The Ramblin’ Man is Back!
And will be blogging again soon. Stay tuned.
The Rambling Man
Scattered thoughts about theology and anything else interesting…
October 7, 2017
Church on the streets
They came from all over, representing unions, churches, and student, political, and civic organizations. Some came simply as concerned individuals, tired of living in a society where your colour determined where you could live, work, play, and even go to the toilet. They were black and white, rich and poor, educated and uneducated. Some held up banners saying, “the people shall govern.” Among the leaders of the march were pastors, rabbis, and imams. They marched to protest yet another election that would exclude the majority of South Africans. But this time things were different. For this march was the culmination of six months of defiance, co-ordinated and led (largely) by churches.
As they marched from the Central Methodist Church and St. George’s Anglican Cathedral to the city centre, they were met by another group. This other group was heavily armed, ensconced behind barricades and accompanied by armoured vehicles. On top of one vehicle was a water cannon. The police ordered the crowd to disperse. The crowd responded by sitting down. Then the cannon fired… purple dye. But one of the demonstrators climbed onto the vehicle and wrestled the cannon away. He turned the spray onto the police, turning them purple as well. In the ensuing struggle, austere government buildings were covered with purple dye. The people cheered. But then tear gas was deployed. Panic ensued. The people scattered. For the rest of the afternoon, anyone discovered in the city centre with purple dye spattered on his or her clothing was arrested.
People ran, coughing, tears streaming, into St. George’s Cathedral, where hundreds took refuge. “Many bore red welts across their bodies and faces,” reports John Allen. The shocked and discouraged crowd was addressed by tiny bishop, also dressed in purple:
Say to yourselves, in your heart, “God loves me.” … I don’t go around and say, “Baas, please give me my freedom.” God loves me. I am of infinite value because God loves me and God created me for freedom, and my freedom is inalienable, God-given. Right! Now straighten up you shoulders… like people who are born for freedom! Lovely, lovely, lovely!
After assuring the now empowered crowd with the words, “Our march to freedom is unstoppable!” the bishop, Desmond Tutu, negotiated with police to allow the protesters in the church to leave. One of the protesters snuck back into the city after dark with a can of purple spray paint. The next day the wall of the Old Town House bore these words: “the purple shall govern.”
The repression increased after the march. In Cape Town 23 people were killed through police action in the run-up to the elections. But within two weeks, 30,000 people converged on the City Hall. Summoning the newly elected State President, F.W. De Klerk, to “come and see” the crowds, their diversity, and their discipline, Tutu bubbled these words:
Come here and see peaceful people! [Then to the crowds] Show Mr. De Klerk your hands. They are empty hands, Mr. De Klerk! [Again, to the crowds] Let’s show Mr. de Klerk that we are a disciplined people. Let’s keep quiet! [The crowds immediately grow silent] Did you hear a pin drop, Mr. De Klerk? [One more time to the crowds] We want to say to Mr. De Klerk, come and see Technicolor! They tried to make us one colour, purple. We say we are the Rainbow People! We are the new people of the new South Africa!
The image of the rainbow is of course also a deeply biblical symbol: it was the symbol given to creation after the judgement on human violence in the Genesis flood, a symbol of new beginnings. After leading the crowds (holding hands) in a litany that repeated the words uttered at the Cathedral under different circumstances, “our march to freedom is unstoppable!” Looking at the jubilant people, Tutu finished saying, “Mr. De Klerk, please come.”
In South Africa “the purple” did govern, and sooner than the watching world expected. The elections of September 1989 were the last to elect an all-white Parliament. Less than five years later, people of all races, colours, and cultures streamed to voting stations for the first non-racial, democratic elections. They chose as President a man who was still a political prisoner during the protests.
It was said by some that that day in April 1994 was the birth of the new South Africa. The world certainly thought so as it viewed, with astonishment, the snaking lineups of voters. The newly minted President Nelson Mandela said as much when he stood not far from the place the purple had been baptized in dye, and the exact spot where Tutu had addressed the crowd in the aftermath. Mandela said in his speech that here, at the southern tip of Africa, a fateful convergence 300 years ago between Africa, Europe, and Asia had gone horribly wrong. The “rainbow”—now a synonym for the new South Africa—carried the promise of that narrative being rewritten, with justice established.
I was privileged to be there on that day, standing with a crowd not of 30,000 but hundreds of thousands. But others, including some of my colleagues at the University of Cape Town, claimed that the rainbow nation had been born much earlier, on the streets of Cape Town and other places of gathering to perform a new society. While some hailed the release of political prisoners and the unbanning of the liberation parties as the turning point, others insisted that the people had unbanned themselves long before, simply by refusing to live by the rules laid down by the regime. They were living the liberating future even in the midst of the oppressive present.
Those who joined in the protests became more than the sum of their individualities: they became a people. Their coming together was not simply to express an idea they all agreed on or to put forth an agenda they all shared. It wants to offer their bodies to a cause. And sometimes that offering meant suffering detention and abuse at the hands of the regime. In occupying the streets of Cape Town, in joyously defying unjust laws and refusing to recognize illegitimate authority, they transformed public space, making it a stage for the performance of a different story: not a story of people divided by their differences but a people united, like the colours of the rainbow.
The Work of a People
The purple protest saw a multitude representing all races and cultures, classes and creeds, gathered to perform a story radically different from that of the police and the governing authorities. As this gathered people peacefully offered their bodies as living sacrifices they represented a threat more profound to the Apartheid regime than any armed insurrection. I want to suggest that what South Africans and the world saw on those days was liturgy.
We often think of the word “liturgy” as the written instructions handed to us when we walk into a church service. They tell us when to stand and when to sit, what to sing and what to say. Understood this way, the liturgy is like a map for worship, keeping the people on the same road, moving toward the same goal. But liturgy is more than this, as contemporary thinkers have argued. The word leitourgia in ancient times meant the peoples’ work, the peoples’ service, even a public service. Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann suggests that, applied to a community, the term denotes “an action by which a group of people become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals.” Roman Catholic theologian William Cavanaugh says that liturgy “enacts and maintains community by the ritual remembering or re‐presentation of foundational narratives, thereby helping to construct the perceived reality in which each member of the community lives.” Finally, Reformed philosopher James K.A. Smith defines liturgies as “rituals of ultimate concern, rituals that are formative for identity, that inculcate visions of the good life, and do so in a way that means to trump other ritual formations.”
The word liturgy is closely identified with worship. The English word “worship” means to ascribe the highest “worth” to something—literally “worth-ship”. But the Greek term (latreia) goes beyond mere ascription to collectively bending the body towards something. P.D. Manson reminds us that one of the most common Old Testament terms, ‘eḇeḏ, connotes “service … of every kind, acts of adoration as well as doing the chores.” Thus in the biblical witness, liturgy, worship, and public service are deeply connected. Paul spells this out in Romans 12:
I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgement, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us (Rom 12:1–6, NRSV).
Notice that Paul talks about plural bodies enacting one, living sacrifice of service. “We being many are one body”. And he goes on to talk about that oneness in the sharing of gifts of service, the welcome to strangers, and the refusal to live by the norms of a violent and exclusionary society. “Being transformed” is not simply an individual experience; it is an embodied and visible witness, running counter to the dominant culture.
That is the New Testament’s understanding of worship. It’s not a “holy high” or an “awesome experience”. It’s the creation of a body in service to God and his people, living not according to the dictates of the present, decaying age, but in the transforming “now” of the age to come.
