Marriage equality and ‘the Christian constituency’

Kevin Rudd has caused a stink. His defection to the pro marriage-equality camp has the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) up in arms. In their media release today the warnings are dire.

According to the ACL, the consequences of marriage equality in Australia will include (i) the creation of a new ‘stolen generation’, (ii) the inclusion of gay sex ‘mechanics’ in our school curriculum, (iii) the destruction of Christian businesses, and (iv) the prospect of public servants and pastors being ‘hauled into court’ and prosecuted for their convictions. They end with the declaration that ‘no government has the right to create these vulnerabilities for the church-going 20% of the population in order to allow the 0.2% of the population who will take advantage of this to redefine marriage.’

It’s a frightening read and, I suspect, is intended to be so. Members of this lobby group are clearly troubled by the prospect of change to our definition of marriage and genuinely believe their fears are well grounded. Whatever I make of these assertions, the ACL has the right to voice them and to do so as passionately and directly as they can. They speak for their constituency. What troubles me is not so much what they assert but who they infer that constituency to be.

In today’s press interviews and media release, the ACL speaks broadly of ‘the Christian constituency.’ It infers, first, that there is such a thing, a uniform Christian community—perhaps that church-going 20% of the national population or the 64% of Australians who ‘declare themselves to be Christians’— that stands united against marriage equality and, second, that the ACL is their preferred public voice. This is not the case.

According to its own website, the ACL does not profess or presume to be ‘a peak body’ for the church. It is governed by a board of eight men—three conservative Anglicans, one Catholic, two Baptists, one Pentecostal, and one from an independent fundamentalist church in Toowoomba. None of them are appointed by their denominations. In deciding on policy positions, the ACL bases its decisions on ‘orthodox historical understandings of Biblical Christian teaching.’ It does so in consultation with unnamed ‘senior church leaders’ and ‘Christian subject matter experts’ but is clear that its board of eight men is its ‘final arbiter’ in all policy matters.

I do not know how many Christians the ACL represents. Their own publicity does not make those numbers available and they have no mechanism for membership. The only hint is that should I choose to ‘register my support’ with their organization I can add my voice to the ‘thousands across Australia’ who have already done so. What I do know is that no matter how many there are, on this matter I am not one of them.

Despite the posturing of the ACL, I want people to know that there are many sincere ‘church-going’ Christians around this country for whom the ACL does not speak. Not at all. We find their assertions and fear mongering as offensive and alienating as do many others. We may not be members of the Kevin Rudd fan club, but as fellow Christians we welcome Rudd’s support on this important issue.

The bishop and the atheist

I am not often moved by a book, not one of this genre. I am intrigued, challenged, educated, infuriated or bored, but rarely moved. Pitting the perspectives of atheism and religious faith against each other can be occasionally stimulating, often frustrating, but moving? Hardly. This book is different.

Graeme and Jonathan Rutherford’s Beloved Father Beloved Son is a very personal book–a series of letters between Graeme, a bishop in the Anglican church, and his son Jonathan, an atheist. By personal, I don’t mean it’s one that wades in the intimate biography of their relationship. Not at all. What they write about is what they believe, drawing rationally on very different world views, multiple disciplines, and articulating their disparate perspectives on life and how they understand it. With rigour they debate the origins of human life, the place of suffering, the veracity of religious texts, the incredulity of divine interventions, and the human search for meaning. In this sense there is nothing new here. Such debates have a long and often tiresome history. What sets this book apart is the nature of the interaction.

The pull of the book is in the very intimate nature of the conversation. One is never far from the fact that these two are family. Both are well read, articulate in their beliefs, and can disagree vigorously, calling a spade a spade when necessary. However, their very honest conversation is soaked in mutual respect. That respect results in a genuine listening between them, one that has been learned through years of intimate and, I suspect, challenging relationship.

I am moved by two things. First, to be honest, I identify. I know firsthand the pain of parenting a child who will not have a bar of my religious beliefs. Though I have suffered my own long nights of fatherly ‘guilt’ and ‘failure’, in my better moments, and especially when listening to a conversation like this, I am encouraged. There has never been a moment in my own family life where we have not been able to talk, debate and wrestle with our understandings, disparate though they be. What’s more, I have watched the deeper values of my faith blossom in the life of the one I love regardless of creed. It is interesting to me that it’s in the last two chapters of this book, ‘the human search for meaning’ and ‘spirituality’, that the common longings of father and son dovetail most closely. Though they disagree vigorously about so much, what they aspire to in the deeper recesses of their lives is not so far apart.

