Easter

Ian Harris                Otago Daily Times                   April 11, 2014

 Easter approaches – but does Easter really matter any more? This is, after all, a secular country. Only the vestiges of Christian observance remain in public life, as in shops closing and ad-free radio and television on Good Friday and Easter Sunday.   Some retailers and broadcasters resent even that – they ask why anyone should be allowed to get in the way of their sacred duty to make money? The case could be made that all restrictions should be lifted and the holiday abolished as irrelevant to our secular world.

Everything hinges, of course, on how Easter is interpreted. For Christians the festival will always be central. But among the secular majority a mix of ignorance, apathy and scorn is seeing it sidelined as a quaint relic of a supernatural past.   In Christian history Jesus’ resurrection is pivotal. It is the equivalent of the Big Bang in the story of the Earth. Without the Big Bang there would have been no planet Earth as we know it, no life on Earth, no us. Yet although scientists can trace the Earth’s evolution back to the beginning and draw conclusions about energy, matter, gravity, electromagnetism, time and much else, the moment of the Big Bang is still shrouded in mystery. We know it happened from its effects.

Likewise with the resurrection. Without the experience of resurrection by Jesus’ followers there could have been no Christianity, no church, none of the Christian cultural legacy of the West. We know it happened from its effects.

Attempts to define just what happened range from the ingenious to the bizarre. The view that resurrection means that Jesus’ dead body sprang back to life to walk, talk, eat and drink is shared, strangely, both by fundamentalist Christians (who affirm it as the core of their faith) and fundamentalist atheists (who use it to reject Christianity as untenable).  Bodily resuscitation is clearly one interpretation that can be drawn from the various New Testament accounts. And the notion of God restoring the crucified Jesus to life was not outlandish in the Jewish and Greek worlds where it took root.

But it is outlandish in ours. We stand 20 centuries, several cultures and a scientific revolution away from the moment of resurrection experience which, for all the zillions of words that have been written about it, remains at base a mystery.  All that is certain is that Jesus’ earliest followers experienced something that transformed them from a dejected, dispirited band into the vanguard of a confident, dynamic movement that was to transform the lives of billions. As with the Big Bang, the reverberations from that experience are undeniable.

The experience triggered the conviction that Jesus was not finished and done with after all. Everything he had come to mean to his disciples still stirred in them – in fact, the more they thought about it, the more they saw in him the fulfilment of all they valued most in their Jewish religious heritage. So they did not find it strange to say “Jesus lives.” More, they found their experience of Jesus somehow reflected their experience of Godness. They summed this up in the earliest creed: “Jesus is Lord.”

But how were they to convey the new reality to others? By composing stories that others could relate to – that was the Jewish way. This meant giving narrative form to their internal experience by telling who went where in the days following Easter, what happened to them, how they responded. During the 1st century those accounts became steadily more concrete in their portrayal of the resurrection, culminating in an empty tomb, a resuscitated physical body, and shared meals. None of these is present in the earliest record, that of the apostle Paul. And despite the elaborations, the heart of Easter remained the Big Bang of their experience, not the stories written to communicate it.

The next step in the process was to interpret the narrative theologically. This came first through imaginative links with key moments in the Jews’ religious history. It was then expanded to take in Greek philosophical understandings. Much later came creedal statements.

A former Anglican Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, identifies the nub of it: “The resurrection of Jesus is best understood, best used, as a symbol or sign of the human possibility of transformation. That transformation can be experienced at both the personal and social level; and one can lead to another.”

That, in modern parlance, is the good news Easter exists to convey – and it’s still worth a holiday to give it wings.

Quotes

Edith Cavell   Her very last words – spoken to a British chaplain before she was executed – were these: “But this I would say, standing in view of God and eternity, I realise that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.” 

War           “War is not over when fighting ends. Last year, more British soldiers and veterans took their own lives than were killed in battle.  Paul Vallely  (November 2012)

Paul Vallely is visiting professor of public ethics at the University of Chester

WAR          “We are rapidly getting to the point that no war can be won.  War implies a contest; when you get to the point…that the outlook looks close to the destruction of the enemy and suicide for ourselves…. then arguments as to the exact amount of available strength as compared to somebody else’s are no longer the vital issues.”   Dwight D.Eisenhower, 1956  (quoted by Ruth Leger Sivard)

Some Nelson Mandela Quotes:            from Common Dreams        December, 2013
1. "There is no doubt that the United States now feels that they are the only superpower in the world and they can do what they like."
2. “It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”
3. “Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity, it is an act of justice. Like Slavery and Apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. Sometimes it falls on a generation to be great. YOU can be that great generation. Let your greatness blossom.”
4. "Gandhi rejects the Adam Smith notion of human nature as motivated by self-interest and brute needs and returns us to our spiritual dimension with its impulses for nonviolence, justice and equality. He exposes the fallacy of the claim that everyone can be rich and successful provided they work hard. He points to the millions who work themselves to the bone and still remain hungry."       5. "We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do what is right.