But liturgy and worship are not confined to the church. Just as humans are made for worship—either of the true Creator or an idolatrous substitute, so human beings are homo liturgicus. In sports stadiums and arenas, in theatres and halls, in parliaments and stock exchanges, humans gather to recount “foundational narratives”, to discipline themselves visibly through “rituals of ultimate concern”, to bodily bend themselves toward something considered of high, or the highest good. And as they do this they become more than the sum of their individual parts. This is what the gatherings of South Africans during the final days of apartheid constituted. But theirs was a contestation of the public, “trump[ing] other formations. There were other visible body politics in South Africa.
Liturgy as Politics
Western Christians have bought into the idea that Sunday is a special day, and that happens in churches has to be hermetically sealed from what happens the rest of the week. “Religion” and “politics” are not only different kinds of things, the intrusion of one into the sphere of the other corrupts both. Church is a “holy huddle” that screens out the world, a shelter from the storms. As we “turn our eyes upon Jesus” we find that “the things of earth grow strangely dim.” Among “the things of earth” are messy and contentious matters like politics and economics, and the attendant injustices and degradations of people and place.
But there is no worship without a politics, just as there is no politics without a people. And there is no people without liturgy. That this strikes us as a strange idea demonstrates how acculturated the church has become, and why Christians often turn elsewhere in the quest to be “relevant” to the world. As William Cavanaugh said:
We are often fooled by the seeming solidity of the materials of politics, its armies and offices, into forgetting that these materials are marshalled by acts of the imagination. How does a provincial farm boy become persuaded that he must travel as a soldier to another part of the world and kill people he knows nothing about? He must be convinced of the reality of borders, and imagine himself deeply, mystically, united to a wider national community that stops abruptly at those borders.
This farm boy has to be taught, catechized into believing that he is part of an “us” called “America” (and what that means). He has to be taught to sing sacred songs and venerate sacred objects representing the nation. He has to be taught to bend his body in a certain way when he hears the first notes of “The Star Spangled Banner” or when he sees a piece of cloth with stars and stripes stitched on it. This talisman-like cloth is acknowledged everywhere: at school, at football games, in parades. A mystique surrounds it. When he sees it alongside others, with different colours and patterns on them, he comes to see the world as a world of nations, with everyone belonging to one or the other, and with some friendly and others hostile and threatening.
When an imagined reality comes across simply as “the way things are”, liturgy has done its work.
It was this way in South Africa. Before it was government policy, Apartheid (an Afrikaans word meaning “apartness”) was an imagination that taught people to see others primarily as Xhosa or Zulu or Indian or white. The contingency of race became essentialized into “blackness” and “whiteness”. As this imagination took flesh, it remade the landscape in its image and after its likeness, levelling communities that were racially mixed, sorting their people by colour and dumping the blacker ones in one place and the lighter ones in another. When people looked at their society and saw the white people wearing suits (when they weren’t playing or watching rugby), driving nice cars to get from their leafy suburbs, and working behind a desk, and the black people wearing coveralls (when they weren’t playing or watching soccer), using minibus “taxis” to get from their dusty township homes, and cleaning the buildings, imagination corresponded perfectly to “the way things are.”
This embodied imagination, this performance of a racialist script, broke up communities and churches that looked out of place in its light. Indeed, it broke up whole families. It remade the natural world in its image and after its likeness, reserving the best beaches, parks, and farmland for whites. It remade public spaces in its image and after its likeness, with separate beaches, park benches, and public toilets for blacks and whites. It was an imagination enforced by a heavily militarized police force, and a complex state bureaucracy obsessed with classification and separation.
It was also reinforced by church worship. Apartheid South Africa understood itself to be, before anything else, a Christian society. All the shops closed Saturday afternoon till Monday morning, in deference to the Sabbath. Bible study was compulsory in schools. There was no newsstand pornography. It only got television in 1975, and even that was heavily censored. It acknowledged God in its constitution and gave every soldier a copy of the Bible to carry—Bibles that carried a message from the State President: “this is your most powerful weapon”.
While they read from a Bible that contained the words, “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female”, the churches in South Africa by and large were places where people worshipped alongside those of the same colour, used the same language, and shared more or less the same social status and cultural values. The world within the church and the world outside were perfect reflections of each other, just the way God intended it.
The Church on the Streets
It is not a stretch to suppose that many if not most of those who divided the city on that September day, who gave the orders, who fired the tear gas and sprayed the purple dye were Christians convinced they were carrying out God’s will. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission observed numerous applicants for amnesty from the Apartheid police claiming that they enjoyed the blessing of their churches. Every Sunday they sang songs about heaven while the rest of the week inflicting hell on other human beings.
But this is not the whole truth. Some South Africans of privilege saw the world, God, and others differently. They asked the question: where would Jesus live, work, and worship? They listened, and listening they learned what the reality of injustice looked, felt, and smelled like. They deliberately gathered for prayer alongside people who spoke different languages, who lived a very different life than they did. This worship spilled out of the churches and onto the streets. Hymns sang in safe sanctuaries became protest anthems. Prayers uttered in private became public laments (“how long, O Lord”?) and calls for an end to unjust rule. Sermons became calls to social action and summonses to mass mobilization.
All this fostered a different imagination. “The way things were” was more than just wrong: it was blasphemy. Imagination led to formation, and formation gave new knowledge–especially about three things. The members of the church on the streets knew that “the way things are” was actually someone’s idea of the way things are. The system of race classification was as arbitrary as herding together all people with blue eyes to distinguish them from people with brown or hazel eyes, all men to distinguish them from women, all rugby lovers to distinguish them from soccer fans.
They also knew that when powerful people talk about “the way things are” it often means “the way things have to be if our material interests are to be met.” They knew that God-talk could disguise self-interest, and even deceive believers. Even a Constitution that had “God” in its Preamble could be false. Because they were involved in and with those who suffered, they knew that the God the state professed to serve by its policies was not the God revealed in Jesus Christ, but a projection of fear and apprehension. And that the hungry and homeless victims of that system were sacrifices to this monster-god.
Finally, they knew that if the way things are is a product of the imagination, then another way of imagining the world could produce a society more just, more inclusive, more human—in short, more like what Jesus meant when he talked about the reign of God. But this was not just a matter of stating ideas: it was a matter of concretely embodying the alternative.
That’s why Tutu’s words were so profound. As he marvelled at the “technicolour” crowds in front of him, a multitude who had been formed into a people, he could say to the newly elected President F.W. de Klerk (who had begun to talk, cautiously, about negotiating a New South Africa): “come and see. It’s here. Now.”
This I think is the message of contemporary movements like Occupy and Idle No More. It’s not in the common ideas they express (they have no unifying platform except that capitalism and exploitation are wrong) but in practices, the disciplines, the liturgies that contest public space and that embody an alternative imagination.
“This is what democracy looks like. Come and join us!”
The Occupy movement was born in a protest against the excesses of Wall Street, bankers getting large government bail-outs, and a growing disparity between the wealthiest 1 percent and everyone else. The protests spread across the world during 2011. Tent cities sprung-up, occupying not only financial districts, but public lands. It was a way of reclaiming space in the name of a people who refused the discipline of corporate overlords.
