Graduation Address 2009

Swimming in the sea of faith

We are the proud owners of an electric kontiki, a battery driven torpedo that tows a couple of kilometers of fishing line and hooks way out beyond the breakers.

 It’s a great Kiwi invention and works beautifully, unless of course the nylon line slips off the reel as its being towed out at unstoppable speed. Then you have a tangle that can take you two days to unravel.

One of the great advantages of retirement is that you find the time to unravel things you never had the time and patience to deal with before.  Not only fishing lines but the mysteries of faith.

The church world spends a lot of time worrying about younger people not having a faith or a spirituality, let alone not choosing to come to church like they used to.

I’m not at all sure whether younger people ever went willingly to church in this country, and I don’t notice any great lack of faith or spirituality.  If anything, there is a greater than ever curiosity about the life of faith and the care of the soul.

 The difference lies in the huge variety of ways that curiosity is expressed and experienced. Check the shelves of any bookshop for books on Christianity ( which 20 years ago was the only show in town) and you’ll struggle to find anything that looks mainstream and orthodox. Instead you’ll find the full range of world religions, a dozen different self help manuals on spiritual health and something on every conceivable form of spiritual health from chicken soup recipes  to do it yourself astrophysics.

What saddens me as a reasonably orthodox Christian believer and church attender is that we don’t seem  to have any sense of urgency or even awareness about how much we’re missing out on  our market share. Tarot card readers and  deep breathing meditators pedal their wares with more enthusiasm and confidence than your average Anglican.

It’s almost as though we think that people will wake up one morning and all come back to church, and after we’ve given them the page number in the prayer book they will pick up with us where they left off.

 Except those people never joined in the first place so they have nowhere to leave off from, and the way we worship and interpret the faith now is going to be radically different in five years time, ten times more radically different than the revolutionary changes we’ve been through in the last fifty years.

In retirement you have time to unravel things. You also have time to simplify things. And the simplest discovery I’ve made recently is the importance of finding the right image or mental picture to help you find your way through a mystery.

 It’s very revealing to consider the images we hold of faith.

 And I mean faith rather than Jesus or God or the kingdom of heaven.

We’re reasonably conscious of the variety of images of Jesus. Everything from him looking like  “healthy Kiwi backpacker” ( to quote John Mortimer) to the grim pain bearer or the slightly effete friend of little children who insist on sitting on his knee like Father Christmas.

And the images of the kingdom in the gospels are equally vivid and varied – yeast and light, fig tree, mustard seed and  hidden treasure.

But it’s the images of faith that I’m interested in here – finding, holding, expressing a religious faith. And they are not as obviously or easily recalled. We take them for granted, they are built into the woodwork of our culture.

 In Israel, the images of faith are walls and caves, enclosures and fortresses. Especially walls. They surround you on every side and just in case you’d missed them, the Israeli government is building a brand new concrete  eight metre high electrified wall around the whole country.

In New Zealand we don’t do walls like that though the new fashion of barred and gated housing compounds is a bit of a worry.

 Just what are the current Kiwi images of faith?

I think we make a lot of use of rocks and cornerstones – something solid, dependable, enduring. Often the church building itself becomes the rock. In Waiapu where we had an overabundance of old churches, people would spend massive amounts on their upkeep, way out of proportion to what they’d spend on ministry, even in remote areas where the buildings were used only two or three times a year. One parish with an average Sunday congregation of about 25 and no stipendary ministry maintained seven of these churches and kept them looking like they’d always been. God was honoured in this way, very genuinely, along with the Historic Places Trust.

Interestingly, the architectural forms of these churches, even in strongly Maori areas, never reflected anything of the built or natural landscape. More often they speak of England and Europe, and dreams of what the settlers left behind. Images of an “if only  faith” nurtured by what might have been.     

Clouds are also popular images of faith, overarching and encompassing and protecting, though clouds easily slip into menace mode, dark clouds full of portent and warning. I’m told that a popular image of faith in Pentecostal circles was a dark cloud hovering over the cathedral in the square when the things being said from the pulpit weren’t approved of.

Certainly in conservative theological circles, you often find the image of impending judgement as a sword or the hammer about to drop, or a war or rumour of war as oil prices drop and food prices rise. Faith in this context becomes the lifeboat in a sinking world. Something to keep you safe in  dangerous times.

The images of faith from the artistic rather than established church community are rather different. Through the eyes of a Colin Machon or a Nigel Brown, faith is a thoroughly indigenous and homegrown gift, harvested from the soil beneath our feet and the sky above our head. It fits the contours of our hills and beaches and the proportions of our streets and houses. Faith becomes something you can find here and nowhere else quite like it.

