of Acts 2:1-29 often gets people talking about how weird it must have been to have tongues of fire dancing around the room and people speaking in languages they had never heard. This misses the point. Luke speaks metaphorically to communicate something more important than whether or not flames actually lit up people’s hairdos.

Pilgrims from all over the world - as it was then - came to Jerusalem expecting to meet God. No doubt some, if not many, were disillusioned by not finding God in the Temple. Certainly they were all surprised when they discovered God in ordinary people, especially this bunch of misfits: women speaking in public, peasants speaking like seers and these were the ones whose master was exterminated like a common criminal – yet here they are speaking to us as friends without fear.

Pentecost speaks to the desire for human unity just as the story of Babel does in the Hebrew Scriptures. The people of Babel had a common language and common purpose, yet they were ultimately scattered across the earth in confusion. Unity is not formed when people seek a common language or a common purpose. These are not ends in themselves but merely convenient instruments.

The people of Pentecost discovered something far more valuable. They shared their lives together, holding everything in common. They cared for one another making sure no one in their community struggled while others were privileged. We’re told, “awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved” (Acts 2:43-47).

Genuine unity is based on love, the kind of love the Pentecostal people discovered.

Jump!

2007-05-18T10:43:00.001+02:00

Having a bad day? Click here.

Synod: Legalism and Grace

2007-05-17T11:09:00.000+02:00

Last week the Cape of Good Hope District of my church, the Methodist Church of Southern Africa, met in Synod for three days. This is a gathering of about 250 lay and clergy members from a region stretching from the Orange River to Cape Town and Knysna. It is one of 12 Districts of the MCSA, which has congregations throughout 6 countries in southern Africa.

At the beginning of every annual Synod there is a roll call, part of which comprises questions asked of all clergy in the District. Each minister must be able to say in good conscience that they believe and teach the church’s doctrine and observe and enforce the church’s discipline. Any member of Synod can raise an objection against a minister who they feel is not doing this.

19 clergy in our Synod registered qualified answers to the discipline questions. This qualification was based on the fact that many of us have blessed same-sex unions and intend to do so in the future. Recent pronouncements by various courts and members of the hierarchy have led us to believe that such blessings are in breach of the church’s discipline. We disagree. A statement to that effect was circulated to the Synod. There was some initial difficulty in terms of process as Bishop Andrew Hefkie, our District Bishop and chairperson of the Synod, appeared apprehensive. His opening comments about not fighting with each other – addressed to a gathering of ministers before Synod – made me feel like I was being told not to rock the boat. There was some confusion / debate about whether we should talk about it together as ministers before Synod but the decision was to keep it as part of Synod. In the end the questions passed without much fanfare, our qualifications were lodged and noted and I think it was good that the process remained dignified.

The only surprise was a resolution from Rev. Keith Vermeulen that those who had registered qualified answers should recuse themselves from the Synod. I thought this was an excellent idea as I hadn’t found a decent place to quietly watch the movies I’d prepared on my laptop for boring moments in Synod! Fortunately sanity prevailed and Bishop Andrew appointed a Pastoral Commission to meet with the individuals concerned to discuss a way forward.

That evening, after Synod had recessed, Bishop Andrew was interviewed by SABC. You can read the article on the web here. There was also something televised. It seems that this news got our Presiding Bishop - that is the highest office in the church in charge of all 12 Districts, what we call the “Connexion” – quite angry and the next morning Bishop Andrew was called out of Synod to a telephone call. When he returned he instructed the 19 ministers to leave the Synod.

It was a huge shock. Many of the 19 were active members of Synod due to facilitate processes or offer reports that day. The vice chairperson and secretary of Synod were also amongst our number. Synod was effectively crippled and limped on throughout the day. At least three groups of local church representatives walked out in solidarity with us, though most were convinced to return.

The Pastoral Commission met with us and through protracted negotiation, the decision was taken to register a formal dispute with the Presiding Bishop and our Connexional Executive and to seek mediation.

Bishop Andrew, who knew well before the time about our planned action, had sought advice from his fellow Bishops and had asked for a meeting of the Bishops to discuss it. He was left hanging. Though I thought he handled it well, allowing us our protest and setting up a process to deal with it, it seems he was instructed to act otherwise, telling us to leave – something he visibly felt uncomfortable with.

During the day, Bishop Andrew suspended Synod temporarily. While Synod was in recess he came to fetch us and brought us back in to the church sanctuary where all the Synod delegates were still sitting – now officially an informal gathering. We prayed together, holding hands in a big circle. It was very moving. People prayed for unity and courage. We then went to tea and after tea Synod was called to meet again.

Many of us were embraced by colleagues and friends who disagree with us theologically on the question of same-sex unions, but who, none-the-less, respect our freedom of conscience. The vast majority of the members of Synod would have opposed our theology but none-the-less disagreed with the way we had been handled. That day was very emotional and profoundly charged with grace.

After the Pastoral Commission informed Bishop Andrew of the agreement to seek mediation, he came to fetch us again. He led all 19 of us back into the now officially constituted Synod and reinstated us as members of Synod. As we filed in behind him we received a standing ovation. It was overwhelming. I don’t think any of us had a dry eye.

There was something of a backlash the following day however, when a motion was put to the Synod. This motion asked the Synod to allow for freedom of conscience with respect to the blessing of same-sex unions. We were also asking that this freedom of conscience give leave for those so inclined to become licensed by Home Affairs to conduct Civil Unions for same-sex couples. If this passed as a resolution, it would have gone on to Conference, our highest decision making body. The motion was defeated by a relatively close margin. I think it was 84 against and 65 for. When one compares this to motions defeated in previous Synods, one can see a definite shift over the years.

During the debate on this motion another motion was put to the Synod, which called for a referendum of MCSA members on the issue of same-sex unions. This was accepted by the Synod and now passes as a resolution to our Conference for decision there. Again, the margin of victory for this motion was narrow. Anyway, it is extremely unlikely that Conference will accept this resolution because there has never been a referendum on any issue in the history of the church primarily because it is not part of our practice to consult in this way.

So while the backlash was not unexpected, it was significant in its muted tone. I believe the church is slowly changing its mind on this issue and I think this Synod turned a corner last week.

Aluta Continua!

(You can read a follow up article in the Sunday Times here.)

Jesus meets a gay man

2007-05-17T11:05:00.000+02:00

Love this. Click here.

Wash my feet every day, Lord

2007-05-07T03:13:00.000+02:00

A teacher decided to start a band at her school and gathered together enthusiastic students. After much effort, investment and bonding, she succeeded in teaching a small group of eager learners how to play their various instruments and do so in unison. They decided to venture forth with a concert for the school and at an assembly the band gathered on the stage in front of the whole school, nervously fidgeting their instruments. As the teacher took the podium to conduct her pride and joy, she noticed their anxiety and leant forwards to whisper: “Remember, if you lose your place or feel too nervous, just pretend you are playing…” With that she raised her baton and silently mouthed, “One, two… three…” The first note sounded: silence.

The church is a bit like that. God calls and on the count of three, there is silence as we look to each other for a lead, for some hopeful sign of knowing what to do. The result is deafening silence.

This last week, the lectionary guided us to read the story of Jesus washing his disciple’s feet at the last supper. It’s a story we know so well it has lost some of its startling power. Jesus act was amazingly simple and powerfully meaningful – something only a fully alive person could have come up with. It shocked his disciples to the core, but, together with the breaking of bread and sharing of wine, went on to be a central symbolic theme in their lives and the lives of the church ever since.

Robert Herhold reminds us that this scene has been called the “sacrament that almost was”. Sadly it never made it even though it has all the ingredients one expects of such ecclesiological constructs. I am sure that this is because of its power. If you have ever participated in such a ceremony, it is far more disturbing than communion or baptism, especially if you are having your feet washed – no matter how much you’ve washed your feet before hand…

Robert imagines the theological battles that might have resulted if foot washing had become a sacrament: “It’s probably just as well that foot washing never became a sacrament. Church property committees would not take kindly to pans of dirty water on the new carpet in the chancel. If theologians had gone to work on the question, we would still be embroiled in endless debate as to whether the feet should be immersed or sprinkled. Liturgists would argue whether the right foot or the left foot should be immersed first. Others would speculate on the symbolism of baptizing heads or feet. It’s always easier to follow Jesus in our heads than it is to follow him with our feet on the Via Dolorosa.”

What is it about Jesus that made him so dynamic; so able to strike home such powerful messages in simple acts? And what a contrast to the apathy of the church! It is tempting to write-off Jesus’ abilities as Divine, especially if one belongs to those of a Trinitarian fundamentalistic bent. For me, Jesus was human and so I can’t but be amazed at his ability in contrast to my lack thereof.

I guess that most of the reason we struggle to act appropriately, effectively and authentically is because we lack the confidence to do so. As much as my self-esteem issues hold me back in so many of my pursuits, it is no different in church.

Surely Jesus has the same problem? We hallow his parents, but they were still human and must have left Jesus with a very human legacy of personal issues to wade through in adulthood. And the playground wounds we all have and live with? He must have had those too. And yet, every time he acts decisively, effectively, shockingly and transformingly.

Something in Jesus’ identity helped him overcome his self-esteem issues. As far as we can tell, his identity is crystallised in the story of his baptism. However we may regard the historical veracity of this story, the kernel of truth must surely be this: for Jesus, he knew in some deep way that he was beloved of God, that God was well pleased with him. I imagine that this was how he began each day of his life, building his identity on this single fact; allowing every act to flow from this singular reference point.

I think of the things I say to myself every day, especially the things I say at the beginning of the day, “Come on lazy-arse, if you don’t get going now, you’ll screw up again. Oh, and you forgot to brush your teeth silly! Do you really think you can handle this meeting today, if you can’t even remember where you left the keys?!”

And yet, I belong to the same baptism as Jesus. I belong to the same promise: I am beloved of God. God is well pleased with me.

What a profound arrogance: to believe that my opinions of myself are more important than God’s!

Jesus’ identity is framed by God. God is his beginning and end. He gets on with his life.

There is a beautiful theological word, “eschatology”, which is all about the study of the “end times”. As Christians we believe that time is linear. It had a beginning and will one day end. Jesus placed his identity firmly in the hands of this God who would bring history to a loving conclusion in God’s heart.

But eschatology should never be divorced from ethics – the struggle to determine what is right and wrong for today. Jesus moved from eschatological identity to engage every day with every day people, bringing his identity into conversation with a broken world.

Some time ago the Methodist Church of Southern Africa struggled with the question of legalising abortions. Our eschatology affirms the sanctity of all life, even unborn life and so the immediate response is always, the unborn are sacred and should not be killed. But as we bring this affirmation to bear on the streets we find that not only the unborn are at risk. Mothers, whose pregnancies cannot truly be called consensual or even desired, are threatened because of back-street abortions and the pressures of family and poverty. Our ethical struggle forced us to come down on the lesser of two evils: abortion is in some cases the best we can do in a terrible situation. We long for a world where such a desperate choice will not be necessary. Eschatology and ethics in conversation.

Such a conversation for me personally is only possible when I begin with my baptism: I am loved by God.

As Robert Herhold puts it: “An eschatology without ethics is futuristic and irrelevant. Ethics without an eschatology is desperate and futile. But joined together, they can produce the power to wash feet; to live fully today because God is in the present as well as in the tomorrow, and to work for the impossible because with God all things are finally possible.”

Gun Control - Australia

2007-05-07T02:20:00.000+02:00

Many of you know that I am part of Gun Free South Africa. Here’s some news which explains a little about why I do this work:

Australian gun reform outcomes _ Geoff Harris

A December 2006 article in the international journal Injury Prevention examines the apparent effects of Australian gun law reforms, now ten years old. The study’s findings may be useful to those involved in the South African gun control debate.

Following the massacre of 35 people at Port Arthur in Tasmania in 1996, state and national governments initiated a programme to remove semi-automatic and pump actions guns from civilian possession. Some 650 000 such weapons were purchased from their owners at market prices, and was funded by a special levy on income tax. Perhaps another 50 000-60 000 non-prohibited guns were handed in without compensation. The main aim of the 1996-98 reforms, which included a much stricter licensing system for gun owners, was to reduce the incidence of ‘mass shootings’, which were defined as the gun killings of five or more people at one time.

The researchers were particularly interested in the effect of the reforms on mass shootings. They found that there were 13 mass shootings in the 18 years (1979-96) before the reforms and none in the following 10.5 years (1996-2006).

A second interest of the study was to examine firearm death rates per 100 000 people (made up of suicides and homicides) which had been declining during the 18 years prior to the legislation. The researchers investigated whether there were any changes following the reforms. One possibility was that the rates could increase as criminals took advantage of the fewer guns held by civilians for protective purposes. Another was that people would simply use another weapon in place of a gun. The study found that the rate of decline in firearm-related deaths (both homicides and suicides) at least doubled following the reforms.

Elementary statistical theory tells us to be cautious in attributing causality in cases like this. It could be that some other factors, apart from the reforms, have led to the non-occurrence of mass shootings and the accelerated decline in gun deaths following the reforms. It is, however, very difficult to think of such factors. The researchers comment that ‘the data swings shown are so obvious that if one were given the data … and were asked to guess the date of a major firearm intervention, it would be clear that it happened between 1996 and 1998.’

There will be plenty of scope to debate the relevance of these findings to South Africa but two concluding points can be made. The researchers report a massive change in Australian attitudes towards guns following the 1996 massacre and reforms. Such a change is yet to happen in South Africa and the government therefore needs to continue to push the public in socially-desirable directions. South African gun owners have no reason to feel particularly victimized in this respect. This is precisely the job of government which it carries out in areas ranging from environmental protection, the use of seat belts in vehicles and the practice of safe sex.

The government does need to be aware of the fear which motivates many South Africans to own guns. It is an enormous challenge to government to genuinely allay these fears, in which case the perceived need to own guns will
be reduced.

Geoff Harris, an Australian, has been Professor of Economics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal since 1999.

Iron John ride to Sedgefield

2007-05-04T10:50:00.000+02:00

Click here to see photos of our recent trip to Sedgefield.

Dead Man Walking

2007-04-15T11:57:00.000+02:00

I wonder what it is about Easter that changed Peter? He goes from being too terrified to leave a room he’s been holed up in for three days, to being able to declare before thousands that he is one of Jesus’ disciples, aware that such a declaration could bring instant death.

If I had heard that the South African authorities had executed some criminal for treason and then three days later he rose to life again, I would have dismissed such a story as the kind of rubbish you read in “The Voice” or “You” magazine.

If I happened to be friends with the dead-man-still-walking and he appeared in my room one night and said “Peace, brother,” I’d run for my life, or have myself checked into Falkenberg Psychiatric Maximum Security.

Peter, however, worships Jesus, or more precisely, Jesus’ ghost… Not the reaction of a sane man.

I don’t believe that the Resurrection appearance of Jesus changed Peter. Something else must have changed him from coward to Rock.

The only thing I can think of is that the story of the women must have changed him. Not actually the story itself, but because of who was telling him - and everyone else: women - forbidden to speak in public - were spreading the story, in the face of real personal danger – danger for speaking, let alone danger for representing a political traitor.

Suddenly, Peter has a dawning realization that Jesus isn’t just another itinerant prophet like Isaiah, or even the Messiah, whom he’d pinned his hopes on. Jesus was more than that. Peter begins to realize that when Jesus welcomed the children despite the disciples’ discomfort, he wasn’t merely displaying a particular affection, but rather communicating something fundamental about his Kingdom. Peter sees that the strange company Jesus kept wasn’t an aberration of his character, but something core to the character of Jesus’ God. Peter sees that the world has been inexorably set on a path to change, beginning with these women's freedom.

Suddenly Peter’s vista on the world opens up and he sees things very differently. Jesus is dead. And so is Peter. And he couldn’t be happier!

Jesus the itinerant prophet is dead, Jesus the messiah is dead. Peter the fearful fisherman is dead. The real Jesus belongs to a Kingdom no death can defeat and has invited Peter to be part of that Kingdom.

There is none so brave as those who know they are dead already. Peter marches out and preaches under the “Wanted: Dead or Alive!” posters. The face of Peter the fisherman on the poster resembles that of Peter the Preacher pointing to the poster, but they are different men.

Peter is dead. The Romans can kill him, the Sanhedrin can put him in jail, but it will mean nothing, Peter is dead already. The real Peter cannot die for he belongs to a dream of human freedom that no darkness can ever put out.

No wonder Jesus says to the disciples in the upper room: “Peace be with you.”

I long to know the peace of a dead man. To confront every knife and gun on the streets of Woodstock, knowing that it can only injure my body, destroy my flesh, but that I am dead already and my dream of a free world will never die.

But if I am dead already, why do I need life insurance?

...

Forgive me Lord, for I am frail and afraid. Visit me with Easter courage.

Carcass anyone?

2007-04-12T15:04:00.001+02:00

There is a photo in the latest National Geographic of a woman buying the carcass of a Nile perch from a local fisherman. The caption reads: “Emblematic of First World exploitation of Africa’s resources, only the carcasses of Nile perch are affordable sources of protein for some Tanzanians living around Lake Victoria. Perch fillets are stripped in 35 lakeside processing plants and shipped north, mainly to Europe but also to Israel. With years of overfishing, perch stocks have fallen drastically, imperilling the livelihoods of more than 100,000 fisherman and depriving local people of food.”

Easter

2007-04-11T14:55:00.001+02:00

Read Luke 24:1-11

Yvette asked me recently, “Do you think I exaggerate?”

This is one of those questions that men dread. Like, “Do I look fat in this?” Damned if you do, damned if you don’t… There really is no answer.

I must admit that in the back of my male mind was this little voice saying, “Don’t all women exaggerate?”

I’m in good company. Even the Gospels report the women have different stories on their return from the tomb. Luke says, “suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them.” The earlier version recorded in Mark recounts that the women saw, “a young man dressed in a white robe.” Matthew says they saw an “angel of the Lord.” John says that Mary was met by “two angels in white,” and then by Jesus.

No wonder the men found the women’s “words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.” The story gets more and more fabulous!

I love the fact that the Gospels don’t try and harmonize themselves as so many Christians have tried. Truth is an elusive thing that changes clothing every day. We meet it serendipitously when we turn a corner surprised to find it wearing the guise of the one person in the world we thought least likely to speak sense.

