Search This Blog

Sunday 10 March 2024

The snake and the Christ: defamiliarising the biblical text

 Texts: Numbers 21.4-9; John 3.14-21

I begin by acknowledging that we worship this morning on the unceded country of the Eora federation. I give thanks for the ancestors who formed this country and the elders who have nurtured it for 5000 generations. I look forward to the day when there may be a more just settlement for all Indigenous peoples.

Today we encounter the Hebrew story of the serpents in the wilderness. So, trigger warning right at the top: this homily discusses snakes! Which few of us are entirely fond of because in these parts, on this continent, most of our snakes are venomous. Their bite can kill you. And so, we are justly and understandably afraid of them.

That the people of Israel, who were winding their way from Egypt to Canaan, were also afraid of them, is made pretty clear from the story we read. When Yahweh their God sends ‘fiery’ snakes amongst the people as punishment for their complaining, they are terrified and beg Moses, their leader, to intercede for them. Moses does, as he has done on many other occasions, and Yahweh relents. Sort of. The snakes continue to afflict the people. But Moses fashions a bronze serpent and places it on a pole. All who look at it, all who fix it in their gaze, are promised life and healing.

This is a puzzling story, to say the least. From the perspective of moderns—most, if not all, of us in this church today—there are many, many questions. What kind of god would meet a complaint about hunger and thirst with a punishment like this? Only a nasty and vengeful god, surely? And why are the snakes ‘fiery’? What on earth does that mean? Also, if their god wanted to provide a way of salvation for the people, why did he not just remove the snakes? What’s all this about fashioning some kind of talisman, some kind of idol, and placing it on a pole for the people to gaze at? Seems kinda weird for a monotheistic religion, hey? In this connection, it is interesting to note that the snake of bronze was apparently kept in Israel for many hundreds of years after this incident. And that it was eventually destroyed by King Hezekiah because the people regarded it as a heathen god and burned incense to it (2 Kings 18.4).

So many questions. How does one even begin to process them?

Perhaps like this. In the Mesopotamian world from which these old, old stories apparently emerge, snakes were seen as magical, even semi-divine, figures because they possessed both the power of life and the power of death. Their power for death is obvious from both our story and from our own experience. But think about the power of the snake for life. This comes from the fact that almost all species of snakes shed their skin as they grow. To the ancient human observer, this looked like a magical transformation, a rebirth from death. What other creature is able to die and be reborn? Many ancient far-Western cultures, including the Canaanite societies from which the story we are reading today partly emerged, therefore saw the snake as a creature that was able to kill, certainly, but also to grant life and healing to the sick. 

But why are the snakes ‘fiery’? The Hebrew root of the word translated like this is ‘seraph’, which is also the root of ‘seraphim’, mysterious winged creatures who occasionally appear in the First Testament as messengers of Yahweh, or symbols of Yahweh’s divine glory (cf. Isaiah 6). What is common to both is the notion of light or fire. Many snakes, like the seraphim, have scales that catch the light and create colourful displays. They shimmer with light, with glory. In ancient cultures, this property of light was seen as divine, reflecting the capacity of divinity to push back the darkness, which invariably contained evil and chaos.  There is a sense in which our story therefore preserves that ancient Mesopotamian understanding. The snakes somehow participate in the capacity of divinity to push back the chaos, the darkness of life and fill it with life and with healing.

Rainbow Serpent by Donna Hensen
It is interesting to me that these ancient, far-Western, stories about the divinity of snakes are quite similar, in many ways, to the even more ancient snake dreamings of Aboriginal nations here in Gondwana. In the dreaming of the Yolgnu people from north-eastern Arnhem land, for example, the snake is Yurlungurr, the most important of the creator-ancestors who formed the landscape and gave the law. Yurlungurr is associated with the rainbow because his scales are lavishly shimmering and coloured; but also with water, because you can always find the snake near a water-hole in the bush; waterholes which, in the evaporating mists of early morning, also form rainbows. Yurlungurr is the one who is said to have emerged from deep beneath the earth and formed the grooves in the landscape which became rivers.

Think, for a moment, about the symbols in play here. The snake who shimmers like divine light as he pushes back the darkness and creates a space for life to emerge. The snake who, like water, has the power to both sustain life and to take it away. The snake who is divine, a creator ancestor, whose venom can both kill and—if combined with the properties of certain berries—can also provide the basis for an anti-venom which will save your life.

What I would like to suggest to you this morning is that these stories—both local and far-Western—preserve a certain wisdom about the divine nature of country itself. Wherever we look in country, whether it be in the life-cycle of snakes or in the power of water or even in the cycles of light and dark that make up a day, you will see the divine power to give life and to take it, the power even to create life from death. Think of the capacity of fire to crack open dead seeds or the power of plants to draw on composting bio-mass for new growth.

