Anglican Diocese of Perth

Northern Region

Bishop Farran's Sermons 2004
 

A sermon preached by Bishop Brian Farran at All Saints Dianella for the Feast of Title 2004. 
(Based on: 'just as you want people to act toward you, act in the same way toward them' Luke 6:31)

As a young boy I was entranced by the stories my grandmother told me about ration books used during the second World War and its aftermath and about meals of bread and dripping. In the late 1950s Australia was a prosperous nation, at least for a primary school boy who could attend the Saturday afternoon matinee each Saturday, have four shillings pocket-money, and even save in his Commonwealth Bank tin money box and school account. Life was sweet then, and my Nanna's stories of rationing seemed like ancient history.

I think I might have tried bread and dripping as an experiment; it was not a regular meal, as it had been for my grandmother and her family. My grandmother -her generation and indeed my parents too- knew scarcity as a normal part of their life-style. I remember visiting a friend's house in Brisbane that was built just after the Second World War and the structure seemed like a very resilient version of cardboard. The building materials were manufactured during a time of resource scarcity and were unlike anything else I had previously seen.

The Australian commentator and social researcher Hugh Mackay has often indicated that Australia is now made up of several generations who relate to each other as complete foreigners. For instance, last Friday night I was at a Valedictory service for the first Year 12 graduates from Peter Moyes Anglican Community School at Mindarie. I noted that as soon as the graduating students had filed out of the assembly area at the conclusion of the service, several of them were on their mobile phones, arranging the rest of their evening!

Those contemporary students are light years away from my Nanna and her diet of bread and dripping. Indeed, it is as if they live in parallel universes, without making too many connections of common experience. Hugh Mackay indicates that it is difficult for the diverse generations who make up Australia, who live together within extended families, to understand each other well. The primary and major difference is their outlook on life. The different outlooks on life are direct consequences of the social and economic environments by which the generations have been shaped.

One difficulty for those in any leadership position in any organization that embraces several generations is that just when you think you have understood each generation, another pops up requiring understanding. So we have the sacrificial generation, the baby-boomers, the baby-busters, generation X, generation Y, and whatever tag is being given to young primary schoolies.

Hugh Mackay's warning is that as a member of a particular generation each of us tends to reflect the stance or values of our generation of origin. Thus each of us has difficulty in getting inside the minds of others from other generations. If we eavesdrop on one another, we will hear much tut-tutting about the behaviour of other generations, or their values, or their priorities. "In my day, we wouldn't..." is standard conversational fare!

My archdeacon recently conducted a ministry consultation in a parish that was preparing itself to invite a new priest to become its missional leader. The consultation was well attended, clearly representative of the parish, and very honest. As Michael Wood wrote up the detail of the consultation and summarised it for the meeting, it became obvious to all that were intending to live with a major contradiction.

The meeting said that as a church they wanted to develop ministry to attract the very many teenagers that lived within the parish and attended the local high school. The meeting also said that they did not want to change, that they were not good at change, that they feared change.

The majority at that parish consultation were aged much as is this congregation - fairly typical of the present constituency of the Anglican Church in Perth. The contradiction emerged from the natural attitudes operant for particular generations. Although it is strange that people who say they do not want change or do not know how to change nightly sit in front of colour television sets rather than sit in a lounge room gathered around a radio console, use microwave ovens rather than daily chop wood for a slow-combustion stove, programme washing machines rather than boil the copper, shop in supermarkets rather than wait at home for the greengrocer, then the baker, then the milkman and the iceman to make their deliveries!

I am laying it on. We all have accommodated ourselves to great changes, changes that have freed up our time, changes that have given us greater entertainment, changes that have made it possible to travel almost effortlessly, changes that have secured our health and well-being. Now, for instance, if you go shopping at the hardware store, you can have coffee there too. What once were discrete, separated enterprises we now find amalgamated in surprising and serviceable conglomerates.

However, change is still a delicate matter within the church. Obviously, we find it difficult not only to attract young adults, teenagers and even children but also to hold them within our parish communities. There are a few parish Sunday services that are noisy with young children, with mothers and babies, but generally worship is quiet, refined, and very acceptable to two particular generations of Australians - the baby boomers and the sacrificial generation.

The issue of inclusion that I am raising is the more acute for us now as a church because in this day we really believe that we should value everyone. One of the greatest changes that has taken place in our life-time is the value that we now give to children, the respect we give children, the attention to their needs that is accorded them. I notice this each time I visit a school, especially our Anglican Schools.

For instance, last Tuesday I spent the entire day with the chaplains at John Septimus Roe Anglican Community School at Mirrabooka as they undertook their usual routines of chaplaincy. I was delighted by the Year 10 chapel service that featured a young female student singing a most moving religious ballad, a collage of projected images that formed the intercessions with the refrain help us God superimposed upon a picture of the Beatles' Album HELP. It was in the idiom, the culture of the Year 10s, as was the chaplain's address.

