Contact 2005 February

From the Registers…

Baptisms

9 January

16 January

6 February

Honor Margaret Jennings

Tiana Rose Magnussen

Gerard Patrick Evans Norsa

Isabelle Mary-Kate Schenck

Weddings

27 December

6 January

29 January

12 February

19 February

Eric Leung & Megumi Yomogida

Simon Baxter & Harriet Tucker

Brett Wilson & Nicole Sproull

Mark Woods & Madilyn Parker

Scott Savage & Rachael Ward

David Corless & Kristen Oatway

Funerals

25 November

7 January

12 January

20 January

4 February

15 February

Peter Compton Hind

Oakley David Took

Campbell Drape Woolstencroft

Joan Lorraine Nicholls

Anthony Joseph Laurence

Gregory Black

Farewell to Penny Harding who has returned to New Zealand and to Dr Peter Sherlock who is moving to Brunswick – they will be missed. Their contribution to the life of the parish has been considerable.

Congratulations to Marilyn Hope who was ordained Deacon in St Paul’s Cathedral on the 5^th February. She will be our licensed Parish Deacon.

Priest to parishioner: Did you like my sermon on the milk of human kindness?

It seems that Christmastide and Epiphany passed in a flash and we were not allowed to sit around idle during January.

The Christmas music was grand and wonderful. Louis Vierne’s Messe solennelle was directed by Philip Nicholls with great skill, and ably accompanied by Siegfried Franke (organ) and Peter Sherlock (piano). Even the great numbers of people at worship was a return to numbers of 1943.

Lent has begun, and in the meantime, Marilyn Hope has been ordained deacon and will serve in this parish as our liturgical deacon, as well as her weekday work in chaplaincy at the Alfred Hospital. Marilyn has written an article for us on the “distinctive diaconate.”

The Tsunami disaster prompted the call for a National Day of Mourning. Fr Paul Bower’s sermon for that Sunday is also reproduced in this edition of Contact.

Another article to watch for is reproduced from Quadrant on the Diocese of Sydney. It is worth reading and reflecting on.

The Director of Music’s page highlights the importance in music in our weekly worship.

The 150^th Anniversary Events have begun with a focus on the wider church. The church in Papua New Guinea is in need of many things that we take for granted. As our 150^th Thanksgiving Gift we are raising $20,000.00 to assist in the refurbishment of St Paul’s Primary School, Dogura, in the Milne Bay Province. Lent and mission giving will be directed to that appeal, and other donations would be appreciated. All donations are tax deductible through Ausaid and will be administered by the Anglican Board of Mission. I am hopeful that we will be able to present the $20,00.00 gift in mid April when national leaders of ABM will be gathered at Christ Church for their annual conference. Other details of the 150^th celebrations are listed separately.

As we, the Community of the Faithful, move towards Easter on our Lenten journey, we need to focus again on our faith in the light of both the crucifixion of Jesus and his resurrection.

I hope that on such a journey that you will encounter the Christ who comes, who dies, and who is risen, and that you will be encouraged in your faith.

A recent biography of Marcus Loane, evangelical Anglican Archbishop of Sydney in the 1960s, records that as a student at Moore Theological College he would read during lectures to avoid having to listen to the liberal Principal. When you are committed to a closed system of thought, you can't be too careful when it comes to letting ideas in from the outside. But what about the ideas already inside? How does the Sydney Anglican interpretation of Christianity compare to what Jesus said?

Sydney's Archbishop Peter Jensen and Dean Phillip Jensen are the public face of a proudly "narrow" interpretation of the Bible that has had an immense success in the English-speaking world in the last quarter of Christianity's history. The basic tenets of "Bible-based" faith are clear. They are summarised in what Peter Jensen calls the "great alones" of the Reformation: scripture alone, Christ alone, grace alone, faith alone. The point of the word "alone" is what it excludes: there is no role for good works as opposed to faith, for human effort in addition to God's help, for the insights of other faiths as well as Christ, for the tradition of the Church as well as the written word of scripture. "Faith alone" means exactly what it says: what God wants is belief in certain propositions about Jesus and salvation, and without that belief good actions are not pleasing to God. In fact, they deserve his punishment. "The final sin of religious people", Peter Jensen writes, "is moralism, by which we trust that we can come to know the living God and to gain his approval by the quality of our lives." He condemns "any religious system which involves even a modicum of human merit". That means, in plain terms, that Jensenites believe God disapproves of the ordinary person's virtue for the same reason he disapproves of Mother Teresa's charity - it is not badged by them.