Second, I am challenged. The nature of public debate in this country has deteriorated. The same is true within the church. The stones thrown between the new atheists and people of faith and large and bruising, the language dismissive and sneering. So, too, the trenches of the religiously ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ are dug ever deeper. Try for a respectful conversation on something like marriage equality and things get ugly. We stop listening. Our language deteriorates. Relationships are marred, sometimes destroyed.

For me, this book demonstrates another way. When we disagree within the church, we do so as family. Just as Graeme and Jonathan will never cease to be father and son, so even when our perspectives and experiences vary, we people of faith never cease to be family. We talk. We listen. We argue. We listen. We disagree with passion and vigour, but then we regather at the table and break bread. As Graeme says to his son in the closing paragraphs of the book, ‘Wherever our journey leads us from here, we must both continue to resist the temptation to turn knowledge into ammunition.’

Graeme Rutherford & Jonathan Rutherford, Beloved Father Beloved Son: A conversation about faith between a bishop and his atheist son, Preston: Mosaic Press, 2013.

The desire for love

The desire for love

Psalm 63.1-8

As a young pastor, I befriended a young man whose life had become a tragic series of disappointments. His name was Stuart. Stuart’s drug addiction had alienated his already dysfunctional family. His move to Victoria from northern Queensland had separated him from his fragile support networks. Since his arrival in Melbourne, his repellant behaviour had soured the few friendships he had made. He was alone and reduced to living in a back room of a sex shop in St Kilda where he worked during the day and slept at night.

In order to see Stuart, I had to go to the shop at night and sit with him on his sleeping bag laid out on the floor. I remember on my first visit, sitting nervously in my car just outside the shop door. It was a busy road and there was no back entrance. I was convinced that as soon as I got out of the car to enter, a deacon from my church would drive by. Thankfully that didn’t happen.

I had never before nor have I since sat with someone for whom the absence of love was so tragically evident, nor for whom the longing for love was so palpable. Stuart would sit so close to me on the floor I was often uncomfortable yet his need for human warmth was painfully clear. When I led his funeral six months later, the consequence of an overdose, I was the only one there.

For the last five Sundays, we have been reflecting together on the desires that drive us, the longings that compel us forward in life. Guided by Hugh Mackay’s book What Makes Us Tick?, we’ve explored the desire for something to believe in, the desire for ‘my place,’ the desire to be useful, the desire to belong, and the desire for more. Today we conclude with the desire for love.

In the very last paragraph of his book, Mackay describes the desire for love as the deepest and most profound of all our desires, the one that sits beneath and within every longing we know. Indeed, the longing for love is a defining element of what it means to be human. From a Christian perspective, this desire flows directly from the fact that we are created in the image of a loving God. As God loves, so we love. As God craves our love in return, so we crave love in response to our own. It’s because of this that the thought of saying anything helpful about love is overwhelming. Love is such an all-encompassing thing, such a deeply complex and emotionally loaded business that speaking of it in any meaningful way is fraught with difficulty.

It’s a bit like Mothers Day. When all is well and life is ideal, celebrating a day like this one comes easily. But life is hardly ever entirely well or ideal. The airbrushed images of motherly love, of maternal dreams and longings realized, of tender embraces and perfect smiles, don’t often match the reality of our lives. For days like today can be unwelcome reminders of what we have lost or never known, of what has be taken from us or failed us, of our own unmet longings or disappointments. While some of us can rejoice on days like today, and we should, others cannot.

As Mackay says so well, when it comes to the love of family there is the ideal and there is reality. In the ideal, love begins in our mother’s arms and continues in a family of perfect security. It is here we learn the nature of unconditional love; we learn of love unearned but given freely and without reserve. It is here we experience the appropriate intimacy of love and the healing power of touch and refuge. And it is here that we experience the life-giving connection between faith and love, embraced by those who believe in us unreservedly and who stand beside us no matter what. All of this, however, describes an ideal, a picture of love at its best. The reality is often quite different. Tragically for some, the ideal is almost entirely absent and days like today are nothing but a cruel reminder of this fact.

So it is, too, with romantic love–love with that special someone. We long for it, we aspire to it, we idealize it, we thrill to it and hold it tenaciously when we find it, feeling things in its grip we have never felt before. And yet when this same love fails us, eludes us, crumbles beneath us or is defined by society as out of bounds, we feel a pain that cuts so deeply we can barely function. It can leave us bruised, scarred, exhausted. Still, no matter how bruised, our desire for it never lessens. The truth is, no matter how many years pass, no matter how wrinkled the skin or sparse the hair, our need for love–our desire to express it and feel it in return–remains as strong as it has ever been. As Mackay says:

‘There is no evidence to suggest that as we age and mature, the desire for love diminishes. We still need the affirmation of love, the comfort of love, the reassurance of love, the rich reward of having our offer of love accepted, the particular form of emotional security that only comes from being loved.’