Such Kiwi distinctiveness is a welcome element but not in itself a compelling one. What we also need from our images of faith is a sense of  universality right here at home. We need images that respect and accommodate all the different pilgrimages that faith seekers are making in Aotearoa, together and alone, in and outside and around the edges of our churches and temples and synagogues and mosques.

The image of faith that keeps coming back to me as I sit untangling my fishing line is rather unsurprisingly and unnervingly simply, the image of the sea itself.

I know that one organization has claimed it as a brand name but the pedigree of the Sea of Faith is a whole lot longer and richer than that, even than the poem by Matthew Arnold.

Arnold’s poem limits the image by its sadness and very Victorian nostalgia for some mythical time when belief  filled the “round earth’s shore” and lay like the “ folds of a bright girdle furled”. Now it’s gone, and we’re left with remnants of aging congregations rattling loose in old empty churches, washed up on the “naked shingles of the world”.

Bleak stuff. But the sea of faith image is bigger than that. It takes us back to the first morning of creation when earth was a formless void and the sea was covered by darkness and the wind of God. It stretches us forward to the day when the new heaven and earth arrive and there will be no more sea. It holds the mystery and terror of the deep, it is the watery cradle for our dead. It links the oceans of the world that lap the shores of every continent and connect every human race and culture. The sea speaks of a faith creating  endless energy and beauty and hopefulness and unreserved embrace, of a promise without limit and a gift without conditions.

Such an image will not be popular with people who want to control and measure faith, who proscribe what we’re allowed to believe about God. The boundary riders of orthodoxy will prefer to talk about the lake of faith, or a swimming pool of measured lengths and practiced strokes.

I’m suggesting that if we took on images of faith that are as generous and out of control as the sea, we’d have a much more fruitful and encouraging time as teachers  and preachers, educators and evangelists of the Gospel. Because the way we picture the faith makes a world of difference to how we go about sharing it, and equally importantly, to how we understand and respect the ways people find faith.

What then might some of those differences be if we took the sea of faith as our central image?

 In the same way that the sea is simply there, just as part of the way things are in the world, so too is the gift of faith that lets us recognize the way things are for what they are, a given of creation that is freely given and in no way dependent on us.

 In our contemporary way of seeing the world, faith easily becomes an additional extra, a negotiable option we can choose to do without. And when we do choose to receive faith we often treat it as a personal possession to be managed how we like, quite independently of the world around us.

 The sea of faith metaphor changes that personalizing and disconnecting. The gift of eyes to see God’s creation and the gift of creation itself are part and parcel of the same package of grace. And just as the ocean continues to move on the cycle of moon and tide, to sustain life and shape the weather, regardless of whether we’re present  or not,  so too does the gift of faith  keep working in us according to its own rhythm, regardless of whether we’re trying hard or being good or not.

This view of faith allows us to stay afloat when we struggle to believe much of anything, let alone of God. There are times when Christian pilgrimage is a hard slog uphill, when God seems to have deserted us, the long dark night of the soul stretches on with no promise of morning. At such times the sea of faith image calls us to lie back and trust the buoyancy of the water to sustain us. Simply floating is an act of faith for us just as walking on water was for Peter. And what’s more there are plenty of other swimmers to call on and carry us along. If faith is a shared gift, we don’t have to always be sure and clear and hopeful. Spiritual capital is an unlimited commodity distributed extravagantly and indiscriminately.  God gives it to the most outrageous and unlikely people. Borrow some of that good stuff from others. There’s plenty of go around and it was made to be given away.

 To dive headlong into a wave is to  hand yourself over to the power of the sea. On a cold day its bracing, when the surf is high it can be risky but it is always an experience of surrender. What happens after that first decision to dive is entirely outside your control. Sooner or later you will resurface and take a deep breath, stand up on the sand or swim but much of the experience of body surfing is going with the flow.

 So much of living faithfully is like that. Absorbing the experience of practicing the presence of God by letting it happen through a process of osmosis rather than control. We surround ourselves with godly people and their stories, make journeys to sacred places and handle sacramental things, remembering what Jesus said and did back there and then  in the hope that by repeating them we will relive them right here and now. We hope something will rub off on us and it often does, though rarely in the ways we expect and plan.

This process of faith by osmosis, by going for a swim in the sea of faith is especially powerful for children who aren’t old enough to be cynical and know it all. Osmosis usually happens slowly and invisibly. Long swims are best.

But sometimes if you’re very lucky, usually as an adult, you might absorb God suddenly. While osmosis is a process that happens to you without much if any say from you, it can also happen abruptly as if to remind you that you aren’t in control of the things of God. You came to us before we came to you says the Eucharistic liturgy.

