Mister Crankypants, Marriage Counselling Services

So… I’m sitting in a bar having a quiet ale, as one does. Through the door steps an older man and immediately I transform. Goodbye, “Isn’t it great to take a break on a Friday night”; hello, Mister Crankypants.

“Pourqui?” my French readers ask. “What is it about this sweet looking, little old fellow that raises your ire? Is it his short, grey hair and neatly trimmed moustache? His conservative clothes? Or perhaps it’s the cap he’s holding in his hand as he goes begging from table to table?”

Yep, it’s the last one.

Now, those of you who know me even moderately well would affirm I’m not completely without compassion. Surely the man with cap in hand distresses me because it’s a sign of society’s indifference which reduces an older man to such desperate measures?

Not so. You see, the cap is part of this man’s uniform, his Salvation Army uniform.

I wonder what goes through the mind of the average, beer drinking Aussie’s mind when fronted by the man from the Salvos? “Would you like to make a donation, my friend?” (I kid you not: “my friend”.)

Watching this fellow work the room, I am struck by the generosity with which he is received; lots of people fish out coins or notes and drop them in the proffered cap. “Why?” I wonder.

Perhaps people give generously for no other reason than they are generous. Perhaps if a bloke in a gorilla suit came in collecting for Wife Beaters Australia they would just as readily dip their hands in their pockets. Or not.

Perhaps they give because it’s the Salvos and everybody knows the Salvos do good work. Except, of course, the Salvos don’t do any better work than anybody else. Yes, they run charity shops and provide blankets to the homeless but so do the Catholic Church, the Anglicans and the Baptists and innumerable other organisations.

Perhaps people give to the Salvos because they did extraordinary things during the Second World War. How amazing that they turned up on the Kokoda Track during the Australian Army’s retreat, offering food, blankets and fags! No matter this took place seventy years ago; the Sallies have a rep so why not trade on it?

Perhaps – and I really hope this is not the case – they give because the sight of a God-fearing man entering a den of iniquity induces guilt and off-loading a couple of spare bucks eases their consciences.

Whichever of these it may be, or even some other reason I haven’t yet thought of, somehow I find it distasteful, bordering on deceitful that a religious organisation plunders the pubs in this manner. I suspect, however, that it may just be me being Mister Crankypants.

After the poor, confused chap has backed away from my table, something else disconcerting takes place. Crowded establishment; do I mind sharing my table with a young couple? Of course not. Perhaps I’m trying to redeem myself for having bitten the quite-possibly-innocent beggar.

Chit chat ensues. No, I haven’t eaten so I can’t comment on the quality of the food. He heads for the bar with menu in hand, and I begin preparing to make my exit. For benefit of the girl I make one of my typically not-humorous attempts at humour: “Is it safe to leave you on your own?”

Mistaking my meaning, “Oh, yes. He’s my boyfriend. We’ve been together for ages.” Cue a conversation about relationships, which somehow or other descends rapidly to, “He’s changing. He says he’s going somewhere and it turns out he’s gone somewhere else. He’s staying out later and he’s started smoking more and drinking more.”

Panic.

I’m not a counsellor. I can recognise an accident just waiting to happen, but I’m not the man you want in an emergency. What can I possibly say or do in this situation? I hope and pray my fumbling attempts at guiding her towards communicating with this bloke about her fears don’t make things worse for them.

For crying out loud: it’s a pub on a Friday night! I’m not Jesus. I’m not at ease with people in pain, nor am I gracious with people who make me uncomfortable.

Does this mean I have to come back next Friday night?

~b and the curse of Matilda

Matilda told such dreadful lies
It made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes.
Her aunt, who from her earliest youth
Had held a strict regard for truth,
Attempted to believe Matilda.
The effort very nearly killed her!

Is it really more than twelve months since I set metaphorical foot in this space?

Over at The Aspirational Agnostic there have been some fairly serious allegations of Matilda-ing.  To read it as it happened, I suggest you head over to The Aspirational Agnostic – just try not to let your head explode as you take in the comments following TAA’s story.

The bit I’m interested in is how to create space in which dialogue can take place, rather than blind argument.  An allegation of Matilda-ing immediately shuts such a space down: lack of trust has many faces but none of them has open ears.