One such site was St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. As Luke Bretherton observed, the Cathedral grounds was “an ancient meeting place where the citizens of London would gather to decide matters of common concern.” But now this site was in the middle of London’s commercial sector, and the Cathedral, which had just hosted the media spectacle of the wedding of William and Kate, was an important tourist attraction. A standoff happened between the city, the church, and the protesters. During the occupation, the church was closed, leading to the eventual resignation of the Cathedral’s Dean.
Some have argued that the Occupy protests—and more locally the Idle No More movement—are “smoke and mirrors” because there is no coherent agenda or plan of action. But as Bretherton counters this is to miss the point. “Demands are formulated but these are secondary. What matters is the transformative experience of participation.” Like the purple rain protest, the gathering was as much a picture of what a truly inclusive community struggling for justice looked like, especially as it faced forces which represented the status quo—sadly this time including the church. Bretherton continues:
The primary point of the Assemblies (the popular forums within Occupy) is … to give people the experience of a completely different space and time so that they are freed to see the oppressive nature of the current one. As the initial statement by Occupy London put it: ‘This is what democracy looks like. Come and join us!’” This experience took place in the involvement of all participants in decisions, the free exchange of ideas, and a social order “free from control by capitalist corporations or state authorities.
Democracy, which in advanced capitalist societies takes the form of wealthy candidates backed by big money pushing through a corporate-friendly agenda on the population through a media similarly controlled, was reimagined as one where everyone had a say. In this way the encampment created a space that “reframed reality in terms other than those defined by the representatives of the state.”
Just as the violent response of the police to the peaceful protesters in Cape Town revealed the truth of the apartheid regime, the response of the London authorities was a revelation of the true lack of democracy within late capitalism. Like the purple rain protests, Christians (including church leaders) were among the participants in the protest. But unlike Cape Town in 1989, where the protest took the form of a march that began at one church—Central Methodist—and ended at another—St. George’s Cathedral—Occupy London set up its encampment on the grounds of a church that found the protests an interference with its life.
The irony pointed out by Bretherton is that a Cathedral is also meant to be “a place where people can come and experience a different time and space,” where, “if only for a moment [people can live] in a vision of a different future and thereby have reality reframed.” Sadly, the cathedral—like the South African churches invested in the status quo—was unable to see that in the motley crew of scruffy humanity on its front lawn was embodied a vision of the future very much like the kingdom of God. It was blinded to the way the City of London looked more like the Babylon of Revelation 18 than the city with the living water flowing from its centre and its gates always open to the nations. It’s concern for the preservative of peace and order missed “a millennial politics” in which the present system stood under judgment.
Conclusion
Popular movements help us see what we cannot (or will not) see within the safe spaces of worship. They may, as in Cape Town, represent a new location for the church—with the people groaning for newness. Or they may, as in London, show the need for the church to repent of its own need for self-preservation and risk losing itself in the performance of the kingdom. Such movements can be understood theologically as parables of the kingdom. They are signs of hope in an enclosed world where options for resistance seem pointless.
But they also are limited as signs. As anyone who knows contemporary South Africa will attest, the Rainbow People as a social imaginary stands in judgement over what the new South Africa has become over the past twenty years. Some of the strongest criticism of South Africa today comes from those whose imagination was formed in the church on the street. And yet, understanding that performance as a “missed (and now lost) opportunity” can (and does) lead to cynicism. For just as the fulness of the Kingdom did not come through “one person, one vote” in 1994, so the fulness of the kingdom can never come through human efforts alone. Even so, the appeal to “come and see” gestures toward a real future. It is a future capture in a vision that gives hope, and guides struggle to make the world a little more like what God has promised it will be.
What about the church, today? What does “the 99 percent” see when they look at the church at worship? What future dRaw footage of the 1989 Cape Town marcho we bend our bodies toward? How does our worship connect to their criticisms of the systems that keep the rich in comfort and the poor in squalor? Dare we point to our assemblies of worship and say, “come and see”? Dare we take those assemblies to the places of conflict and contest, that the world may see, and hope, and believe?
August 4, 2016
A Tale of Three Hashtags
Over the past two or three years I’ve published several pieces with PTT on the theological significance of South Africa’s democratic evolution and the involvement of churches there. The last of these concerned the #rhodesmustfall movement, which began with a statue fronting the University of Cape Town’s Upper Campus. With a fresh hashtag (#feesmustfall), the extension of the movement across the country over the past year has signalled the difficult situation poverty-stricken Africans face in educating themselves for a better life. The doors of education, while in principle open, remain difficult to pass through. Moreover, academia itself is seen to be in need of foundational transformation—a fascinating debate which I will not enter at this moment.
The particular situation signalled by #feesmustfall is the plight of South Africa at another election season. According to a study published in this past May1, 63 percent of South Africa’s children grow up in poverty. While this is an improvement from earlier figures, it remains staggering in a nation hailed as an icon of democracy and hope only 20 years ago. Violent service delivery protests continue, though now unreported by the national broadcaster2 which in a chilling reminder of the old days is looking more and more like the propaganda arm of the ruling ANC.
And there is President Jacob Zuma. Long held to be a necessary evil for maintaining the unity of the party and its alliance partners3, Zuma’s incompetence and corruption lies at the heart of the protests, and the election campaigns. Late last year, a new hashtag emerged: #zumamustfall. Launched4 with an eight-story-tall banner5 (which was immediately torn down by ANC supporters) in Cape Town’s CBD, the hashtag signalled yet another gatvol6 moment.
The year 2016 has indeed been one series of “falls” after another: first there were the after-effects of the firing of Nhlanhla Nene7, a Finance Minister generally respected for his refusal to give blind support to the President’s deals. Then followed attempts to use special investigators on Nene’s eventual successor, Pravin Gordhan8, ostensibly for insisting on the independence of the Treasury and Revenue services. Just as he had done for the Public Protector, the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, Thabo Makgoba, responded with a “Statement of Support9” for Gordhan’s commitment to fiscal discipline. While this was going on, the media were exposing the Gupta family’s attempts to influence 10government appointments. And then there was the Constitutional Court’s condemnation of Zuma11’s failure to act on the Public Protector’s recommendation that he return to the public purse funds taken for upgrades to his Nkandla homestead.
“SA Churches unanimous – President Jacob Zuma must resign.”12
Examples could be multiplied. But it was the latter, Constitutional Court decision on March 31 that galvanized South African churches to embrace the #zumamustfall hashtag.
Terming the decision “a devastating judgement on the constitutional and moral conduct of the President, the National Parliament and the leadership of the Speaker.”13 the South African Council of Churches (SACC) issued a statement calling for Zuma to do “the honourable thing” and resign. Addressing students and faculty at the University of the Witwatersrand, Makgoba echoed it, calling for “a tsunami of truth14-telling”. Similar public sentiments were expressed by the Methodist Church of South Africa15, and a number of Catholic sources16. After a meeting between the The National Religious Leaders’ Council and senior ANC leaders, SACC General Secretary Bishop Malusi Mpumlwana revealed that four of the six17 were wrestling with consciences on the question of Zuma’s resignation. Several ANC struggle stalwarts, including Ahmed Kathrada (Nelson Mandela’s friend and fellow prisoner) voiced the same sentiment.
It is doubtful that all South African churches are unanimous. Such is the complexity of the South African religious scene. And Zuma can still command a large, Christian audience as he did on Good Friday at the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God18. Likewise, the ZCC—South Africa’s largest denomination—has dissented19 from the call for Zuma’s resignation.