I grew up in a culture that taught me to treat all information with skepticism. “I’ll believe it when I see it.” And this is a useful skill for it prevents gullibility. But it can only go so far. There is a limit to its usefulness. There are some things that can only been seen by those who believe…

Women see a world men can only perceive with effort. So too: children and the poor. Those who wage war do not know the world that is seen by those who receive the “peace of empire”.

Because of the peculiar world seen by those on the receiving end of other peoples’ exercise of power, there is also a peculiar hope that springs from such people, a hope perhaps born from a position of having nothing to lose…

It’s the kind of hope that “moves mountains” – Faith. The kind of hope that believes a man can defeat death. The kind of hope that believes all people belong to each other. The kind of hope that believes we can love our enemies. The kind of hope that gets women risking their lives talking to men in public. The kind of hope that allows truth to speak for itself in the moment.

Sarah tells of a Franciscan blessing which speaks to this hope: “May God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you really can make a difference in this world, so that you are able, with God’s grace, to do what others claim cannot be done.”

Christ is risen. He is risen indeed.

Thank You

2007-04-10T14:47:00.000+02:00

I’ve been very quiet recently. The run up to Easter was a stressful time and generally I don’t look forward to this time of year. This year I received a great deal of love and support and was reminded of what is most important about this time: that friends carry one another’s burdens. I am thankful for all the wonderful people in my life, and am grateful for all the gifts of grace given these past few weeks. Yvette carried the heaviest burden as she had to compensate for me not being around much. Thank you Vettie. Thank you friends.

Job Interview Continued

2007-02-26T11:21:00.000+02:00

What if I ask myself the same questions I asked in the previous post? This seems appropriate as an exercise for Lent.

"What will your strategy be?"

I tend to approach daily life reactively. This makes life very busy. I seldom take the time to ponder the underlying, often hidden dynamics that create the problems and opportunities I am responding to. This is no strategy at all. It is merely survival.

I remember an interview with Bishop Tutu in which he was asked how he managed such a busy life. He responded that he spends two hour a day praying.

Those who understand spiritual maturity speak of one of the primary benefits of such introspection and examination being that one can respond spontaneously and authentically to daily events in ways that encourage what is important rather than merely reacting to the urgent.

If I presume to complain about the state of the nation, perhaps I should start with the state of me soul. Gandhi said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world”?

“What is your hope / vision?”

Where is my hope? What does my budget say about my hope? My hope I guess is in Sanlam. I am insured to the hilt. I have often wondered about Western culture’s obsession with pension funds. Arguably it is the young looking after the old, but personally it feels like trusting an impersonal institution for my care rather than my own children or community…

“Whom (what) do you trust?”

Do I trust Jesus? Yikes, what a question! The oke’s already in heaven, so the one running the risks is me. Truth is, there is no cavalry when the shit hits the fan. So it’s a tall order. Do I really want to follow this man?

Yes. At the end of the day, I can think of nothing more meaningful than the cause of Jesus’ adventure. I am alive because Jesus has shown me how to be alive.

Nice Net Nibbles

2007-02-26T01:41:00.000+02:00

This is a selection of stuff I've found interesting from the net from the last three months. Can't remember who sent it all to me.

These happy pots are cleverly created from the reflection of the adjacent burners, a piece of pasta and a bottle top. (Link)

Damn! This kid is funny...

Last year was the 10th memorium of Carl Sagan. He is one of my heroes and you can read what people have to say about his memory here.

You can download free documentaries from this site. Some of them are really good.

Another really clever design idea. Great toy.

This is a clip from an Attenborough documentary which I've seen a few times in the last few months. It's obviously getting people freaked out.

If you like maps and you have a social conscience, then this site is going to keep you locked in for a long time. It's fascinating.

This one is funny for a while and then disconcerting. Find out where Santa is...

David Bayne has been visiting SHADE and told me about the black ring he wears on his finger. It's worth reading David's blog to hear the story.

I found this video amazing. It expanded my ideas about what constituted thinking, personality, personhood.

This is a practical joke I'd love to try. Somebody's car has been covered in post-it notes!

Here is an interview with Richard Dawkins about his recent book, "The God Delusion." I think he makes some valuable points. This is why I tend to agree more with Dawkins scientific "fundamentalism" more than with religious fundamentalism. I found this quote from Dawkins particularly meaningful. Dawkins wants this to be read at his funeral:

"We are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they're never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place, but who will, in fact, never see the light of day, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. ...In the face of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. Here's another respect in which we are lucky. The universe is older than a hundred million centuries. Within a comparable time, the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or will be when its time comes, the present century. The present moves from the past to the future like a tiny spotlight inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere on the road from New York to San Francisco. You are lucky to be alive and so am I."

And on a similar vein, Peter published a valuable contribution on his blog.

Job Interview

2007-02-25T11:58:00.000+02:00

Read Luke 4:1-13

Some have compared the temptation of Jesus to a job-interview. These would be fascinating questions to ask in a job interview. I extrapolate some questions we might ask of our leaders now that we have heard the “State of the Nation” address and the budget speech.

What will your strategy be?

Firstly, Jesus is tempted to turn stone into bread. Jesus responds that people live on more than bread – they need the Word of God (cf. Matthew’s version of the story). I presume that Jesus refers to the prophets that came before him, whose consistent refrain was for Israel to care for the “widow, the orphan and the stranger.” These were the most vulnerable in society then as they are even today. A society is measured by how well it cares for such people.

The people who applauded the recent speeches in Parliament, including some of the rebuttals by the opposition party and other parties, were largely powerful and wealthy. The poor and disenfranchised were not applauding…

Jesus is tempted to meet people’s immediate needs as a way of gaining their favour. Instead he spends his time, not only responding as best he can to their immediate distress, but also examining the systems that cause ordinary people’s distress. There was nothing in the President or Mr. Manuel’s addresses that left me confident we are addressing the causes of our nation’s distress.

What is your hope / vision?

Secondly, Jesus is tempted to embrace Satan’s power and give his allegiance to the expediency of the devil. Jesus responds that such worship is for God alone. Only God deserves our ultimate allegiance.

Where one’s hope is can be seen immediately when one examines one’s budget. South Africa’s hope is in Big Business. We believe that creating a climate that benefits the largest companies is where our hope lies. Not in small businesses, not in the vast majority of the people of this country – the wretched of the earth - but in those companies whose Apartheid complicity - not to mention inhuman African operations - has yet to be interrogated. We are investing in “economic growth” (read “Trickle Down Economics – ala Thatcher / Reagan) and “black economic empowerment” (read “buddy economic empowerment”) rather than genuine social capital.

Jesus is tempted to follow political expediency and instead follows the dangerous path of compassion. I shudder to think that our leaders know nothing of the truth of people’s suffering.

Whom (or what) do you trust?

Thirdly, Jesus is tempted to play dice with God; availing himself to the truth of Scripture. But instead, Jesus points out how Scripture itself is contradictory.

For the past 13 years our government has implemented economic policies consistent with the rules of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Adherence to these policies is required of all countries that receive loans from these institutions. Most of the countries that have received such loans are from the so-called developing world. These policies have consistently led to the impoverishment of the vast majority of these country’s people. South Africa has no loans with the IMF or the World Bank that require adherence to these policies. South Africa implements them because they are policies laid down by the economic bible of globalisation.

Jesus is tempted to seek the security of religious fundamentalism yet casts himself instead in faith upon the mercy of a Living God who goes with him to the glory and agony of a cross. I recall the words of my friend, Alan Storey, “I do not follow the Bible, I read the Bible, that I may follow Jesus.”

Our leaders have retreated in fear from the risk of trusting the people who elected them. They have placed the trust in people who have never lived without clean water and electricity, lived in fear of state police or worked 16 hour days. What these “experts” know about the “real” world leaves me at a loss for words…

From Sojourners

2007-02-23T10:29:00.000+02:00

Diana Butler Bass: Giving Up Lent for Lent
A few years ago, I stopped struggling with my bad attitude toward Lent. I gave up Lent for Lent. I skipped Ash Wednesday, made no promises to God, and instituted no rigorous prayer schedule. I wanted to enjoy one March with no onerous spiritual obligations. An odd thing happened, however, during my Lenten non-observance. I began to understand and experience Lent in new and deeper ways. When freed from expectations and requirements, sermons and scriptures spoke to my soul. By the end of Lent, I found myself willingly attending extra services, including two Good Friday liturgies. On Easter Sunday, the resurrection broke over me with unexpected power – with love joyfully overcoming the intense introspection that built during my non-Lenten weeks.

Love's True Form

2007-02-19T00:48:00.000+02:00

Luke 9:28 - 36

Thinking about transfiguration I came across several transformations this week in the papers: Zebulon Dread, the Observatory-based cultural terrorist famed for his publication “Voetsek!” has become a Hare Krishna, trading in his dreadlocks for the shaven countenance of a pilgrim. This coming week hundreds of good looking guys will become fantastic, peacock Queens as Cape Town hosts the 7th annual Pride festival. In the near future Cape Town International may become La Guma International. Then I think of the changes that have happened in South Africa since 1994. We are accustomed to change in SA.

Like all these changes, the transfiguration generated a mixed response from the disciples: awe, fear, worship. Such an event demands attention, demands a response. The editorial page of most papers attests to South Africans’ response to changes in the last 13 years, but Jesus’ disciples keep silent. Strange.

Another strange thing about Jesus transfiguration is that it happens in the middle of the story. This is the kind of thing Hollywood would put at the end of the story – a dramatic, dazzling transformation of the hero of the story.

But the glory and climax of Jesus' story is still to come. Jesus' story upsets our ideas about how a story should be told. Like Peter and the other disciples we will be shocked at the awesome terror of Christ’s Cross: Christ’s true glory.

Sarah compares the transfiguration to two movies: “Beauty and the Beast” and “Shrek”. In “Beauty and the Beast” there is a transfiguration as we would expect to find it: the ugly hero of the story is transformed into a handsome prince. In Shrek, Princess Fiona is cursed and becomes an ogre every evening at sunset. In her transfiguration she is transformed into “loves true form” but this is an ogre, not a princess! Fiona’s transfiguration subverts our understanding of beauty but is entirely appropriate since Shrek, an ogre, loves her.

Jesus’ transfiguration is similar in that it too subverts our understanding of glory.

In this painting of the Transfiguration by Raphael, one can see some of the subversion intended by Luke. Jesus, Moses and Elijah are painted in typically heavenly fashion, but one’s eye is immediately drawn to the crowd below. A woman points to a crowd of people needing healing and attention. The nine remaining disciples seem reluctant to respond. One even seems to suggest that attention should be focussed on what is happening on the mountain.

In the telling of the story, Jesus too rushes back down the mountain to attend to the real business at hand.

The Transfiguration story has all the attributes one would expect in ancient literature when the protagonist is being held up as something special. Apart from the fantastic demonstration of light and wonder, there are the specific clues to Jesus’ authority within the Jewish tradition: Moses and Elijah.

But the story appears in the wider story like wayward punctuation. It is almost as if Luke is saying: “Here are the required heavenly rubber stamps, now let’s get on with the business of healing and transformation...”

The embrace of humanity is far more important to the Divine than the glory of heaven. Those who call themselves by his name would do well to adopt the same kind of worship.

Turn up the volume of your life

2007-02-07T00:35:00.000+02:00

When I was little our bathroom had the usual clutter that accumulates around most people’s baths, but there was one piece of bathroom detritus that fascinated me. It was a rock that floated. Mom and Dad called it “pumice”. I later learned that pumice is formed in the bowels of a volcano when rock is liquid and bubbles are trapped in the hardening liquid, like the fizz in a cola. It is the bubbles in the hardened rock, which allows pumice to float. The bubbles also give pumice a sandpapery texture just rough enough for smoothing calluses. I spent most of my childhood barefoot and my hands and feet often became cracked as calluses became too big. So the pumice was a useful item in my bath time.

Look at the calluses on your hand. What stories do they tell? What do they say about the work you do? Manual labour tends to make the calluses at the base of each finger quite prominent. Guitar players will have calluses on the ends of their left hand fingers from pressing the strings on the fret. If you wash your hands using a rock to knead the cloth, the heel of your hand will be callused. And if you wear a ring it will create a callus where it rests on your finger – something the astute will notice when being picked up in a bar by the ring-less…

Calluses are useful to protect our bodies from the daily grind we subject them to. Sometimes, however, a callus can become too hard, too big, it cracks and become infected.

Read Isaiah 6:9-10

Isaiah is instructed to harden people’s hearts so they will not repent; a strange message.

Steve Cook points out that the hardening of people’s hearts is a form of emotional callus. A callus on the hand is useful and so we don’t notice it until it becomes a problem when the hardening becomes so hard that it no longer flexes with the surrounding skin. It is then that we notice the problem and deal with it. Similarly, an emotional callus is useful up to a point in protecting us from some of the traumas we face, but it becomes a problem when the callus is no longer able to flex, to mould to the circumstances of our lives. At this point it cracks and can become infected – perhaps with cynicism or bitterness.

Isaiah must push the people to the point where their emotional callousness becomes a problem they are forced to deal with.

Listen to these words from Paul Brand in “Fearfully and Wonderfully Made”:

“A troubling phenomenon recurs among young Christians reared in solid homes and sound churches. After living their early years as outstanding examples of Christian faith, many become spiritual dropouts. Did they fail because they concentrated on the exterior, visible Christian life? Did they learn to mimic certain behaviors, nuances of words, and emotional responses? Crayfish-like, did they develop a hard exterior that resembled everyone else’s and conclude such was the kingdom of God, while inside they were weak and vulnerable?

... An outside shell can seem attractive, trustworthy, and protective. It certainly has advantages over a dead, useless skeleton or over no skeleton at all. But God desires for us a more advanced skeleton that serves as it stays hidden.” (thanks to SojoNet for the quote).

Part of the reason we become emotionally callused is survival. It’s a coping mechanism: one that works but it has diminishing returns as the callus grows.

To switch metaphors: yesterday in our biker’s circle we talked about feelings and how important they are. Like the lights on the motorbike dashboard feelings are signs that alert one to needs within one’s system. Putting duct-tape over the oil light isn’t going to make the oil problem go away, yet this is exactly what we tend to do with our feelings – we ignore and bury them and the need becomes a problem. Emotions are signs that there is something in the system that needs attention.

Read Luke 5:1-11

We often think of Peter and his fellow fishers as living an idyllic country life. As Sarah Dylan Breuer points out, though, it was anything but… Apart from the obvious dangers of the Sea of Galilee which apparently is tempestuous for its size, the fishers of Peter’s day were caught in a debt trap, having to pay taxes over an above their usual overheads. There was also the cost of fishing rights on the Sea. At the end of each day, there was seldom anything left for their families. With no insurance, the daily worry of injury or accident must have worn away at their lives.

When Jesus asks them to cast their nets on the other side and their nets come up busting with fish, their world changed forever. They no longer were consumed by the daily question, “Will I catch enough?” but from then on their lives were determined by the question “Can I find enough people to help me haul in this generous catch?”

The emotional callus of daily worry is transformed into an emotional openness to new possibilities and people.

This is the promise of spiritual maturity that the Good News offers: a transformative experience that liberates me from the narrow confines of my daily grind so that I can see people as people again, not just instruments, clients, allies, enemies, providers, takers and so on. I can be transformed from callousness to compassion. My heart becomes soft again so that, like a child, I am sensitive to so much more of the world around me.

This doesn’t mean that the spiritual journey is one of instant and perpetual joy. On the contrary, Peter embarks on an emotional roller-coaster ride with Jesus all the way to Jerusalem. As one reads that story, one cannot but be amazed at the volume of the emotions Peter experiences. It is an intense experience – the highs are mountainous (remember the transfiguration?) and the lows are hellish (remember his denial of Jesus?).

Let me switch metaphors again: when we were talking about feelings yesterday William pointed out that out feelings are like a Hi-fi system without a graphic equalizer. The graphic equalizer allows one to manipulate the volume of specific frequencies so that, for instance, one can make the music have more base or treble. But in the emotional system, there is only a single volume control. Turn down the volume when one is angry or sad, and one finds that affection and ebullience are muted too.

The spiritual journey tunes us in to our feelings so that we know our needs more acutely. Similarly we can tune in to the needs of others because we become more sensitive. We become more compassionate.

The discipline of the spiritual life is to spend time with emotions, to discover the underlying needs. This is especially true of the darker emotions. Spiritual maturity is characterised by an ability to know oneself and so be in control of oneself. Feelings become the wind that blows through a flute each with a distinct note that together creates music – to borrow a Buddhist metaphor!

Discovering the energy of our personal emotional systems also tunes us to the possibilities in the world. Instead of being overwhelmed by the massive problems the world faces our creative energies are released to find innovative strategies of dealing with these problems. We can move from the cynical, “There just isn’t enough to fill this bottomless pit” to the insightful, “Poverty is stupid in a world that has enough but will not share.” (Bono paraphrased)

Jesus is calling you to the bounty and wealth of your own inner life and the gift of vulnerability to others. Discover the joy that comes when you spend time with your own feelings – especially the dark ones. Discover the connection that comes when you open yourself up to those around you and trust them with your feelings. Discover the power of God’s generosity in your own life and the world.

May your heart grow soft and supple.

Great news: weird is good

2007-01-22T10:26:00.000+02:00

I received a piece of email humour this week about the difference between men and women:
Friendship between women: A woman didn’t come home one night. She told her husband that she had slept over at her friend’s house. Her husband called her 10 best friends. None of them knew what he was talking about.
Friendship between men: A man didn’t come home one night. He told his wife that he had slept over at a friend’s house. His wife called his 10 best friends. 8 of them confirmed that he had slept over. 2 said he was still there.

This week I had a motorbike accident and the news spread pretty quickly. The support from friends was very affirming. I know that I am loved.

My women friends called: are you ok? Wonderful! What did the doctor say? Uh-huh, what’s the diagnosis? And the prognosis? So what actually happened? Does it hurt? How are you feeling? It must have been awful! What will you do? How long will it be sore? Are you taking medication? Can I bring you something? Can I do anything?

