(Printed with the kind permission of Dr Jenny Te Paa)
"May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, o Lord, our strength and our Redeemer.
E te Pihopa, toku tino hoa, tena koe; nga Pihopa me etahi o nga kai whakahaere o te Hahi, me te whanau whanui o te Karaiti, tena koutou katoa – Bishop John, my friend and my guide I greet you with love and respect; my family in Christ gathered here in the 3rd session of the 52nd Auckland Diocesan Synod I greet you as you gather to transact the legislative, governance and missional affairs of the Diocese in a timely and orderly fashion.
It is a Thursday evening toward the end of what has no doubt been a busy week for all of you. Many of you have traveled considerable distances to be here on time, many of you have simply travailed considerably through early evening Auckland traffic! We are here together and for that may thanks be to God.
Synods are always really important times in the life of our beloved Church. This one is no less so given the changes that are before us, those that we know about and those inevitable, albeit yet unknown changes that are always before us as part of God’s purposeful, ever mysterious and ever unfolding plan.
Synods are always really important times in the life of our beloved Church because they are times for us to measure our own progress at how well we are doing at being truly, authentically, effectively, God’s Church?
Synods are always really important times in the life of our beloved Church because they are times for us to imagine anew just how much better we could yet become at doing justice, at loving kindness and at walking humbly with God?
Speaking of justice and its counterpoint, I am now at that age that my grandfather Ephraim Te Paa, once was when he used to infuriate me by gently and calmly insisting that before I went off on yet another one of my diatribes about how unjust some structure or system or another was, that I first pause to consider two things. The first was to remember that injustice and personal sin are inextricable. The second was to recognize that doing injustice is by no means the sole preserve of the unjust!
The partial remedy for the first he would suggest was to live life in accord with the extraordinarily simple unambiguous words of scriptural teaching such as those we have just heard this evening. The remedy for the second he would very lovingly suggest was for me to recognize that my own judgemental attitude could always do with a little attention as well!
However when I was much younger and far more headstrong than I now am, his wonderful logic, his grace filled wisdom was often too simplistic for me to bear, too simple for me to countenance and as for his chiding of me, well I just knew he would still love me regardless of my high mindedness.
And so it was that in those days of my youth, I carried a far ‘loftier’, essentially politicized and (as I now realize) an embarrassingly naive view of just how injustices of virtually any kind are created and sustained.
It was so much easier (then) to locate causality for structural injustices in a monolithic sense. It was so much easier to claim with boldness and certainty that the blame and the responsibility for those injustices for which I carried a particular crusading interest, for example those of racism, sexism, poverty, domestic violence, homophobia, corruption of any kind, quite clearly lay either with ‘all missionaries, all men, with all Pakeha, all conservatives or indeed, with all wealthy people’!
Now not only is this very thin and very inaccurate analysis unhelpful it also uncritically, very foolishly and very unjustly ascribes, together with blanket blame, a self-righteously opinionated measure of the human worth, of human value to the monolithic ‘other’, based on some spurious and unsustainable notions of their shared, so-called innate characteristics.
Identity politics in our contemporary societal circumstances ably supported by a voracious media, function very efficiently, very persuasively and very divisively in this way. Indeed our beloved three tikanga church politics also have some close resonance. I say this because our overarching model of being Church allows for and encourages a significant measure of ethnic high mindedness. Populist and uncontested notions of tikanga allow for the uncritical valorizing of cultural difference without always necessarily taking into account the obvious dangers.
As a result we have become practiced at standing off from rather than standing with one another in the common pursuit of God’s justice and in the shared responsibility of advancing God’s mission in all possible ways. We selectively and variously apply culturally based characterizations and or justifications under the often ill defined rubric of tikanga to defend our self-interests or to condemn what is perceived as either the disproportionate advantage or the ongoing imperialism of the other.
Consequently we have I think developed something of a silo mentality when what is needed is a marae. We have developed an unhealthy introspective preoccupation with our essentially one tikanga selves instead of first doing that which Paul so clearly urges of us, ‘to look not to our own interests but to the interests of others; instead of, in humility regarding others as better than ourselves; instead of, being of the same mind that was in Christ Jesus who became obedient to the point of death upon the Cross’.