Nevertheless, this is an important moment for the public witness of the churches. I believe we are seeing the “coming out” party of the SACC.
“A Cocktail for Regime Change20”
Nearly four months later, the President retains his hold on power. But pressure has been maintained in protests and petitions. The current elections have focused this pressure. While for local government, the elections are widely seen as a referendum on Zuma and the ANC at a federal level. Sadly, the campaigns have not been without incident, and once again the churches and other religious groups have called for calm21 as forces of anger and betrayal are unleashed by partisanship.
That the actual elections have proceeded without incident is a testament to the solidity of democracy as an institution in South Africa. And a vote—even now routinized—still has powerful significance22 for people who in living memory paid so dearly for that privilege. What follows over the next few months will no doubt continue to test how well the other institutions (the Public Protector and the Constitutional Court especially) that have been sorely tried will stand.
That the #rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall hashtags initiated by students were succeeded by a broader, #zumamustfall movement taken up by the churches and other civil society organs is a sign perhaps even more positive than the survival of “Chapter Nine” structures. For they signal the health of another kind of democracy: a restless yearning for a just future for the whole demos, the whole people.
The Beyond in the Midst
Here though South Africa’s churches must exercise theological restraint—especially if they are to learn the lessons of the recent past.
After all, the ANC’s origins are tied-in to early twentieth-century African Christianity. And its role in the anti-Apartheid movement was mediated in part by many church leaders in the 1980s. The election of Nelson Mandela in 1994 was not just a victory for the ANC, it was a vindication of those churches who had supported the liberation movements. In fact, it was this association that made criticism so awkward in the intervening years.
Unlike other civil society agents the church always points beyond the immediate dynamics and movements of a situation. Or perhaps better stated: the church points to the “beyond” that is partially visible, partially hidden, in such situations. For even if Zuma’s failures ultimately add up to his fall, it is not the end. The world and its contests for control goes on… until Christ announces its end.
At the same time, it is only by being situated “in the midst” that the church can truly see the “beyond”. To place itself “above” or “beyond” the struggles of the people is precisely to lose the vision of the Kingdom. This also is a hard-won lesson of the South African church.
Theologically speaking Christians must assert that the world, not just its local manifestations, must fall. That is the true regime change we all long for.
1 http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/63-of-young-sa-children-live-in-poverty-study-20160513
2 http://ewn.co.za/2016/06/24/Wholl-invest-in-a-country-where-the-assets-arent-protected
3 http://mg.co.za/article/2016-04-02-the-anc-centre-cannot-hold-without-zuma
5 http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/cape-town-banner-did-its-job-zumamustfall-movement-20160117
6 translation: “had it up to here”
7 http://mg.co.za/article/2015-12-17-nuclear-price-tag-set-nene-against-jacob-zuma
8 http://www.news24.com/Columnists/AdriaanBasson/the-case-against-pravin-gordhan-20160516
9 http://archbishop.anglicanchurchsa.org/2016/02/statement-of-support-for-south-africas.html
10 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-22513410
11 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-35932286
16 http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2016/04/05/church-leaders-call-for-south-african-president-zuma-to-resign/ The Southern African Conference of Catholic Bishops is a member of the SACC.
19 Bishop Barnabas Lekganyane, Letter dated 11 April 2016. See http://www.biznews.com/leadership/2016/04/12/sas-biggest-church-rejects-zuma-must-resign-call-zcc-is-above-politics/
22 Makgoba said he “still felt goosebumps” voting. http://ewn.co.za/2016/08/04/South-Africas-democracy-is-maturing-Thabo-Makgoba
June 9, 2015
“God is not a Christian”
Several Facebook friends have recently posted an interview with Desmond Tutu entitled, “God is not a Christian.” Tutu has used this phrase for the past few years, and even published a book with the title. So it’s not new. But I must admit I’ve always been confused by it.
If “God is not a Christian” means “God is not subject to any construct of human language”–which the term “Christian” is: according to Acts 11:26, it was first used by pagans to describe followers of Jesus–then, yes, “God is not a Christian.” And we can understand in this way the truth in the subtitle, “Nor a Jew, Muslim, Hindu…” These designations were attempts to make sense of an unfamiliar set of practices (see W. Cantwell Smith’s Meaning and End of Religion).
But if it means that our particular understandings of God “don’t matter,” then we must think a little deeper. Clearly for Tutu understanding God as “nation,” or “capital,” or “race” is a problem. Because there is such a thing as idolatry, at least some understandings do matter. Indeed, there is an important contradiction in asserting “We are born for goodness, to love” while holding that particular beliefs don’t matter. For what is “we are born for goodness” if not a particular belief?
Even more so, if “God is not a Christian” means that the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is but one particularity among others, then my disagreement is even deeper. For if God did not become a human being in Jesus Christ, taking on the particularity of first century Jewish flesh, living in such a way as to reveal the root of human violence (in the desire to murder God), absorbing that violence in the cross and overcoming it in the resurrection, then I see little point in talking about “God” at all. If God did not say a radical “yes” to human being in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, and a radical “no” to human violence in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, then I see no basis for a divine “yes” to the human future (in Jesus Christ). We are on our own.
Despite all this, my deep respect for Desmond Tutu (and my awareness of his deep rootedness in the practices of Anglo-Catholic spirituality) leads me to take the statement not as a piece of reflective theology but as an expression of his generosity: that God welcomes all, regardless of people or class or race, and that God cannot be “tribalised”–even if one of those “tribes” is named “Christian”. As a piece of rhetoric, it’s merely a nice sentiment.
October 22, 2012
Broken Windows
Some of the windows broken at Holy Trinity on the evening of Oct 14. Five other Edmonton churches were similarly attacked.
Windows are portals to the world. They let light in, and they project light out. Some windows are functional. Other windows represent the artistry of love. Stained glass windows transfigure seeming ordinary light into colours displaying the gospel.
To those inside a church, windows remind people that there is an ‘outside’ called the world. And it is for the world that the church exists. But windows are fragile. They are easily broken. Having windows is risky.
Broken windows also refract light, but in shards that display the brokenness of the world. Broken windows also remind the church of its vulnerability in the world. Broken windows also remind the church of the vulnerability of the world, God’s world, in the face of the much greater vandalism of sin.
The good news is that windows can be repaired. Even better is the way the fragility that we feel upon looking at them can lead us to the one whose brokenness heals and restores.
But we are still dismayed, angry, and perhaps even vengeful at the sight of our 100 year old windows being so easily destroyed by random acts of vandalism.
Perhaps it is a truism to say that the church is not the building but the community of which the building is a visible sign. That is so. Our building has been a visible sign to our city of the community of Holy Trinity, meeting as the people of God in the midst of the neighbourhood of Old Strathcona. More than this: it is a visible sign of the presence of God’s kingdom in time and space, here and now, a sign that ‘the Word became flesh, and moved into the neighbourhood.’ (John 1:14, The Message)
Our beautiful old building is a way of saying to our neighbourhood, ‘come on in.’ And in coming in people will discover that the community of Holy Trinity is more than the building.
At various times in its history the church of Jesus Christ has existed without buildings, and it may well do so again. The challenge the church faces is to also be visible signs of God’s kingdom outside the security of the building, beyond the building–living windows to the world, if you will.
