Dr Maria Tumarkin (writer & historian)

by David & Shirley Johnson

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Maria Tumarkin left the Ukraine, as a child, in December 1989, a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall. With their passports marked in the fifth column with the word ‘Jew’, her parents were concerned about what might happen to them if turmoil erupted. Their fears were justified, when, 18 months later the Soviet Union collapsed. Then followed a period of chaos when racist anti-Jewish sentiments were expressed, and a lot of terrible things happened.

Maria is impressed by what she calls ‘small courage’ shown by people in the Soviet society. She distinguishes this from the bold, great courage that we hear about when people said or did things that so upset the regime that they were sent to the gulag, or worse.

She characterises this small courage as, when in daily life, people stand up for what is right: chastising the person who tells a racist joke, objecting to small acts of discrimination, defending  the person being victimised.

On coming to Australia, she was shocked to discover that courage is not celebrated and that people are not urged to have the courage to say something. When she searched the Melbourne ‘Age” newspaper website for the word ‘courage’ she only found references to it in the contexts of sport, foreign conflicts and politics – no references to everyday small courage.

In their summary of Dr Tumarkin’s second of three books, ‘Courage’, Readings bookshop writes, ‘… Tumarkin’s vision of courage concerns the spontaneous actions of everyday people. She explores the courage we need to get by in our daily lives and to stand up to the bullies of this world, focusing on her own experiences as a migrant from the former Soviet Union and a wide-ranging palette of cultural and intellectual touchstones – from the Holocaust to Dave Eggers to Love Actually. …’

Maria’s conversation with Vanda Hamilton at the Clare Castle Hotel was filled with warmth, humour and passion. She inspired the audience to continue the conversation following the meal.

Thank you, Maria.

CARLTON CONVERSATIONS @ THE CLARE

What I Believe … & Why?”conversation series 2011

SUNNY CHEN

CHAPLAIN QUEEN’S COLLEGE

(UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE)

Thursday July 21st 2011
6pm for 6:30pm – 8pm

Conversation & Dinner – $15 Students/Concession & $25 Adults
BOOK by calling 9347 8171 or 0423 407 499 (email direct: australia-dreaming@carlton-uca.org

“I believe in a God who transforms people.  And I believe that the essence of the Christian faith is best expressed through transformed lives, instead of mere religious dogma.  In our society, which sees faith as largely irrelevant, I believe that there is a thirst for transformation that lies deep within many”.

Come along to The Clare in Carlton & talk with Sunny Chen about his beliefs and why …

Sunny is a Uniting Church Minister. He became Chaplain of Queen’s College (University of Melbourne) in 2009.   Previously he was a secondary school teacher in Hong Kong before his theological training in the United States. Since he arrived in Melbourne eleven years ago, Sunny had been a youth worker and a parish minister of several Uniting Church congregations, including Mulgrave & Wheelers Hill Uniting Church.

Come and hear Sunny in conversation at the Clare Castle Hotel in the month of July 2011, and enjoy a great pub meal & conversation all for $25 (or $15 concession).

Thursday July 21st, 6:30-8pm

The Clare Castle Hotel
421 Rathdowne St, Carlton
(enter via Palmerston Street)

Bookings: 9347 8171 or 0423 407 499
email: australia-dreaming@carlton-uca.org

Palmerston Street in the 1920s: The original 1861 church side-by-side with Joseph Reed's extant 1870 bluestone church to the right

Designed by Melbourne’s great architect Joseph Reed in a distinctive Romanesque style, our church in Palmerston St is almost as old as the congregation itself, now celebrating its sesquicentenary.

David Johnson has prepared a carefully researched and illustrated chronicle of the history of the church buildings on this site.  This material is not included in our new book The Need is the Call: 150 Years of Service in Carlton.