My men friends called: are you ok? Uh-huh… how’s the bike? Ouch!

When I first started working at Central Methodist Mission I did a bit of preaching at the other 5 churches that form part of the Table Bay Circuit. On a Sunday there isn’t much transport and I didn’t have a car, so I would often arrive on roller blades at preaching appointments. When I was accepted as a candidate for the ministry, a member of the congregation insisted on getting a photo of me in clerical gear – full gown and collar – riding down Church Street on my roller blades.

Over the years I have been blessed with the acceptance of people who have accepted my idiosyncrasies with grace. But I’ve also been dismayed that so many people’s individuality is not accepted in the church. By and large, ministers get away with more than lay people and this saddens me even more. It is very difficult to be an eccentric in the church, particularly if you are not clergy.

Naomi Klein, in her book No Logo, points out that the important gains made by the identity politics of the 90’s had the unfortunate side effect of diminishing the importance of uniqueness, of individuality. Fighting for racial and gender equality has been a critical movement of the last few decades but there is a danger of subsuming the important differences between people under the banner of equality.

For instance, we often talk of “unity despite our differences” but if genuine, just unity is to be achieved it is differences that hold the key. Let’s see why…

First a bit of background: humans have evolved as the most successful species on the planet at the moment. One of the skills we have honed to perfection is that of co-operation. While many animals co-operate, humans have made it a cornerstone of their success. A mechanism that is very important to co-operating organisms, particularly humans, is the ability to conform.
If an individual arrives in a new environment which is unfamiliar the best way to learn how to survive is to copy the behaviours of the majority of individuals already in that environment. The degree of accuracy in copying these behaviours determines the newcomer’s ability to adapt quickly and efficiently. Sometimes this means that superfluous behaviours are copied indiscriminately together with the adaptive behaviours.

For instance, a hunter from the highlands comes down to the coast. There is not much game to be had near the sea but the hunter can learn to fish from the fisher folk who live at the sea already. To gain access to their knowledge, it is in the interests of the hunter to quickly assimilate into the culture of the fisher folk and so many behaviours will be learned which have little or no immediate survival value apart from allowing the hunter to gain access to the valuable fishing skills of his new people. Depending on how stringent the culture of the fisher folk is and how assertive the hunter is, there is also a danger that important information carried by the hunter may be lost as the hunter becomes a fisher.

By and large, over the broad expanse of evolutionary history, the benefits of conformity have outweighed the problems. Until now that is.

Humanity’s extraordinary adaptive power has created for the first time a being that threatens the whole biosphere and we can longer rely on the randomness of evolution to determine our survival. While there is a strong likelihood that humanity’s extinction will not necessarily result in the earth’s destruction, there are too many possible scenarios in which our extinction will have cataclysmic results for all other species and the biosphere as a whole. Be that as it may, our survival is important – at least to us – and that survival cannot happen without the planet

Hence Jesus calls us to a new creation. We are the first creatures that have the chance to consciously affect natural selection. We have become what God has longed for: a being able to make decisions equivalent to God’s own; a being able to choose to love.

If we love the world we live in, indeed, if we love ourselves, we have to start choosing behaviours that are good for us and our world. We can longer conform to standards that once worked. Those behaviours have resulted in overpopulation, expended resources and death. What is needed more than ever is the eccentric – an individual prepared to break the mould.

Read Luke 4:14-21

Jesus goes home for a visit and pops in at the church he grew up in. I imagine him remembering his days in “Sunday School” and “Confirmation Class” – the way Rabbi Z’s beard used to bounce when he got excited about some Talmudic obscurity. He is invited to preach. The congregation want to see what all the fuss is about. They’ve heard about young Jesus’ controversial sermons in other parts of Galilee.

Jesus reads from Isaiah. What many modern readers miss in this quote is the fact that Jesus has deliberately edited Isaiah. Instead of carrying on into verse 2 from Isaiah 61, Jesus skips back to Isaiah 42:7 and inserts those words. He is quite careful in this selection because it still fits with the rhythm of Hebrew poetry in the text. Jesus’ deliberate change means that the words of “God’s vengeance” are taken out and instead he reads about the recovery of sight for the blind.
Jesus deliberately chooses to ignore hundred’s of years of theology about the vengeance of God.
Ever since Jesus, the church has tried to resurrect that vengeance.

Whereas, Jesus’ mission statement is all about grace visited on those whom his society regarded as beyond the pale, the church has consistently created filters through which only those who conform to its standards of acceptability may enter.

Jesus deliberately chooses those unable and even unwilling to conform. The church chooses those whose conformity is most nearly perfect.

If humanity is to survive Jesus’ project of a new creation is critical. A key component of that project will be the management, celebration and encouragement of people’s differences.
Further on in the story of Luke 4 we read how the people in the Synagogue took offence at Jesus’ sermon. The gist of his sermon was that the “Chosen Nation of Israel” was not so “chosen” after all. Jesus was effectively saying: “You think you’ll get into heaven because you come to church? Think again…”

Jesus’ “Good News” was bad news for this congregation. They had their insurance policies all signed and up to date but their investment was misplaced. The good news is not some ecclesiastical maze through which one may gain access to heaven. The good news is that this world can change for the good and the ones who will change it are those who don’t fit in: the poor, the oppressed, the prisoners, the wretched, the downcast, the persecuted, the children, the little ones, the disabled, the computer illiterate, the weird, the incompetent, the ignorant, the dykes, spics, niggers, hobos, the ingrate, the stupid, the fashion unconscious, the bullied, the failed, the forgotten, the god-forsaken, the last and least of these.

Dassie and Bosvark klap it again

2007-01-22T00:22:00.000+02:00

The reference to a bike accident in my previous blog refers:

No animals were harmed in the incident but it was a close call: I couldn’t breath properly when the other driver got out his car and he wasn’t around when I got myself together again.

As to the nature of the accident: I was traveling at about 70km/h around a blind bend past Oudekraal. The silver bakkie parked on the left was doing a u-turn across the road. As I came around the corner he was placed perfectly across my lane. No hope.

I broke my pinkie. The bike’s damage was R20 000 – mostly cosmetic however.

Now begins the frustrating process of reconstruction. Yuk.

Magnificent Freedom

2006-12-24T02:13:00.000+02:00

Read Luke 1:39-55

I have in my hand a very scary document: the Freedom Charter. It was read for the first time on 26 June 1955 in Kliptown at the Congress of the People. Members of the SA Communist Party wrote it: Z.K. Matthews and Rusty Bernstein the most well known amongst others. It was adopted by all four organisations at the Congress: the ANC, the SA Congress of Democrats, the SA Indian Congress and the Coloured People’s Congress. Nelson Mandela was there and had to escape disguised as a milkman when police broke up the meeting. This dangerous document formed the basis of our Constitution, the most radical Constitution in the world at the moment. 50 years later, the Freedom Charter’s ideals of democracy and a commitment to a South Africa owned by all its peoples, of all races and creeds, still speaks to a world beset by powerful elites who rule with impunity but whose power is slipping.

I hold in my other hand an even more dangerous document. While the Freedom Charter has been speaking for 50 years and inspired our Constitution, this document has been speaking for nearly 2000 years and, arguably, inspired some of the values voiced in the Freedom Charter. This is the Bible. Powerful people have tried to corrupt its message, to water it down so that its call to freedom will not be heard. They have banned it, they have mistranslated it, they have put it in museums, they have funded whole universities to divert people from its meaning with clever interpretations, and they have killed those who took it seriously. But, despite all this, people all over the world have read it and claimed for themselves and their neighbours the right to be free.

Back before India won its independence, it was under British rule. Bishop William Temple of the Anglican Church warned his missionaries to India not to read the Magnificat – or Mary’s song - in public. He feared that it would be so inflammatory that it might start a revolution!

There once was a time when established theology in South Africa seriously advocated the separation of black and white as well as the subjugation of darker races on the basis of the separation of Noah’s descendents. The separation of Noah’s sons after the flood had receded seemed to indicate a natural separation of people. It was obvious that the tasks assigned to the sons should be applied for time immemorial, namely that the sons of Ham shall suffer the “curse of Canaan” to be servants of servants. Today we find this interpretation laughable if not criminal.

But the Bible’s call to freedom today is in danger not from any government, but from it’s own avid reader: the vast majority of Christians who read this collection of documents read it as a personal love letter from God to themselves. As such it is about as much use to human freedom as a Reader’s Digest collection of recipes or gardening DIY.

From this radical document, Christians are inspired to proclaim the “Good News”. But few actually know what that good news is. For most it is simply that “God loves you”. This is true, but the full ramifications of what God’s love actually means is seldom taken into consideration.

The word “evangelism” comes from the Greek word “euangelion” which means literally “good news”. In common usage at the time that the New Testament books were written, euangelion was most often used to announce a new Emperor.

The early church’s command to preach the “good news” to all nations was tantamount to treason. It was a declaration of independence; of freedom. It was that world’s Freedom Charter. If we preach anything less today, we sully the blood of those who gave their lives for the cause of human freedom. As Christians we are not afraid of blood – it is our staple spiritual diet and for good reason. The blood of Christ flowed for freedom’s sake; the blood of his martyrs covers the world; and if we are not prepared to give at least our own lives for freedom, then we have no place in the “good news” of Jesus Christ.

That good news is... Listen! Listen world! Listen to a 14 year old girl braving a dangerous journey alone and pregnant so that she can rejoice with her older relative in the babies of their wombs; babies who will proclaim dangerous freedom:

‘My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.’

Good News indeed!

Dassie Hiking List

2006-12-23T11:16:00.001+02:00

President Katie has requested that the Minister of Sport and Recreation make special effort to increase the opportunities for her subjects to enjoy the beautiful mountain in her back yard. With this directive in mind, I've set up an email list which will inform people of when and where the next hiking opportunity will be available. You can subscribe to the Dassie Hiking List by sending an email to gregandrewsATshadeDOTorgDOTza

Life is a lemon

2006-12-17T00:31:00.000+02:00

Read Luke 3:7-18

When I was a child I was a fan of a TV programme called “Senor Onion” developed by the South African playwright, Janice Honeyman. I looked forward to the adventures of Senor Onion and the other fruit and vegetables as they went about their veggie business in fear of the kitchen chef who occasionally came to harvest them with his big knife. One character particularly was my favourite: Mr Lemon. He had a signature song: “I’m a lemon, I’m a lemon, and I smell just like a flower. But when you taste me, oh, when you taste me, I taste so very sour!” (sung to the tune of My Darling Clementine).

Like a lemon, the apparently sweet smell of religiosity can sometimes be confused for genuine change when in fact it is but a sour attitude. I want to explore personal change, or repentance in the light of John’s message and am indebted to Sarah Dylan Breuer once again for her insights on John.

In John Steinbeck’s novel “The Wayward Bus” we meet a sombre group of drifters travelling on a bus. The bus driver whose life has become a rut, deliberately engineers a minor accident to create some excitement for himself. While the passengers await help they take refuge in a cave. As they enter the cave they pass a piece of graffiti scrawled on cliff adjacent to the cave. It reads “repent” but no one notices. Through their interactions with each other and the conflicts and connections that occur, many of the characters come to resolve that they will change their lives once they return to civilisation. But as the novel proceeds, it seems more and more likely that they will remain caught up in their old lives, unable or unwilling to break free from old habits. One is left wondering at the end, if indeed, any of them will really did change.

Psychologists have long puzzled over what makes for a personal change. One thing that they are certain about is that fear does not work in the long-term. So, for instance, advertisements that scare one about the dangers of speeding or of smoking might work but only in the short term; they do not provide the wherewithal for sustainable change.

Psychologists are also finding that the best kind of personal change is one based on a change of one’s personal ideas about oneself. Role models are therefore important in helping us change for we create for ourselves a personal image of self based on what we see in our role models. When we choose role models that model unhealthy behaviour, we are more likely to adopt that unhealthy behaviour and similarly, if their behaviour is healthy we will adopt healthy behaviour. Most of this happens at an unconscious level.

Because it is mostly unconscious, acquired behaviours are often those, which are visible to the observer but invisible to the actor. In other words, kids will do as their parents do, not as their parents say!

An example of the importance of role models is in the struggle against HIV where role models are the number one reason why young people engage in risk behaviour despite knowing intellectually that such behaviour is dangerous. Too much effort and resources are being expended in creating awareness without enough attention to the role models that young people emulate.

There is a great deal of hand wringing going on about the materialism of western culture. Young people are bombarded by consumerism and seem largely to have capitulated (as have all generations for that matter). In the church we are anxious because young people are inclined to follow Schumacher in a Ferrari rather than Jesus on a donkey. But it should come as no surprise that this has happened.

While this generation may ostentatiously demonstrate wealth as a value, a previous generation were no less covetous of wealth, even if it was “only” the new kitchen or family sedan the next-door neighbours have bought.

The question remains, how can Christians inspire radical change in society and individuals with anything near the effectiveness of John and Jesus?

Let’s take a closer look.

Firstly, John’s message was surprising and radical for a number of reasons, one of which was who it was directed at. Unlike his contemporaries who used Baptism as a means of entry into the Jewish faith, John believed that even Jews needed to be baptised - needed to repent. This is why he was not popular with the religious establishment. For John, Baptism was a mark of ongoing personal commitment to the values espoused by the prophets that preceded him.

Who you are and to which social category you belong makes no difference in the Gospel scheme. John declares that even stones can become Abraham’s descendents. We do well to remember that John’s call to repentance was not aimed at “non-believers” but at the heart of belief itself.

Today, as with John’s day, belief is seen as the destination. Once one has converted to the faith, been Baptised or Confirmed, one has arrived. In fact, this is the beginning of the journey, not the destination; it is a commitment to live constantly in dialogue with the values of the prophets so that slowly one may grow to maturity in faith.

If we want to change the world, we can begin with ourselves. When did we stop studying Jesus’ strange ways? At what point did we think we knew the answers? When did we become comfortable? Journeying with Jesus should become increasingly uncomfortable as we discover more and more in our lives that does not measure up to his model.

Secondly, it is worth remembering that Jesus and John did not agree on everything. Remember when John sent some of his disciples to ask Jesus if he is the one they were expecting or if they are to wait for another? Obviously there was enough that Jesus was doing for them to think he was the one, but some aspects of Jesus’ behaviour that had them wondering if he really was the one. One of those things was undoubtedly that Jesus had not brought the fire of judgement John predicts. John expected Jesus to gather up all those who had given themselves to God, but he also expected Jesus to destroy those who chose to ignore the call to repentance. But Jesus did nothing of the sort. Instead he says to John, “Blessed is the one who takes no offence at me.” He challenges John to adopt a more gracious attitude.

It is interesting that history tells of many movements that continued John’s strong line of judgement against the wicked long after Jesus and John. It may be that not all of John’s disciples, perhaps not even John, could accept this call to grace.

As psychologists will tell you, you cannot scare people into heaven with pictures of hell. John’s message of repentance is critical for a generation of church people who see themselves as having arrived. But John’s message of the fearful consequences is not going to convince anyone – at least not in the long term.

However, Jesus’ practice of grace in his teaching and friendships does change the world. If those who see themselves as having arrived would repent of a judgemental attitude and begin again the hard process of growing in the stature of the Divine, the world might actually have some hope that there will be people to lead them into heaven instead of yawning when they are prodded by fearful fire and brimstone.

Christians are called to lead people into heaven, not scare people away from hell. If we want the world to change, the best way is to offer the model example of that change. I hope this Christmas we will engage again with Jesus, even if that engagement challenges us deeply. The world needs people who are learning how to follow Jesus.

For a great hymn about lemons check out Brenton’s song “Lemons” to the tune NOEL:

Jesus and Scientific Reasoning

2006-12-14T11:32:00.000+02:00

Mike Anderson is someone I met a long time ago and have always enjoyed his occasional articles. If you enjoy games, his most recent article will be particularly enjoyable. You may even want to write to Mike and get on his list. I only have a PDF version so have sent it to the dassie subscription list. If you like the excerpt below, send me an email and I'll forward the PDF (64k).

"Our children awoke one Sunday to discover their shoes on the ceiling instead of under their beds, rice instead of their favourite cereal pouring out of the box and all the dining-room chairs were upside-down! They were a little surprised at first, but quickly laughed over their parent's shenanigans. We were trying to help them appreciate something so very ordinary and ubiquitous that it is easy to miss how extremely wonderful it is. This something is the remarkable consistency of the world. There is a Chinese proverb that goes, "If you want to know about water, do not ask a fish." The world's consistency to us is like water to a fish."

Reading Levels

2006-12-14T11:20:00.000+02:00

Mom forwarded this to me. It's a bookshelf with notches carved into it. Each notch accommodates a specific religious text. You can read more about this functional piece of art here.

Hope is a blanket

2006-12-12T21:48:00.000+02:00

Our dear friends Harry and Lerato lost their unborn child last week. At the funeral service on Saturday, Themba spoke about the Zulu expression, "akulahlwa mbeleko ngakufelwa" which refers to the blanket wrapped around a newborn baby, the Mbeleko. Roughly translated the expression means, "Do not throw away the receiving blanket." It expresses the hope that soon another child will come to fill the blanket.

I can think of no better metaphor for the meaning of Advent. As I read the disastrous tale of Jesus' early years: fleeing a genocidal despot, hiding in Egypt, not to mention his eventual execution; it strikes me that this is a season to recall all the past year's hurts and consider the hope that the Christ child brought to the world despite his own struggles and still brings today despite our own. No matter what has happened to you over the last year, I hope you will not throw away the Mbeleko but allow it to remain open for the Child born for you this Christmas.

The Backhand

2006-12-12T14:33:00.000+02:00

When Jesus said turn the other cheek, he had in mind something very different from being a "doormat". You can read Walter Wink's exegesis about that.

I recently came across a friend in a very strange place. Bradley Bordis helped to set up the "Not In My Name" movement which mobilises Jewish people around the world against Zionism. For this he has been publicly branded on this site. (Go down the list to "Bordis, Bradley") Of course Bradley was outraged when this happened, but I can't help thinking that, coming from where it does, it is sort of a backhanded compliment to be openly vilified for doing the right thing.

I'm trying to keep this in mind especially with recent criticism about some of the ideas I've published here and stands that I'm taking. It is tough to respond respectfully - non-violently - sometimes.