That’s the way it happened to Sarah Miles. She was an ever so clever and worldly wise, left wing lesbian journalist who had no time for God until she went to communion at St Gregorys in San Francisco one Sunday morning. There she was, totally unfamiliar with the liturgy and the surroundings, receiving a piece of fresh crumbly bread and a man saying the body of Christ, and drinking some sweet wine with the words the blood of Christ, and then out of the blue, she writes, “something outrageous and terrifying happened. Jesus happened to me.”

 The experience left her in tears and physically unbalanced. She couldn’t explain it. ”That impossible word Jesus lodged in me like a crumb. I said it over and over to myself, as if repetition would help me understand. I had no idea what it meant but it was realer than any thought of mine ..it was as real as the actual taste of the bread and the wine. And the word was indisputably my body now, as if I’d swallowed a radio active pellet that would outlive my own flesh.” (p 58)

The story that follows is told in Sarah’s book “ Eat this flesh”. As a result of what happened that morning she gave her life over to establishing the biggest church based food bank and soup kitchen in the city, where the food is served off the altar of that beautiful church.

This is a story about faith by osmosis, sudden and dramatic but not so sudden as to forget the barely remembered but powerful childhood influence of Sarah’s missionary grandparents. Osmosis works in hidden  and cumulative ways. The memory of a swim on a hot blue summer day can keep you going through many a long grey winter.

The mainstream churches were dragged kicking and screaming to recognize the power of sudden conversions at Billy Graham crusades in the 1950’s but we’re less comfortable about recognizing the often quirky, intensely  personal and seemingly silly and domesticated  ways in which people experience and absorb God. In our anxiety about orthodoxy and holding onto what we’ve got, we struggle to create a permissive all embracing culture of curiosity and  celebration about all things spiritual that to use the gospel parable image, lets the wheat grow with the weeds and leaves it to God to do the refining at harvest time.

In my own life of faith I’ve had few dramatic moments of discovery. The Billy Graham crusades and later the charismatic movement’s overwhelming encounters passed my by. I envied friends whose hearts were suddenly and strangely warmed. But there have been times and places that shook me up and unsettled me spiritually and in retrospect  left me never quite the same again.

I think of a weekend workshop led by Ted Buckle I went to in an old pub in Rotorua as a very young and very uncertain ordination candidate, that opened my eyes to a theology of liberation that saw the secular and the political as God’s arena.

I think of the pilgrimages we made in Waiapu up the East Coast to empty places where the church once thrived with hundreds at worship every Sunday and a once proud mission station that became a battle field and a ruin. And every spring when the paddocks on that now deserted site are ploughed, shards of broken crockery from Bishop Williams dining table are still turned up.

I think of the service in Christchurch Cathedral on the midnight eve of the new millennium – with the rolling noise of fireworks in the square outside and fears of Y2K and rumours of  planes crashing, and the power of the story we told that night about another centennial  celebration at the turn of the 18th century when in Puritan Massachussetts many were convinced the world would end and the speaker of the house of representatives called an end to the speeches of the doom and gloom merchants and called for order- “let the doors be opened and the lamps be lit and the debate for a new century proceed”

 I treasure those epiphany moments  and still absorb  energy and hope from them.

In a small boat  it’s always a source of great pleasure to be in the company of a good sailor. Not only to restart an outboard motor that dies suddenly but even more magical to read the sea and the sky, sense the impact of the tide and current and the change in the wave pattern – mysterious things that an amateur can’t see for looking.

 The life of faith is a bit like that – full of signs that we need to read to navigate our journeys into the heart of God.

 Navigating our pilgrimage is another way of talking about vocation – the way we fit in with the flourishing of God’s creation. Faith is very hard to talk about when you’re standing still, when you haven’t begun the journey God intends you to make towards the way you need to follow and the truth you need to know. It’s equally hard when you have begun and then you lose your direction.

But faith in God when you are on the move and you see enough signposts for the next stage of the journey, that’s much easier and more rewarding than any theology abstracted from the experience of the journey itself.

Christianity is essentially a road movie. The audience, like the first Christians, are best described as the People of the Way.

The exhilaration of faithful living comes from receiving  corrections to your course, nudges and hints that redirect you to a road less traveled, maybe with an unlikely companion into unfamiliar country. Faith becomes the road map and the compass, the sense that you are not travelling alone. You start to realize you are a pilgrim being led as much as you are a disciple trying to follow, and that you’ve been blessed with eyes to see things others might miss, signposts that others can’t read.

One of my role models was a lady called Gwen Witt, one of Winston Churchill’s secretaries during the war, then a secretary extraordinaire at Christchurch Cathedral. She died recently and at her funeral a poem by Thomas Hardy was read, which began:

 “When the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,

Delicate filmed as new spun silk, will the neighbour’s say,

‘He was a man who used to notice such things.’ ”

 Gwen had that gift of noticing things, of seeing the world in a grain of sand.  We can all cultivate it. It makes navigation easier on our journey to God. But regardless of how well we notice details the metaphor of navigation  is  powerful  for those of us who want something practical and down to earth, something to hold onto as we explore the realm of the spiritual and the heavenly. 