Despite the dominant images in our media–the ones that define love as overwhelmingly youthful–the longing for love is universal. No matter our age, our gender, our sexuality, our life experience, education or personality, what we all have in common is a desire for love. It is with us for life. In the words of Mother Teresa, the need for love is ‘a hunger much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.’ The desire for love runs deep. It was so for my friend Stuart, and it is so for us.

Psalm 63 is a psalm of David. It was written long ago from the wilderness of Judah, a place of exile and isolation for its author. Bereft of friends and family, suffering under the weight of his own moral failure and surrounded by enemies ready to gloat over his defeat, David expresses his need for love. He thirsts for it. His flesh faints for it. To quench this thirst, he calls upon the love of God, the only love he knows to be secure and dependable: ‘your steadfast love is better than life,’ he declares, though in the thick of his own tears I imagine. David nestles down into the shadow of God’s wings as he clings to this love. And it is here that he finds the resources to return to the challenges of his life and relationships, restored and empowered.

There are three things about the desire for love that I want to simply underline this morning.

Firstly, our desire for love is both gift and burden. It is gift because through it we discover the beauty and richness of life. Through it we are healed and enabled as David was. Through it we find our reason for being in the world and we can face whatever life holds. But the desire for love is also our burden. For living in love is the most demanding and costly calling. Many of you know that first hand. Our love can be refused, abused, taken for granted, misunderstood or thrown in our face. Our thirst for it can cause such anguish of heart that we sometimes wish we could be done with it. Our endless yearning for it can send us into addictive behaviours that cast shadows over our lives and relationships. At its best, love can give the deepest joy; at its worst, the deepest pain. It is both gift and burden.

Secondly, in our desire for love we cannot have the gift without the burden. We cannot know love in all its liberating, life-giving grace without the experiences of pain and struggle. To walk away from the burden is to walk away from the gift. David could only plumb the depths of God’s love because he had known the depths of despair. As painful as love can be, as demanding as it is, as consuming that our longing for it can become, the only alternative to bearing the pain is to shut ourselves down and harden our hearts. And what profit is that, to ourselves or to others? The joint commandments to love God with heart, soul, mind and strength and to love our neighbour as ourselves depend entirely on our willingness to remain open to love, to have hearts that can sore the heights and navigate the depths. We cannot know the gift apart from the burden.

Thirdly, this desire for love is God given and common to us all. To desire love and intimacy is part-and-parcel of what it means to be human … for all of us.  The debate in our society about the rights of the Gay and Lesbian community to the ritual of marriage is far from resolved. Even here in this church we are not uniform on this question. Thankfully what we do agree on is the basic Baptist commitment to freedom of conscience in our approach to an issue like this one, our commitment to name injustice when we see it, and our determination to stand on the side of the marginalized. The freedom you give Carolyn and I to speak out on issues like these is a great gift and soon Carolyn will take her place in a very public event on this very issue. Whatever our views on marriage equality, let me say this. For the church to actively promote the expression of fidelity and faithfulness in love between two people while at the same time denouncing all expressions of covenant love between two people with a different sexuality raises some critical questions for the church. If we are created with an inbuilt need for love and intimacy in our lives, all of us, then to cheer on the expression of that love for the majority while having nothing to say to the minority but the exhortation to ‘stop it,’ seems to run counter to our resounding affirmation of God’s love for all humanity.

My friend Stuart craved love. Through his actions and choices, he inadvertently pushed away the very thing he longed for. His unmet longing led him to an early death. I can only believe that the steadfast and enduring love of God received him into the love he so desired all his life and that there he rests today. But you and I are still here, craving love just as deeply–to experience it and to express it. That is at it should be. We are made for love. May you know its gift from God and may you never cease to bear its burdens with faith and hope.

Conclusion

As we draw this series of reflections to a close, I want to suggest that we reframe this idea of ‘desires that drive us’ to ‘longings that inspire us.’ We know that every human drive has as much potential for darkness as for light, but as people of faith we believe in the transforming power of God’s Spirit. Rather than being held captive to the drives of selfishness and personal gain, we aspire to the resurrection life of God. In Christ these drives are reshaped into God-given longings: the longing for something bigger than ourselves to believe in and live for; the longing for experiences of home, community and belonging that include all people; the longing to know our worth in God and not in the fickleness of our own achievements; the longing for more of all that is good, just and life-giving in the world; and the longing for love that gives and receives in equal measure.