Please click on ‘History‘ in the left-hand menu to find his series of 4 brochures available in pdf for easy download and printing:

1. The Origins
2. A time-line of changes
3. Colonial architect Joseph Reed
4. Changes and furnishing along the way

2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10
Psalm 48
2 Corinthians 12:2-10
Mark 6:1-13

Daniel Smith-Christopher (right), the keynote speaker at the recent Wisdom’s Feast conference, and preacher here at the Church of All Nations just a two weeks ago, says in a recent book that Jesus is a “good coyote” — that North American dingo, or wild dog equivalent.

The image comes the US experience with illegal immigration and refugees through the southern US border with Mexico. In the US, those who assist illegal immigrants are known as polleros (literally, ‘chicken farmers’) or coyotes.   As with the Australian experience, these coyotes or people smugglers, are despised for their greed and their cruel and harsh treatment of desperate people.

There is however, a group of ‘good coyotes’ — people who through their love and pity for these people, take it upon themselves to ‘run the border’ and provide a path to sanctuary. The refugees are shown love and compassion.

So Smith-Christopher quotes from a newspaper article, and this got him thinking: Migrants don’t see coyotes as the bad guy in the movie. Many call them heroes because they got them and their families across the border.  There are thus good coyotes; good people smugglers, or asylum seeker shelterers!

Smith-Christopher says that Jesus is a good coyote “because he invites us to cross borders – often violating, for the sake of the gospel, the loyalties we humans have built to separate us from one another.”

His book Jonah, Jesus and Other Good Coyotes is about this “holy border running” in which people who are captured by a vision of God’s will shown in Jesus for love, justice and peace, and are prepared to challenge power and structures, even religious power and structures, so that this end may be achieved. His book, given that he is an Old Testament scholar, is about examples within the Old Testament of people who have crossed huge cultural, ethnic and religious divides for the sake of peace and another way of living. So there is Naomi and Ruth, who from the despised land of Moab, cross into the land of Judah; or Jonah going to Nineveh, the capital of the despised Assyrians, and others.

There is a deep and profound conflict between power and dominion on the one hand, and love, peace and justice on the other.  The subtitle of the book is: Speaking Peace to Power in the Bible.  God is a God of power and might – “God almighty” we say; or as we end the Lord’s Prayer with the ascription of glory which we Protestants say, but our Catholic sisters and brothers don’t, “For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours now and forever.”  However, at the same time God is a god of love and compassion; God shows lovingkindness, justice and peace. How do we balance and reconcile the two?

The Canadian theologian, Douglas John Hall, in his book The Cross in Our Context also suggests that there are two themes within scripture and Christian tradition. On the one hand there is what he calls the theology of glory – a theology that has, perhaps until recently, undergirded Christendom and empire. On the other hand there is the thin tradition, as he calls it – the theology of the cross: a theology which he sees as now being relevant for the church in these post-Christendom times; our own context.

Today our readings are about these profound tensions, almost fissures, within scripture. On the one hand we have the great might and power of Israel’s greatest king, King David, and his establishment of Jerusalem which he immodestly names The City of David. As our reading says:

David became greater and greater, for the Lord, the God of hosts, was with him. (2 Sam 5:10)

The psalm for today, Psalm 48, we sort of sung about in an earlier hymn, is even more explicit about the might and power of God – especially in relation to this city of Jerusalem.

Great is the Lord, and highly to be praised
In the city of our God is his holy hill. (vs 1)

But then brother Paul presents a different insight. Paul is the renowned interpreter of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. He is the theologian of the cross par excellence. In our reading from 2 Corinthians 12, he is continuing to address this difficult church at Corinth. You may recall our amusement last week as he tried to develop arguments for them to give to his Jerusalem Appeal. Well this week he is dealing with the reality, perhaps not greatly different from our own time, of when a group of teachers and preachers had breezed into Corinth promising knowledge, power and might in the name of Jesus. I take it this group supported an early form of the ‘prosperity gospel’ of which we often hear today: “Believe and you will be rich and blessed by our God of power.”

Paul begins to challenge this visiting group and their teaching in the preceding chapter to our reading, chapter 11: (I wish you would bear with me in a little foolishness. Do bear with me!) … so he says, someone has come to you to proclaim another gospel, another Jesus. Then he says, “I think that I am not in the least inferior to these “super apostles”. I may be untrained in speech, but not in knowledge – and so on.

