August 17, 2008

Glynn Cardy

Pentecost 14

This morning we have begun to use a new liturgy, the culmination of seven months of writing, consultation, and composing. It’s titled: “Journey in Aotearoa”.

The journey referred to is the spiritual journey into God. It’s a journey of discovery – discovering who God might be, who we might be, and what might be asked of us. Traditional church language, of which this liturgy uses little, would have called this ‘revelation’, ‘redemption’, and ‘sanctification’.

Aotearoa, our context, is both the starting place for this journey, the means of travel, and the destination’s cradle. It is similar to T.S. Eliot’s famous words ‘at the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time’. Note I use the word ‘cradle’ to indicate that the destination itself may feel like a beginning, or a beginning again. For the spiritual journey never ends.

There are many ways that the Church has promoted as the highways or backstreets to God. The life of Jesus, the Bible, and the traditions of the Church, the sacraments, and worship come to mind. Yet how we read, how we listen, how we know, and how we pray are all shaped by our context.

This emphasis on context [people of the land… people of the sea…] is what is called in technical language ‘incarnational theology’. It means that God is not far off somewhere over the universe but, as revealed in Jesus, is in our midst. God is around us, among us, and within us. The feelings and experiences we have of God being transcendent, mysterious, and beyond are interwoven with our experience of God being with us here and now in this place. We know God and are known by God in our physical, cultural, and emotional contexts.

One of the key metaphors for this liturgy is water. Water is literally all around us here. It refreshes us, it disturbs us, and it nourishes us. In the Church it is used in baptism [a beginning ritual], in blessing houses [an owning ritual], and in the Eucharist [a sustaining ritual]. It is also symbolic of our ancestors’ journeys in coming to this land. All peoples have travelled either on or over the water to get here.

The Song of Praise, written by Joy Cowley, talks about life as a river. Life flows, but not from a bad place to a good one or from sin to grace. Rather struggle, pain, loss, endurance, tenacity, hope, love, and joy are all blended into the flow; tossed and tumbled by the river. Sometimes we float sedately and at other times we are thrown through the white water. Sometimes we are in control and sometimes we’re not. The refrain ‘Where does the sea begin? Where does the river end?’ asks the question whether there are any limits to where God, has been, is, and will be in our lives.

The Words of Encouragement and the Prayer for Everyday are not the comforting ‘God loves you’ words of traditional liturgies. Neither are they of the ‘you-are-a-sinner-God-forgives-you variety. These words are not to make us feel good about ourselves but to encourage us to get up and do something. Like love one another, know our neighbour, loosen bonds of oppression, and protest. They are focussed on our mission to others not on our own needs. Daniel Berrigan, the resolute Catholic peace advocate, reminds us that when we are tired, weighed down, trying to care for the fractious and the fragile, when we want to avoid anything difficult, then like it or not, we just have to do what is right.

Similarly the response after the first reading: ‘Kia kaha. Be strong’. The traditional liturgy asks us to ‘hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church’. This liturgy however asks us to take what hear, if we can, and use it as spiritual fuel for the tasks of mission.

The crux of any Eucharistic liturgy is the prayer of The Great Thanksgiving. They usually have an up-down movement. God is up. He [and God unfortunately is always a ‘He’] creates humankind, who quickly screw up. God tries a variety of fix-it formulas. Then Jesus is sent down, dies, and is resurrected/elevated back up to God. He leaves behind his Spirit and the Holy Communion. We, the disciples’ offspring, are to carry on his work and message.

This Great Thanksgiving however starts with the earth, our planet. Spirituality, God, earth, and humanity are all interwoven. Earth is not a profane object. It is part of us. When we care for it and listen to it, it is like listening to our own bodies or listening to our parents/partner/children. In order to underline the intimacy of our relationship with the earth the liturgy uses some anthropomorphic language e.g. ‘ocean’s fingers caress’ and ‘the pregnant forest tends’.

It is important though to note that the liturgy is not trying to deify nature. It isn’t equating the earth with God. The purpose of the personifying language is to build connection, recognizing that our Western thought has in the past sought a disconnection with nature in order to utilize and exploit it. What we are seeking today are ways to cooperate with nature, and theologies that support that.

The first responsorial has us addressing creation ‘O brilliant sun… O bountiful earth’. Again this is not an attempt to deify nature. There is a long tradition of praying to others beside God – like Mary and the Saints, ‘Brother Sun and Sister Moon’, etcetera. Praying to them, despite what early Protestants would have us believe, doesn’t mean we equate them with God.

The Great Thanksgiving goes on to talk about, as with the river, the toss and tumble of human life. It identifies the structural, political, and cultural arm-wrestle between generosity and greed, with the cop-out option of apathy. Generosity and greed compete for allegiance in our hearts, in our neighbourly relations, and in our governments’ policies. This struggle impacts upon our earth and upon our soul.

Jesus knew this struggle and took sides. For centuries mainstream Christianity preached a Jesus who was above the struggle, who wasn’t interested in politics but only in saving souls, a Jesus who was on all sides and none. What that meant in effect was a politically neutralized Jesus, a Jesus who was in the pocket of the powerful, and therefore a Jesus who was bad news for the poor.

The resurrection is a way of talking about Jesus’ life and commitment living on in his followers. This liturgy again uses a water metaphor: the precipitation cycle. As water flows from river to sea and back again so Jesus life feeds and flows through our lives. It is not constrained by his death. The indication of a life affected, infected, by Jesus is love – i.e. a giving life rather than an absorbing love. This love comes like a gift.

The gift of love, the Jesus legacy or spirit, is both a comfort and a disturbance. While it is sustaining and supportive it also obligates us to be generous and confront the policies and practices of greed. It obligates us to work for justice. This love is our compass, paddle, and destination of our journey.

The Prayer after Communion expresses not only our gratitude but also that we are gifts of God given to the world. With all our faults and failings God flows through us, trusts in us, and believes in us. We are grace and hope, holy and powerful.

You may notice there is no subtitle called ‘Blessing’. On one level the whole liturgy is a blessing, declaring God’s generosity. On another level the blessing is the gift of Jesus’ life known as we gather together around an open Eucharistic table and journey on into God. On another level earth, our here and now, life itself is the blessing. And on another level we are the blessing. Warts and all, worries and all… we are God’s eyes, ears, hands, and hearts… God’s love and hope for the world.