May God lift our vision and entice us forward into the fulness of life.

Amen.

John, me and Dorothy

I didn’t know until now, but apparently I have a John allergy. I must have. How else can I explain my aversion? By John, I mean the gospel. You know, Matthew, Mark, Luke and … that one. With four to choose from, I clearly have a preference. I wouldn’t have guessed it, but ferreting through my sermon files (yes, we pastors have them … riveting stuff) the evidence is overwhelming. Luke and Mark are looking positively rosy, Matthew less so, and John … well, let’s just say he’s a bit lonely.

I only know this because I’ve just finished reading Dorothy A Lee’s book Hallowed in Truth and Love. It’s an exploration of the spirituality of John, both in his gospels and letters. I picked it up some time back, more because I’ve met Dorothy and respect her scholarship than out of a passion for the subject. But now I’ve read it I wonder why I waited so long. It’s an inspiring read, so much so that I was propelled to my files to make my sobering discovery.

It makes no sense really, this John aversion. As the product of a robust evangelicalism, I was formed in a tradition with a clear preference for John. I remember the advice to new converts: ‘read the bible … start with John!’ After all, it’s full of the most compelling stories of encounter with Jesus along with beautifully poetic descriptions of his role in the life of faith. What’s not to like? But it’s clear I have stayed away. As for why, that’s probably best left for my therapist and me (I do need to get one of those). Regardless, Dorothy has called me back and I’m glad.

I suppose the path was made easier by the focus of this work. As a pastor and preacher, I struggle a bit with commentaries. In my experience they often treat the text more as a problem to be solved than a source of truth to be discerned. As a bit of a spirituality nut, it is wonderfully refreshing for me to find a New Testament teacher of Dorothy’s ability listening intelligently for the experience of God in the text and allowing that experience an authoritative voice in understanding its truth . Too often, the spirituality of the text, its author and audience, are important to the scholar only in a derivative way if at all. But that’s not the case here.

I do not mean this is an easy read, heavy on the devotional and light on scholarship. Certainly not. But what I valued most as I read was the sense of the writer as more than a scholar. I wrote in the margins of the first chapter ‘preacher, scholar, pilgrim.’ And it was this sense that carried through the entire book. One cannot help but sense the author knows something of this spirituality herself. Not in an overt way. It’s simply there in the text. What’s more, her affirmation of the gospel’s imagery, its acknowledgement of both light and darkness in the way of discipleship, and its appeal to and affirmation of the senses … all of this reminds me of John’s worth.

There is so much in this book that inspire me back to the gospel, and, even more, back to the pulpit. For one who does not often relish preaching, that’s quite a feat.

Kitchen Table Memoirs

I’m not long back from a few days in Christchurch, New Zealand, with the wonderful communities that make up the church formally known as Spreydon, now Southwest. More of that later. On the way home I passed the transit hours (always too many) reading Nick Richardson’s Kitchen Table Memoirs: Shared Stories from Australian Writers.

It’s a gathering of very personal reflections centred around life at the table, most commonly kitchen tables but including a few in restaurants and professional kitchens, even a community table shared deep in the Antarctic. It’s a gentle collection, undemanding and easy to read, sometimes funny, occasionally odd, and often moving. Each chapter provides a small insight into the highly personal worlds of domestic memory, family intimacy, regret, longing or the simple comfort that a table can provide. Contributors include comedians Denise Scott and Jean Kittson, writer Helen Garner, food historian Barbara Santich, chef Stefano de Piere and restaurant critic Gemima Cody.

A collection like this could easily slip into shallow sentimentality. The truth of table memories on public view can be lost in a romantic mist more to do with wishful longing than reality. For the most part, this collection avoids the trap. There’s enough reality here to make this a worthwhile read for anyone wanting to appreciate again just how central the kitchen table is to life, no matter how scarred and fragile it might have turned out to be.