And so in chapter 12, he comes to his weakness, or his famous ‘thorn in the flesh’. Paul wants to make the point God does not work through boasting, and crass appeals to power and might, or the teaching of these rather sarcastically named “super apostles”. He has God addressing him saying:

My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.(vs 9)
So I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. (vs 9)

Yes, God is a god of power, but that power is made perfect, perhaps made evident, made real, in weakness. Here Paul is talking of his physical “thorn in the flesh” – whatever that was for Paul, but it also applies to how God shows love in the cross of Christ.

Indeed this tension that exists between these two paradigms: one of power and another of love, is shown in the account of Jesus’s return to his hometown, Nazareth. Now we usually remember this story by the observation:

Prophets are not without honour except in their hometown and among their own kin and in their own house.  (Mk 6:4)

But why would that be the case here?  Was there something about Jesus being a prophet or a good coyote which was actually the cause of the problem; the cause of the rejection?

'Our' Nicole

I have been musing – if Jesus was actually, in the ways of the world, a celebrity: a great sporting identity, or famous musician or entertainer, or military hero, the locals would adulate him. We would do the same. We recall fondly those with whom we went to school, or university or who used to live down the street and who became famous. Or in this suburb, we at home are always having the conversation about who we saw today in Lygon Street, or while we were having coffee. If Jesus was a hometown boy who had made good, I don’t believe he would have been rejected. You see, the hometown-boy-made-good plays to our interest in flirting with power and fame.

But that was not what Jesus was doing, or was on about in this ill-fated return to Nazareth. I suspect he was actually challenging his old town to move to a new self-understanding, a new way of living.  He was offering a new teaching of love and peace. He was seeking a conversion.

His healings, though not huge in number, were still there – “he laid his hand on a few sick people and cured them”. He just was not an all singing and dancing, bells and whistles, display of power and miracle.  Indeed, as Mark says, “he could do no deed of power there”.

So who does he think he is?  He is just Mary and Joe’s son!  The carpenter’s kid.  Which really is saying, he can’t tell us what to do.

Interestingly Jesus himself was rattled by all of this. He thought people would be eager for a new way of living and a new way of relating with God – but apparently not.

He was amazed at their unbelief. (Mk 6: 6)

Within our understanding of God, there has to be an understanding of power. Our God does have power – but it perhaps it is not what we might think. As Paul says, “God’s power is made perfect in weakness”.

What can that mean? It does sound rather wimpish. I believe Paul is saying God does not lack power. Indeed on the Mount of Olives when Jesus is arrested, he said to the soldiers God could have sent a whole legion of angels to protect God’s anointed one (Matt 26:53), but God’s object was different. God sought to reach down to us, into our soul, befriend us, cleanse and offer new life.

As noted in then – to live by the sword, is to die by the sword – a statement which is true for us humans, as it is also true for the divine. Douglas John Hall says a god who rules with the sword, who shows power and might, will not survive the revenge of his victims.

To have a relationship with anyone, let alone with God, requires love – and not power, or power over them, which will only induce fear and submission. As Paul says in his great hymn of love (1 Corinthians 13), “Love does not insist on its own way . . . but bears all things, believes all things, endures all things.” Love qualifies power; peace speaks to power. Reinhold Niebuhr says:

“The crux of the cross is its revelation of the fact that the final power of God over us is derived from the self-imposed weakness of God’s love.”

The strength and power of God all get redefined through the cross of Christ. God seeks a different relationship of power with us.

So to our own time – are we wanting the church to return to the power and might of Christendom and our colonial times?  Do we want the church to exist again as a powerful institution across the land?  Or is our hope for a different sort of transformational power that we Christians can show through our mutual love and support and our care for others. . . our love for the outcast and marginalised?

Are we wanting God to act in power and might to right wrongs or address evils, so people will just respond out of fear and we will be self righteous about our cause?

