by Rev. Dr John Evans
I want to continue our practice of using the simple pattern of reflecting on this piece of art work during Pentecost: of putting ourselves in the picture. Today the question for our crowd restlessly sitting there, looking leaderless, on this National Reconciliation Sunday is, who are we as Australians? Or perhaps, what does it mean to be the Uniting Church IN AUSTRALIA given our church’s heritage involving Aboriginal people?
This morning I am wanting to suggest to you that our distinctive identity – more, our unique identity – as Australians, and in turn as an Australian Church, involves us understanding and appropriating our Aboriginal heritage. Our culture, at least our popular culture such as music, film, television and magazines is homogenous Western, perhaps even American. However, what sets us apart as Australians?
The one thing that is unique to us – is indeed our Aboriginal heritage.
As we are aware the white part of this has not been a particularly glorious history. It has followed the pattern repeated again and again around the world of a conqueroring peoples riding roughshod over those who were indigenous to a particular land. In recent years we have become aware of this history, especially as it has applied to the struggle to have land rights recognised and then to understand the story of the stolen generations of Aboriginal children taken from their families and communities. Through all of this, reconciliation, God-given reconciliation, is our hope and prayer. We do wish to see reconciliation between our indigenous brothers and sisters and us latecomers. That will take an acknowledgment of wrong, forgiveness and a joint work for a better future for all Australians. We are by no means there yet – but we are moving, perhaps too slowly, in a positive way.
As this is happening, I think we are beginning to see that as a nation there are unique features of our national identity which can only come from our indigenous people. So if you were to consider contemporary Australian art, we would see the distinctive and dramatic contribution our Aboriginal brothers and sisters have brought to us and the world. It is uniquely Australian and we are enriched by it, and we gain by their understanding of the land and care for the land. And we are seeing the same in Australian Rules Football with the distinctive flair the indigenous players bring to that unique Australian game. We love it. It enriches the game, but in a sense it makes Aussie Rules more genuinely an Australian game than some other imported or universally played sport.
However, this morning I wish to consider what it is our Aboriginal sisters and brothers may bring to the understanding of our faith, our Christian faith – as Australians. How does this help shape our Australian Church identity and be an Australian expression of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church?
Our Aboriginal Christian sisters and brothers want to tell us that God did not come to this land in 1788, or earlier with Abel Tasman or a group of wayward Portuguese sailors. God has been here all along. Now this is both obvious and also very interesting. Our Christian heritage, certainly our Church heritage, even our fundamental cultural heritage has assumed for centuries and centuries the Judeo-Christian heritage. It has always been thus – the stories of creation, of Noah’s ark, and the stories of Jesus are just there. They come as a package. This is what it means to be Christian – obviously. And to be Christian means the history you and I have had is the only way to experience the knowledge and presence of God. Any other way is wrong and to use a coloured term, is heathen.
But this become the central question for Aboriginal Christians – how do we understand and treat their millennia of spirituality prior to the arrival of the Christian faith. Is the past to be wiped out, and just become a clean slate? The view which basically happened in the 19th and most of the 20th century. But if that was not the case, what remains? And how does the story of Jesus then actually fit in?
In a recent meeting in Darwin, leaders of Congress, our indigenous ministry within the Uniting Church, gathered to consider if there should be some sort of preamble to our current Uniting Church constitution. (As an aside, Aboriginal people like constitutions because law is very important within Aboriginal communities. So this is an important exercise.) You may remember there was a bit of flurry some 8-10 years ago about doing that with our own national constitution – Les Murray drafted a statement that, well, went nowhere. A similar thing is now happening within the church. At that meeting our brothers and sisters suggested words that indicate when this land was colonised, people found a land that had been created and sustained by God who is revealed in creation. They state in a draft preamble:
These First People had already encountered the Creator God before the colonisers had arrived. The Spirit was already in the land speaking to the people. These First People were guided in the way to express and share their experience of this one God through law, custom and ceremony. Law, custom and ceremony has infused their consciousness and social structures, and become foundational to their whole way of life.
What came with the colonisers was knowledge of Jesus and his life and work.
Our Old Testament reading today continues our unpacking the stories of beginnings for the Hebrew people – and in a real sense our western culture. Two weeks ago we had the creation account – today it is good old Noah, his wife, three sons, their wives, all those animals and an ark. A creation story – or perhaps more accurately a re-creation story. A story from the dreamtime you would have to say. Now ‘the wickedness of human kind was great in earth … evil was constantly in the hearts of men and women ” and so God resolved to “blot out from the earth human beings God had created”, except “Noah found favour in the sight of the Lord.” And, well, the rest is history . . . or is it myth? Creation, which God said was good, is almost wiped out – but survives, just. Through the waters of death life is given; and as an aside – through the waters of baptism – life is given again; new life in Christ. (Indeed for today’s interesting fact, most baptismal fonts are eight sided, ours included. It represents the eight humans in the ark.)
In Noah’s story life continued, the rainbow was the sign of the covenant – a new start between God and creation. God was gracious and just; God was trustworthy. And without much imagination we can see how this story of beginnings is like the stories of beginnings of our Aboriginal brothers and sisters. Our Aboriginal brothers and sisters want to say that they new that – God was trustworthy. It was a part of their living.
Can we now fast forward to the Gospel reading: a passage from the Sermon on the Mount. It perhaps does not look much like a reading about this covenant with Noah, and perhaps directly it isn’t, but it is still about the trustworthiness of God and God’s faithfulness . . . if you like, God’s covenant with this world, God’s love for this world; and God’s concern that within this world - we do God’s will.
What Jesus highlights is how the progressive unfolding of God’s nature – certainly in the subsequent covenants with the Hebrew people – such as in the giving of the Law to Moses – got hijacked. Law, custom, worship, even acts of prophesying in the name of God, became just hollow observances, empty rituals – and did not satisfy the will of God, or lead to the extension of the kingdom of heaven. Human structures in the end fail to attain God’s kingdom.
Jesus says, “Not every one who says to me “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.”
Simply said, we humans fail, whether Anglos or indigenous, we fail to achieve that relationship with God, that peace in our lives, that understanding of God’s will. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, as Paul says. Simply observing customs – saying “Lord, Lord” or prophesying in God’s name or casting out demons in God’s name – is not enough.
The perspective Jesus presents is different. Those who hear his words and act on them will indeed have life. In fact in a scene reminiscent of the story of Noah, Jesus says if you do hear and believe him to be trustworthy, you can survive rain, floods and wind – and be like a person who builds on rock, or like Noah who survived the very same. The alternative is destruction.
Christ here becomes the key for this new relationship with God. A relationship in which Jesus now becomes central. God’s righteousness, justice and goodness is now shown through Jesus’ death on the cross for our sinfulness. . . and not just the former practices, the law.
Jesus becomes our new hope. The previous ways of understanding are not jettisoned. At least Paul doesn’t want to ditch his long Jewish heritage, and in particular the law of Moses. No, he says, at least among other things, they show people have sinned; and they show God was trustworthy – then. But now fundamentally he wants to say it is not what we do – it is what God has done in Christ. All it takes is for us to believe this.
In the same way our Aboriginal brothers and sister are saying – they cannot jettison the past, especially a past in which they saw God’s faithfulness present. That past, the law, the stories and the customs, provides a basis, a starting point for them now – but at the same time would now acknowledge that it is by faith in Jesus in which their hope for the future is founded.
The challenge for us today, on the Sunday of National Reconciliation is to take a step which recognises that as an Australian church – we listen to this call of our Aboriginal brothers and sister, and understand that heritage of our indigenous people, enriches and deepens our understanding of the Christian faith.