I’ve recently finished reading Islam and the future of tolerance: a dialogue, a fabulous conversation between the well-known and respected atheist Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz, a Muslim who was but is no longer an extremist.  The book offers many valid and useful criticisms of Islamic fundamentalism which turn out to be just as valid criticisms of certain expressions of Christianity.  However, the thing which strikes me most is the careful consideration of the suffix –ism.*  Nawaz and Harris specifically distinguish between Islam and Islamism.  The –ism is seen as an ideological insistence that all people must accept the dictates of Islam combined with the explicit understanding that the use of force is an acceptable means of achieving that end.

A different example of this kind of religious –ism is the culture which developed in Japan in the period leading up to the Second World War; there, Emperor worship combined with a skewed understanding of their samurai past led the Japanese to believe it was both acceptable and necessary to rule over the other nations of Asia.  Cue Pearl Harbor, the fall of Singapore, the Burma railroad, and the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.  Where people insist that all others must conform to their ideology then there can be no discussion and no tolerance.

This dialogue between atheist Harris and Muslim Naawaz beautifully serves to illustrate tolerance at the same time providing a useful definition of in-tolerance. Neither the atheist nor the Muslim insists that the other has to relinquish their underlying beliefs before they can engage in discussion; neither assumes the right to impose on the other.  Neither of them is guilty of –ism.

Which drags me – albeit unwillingly – back to the vexed question of whether or not it’s possible to be a fundamentalist atheist.  (A topic argued heatedly elsewhere in this blog as well as over at The Aspirational Agnostic.)

Fundamentalist Christians insist that others must conform to their worldview; fundamentalist Muslims ditto.  What then do we call atheists who do the same?  How are people of faith – however misguided or unhelpful that faith might be – to interpret the actions of people without faith who absolutely insist that everyone else must agree one hundred percent with them?

If a Christian or a Muslim posted “this is what will happen when you choose to stop allowing me to comment truthfully on your site: I will introduce your deceit and dishonesty to a wider audience…” we would  dismiss it as an illustration of religious intolerance, of fundamental-ism.  However, these are the words of an atheist, a person who claims the voice of rationality but who is just as prone to irrationality as the rest of us.  And that’s because none of us is perfect, none of us escapes the human desire to beat our “enemies”, none of us is immune to faulty logic and prejudiced reasoning.  Regardless of our high ideals or the intellectual rigour we think we exercise, we’re all susceptible to –ism.

The funny/tragic part about the comments on TAA’s blog is that they embody the very quality they seek to criticise: blind prejudice.  The funny aspect is that her harshest critic, the one who most vehemently accuses her of telling porkies, ~b simply can’t allow space for TAA’s story to vary from his own; his atheist arguments simply must be accepted by all parties.  The voice of intellectual tolerance is in-tolerant.  The tragic part is that ~b has a useful contribution to make but his –ism means others turn him off (much as we turn off the shouting ads on TV) and miss his valid criticisms.

The tragic story of Matilda “who told such dreadful lies” takes an unexpected twist.  In Hillaire Belloc’s tale, Matilda is ignored with fatal consequences:
For every time she shouted “Fire!”
They only answered “Little Liar!”

However, in TAA’S tale,
Every time ~b shouts “big, fat liar!”
They only answer “I see no fire.”

 

*  Not that I condone fascism, or any -ism for that matter.  -Ism’s in my opinion are not good.  A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself.   I quote John Lennon, ‘I don’t believe in Beatles, I just believe in me.’. Good point there.   After all, he was the walrus. 

Ferris Bueller

Now this is worth a read!

Somebody read it, so they shared it with someone else who passed it on, until in the mysterious way of things, an email appeared in my inbox, and I read it.

Now I want you to read it!

Stop saying the Church is dying

Who would Jesus drink coffee with?

Scene: a busy Melbourne coffee shop

A man wearing a tag for the International Conference of Jehovah’s Witnesses sits down next to me.

Me:    Excuse me. I don’t mean to be rude but I thought Jehovah’s Witnesses weren’t allowed to drink coffee?

Well, it turns out some do and some don’t. Some drink beer and some don’t. Some support Tottenham Hotspur and some are going to hell. Actually it was the last one that was the clincher.

My newfound JW friend and I embarked on a rapid-fire journey of discovery covering everything from the Peace of Westphalia and the Anabaptists to the place of Jurgen Klinsmann as a Spurs icon. We touched on comparative religion, the significance of good coffee, the Great Ocean Road, my grandfather, his parents, Etihad Stadium, history, the Watchtower, the distance from Munster to White Hart Lane by plane, and the clearing up of misconceptions.