I hope we see a different reality of power.  Our strength rests on God’s love, and because of that we can pursue a path of peace and of selfless love.

‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’

I hope we all can enjoy being good coyotes.

You can hear the interview repeated on AM 621 this afternoon at 4 o’clock, or else listen on-line or download it to your ipod via the Radio National website.  There will be no transcript.

The film Scarred Lands and Wounded Lives is available on DVD for US$19.95 (approx AUD31.50).

Avril was a long-time student of Melbourne University with a law degree and doctorate in Uniting Church history. She was a member at Church of All Nations when she began training for ordained ministry. She recently spent 5 months studying ecumenical spirituality with the World Council of Churches in Switzerland.

Avril is currently serving her internship in rural ministry to four congregations: Romsey, Riddells Creek, Mt Macedon and Lancefield.

Her service of ordination will be held at Church of All Nations on Sunday 5 October at 2:30pm.

Arthur grew up in Carlton during the Depression years of late 1920s and 1930s. Illness and limited finances were central to his early family years.

Arthur worked for the Taxation Department there he finished in a responsible position. He had a reputation for his detailed knowledge of the intricate taxation laws. Arthur used to travel to work by public transport and he would be constantly reading the latest texts on the Taxation law and regulations. He was always willing to give informed advice about income tax matters.

He had a close friendship with his brother in law, Albert Coles, who was the husband of May. I remember them coming from Preston regularly on Sunday evenings in the 1970’s when we had a small evening service.

Arthur always seemed at home at church whether he was a greeter, collector of the offering and communion steward. A vivid memory of Arthur each Communion Sunday was of him collecting the cups and taking them out to the kitchen and laboriously washing each one.

In his later years, Arthur was a very keen proponent of keeping fit. He was a regular attendee at the gym in his retirement and whenever it became a bit of a drag, he would say to himself, “Stroke, nursing home, wheelchair,” and that would be enough to motivate him to get in the car and off to the gym.

There are many good stories about the early days when they were kids at church. Particularly I recall the fiendish plot the young ones had to discomfort the choir members. A hole was made in one of the choir seats and a device set up so that a sharp pin could be manipulated from a distance into the posterior of the person sitting in that spot. It must have been operated by pulling on a piece of string connected to the choir seat.

Arthur was a mixture of shyness and talkativeness. Once given the opportunity to speak, he could talk with great interest and enthusiasm. At the recent Founders’ Day, he was very keen to see that we did justice to Rev. Penner who obviously was much appreciated by Arthur and others.

He was not particularly confident talking religious language or leading in vestry prayers. He was really a humble man of faith. If anyone got him talking about health, hearts, illness and he could talk in great detail and depth. He had a lot of problems with his heart in his retirement years, possibly related to his childhood times with rheumatic fever.

His life demonstrated better than words his values and his commitment. He is well described by the word ‘faithfulness’.

– Reflections by Mac Nicoll

Arthur Hill died at home on Tuesday evening. His funeral will be held at Church of All Nations on Thursday 19 June at 2:30pm.

The funeral will be at 12 noon on Thursday 24 April at Church of All Nations, with a private cremation to follow. Doug requested that in lieu of flowers, contributions be made to CAN Community Support. Download and print this form to make a donation in his memory.  Envelopes will also be available at the church.

Here’s a recent photo of Doug with Ethel, his beloved wife of 62 years, taken at the naming of the Fullerton Chapel. As Rev. John Evans said at worship this morning, which was to have been a celebration of his 90th birthday:

Doug was a passionate follower of Christ; a person of the Easter faith. In this season of Easter, let us be reminded that death is not the end, but a new beginning in our relationship with God. Doug, I am sure, would want us to worship God and give our thanks and praise for this hope we have in Christ.

And the hymn by Fanny Crosby, among those Doug chose for this morning:

Great things He has taught us, great things He has done, And great our rejoicing through Jesus the Son;
But purer, and higher, and greater will be our wonder, our rapture, when Jesus we see.