Name-dropping

2006-12-11T12:57:00.000+02:00

Read Luke 3:1-6

Luke begins his story about John with a whole bunch of name-dropping. In fact, throughout his Gospel, there is a great deal of name-dropping going on. John the Baptist’s ministry happened at the time of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate, his brother Philip Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene and during the high priesthood of Annas and his successor Caiaphas; all very important people indeed. What’s up with all the name-dropping?

We all know people who are name-droppers. They use the important names of people they know to bolster their own confidence. We associate name-dropping with poor self-esteem.

In Luke’s case, though, there is a very different reason for all this name-dropping. Once he has paraded the dignitaries he goes on to tell us from whence the Word of God comes… not from any of these luminaries. No, the Word of God comes from scruffy, smelly old John.

“Halford Luccock once noted that Nero was sure that the most important happenings in Rome were the words he said, the laws he enacted, and the things he did. As a matter of fact, the biggest events in Rome at the time were some prayer meetings which were being held secretly in the catacombs. The Medici, he observes, must have seemed the key figures in Renaissance Europe, with their palaces, art galleries, and political power. Yet they are overshadowed by "a little boy playing about on the docks of Genoa," who would eventually open the seaway to the Americans – Christopher Columbus.
So it was in John the Baptiser’s time. One can easily imagine the pomp and circumstance with which Herod trampled about as tetrarch of Galilee. Wherever he went, people scraped and bowed. They waited for a disdaining nod and dreamed of some act of preferment from his hand. Herod was, indeed, a big man in Galilee in the first century. Today, all his pomp is simply pompous, and all his circumstance only circumstantial. But John the Baptiser! - a great human being.”

(J. Ellsworth Kalas, ‘The Hinge of History,’ Sermons on the Gospel Readings, Cycle C, CSS Publishing Company, 2003)

Luke is also portraying the luminaries in the background of this story because of the importance this story has to the current events of the day: contrast, for instance, this list of dignitaries and the power that they represent with the freedom songs of Mary and Zechariah. Luke is clear that the arrival of Jesus in our world speaks a clear message of warning to power.

In today’s world of televangelism it’s hard to see how John’s message of repentance had any political significance. We know about his criticism of Herod for which he lost his head, but that seems to be all there is and even that seems to have been about Herod’s moral character rather than matters of politics or justice. But John got into trouble not because he preached forgiveness, per se, but because he threatened the power of the Temple establishment that made a living from granting forgiveness through expensive sacrifices. A lucrative industry had grown up around the Temple which exploited people’s need for relationship with God. John’s message of repentance and personal re-commitment to God undermined this system.

To understand John and his relationship with the powers of the day we need to briefly trace the history that precedes John. In the time between Malachi in the Old Testament and Jesus, a very significant period of Israel’s history took place. A Jewish family led a revolt which came to be called the Maccabean Revolt against Roman occupation. The revolt installed the Hasmonean dynasty of priest-kings. But no sooner had the new rulers taken power than they began to betray the hope placed in them by so many people in Palestine. They executed their enemies and operated in contravention of Jewish practice and law. They were not legitimate priests of kings being neither of the line of David or of Zadok. A disillusioned group of people created a series of desert communes. This religious sect came to be called the Essenes. This is the sect that created the Dead Sea Scrolls. They believed in a retreat from the world into a strict piety practiced in virtual isolation in the hopes that God would respond to their holiness and rescue them from the impending destruction of the world.

John was probably an Essene at some stage though he departed from their pessimistic world-view and rejection of the world.

Power and especially the abuse of power were a staple diet for the people of Palestine then as today. John was born into this situation and his message of repentance is one linked to social transformation. Like his Essene background John sees the world’s powers as essentially corrupt but unlike the Essenes he engages with people in the hope that he can call people away from allegiance to such corrupt power.

Jesus, in his turn was a disciple of John but went even further, taking his engagement with the world beyond the wilderness into the streets and homes of the people he met on his epic journey through Palestine.

Sarah asks an interesting question: Do we believe God/Jesus is powerful? We’ve all been raised to affirm that God is “omnipotent” but we behave rather differently. For instance, she points out the question often asked by those who are worrying about getting cremated after they die: “How will God put me back together again come Resurrection?” Or look at the way we pray: with great fervour and anguish we strive to find the correct words in the hope that just the right prayer may move God to action. Some people go so far as to blame a person’s poor faith for God’s failing to act on their behalf.

The Essenes were like that, thinking that if they could get the holiness formula right, then God would come and liberate them from the world. Ironically, the Essenes understood power in much the same way as the world they were trying to escape.

Please the local tax-collector, and he’ll throw a rebate your way. Please the village elder, and he’ll grease your next job application. Please the Roman consul, and you’ll have a get-out-of-jail-free card. Please God and your place in eternity is secure.

This is power based on how the world understands power. If you know the right people, if you can please the right people, then the world is your oyster. We bolster our own power by association with those who already have power. We court power.

Jesus believed in love and the power of love to transform. It’s a simple idea, which flies in the face of our usual power mongering. It is power that we can rejoice in, that is comforting at the same time as it is challenging.

Jesus takes John’s theology a step further and engages people where they are at. He met with people in their homes, conversed and joked with them in their own language. Jesus befriended people who society had relegated to the outskirts. His love sought them out and his love transformed them. It is Jesus (God) who makes the move, who acts decisively. There is no human standard that must be attained first, no human action that is a pre-requisite to Divine action. God’s power is not limited by human ideas of good and bad.

“I don't believe in perfection; I believe in redemption. I believe that God's power to redeem is such that no human misstep or even deliberate human wickedness can have the final word.”

Sarah Dylan Breuer

Lord, I believe a rest remains
To all Thy people known,
A rest where pure enjoyment reigns,
And Thou art loved alone.

A rest where all our soul’s desire
Is fixed on things above;
Where fear, and sin, and grief expire,
Cast out by perfect love.

O that I now the rest might know,
Believe, and enter in!
Now, Savior, now the the power bestow,
And let me cease from sin.

Remove this hardness from my heart,
This unbelief remove:
To me the rest of faith impart,
The Sabbath of Thy love.

Charles Wesley 1740

F art

2006-12-08T13:41:00.000+02:00

I am a complete philistine when it comes to appreciating art but sometimes I come across something that intrigues me. There was once a series of sculptures at the National Gallery in town that were compelling and shocking: bodies of children but the heads of fantastic beasts... and I remember the occasional painting in a gallery that made my heart skip a beat. Mostly I enjoy art that pokes fun at the world. I especially enjoy art that explores deep and meaningful things while still being funny.

Here's a mural which explores a whole range of taboos e.g. God = female; God's creative wind from the wrong end; women farting. Lovely. Read more about it here. Divine Gas indeed!

And there is nothing quite so good as Calvin and Hobbes. Mom sent me a link to all of Calvin's snowman works. This one speaks to the point of this blog:

And then there is the interesting relationship between art and function. Here is a company that creates cameras that look like guns. I don't think they're trying to make a point, just cornering a niche in the market, but I can't help feeling that this is an inadvertent comment on their part and isn't that what art is?

Iron John

2006-12-07T10:07:00.000+02:00

For those interested in what I get up to on the first Saturday of the month, you can visit the Iron John site to see a diary of our rides and photos too.

The Iron John Circle is based on the book by Robert Bly who used the legend of Iron John as a metaphor for conceptualising masculinity. You can read more about that here.

The Iron John Circle is a bunch of bikers from different walks of life who meet because they enjoy riding bikes but also want to connect with other men in a meaningful way beyond beer and sport (not necessarily to the exclusion of these two worthwhile pastimes). We meet once a month on a Saturday morning. We begin with Circle work – talking about life. This goes on for about an hour (men of few words). Then someone is elected (strong word – its more like mutual silent consent or at most a few grunts but it is democratic) to ride point and leads us on an excursion through the highways and byways of this beautiful part of the world. Once in while we also arrange extended rides over a weekend or even a week. We also organise the occasional John and Jill’s ride to include our wild women. Not all of us are riders, some ride pillion. This seems to be a good way to get involved to test the waters and learn about biking before one actually commits. Others simply prefer to ride pillion and not own a bike.

I often wonder what is more important: the ride or the circle? I still haven’t worked it out. I have never wanted to be part of a biker club, but I really look forward to my Saturday’s ride with the men. I guess I most look forward to connecting and hearing the wisdom of other men who have struggled in life. But I also don’t like the idea of a support group and if we didn’t have the biking, I guess that’s all we’d be. There is something about the mix of deep sharing and shared exhilaration that is compelling. Perhaps it is something that is missing in our society – a place where boys and men can test themselves in the company of wiser fellows.

I know I am a better man because of these men.

Our last ride of the year was a duzy. Nearly 300km through the back roads from CT north of Durbanville to Wellington and around Bains Kloof, Slanghoek and Du Toits Kloof. We had one crash, a skinny dip and two pit stops. Thanks to President William for riding point – magnificent ride in splendid conditions.

Cool stuff

2006-12-06T13:43:00.000+02:00

There's some really creative stuff on the net that just happened to be floating in my inbox so I thought I'd share it here.

Apple Mac is running a competition in South Africa. You could win an iPod. But more importantly, you get to watch some of the really funny ads that they've created. If you hate PC's as much as I am beginning to, then you'll love it even more... Click here.

And then there is this mug with the American Bill of Rights on it. When you add hot water the various rights that have been compromised or completely eradicated by American Presidents will dissapear. Go here to get one.

Awesome!

Brandan did a really great cartoon this week on Climate Change...

There is a craze at the moment to create bogus trailers for old movies. This one is brilliant. Mary Poppins is scary...

And Ze Frank has done two particularly good vlogs recently. Actually - its all good but here are two I think you'll enjoy.

Thanksgetting
Thanksgiving

Declaration of Independence

2006-12-04T14:41:00.000+02:00

President Katie has decided to start her own blog. For anyone interested in following her exploits, please follow the link in the side bar or click here.

Fingered

2006-11-28T11:14:00.000+02:00

I recently represented Gun Free South Africa at a workshop organised by the CSIR. They are working on a vast research project that will examine violence in South Africa and hopefully impact on policy well into the future.

We were asked to share our ideas about what a safe and secure South Africa might feel / look like.

One response was: “Survive Alive”

Another: “You watch a little girl riding on a bicycle and a butterfly flits past. You have time to watch the butterfly because you are not worried about the little girl.”

Someone said they want to live in a society that has open doors and where her own front door is unlocked.

I thought about the “New Jerusalem” in Revelation. The image is one of a city built out of precious stones. Walls built with diamonds, rubies and the like would be beautiful, transparent and still functional. For me, that is my dream for SA; I look forward to the day when the structures of our society are life affirming (beautiful), not sinister (transparent) and work efficiently (functional).

Which raises a question (amongst others) of why Home Affairs needs my fingerprints when I apply for an ID book? What purpose does it serve to have my fingerprints?

Home Affairs says that its system is separate from the police (and I assume intelligence services) and is not used for finding people whose prints turn up on crime scenes. The HA fingerprints are used exclusively to establish the unique identity of each person.

But, by its own admission, HA is rife with corruption. It is relatively easy to procure an identity document. Apparently the manual system for storing and acquiring fingerprints is partly to blame for the ease with which crooks are selling fake identities. Why will a more complicated system change this necessarily? What is about fingerprints and computers that will make it harder for people to fake and steal identities any more than say, photographs or retinal scans?

Furthermore, while it is not impossible that two people with the same name could be born on the same day in the same place, surely the odds are stacked hugely in favour of this information creating a reasonably discreet individual identity without the hassle and expense of maintaining a technology intensive electronic fingerprinting archive.

Is the current system efficient? No. Will a new computerised be more efficient? Yes, but at what expense?

Is the system life affirming? No – taking my prints makes me feel like a criminal.

Is the system transparent? No. I think there are undeclared interests at play. At best, somebody stands to benefit from the investment in the new technology for a fingerprint database while holding out the carrot of incorruptibility. At worst, the assurance that fingerprints are used only for identification purposes is a lie.

Christ the King

2006-11-27T10:48:00.000+02:00

Read John 18:33-37

Christ the King is a relatively new festival in the church year. Its roots go back only to the late 1800's, when the world's great empires - British, American, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Japanese - were all at war or about to go to war somewhere. After World War I, in 1925, Pope Pius XI designated the last Sunday in October as Christ the King Sunday. The Second Vatican Council moved Christ the King Sunday to the last Sunday of the church year.

It is fitting that this year the festival coincides with the “16 days of activism” against domestic violence.

In the published diaries of Joseph Goebbels, the infamous Nazi Propagandist, there are a few references to Mahatma Gandhi his contemporary. Goebbels believed that Gandhi was a fool and a fanatic. If Gandhi had the sense to organize militarily, Goebbels thought, he might hope to win the freedom of India. He was certain that Gandhi couldn’t succeed following a path of non-violent direct action. Yet as history played itself out, India peacefully won her independence while the Nazi military machine was destroyed. What Goebbels regarded as weakness actually turned out to be strength. What he thought of as strength turned out to be weakness.

The same ideological differences characterised the contemporaries of our Bible story today. In this courtroom drama we have Pilate and Jesus sparring in a life and death struggle with words that ring out over history. One wonders if anyone - save perhaps Jesus - grasped the magnitude of that battle.

For sure, we often assume that Jesus was misunderstood, and indeed he was. But one person understood Jesus only too well. It is for this reason that Pilate allowed Jesus to be executed. He knew without a doubt after this duel of words that Jesus was dangerous to everything that the Roman Governor was tasked to protect.

Like Gandhi, Jesus refused to use the methods of Pilate and of Goebbels. Jesus’ way – a method which Gandhi incidentally learned from – was far more powerful than any military empire. It is a method that to this day is not fully appreciated nor understood.

Jesus’ method excludes all other methods. It cannot be adopted as one strategy amongst many, as one arrow in a quiver of tactics. It requires total allegiance. One cannot love one’s enemy and plot against them at the same time.

Jesus’ method is all consuming. It cannot be applied to only one area of one’s life. To have compassion on only one’s friends and family while ignoring the plight of the rest of the world is not compassion but self-interest.

Jesus’ method is ultimately powerful. Assume it, and you may very well lose your life. Reject it, and authentic life will forever be beyond your grasp. Jesus method is so radically new it requires the end of life as we know it and the creation of something so radically new we cannot imagine it from any “old-life” perspective. It is for this reason we celebrate Christ as King at the end of the Christian year – for we acknowledge that everything comes to an end in Christ’s new beginning.

All of this is quite apocalyptic and rightly so. Jesus framed his theology in an apocalyptic mindset. He saw his adventure on this earth as heralding the end of time but let us not confuse Jesus’ apocalyptic with the sensationalised Armageddon of modern doomsday prophets ala Hal Lindsay, “Left Behind” and co.

Jesus’ method did not and does not predict or require the end of the earth, only the end of the world. There is a difference. The earth is “good” (Genesis) and so is all life on it. The covenant with Noah guaranteed that God would never again cause the destruction of earth. Where such destruction is happening today, it is human fault, not God’s design. Jesus’ method does require that the systems of the world come to an end and for the past two thousand years that process has been ongoing. Dictatorships and empires have crumbled and democracies are rising, global efforts to redress poverty have mobilised, prejudice is being dismantled from our systems of governance as well as our hearts and more and more revolutions are won through non-violence rather than sword or gun.

The world – as it once was - is ending.
The world – as it once was - is ending. The earth rejoices.
The earth rejoices.

This is not to say that we don’t still have a long way to go. Poverty and war have seen their premium century in the last hundred years, as has prejudice. But there is a global consensus and a global ability, for the first time in history that has the potential to end human suffering. That consensus is gaining strength, not losing strength.

Christ the King Sunday reminds us that we are called to celebrate the Reign of God that is arriving and has arrived all over the world. Wherever Christ’s Reign is being made manifest, let us add our voices and efforts to the furtherance of compassion, justice and freedom for all people.

Pilate has reason to be nervous. So should all modern powers, especially those that in any way impinge on human dignity and freedom for Christ will Reign over all.

Oh, and here's an interesting riddle...

Axe to grind?

2006-11-27T10:00:00.000+02:00

In the sidebar, you'll see I have a link to "The Axle". I'm part of the coffee-holics support group that started it and we're trying to create a space for Christians to encounter fresh ways of engaging their faith in South Africa and the world. So if you think there is something that could help us get a debate going let us know.

The latest post I've copied here:

Mother Theresa always said, “Calcuttas are everywhere – if only we have the eyes to see. Find your Calcutta.” I was ready to come home. I knew that my Calcutta was the United States. For I knew we could not end poverty until we took a careful look at wealth. ... I learned from the lepers that leprosy is a disease of numbness. The contagion numbs the skin, and the nerves can no longer feel as the body wastes away. In fact, the way it was detected was by rubbing a feather across the skin and if the person could not feel it, they were diagnosed with the illness. To treat it, we would dig out or dissect the scarred tissue until the person could feel again. As I left Calcutta, it occurred to me that I was returning to a land of lepers, a land of people who had forgotten how to feel, to laugh, to cry, a land haunted by numbness. Could we learn to feel again?

Shane Claiborn, The Irresistable Revolution. (after a stint of serving in a leper colony in Calcutta.)

In South Africa, we have Calcutta and the US living next door to each other. We are one of the few countries where such poverty and wealth are so proximate. We do not have the luxury of geographic distance. So our collective numbness seems even more stark.

Check out "The Axle"

Creed

2006-11-21T11:32:00.000+02:00

"I am well aware that I don't get to decide who God is. What I do get to decide, however, is to whom I pledge my allegiance. I am a free agent, after all, and I have standards for my God, the first of which is this: I will not worship any God who is not at least as compassionate as I am."

Want to find out more: read this article.

Yabonga

2006-11-21T11:16:00.000+02:00

Some of you will remember my post about Yabonga getting robbed and the threat that this posed to the ongoing work of their voluntary counselling and testing site. Yabonga have decided to keep the site open, although they have taken steps to increase security. Below is a letter from Yvette.

From: Yvette Andrews
Sent: 17 November 2006 02:04 PM
To: Greg Andrews
Subject: Yabonga

Hi Love
Please send this to your dassie list esp those who wrote after the robbery.