And all because I was rude enough to ask if he was allowed to drink coffee! I must try this more often.

Welcoming the stranger: just how welcome?

I came across this article Welcoming the stranger

And I immediately thought of the comments Heather and I passed backwards and forwards on refugees/aliens/illegal immigrants in the Fundamentalisms thread.

Shane Claiborne’s position is pretty close to mine, which is not surprising given that he references Matthew 25 (“Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me”): for me, that pretty much encapsulates everything we need to understand about the life of faith.  How will history judge us when it comes to how we welcome those who are strangers in our midst?

Fundamentalisms

A few years ago I was associated with a group of “progressive christians” – the labelling was entirely theirs. They were an intelligent, passionate mob, keen on Jack Spong, Karen Armstrong, Gretta Vosper, and other thinkers of like mind. But here’s the thing: these folk were not only “progressive christians”; they were actually “fundamentalist progressive christians”. That is, they sincerely believed that if everyone else believed what they believed

Which came first? (A reflection on Acts 9:1-20)

I’ve just returned from a few days in Sydney. Strange place, Sydney. Amongst a whole variety of interesting experiences, two stand out. The first? Apparently a young woman travelled all the way from Israel just to bail me up in Hornsby shopping centre in order to sell me nail care products. (And if you would like to know more about my new nail care regimen, please form an orderly queue after the service.) The second interesting experience. Same shopping centre. My phone beeps with a message. The message says:    Now the first thing that came to mind is that I’m not Pete. The second thing was, “How do I respond to this message?” How do I respond? “Easy,” you reply. “Just send something like this –

Mary of Bethany – in three parts

an icon of Mary of Bethany

Three times in the gospel of John we hear of Mary of Bethany at the feet of Jesus.

The first is an act of attending; of listening; of being in the presence of the Holy One. (Luke 10: 38-42 – Mary of Bethany sits at the feet of Jesus)

The second is an act of raw grief expressed in an accusation. (John 11 (selected verses) – Mary of Bethany weeps at the feet of Jesus)

The third is an act of pure, extravagant love. (John 12:1-8 – Mary of Bethany anoints the feet of Jesus)

I want to suggest that these three stories

A story in three acts (Luke 15: 11-32)

The prodigal son by He Qi
This image is taken from the internet. If it is in breach of any copyright requirements, please notify me for its immediate withdrawal

Three years ago when I reflected on the parable of the prodigal father I suggested that this is a story in three parts.

The first part is the story of the father and the younger son – it’s the interesting part, the dramatic part and the genuinely surprising part. It’s also the easiest bit to interpret. The second part is the father and the older son – less dramatic (at least, to our modern sensibilities) and less surprising. It’s full of rich meaning, but it’s frequently the part that gets overlooked.

But the third part is by far the most important part of the story and it’s the part of the story which is missing. Deliberately so. Jesus deliberately misses part 3 and leaves it to his hearers to work out what happens. The third part is the story of the older son and the younger son after the father dies!

Act 1 – the younger son and the father, in which the younger son wishes his father were dead.

Let us not pretend for even a moment that the younger son has any redeeming features. This is not a misguided youth, who accidentally causes a few problems. What the younger son is asking is a complete violation of the commandment to honour father and mother. In the eyes of the community in which this tale is told, the younger son is “asking his father to drop dead”. A literal translation of the text is:

Father,
Give to me that part which belongs to me of your substance.
And he divided among them his life.

The father’s agreement is no less appalling than the son’s request. He goes against all the injunctions of the Old Testament; he surrenders his control of his family, not to the younger son but to the older who gets two-thirds of his father’s life.

The younger son takes himself to the land of the gentiles. He is profligate. He squanders everything he has. The life he claimed from his father is gone. The boy’s attachment to gentiles signals the loss of his life amongst his own community and the loss of his faith. Pigs doesn’t mean bacon; pigs means apostasy, the abandonment of the Torah and the traditions of his ancestors.

We are told that, when he could sink no further, the younger son “came to himself”. Whatever that phrase may mean, it doesn’t mean that he experienced Christian repentance. Luke loves to use the language of repentance, but he doesn’t use it here. He says nothing more than “he came to himself”.

The younger son sets out on the journey to the place that was once his home. And the viewpoint of the story immediately changes. Now we are sitting upon the father’s shoulder. And we, the listeners so horrified at what we have already heard, are now doubly and triply offended.