There are many objections that spring to mind - is that not a narrow view, intolerant, prejudicial to the good health of society? Jensenites rejoice in those criticisms - the best persecution going, they think, in our sadly lion-free age. But what will immediately strike anyone who has read even casually in the Bible is how grossly it is out of tune with the Jesus of the gospels. The big statements of Jesus' message that the gospels themselves foreground, like the Sermon on the Mount and the story of the Good Samaritan, are all about God's concern that humans should act rightly, with love and compassion. "Blessed are the peacemakers", says Jesus, not "Blessed are the staunch subscribers to Reformation formularies of doctrine." The very point of Jesus's choosing to illustrate care for one's neighbour by a Samaritan - by Jewish lights, one of woefully heretical beliefs - is to emphasise that God does love compassionate action irrespective of belief in doctrinal details.

In a key passage (Matthew 25) that so-called Bible-based Christianity has always been keen to downplay, Jesus discusses the principles on which God judges people: "I was hungry and you gave me something to eat ... I was in prison and you visited me." There is no mention of ritual observances, none of assent to propositions. That is not to say Jesus was unconcerned by doctrine - he was very eager to reveal that there is a God who cares for humans and wishes humans to have a relationship with him. But his emphasis was always on how that relationship plays out in action, not on details of doctrine or religious ceremonies. It is impossible to imagine him getting hot under the toga about doctrinal and liturgical trivia like stained glass or church choirs. What would Jesus have thought of a "Christianity" that plays up St Paul's statements in a minor letter about women in church, and hides in embarrassment the peaks of Jesus's own teaching?

Jensenism believes it has an answer to these criticisms in the words of St Paul on the importance of faith. In addition to the obvious incoherence of preferring a follower of Jesus to Jesus himself, Paul has a few choice remarks about those in his own day who said, "I am for Paul." The faith Paul spoke of, he makes clear, is not his own but refers back to Jesus. The extraordinarily low profile of the gospels in the writings of the Jensens - except for carefully selected snippets - is the clearest indication possible of what is really happening. They fear the gospels, for the gospel message is inconvenient.

Fear of the plain meaning of the gospels explains several other distortions in the Jensenite approach to the Bible. The Jensens are not strict biblical literalists. Phillip Jensen admits that the Jesus's statement "If anyone comes to me, and hates not his father and mother and wife and children, he cannot be my disciple", is an exaggeration. That is plainly right, since a literal interpretation of the text would be out of tune with the moral tone of the whole. Why then are the Jensens uniformly suspicious of historical and linguistic studies that might cast light on the meaning of the whole? It can only be a fear of what might be revealed about the gospel as it really is.

It also explains the evangelical practice of "Bible study", in taking a very tiny portion of text and embroidering obvious comments on it for an hour. Will the text for comment ever fall beneath the size of a sentence, as in the classic Tory political broadcast from the British comedy Not the Nine O'Clock News, "tis easier for a rich man to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a camel to"? If one could give a single piece of advice to those who have fallen into the rut of this kind of "study", it would be: read the Gospels less often, but in longer portions.

It explains too the Jensenite hostility to the other ("idolatrous") branches of Christianity. A fundamental contradiction in "Bible-based" Christianity is that the Bible itself does not say that Jesus left a book but a community. Yet evangelicals have cut themselves off from the great body of Christian believers, Orthodox, Catholic and Coptic, the church to which Jesus promised his unending help. Evangelicals have created instead an inward-looking and recent sect, interested neither in understanding the Hebrew background of the Biblical text, nor in the person of Jesus, nor in the simplest "big picture" understanding of the gospel message. The real gospel does not make itself an object of worship, as in Peter Jensen's talk of "the gospel, by which men could be saved from the wrath due to their sins" (actually, he writes "saved for the wrath Š" but I am assured that is a Freudian typo.) The slogan "scripture alone" is not just narrow, but self-contradictory.