Some words worth repeating:

‘The table was the centre of the family, touched hundreds of thousands of times. Touched and thumped and leant on and slumped on and very occasionally stood on at moments of joy and grief and relief and revelation. Whoopee has been made around it, and war. A normal bag of life’s emotions, and a family’s. … Everything happened at the table. The table was the tablet on which the stories were written in DNA and scuffs and stains. … the table wasn’t just an open book with footnotes and handwritten jottings and the impress and imprint of everyone whose lives had intersected at the table. It was a whole library. A leatherbound, handsewn, copperplate record, with mug rings and ink stains and spit on the corners and all.’ (Jean Kittson)

‘In the glorious clusterfuck of our existence, the table was our sanctuary from the greater insanity of the real world. Two square metres of civilisation. … That scored and battered stretch of wood was classroom, courtroom, parliament and temple. It was theatre and restaurant and sometimes zoo. A place where peace was found in the meditative cutting of carrots. Where we learnt the rewards of trusting the unknown by taking a chance on the liver. And where, over a thousand chicken pies, and many more teas, we’d argue the world down to a size and shape that made some sense.’ (Gemima Cody)

Nick Richardson ed., Kitchen Table Memoirs: Shared Stories from Australian Writers, ABC Books (HarperCollins): Sydney, 2013

‘My place’

Number 2

The desire for ‘my place’
John 14.1-7

You may not have been there in 1939 when that glorious film The Wizard of Oz was first screened. Chances are, though, you’ll recognize its music and know its story in detail. Who can forget a young Judy Garland looking wistfully across the Kansas cornfields singing those dream-like words ‘Somewhere over the rainbow’? The film version is based on L. Frank Baum’s story by the same name. It’s a good read. Not long after Dorothy’s arrival in the land of Oz and at the beginning of her journey along the yellow brick road, Baum recounts a conversation between Dorothy and her new friend, the Scarecrow.

‘Tell me something about yourself, and the country you come from,’ said the Scarecrow, when she had finished her dinner. So she told him all about Kansas, and how grey everything was there, and how the cyclone had carried her to this queer land of Oz. The Scarecrow listened carefully, and said, ‘I cannot understand why you should wish to leave this beautiful country and go back to the dry, grey place you call Kansas.’ ‘That is because you have no brains,’ answered the girl. ‘No matter how dreary and grey our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.’ ‘Of course I cannot understand it,’ he said. ‘If your heads were all stuffed with straw like mine, you would probably all live in beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all. It is fortunate for Kansas that you have brains.’

‘There is no place like home.’ Home is a potent word, a word that carries such a weight of meaning, memory and longing that our ability to articulate it is rare. That’s because the idea of home speaks out of and into the deepest part of who we are as human beings. Its beauty and meaning are not measured so much by what we see but by how we feel and who we are when we are there.

In his book, What Makes Us Tick?, the social researcher Hugh Mackay details ten desires that drive us. Based upon decades of listening to ordinary Australians talk about their hopes and beliefs, Mackay holds up a mirror, helping us to see the longings that most define our daily lives. In this series, we are exploring six of these desires from the perspective of Christian faith–evaluating and critiquing these desires in light of our belief that life is a gift given to us by God. Last Sunday we explored the desire for something to believe in, and today, the desire for ‘my place.’

Mackay describes home as a ‘multilayered concept,’ invested with a host of meanings and associations. Home might speak of where we currently live, or our place of origin–a house or neighbourhood from childhood. It might describe a particular set of relationships to which we return periodically. It might have to do with a sense of personal territory or comfort, a back shed, a Sunday pew, a park bench to which we return again and again–a place in which we feel secure and at home. In the land of the great Australian dream, the aspiration to home ownership is deeply connected to our sense of citizenship and belonging in a way that is almost unparalleled in the rest of the world. According to Mackay, this longing for home, whatever form it takes, is ‘a desire for a place that is unambiguously ours; a place that is in harmony with us; that welcomes and comforts us; that says things about us we’re pleased to have said.’ Mackay describes it as an anchor in our lives, a refuge, a stable reference point in a world that is complex and constantly changing. At its best, it’s a place of belonging, identity and security. For Mackay, the desire for a place to call our own sits at the heart of what it means to be human. It is only when we are deprived of such a place we begin to understand its importance. It’s all this that makes the experience of homelessness so violating.

Who can ever forget the fires of Black Saturday here in Victoria. Night after night we heard on the television news the stories of those who suffered such terrible loss. We wept with those who stood awkwardly before the television cameras, their decimated homes still smouldering behind them. Repeatedly we heard these brave people dismiss the loss of their homes and possessions as nothing compared to the sacredness of life itself: ‘At least we’re still here; that’s what matters,’ they said. Of course, they were right and profoundly so. Yet as they turned away from the cameras to look back at what was gone, the tears and bewilderment betrayed the fact that it did matter, and deeply so. Places count. Bricks and mortar they may be, but our homes are us. They speak deeply of who we are and where we belong.