One way of doing this now is to display the light of Christ in our response to the mischief on our building. Yes, we can (and perhaps should) feel violated about the carelessness of those throwing stones. Yes, we can (and perhaps should) feel angry about the money that will be spent repairing windows before the onset of winter–money that could better have been spent helping the poor. Yes we can (and perhaps should) hope that the police apprehend those who caused the damage.
But we must insist that being windows to the gospel means that the brokenness displayed in our windows can be healed–and so can the broken who throw stones. As embodied stained glass windows who have ourselves been healed in Christ we stand for the justice of restoration, not the justice of retribution. And so we pray for the stone-throwers, that they might be convicted of sin (if not of the crime) and find hope in that which they sought to destroy. In the words of the Apostle:
Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’ No, ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
September 4, 2012
Sermon: Why do Christians work on the sabbath?
Jesus Healing on the Sabbath, Strasbourg Cathedral
Preached at CentrePoint Christian Reformed Church, Edmonton
Sept 2, 2012
Texts: Gen 1:26–2:20; John 20:1–20
Labour issues are in the news. Those of us who love to watch hockey are aware of the millionaire players’ dispute with millionaire owners, with the upcoming season in the balance. It seems the language of unions and management, of lockouts and strikes, has gotten quite ridiculous.
We forget about the conditions 200 years ago that brought about the need for workers (often supported by churches) to unite. Those conditions still exist in other parts of the world. Some of you may have heard about the tragic events in South Africa last month. Striking miners (who extract from the depths of the earth materials that help power our iPhones and tablets), who are paid as little as $500 per month for doing dangerous work, went on strike and were met with a police force that opened fire on them killing 34.
This was a dark day for that country born in the hope of justice, peace, and a better life for all its people. It gives us pause as we think about the dignity of our work on this labour day weekend, and as many of us say goodbye to the recreation of summer and prepare to return to the routines that will take us through fall, winter, and spring.
The Sabbath and the fruit of our labour
The Bible contains the most radical charter for workers. This charter is found in our first reading. It has two components.
First, humans are created with a purpose, a task, a vocation.
This is the concern of the students that are arriving at King’s this week. What is my special task in the world? What will I do with my life?
Genesis tells us that humans have a single task, but one which unfolds in many different areas. That single task is to take care of the creation, to serve and protect it, to tend and nurture it. Creation must not simply exist: it must flower. It’s a task for which we are gifted and equipped. God gives us what we need to sustain us in our task: food and companionship.
There are other gifts as well scripture talks about. Discovering those gifts will set the course for our lives. There are also limits to our calling: things which we cannot do without violating it. If we go beyond these limits–as humans did (and continue to do)–then labour becomes enslavement, flowers become thorns, companionship becomes bondage.
The second thing found in our Genesis reading is a complement to the first. While we are given the vocation to serve creation and in so doing image the creator, our work is not to define our lives. God is not a God who works 24/7. He rests. And we who are created in his image also are created to rest. While our task is to imitate the God who creates, that task is only understood as we rest.
The sabbath becomes so important to Israel that it comes to define who Israel is as a people.
The sabbath taught Israel to trust in the God who provided. Remember the story of the manna in the wilderness? Israel was to gather for six days and rest on the seventh day, trusting that God would provide enough to get them through to the first day. That God was responsible for all they had (and not their own labour) is demonstrated by the prayer found in Deuteronomy 26:
"The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.”
This rhythm of work and rest is something radical in our world today. For consumerism will not let us rest. We are always made restless by the urge to buy the latest app, or trade up to a better car or a bigger home.
The sabbath however was not just a principle for work. Everything was to imitate God’s day of rest, including animals and the land itself which rested every seven years. Again there was the principle of trust: Israel had to trust that God would give them enough of a harvest during the sixth year to get them through to the first of the new cycle.
The principle of Jubilee took this idea to the greatest length. Every seven sabbath years slaves were to be released, debts were to be cancelled, and the land returned to its original owner if a family had fallen into hard times. This reboot of the whole economic system was to prevent injustice from reigning in the land.
Of course, Israel did not in fact practice jubilee, and that’s why they went into exile. The land “expelled” them in order to rest. But they hoped for God to intervene and bring jubilee himself. This was the acceptable year of the Lord that Jesus proclaimed in his first sermon: that in his ministry the sabbath would be truly fulfilled.
And so it was. Jesus fed, healed, and restored the poor, the sick, and the hungry. He welcomed the stranger and outcast to his table–even when it seemed he was violating the law, even when it seemed he was violating the sabbath. In truth, he was giving the sabbath its true meaning.
The Lord’s Day and the labour of the Kingdom
So then why do Christians work on the sabbath and worship on the Lord’s day? This question might surprise some of you. After all, isn’t the Lord’s day the same as the sabbath?
No.
The sabbath is the seventh day of the week. Just as it brought the week of God’s creation to a close, so it brings the work week to a close. It was a day to rest, to reflect, to give thanks.
But nowhere in the New Testament are Christians told to keep the sabbath. Of the ten commandments, every one (understood in the light of the Gospel) is repeated in the New Testament… except the fourth.
This brings us to our second reading.
In chapter 20 of his Gospel, John takes great pains to emphasize the significance of the day on which Jesus rose. Twice he calls it “the first day”.
Two scenes take place on this first day: in the morning when the disciples discover Jesus is risen, and the evening when the disciples discover Jesus standing in their midst. In between these is the encounter with Mary Magdalene that we read.
Now John knows his Bible, and he especially knows Genesis. He begins his gospel with the same words that Genesis begins with: “in the beginning.” However, his retelling of Genesis talks about the Word who was with God in the beginning, the Word who became flesh in Jesus Christ.
Genesis tells us that it was dark on the first day when light burst forth at God’s command. John tells us that in Jesus Christ the light came into the world.
And yet the world rejected the Word.
So when on the sixth day of the week Pilate parades Jesus before the crowds and says, “behold the Man”! he’s echoing both the creation of humans as God’s image and the rejection of God’s image by humans.
Jesus is crucified on that sixth day. His life ends with the words: “it is finished” (the same words that marked the completion of creation in Genesis). And on the seventh day, the sabbath, Jesus is resting in the tomb. The old creation is now finished.
And now… the first day of the new week. As I said, Jesus appears twice. He appears first to Mary, who doesn’t recognize him as the Jesus she knew, but as the gardener. How sad, we think, that in her grief she is unable to see such a wondrous thing. However, as Tom Wright says,
“Mary’s intuitive guess, that he must be the gardener, was deeply right at another level. ‘Behold the man’! Here he is: the New Adam, the gardener, charged with bringing creation into new order, into its flower, its fruitfulness. He has come to uproot the thorns and thistles and replace them with flowers and harvests.” (John for Everyone, 146)
When Jesus appears later to the disciples, who had gathered on that first day in a secret place, his first word is “peace”, “shalom”, wholeness and healing to them. Just as he announced a new beginning to Mary, so he does to his church. They are to be the people who bring the blessing of God to creation. As they are from the dust of the old creation, Jesus breathes on them the Holy Spirit–-yet one more reference to Genesis. Just as God’s breath made Adam a living being in the first creation so Jesus’ breath made the church alive again to the new creation.
So the day of resurrection is the first day of a new week–-a week that begins a new creation. And on the first day of this new week of creation (and in the early church this happened at sunrise) Christians gather to remember that for them the new creation is here. We gather to hear the blessing of peace, shalom, wholeness. We gather to receive the Holy Spirit to empower our work in the world.