XX

Hi
A while ago we had an armed robbery and Greg wrote asking for support for us at Yabonga while we found our feet again.

It is now months later and as I write this I have a background choir of Yabonga women practising their songs for World Aids Day.Listening to these women singing 'Never give up ' I wanted to write to all of you who supported us initially after the robbery to thank you for your prayers and emails - those messages sustained us at a time when Yabonga felt like a scary place
rather than the refuge that it normally is for so many of us.

I also wanted to say as we approach World Aids Day that Yabonga has overcome the various challenges thrown at it this year and not only have we survived but we have grown as individuals and as an organisation. It is because of this we can approach WAD with gladness in our heart and truly say we have discovered how to live positively with HIV.

However none of this would have been possible with out the love and support of friends. We understand that our success is largely due to the support we receive and this support enables us to reach out to others.

So from the bottom of Yabonga's heart - Thank you , Dankie , Enkosi and may you have a blessed World Aids Day..

Yabonga
2 Main Rd Wynberg
Tel : 021 761 2940
Fax : 021 761 3407

Finding God in the Busyness

2006-11-15T14:55:00.000+02:00

Jurgen sent me this article. The idea of finding God in busyness is central to my own theology. Of course too much busyness is unhealthy, but as the author of the article suggests, busyness is life and God is there too. This is particularly important for people in urban settings where busyness envelopes one, even when one is still. There are a thousand messages streaming at one through advertising, newspapers, sounds and activity. There are as many threats, both to one's sense of self as to one's health. To remain focussed on what is precious and life-giving is challenging but it can be done.

Fuzzy Wuzzy

2006-11-15T13:37:00.000+02:00

I picked up one of Katie’s books – one I’d not read yet. I read it to Katie and it touched me, which is a measure of just how much hormones affect Dad’s too. It’s called “Guess how much I love you” by Sam McBratney and illustrated by Anita Jeram. Here it is…

Little Nutbrown Hare, who was going to bed, held on tight to Big Nutbrown Hare’s very long ears. He wanted to be sure that Big Nutbrown Hare was listening. “Guess how much I love you,” he said.

“Oh, I don’t think I could guess that,” said Big Nutbrown Hare.

“This much,” said Little Nutbrown Hare, stretching out his arms as wide as they could go.

Big Nutbrown Hare had even longer arms. “But I love you this much,” he said.

Hmm, that is a lot, thought Little Nutbrown Hare.

“I love you as high as I can reach,” said Little Nutbrown Hare.

“I love you as high as I can reach,” said Big Nutbrown Hare.

That is quite high, thought Little Nutbrown Hare. I wish I had arms like that.

Then Little Nutbrown Hare had a good idea. He tumbled upside down and reached up the tree trunk with his feet. “I love you all the way up to my toes!” he said.

“And I love you all the way up to your toes,” said Big Nutbrown Hare, swinging him up over his head.

“I love you as high as I can hop!” laughed Little Nutbrown Hare, bouncing up and down.

“But I love you as high as I can hop,” smiled Big Nutbrown Hare – and he hopped so high his ears touched the branches above.

That’s good hopping, thought Little Nutbrown Hare. I wish I could hop like that.

“I love you all the way down the lane as far as the river,” cried Little Nutbrown Hare.

“I love you across the river and over the hills,” said Big Nutbrown Hare.

That’s very far, thought Little Nutbrown Hare. He was almost too sleepy to think any more. Then he looked up beyond the thorn bushes, out into the big dark night. Nothing could be further than the sky.

“I love you right up to the moon,” he said, and closed his eyes.

“Oh, that’s far,” said Big Nutbrown Hare. “That is very, very far.”

Big Nutbrown Hare settled Little Nutbrown Hare into his bed of leaves. He leaned over and kissed him good night. Then he lay down close by and whispered with a smile, “I love you right up to the moon – and back!”

President Katie unfazed by recent Senate upset

2006-11-10T09:02:00.000+02:00

Make a meal of it

2006-11-10T08:55:00.000+02:00

Mom sent me this link which I enjoyed very much. Don't worry, the pasta is wheat free.

Nuf Sed

2006-11-06T11:45:00.000+02:00

A dangerous man who faded away has finally died. I hope he is enjoying a nice cup of rooibos tea with Steve Biko. Too early as yet methinks, but at least Steve is enjoying it.

My abiding memory of PW Botha was an interview conducted by journalists outside his Wilderness residence during the Truth and Reconciliation Campaign. He was saying his usual stuff about how the TRC was maligning his name and his people and that he would have nothing to do with it, blah, blah, blah…

Behind him in the background was the driveway to his house, “Die Anker”, which is Afrikaans for “The Anchor”. There is a sign at the bottom of the driveway with this name on it. There is a graphic on the sign of an anchor lying on its side with the words arranged around it. The end hooks of the anchor which form a “W” shape lie next to the word “Anker” so that the net result is a sign which says:

Die Wanker

As PW wagged his finger at the world, his own home silently and unwittingly condemned him. What I found funny then, I find sadly prophetic now. I expect that there will be many deaths in the years to come which will be just as sad because one more chance at reconciliation will die with each recalcitrant, narcissistic and unrepentant soul.

In this context it is good to remember Vlok’s recent penitence at the feet of Frank Chikane (and a few others that didn’t make the media spotlight, mind you). While it doesn’t go far enough, it was immeasurably better than nothing.

History is the quintessential reality-defined-by-perception. PW has condemned himself to an eternity of bad jokes and piercing satire. Vlok has created a paradoxically hopeful as well as confounding position – one that will be debated but never pitied.

Sermon - living faith

2006-11-05T12:15:00.000+02:00

Following Bill Loader’s lead this week, I imagine here a conversation between Jesus and a less sympathetic Scribe than the one who confronts Jesus in Mark 12: 28-34. First, read Mark’s version.

Scribe: “So Jesus, which commandment is the first of all?”

Jesus: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.”

Scribe: “Mmmm…”

Jesus: “And the second is this: love your neighbour as yourself. There isn’t a commandment greater than these.”

Scribe: “Oh really?”

Jesus: “Yes, these are greater than any law, more important than whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

Scribe: “Well, I don’t know about that. Surely if one loves God, one will obey all God’s commands? These include sacrifices and burnt offerings, not to mention much besides.”

Jesus: “Absolutely, but they are all subordinate to devotion.”

Scribe: “Perhaps, but on what basis is ‘love of neighbour’ second? Surely all of God’s commands are second? The ‘love of neighbour’ is but one of many.”

Jesus: “God’s command to love is one, just as God is one. ‘Hear Oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.’ All commands - all law - are subordinate to the nature of God, subordinate to love.”

Scribe: “Are you suggesting we should stop making sacrifices?”

Jesus: “There is no need for sacrifice for love fulfils the law. Law was created to regulate human relations and love perfects those relations.”

A conversation between modern Christians reminiscent of this conversation between Jesus and the Scribe, might go like this:

“How can you accept homosexuality? Don’t you follow the Bible?”

“No, I don’t. I follow Jesus. I read the Bible”

Today is called “All Saints Day” in the liturgical calendar. It is a day we recall the people who have died in the past year as well as the saints of old who have rooted us in the faith. One of these saints is John Wesley.

Whereas Jesus gave to us the principle of interpreting scripture through the eyes of love, Wesley gave us a method to do this.

For Methodists the Bible is but one of four sources for theology and ethics. The Bible is to be read in tension with Reason, Tradition and Experience. This amounts to a wrestling for truth, but never a pronouncement of truth. Our decisions are always contingent upon new information. And this is why we speak of faith for certainty has no place in this struggle. This is why we speak of our religion as ‘living’ and that Jesus is alive – for we follow a man who still walks in surprising directions, shifting the goal posts, wily and unpredictable.

After Jacob deceived his brother and left his family he slept one night, no doubt troubled by his past and searching for direction. During that night God came to him and they wrestled with each other. In the morning, Jacob was more resolute, but still bore the mark of having wrestled with God. Our faith is like that. We wrestle with God and each other to discern a truth that propels us to action.

"What big ears you have, Grandma!"

2006-10-31T13:14:00.000+02:00

Little Red Riding Hood meets the Big Bad Wolf dressed in her grandma’s nightgown and lying in her bed. She says to Wolf-dressed-as-Grandma, “My, what big ears you have, Grandma!”

“All the better for hearing you, my dear” replies Wolf, “All the better for hearing you.”

Will big ears improve my hearing?

When I was 25 I wore a size 7 comfortably. Now at 35 I prefer a size 8. At this rate I will be resorting to stokies in my 80’s - if I last that long. From foetus to grave our extremities continue growing. This is why the older one gets, the bigger one’s feet become or the more out of proportion one’s ears and nose to the rest of one’s face. There may be some advantages for men in the continual growth of extremities, but to my knowledge this hasn’t been studied…

Long before I cuddle my tired dogs in towelling slippers, I will, in all likelihood, be felled by some age related disorder caused by my genes.

Overgrowing bits is one of those taken for granted realities that actually make a good case for evolution as opposed to creationism.

For the creationist there is cause for praising God for the apparently miraculous “fit” of species to their environmental niches. But this natural “fit” is far from perfect. What is the design point of super sized extremities? It makes no design sense to waste energy on peripherals while one’s core structure is deteriorating, not to mention the increased wastage of time pruning nose hair.

From an evolutionist perspective the superfluous growth of my big toe is an indication of the unconscious process of natural selection, which “designs” by accident. Many creaturely attributes could be improved upon by careful, conscious design, like the skew face of a sole. Just as there is no environmental or competitive pressure for the sole to “improve” the design of its face (yet), so there is no pressure for humans to evolve more efficient ear lobes.

The same clutter and inefficiency is visible in the preponderance of genetic disorders among the elderly. At first glance one may wonder why so many people are afflicted with genetic disorders if the principle of natural selection is working well: weeding out such maladaptive traits in the population.

Most disorders manifest later in life because they affect people who have passed their normal reproductive life. As far as natural selection is concerned I am insignificant when I cease to have children – I am already dead. Any disorder that crops up then has already been passed on to the next generation. As long as the disorder remains invisible while I’m “fruitful and multiplying”, no one is going to be choosy about having sex with me because I haven’t yet grown that third eye. Any disorder that does manifest while I am in my reproductive years is not going to swim long in the gene pool (in evolutionary terms that is).

Genetic disorders that manifest later in life are the detritus of evolution by natural selection - as are big ears. We regard such anomalies as normal when in fact they are litter in the otherwise pristine theological framework of creation.

It is therefore fascinating to me that the Jesus theology celebrates a “new creation” as opposed to glorifying creation as is. Jesus celebrates those who will “do even greater things than me” in the future. Much of Jesus’ ministry was about healing people and today we have within our power the ability to heal people of profound illnesses, even those of a genetic source. Medical science has the potential of cleaning up the litter of careless evolution.

With the hope of realising God’s dream of a new creation it seems blasphemous that we are more preoccupied with plastic surgery than we are with healing the world of rampant disease. Medical science has veered toward lucrative cosmetic gerontological study rather than attacking the roots of genetic disorder and endemic disease. The values of those who fund medical research, and those who benefit from it, have become superficial in the extreme. We are inventing ways to prevent wrinkles while we have the power to eradicate epidemics. We are more worried about our big hairy ears than dying from internal decay. Commercial interests mean that medical research is increasingly directed toward drugs that are lucrative rather than significant. Our society is creating an industry driven by sexual interests rather than the miracle of a “new creation”.

“Slice my shnoz, but please, no digital exam!”

Sermon - blind faith

2006-10-29T11:37:00.000+02:00

Mark 10:46-52

This story forms the end bracket to a body of material that begins in Mark 8:28, in which Mark tells the story of Jesus’ journey from the north of Palestine to the south on his way to Jerusalem. It is the way to the cross. Three times Jesus predicts his suffering and three times the disciples don’t understand. Just as the story of Bartimaeus forms the end bracket so the story of the blind man of Bethsaida forms the beginning bracket. The journey of the suffering servant is bracketed by two stories of the healing of blindness.

Blindness for Mark is a symbol for failing to understand Jesus’ purpose. This is reinforced in the contrast between Jesus’ disciples and this blind beggar. The name that Bartimaeus uses to call Jesus is a testimony to the truth the disciples fail to see: “Son of David” which in Jesus’ day was a freedom chant like ‘Amandla’ was during our own freedom struggle. Bartimaeus is putting himself at risk of arrest by shouting this while Jesus disciples tell him to be quiet. Bartimaeus’ name is also symbolic. It means “son of worthiness”. The disciples at the centre of attention get it wrong, while the beggar at the periphery gets it right. The disciples have followed Jesus through Palestine without realising what is about to happen. They will desert him. But here, a blind man who has met Jesus this once, is prepared to follow to the impending cross.

Do we in the church, with our millennial tradition of theology perhaps pretend to know more about God than we do? The church has been through many a reformation in its history and each generation makes a hero of the reformer of the previous generation, while ignoring the radical in their midst.

Today we are at risk of clinging to our treasured history of homophobia while the secular state, which does not even know Jesus, leads the way to justice for gay and lesbian people. The disciples fail to understand, while the blind man on the street sees.

The disciples pretend to own Jesus, giving him advice on how to behave and protecting him from bothersome children or annoying commoners. But Bartimaeus has no time for scruples. He shouts the odds and makes a scene. He raises his allegiance in public defiance of oppressive authority and the witness of the secret police.

The proper place of a beggar was on the periphery of the crowd at the city gate begging. To lead the crowd in praise - especially such politically dangerous praise - was an affront to decency. I remember the debates of yesteryear when prophets of the church opposed Apartheid and were criticised for mixing politics and religion.

Today, our codes of decency threaten our discipleship as they have for every generation. Our disgust at swearwords renders us deaf to the discontent and anxiety in our young people’s music. Our opulence renders us blind to the increasing gap between shiny rich and smelly poor. Our comfortable habits render us immune to the shock of Jesus’ living presence. Our theology has become so consuming; we cannot see the people we disagree with.

Helen Keller once remarked, “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”

On Tuesday, I participated in a debate about the Methodist Church’s stance toward same-sex unions. I was tempted to use Keller’s phrase to label Ray and Dave as blind because of their sincere belief that homosexuality is a sin. Now I see that perhaps it equally can apply to me. Jesus calls us to love people, not theologies, positions, types, labels.

The story of Bartimaeus is the end bracket. The story that is the beginning bracket is the healing of a man at Bethsaida. It is the only story where Jesus’ healing powers seem incomplete.

Jesus rubs mud made from his spit into the man’s eyes and then asks, “Can you see anything?”

“I can see people, but they look like trees walking,” replies the man.

Like Bartimaeus let us call upon God’s mercy that we may see people as people, not as trees; that we may see people not by their labels, theologies or politics, but simply as the people God loves regardless.

Internet Sources:

William Loader
Mary W. Anderson
www.esermons.com

Certainly uncertain

2006-10-27T14:22:00.000+02:00

This article comments on Richard Dawkin’s new book – the only book of his I am likely not to read.

http://shipoffools.com/Features/2006/dawkins.html

A recent TV docie by a prominent Jewish scientist examined the fraught relationship between science and faith. The presenter made an interesting point that science and religion when practiced appropriately are both founded on the same principle: uncertainty. Fundamentalism of both science and religion is based on false certainties.

I must say, I still find myself more accepting of scientific fundamentalism than religious fundamentalism. I wonder why?

Dassie finds hawks may be doves

2006-10-26T14:32:00.000+02:00

Two weeks ago I mentioned briefly the ongoing saga of the church’s debate on dame-sex unions. My nervousness about hawks has been allayed.

Tuesday 24 October Alan Storey and I were invited to present papers to DEWCOM, the Doctrine Ethics and Worship Commission of the MCSA. This body is a think-tank that advises our church on matters of theology, ethics and church practice.

After the 2001 Conference of the MCSA, DEWCOM were tasked with publishing a discussion document for all churches on the matter of same-sex unions. DEWCOM presented a paper, which was accepted at the next Conference (2004?). DEWCOM was criticised by many for presenting a “one-sided” discussion paper. They had advocated an inclusive position based on a historical critical reading of scripture, a review of the latest scientific evidence as well as pastoral experience.

The meeting of DEWCOM on the 24th was an attempt to hear two points of view on the matter and see if a way forward could be discerned.

Ray Alistoun and Dave Morgan presented a view in opposition to the blessing of same-sex unions. I was especially surprised by Ray’s eloquence and the logic of his argument, even though I disagree fundamentally with his approach to scripture.

Alan’s “paper” was brilliant – the more so because he spoke from sketch notes on several bits of paper! Dion’s comment afterwards was succinct: “Broer, if you’d had an altar call, I would have been on my knees!”

I spoke from experience and showed how my experience had coloured my approach to scripture. I reiterated Alan’s challenge that the outcome of this meeting needed to be a commitment to remain in fellowship with one another despite our differences of opinion.

Ray and Dave responded positively to this call and I believe the way forward, while painful, will be hopeful. There was a general acknowledgement that we need to respect that each “side” approaches the Bible with integrity and sincerity. We also agreed that our being together in the church is more important than our opinions about sexuality.

This is a massive step forward as it holds out the hope that we can as a church express a single conviction that our members may have differing opinions.

I hope that this will mean in future that the church may even accommodate a divergence in practice as well as opinion so that some of us can conduct same-sex marriages. I believe that this may in fact be what DEWCOM recommend to Conference. This would be consistent with Methodist theology and the MCSA’s current stance on homosexuality.

Methodist theology holds many different forms of Christianity under one denomination. We are often accused of being un-systematic and mixed up, but it is the beauty of this denomination that so many different Christian expressions find a home here and have to work out how to live with each other. The current MCSA stance on homosexuality is that we have none (simplification) and are engaging in a conversation to establish a way forward. My argument is that until we have an opinion as the whole church we must either place a moratorium on all marriages or allow clergy to conduct marriages for anyone they choose according to conscience.