From a Christian perspective, the importance of home is only underlined. Certainly, in the biblical narrative the idea of home features prominently from beginning to end. The story begins in Genesis with the garden of Eden, a place given by God to humankind, a home in which to flourish and prosper. The story of the people of Israel is a journey from nothing to nationhood, from homelessness to the promised land, a place flowing with milk and honey in which the people find their identity and security. In today’s reading, Jesus reassures his bewildered followers that he goes to prepare a place for them, a house with many rooms. It’s a grounded promise, a promise that understands our need for place and belonging. What’s more, Jesus’ story of the prodigal son returning home to the embrace of his waiting father is the moving story of salvation for all humankind:

‘Come home, come home,
you who are weary, come home;
earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling,
calling, o sinner, come home!’

And in Revelation, the final book of the bible, we have described that place of eternal home, a neighbourhood lined with houses and trees and its streets paved in gold. From beginning to end, according to the scriptures, we are made for place; we are made for home, at home in Christ and destined for homecoming.

But this affirmation of home and our in-built need for it is not the full story from a biblical perspective. Neither is it for Mackay. Mackay goes on to say that our sense of home is only complete when we understand that our desires for ‘my place’ and ‘our place’ are linked. The needs for home and community go hand in hand. Home is never home in isolation. According to Mackay, ‘If we lose our sense of being connected to a local community, we lose a significant part of our sense of home.’ If our sense of home is only about what happens within the four walls of a house, or within the walls of memory or personal security, then home becomes a fortress, a place defined more by fear and boundary than by relationship and community.

The rise of gated communities is testament to this; people retreating behind walls and secured gates for the sake of personal safety. The result, however, according to the most recent studies, is not a greater sense of security for these residents but an even more heightened sense of fear. While the residents of such communities attests to a very positive feeling of security while at home, whenever they venture beyond the gates their perceived fears skyrocket.

An old maxim of the urban planning community is that as we shape our neighbourhoods, so our neighbourhoods are shaping us. According to Mackay, ‘This is why local neighbourhoods–the actual places where we share the experiences of living in communities–play such a crucial role in our moral formation. The local neighbourhood is the test-bed our our values.’ Similarly in our Christian calling, the most fundamental ethic of the home is that we should love our neighbour as we love ourselves, that we should love those beyond the front door as intentionally as we love those behind it.

In his celebrated book Sense of Place, Sense of Time, the late and respected social geographer John Brinkerhoff Jackson describes the role of the home using the metaphor of the hand:

‘It is the hand we raise to indicate our presence; it is the hand that protects and holds what is its own; the home or hand creates its own small world; it is the visible expression of our identity and our intentions. It is the hand which reaches out to establish and confirm relationship. Without it we are never complete social beings.’

Jackson’s metaphor is helpful. The purpose of a good metaphor is that it helps us get a handle on something difficult to grasp. It helps us understand better the roles that the home plays in our lives and, even more, the interconnectedness of these roles. First the home is the hand we raise to indicate our presence in the neighbourhood; it’s an expression of our identity as a household or family. Second, its the hand that enfolds and protects; its a place of refuge, healing and connection for those who live there. And thirdly, its the hand that reaches out to initiate and confirm relationship with those around it; its an inclusive place of invitation, hospitality and welcome. The first two expressions of home are not difficult for us to embrace: the hand that we raise as an expression of our identity; the hand with which we enfold those within. It is perhaps the third that we find more challenging; the hand that reaches out and beyond.

A few years back, the cultural analyst from the University of Western Sydney, Fiona Allon, released the fascinating book Renovation Nation. In it she documents Australia’s longstanding obsession with homeownership. This obsession, she argues, is now surpassed by our infatuation with home renovations. To a degree unmatched anywhere else in the world, we are preoccupied with improving and changing what we have—upgrading, extending and modernizing. Allon cites a recent report that surveyed 2000 homeowners across Australia. The report found that 90% of homeowners are currently renovating their homes or have specific plans to do so. On average we have up to five renovation projects on the go at any one time. The two most common motivations for home renovations are increasing resale value, and enhancing our quality of life. And it seems we are prepared to spend significant amounts to make it happen. Just under 70% of home renovators are spending in excess of $60,000.

While Allon has no religious barrow to push, she expresses concern with what drives this infatuation. Perhaps in the face of fear, terror and uncertainty, we are retreating ever deeper into our homes, obsessively feathering our own nests, cacooning ourselves from the threats of diversity and difference that push in on every side. Ultimately, Allon says, ‘renovations engage our imaginations but narrow our horizons; it excites our vision but limits what we see.‘ And in the process, we collectively pull up the draw bridge and secure the boundaries.