But what about the sabbath principle?
While it’s clear that Saturday as a day of rest seems to have lost its place, the early church most certainly practiced sabbath in their life together.They shared all they had, putting their possessions, the fruit of their labour, into a common pool which was distributed to anyone who had need. And the Jewish emphasis on gathering in worship and making offerings shifted from the last to the first day of the week (Acts 20:7; 1 Cor 16:2).
It’s plain that they were in fact “keeping the sabbath”, but they were emphasising less the day and more the reality to which the day pointed.
Keeping the Sabbath Today
How do we then “keep the sabbath”?
My mother grew up in a strict Presbyterian home where all the cooking was done on Saturday evening. Was that “keeping the sabbath?”
When I first encountered Christian Reformed people I knew them as those who refused to go to Swiss Chalet on Sundays. Was that keeping the sabbath?
Today in our church I know parents who struggle with their kids playing sports on Sundays. Is that keeping the sabbath?
These are not bad things to do–as long as the rest of the week we live as in the Kingdom of God and its justice. It is possible to strictly enforce Sunday as a day of rest, as did many of those who kept slaves in the old South, and live the rest of one’s life as violation of the Sabbath. And there are contemporary examples of slavery, not least our support for companies that force their employees to labour under inhumane conditions–such as the miners of Marikana.
The everyday choices we make determine whether or not we are truly keeping the sabbath.
Christians–those who have been baptized into Jesus’ death and resurrection–are to be signs of a different world, a new age. And we bear witness “as the father sent Jesus” even amidst the decay, the devastation, the injustice of the old creation.
N.T. Wright suggests that if we see the old creation as brought to a close in the death of Jesus and his resting in the tomb, and if we see the new creation as coming with the resurrection of Jesus, then challenging ourselves to live into this new creation should mark the Lord’s day.
Every day is the Lord’s day for Christians, because every day carries the call to do sabbath justice, mercy, and healing.
But just like it’s helpful to take one day out of the year to honour those who labour, so one day in seven we focus on how the resurrection of Jesus Christ has brought the new creation into being, that in him we are a new creation, and that we are called to bear witness in our work to a world still suffering.
The Lord’s day should be a day where we call the world to get ready for the coming justice of God.
That the world of work contains people who dispute over millions while others enslave themselves to bring bread and water to their families tells us that the old creation of thorns and thistles remains. That the miners at Marikana and so many others in our world don’t experience the blessings of sabbath should mark the day as a day of lament, but also as a day of provocation where we commit ourselves again to repent and take action.
But it should also be a day of joy where we give thanks for the provision of God–a joy that should inflect our own work throughout the coming new week.
Our work, after all, is from and for a new creation.
Amen.
August 27, 2012
Coming Home, or How I Became an Anglican
With the choir at St. Mary’s Anglican Church, Stellenbosch, South Africa
Like almost everyone in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the city of my birth, I was baptized as an infant. But by my teens I had rejected church as being an outdated relic at best and a source of violent conflict at worst. It was a something called “the Jesus Movement” of the 1970s that drew me into the Christian fold. But this was a kind of Christianity that had little time for the institutional church. At our home Bible studies and prayer meetings we would call mainline denominations “dead” and Pentecostals and evangelicals “compromised”. That’s where I began.
So how did I wind up at an Anglican Church?
Like many small sects our group was eventually torn apart by divisions over leadership. We drifted from place to place afterward, trying this church and that. I spent time in Presbyterianism and Pentecostalism before wandering into an Anglican church in downtown Toronto at the age of 28.
What did I find there? Well, there were many things I was used to in other churches, especially the rhythm of singing, listening, then singing again. There was prayer for members of the congregation, for the community, and for the world. There was special music. There was an offering. Like the Pentecostal church, the momentum of the service was toward the congregation coming forward, gathering around a table (called an “altar”), and receiving a special gift from God. Everything, the songs, the readings, the preaching, reached a climax at that moment. Like the Presbyterian church, the building and the ministers wore special, seasonal colours. The readings were also tied to the special calendar used by Christians. But I especially enjoyed the way the service appealed to my body, to my senses, like in Pentecostal worship, rather than to my ears and intellect, as did the Presbyterian. People were worshipping with gestures, responding physically to what was being said and done by the leaders. Bowing and kneeling, making the sign of the cross, raising hands to receive the bread and the wine–all these things communicated more than words. Something was going on in the service that, while fascinating, couldn’t be captured by rational thought. It was a drama, and I found myself caught up in it.
But most of all, what struck me in the Anglican church was the sense of being part of a community greater than the local church–a community that had existed, and would continue to exist, across time and space. This idea of being enfolded in a larger community is called “catholicity”, and it was brought to my attention most powerfully in two experiences.
The first happened on February 11, 1990. That was the date Nelson Mandela walked free from Victor Verster prision in South Africa. I had followed events in South Africa closely for several years, especially the involvement of the churches in supporting or resisting apartheid. Like many around the world, I was glued to my TV, waiting for the moment when this icon of the freedom struggle would emerge from twenty-seven years of confinement. That morning I went to church, where the lectionary reading (the passage of the Bible Anglicans around the world would read that day) was from Isaiah 58. The preacher talked about the significance of “breaking the chains” and “setting the oppressed free” on this particular Sunday, and that in Anglican churches throughout the world (and especially in South Africa) this same text was being read. Like the ancient Jews, South Africans were finally coming out of exile. “Today, this scripture is being fulfilled in your hearing.” And the church around the world was bearing witness.
I also thought of the visible, public role of the Anglican church in South Africa, and another icon, Desmond Tutu, who played emcee to Mandela’s welcome to Cape Town. While the history of the church has had its low points, it certainly felt good and right to be part of that global event.
The second experience happened about five years later. Again it involved South Africa. This time I found myself sitting in an Anglican church adjacent to the campus of the University of Cape Town. It was a Sunday evening student service, and most of the congregants in the small gathering were African. As the liturgy reached the point where the Lord’s Prayer (the “our Father”) was said, the priest invited each of us to pray in his or her own mother tongue. It was something that took me out of my shoes and transported me to heaven. For there were seven or eight distinctive languages being spoken among the fifteen of us. Yet we were each praying the same prayer. Unlike in my Pentecostal experience (which was the closest I’ve come to something similar) these were not “ecstatic utterances”. They were real, empirical languages, the native language of each pray-er. I thought of this church which speaks so many languages, and exists in so many different places and among so many different cultures. And yet we were all gathered together here and now, in one accord–just like the early church on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2).
It was in South Africa, at that service, that I finally felt I’d come home to the church. Not long after this, I asked the priest to confirm me as an Anglican.
And I’ve never looked back. In my studies I have learned the reasons for my experience, and the theology behind them. I have experienced more and different kinds of Anglicanism, from smoky high to low charismatic, from activist liberal to old-money conservative. I have worshipped accompanied by pipe organs and choirs in one place, and by drums and marimbas in another–all using the same prayer book. I have learned how many of the prayers and practices in that book are shared across the communion and go right back to the very beginnings of Christianity. What holds us together is not a confession (as in the Presbyterian or Reformed traditions) nor a statement of faith (as in the Pentecostal or evangelical churches), but a way of worship. It’s primarily what we do, rather than what we think, that makes us Anglicans.