Now, when I was in Year 10, we sat rigid, scared of misbehaving because we would be canned. The atmosphere is so different. The students are valued, delighted in, respected and affirmed. As one parent remarked to me at last Friday's Valedictory Dinner, "who would want to leave school nowadays?"

This valuing that has changed society so richly is explicit in the teaching of Jesus. Jesus' affirmations of children were not about their cuteness, but about their vulnerability, their lack of status, their powerlessness. As Jesus signalled out children as models of receiving the Kingdom of God, he was requiring all disciples to become as those children were then - dependent entirely upon the embracing of the Kingdom of God to ensure them the value implicit in their relationship with God.

We have much catching up to do in the present-day church in our ministry with children. For we are failing in practising a core piece of the teaching of Jesus that is set in the lections for the observance of this wonderful feast of All Saints - 'just as you want people to act toward you, act in the same way toward them'.

If our way of being the church were informed by this gospel principle, how might congregations look on Sunday mornings? Might our Sunday mornings represent the value we accord to the various generations that now make up our local Australian community?

We must struggle with this ethical and missional dilemma, just as the first Christians struggled with it. It is obvious from the letters of Saint Paul that inclusion in worship, as much as in the churches themselves, was a tension. The shift that Jesus requires from utilitarian ethics where we look after the like-minded expecting them to look after us, to the ethic of self-giving love towards all that reflects the self-expending of God, is a huge shift in thinking and in behaving.

Yet our integrity as a church requires that we at the least attempt such a shift. This means that like the first Christians - those whom Paul names as 'saints', holy ones - we will stay with the tensions of being inclusive and not subside into the past familiarities of easy exclusion.

What might sustain us as we seek to be obedient to the teaching and example of the Lord Jesus, as we live up to our name as 'saints' or 'holy ones'? What might empower us so that as a church we do not lapse into nor luxuriate in our natural comfort zone and so be a church for some generations and not for all?

To suggest an answer to these vital questions, I want to extract a metaphor from my grandmother's rationing experiences. It just might be that many Anglicans, especially those who have lived with the Anglican Church for a long time, have a 'bread and dripping' view of themselves as Christians, and have a 'bread and dripping' spirituality. Let me try to tease out this observation.

Bread and dripping belong to the realm of scarcity. My impression is that each of us can think of ourselves as Christians in terms of scarcity -what gifts we do not have- rather than in terms of abundance -what gifts we do have and the natural extravagance of God. Jesus tried hard to get the people of his own day to make the imaginative leap of awareness that if wildflowers are beautiful, enchanting, glorious, then they as children of God are much more beautiful, enchanting and glorious to God. It is when we make that leap of understanding, that scarcity shrinks, and abundance flows in, almost like a rushing, returning coastal tide.

Not only do individual Christians need to make this cognitive switch from scarcity to abundance (a natural consequence of simply taking God at Jesus' word), so also do churches who often set their budgets from an expectation of scarcity rather than from an expectation of generosity. The miracle of the wine at the wedding at Canna of Galilee is about what we can expect from the ministry of the Raised Christ - that abundance is his preferred way of doing things, not meagreness and certainly, not scarcity!

Some years ago I saw this principle of abundance thinking at work in a group of elderly women. These elderly women had come to mid-week worship for years, stayed for a cuppa, and then dispersed into their several lonelinesses until the next Wednesday. I inherited this practice in one church. As I got to know these women, I assessed that they were rich in wisdom, even if they denied it. I invited them to form a bible study together.

They must have been daring, for they did undertake group bible study. Now these were women who had never done bible study before, at least not in public. We adopted a simple African Bible study method that concentrated on the power of the text being able to speak directly into our lives. Soon these women who would have assumed a 'bread and dripping' demeanour about their faith were sharing profound life experiences, rich insights, and were including each other in understanding, support and love. They became a community that took Jesus at his word - 'just as you want people to act toward you, act in the same way toward them'.

On this day of your feast of title, let me ask you as God's 'holy ones', the saints in Dianella, to move from a 'bread and dripping' scarcity spirituality to a 'bread and wine' abundance spirituality both in how you think of yourself as a child of God and in how you exercise your gifts for ministry.

A 'bread and wine' abundance spirituality daily remembers the words from the Great Thanksgiving Prayer used at Baptism,

You pour your Spirit upon us, filling us with your gifts,
and calling us to serve you as a royal priesthood.

To live in daily remembrance of this is to live out of abundance, not scarcity. It is when God's lavish presence is intimately known that the church can be an inclusive church that values the various generations that make up our Australian community.

This morning I am inviting you not to 'bread and dripping' but to 'bread and wine'!