Allon’s words are important for us to hear. While the desire for home is strong and, according to scripture, God-given, it can so easily be reduced to a very self-serving, self-protecting drive that ignores its essential connection to community and neighbourhood. In our 5pm service today, we are exploring the Christian response to asylum seekers, those who come to our shores looking for a sense of home and belonging. Its a contentious issue in our society. If the church, like the home, is a hand we raise in identity, a hand by which we enfold those within, offering a refuge of healing and renewal, and hand that we extend to those most in need beyond our front doors, then what does this mean for our response to those who come to this land from other shores, often broken and without any sense of belonging or home? These are important questions to ask. In our reading today, Jesus is reassuring his fearful disciples, telling them of the home he goes to prepare for them, but he does so in the context of commissioning them for mission. Security and challenge go hand in hand, and no less for us today.

In my early twenties I was a regular visitor to a Benedictine monastery, a community of brothers committed to a lifetime of living, working and praying together. I would stay for a few days at a time in a small room sparsely but neatly furnished with a single bed and a small wooden desk. After several of these visits I noticed an old and yellowed piece of paper mounted in a cheap plastic frame on the back of the door. It was a prayer of dedication that a Benedictine prayed as he moved into his ‘cell.’ I copied the words into my journal and have used it in all the years since as my own prayer. By simply replacing the word cell with the word home, it became mine in a very moving and helpful way. I close with its words this morning:

Lord, this house
is to be my home.
May you holy power
furnish it in peace
and decorate its four walls
with holiness
so that your sacred presence
will also abide here.

Lord, it is not large or grand
but it is to be my living place.
May I find within its close quarters
refreshment and your sacred space.

May your spirit of prayer
be my frequent guest
and welcome housemate.
May the spirit of praise
guide every task and
deed performed here.

Lord, this home will be a place
for living, sleeping, praying;
it will be a shrine
and a place for healing.

May my door stand open
to all who are in need—
as a sign of the posture
of my heart.

May peace, love and beauty
flow out from this home of mine
in all four directions
and up and down.

May your silent echo be heard
by all of those who lives surround me.

The birds of the air have nests;
foxes have dens;
may this home of mine
be blessed by you, my God
as a home for me …
and for you as well.

Amen

Something to believe in

Number 1

THE DESIRE FOR SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN
John 20.19-31

On Good Friday, some 4,000 people walked the streets of Melbourne behind a large wooden cross. I was one of them. Perhaps you were too. By any account, it is an odd thing to do, to traipse along the city streets behind a symbol of death, chanting prayers and reading the morbid story of a man executed in a far off place more than 2000 years ago. Not only that, but two days later, Easter Sunday, churches like this one overflowed with people celebrating the incredulous, some would say ridiculous, story of this same man supposedly come back to life. Why? Why, in this age of science and reason, does faith like this persist?

It has been said that the 20th century was a 100-year argument against the existence of God. It was the century of war on unprecedented scale, the horrors of camps and gulags, of the most atrocious racial cleansing and genocide, and the development and deployment of hideous weapons of mass destruction. Surely if ever there was a case that put to rest belief in an all-powerful Deity who pronounces everything good, it has been made. What’s more, the 20th century was one of both sophisticated and popular philosophies that sought to debunk the notions of religious faith. Karl Marx argued persuasively that religion did not even need to be refuted by logic. Its necessity would simply fade away as people found their needs met through hard work and material prosperity. In the midst of all this, science seemed to confirm routinely that God was no longer necessary; even theologians began proclaiming the death of God.

But here we are in 2013, the beginnings of the 21st century, and statistics tell us in no uncertain terms that God is back; or more accurately, that belief in God never went away. According to the most recent data from the World Religion Database, only 2 percent of the global population identify as atheists. At least three quarters of the human race hold a theistic belief. The overwhelming majority of people in the world continue to believe. Why?

In his book, What Makes Us Tick? the Australian social researcher Hugh Mackay explores the basic desires that drive us, those longings that compel us forward as human beings. He is not concerned with abstract desires–the yearnings for truth, beauty or justice. He’s more interested in what he calls our ‘social desires’–those drives related to our sense of personal identity, our relationships with each other, and our place in society. These social drives, Mackay says, influence our approach to love and friendship, to family life and work, and to our connections in neighbourhoods and communities. Indeed, they infiltrate every aspect of our lives. In his book, Mackay identified ten such desires. In this six-week series, our task is to consider just six of them, but to do so from a faith perspective–to explore, evaluate and critique these desires in light of our Christian faith and our belief in life as God’s gift to us. Today it’s ‘the desire for something to believe in.’