But that said, I’ve also come to a new appreciation of other Christian traditions, including those I previously was involved with. One of the characteristics of Anglicanism is “the middle way” between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, honouring the truth as it is found throughout the Christian world. We all make up the church, which in the creed is called “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic”. Coming home doesn’t mean finally finding the Truth absent in other churches, but rather a place where God’s movement to heal creation has become especially welcome for me.
We all need such a place.
Since moving to Edmonton in 2004, Holy Trinity has been my home parish. It embraces much of the diversity I’ve experienced in Anglican churches around the world. On any given Sunday you might hear folk-blues or choir and organ. Our congregation includes artists and university professors, stay-at-home parents and businesspeople, labourers and baristas. If the Anglican tradition brought me home to the church, Holy Trinity has been home in Edmonton. I hope you find that, or will find it, true as well.
August 16, 2012
Sermon: Competing for a Kingdom
This sermon was preached at CentrePoint Christian Reformed Church, August 12, 2012.
Introduction
For the past two weeks the eyes of the world have been on London. Unlike the soccer World Cup where everyone plays the same game, the Olympics features a great diversity of games and an even greater number of participants from across the globe.
These games are more than a game. They are enfolded within the most memorable of liturgies in which all contestants participate: the torch relay, the procession of the nations each under their own banner, the reciting of the Olympic creed, the lighting of the Olympic flame, and the rewarding of successful contestants with gold, silver, and bronze medals.
This morning I want to ask three questions:
1. what do the Olympics say about our world?
2. what does the Gospel of Jesus Christ say about the Olympics?
3. what do the Olympics say to those of us who are followers of Jesus Christ?
1 What do the Olympics say about our world?
The Olympics as a whole, the fierce competition and the wondrous spectacle, the commercial hype and the patriotic pride, show us a divided world that longs to come together in a common cause, a violent world that longs for peaceful resolution of conflict, and a broken world in which the strong, the beautiful, the skilled are singled out as stand-ins–and inspiration–for ordinary people. The Olympics suspends the ordinary for two weeks every four years, showing us a vision of another world. Each event within this whole contains, in the words of London bid chair Sebastian Coe, “all that matters in life”.
At least that’s the way the Olympics is presented to us.
At a deeper level, the Olympics is a gospel. It proclaims the good news of peace in which wars are suspended. It announces happiness and joy to all humankind. It heralds the reign of an ideal–for a time. The Olympics is a gospel for athletes who aspire to commune with Olympians of the past, to participate publicly in their glory. Such an opportunity presents itself rarely in an athlete’s career. But most of all the Olympics is a gospel for nations. In the Olympics we see ourselves reflected back as members of nations. It is where the pride of nations is displayed, where nations compete for supremacy, not on the battlefield but in the sporting arena.
Like every gospel, the Olympics tells a story, a story which begins with nations divided internally by competing interests among the population and externally by rivalries and wars. Conflict is the character of our world. But this character is suspended by an agreement every four years to exchange wars for friendly games. The effects of this suspension include national unity and pride, the working together towards the more benign goal of “owning the podium”.
So the Olympics tells a story which begins with war but ends in hope–that in four years time the nations of the world will once again find the courage to accept the invitation to lay down their weapons, and to convert dangerous animosity into friendly competition. Implied but not stated is the ultimate hope, that there might come a time when there would be no need for an Olympiad to suspend war, but that peace and justice would reign over the world.
The modern games is based on the ancient practice of gathering athletes across the Hellenistic and Roman empires. The ancient games was banned by the Christian emperor Theodosius in the fourth century because of its pagan associations. The modern Olympic revival dates to the late nineteenth century. It was an educationist named Pierre de Coubertin who saw organized sports as a way of building national character and peaceful relations through friendly competition. This modern ideal employs the ancient games as a means to these ends. And so from the first games in 1896 the gospel of the Olympics has made itself visible in modern rituals with an ancient feel. In fact, the mythology of the Olympics is so successful that we rarely pause to consider where these ceremonies come from.
The answers may be surprising.
The lighting of the Olympic torch for example dates only to 1928, as does the tradition of the nation of Greece entering first. The memory of the Greeks (associated with the dawn of civilization) links past and present. So also does the procession of the torch from Olympia, the site of the ancient games, to the present site. Shaped by Hitler’s propaganda machine and documented in Leni Reifenstahl’s Olympia, the torch relay was first staged at Berlin in 1936. It was a powerful acknowledgement of the ancient, pagan ideals the games embodied.
The Olympic rings were also exploited by Nazi propaganda, even though their adoption in 1912 was to represent the global community. The Olympic creed and the Olympic motto are the creation of de Coubertin himself, first appearing in 1908. The motto Citius, Altius, Fortius (“faster, higher, stronger”) captures well the idea of progress in our modern world, the idea that highlights our obsession with breaking records. Perhaps this is why so many of the Olympics’ corporate sponsors make use of it. But the motto is also in tension with the creed of the games, which says it’s not about winning, but about competing. The creed of course has also evolved with the times, and now takes into account the problem of corruption of officials (remember Sale and Pelletier?) and doping (remember Ben Johnson?). Guided by an ever-evolving creed, the Olympic ideal must be maintained in a world ever able to find new ways of subverting it.
2 What does the gospel of Jesus Christ say about the Olympics?
And so when the Chair of the London bid committee Sebastian Coe told the gathered nations at the recent opening ceremonies that sport has a kind of purity [or holiness] and that in each event was contained all that mattered in life, he was preaching a gospel. But this is a gospel different to the gospel of Jesus Christ. For the gathering of the nations to play games not make war always takes place in the midst of conflict. Think of the boycotts of the 1970s, where African countries refused to share the Olympic peace with New Zealand for its sporting friendliness with apartheid South Africa. Think of the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow games after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and the reprisal at Los Angeles in 1984. In London, the refusal by the International Olympic Committee to acknowledge the anniversary of the greatest violation of the Olympic peace 40 years ago during the ceremonies was telling, as was the fact that the games had to be protected by a blanket of security and a mobilization of troops the scale of which had not been seen in decades.
All these things demonstrate the gospel of the Olympics as a faint echo of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Finally, the Olympics forms a piece with the greatest mass religion of modern times: the religion of consumerism. And so the participation we are encouraged towards is not only to run faster like Usain Bolt, or to score more goals like Christine Sinclair, but to watch them while consuming pseudo-food like Big Macs bought with our Visa card, and washed down with stomach-rotting Coca Cola!
The gospel of Jesus Christ also imagines the nations uniting, not on Mt Olympus but on God’s holy mountain. Isaiah 60 and Revelation 20 speak of a gathering of nations that begins with the gathering of the people of God, a people who are defined not by the banner or flag they carry, but by their membership in the covenant. This is a gathering not to watch people striving for faster, higher, and stronger feats, but to worship. This is a gathering not to mark an Olympiad, but the sabbath rest of God, now extended to all creation. The light of this New Jerusalem shines brighter than the glitter of London or any other Olympic venue. The nations are drawn to this light, to this city which has no need for police protection. There they bring their treasures as an offering to the God of creation.
The gospel of Jesus Christ also gives us a vision of peace. But this is not a peace created by wars that end war, nor does it need to be enforced by the armies of empire. In fact, it is a peace that reverses the normal course of the world’s affairs. It is a peace that comes at the very moment human violence and folly reaches its peak. It is a peace in the aftermath of which the strong and the swift, the rich and the powerful take second place to those they have oppressed and exploited.