The most unsavoury aspect of the Jensenites' distortion of the simple message of Jesus is its concentration on sin and guilt, without a compensating sense of human worth. The gospels are quite free of the extreme evangelical "heads I win, tails you lose" attitude to guilt, where everything I do wrong deserves God's wrath but anything I do right is done by him. The dark mindset of guilt alone is designed to prey on early teens and technically smart but socially unconfident older teens who, for one reason or another, have a shaky sense of self-worth. Missing is the sense, clear in the gospels, that God is only displeased when we have done something evil that we might not have done. Harming "little ones", the gospels record, was what made Jesus most angry.

As to Phillip Jensen's accusing the Archbishop of Canterbury of taking his salary under false pretences, there is no escaping the obvious applicability of Jesus's throwaway remark about noticing first the beam in one's own eye.

Though five years have passed, it doesn’t seem that long ago that the world was overwhelmed with Y2K fever. Despite all the fears of a global shutdown due to computer malfunction, it was a cause for many of great celebration.

I remember a great sense of excitement and also of hope that this first decade of this first century of this new millenium looked like it was going to be a new opportunity for peace and harmony in our troubled world. That great New Year’s party then seemed to continue throughout the year 2000 for us in Australia with the great success of the Olympic Games in Sydney.

By and large, all seemed to continue well until that fateful day of September 11, 2001. In an instant it seemed to most of us that the world had changed for ever. Then 13 months later we were rocked to the core again with the tragedy of the bombings in Bali.

Of course many of us had experienced personal tragedies and griefs, but it seemed that after these events we had entered a completely new realm of tragedy and disaster. So much so that the first ever Australian National Day of Mourning was declared for the Bali victims.

Now, within what seems just a short space of time we are here observing our second ever National Day of Mourning for the victims of one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history.

The scale of the aftermath of the tsunami disaster seems almost completely incomprehensible to us. Those early reports of the death toll as it rose exponentially with each succeeding hourly news bulletin were, and still are, beyond horrific. And, with any tragedy, whether it involves the loss of one life or more than 150,000 lives, we are left with many more questions than answers. As with every grief that we experience these questions are ultimately all variations on the basic question of “Why?”

Much of our liturgy today seeks to honour these questions and encourages us to struggle with them instead of attempting to reel off glib answers. For in my experiences of grief – both in my own life and in the lives of others – even if we had all the answers it would not ease our grief one iota.

I certainly am not helped by those who piously declare that this, or any such disaster, is somehow a judgement or a message from God. If it is, then this is not a God in whom I can have faith.

What happened to the promise we heard of today’s first reading from Isaiah? “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.”

A few years ago when I was co-ordinator of pastoral care at Monash Medical Centre, a small plane crash landed on nearby Ferntree Gully Road. All on board survived and were rushed to our emergency department. One of our chaplains happened to remark “God must have been really looking after them”. I tersely replied, “So according to that theory, God was not looking after the man who was killed in a car accident at 2am this morning!” I later apologised to her for snapping, but it had been a long night with his family, doing what I could.

Doing what I could. What could I do? Except be there. What can we say when something like this happens? Where was God at 2am that day? Where was God on the 26^th of December? Where was God while the bushfires killed people in South Australia last week?

These are the questions of Mary and Martha in our Gospel reading for today as Jesus arrives after the death of their brother Lazarus. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Where were you when we needed you?

The only difference between any of these situations is the number of times the question is asked. Today, we are overwhelmed with the need to ask the question more than 150,000 times.

At times, we have all experienced the beauty and tranquillity of the sea and yet at other times it’s terrifying power and fury. It is not surprising that water and the sea are powerful images and symbols throughout the scriptures, and beyond. Many among us will have experienced how quickly that enjoyment of the sea can turn to terror.

We live on a living planet with a molten core, tectonic plates move, marine earthquakes happen, tsunamis result. With other disasters we search for someone who was responsible, someone to blame. Today, there is no one. And again, even if there were, it would not change one iota.