One step closer to an inclusive church…

Sermon - the price of change

2006-10-15T12:46:00.000+02:00

Read: Mark 10:17-31

Sarah says there is a comedian called Eddie Izard who says it’s easy to get a camel through the eye of needle – all you need is a heavy duty blender and lot of patience…

Sarah also points out the ways that preachers try to side-step this one, including the “ecclesiastical urban legend” of the “eye of the needle gate”. So I am conscious that I have a big responsibility to speak of good news as well as carry over Jesus’ hard words without compromise.

Yup – this is one of those texts that is real hard to preach… I keep hearing Jesus saying, “Sell the bike; sell the bike.” Eina. Jesus said it – deal with it…

“Who is rich?” is the first question that springs to mind. An income of just over R1000 a month puts you in the top 18% of the world population. I am in the top 9% which is embarrassing and it hurts to think I am like the young man in the passage today.

But wealth is more than income, it is access. Some people, who earn R1000 a month, must share that with a large family. Others can keep it for themselves. Some must spend almost all their income on rent and transport alone, get a second job to pay for survival. I think access is a more appropriate measure of wealth – access to health care, access to human rights, access to democracy, access to security, and especially access to leisure.

Yesterday, I spent the whole day with friends and family having fun. That is a privilege very few people have in the world. I admit it, I am rich…

Why do the disciples then say, “Then who can be saved?” They came from relatively poor families and had effectively sold themselves into poverty for Jesus’ cause. And anyway, the obvious answer is that their question is that the poor are saved. But perhaps the disciples recognize that it isn’t about money in the pocket as much as money in the head. Everyone wants to be wealthy. From the poorest of the poor to the wealthiest person, everyone wants more. A radical redistribution of the world’s wealth will not leave everyone equal; it will simply reboot the system. It will not be long before poverty sets in again. The disciples recognize that Jesus is targeting the desire for wealth.

The problem with wealth, as Sarah has so rightly put it, is that it orders our relationships in ways that are unhealthy, not to mention sinful. These unhealthy relationships connect us to a web which is part of the global system that creates poverty.

Take charity for instance: out of the ten people who knock on my door asking for money or food, at least one is genuine. What do I do? Normally I give something. It costs me nothing and assuages my guilt to some extent. But it changes nothing. The person is still poor, and no matter how grateful for the gift, their situation confronts my apathy. The power imbalance is still there – I have the power to give life and death. Charity is not part of God’s Kingdom.

Should I give away all that I have – sell that motorbike? Yes, but carefully. As much as giving at the door does not change the system, so will giving all my wealth to a worthy cause not change anything. It is the system that must change. Part of that is the idea that I as an individual can change the system single handedly…

Jesus and his disciples lived in community, sharing everything with each other, largely supported by wealthy, independent women.

Notice that there is a journey of faith played out subtly in the characters of today’s story.

The young man has already worked hard at being good, only to be told that even Jesus is not good. That sucks. You slave away your whole life and realize the oke you’re trying to copy has been a bad boy. And Jesus was bad – healing on the Sabbath, chasing people out of church, getting people drunk at parties, fraternizing with prostitutes…

So, the young man has a revelation – it is not about being good. That is not to say, that you should be bad – unless you are going to be Jesus-bad. But being good doesn’t cure this young man of his deep spiritual longing for … for what?

Jesus looks at him and loves him. Wow. Before the man has answered, before he jumps through any more hoops – he is loved. This is enough for some people. Be good and know that God loves you. But if you long for more, then Jesus says sell all you have and follow him.

The young man can’t do this, but Peter is worried and says, “Look, we have left everything and followed you.” You can almost hear him wondering about that secret stash of cash back home in the pantry. Peter is wondering whether he has made the cut.

And Jesus’ answer to Peter begins the same – love. “Look, Peter, you have given up much and you have in turn received so much. See your brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers and children gained in this community because of your sacrificial service.” Jesus loves Peter and points to the gains he has. But there is more, “You will also receive persecution because of this choice of yours. You will suffer.” It is by no means easy.

I can imagine Peter saying, “Yes I get that – I’ll see about the persecution thing – but I get the new family thing. But have I made the cut?”

And then Jesus says something strange, “The first will be last and the last shall be first.” This is something you’d think he’d say to the rich young man, not to Peter. Unless it is Jesus being Buddhist again, constantly shifting the goal posts.

At the end of the day, there is nothing one can do to gain access to the Kingdom. Access describes wealth in the world, but access to the Kingdom cannot be attained by any amount of noble intention or action. The Kingdom constantly slips through our fingers like a bar of soap. Just when we think we have it – like the young man, or like Peter – it evades our definition, our ownership.

Eventually, when we give up trying to be good people, when we give up trying to be right people, when we cease in our desperate striving, we realize the Kingdom has been hear all along. When we fail, when we give up, we arrive. We are surrounded by brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, children and lands. We belong already.

“For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible” says Jesus.

So, if you want to be good and know that you are loved then come to church, do the right thing – Jesus loves you. If that doesn’t satisfy, know that there is even more, salvation is secure. Peter, you belong. Your place is assured. God has forgiven you.

You can do all this and still not be satisfied. You can sell all your goods and realize that even that does not bring peace. None of this has anything to do with knowing Jesus. If you want to know Jesus; if you are interested in following him then take the next step. It will hurt, you will suffer, but it will never be boring. Bind yourself to Jesus’ friends, using your combined resources to change the world by living out in your relationships with each other the kind of Kingdom stuff Jesus talks about.

Start small:

Maybe I won’t sell my motorbike, or maybe I will, but I will definitely use it to help others enjoy the leisure I get from it.

And the woman who helps clean my house for a little more than a R1000 a month. Maybe I can help her get the education which could see her owning her own business one day.

And the next time someone who needs my help comes to the door, I’ll offer to go home with them and see where they live. In all likelihood the offer will be refused. But one day it will be accepted and I will need the grace to accept hospitality from someone I once saw as poor. Who knows where that will take us…

You never know, maybe we’ll change the world.

Dassie checking for hawks

2006-10-13T10:03:00.000+02:00

Monday I put in a last minute submission to the Portfolio Committee on the Civil Union Bill. Only Die Burger was present to hear it so they ran a story on the submission. If you can read Afrikaans, you can read it here. Yesterday Raport, another Afrikaans newspaper, picked up on the story and conducted an interview. I'll post a link in due course. I'm a little nervous about this given missive from on high recently about Methodist Clergy not misrepresenting the MCSA. I have been at pains to point out to people that I speak in my personal capacity. I wonder if Tutu has this problem?

Sermon - marriage

2006-10-08T14:36:00.000+02:00

Add in paper for motorbike:

For sale: 2006 Suzuki 1000. This bike is perfect! It has 1000 miles and has had its 500-mile dealer service. (Expensive) It's been adult ridden, all wheels have always been on the ground. I use it as a cruiser/ commuter. I'm selling it because it was purchased without proper consent of a loving wife. Apparently "Do whatever the HELL you want" Doesn't mean what I thought.

Read Mark 10:2-9
Once more the lectionary provides a fitting reflection for God’s people as we debate with each other the proposed Civil Union Bill. Tomorrow Parliamentary representatives will be visiting Woodstock Town Hall to garner community responses to the Civil Union Bill. The debate so far, both in the political and ecclesiastical spheres, has centred on the definition of “marriage” so it is fitting that we reflect on Jesus’ theology of marriage.

As always, when considering how Jesus speaks to us in the present we need to understand the original context of his teaching lest we do him the disservice of mistranslating his words into our context, so different from his own.

I found Sarah’s reflection on the background succinct. You may want to visit and see the points that she draws out from Jesus’ words.

We can see how different those times are from our own from even a cursory reading of the text. The Pharisees ask Jesus if it is permissible for a man to issue a certificate of divorce. They do not ask if a woman can do so.

There were two, not entirely mutually exclusive, theologies on marriage at the time of Jesus. The first saw marriage as a contractual arrangement between father and husband, whereby the daughter is transferred from father to husband by mutual agreement. The wife is absent from this agreement. A woman did not issue a certificate of divorce. Her father might do so, but not her, even in the case of infidelity on the husband’s part. Should a woman find herself divorced she could appeal to her father for ongoing support but she was not guaranteed this support. She forfeited her rights as a daughter once she got married. She forfeited her rights (such as they were) as a wife once she got divorced. A divorced woman without the support of her father often had to resort to prostitution as the sole means of making ends meet since the likelihood of re-marriage were poor to nil – divorced women were “used goods”. It is for this reason particularly that we see Jesus taking up the cause of prostitutes. They were above all else, the victims of a terribly brutal system.

A second view of marriage placed marriage as cornerstone of national identity. For a small nation with curious customs and beset by oppression and prejudice, the preservation of national identity was paramount. Securing and growing the next generation was considered a command of God: “go and multiply” says the Priestly story of Creation in Genesis 1, written during Israel’s exile in Babylon where they suffered a particularly harsh regime. If a marriage did not produce children, it was a worthless union – the woman carrying the blame for its infertility. Such a marriage was as good as dead by society’s standards and so the husband was obliged to seek another wife.

The Pharisees ask their question because they know that the Mosaic command was a compromise. The issuing of a divorce certificate was a practice that evolved as a result of the imperative to procreate. Everyone knew that the original design of God was something lifelong. Jesus takes to idealistic position and criticises his brother Pharisees for their compromise with expediency.

Jesus returns to the creation stories and quotes from both versions to justify a hard line on marriage. It is as important to note what Jesus leaves out as it is to see what he incorporates as his foundational texts for a theology on marriage.

He quotes Genesis 1:27 firstly. Both male and female are created in the image of God. The implications are obvious – women should enjoy the same rights and privileges afforded to men in marriage. Anything less, is an affront to the image of God. Furthermore, the image of God is two unique individuals, created as equal but separate entities. It is not “marriage” that is the image of God, but the individuals who make a marriage – or who are not married for that matter. Marriage is not the cornerstone of society. A fully alive human person is – male and female. Jesus confronts his society’s obsession with marriage and calls his followers to regard all people as equally valuable whether married or single, divorced or widowed, male or female.

Then Jesus quotes Genesis 2:24. But he leaves out Genesis 1:28, which more traditionally would have been quoted in any theology of marriage. In so doing Jesus chooses to use the second creation story as the basis of his theology and specifically rejects the first.

The first story has God create the humanity as the pinnacle of creation. Humanity is created at the end but is given the same command as all the other creatures: “Be fruitful and multiply.” The first story pictures humans as special but still very much animals – multiplying like the rest of creation.

The second story focuses far more on humanity with Adam being created as God’s companion. For some reason (perhaps because God makes poor espresso) Adam wants a companion too (perhaps God is too busy making the universe). So God creates Eve as a companion for Adam.

Jesus chooses the idea of companionship as the foundational idea of marriage. He specifically rejects the idea of procreation as the basis for marriage. He also speaks against the notion that the man is the most important part of a marriage.

Then Jesus goes on to say, “Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” Such companionship is lifelong and not to be treated lightly.

Jesus speaks against the prejudicial notions of marriage in his own time, but also against the obsession with romance that characterises our own time. Lifelong mutual companionship cannot be based on fleeting, fickle romance; otherwise the next pretty face may cause one’s commitment to waver. While the romance may help in the beginning it is no long term foundation.

I think of comments I hear from young people these days, which remind me of the problems Jesus addresses.

“My parents think John is not intellectually my equal, that he is not up to our standard.” This smacks of marriage seen as a contractual arrangement to secure the status quo – to preserve status and economic class. Not unlike the contracts of Jesus time.

“Isn’t sad that they haven’t had children yet.”
Sometimes couples choose not to have children. Sometimes they do. One wonders if greater attention needs to be paid to the issue before marriage – questions of fertility and children resolved before making a lifelong commitment.

“She would be a lot happier if she could just find a husband.”
No doubt this is true in some cases, but singleness is not a curse and some people choose it deliberately, preferring to not make lifelong commitments.

“But Mom, I love her!”
Are we teaching our children what love really is? It seems to me most young people’s (and adults for that matter) idea of love is formed by romantic comedies. A better comparison for love in marriage would be the convent or monastery – that is the commitment not the total celibacy!

And then there is the question of gender. If Jesus’ theology of marriage is based principly on the idea of lifelong companionship, why does such companionship have to be gendered? Is not possible that such a covenantal union could be exercised by same sex couples?

Jesus challenged the definition of marriage in his day, and I believe he challenges our definitions today.

Hell 4

2006-10-08T08:11:00.000+02:00

Damnation! Scolded again… er… scalded that is. Slabbie sent me veritable proof that Hell exists…

It’s in Michigan, USA.

Hell was first settled in 1838 by George Reeves and his family. George had a wife and 7 daughters – no reason to call it Hell yet… George built a mill and a general store on the banks of a river that is now known as Hell Creek. The mill would grind the local farmers grain into flour; George also ran a whiskey still, so a lot of times the first 7-10 bushels of grain became moonshine.

In turn, horses would come home without riders, wagons without drivers….someone would say to the wife, where is your husband? She'd shrug her shoulders, throw up her arms and exclaim, 'Ahh, he's gone to Hell!'

In 1841 when the State of Michigan came by, and asked George what he wanted to name his town, he replied, 'Call it Hell for all I care, everyone else does.' So the official date of becoming Hell was October 13, 1841.

Word Cancer

2006-10-05T22:06:00.000+02:00

Recently some of my buddies in the kerk have been playing with word verification meanings with hilarious results. I want to start a catalogue of funny spell check Freudian slips like this one:

My word: Parastatal
Spell check suggestion: prostate

A friend quipped: makes sense… when they reach a certain age, cancer is more likely.

Send your entry to gregandrews@shade.org.za

Hell 3

2006-10-02T10:21:00.000+02:00

I have been duly chastised. Hell is a real place. Click here - if you dare - to visit.

Sermon: loskop

2006-10-01T12:36:00.000+02:00

Read Mark 9:42-50

Whenever I read this text I imagine a congregation of torsos and heads lolling around on the pews. It is a ridiculous exaggeration - typical of Jesus style - to suggest that we lop off body parts that cause us to sin. Gives new meaning to the word "loskop" in Afrikaans.

We do well to remember that Jesus is using exaggeration, much as he does in his parables and other teachings. Obviously, sin does not reside in my hands and feet or eyes, but in my mind.

Jesus refers to the “little ones” and Sarah reminds us that this meant more than just children. It referred to anyone vulnerable, whether because of poverty, injustice or some other circumstance.

It is interesting, though, that Jesus warns about causing the little ones to stumble in the context of feet, hands and eyes. These three words are often used in ancient Hebrew as euphemisms for sex. For instance, Ruth slept at Boaz’s feet on the threshing floor…

It may be that Jesus is dealing here with sexual abuse, exhorting in the strongest possible language that his followers deal with abuse unequivocally in their midst. Read William Loader’s comments on this.

We do well then to remember again that Jesus is exaggerating! I think of the numerous calls that have been made to have rapists and child abusers castrated. Such mutilation does not work. Rape is not about sex; it is about power and domination. Similarly, sexual abuse is not about sex; it is about inappropriate intimacy. Taking Jesus literally would be reading too much into Jesus’ hyperbole and pragmatically useless.

But there is a theological reason why Jesus words should be taken as figurative not literal. Look at who is speaking them. This is the man who at the end of the story is mutilated for the world’s sin. The man who never sinned is mutilated because of other people’s sinfulness. Jesus is doing more than exaggerating: he is being ironic.

At the moment of his crucifixion we hear Jesus grant forgiveness to those who killed him. We believe that forgiveness is available for everyone because we are all involved in Jesus’ death by virtue of belonging to a society that creates the dynamics that killed him.

Can we say that forgiveness is offered to the perpetrators of abuse? Surely we are bound to say so. How can we not? The abuser was once abused. Will God give the punishment the abuser deserves or the compassion the abused abuser needs?

My mom-in-law, Jeanne, tells of an incident that happened early in her career as a social worker. She was sitting with a child who had been abused by her father. None of Jeanne’s therapeutic skills could get this child to talk about her trauma and begin the journey to healing. They were sitting in a room - shortly after the girl had been brought in by police - with a view of the rest of the police station. Her father was brought in for questioning. One of the policemen involved who had heard the little girl’s story, saw the father being brought in and the little girl’s expression of fear. The officer got up and walked over to the father and decked him with a full blow to the face. To Jeanne’s surprise the little girl immediately responded to the policeman and began to tell him her story.

That little girl needed justice; needed an adult to stand up for her against the evil that she had suffered. I can’t say that what the cop did was right but, somehow, I can’t say it was wrong…

Children in South Africa suffer the triple abuse of the abuse itself, society’s silence about abuse and justice delayed which is justice denied. Without justice, how are children to trust society? Without talking about these things, how are children to journey to wholeness? It is no wonder that so many abused children become abusers.

I recently met a man who introduced himself as a child abuser. I had a hard time regaining the conversation after that. Where do you go from there? I wanted to excuse myself. He was abused as a child and grew into an adult who abused. He was arrested and pled guilty. He was imprisoned but this never helped. He still needs sex with children. He hates himself and has tried to commit suicide several times. Therapy has helped a little but the only thing that stops him abusing again is his introducing himself to everyone as an abuser. Some people shun him; a few accept him with caution. I was afraid of him.

This man needs compassion but who will give it?

Jesus asks us to do two contradictory things at the same time. He asks us to seek justice for those who are wronged, to confront evil wherever we encounter it. Jesus also asks us to extend compassion to those who perpetrate evil. Often the one who must suffer justice and needs compassion is one and the same person.

We cannot hope that our society will be able to offer justice to children as well as therapeutic compassion to perpetrators of abuse unless we completely revise out language. Our language does not enable us to embrace and confront at the same time. Our justice system is based on the premise that the individual bares the full responsibility for their actions, even when the roots of evil are more complicated and extend beyond the individual.

I have found Nonviolent Communication to be the best example of a language that might offer us the opportunity to do that. I recommend it to your conscience for your sake, but more importantly, for our society’s sake.

I think Jesus' last line in this reading is interesting: "Be salty people and be at peace with one another." I have always thought of salt as abrasive. I think of salt on open wounds. Jesus makes the clear link between salty people and peace. Interesting...

The future of evolution

2006-09-22T11:38:00.000+02:00

Since my posts recently have toyed with the skirts of evolution, here is something a lot much beterer and funierer on the subject of "Breeding".