Pope Francis:   “We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. … A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.”   A quote from his Evangelii Gaudium, December 2013.

Two Winston Churchill Quotes:
[of Hitler]  “The story of his struggles cannot be read without admiration for the courage, the perseverance and the vital force which enabled him to challenge, defy, conciliate or overcome all the authorities or resistances which barred his path.”   “I have always said that if Great Britain were defeated in a war, I hoped we should find a Hitler to lead us back to our rightful position among the nations.”  From speech 11 November, 1938   Not quoted to indicate agreement!

Today   “We live in the most illuminated of dark ages.”   Paul Heins – quoted by Dorothy Butler in her autobiography “All This and a Bookshop too”  P.407

New 'religious' group just as deadly as the ones that preceded it

Joan Chittister                 National Catholic Reporter              |  Mar. 19, 2014

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Here's the problem with religion. You never know which religion you're going to meet: the "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" kind, or the "Get thee behind me, Satan" kind.  You have to be very careful not to confuse one with the other. Your very life could depend on it.

The golden-rule types take people into the center of the community; the get-out-of-my-sight kind keep people out of it. One kind of religion embraces those who are different from themselves; the other excludes those who are different, the ones who are not like them: blacks if they're white; Jews if they're Christian; women if they're men.

Some people have lived restricted lives and even died at the hands of those who sought to restrict them -- some for trying to eat at white lunch counters or sitting down on buses; some for having ancestors in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago; some for serving soup that was cold or not ironing the shirts right.

The important thing to remember is that it doesn't really matter how the transgressions were defined. What matters is that the arguments in defense of doing it were always the same: God didn't want mixed races, or God wanted women to obey men, or God wanted Jews punished because the Romans crucified  Jesus.  And we forswore them all and thought we had learned something.

Until, lo and behold, we now discover that we have a new group developing, just as deadly, just as "religious" as the ones that preceded it.  It was done as if we never learned anything from all our previous attempts to exclude multiple other groups before this -- Native Americans, women, the Irish, Eastern Europeans, anyone who fell outside the pale in the past.  This time, they wanted to discriminate against people in the name of "religious freedom" -- read lesbian, people. They wanted public businesses to have the right to refuse to serve patrons who seek the services promised to the public under those same laws. It was a matter of "religious freedom," they said. But the argument is not all that simple.

The state that gives businesses tax breaks and public security protections and requires quality control of goods and services for the sake of the public good has the right to require that those services be available to the public. Or forget the tax breaks and the public police and fire protection and the legal recourse to protection of that business under the law.  After more than a century of segregation, people across the country stood up to refuse another century of shunnings in the name of God.

We have all watched our gay children committing suicide to avoid the bullying and social discrimination that dogged their lives. This time, Arizona said, "Enough of that."  We all see young gay women and men doomed to lives of rejection and ridicule for choices not their own, and people everywhere are beginning to say no to that.

So now, the exclusionists whose "religion" defies the very principles of the God who created the others as well as themselves are working again to sequester and silence those who are other than themselves. So if they get the right to do those things, what will the future look like for the rest of us?

Well, if this new kind of exclusion becomes standard, beware of your own social fragility. If your Mormon grocer finds out that you drink, you may never be allowed in the store again. Or your Jewish restaurant owner finds out you eat pork. Or your Muslim gas station owner does not approve of women drivers. Or your Catholic pharmacist figures out that you take birth control pills. I just want to remind you that people have been killed because they were Jewish, or black, or women -- or gay. So why not again? Why not here? Why not, if it's all legal?

After all, the next time, you may be what someone considers "morally offensive to their deeply held religious convictions." Just as were Jews, Catholics and blacks to the Ku Klux Klan in the United States. Or gypsies to the Nazis. Or now, homosexuals in Uganda. All of them by very religious people. The other kind.      [Abridged]

http://ncronline.org/blogs/where-i-stand/new-religious-group-just-deadly-ones-preceded-it

Same-sex marriage will help spread the message that Gay is OK

Heather Peace                 Independent/UK             30 March 2014

Earlier this week I was the guest speaker at the school assembly for Carshalton High School For Girls. I was invited by pupils who told me the school was celebrating the legalisation of equal marriage and spreading the phrase ‘Gay is OK’.  As someone who remembers Section 28 all too clearly, I readily accepted the invitation. The whole morning spent with these wonderful teenagers and their teachers was both moving and inspiring.

For the past three years, I played Nikki Boston in BBC One school drama Waterloo Road. Every single day I received messages on social media from kids struggling to deal with their sexuality or with gender issues. Struggling because of homophobic bullying, because the phrase ‘that’s so gay’ has become a way to describe something that’s rubbish, because they don’t know how to speak to their peers or their families and because they feel lesser by admitting that they’re gay.

At Carshalton High School, we talked a lot about language and why it’s so important to consider the words we use and how they’ll affect other people. I also explained that, for me, this is one of the main reasons that equal marriage is so important.  My partner and I had a beautiful Civil Partnership last year and since we’d already spent five years together, I was unprepared for the very subtle, gorgeous change that your relationship experiences when you make those vows. A feeling of security and calm came with having made the commitment, of telling each other, in front of all of the people we love, that this is forever.