This gathering is blessed with these words: “I will appoint Peace as your overseer and Righteousness as your taskmaster. Violence shall no more be heard in your land, devastation or destruction within your borders; you shall call your walls Salvation, and your gates Praise.” (Isaiah 60: 17b–18) Peace comes as a gift to those who wait with patience, dedication, and discipline. It comes as the overturning of oppression. Again the memory of enslavement is central, the terms “overseer” and “taskmaster” recall Israel’s experience prior to the Exodus.
In ancient times, the arena was a site for the supreme demonstration of the pax Romana–the peace of Rome that kept its provinces under its thumb. The gospel of Jesus Christ also creates a great arena for people to be involved. But this is not a gathering of spectators, but of participants. This brings us to the second scripture reading, which I’ll come to in a moment.
But first let me reiterate: the gospel of Jesus Christ affirms the desires present in the Olympics. The desires for unity, participation, and peace are good things, implanted by the image of God. But while these desires are displayed by the Olympics, they cannot be fulfilled in the Olympics. The true signs and wonders that accompany the spectacle of the reconciliation of the nations are not laser shows, fireworks, and death-defying stunts (not even Queen Elizabeth and James Bond together jumping from a helicopter), but the ultimate wonders of resurrection and new life.
3 What do the Olympics say to us?
In the ancient world, sports and worship simply went hand-in-hand, as did athletics and war. The games were accompanied by hymns of praise and sacrifices to their patron–Zeus / Jupiter in the case of the Olympics. This is why the ancient Jews were very suspicious of sports: they were inseparably linked to idolatry.
But this didn’t mean that the New Testament writers weren’t above using the games as examples of Christian life in the world, or the athlete as a model for discipleship. Of course in doing this they changed the story which the games told, the nature of its setting, and the rituals which communicated its goals.
So the letter to the Hebrews imagines faithful discipleship as a race run before spectators. But the spectators are not passive consumers of the spectacle. They are those who have run before us, who have finished the race, and who now await us in glory. Those who have gone before us are also around us and ahead of us.
What does the athlete model for us?
– focused training and preparation
– self discipline and dedication to a single goal
– cooperation and awareness of playing a role on a team (something different to the ancient world–but reflected in what Paul will say about the body of Christ).
For Paul, the athlete is the one who gives up their rights for the sake of attaining the prize, but who also must run in a certain way in order not to be disqualified. The virtues of preparation and self-discipline are not only for athletes, nor even for apostles. They are for all of us who are in pursuit of the Kingdom of God through following Jesus Christ.
They are exemplified not in those who run faster, who jump higher, who prove themselves stronger, but
– in the man who leaves his wealth and privilege to serve with dedication the poor of his community
– in the grandmother who perserveres in courage to care for HIV-positive children in South Africa
– in the church whose witness to the truth leads it to take a risk in opposing unjust laws, bearing the violence of the state on its shoulders.
These will not receive perishable gold, silver, or bronze medals, but a greater, imperishable prize.
Conclusion
You and I this morning are invited into this communion, this peace as we lay old ways aside, old habits that prevent us from running well and as we take on new ways that point us in the direction of the imperishable wreath of God’s destiny for us. This is what the Olympics shows us, and the gospel of Jesus Christ allows us to live into. May we all take this challenge to heart as we go forth to serve his Kingdom this week.
Amen.
August 13, 2012
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April 7, 2010
The Truce of God 3: “Illusions of Peace”
The “illusions of peace” Williams speaks of concern peace either as escape from engagement with the other, or as an equilibrium which fears real engagement lest war break out. The former is typified in the hippie movement of the sixties; the latter by the nuclear detente ensured by the Cold War. In both cases the casualty is language, which ceases to be communication woven into genuine human exchange (where those involved give and receive, thereby opening and expanding their horizons) and becomes slogan. When pursuing peace becomes repetition of catchphrases (“All we are saying, is give peace a chance”) or bureaucratic doublespeak (“destroying the village in order to save it“), discourse has shut down. We live in “unreality”, which for Williams means to live in privacy, in an “impregnable castle of cliche and repetition” (53).
The legacy of lost discourse remains with us in a post-Cold War world, perhaps captured in a common mistake my students make when they write “pacifism” as “passive-ism”. Peace means maintaining the status quo, refusing to act with a decisiveness that challenges the grain of society, or that places the self at risk. And so Williams writes of “a miserable link between militarized politics, consumer society, the corruption and decline of the arts, and the cheapening and trivializing of language—in politics, journalism, advertising, and worship.” (55)
Against peace as “intensified withdrawal”, Williams offers a surprising counter: the cloister. Not the romanticized cloister of popular fiction and singing nuns, but rather the cloister that “abandons privacy for a solitude which forces people to confront their fear and evasiveness and so equips them for involvement by a stripping down of the will.… having shed the impulses to self-protection and self-gratification which limit and distort its horizon.” (63) Williams recounts a story from Dom Hubert van Zeller: “a North Welsh convent where the garden gate had at some point in its chequered career been reversed—so that the side facing inwards now read ‘Private’ in large letters. The cloister was being warned to keep its distance from the privacy of the world.” (63) The point is that the world is a place of “isolated existence, fear of facing the cost of decision and involvement—haunted by the fantasy of ‘peace’.
The church faces its own temptations to withdrawal. Even the self-consciously prophetic church, can become “an impregnable castle” when its social engagement manifests a fondness for generalized denunciations”, launching missives from a comfortable distance (64). It will take distance from the world, but from “the tight huddle of fear, where people cling together to feed each other’s fantasies”, from “the decayed and corrupting language of self-justifying and self-perpetuating cliques”, and from “the manipulations and distortions of a self incapable of opening up to others.” (64)
Returning to the cloister, the three classic monastic practices: solitude, silence, and contemplation are necessary to create space for new patterns of community, speech, and action (65). This is indeed a kind of death, but one that “redraws the boundaries” of what a genuinely human life is: a life conformed to the pattern revealed in Jesus (65).
I’m put in mind of two rather extreme figures: Paul Tillich, who once said that the best thing the church of his day [1950s America] could do would be to renounce speech for a time, and Sting, who penned the immortal lines
poets, priests and politicians / have words to thank for their positions / words that scream for your submission / no-one’s jamming their transmission / when their eloquence escapes you / their logic ties you up and rapes you / da do do do, de da da da / is all I want to say to you.
OK, so repeating nonsense syllables to the powers that be is not exactly responsible protest politics, and the line
[words] are only cheques I’ve left unsigned / from the banks of chaos in my mind
is a little two nihlistic for my tastes. (Williams has an interesting paragraph in which he, via Thomas Merton, speculates on the pervasiveness of “speaking in tongues” amongst conservatives at times of social crisis that may well echo Sting’s sentiments here (54–55).) What is one to do “when language takes a holiday”? Perhaps silence is better than speaking. And silence can be its own eloquent protest—I’m thinking of the refusal of Bishop Barnabas Legkanyane at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997—interrupting discourses that are so “word heavy” that they risk falling into the kind of ideology Williams warns against.
Silence as a way of non-violent protest, and as clearing space for the renewal of discourse, is an interesting idea. What kind of liturgical shape would such silence take? How would we worship without words? And what then would be the shape of “the peace of Christ” that we’d exchange? For that, we have to wait for the next chapter, entitled “Not as the World Gives.”
The Rambling Man 