January 22, 2012

Glynn Cardy

Epiphany 3     Jonah 3:1-5, 10

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

On January 2nd our Rainbow billboard, celebrating the variety of relationships in our world – including same-sex couples, was defaced by a scripture-quoting critic who believes that voicing our opinion, on our billboard, on our church land, can’t be tolerated.

Such intolerance of others’ opinions was evident also in Dunedin on January 13th [i] when the pro-euthanasia campaigner, Sean Davison, received a brick through his window and, ironically, an accompanying death threat. The note said, “Leave Gods laws or be struck down dead”.

Strong disagreement with an opinion is very different from the intolerance exhibited by destroying property and making threats. When actions such as these are taken in the name of religion then not only do they do a disservice to all who follow that religion but they help create a climate of timidity where speech is self-censored for fear of offending those who can’t tolerant any opinion, save their own. 

Many churches seem to have embraced timidity as part of their ethos, believing it is more pastoral and caring to evade or fence-it on contentious issues rather than to speak out, express a view, and encourage debate. When passivity is extolled as wisdom we have taken another step along the road to irrelevancy. 

Twenty-five hundred years ago the Book of Jonah was written in and for a time of timidity and intolerance.

The defeat of the Jewish army and the subsequent captivity in Babylon was blamed upon those of their forebears who had married non-Jewish spouses, thus introducing alien and evil practices. The foreigner was to blame!

When Ezra and Nehemiah led the people out of Babylon and back to Jerusalem they proposed, in this climate of xenophobic piety, a statute that required every Jew married to a foreign spouse to divorce and banish the non-Jewish partner. It further required that any "half-breed" children born of that union be banished with the non-Jewish mate.

The enforcement of this statute moved Judah into one of the uglier phases of her history. Racial purists organized vigilante squads. Bloodlines were checked. Tensions ran high, as the inquisition tore families apart. Judah was to be for the Jews only. No protest was heard.

Then there appeared on the streets of Jerusalem a story, a parable, penned anonymously, that would theologically challenge this destructive religious intolerance. It was a story about a man, Jonah, who was fixed in his prejudice, and a God, who wasn’t. It included a whale, symbolic of the need to take time to think about what one is doing, and why.

The Book of Jonah is not an historical account, but the prejudice and the challenge was real. It’s an in-house story – a minority of Jews criticizing the majority – saying in effect ‘we are too narrow, too limiting of God, we need to open our doors wide to the strange and the stranger’. As the Rabbi Jesus would say 500 years later, ‘let the wheat and the tares grow together and then let God judge what is pure and impure, right and wrong, rather than us.’ [ii]

Tolerance is not just some namby-pamby liberal mush. It is an attitude of humility before God, acknowledging that we do not have all the answers. Indeed sometimes the answers we need come from those we distrust and even despise.

It is also an attitude that says wisdom is served by hearing views contrary to our own, disputing with those views, and encouraging others to make up their own minds. Wisdom is not served by timidity.

Our Christmas billboard was a comment on the humanity of Mary. It was an artistic and theological interpretation. It was not the only interpretation, nor was it ‘more right’ than other interpretations. Among those who disliked it however were people who believed that there is only one right way to think about Mary and to say otherwise is to both disrespect her and them.

Further, a subgroup of the ‘one right way’ decided to label our interpretation not only wrong but satanic and demonic. There is a dangerous history in demonizing one’s opponents, as for example the Nazis did to the Jews. One must always be careful in critiquing another’s viewpoint to acknowledge both their humanity and their right to disagree, even if they don’t acknowledge yours.

I pray that we at St Matthew’s will never falter in expressing our views, despite threats and vandalism, despite the prevailing religious climate of timidity, in the hope that the values of mutual respect, intellectual humility, and the pursuit of truth will predominate.

Last week I heard of a pacifist vicar in a country parish in Kent, England, during World War II. The parish had a number of former military personnel in the congregation who were not particularly tolerant of pacifism. Nor, needless, to say was the national mindset. The vicar’s popularity was at an all-time low. He sent his bishop, the Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple, a letter of resignation, citing pastoral breakdown.

The archbishop wrote back, refusing to accept his resignation. Although not a pacifist himself, Temple stated that the Anglican Church would be poorly served if everyone thought the same and the pacifist voice, particularly in wartime, was not heard. Further he encouraged the vicar to seek pastoral support by joining the local Quaker fellowship. The Archbishop evidently saw no problem with being both Anglican and Quaker.

This story was related to me by Canon Paul Oestreicher who, after writing in the English Church Times of his dual allegiance to both Anglicanism and Quakerism, received a copy of Archbishop Temple’s letter from the son of that Kentish vicar.

Unfortunately neither the story from Kent nor the Church Times article were seemingly known to Peter Sutton, Archbishop of New Zealand for a period in the 1980s, when he led the House of Bishops in overturning the decision of the Wellington diocese to nominate Paul Oestreicher as its next bishop. Ignorance and arrogance, as they so often do, teamed up to produce injustice. According to Archbishop Sutton and four other of the nine New Zealand bishops one could not be Anglican and Quaker. The rich possibilities that his nomination promised were trounced by a narrow-minded prejudice. It’s a pity there was no whale around to swallow up the mitre-wearers, invite them to re-think, and deposit them on a shoreline in Kent.

Intolerance takes many forms and shapes. It is fed by ignorance and arrogance. It is wary of truth, particularly that which it dislikes. It encourages those who think that being caring equates with being quiet. Intolerance likes religions that say truth is locked into past events and thinking, and adherents need only to unquestionably accept it in order to be faithful. Intolerance doesn’t like the strange and strangers and erects walls of certainty to keep them at bay. Intolerance peddles fear.

May we have the courage of the author of Jonah to name it, shame it, and constrain it.

[i] http://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/194516/davison-unfazed-death-threats

[ii] Matthew 13:24-30