"President Katie caught napping"

2006-09-21T19:28:00.000+02:00

Statement from the Honourable President Katherine Jeanne Andrews:

Rumours that I have been reneging on my responsibilities are to be seen as spurious by those loyal constituents who would like to remain bodily intact. The photo published in certain unscrupulous publications was taken out of context. The Minister of Sport and Recreation arranged a day’s outing in the mountains and I can be seen here enjoying the fresh air. Any further comment on this issue will be entertained by the Minister of Security and National Director of the Secret Police.

Creed: the earth is a globe...

2006-09-21T15:05:00.000+02:00

Barry asked a good question: “Do you ever get a little threatened by the ideas of science and psychology that threaten to reduce our long-held Christian beliefs into fragments of a quaint historical period?”

I guess that’s where I started. It is the crux of my struggle – to reconcile apparently alienated ways of thinking. But this crux is a creation of a debate between alienated positions, which are neither representative of their respective fields not appropriate for me to inherit in my thinking.

Science has its fundamentalists. Richard Dawkins being one of the more vocal examples from Evolutionary Biology. A debate between fundamentalists in science and fundamentalists in Christianity is never going to be a helpful debate. While I respect Dawkins immensely, I think he is just plain wrong when it comes to his opinions about religion (although not all his opinions…). Similarly, I think most Christian fundamentalists have misrepresented the faith I hold dear. Between these two extremes is a host of view points that actually have a great deal in common, or at least reason to cooperate.

The supposed pitched battle between science and religion is a false idea based on false conceptions about both science and religion. I consider myself religious, but there are many religious people who would call me an atheist. The science most people have in mind is the science of high school, which is all about hard facts and a categorical world-view. Science in fact is quite tentative and every year new revisions are making once accepted world-views relative.

It is worth bearing in mind that science and faith in the western world have grown up together. Seldom have they behaved as separately as they have in the last century and the consequences of that separation are moot: nuclear bombs and Pat Robertson. Prior to this unfortunate separation some of the most important scientific discoveries were made by church people. And still today, some of the most important religious movements have been bolstered and led by scientists.

I no longer fear science. I have found science makes me wonder like nothing else. It was an atheist scientist who introduced me to the idea of wonder (the “numinous” – Carl Sagan) – an idea I think is integral to worship.

I think the idea that religion can be localised in a part of the brain should give us cause to rejoice that we are about to figure out what makes for good religious experience. The church should be supporting studies that are helping scientists understand how religion works – good and bad. These studies do not erode religious claims unless those claims are inappropriate.

When Kopernik (Copernicus) proposed his solar system model of the universe, he did not lose his faith. When Galileo used this idea to challenge the church he did not lose his faith. And many faithful people found these ideas refreshing, even if the hierarchy were threatened. And today we accept this view of the universe without a moments hesitation.

Science may cause us to revise our language, but it can never undermine faith. This conversation was reported by Carl Sagan after he met with the Dalai Lama.

SAGAN: What would you do if we came up with convincing proof that Buddhism was wrong?
DL: If science found a serious error in Tibetan Buddhism, of course we would change Tibetan Buddhism.
SAGAN: Suppose it was something basic? Suppose, for instance, it was reincarnation?
DL: If science can disprove reincarnation, Tibetan Buddhism would abandon reincarnation. (with a twinkle in his eye) But it's going to be very hard to disprove reincarnation.

Jesus Instinct?

2006-09-20T15:17:00.000+02:00

William James wrote a seminal work on psychology, Principles of Psychology, a generation after Darwin’s legendary Origin of the Species. James attempted to explain human nature as a product of our evolutionary history.

Some commentators see humans as unique amongst the animals because we appear to be ruled by our reason, not instinct. James disagreed. For James the distinctiveness of humans was to be ascribed to having more instincts not less. An instinct is a “software programme” that has been developed by natural selection in a species to cope with a particular reality. Humans have the finest and most complex system of instincts, which makes our decisions more subtle and dextrous.

Evolutionary Psychologists refer to this problem as “instinct blindness”. Our instincts work so well for us, so effortlessly, that it is difficult to imagine that things could work any other way.

Several studies are drawing attention to the fact that much of religious experience is located quite precisely in certain parts of the brain and organised around certain chemical reactions. It is also becoming clear that certain types of people are prone to religious experience – have an aptitude for it. We have a religious instinct – some more than others.

This is also true of social change, which has its origin in the individual revolutionary’s psychology. Just as religion is a corporate, outward expression of an internal psychology, so social change begins with some psychological process. Feedback and “cross-pollination” enhances or dampens the experience, changing it and developing it.

Religion and social change are my bread and butter. The question I am living with at the moment is how an evolutionary psychological point of view affects me as an instructor of religion. Fascinating!

Trading on the Brand

2006-09-19T15:18:00.000+02:00

My church, Methodist Church of Southern Africa, is debating whether or not to accept same-sex unions. Currently the MCSA has no position except a rather vague bit about discouraging homosexual people from “practicing”. A group of us recently put together a submission to Parliament calling for a revision of the Marriage Act so that same-sex unions can enjoy the same rights as married couples. We were reprimanded for “misrepresenting the MCSA brand”, this despite the fact that we specifically said that we do not represent the MCSA. We do feel that we are Methodist and this needs to be recognised in the context of the overwhelmingly bigoted Christian response to same-sex unions that has so far been hogging the limelight. Anyway, this is Gus’ response to the reprimand…

Maybe we should change the document to read "Christian Clergy, Theologians and Christians" instead of "Methodist...” I'm not sure if I want to be too closely associated with "the MCSA brand."

Sometimes I am ashamed to tell my gay friends that I am a Christian (not that I have many, I guess its 'cos I'm a Christian). I kinda hoped that when I said I was a Methodist I/they would feel a bit better. I hoped I would be able to, as they say: "Trade on the MCSA brand." But I don't think I will.

Minister: "I'm a gay friendly Methodist!"
Gay Person: "What!? You mean some are not?"
M: "Ja man, sorry, we're still trying to figure out whether you're our target market. It's about branding you see - we're mostly aimed at LSM 1-4, we do 5 and up, but that’s just to get some cash in the coffers. (We're not so bad at getting money out of 1-4 though, but don't let them know that, liberation is also our brand... some might say the ANC at prayer.) But we have to work with our market, and 1 to 4 is mostly conservative - they don't really like gays."
G: "OK, I understand, let us know when we make the brand... we'll just hang about here at the door in case you let us in one day."

Yeah right!

If we are actually so into branding then surely it would be a good thing to expand our target market a bit? Maybe we need to keep an eye on the prophets? Profits? Prophets? Profits?

"Do you think Gogo is a good brand? She's dependable, loving, caring, wise - she's nice... she's our brand - LSM 1-4 I guess, Radio Ads will bring her in. But I don't think we can really sell her - we need beautiful, sexy, sassy, wealthy!!! Get ReBorn! You can be young hot and healthy Gogo - Oprah's coming to give you a makeover. See how those jeans make your bum look small - like a nice white girl."

Trading on the brand - my ass.

No Gogos were harmed during the writing of this nonsense.

Dassie

2006-09-18T13:11:00.000+02:00

Some people have asked what's a dassie (pronounced "dussee"). This is a family of dassies in Nambia - thanks to Jenny for the photo. Those of you who know me, may be able to see the resemblance.

Here is a good wiki article on them. I have always liked them cos they seem like fierce yet fun loving animals; reclusive yet social. Their habitat is rocky - mountain or seaside - my favourite places.

Yes, they may be the closest living relative of the elephant. Ancient fossils indicate that these diminutive modern versions are much smaller than their giant ancestors. That's another reason I like em - great family connections.

Who do you say I am?

2006-09-17T12:19:00.000+02:00

Mark 8:27-38

A Sarah-inspired sermon.

There is an ad on TV at the moment in which some pretentious git comes hurrying up to the check-in counter at the airport demanding immediate service. The staff are a little slow as there seems to be some problem with the ticket so he get’s huffy, “Do you know who I am?” The woman who is helping him takes a moment to calm herself. She says to him, “Oh, I didn’t realise!” and picks up the public address intercom, to the satisfaction of her blustery client. She calls the airport to attention and then informs everyone, “There is a man here who does not know who he is. If there is someone who can help him, please report to the information desk.”

I have heard on many occasions someone in Sunday School referring to Jesus’ parents as Mary and Joseph Christ. It is not such a surprising mistake. I learned this week that there was a Roman historian who confused the Greek word Christos (which means Christ) for the common slave name Chrestos. He spoke of the troublesome “tribe” of chrestianoi led by the slave Chrestos.

It is interesting that today we are so certain of what Christ means and assume that this word was easily understood even in Jesus’ day. In the NRSV that I read from today we read it translated as “Messiah”. The KJV translates the word “Christ”. Some versions try to stick to the original meaning of the word and translate it as “anointed one”. This is in fact what “messiah” means: anointed one.

I learnt this week Peter’s saying this to Jesus, was not as categorical as it sounds. In fact, it is very difficult to know what Peter actually meant when he said it. Anointed doesn’t really mean much except that someone has been chosen for something by virtue of the ceremony of soaking their head in oil or water. It could refer to just about anyone. What one needs to know is: anointed by whom? Peter does not say - perhaps Peter does not know.

There were many people in Jesus’ time who looked forward to the arrival of a messiah. But, it is apparently misleading to think that the Jewish people of Jesus’ day longed for some God-sent, spiritual superman who would fulfil their dreams and start a new creation. In fact, most were waiting for someone who would reinstate the monarchic line of David. Others hoped for a reformer in the Temple hierarchy. Then there were prophets who were also seen as anointed and some people longed for a prophet just as our text today suggests.

We tend to think that Jesus asked, “Who do you say I am?” because he was testing his disciples. To us “Christ” is the right answer. So why would Jesus then tell his friends to shut up about it? His response is puzzling. We are not the only generation of Christians who find it puzzling. Even Matthew, written a short time after Mark, adds a little to Jesus response so that it sounds as if Jesus is saying, “Quite right, well done, but this is going to be our little secret?”

But Mark is the plain speaker of our gospels and there is no mistaking Jesus’ abrupt tone here. It is almost a reprimand. It almost seems to throw Jesus into a bad mood for a little while later he calls Peter “Satan”!

Bruce Malina in his book The New Testament World explains why Jesus asks this question. He points out that people’s identity in the cultures of the Mediterranean was not based on an individualised, internal and personal construction like we have in the Western world today. Rather people’s identity was what anthropologists call “dyadic personality”. This means that a person’s identity was built from what other people said about them – something akin to the African idea of a “person is a person through other people.” So when Jesus asks, “Who am I?” he is not testing his friends, but is collecting information about himself so he can know who he is.

Now we know that people confused Jesus with a militant revolutionary or even a temple reformer. It is one of the reasons people deserted him in the end when it was clear he wasn’t going to usher in a new Kingdom. And we also know that this was despite Jesus’ best efforts to teach people about what he is. We read over and over again his frustration with people’s confusion about who he is. So when Peter calls Jesus “The Christ”, it may be that Jesus’ reply is actually telling Peter he is just plain wrong.

All through Mark, we hear Jesus telling people to be quiet about what he has done for them, especially the miracles he performed which would have fed the idea that he was some kind of prophet or spiritual superman. Jesus is not trying to protect his secret long enough to postpone a confrontation with the authorities so that he can make an entrance in Jerusalem. He is trying to control perceptions about himself, trying to steer people away from the misleading idea that he is a revolutionary, a temple reformer, a reincarnated prophet or even God’s special strongman.

Jesus goes on to speak of carrying the cross. Of suffering for the cause he has taken on. It is a distasteful idea: the anointed crucified. Remember crucifixion was meted out on slaves and traitors. It was a demeaning as well as agonising death.

Jesus’ whole cause is nothing less than the inversion of every human institution. He does not want to be seen as a revolutionary, because it is both establishment and revolution that he seeks to subvert. He does not want to be seen as a reformer of the temple, because the entire temple idea must be undercut. He does not want to be seen as a prophet, because he is undermining the very notion of specially spirited authority. Jesus is unique and incomparable. He upsets every stereotype and surprises anyone who thinks they have him pigeon-holed.

Every identity, every institution, every assumption, every prejudice, every edifice is in danger from this man. He is a truly disturbing presence.

The revolution of one age becomes the establishment of the next. The reformer of one generation is the oligarch of the next. Jesus is not interested in recycling. He wants a genuine revisioning of humanity. Jesus wants to get to the bottom of things and there he finds in every temple basement, in every government cellar, in every heart’s secret the truth that we are desperately afraid to be known and loved. Our civilisation is our protection from actually dealing with one another; knowing and loving one another. Our levels of sophistication reflect only the lengths to which we will go to avoid having to connect. “For what will it profit you to gain the whole world and forfeit your life?” Jesus asks.

The eccentric or maverick that stands apart from traditional institutions is regarded with pity or outrage, yet such people are often the most precious. Jesus was such a person. He stands clear of human institutions while still being eminently human. So special is he, he seems almost to transcend history itself. Yet Jesus is the quintessential lover. And this strange man asks us to divest ourselves of our pretensions, to live more honest lives, unafraid of being our genuine, strange selves.

No wonder he rebels against any label that puts on him the expectations of others. He owns his own identity and yet that identity he freely shares with anyone who would open themselves up to the power of compassion.

“Who do you say I am?”

God is a good idea

2006-09-15T15:05:00.000+02:00

Murray asked a good question after my post on Resurrection. Actually a few good questions.

Murray: “Were the stories of Jesus re-appearance to the disciples then just stories?”

I would say they are legends but not "just stories".

I can imagine that the stories developed from initial comments made by the first disciples: “I was sweating it out upstairs, wondering when the knock on the door would herald my own crucifixion, when I had this epiphany: Jesus said, ‘Peace be with you’ and I felt the Spirit move me to courage!” Through retelling and embellishment these comments became the stories we have now.

Alternatively, the writers of the gospels may have deliberately embellished what they knew and used stylistic idiom to indicate that the story fits into the legend genre. We may not be able to appreciate this style from our modern perspective and so take the stories as historical fact.

But I don’t think they were “just stories”. They are powerful, regardless of their historical content. I wouldn’t say that Dead Poet’s Society was “just a story”. It affected me deeply and challenged me. Similarly, I am sure that Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is a far cry from the original story in the Bible - let alone whether the original can be called history - but both remain a single powerful story for me.

Murray: “Were they further parables to show ideas and values that Jesus taught, before He died? And if the answer is 'yes', then does that change how we understand the concept of the Trinity?”

I think legend is a specific genre distinct from parable, but I do think that part of the reason for presenting the story as legend would be to highlight Jesus’ teaching. It was also to make Jesus’ character larger than mortal life. One of the clear aims of the legend genre is to put a personality on a pedestal. In the case of Jesus this makes thematic literary sense because of the Incarnational message of Jesus: God becomes human so that people can become God.

Viewing the stories of Jesus’ resurrection appearances as legend does change one’s conception of the Trinity. In fact, it actually worked the other way around for me. I changed my ideas about God and that helped me make sense of the questions I had about the stories of the Resurrection.

And I guess that is were the rub comes. I now cross my Rubicon (drum roll please, warm up the heretic stake…):

I believe God is a Myth. It is very, very important that people read that statement within the context of what follows…

When I use the word “Myth” I do not mean “invalid” or “untrue”. I am saying that it is an idea that has power in my life, but is not objectively verifiable. Let me explain

I have long struggled to reconcile two ways of understanding the world that are both incredibly important to me and, while these worldviews are often pitched against each other, they were born in the same impulse: the desire to understand our world and our place in it.

I value both a theological and a scientific view of the world and think both are powerful means by which humanity can make sense - and a future - out of the mess we are in now. I also believe that one without the other is asking for trouble. But it has been a long and painful journey trying to work out in my head how I live with both consistently. Most of the time I have been resigned to a kind of schizophrenic ping-pong, picking and choosing between the two – but that makes me feel like a selective fundamentalist.

The crux of the matter is that science will never be able to prove that God exists or doesn’t exist. It is simply beyond the ability of the scientific method. But science weighs in heavily on the side of “does not”. Religious experience can be shown as a function of chemistry in a particular part of the brain. Theological insight (revelation) can be seen as cultural constructs common to a range of groups both near and far from each other. The universe demonstrates no evidence of design; in fact what one sees is very messy and clumsy. So the tentative, if sometimes forceful, opinion of science is that God, for all practical purposes, does not exist.

I agree: God is not objectively verifiable. There is no evidence that God exists.

However, I still think believing in God has merit. Whatever the existence of God actually means, God is a good idea (Crusades and Jihad not-with-standing).

I see science and theology as two ways of knowing, one based on objectively verifiable information we receive through rigorous testing and re-testing of our world. This is science. It helps us make sure that what we see, actually exists in such a way that we can accurately predict what will happen tomorrow. The other is theology: a way of knowing that tries to grasp at reasons and meaning that science cannot explain; indeed, to extract from apparent chaos, some semblance of sensibility.

Within the scientific framework it is not a useful question to ask, “Does God exist?” It would be like asking “Does love exist?” I can identify the hormones, observe the behaviour and write it off as just so much chemical interaction and social instinct. But no scientist worth their salt would propose such a thing for a scientist is still human and capable of love. There is a magic – a mystery – beyond the data that is more than the sum of its parts. In fact, most good science would add to the wonder of love, by demonstrating its intricate complexities at the chemical and social level. It is theology’s task (with the other “art” disciplines) to help humanity become more than the sum or its parts.

I find a “eureka” experience when turning to a more appropriate question of the God-stuff: “How do humans experience God?” Science, in all its disciplines comes up with some marvellous gems when asking that question.

I can imagine that some will say that “God is a good idea” is not the same as saying “I believe in God” Semantically, I agree, but essentially, what’s the difference?

The person who says “I believe in God” has a concept in mind, one that every good theologian will admit is a dim shadow of God. God is in the end unknowable because finite human minds cannot grasp an infinite God. The concept in the believer’s mind is an idea. It is a powerful idea because it demands the allegiance of the believer. But it is not an unchangeable idea. Of course, how that image, or concept, of God plays out in the person’s behaviour will help determine whether that particular idea of God is “good” or not, but let us assume that it is good. Essentially the believer has an idea in their head about God, which is good; i.e. “God is a good idea.”

