delivered 4 January 2009
by Rev. Dr John Evans
For Christmas I received Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, the book he wrote when he was a comparatively young man. He had just been elected the President of the Harvard Law Review – the first African American to do so. It is book of roots, identity and origins; particularly as it obtained to his Kenyan father, Barack Obama Snr.
He begins with this observation:
At the time of his death, my father remained a myth to me, both more and less than a man.
He then tells a story about him and says,
That’s how all the stories went – compact, apocryphal, told in rapid succession in the course of one evening, then packed away for months, sometimes years, in my family’s memory.
Stories carry our identity, our hopes and our fears and our memory. They sometimes are small stories; personal stories only told to the family, if at all; sometimes they are large, broad-brushed stories that serve to mark the identity of whole communities – even of nations. The story of pioneers, victory in battle or in Australia’s case, a loss in the Great War or of dispossession and conquest.
The fear is, as a community, as the nation of Australia, we have lost our story; no longer do we know who we are and where we are going – what is in fact our hope for these troubled times.
2008 has now finished; 2009 has begun. This year, however, there is no sense of excitement, confidence or even understanding, as we look ahead. Where is our story? We know the environment, drought and the climate change situation is troubling – hugely troubling; we are engaged in several deadening and deadly wars in which the values undergirding our involvement are not clear; we are sick – perhaps sick to death, about the global financial crisis BUT in all of this we do not have a big story which can carry us forward; in which any of these things can form a part – or from which we can make sense what is happening, or from which we can derive hope. The best story we seem to come up with in recent times is that the Australian cricket team after a long period of dominance, is in a rebuilding phase. That’s it. As we face really very interesting times – the state of health of the cricket team is, perhaps as it always has been, the national obsession.
We are at very interesting times in the very secular, Western world as the great modern sweep of history struggles to focus and lead us in any new or meaningful direction. Progress, the great motif of the last 200 years – progress in industry, science, even economics – has come up against climate change and since 2008, financial disaster. Science, markets and human ingenuity has not provided the ready click of the fingers and a story of hope and a way through. Indeed, for some time now we have been left wondering what is the great narrative, the story we follow, after the niggling problems we have had with modernity? For a while fundamentalist, rigid and dogmatic stories from either market ideology or religion – whether Christian, Hindu or Muslim – seemed to be the stories that would fill this void. Certainly the war on terror for a season seemed to be the story around which we would rally – but that has in recent times shown it still does not deliver hope for the citizenry. It might win an election or two with a fear campaign – but is not the stuff of a great story that draws people forward.
Robert W. Jenson
In that wonderful period between Christmas and New Year, when mercifully nothing much happens, I read an article, now getting a little dated actually – How the World Lost Its Story, by the theologian Robert Jenson. Now he is writing from a western perspective, so keep that criticism in mind, but basically he sees that once there was a great story – a flow, a sequence of events of human history – which were placed within the great biblical story of creation, sinfulness, salvation and redemption and with the hope in God’s over arching reign and rule. Modernity, with the Enlightenment, then replaced God with human achievement (this is Nietzsche’s death of God stuff) – and indeed as Nietzsche sort of predicted – that is now falling apart. Science itself is not falling apart – we don’t need to go and be like the Amish and all drive horses and carts again – but the narrative of who we are as a people, and what gives hope has reached a state of confusion and atrophy. Jenson refers to the changes in the nature of literature and art to bolster his argument. And he concludes in this way:
The story the Bible tells is asserted to be the story of God with God’s creatures; there is a true story of the universe because there is a universal novelist/historian – a storyteller. Modernity was defined by the attempt to live in a universal story without a universal storyteller.
So good folk – members of your family, work colleagues, neighbours, perhaps yourself, do not apprehend or inhabit a narratable, story-directed world. Indeed, the amazing thing is many, many people today do not know anyone whoever did. Life is just a series of unrelated incidents – not really hanging together. That is, they do not know anyone who could tell a story about where they had come from and where they might be headed. For example, when I grew up one of the stories of my time – now possibly not political correct – was still about developing our frontiers – the Snowy Mountains, the Ord River – Northern Development were the evidence of this – we thus accepted migrants to develop and populate our broad, empty land. Today – well? Obviously as a nation it needed to change, but we then sort of lost the direction as people too. As individuals we are more likely to hear such phrases as “I am getting my life together” or “I am getting there” , than a clear assertion of where a person might be headed – because people don’t know what it actually can be like if life is together or what that destination might look like. Many, if not most people I meet Monday to Friday, here or in the street, are like this. Others just are obsessed with the ephemeral, their body, or Elvis Presley, or whatever. Even in the church, many just see membership as being something that provides a good place to come together – but they don’t believe a word of the Biblical story. Again – people are not clear where and why, and how they fit in.
So what we do and say here this morning – especially, what we celebrate in our service of Holy Communion is important. For people out there, in every sense of the word, it has no sense – it is nonsense. Now this state of affairs is not anyone’s fault; I am not wanting to be judgmental – but by heck, it is critical. We need to be clear what we do and say when we endeavour to engage that world which moves to a different rhythm. But as Jenson says, if the church today does not find her hearers automatically inhabiting a narratable world, and we see this is important, then the church herself must be that world. We must be able to show to people that we do offer meaning – within the story we see unfolding in the Bible.
And the church has done this before. In the death throes of the Roman Empire – the so-called Holy Roman Empire – when the world seemed hell-bent on living in meaningless chaos, we actually call it the Dark Ages. The church had to save her converts by offering herself as life with a story which could provide hope and coherence. They did this in the monasteries and communities. Earlier, Israel itself had been the nation that lived a realistic story amid nations that lived otherwise – like living just for the thrill of that conquest or fleeting empire. The church indeed in New Testament times offered herself to the gentiles as their Israel – as their story, so that they might have identity and hope.
And so we read the Bible in our worship – and we celebrate faithfully the sacrament of holy communion – an acting out the story of our salvation and also baptism.
Today, in this season of Christmas we have a word from the prophet Jeremiah of hope amid the adversity of exile. The very vision we see in the coming of Jesus in our midst. We have a story of wonder and amazement of distant astrologer kings whom God has chosen to become a part of our human story in the humble, what is the word, rude, birth of the Christ Child – and that powerful and wicked forces will always object to such signs of hope; and we have an attempt in Ephesians to hear this broad-brush story:
With all wisdom and insight God has made known to us the mystery of God’s will, according to God’s good pleasure that is set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time to gather up all things on earth.
Our Christian faith provides that story – that grand narrative. This helps us personally to make sense of our lives, to provide stability and hope. It tells us where we slot in. It can undergird a community or a nation. Indeed Paul Keating was on to something when he said during last year that the current government lacks a grand narrative. It is important – and it is a little diffuse at the moment.
All of this is I believe a good focus for us as a congregation at the start of this year. It is a reminder to us what we must always faithfully do – to tell, above all tell, and through our sacraments – live out – this story of hope and purpose. For we, more than ever, must be a place where people who have no story, or have a confused story, or an incomplete story and want to have meaning, can come to hear a story of hope, justice and salvation. We need to feel that telling again and again the story of God’s love for us and intervention into our human story is just the central thing we do.
At the start of the year, we need to reflect on the alignment of our personal and family story, with this story. We need to be committed again to living that story.
So, at the start of this new year, let me say may it be a good year; a year in which your story has an authenticity, a joy and a meaning which is personally and for your wider world very satisfying; a year in which we might delve even more deeply into our part within God’s story for this church and this community. Happy New Year.