The old man is looking for his son. Searching and hoping for the one who should have been cut loose from the family. And the old man sees him, and he runs, disgracing himself and his family by hitching up his skirts in public. And the old man shocks the audience with his compassion – compassion! not judgment and rejection – and he falls on his neck and he kisses him again and again and again.

Brandon Scott describes the scene thus:
The father has gone too far. There is no test of the son, no questioning of his motives. This son has behaved in an outrageous fashion, insulted his father, lost the inheritance, committed apostasy. The list could go on and on. The father makes no judgment, demands no price from the son. He is back. No questions asked. Dead and alive. Lost and found.

And the curtain comes down on Act 1 and the younger son.

Act 2 – the older son and the father, in which the older son sees himself as dead.

How is it for the older son when he is not even notified of his brother’s return, when he has to approach a “boy-servant”, a very junior member of the household, for information which he should have been the first to hear, and when he is told that the best clothes and a ring of authority have been given to his younger brother and that a celebration is in full swing?

He feels dead. The older son is the one who was given his father’s life, and now it appears it has been taken away from him.

Now, before we feel too much sympathy for the older son, we must first note what he now does. Now he takes up the language of insult and rejection. When our ears hear “Then he became angry and refused to go in” we don’t hear the intake of breath of Jesus’ listeners as they recognise that the older son is now turning away from his father; he, too, envisages a life in which his father is dead.

And his words of anger and resentment when the father comes out are insult added to injury: “this son of yours… who has devoured your life with whores”.

Is it now that the father is finally forced to defend himself and his honour? Is it now that the father will claim back his life and force his elder son to accept his decisions?

No. No, the father is not going to force anyone to do anything. We are told that, when the father hears of his older son’s refusal to come in, that he comes out and pleads with him. And when his son argues with him and insults him, he calls him “my dear child” – the language of the doting father for the innocent child. “The father strips away the hierarchy” of family and society and reaches out to his child as an elder to a baby.

The life that the elder son thought he had lost is there to be found: “Everything I have is yours.” While the father may have had the authority to give what he has to the one who appears to be his favourite, that’s not how it is. “Everything I have is yours.”

I wonder if the younger son inside with a ring on his finger and fine robes on his back, I wonder if he realises that the older son is still the one with all the property and all the power?

And Jesus finishes the story right there. Which is either a very good place or a very bad place to stop. Because the audience knows that there is much, much more to come. Fathers don’t live forever and whatever short-term solution is stitched up between the father and his two sons, sooner or later it’s only going to be the older son with all of the property and the power and the younger son with nothing but whatever his brother will give him.

Act 3 – the two brothers, in which … ?

Three years ago, I suggested that this is a story about divine hospitality. Divine because it is undeserved. The younger son’s initial request does not deserve to be honoured. But he is given what he does not deserve. The younger son does not deserve to be welcomed and kissed and given gifts and celebrated. But he is given what he does not deserve.

When the older son turns on his father, he doesn’t deserve his father’s willingness to come to him and reassure him and love him. But the older son is given what he does not deserve. Divine hospitality.

Act 3 asks the audience, “Will the older brother give the younger brother what he deserves? Or will the older brother do as his father did? Will he offer divine hospitality to one who does not deserve it?”

That’s the question Jesus asked his audience to wrestle with. That’s the question God asks us. Will we give others what they deserve? Or will we give them divine hospitality?

Can we be the father?

Chaos and order: the fig tree and the gardener

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was without form and void, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

I love the Hebrew tohuw webohuw, without form and void. There you have it, folks. The bible tells us that, before God got underway with the whole creation thing, everything was tohuw webohuw. Hardly a hospitable environment: nowhere to park the armchair and absolutely nothing in the fridge to drink. But wait! There’s more, and it’s all bad: “darkness covered the face of the deep”. No lights and it’s wet.

Actually, it’s worse than wet, much worse than merely wet. “The deep” in Hebrew understanding was chaos. The sea was the ultimate symbol and example of the chaos that waits to reach out and destroy; it’s unpredictable, ungovernable, unknowable.

The biblical story of creation – this lovely piece of Hebrew etiology – is all about what God does with chaos. What does God do? God brings order. Form out of emptiness, light out of darkness, earth out of the deep. Order out of chaos.

The Chosen people were not keen on chaos, but then neither are we. From the moment of our birth, our brains begin the extraordinary task of sorting things out so that we can make sense of our world. Out of the chaos of light and noise and touch and taste and smell, our brains begin to catalogue and analyse everything around us into some semblance of something we might call order. Without order, we would not survive at all.