God was not in the earthquake; nor in the tsunami; nor in the bushfires. Most terrifyingly of all is that God is in us: us clay jars (that we heard of in today’s second reading) who are afflicted in every way. God is in our response: our tears, our giving, our care, our being there for others..

It has been widely said that a great good to come out of this tragedy is that it has re-focused our need to give out of our plenty to those who have little or none. This in itself may be true. But hopefully we are also challenged to remember those who suffer every day in all parts of our world and our own communities.

It is right that we should stop today and mourn for this terrible loss of life and livelihood. It is also imperative that our concern for all who are in need in our world is ongoing and long lasting.

This is not so much a test of our faith in God but rather of God’s faith in us.

These following words may at first sound trite, but when you know that they were found on the walls of a cellar in Cologne where Jewish people attempted in vain to hide from the Nazis, they say more than I ever could:

I am most grateful for the support I received from all the people of Christ Church during my mother, Joan Nicholls' illness and subsequent death. I will especially remember the fabulous Requiem Mass and subsequent Wake, which were thankfully two of the most memorable occasions of my life. Special thanks to Paul Bower, Allison and Des Benfield, Jenny Nelson, Sarah Benfield, and Peter Sherlock and Siegfreid Franke, who had the lion's share of the work in making the Celebration of Mum's Life exactly that.

I am extremely fortunate and grateful to live and work in such a supportive and loving environment.

I am extremely fortunate to be working in my “home” parish after ordination, and I say that because of the support and encouragement I have received from so many people, including the Vicar and the other clergy. It has meant a great deal to me, so Thank you.

Some of you have been asking me when I will be priested, and since the Distinctive Diaconate is newly appearing in the Church in this country, I thought it might be worth while to write a little bit about it.

The number of Deacons reached its peak in the early church, between 100 and 600 CE. In the New Testament the Bishops and Deacons are mentioned, although just how that was understood seems to be unclear. The early Church Fathers wrote about them though, for example St Ignatius, who was Bishop of Antioch and martyred under the Emperor Trajan wrote: ….everyone must show the deacons respect. They represent Jesus Christ, just as the bishop has the role of the Father, and the presbyters are like God’s council and an apostolic band. You cannot have a church without these. The deacons were the bishop’s assistants, and held some important positions, until the growth in numbers of Christians in cities and churches meant the bishop needed to ordain more priests to preside at the Liturgy, and the deacon started to assist the local priests. Since about the Middle Ages, the diaconate has just been a stage on the way to priesthood.

The diaconal ministry is seen as being that of Christ because it is a serving ministry, both in the Liturgy and amongst the people. Jesus served others to proclaim God’s Kingdom, and the deacon also proclaims the Gospel in the Liturgy. In the Liturgy, the Deacon sets up the ‘table” just as a servant would set the table for a feast’ and helps the priest distribute the Holy Communion. At the end, the Deacon sends the people back out into the community. Of course serving others in ministry is what every baptised Christian is also called to do, but in the deacon, this role is focused and symbolised, not taken over.

Sometimes it is said that the priest cares for the gathered and the deacon cares for the scattered. I think this is too simplistic, although my ministry is certainly outside the church community. The spirit of service in ministry can be applied anywhere, whether in a parish or in the community. Traditionally, Deacons will be working in the community rather than a parish.

The 150^th Anniversary Patronal Festival will be celebrated on Sunday November 20 2005

Former parishioners are invited. As many addresses are not known the Parish Office is relying on current parishioners to provide names and address of as many people as possible. Please write a note or telephone the Office.

We can all contribute by inviting friends and neighbours to Christ Church for the celebratory events.

[1] $20,000 for St Paul’s Primary School, Dogura, Milne Bay Province, Papua-New Guinea.

[2] $20,000 towards the restoration of our unique and valuable altar frontals; a new set of gold vestments; a new Choral setting for the Eucharist(tax deductible); and a new entrance archway cnr Toorak and Punt Rd.

20 November 2005 – Feast of Christ the King & Festal Luncheon
Premiere of Willcock Christ Church Mass Setting