Back to our question: Why does faith persist? According to Mackay, it is as though we are made for it. For the past three decades, Mackay has been sitting down with ordinary Australians and asking them questions about life, relationships and belief. He concludes that within each of us is ‘a powerful human desire to believe in something.’ We share a universal need to at least express the questions, Who are we? What are we here for? and What is life about? We seek sources of comfort and consolation when life is hard to understand, when grief and confusion overtake us and when we feel deeply our own fragility. In all of this, we reach for something beyond ourselves.

Mackay describes himself as a spiritual pilgrim, personally unsure about religious belief but open to the possibility. In contrast, the philosopher Alain de Botton is a decided Atheist. Regardless, in his book Religion for Atheists, de Botton is concerned for what is lost to society when religious belief and its associated rituals are eradicated.

‘ … we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not been able to solve with any particular skill: first, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And second, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay and demise. God may be dead, but the urgent issues which impelled us to make him up still stir and demand resolutions …’

For both Mackay and de Botton, belief is natural, even vital to human existence. In Mackay’s words:

‘Even the most sceptical of us find we have to resist the desire to believe, as if we are believers by nature, whether that desire is satisfied by conventional religious faith and practice or in some other way entirely … in fervent deification of science, or an almost mystical belief in the inherent integrity of the free market, or passionate atheism.’

All belief, not matter what form it takes, it a way to make sense of things, to understand, and to discern our own reason for being. It strives for something bigger than just me, a broader narrative in which my own story finds its place. In that sense, perhaps the longings of science and the longings of religion are not as different as they might seem. The writer Annie Dillard in her wonderful essay Teaching a Stone to Talk writes: ‘What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn’t us. … What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are they not both saying: Hello?’

All belief, religious or otherwise, arises out of a longing to understand: to understand life’s meaning and to understand our own place in it. The trouble with the new Atheism is that it wants to eradicate mystery from the equation altogether. It posits the possibility that all mystery can ultimately be solved, than any sense of the beyond in life is just a matter of time. They are of the assumption that once they can discredit the historicity of the bible, point out the logical flaws in its creeds and the social irrelevance of its commands, and demonstrate the fallibility of its institutions, the motivation to believe will be quenched. But they are wrong. At the end of the day, my belief is not in a book or a creed, not in a set of propositions or commands, not even in the institution of the church. My faith is first in a person, the person symbolised by that empty cross I followed through the streets of Melbourne.

In our gospel reading today, we have heard the story of the resurrected Jesus appearing to his disciples behind closed doors. He stands among them with nail pierced hands and says, ‘Peace be with you.’ He then breaths upon them the Holy Spirit and commissions them to go and live as he lived, a life of self-giving and grace. According to John’s story, it was Thomas, the doubting one, who was not present when Jesus first appeared in that upper room. When the other disciples told him the good news, he simply could not believe: ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my hand in his side,’ Thomas said, ‘I will not believe.’ Did Thomas want to believe? Of course he did. But sometimes the desire to believe is challenged. Even we people of faith must deal with the weight of reason and logic and so we should. Our faith is not blind faith. Questions can and must be asked. Our belief must be interrogated and tested. And therefore we must expect that at times our faith will be shaken. Mine certainly has been. To be perfectly frank with you, there have been times, in fact there are times, when I ask myself is this all just an illusion? Are we kidding ourselves? But then I come back to the story of Jesus, to the person of Jesus, and I believe.

On the news in the last week, we have heard the story of Nelson Mandela’s illness and hospitalization. We have watched the grief of the South African people even at the thought of his passing. For so long now, Mandela has been the embodiment of hope and liberty for the people of that land, and indeed for people around the world. His story has enfolded the story of a nation. His is the public story in which all the other untold stories find their voice. He has carried his own cross and the cross of his people and so symbolizes the best of what it means to be South African, the best of what it means to be human. And we believe.

It was when Jesus appeared to Thomas, and Thomas touched his pierced hands and his wounded side, that he finally responded, ‘My Lord and my God.’ Like Thomas, my faith is in Jesus and the great mystery of his life, death and resurrection. My faith is in the crucified saviour who stands even today with the wounds of self-sacrifice still evident in his hands and feet, the one who bore his own cross and mine, the one who bore the pain and struggle of all humankind, the one in whose story every human story is embodied. My belief is in the one who so enfleshes the mystery of God’s love and grace, that I am compelled to live differently as a consequence.

I believe. I believe in Jesus.

Amen.

‘The incredulity of Saint Thomas’ by Caravaggio