One of the primary ways we learn about order is through cause and effect. “Don’t touch the stove,” we tell little children. “You will burn yourself.” Heat is the cause, pain is the effect. “Be nice to the pretty girl and she might smile at you. Work hard and you can provide for your family. Drive too fast and you’ll get a speeding ticket, or worse.” Cause and effect.

The bible itself is full of cause and effect stories: Abraham was faithful so God blessed him. Pharaoh was hard-hearted and God sent plagues upon Egypt. Samson let Delilah cut his locks and so he lost his strength. Lot’s wife looked back and the rest of her family never had to go without salt again (or something like that). Cause and effect.

And so we come to this morning’s gospel story:

there were some present who told [Jesus] about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.

What’s that about? It’s about cause and effect, it’s about trying to make sense out of something which appears to be senseless, chaotic. In Jesus’ time, sin lead to punishment. Are you sick? Then God must be punishing you for some undisclosed sin. Lepers were sinners. Blind Bartimaeus must have been wicked. The woman bent over with her haemorrhaging? Who knows what she must have done to deserve God’s punishment.

“So, Jesus, Pilate killed those Galileans. What was their sin?”

But the answer they get is not what they expect:

“Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you… Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you…”

Jesus refutes the cause and effect thinking. The Galileans weren’t killed because they were sinners; they were killed because Pilate was evil. Those killed in the building tragedy were no more sinful than anyone else. It was an accident.

Sometimes, lots of times, there is no order; it’s just random, it’s just chaos. And we don’t like it. We want order, we want things to make sense, we want easy answers.

But God is not just the God of order; God is also the God of chaos.

If, when God created the heavens and the earth, the waters of the deep already existed, chaos existed, where did that come from if not from God? From the incredibly ordered world of science, we have discovered that chaos exists, creation itself is not ordered. We throw an apple in the air and it comes right back down. Gravity, we say. What goes up must come down. Except that’s not true.

If we look deep into the heart of all created matter, we discover something extraordinary. At the tiniest of miniscule levels, way down smaller and smaller than we will ever see, at the sub-atomic level, much, much smaller than atoms, the particles that make up the universe are not bound by gravity in the way we expect them to be. What goes up does not necessarily come down.

Scientists observe particles at point A and suddenly they appear at point B, but they didn’t move there in a logical fashion. They just appeared there! That is not order. That is chaos. It can’t be explained; it can’t be understood.

It’s as if I said to you,
you that have no money,
   come, buy and eat!
   Come, buy wine and milk
   without money and without price.

That’s not logical. It doesn’t make sense. It’s not the way that we order things around here.

But that is God for you. God’s ways are not our ways; God’s thoughts are not our thoughts.

Which is why Jesus immediately goes on to tell his listeners about the fig tree that doesn’t bear fruit. Three years it’s stood there, using up valuable water, taking up important real estate, not contributing in any way, shape or form to the economy of the family. It’s got to go. In a subsistence society, that is the only logical decision that can be made. That’s precisely the conclusion the man who owned the vineyard came to: cause and effect. No fruit, chop down.

That’s the man’s thinking. That’s human thinking. That’s ordered thinking.

Enter God. (Did you get that?)

[The gardener] replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’

God is the gardener; the gardener is God. God is the one who makes the illogical plea for one more year. One more year of fertilizer, one more year of watering, one more year of the gardener’s time and energy with absolutely no guarantees whatsoever that anything will change. That’s God’s thinking; those are God’s ways.

So we are left with our need for order directly challenged by God. Our need to be able to explain everything neatly and easily is disrupted by the chaos of that which we don’t understand. Why leave the fig tree? Because God is the God of the second chance, the third chance, the infinite chance. God’s ways are not our ways.

You that have no money, come, buy and eat!
   Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.

Our way: we insist upon the market economy.
God’s way: God insists upon the free gift

you shall call nations that you do not know,
   and nations that do not know you shall run to you,

Our way: We insist upon dividing and excluding those who are different from us.
God’s way: God insists that we are all the same

   let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts;
   let them return to the LORD, that he may have mercy on them,
   and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.

Our way: We punish the wicked and the unrighteous
God’s way: God insists upon mercy and pardon

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD.
   For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

And we are called to accept the chaos of God’s ways because we too are the ones who receive abundant life. We too are the beneficiaries of God’s grace. Amen.