 God gives each of us a place to stand and a niche where we fit into the flourishing of creation, a role that only we can play in the divine economy. When we find it we know it is meet, right and proper and God smiles.

Finding it is the hard part that takes so long, so why not  envisage the action of finding, navigating as itself an act of faith.  Why not turn the journey with all its twists and turns into  something worthwhile for its own sake?

One of the puzzles I try to unravel in retirement is sorting out the time I’ve spent seeking faith outside the church. In one sense you are never outside the church, by virtue of your baptism, but there were long stretches of my life when I felt on the fringe of the church I belong to, certainly the Anglican expression of that. When I worked for the WCC, the most polemical debate, even more than funding liberation movements,  was whether the ecumenical movement was in any sense church. The Eastern Orthodox said very definitely no, which made life difficult for expatriate employees whose only experience of  a gathered church was found in ecumenical gatherings.

Jesus wasn’t very helpful in giving us images of church, apart from that of his own body, which was a very risky one, given what happened to his own body. By inference you could argue that he wouldn’t have favoured images of church that are about security and protection and self preservation. Yet these are precisely the images that dominate our ecclesiology, as we try to hang onto what we’ve got, especially in their bricks and mortar forms.

I think we’d be more faithful to the biblical vision of church if we saw it as first fruit and foretaste , advance outpost of the kingdom still to come, or light on the hill cutting the darkness.

So much of   our language of faith is domesticated by rituals of incorporation and commissioning – confirmation, ordination, licencing and administration. The licences I used to sign as a bishop were nine parts to keep the show on the road, and one part to look for new members and new ministries.

Faith in this sense becomes a swim inside the shark net, protected from the dangerous world outside.

Last Easter Sunday, I didn’t go to church for the first time in my life. The small rural community we recently moved into invited us to join a golf tournament which is the biggest annual event in the village. We’d never been invited before and I’d never played golf before but we went, feeling bad about not going to church to celebrate the new life of resurrection.

But in the course of the golf tournament I heard several stories of new life, a retired music teacher told me about the keyboard she was lending and the lessons she was giving free to a local child, a caravan camper told me about the work he was doing for the Special Olympics and the way children with disabilities were changing his life. And I got asked by some people who don’t go to church whether I’d take a service for them, not too religious of course.

We all need a safe harbour to come home to, we all need a community of faith to connect us with the tradition of faith that keeps us accountable to the Gospel anchorage. But the faith we seek in the God who so loved the world that he gave us his son has to be found in that world that he made good and continues to make gooder – ever more beautiful, and just.

 When the church becomes a gated community, when the swim of faith is limited by shark nets, we risk a Clayton’s religion. A faith that looks like the real thing but isn’t, quite.

So what’s all this got to do with the way we work as teachers and tutors, students and practitioners of theology?

Just as we all learn in different ways, so we believe in equally diverse ways. And the challenge of the theological education enterprise is to cater for that diversity in the way we meet God, or more precisely and vastly more widely, the way that God meets us.

Go back to the bookshop image and recall the plethora of ways on offer for talking about God encounters. Does our theological curricula and pedagogy reflect anything like that range of options? I suspect we’d be judged as a bread and butter offering trying to compete in a  lineup of gormet food suppliers.

Recently I heard Australian market researcher and pastor Mark McCrindle talking about “changing times and emerging trends” and making the case for a radical rethink of the way we go about evangelism and church growth. He traced the revolutionary changes underway in what’s important to generations under fifty and the values they live and learn by.

 Some of it was obvious and often discussed, like the shift from content to process questions, long term needs to short term wants, respect for innovation rather than tradition. But some of his shifts were less obvious, like the valuing of authenticity over authority, most recent recommendation over long established reputation, trying and seeing over sitting and listening, connectedness with others over individual achievement, relational and emotional intelligence over technical expertise.

Our context for learning and believing is light years different from that of our parents, in a deconstructed world that is multi sensory, interactive, spontaneous, collaborative, and filled with limitless expectations.

Such a world makes students of us all, relativises the authority of all our  experts, forces the constant revision of all our methods.

I’m convinced that the attractiveness of  theological education  would be enhanced a hundred fold if people sensed we were serious about meeting them where they are on their journey of faith, and willing to explore the faith they’ve been gifted as a sea to swim in and navigate across, rather than a pool to be controlled  and protected.

In so far as EIDTS has begun and continued in that spirit it’s got a great future.