Someone can reply: “But I believe that God is objectively verifiable.” Apart from the fact that this is an impossible task, it is still a statement born of an idea. Just saying it, doesn’t make it so.

An ultra-Darwinist might interject: “But believing in God is patently childish!” To which I would reply, “Tell that to the people whose faith kept them strong in the face of death as they fought for freedom.”

I believe in God, because God is a good idea.

Murray: “I wholly agree with the idea, I just can't seem to fit it together with the Doctrine that is held as truth.”

By now, you are probably keenly aware that I may well be playing outside Doctrine – whatever that may be. I don’t mean to be flippant - I value the Christian tradition. That tradition has given rise to both science and modern theology. Both have delivered scarcely believable advances in our understanding of ourselves and our world. Both have enlarged our awe of God, but both have caused us to question God’s nature and even existence. So, I may be seen as a heretic, but I prefer to think of all this as honest wrestling. You be the judge…

Who is the enemy? by Omar Al-Rikabi

2006-09-15T13:05:00.000+02:00

The following piece came to me via sojomail. It's worth subscribing to if you haven't already done so.

I have been on the road a lot in the last three months, taking different road-trips to New Orleans, New York City, Nashville, and Dallas. Constantly in the shadow of the endless line of 18-wheelers, I noticed that one particular trucking company had this sign posted on most of their trucks:

Support our troops whenever we go!No aid or comfort to the enemy!
No way!

So who is the enemy?

Last summer my older cousin Ali was able to come in from Ohio to be at our wedding. I think it was really good for my dad to have someone from back home who was able to be there, and he filled in as my grandmother's escort, sitting with her on the front row.

Ali was forced to serve in the Iraqi Army in the first Gulf War. Other cousins were also conscripted, stationed on the front lines and in Kuwait City. Some of them were rounded up in the mass-surrenders after the ground war began, and they all made it home. But Ali had a different story. He was a field surgeon on the front lines with the Republican Guard. Sadaam thought that if he placed the medical units close enough to the rest of the soldiers then the Americans wouldn't bomb and shell them. He was wrong.

Somehow the Iraqis knew when the American ground troops would be coming over the dunes, and so they were given a five-day pass to go home to Baghdad and say their goodbyes. Ali knew it would be a meat-grinder, and he knew that under Sadaam desertion meant death and trouble for your family. So while he was in Baghdad he had another surgeon friend take out his perfectly good appendix. While he was in the hospital, his entire unit was annihilated.

Around that same time a Marine friend of mine named Nelson had been part of an artillery outfit that was shelling Iraqi positions inside Kuwait. Suddenly an Iraqi artillery shell slammed into the hood of the truck Nelson was standing next to, but it was a dud and didn't go off. He lived to come home and tell me that story.

Also at our wedding, only four rows back from Ali, was my friend Joe, who is an Army Ranger veteran. On the other side of the isle from Ali was one of my two mothers-in-law, whose stepbrother was part of the Army forces that moved through the same area of Kuwait where Ali had been. On another pew was my friend Johanna, whose husband has served in Afghanistan and is now training for Special Forces duty in the Middle East.
I could go on, but you get the idea. The best phrase came from a taxi driver in Cairo, right after the invasion of Iraq three years ago, who upon finding out that my brother was half Iraqi and half American said, "Ahhh ... is funny. Your country is attacking your country."
I have often become frustrated when I have heard people in my church make statements like, "Remember who we're fighting here," before they lead prayers for our military victory. A professor here at Asbury once said that the only two choices we have is to either "convert them or keep them from hurting us."
Well ... first of all you can't fight and win a "war on terror." Terrorism is a method, not a country or ideology. I once heard it said that fighting a war on terror is like having the flu and declaring a war on sneezing: you're only attacking the symptoms. As long as there have been people, there has been terrorism.

But what frightens me is the mindset in this country, and in the church, that seems to think terrorism was born and raised in the Middle East, and if we can take out the Muslim Arabs then the world will be a safer place. Put this idea up against the idea in large segments of the Arab world that America has, in a sense, created terror herself with her policies toward the Middle East. So the cycle continues, and we have "become a monster to defeat a monster."

So who is the enemy? I believe that on this side of the cross, according to the scriptures, that "we are not fighting against people made of flesh and blood, but against the evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against those mighty powers of darkness who rule this world, and against wicked spirits in the heavenly realms" (Ephesians 6:12)

If you track through the whole story of scripture, you see that while God may have fought battles on Israel's behalf in the Old Testament, the trajectory was always towards to the cross, which redeemed God's intention for creation. Jesus set for us an example of living and witnessing that intention through loving, serving, and forgiving our enemies. The way of Christ was not to kill and destroy those who had abused and killed him.

Imagine what would have happened if the entire mass community of Christians who prayed so fervently for our troops to "defeat the enemy" would have instead prayed against the real Enemy and for peace between humanity.

So who is the enemy? We must first remember that the enemies of America are not the enemies of God. I have Iraqi Army veteran family and U.S. Army veteran friends. I have been raised by Southern Methodists and Shiite Muslims. I cannot abdicate the gospel message of Christ to a bomb, but can only bear the cross: the ultimate battlefield victory over the Enemy.

Omar Al-Rikabi is the son of a Southern Methodist mother from Texas and a Shiite Muslim father from Iraq. He is in his final year of earning a Masters of Divinity degree from Asbury Theological Seminary, and a declared candidate for ordination in the United Methodist Church.

More 9-11

2006-09-15T12:38:00.000+02:00

Jim Harnish is a preacher I respect and am challenged by. He has posted some of the sermons he preached before and after the fall of the Twin Towers. It is uncanny how well he hits the mark. A few days before the attack he preached on "Why do people suffer?" using the test where Jesus speaks of the collapse of the tower Siloam. I encourge you to

Resurrection - tall order or rising high?

2006-09-14T11:51:00.000+02:00

I ended my last piece on “hell 2” with the question that that piece begs: “What about resurrection?” I also said a while back that I would have appreciated someone in my life to give me straight answers. One of the reasons people may have hesitated is that a straight answer often begets more questions. But here goes…

I believe in resurrection, but I don’t believe in life-after-death in the conventional sense of my sense-of-self continuing after I die.

Resurrection is the idea that death cannot contain a person who has truly lived to the full. There is more to the idea than just that, but at the very least, everyone understands it thus far and I think almost anyone can agree to that. People whose lives have been touched by someone who has died continue to hold that person in their memory. The more fully that life was lived, the greater the reverence for their memory both in quantity of people (fame) and quality (authority?).

Going further requires a belief system that I have long since come to doubt. This is not to say I have dismissed it entirely…

The Christian idea of Resurrection is that one day all believers will be bodily and spiritually reassembled to live together for eternity. I have already expressed my doubts about an eternal life-after-death so I won’t go into that here.

Just as science has helped us to see that St. Paul and co had the wrong idea about how the universe is arranged, I believe science is unravelling the substance of physical resurrection. St Paul assumed a three-tiered arrangement of the universe: an underworld of spirits or hell; the earth (flat); and heaven above. He was wrong about that. St Paul also believed in a resurrection of all souls who believed in Jesus, something he thought would happen very soon – even in his lifetime. He was wrong about the timing and I think he was wrong about the bodily resurrection.

But I won’t go into the historical debate here. I think this quote says it all:

"The truth of the Resurrection shouldn't be the real battleground. I think what we want to do is try and rise above that and ask, 'What is the metaphoric truth of Easter?' The real power of Easter is the transformation that, as Christians, we believe continues to happen in people's lives....If Easter is about proving the veracity of some historical event that happened 2,000 years ago, that misses the point." Rev. Steve Huber of St. Columba's Episcopal Church

That about sums it up for me. (You can read more at Religious Tolerance.)

St Paul may have been wrong about the three-tiered universe – a forgivable shortsightedness given that he didn’t have a telescope. But that doesn’t stop us looking heavenward when we pray. Why? Because it is a helpful idea to imagine God and heaven as larger than us – above us – beyond us: God draws us toward an ideal. The metaphor has survived scientific scepticism. I have the same orientation toward the Resurrection. The story of Jesus’ rising from the dead is a powerful metaphor of his new Body in the form of those who choose to follow him and continue his memory in their own lives and commitments. If I doubt the historical validity of the Resurrection that does not impinge on that metaphor and therefore my belief is the more powerful.

I also think that believing in a metaphorical resurrection is more consistent with the idea of Incarnation: God becoming human. When I say, “Jesus lives!” I am declaring that Jesus’ teachings, values and power are real, present and available right in front of me by virtue of the activities of those who follow him.

"For the Son of God became man so that we might become God" Athanasios the Great, Archbishop of Alexandria

Resurrection draws us toward the divine ideal of a fully alive human being who transcends death by virtue of the power of their ideas, commitments, actions, values, teachings and so on.

I am more than merely a “skin-encapsulated ego”. Resurrection is something that begins even before death as my values, ideas, memories, loves infect the people around me. Resurrection is most apparent at funerals where people avoid the bad stuff, preferring to highlight the good. This is not always a bad thing, or at least we should acknowledge that to reconcile ourselves to a person’s mistakes begins the work of resurrecting their life and honouring their memory.

He said it...

2006-09-11T12:45:00.000+02:00

In light of earlier posts on heaven and hell as well as today being the anniversary of Gandhi's naughtiness, I want to point to a foreword writen by his grandson Arun Gandhi. He expressed better than I could hope to what I believe. What's more, he says it in so few lines.

9-11

2006-09-11T12:21:00.000+02:00

I am reminded by Tobias Winright of Sojourners that today is the 100th anniversary of Gandhi's first act of civil disobedience in Johannesburg. The Gandhi Institute has some useful information about present day attempts to make non-violence a useful part of social change even when dealing with terrorism.

Some people believe that non-violence and civil disobedience are useful strategies when it comes to individuals and groups trying to exercise social change from grass roots but that it has limited applicability to international relations.

It is worth remembering that things like the the Land Mine treaty are ventures that involve nation states. The fight for a World Court (that has teeth) is similarly an attempt to deal with violence at the level of macro politics.

The point of non-violent direct action is that it requires creativity to be exercised as a first resort so that one's dependence on the conventional means of resolving conflict are slowly displaced by more life-giving methods that emerge from one's context. No one method is universal because all situations are unique. Violence is universally failing yet we return to it so often!

Hopefully the UN can use diplomacy (or even sacntions) to prevent war in Iran where the US and UK were quick to rush to war with Iraq.

While you are at it, check out Ze Frank. Oh, and this one too.

Hell 2

2006-09-06T11:08:00.000+02:00

Flop this is long!

I started wondering about heaven and hell once. More specifically: who made hell? If God made everything, then surely God created hell, which means God must take some credit or blame for it, depending on your point of view. This is true even if hell is something somebody else created because, presumably, God created somebody. The nature of hell has a marked effect on to what extent God’s creation of hell is palatable. Is hell a place of eternal pain – a consequence of a lifetime of sin? Is hell another chance to change one’s ways? Is hell something we create for ourselves while we are alive? Is hell something we are living in now?

These are all ideas I have entertained and still use to some extent in the sense of Myth. Each one deserves a paragraph or two.

The first idea doesn’t make sense to me. How can “3 score years and 10” of life determine an eternity of pleasure or punishment? The maths seems unjust. Surely those enjoying eternal bliss have a troubled conscience? “Hey Dudes, wanna go watch the Aurora Hades tonight? I hear the conditions are just right for a spectacular display. There’s been a new unseasonably large influx of the damned what with population explosions and contextual theology and all.” Let’s not even begin to talk of the people I love who qualify for hell and how I’m going to feel if I’m on the other side of the fence.

OK, so maybe it’s like a supplementary exam. You failed the first time. You got enough points to get a rewrite, which means you spend your holiday studying but, hey, at least you get a second chance. Problem is, it’s a no-brainer. Someone sits me down and says: “You screwed up and this is your last chance or we put the cement shoes on and dump you overboard. No more Love Boat.” I know what I’m going to do. Which begs the question: how come all the confusing life-stuff in the first place? Why not just get to point and say that? It’d save an awful lot of pain and angst… and paper.

The answer could be that life is a test of one’s character. This begs the question as to what the correct answers are. It still seems jolly unfair cos some people’s circumstances make passing all the more possible according to their own criteria. Furthermore, nowhere is it made clear what the requirements are. Most people just end up following the path of least resistance. And even those who seem to break the mould – well, what is the mould? And who says the mould should be broken. It all boils down to not knowing what the pass mark is…

Somewhere in the equation, life and eternal consequence have to match up in a sensible way. Maybe, my actions in life create the conditions of life-after-death. Nothing much changes, it’s just that I get to see it all in glowing heavenly colours – no more denial. Imagining the worst hell for someone like Hitler best captures this idea. Such a hell would be to spend eternity with the 6-million+ people whose death he engineered, especially if they were kind and forgiving. Which opens the opportunity for Hitler to actually accept that forgiveness and we’re back with the “why not just get to the point,” question again.

Mmm… I hear someone saying “freewill”. That’s important. Life is about exercising choice and life-after-death is the consequence of those choices. I also hear some heckler shouting “grace”. Spoiler. I was on a roll.

I still think that exercising choice and then accepting the eternal consequences doesn’t make sense. I can’t imagine why I would want to stop using freewill after I die. There may come a moment when I get fed up with the 70 virgins and the all-you-can-eat-no-way-it’s-fattening buffet and decide to rebel – just for the hell of it J. What then? Is there another tier to this arrangement, a hidden level in the matrix? Or maybe I just get booted across the divide to spend some time with homosexuals and Hindus. Hopefully I’ll find that sufficiently intolerable that I will see the error of my ways. Can I bounce across again?

Ah, grace. Ja, that’s a good one. We only get into heaven by virtue of God’s grace. There is nothing we can do – we are damned anyway. But forgiveness is ours if we choose to take it. So when do I get to choose: only now in life? Why not after death? Is there a free will off-switch in the coffin? That makes no sense at all. Heaven would be a pretty boring place filled with automatons going, “I told you so.”

Which brings us to the “empty hell” idea. That’s just a nice way of saying hell doesn’t exist. We die and we all hang out together for eternity and we gotta sort out the mess then too, just like we’re trying to do now. Only God’s a little more REAL, so we’re all REALLY motivated! So, again, why not just get to the point! What’s up with the cloak and dagger stuff – now you see God, now you don’t. Ho hum, in circles we go…

Either God has a bizarre sense of humour or there is no life-after-death.

Either: God sets up this world so that we live our lives constantly wondering whether God exists, wondering what the rules are - or not; hoping like crazy we’re getting life squared up – or not; sometimes realising it’s a lost cause and we may as well just give in and love – or not. Then one day we’re taken up to meet the Dude and it’s “Where is your ‘accepted forgiveness’ visa?”

Or: Hell and Heaven are a fiendishly clever idea to make us think about these things so much that we’ll realise the urgency of fixing this planet up quick cos THIS IS IT.

I believe… There is no heaven and hell. Death is final in the sense that my self-awareness will one day cease. If there is a heaven and hell, then - to the extent that one can speak of such things in geographical terms - I believe it will be a single place something like Hitler making friends with 6 million Jews. I just can’t see two places working very well.

I still believe that heaven and hell are useful Myths for describing earthly realities. Our choices do have consequences, but the ultimate value of these choices isn’t felt in eternity; these choices affect the here and now. We are creating heaven and hell all around us, all the time. “Who’s in and who’s out?” is not a helpful question anymore. It’s more about “What do you want and what are you prepared to do to help get it?”

Resurrection? One thing at a time…

Out

2006-09-05T09:38:00.000+02:00

When I started this blog, I had a hidden agenda. A long time ago, I started wondering if I really believed this Christian stuff. It has been a long struggle to figure out what I believe. I tell people almost daily that they must take responsibility for what they believe, but those words sound hollow, when I have seldom done so myself. I decided a while back that I needed to do so for the sake of my integrity, but also because ideas do not develop and mature without challenge.

So far I have expressed opinions on this blog that tend toward the fringe of what is considered Christian, but it remains within those boundaries. Most people who read this blog have been supportive, occasionally offering questions and even resonance. But I have yet to venture – publicly, at any rate – into the more… err… disturbing (?) ideas that I now consider my own. That is not to say that they are original, but rather that I own them, take responsibility for them and accept the consequences.

This is another reason I named this blog “Dassies Bounce” – I want to see if my ideas can stand the test of debate – can they bounce – “does he bounce?” I have no doubt that I will change my ideas as people respond to what I write – that is part of growing. But will the fundamentals change? That is what I want to see…

I started asking questions very soon after I became a Christian in 1986. I found it irritating when people evaded giving straight answers. Sometimes people would do this because they were covering up ignorance, other times because they hoped the mystery would keep me searching, I guess. I really would have liked some straight answers, especially when I asked, “What do you believe?” but even more when I asked, “But how then can you reconcile…(add conundrum of choice)?” So, stop me if I start to sound like I’m beating around the bush.

I look forward to your interaction. Keep watching to see if something tickles or itches.

"Blessed are you..."

2006-09-04T10:20:00.000+02:00

To truly change the world, we have to make ourselves vulnerable. That is part of the essence of the Jesus idea. That vulnerability, while offering hope to the world, can lead to our own demise.

Gunmen recently attacked Yabonga, the organisation Yvette works for. They made off with computers, cell-phones and money. Fortunately, no one was hurt. As a result of this trauma, the staff at Yabonga are considering closing down their VCT project. They correctly recognise that the attack is a direct result of their increased vulnerability as a result of this project.

VCT stands for voluntary counselling and testing. The service is free to the public and anyone can come and be tested confidentially for HIV and receive counselling before and after. The attackers made an appointment earlier on the day of their attack and so were let in without suspicion.

In South Africa, this service is more important than any other single service currently offered in the sector of HIV. Behavioural change most often happens when people are engaged in relationship that is non-judgemental, but informed. If South Africa hopes to overcome this disease, it will be through the implementation of more sites like this.

I believe that there are ways that Yabonga can increase their security without diminishing the accepting nature of the VCT service or doing away with it. But right now the most important thing is for the staff to know that what they are doing is important, even if it is frustrating and bruising.

Perhaps you would consider writing to them – just a sentence or two – to give them courage.