May 31, 2009

Clay Nelson

Pentecost Sunday     Acts 2:1-21

Something is happening today that has only happened once before in my lifetime. It will only happen once more if I live to be 71. After that, even if I live to twice that age it won’t happen again. This year, the church and I are sharing the same birthday. Today is Pentecost, what is traditionally celebrated as the birthday of the church. The Church according to the Gregorian calendar is a venerable 1,976 years old today if Jesus died at the age of 33. I am a more modest 60.

Considering my well-documented love-hate relationship with the institution I affectionately but cautiously call “The Beast,” I’m not sure how I feel about sharing my birthday with it. As the Church and I are both Gemini’s this year, part of me would like to be the evil twin who forgets his twin’s birthday. But I do know that like all birthdays that end in zero I am feeling reflective about my life--where it has been, where it is, and where it is going. But this year those ruminations are overshadowed by thoughts about where the church has been, where it is and where it is going.

The week before last Glynn, Margaret Bedggood and I were three of about a 100 bishops, clergy and lay folk from the three Tikanga of Maori, Pasifika, and Pakeha at a Hui in Wellington that focused exactly on those questions. It was the second of three annual meetings that arose in response to the trauma the Anglican Communion is experiencing because the American church consecrated an openly gay man bishop and the Canadians began officially blessing gay and lesbian unions.

As you might guess there were about 100 different opinions on the subject, but ardent fundamentalist Evangelicals and St Matthew’s represented the two extremes. In brief the Evangelical position is that Holy Scriptures, the “Written Word of God,” calls homosexuality an abomination. Including gays and lesbians is tantamount to secularizing the church. The Church is called to holiness. There is no room in it for gays and lesbians or those who would include them because God said so.

In case this is your first Sunday at St Matthew’s, the Progressive Christian position is that Scripture is a human document that has to be read in its historical and cultural context to be applied with integrity to our present day. The Gospel message distilled from the early church’s need to validate Jesus’ importance in a Hellenistic world is one of liberation and inclusion. To exclude gays and lesbians on the basis of Scripture violates that message just as much as when it was used to justify slavery, colonialism, and the oppression of women. To continue to do so is to grease the slippery slope the church is already on to becoming fully and perhaps, deservedly irrelevant to the vast majority of New Zealanders.

We won’t know where Aotearoa New Zealand Anglicans will stand until next year, if then. But this might be a time to take a breath and consider the long view. We have the fortune or misfortune, depending on your perspective, of living in a time of major transition on many fronts. This is especially true for the church. It is hard to say how it will play out. Perhaps our great, great-grandchildren will have a clue. But being clueless, does not give me the excuse to give my shoulders a “she’ll be right” shrug. I do believe the decisions we make today can have a profound and permanent effect on human life. The church exists to worship. What we worship, and how and who we do it with, matters. It is a matter of transformation, individually and communally. But the question is will it be a transformation that gives us abundant life or death.

To make my case I would like to go back a wee bit in our human story to the Garden of Eden. I have never thought of the story as history any more than I do of Luke’s Pentecost story, but it turns out the fundamentalists may not be as wrong as I thought, but not as right as they think.

In 1994 a Kurdish shepherd tending his flock found unusually large stones peeping from the arid soil in the rolling hills of eastern Turkey. Since then archaeologists at a place called Gobekli Tepe have unearthed 45 limestone monoliths with many more to be revealed. They are arranged in circles and quite massive. Some are four meters high, weighing seven tons. They are covered with carvings of a wide range of animals and human forms. All this would be pretty astounding in itself, but what has made Gobekli Tepe profoundly important to our knowledge of human history, is how old it is. Carbon dating has determined that our pre-historic ancestors assembled these stones 12 to 13 thousand years ago. To give you a sense of how ancient they are, Stonehenge is only 5000 years old and the Pyramids are a youthful 4000 years old. It is even 7000 years older than creation itself according to some biblical literalists who believe the seven days of creation began on October 23rd, 4004 BC.

These builders were still in the Stone Age. Making pottery, using the wheel, writing and just about everything else were still waiting to be invented well into the future. Yet what truly astounded and surprised archaeologists is what they built. Gobekli Tepe is a temple. According to the prevailing theories this didn’t make any sense. It was thought that only after people settled down into farming and building communities did they have the time and resources to build temples. Yet nomadic hunters and gatherers built this temple. And archaeologists aren’t the only ones confounded. It appears that they built it in Eden, a place most biblical scholars previously considered mythical. It turns out that this temple sits in an area broadly defined in Genesis as the location of the Garden of Eden. While the area today is arid and unfertile, when our ancestors gathered there it was lush with a wide variety of vegetation, birds and animals. Clearly the site was chosen because it was paradise.

Their decision to build the temple in the midst of this garden of plenty was an immense undertaking. With only flint tools and not even the simplest of machines it took hundreds of labourers and their extended families to accomplish such a feat. Evidence suggests that our forebears gathered at the site periodically to build and to worship over a span of time longer than Christianity has existed. Then for reasons known only to them they buried the temple never to return, preserving it in pristine condition for us today. It certainly sounds like the Garden of Eden story. All that is missing is an angel with a burning sword guarding the entrance. Even the outcome of expulsion for Adam and Eve is included.

With so many people to feed and house, eventually even the Garden of Eden surrounding Gobekli Tepe was depleted. There is DNA evidence that over time these hunters and gatherers were the first humans to domesticate animals and wild grains. While we don’t know whom, how or what they worshipped we know their worship had consequences. Humans began the journey from being nomadic hunters and gatherers to settled farmers and city-dwellers. Worship led to civilisation.

In this particular case, worship also led to environmental disaster. By 8,000BC the local landscape began to alter. As the trees were chopped down, and the soil leached away, the area became arid and bare. What was once a glorious pastoral region of forests and meadows, rich with game and wild grasses, became a toilsome place that had to be worked ever harder.

It may also have led to human sacrifice. Nearby archaeologists unearthed a hoard of human skulls under an altar-like slab, stained with human blood. Evidence suggests that victims were roasted in huge death pits and children were buried alive in jars.

This is inexplicable human behaviour unless we understand that the people had learned to fear their gods in the face of paradise lost. So they sought to propitiate the angry heavens.

So, no surprise to us, they learned early that civilisation is not always civil and religion is often at the root of its worst excesses. While no one will ever know for sure, perhaps this is why our forbears with an effort equal to that of building it, buried the temple in 8000 BC.

Now jump forward 8,033 years to the first Pentecost. The disciples had a transforming moment. Fresh from their experience with Jesus and his radical ideas about a loving God, they came to a new understanding of faith. Empowered by his full embodiment of love, they felt compelled to share their experience. Faith did not have to be lived out in fear, even in the face of death. Being faithful was not about being exclusive or tribal, for love knows no boundaries. It wasn’t even about religion, often used by the powerful to oppress. Faith was not about purity but compassion, healing and justice. It did not have to be destructive if it heightened our awareness that the creation of which we are a part is an interconnected web. To heedlessly harm any of it is to harm all of it. And lastly, it is not best practiced in temples but in an enlivened heart.

1,976 birthdays later that message is surprisingly still with us, considering religion has done its worst to mute it. In 2010, I pray that New Zealand Anglicans will reaffirm it by its full inclusion of gays and lesbians into our common life. That will be a transformation worthy of whom we worship. That will be a happy birthday for the church. If we don’t, perhaps, we are approaching a time when the most loving thing we can do is to do as our ancestors did and do civilisation a favour. Bury the church that the Gospel might live. If our species survives for a few more millenia, it might then at least serve as a cautionary tale.