More and more in the Councils and Committee’s of this Church, as I experience them, we fret and we fuss about tikanga claims and counter claims, we suspect and we accuse, we doubt and we abuse each other and we do so inevitably because I think we do not now know how to surmount our ecclesially prescribed fixation with our well intended, well timed, very creatively constructed but theologically problematic tikanga politics and practices.
Surely, then the time has come for us to purposefully and prayerfully self-reflect?
I know in my conversations with many of you, mine is a shared concern. Many among us are beginning to question whether or not we are indeed any longer the national Church which has a credible prophetic voice in the public square, whether or not we are the church renowned for our compassionate ministry among the poor and outcast, whether or not we are the church unafraid of the costliness of challenging and dismantling unjust structures??
As we prepare ourselves sacramentally for the business of Synod, as we prepare therefore to consider the prospects of and for change, as we prepare to measure our progress and to imagine anew how we could yet be that credible, courageous and compassionate Christian community, what better Gospel could we possibly have been gifted for a moment such as this.
‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you . . . you are my friends . . . I chose you . . . I appointed you . . .’
I pride myself on not being a Biblical literalist but with Gospel texts such as this one I am in danger of lapsing bigtime!
‘No-one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything I have heard from my Father’.
There is nothing exegetically complex about this text. John is unequivocal, the disciples, we as disciples, are to live in and from God’s love, they/we are to live in the world standing together against anything that is evil. The vine image is a vivid illustration of the disciples and of our utter dependence on Jesus; apart from him we have no life.
Life in Jesus gives us and all of creation, the promise of abundant life and the capacity to bear fruit, which is John’s metaphor for our capacity for doing works of love – herein, lies the indisputably concrete sign of true discipleship.
The status we inherit as friends, no longer servants is not some kind of private promotional arrangement. To join the community of friends means to love one another, and not just those most like us, but to love all in the community of friends, those whom Jesus at the point of preparing to sacrifice his own life has commissioned to do works of love. ‘I appointed you to go . . .’
Living with difference is not easy. Even in the Johannine community there were difficulties – the old political and religious centres were gone and survival prospects were paramount. Ethnic politics were on the horizon but John insists they are theologically irrelevant – the distinctions he says are not between two or more human religious or ethnic communities but they are between two ways of being, one admitting the reality of God’s primacy and living out of God’s love, the other asserting its human primacy and hating those who question it.
Each one of these incredibly beautiful readings, especially the Gospel, evoked very strongly for me not only my grandfathers sage and enduring words of advice but they also evoked within me that profound sense of certainty, of gratitude and humility that comes from re-membering what it means to belong to this extraordinarily precious family of God – I am not here as your tikanga partner, I am here as your sister in Christ.
My life, my wellbeing is inextricably bound up in yours – there is in Christian community no monolithic ‘other’ - we can each only know the fullness of life when we are all freed of the shackles of injustice, of ignorance, tyranny and self-love all of which are the intersecting and interdependent features of virtually all injustice.
I want to suggest therefore that in seeking now in this Synod gathering, for best ways forward for our beloved Church we ought to take time, all the time in the world to debate more deeply, to dream more expansively, to pray more boldly about the possibilities of the kind of Church we might yet become if we were to consider that it is inside the Christlike qualities of our character and not inside the characteristic qualities we selectively assert in the name of tikanga that we will ultimately find our shared freedom from ideological entrapment; that we will find our shared freedom to truly delight in one another; that we will find the humility to say I am sorry, I was wrong, forgive me; that we will find the moral courage and the feisty intellect needed to fight together against all forms of evil.
And so, full circle - as John so metaphorically preaches, as Paul so eloquently teaches, as Micah so brilliantly underscores in that profoundly direct chapter 6 passage – in the end, very, very simply, it is love, it is love, it is love. Amen."
Dr Jenny Plane Te Paa
3 September 2009