I’ve described this to many people who have then asked why we really need equal marriage if a civil partnership looks the same, feels the same and by all accounts is the same. There are obviously a few legal differences with regards to wills, pensions and the fact your ceremony can't take place with any religious context. But the biggest difference is simply language. By calling it something else, we constantly reinforce to wider society and, most importantly to the next generation, that same sex partnerships are different, that they are somehow less. Less important, less real, a lesser love.

The passing of equal marriage will send a message to young people struggling with their sexuality that their future relationships matter. One day they will have the choice to commit to the person they love in exactly the same way as their straight friends. It will tell them that their love is not different and it will also send exactly the same message to straight kids.

There’s a long way to go until our society achieves equality for LGBT people and we must not forget the bigger struggles faced by our brothers and sisters internationally. But equal marriage is a massive step and even if the tradition of marriage isn’t something you’re interested in, then just having the choice to reject it is something to celebrate.

The ‘Gay Is OK’ assembly at Carshalton High School was organised completely by the students and included dances, videos and speeches. I left feeling incredibly optimistic. With a bit more pressure, campaigning and fighting from our generation, the next generation will ridicule the fact that we had to fight at all. 

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/samesex-marriage-will-help-spread-the-message-that-gay-is-ok-to-the-next-generation-9224389.html

Fringe People

by Ian Harris               Otago Daily Times          March 28, 2014

There have always been two main ways to bring about change: from the centre, and from the fringes.  The first brings change through power and authority. It was from the centre that Britain’s Parliament repeatedly reformed itself to reflect a changing society. From the centre that Pope Francis is apparently trying to reorient the Catholic Church away from the security of domination by the Vatican curia to the vulnerability of serving the powerless. From the centre that successive New Zealand governments jerked the country away from its humane ideal where the economy serves the well-being of all to an economy which is geared to serve the powerful, and where the gap between rich and poor consequently grows ever wider.

Contrast that with change generated on the margins – the French Revolution, the rise of trade unions and their party of Labour, the American civil rights movement, the emergence of the Treaty of Waitangi as a force for social justice.  In the arts, the 19th-century Impressionists challenged a stultified art establishment, Ibsen wrote a new kind of play, Freud and Jung steered psychology into new territory. Energy on the margins continues in periodic fringe festivals, full of experiment, creativity and edginess.

One of last century’s most influential theologians, Paul Tillich, knew all about fringes. A marked man after the Nazis came to power, he was forced to leave Germany for the United States. But he always felt himself to be on a boundary of one kind or another – between the Old World and the New, between tradition and the pressures of modernity, between abstract theological thinking and full engagement with a wide range of people, between theology and politics, economics, art, literature, philosophy. He found the boundary the most creative place to be.

In matters of religion, it still is. That is not to denigrate the role of institutions which have carried age-old traditions into the modern world, especially the elusive experience of the sacred. But it does suggest that the old formulations, conceived in and for other eras, are no longer adequate. What they point to needs to be rethought and re-expressed if it is to be part of that elusive experience of the sacred for secular people in a secular world.

Since the 1960s there have been plenty of theologians and ministers quarrying on the fringes of traditional belief, plenty of groups on the fringes of church life feeling their way into new understandings of Christian experience. They find, inevitably, that stepping beyond the authoritatively sanctioned carries uncertainty and risk.

Those who explore something new obviously hope to find something worthwhile – but they also risk failure. Tillich comments: “He who risks and fails can be forgiven. He who never risks and never fails is a failure in his whole being.” And “Decision is a risk rooted in the courage of being free.”

The early days of the church illustrate this. The Christian way began as a fringe movement within the mainstream of Jewish life and faith. The first followers of Jesus worshipped in the synagogues. Their holy book was the Jewish scriptures – the gospels were yet to be written.

About 50 years after Jesus’ death, however, mounting tension between the rabbis of the old Israel and what Christians came to call their new Israel pushed the Christians to the margins, then out altogether. But there had to be a mainstream for the fringe to exist at all, and the church has never repudiated its debt to its Jewish spiritual heritage – indeed, Christianity makes little sense without it. Over the centuries this fragile fringe grew to become a new mainstream centred on the authority and power of the Catholic Church. In the early 1500s a new fringe developed and burst free in the Protestant Reformation – and churches that emerged from that convulsion then became mainstream in northern Europe.

Again today there are fringes all round the mainstream churches, but of a different order. Most of those involved have not cut all ties with their churches, but have become impatient with institutional preoccupations, supernatural assumptions, creedal rigidity and growing conservatism.

So, like Tillich, they look for breathing-space on the margins – to explore new thinking, seek fresh perspectives on the sacred, find their own spiritual integrity and confidence. That carries the risk of rejection by the mainstream and, for those not determined to retain their connection to the core Christian heritage, of ending up in quirky isolation. But the risk is worth taking. Those who never risk and never fail are failures in their whole being.