If you read the biblical story of the fiery snakes in the wilderness through this lens, the personal vengefulness of the Hebrew god might just fade into the background somewhat. And you will see, instead, this more ancient understanding of the divine: that power which is able to create new life from death, and heal through illness, and push back the chaos of darkness with divine light.

For that is what my trawloolway sensibility picks up, also, in the homily from Jesus in John’s gospel, chapter 3. Note that in John’s gospel, the cross of Jesus always communicates a dual power that is consistent with the power of the fiery serpent. It is both death and the very first moment of resurrection. Even as the Son of Humanity is killed by the Romans on the cross, he is also ‘lifted up’ or glorified as a divine figure who has the power to be reborn. Just as the image of a fiery snake was lifted up on a pole on Canaanite country, so the divine Son of Humanity is lifted up on a cross, that everyone who looks to him, who trusts in his magical and transformative ways, may have the kind of life that is able to persevere even beyond death. For, in this same passage, Christ is seen as the one who can drive back the darkness in people’s lives, the one who can bring truth instead of lies, the one who, by his sacrifice on the cross, communicates the love of the divine not just for people, but the whole world, the whole cosmos, that realm that we Aboriginal people call ‘country’. 

So how to we deal with these ‘texts of terror’, these images of personal divine vengeance that we find in the Hebrew bible?  By stepping back a little to see the bigger picture, the more profound and ancient wisdom, that lies at the root of the story. A wisdom that speaks of the divine capacity of country to persevere through death to life. A divine power to which we can be party as well, if we will simply trust in country’s ways and give ourselves over to the truth that we find there. For there is more than one sacred text, you know. The sacred texts of the bible, both First and Second Testaments, are relatively new to the scene. The more ancient text is country itself, of which William Wordsworth wrote in his poem, 'The Tables Turned':

One impulse from a vernal wood
may teach us more of man,
of moral evil and of good,
than all the sages can. 

Those English romantics were on to something, actually. In the wake of the industrial revolution in Europe they saw that people were losing their relationship with the wisdom of the earth and of country. A wisdom which teaches us of life and death, even of good and of evil, a wisdom that is destroyed just that little bit more as each tree is cut down and each species of animal made extinct for the sake of the ever-expanding empire of human beings.

When the European colonists came to this country, the unceded country of Gadi and Kami peoples, they brought that same instinct to kill and destroy as the people of Israel brought to Canaanite land. For the lectionary text from Numbers neglects to mention what immediately proceeds the story of the fiery snakes. In Numbers 21.1-3 we read of a prayer of the Israelites to Yahweh which promises that they will utterly destroy the habitation of the Canaanites if Yahweh will agree to give them their land. And that is what happened, mostly. The land took a beating, and most of the Canaanites were killed or enslaved. Yet they persevered through it all because both country and its people possess the power of life through death, and healing through suffering.  As the Canaanites survived, so do we, the Aboriginal peoples of this land. For we also share in the divine power of country to live, even though we die many thousands of times over.

The good news of the gospel is that life perseveres. That life perseveres even beyond our stupidity and our appetite from self-destruction. For God has made it so. And God’s story is written everywhere: in country itself, but also in stories from the Hebrew and Christian traditions. Stories we have read today. Let us hear and rejoice. For though it might often feel as though our world is utterly lost in violence, self-destruction and darkness, this is not at all the last word on the matter. For all is not lost. Not at all. Life perseveres. God perseveres. And so, therefore, can we.

Garry Deverell

First preached for Lent 4, 2024, at Hope Uniting Church, Maroubra

Tuesday 30 January 2024

Christ: a sign to be opposed

 Texts: Malachi 3.1-7; Luke 2.22-38

When Jesus is taken to the temple in Jerusalem to be dedicated to the purposes of God, Luke has an old man named Simeon say the following prophecy over the child:

Now my eyes have seen your salvation you have placed in the midst of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for the glory of your people Israel . . . This child is destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel. He will be a sign to be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed . . .

Here the venerable Simeon appears to recall the prophecy of Malachi, who imagines the Lord 

. .  returning to his temple. But who can endure the day of his coming, who can stand when he appears? For the Lord is like a refiner’s fire, like fullers’ soap . . . I will be quick to bear witness against the magicians, the adulterers, the liars, the oppressors of workers, of widows, orphans and aliens, again those who do not fear me, says the Lord.

By this Luke foreshadows three themes that will become very important in his gospel as the story unfolds.  The first is about the identity of Jesus as God’s messiah. The messiah, he says, is like a very bright light in the world, a light with such glory that everyone’s secret agendas (whether for good or for evil) will be penetrated and revealed for what they are.  The second theme takes the form of a paradox.  Though the light of the messiah is very bright, not everyone will see or understand what his light signifies: forgiveness, salvation and peace for all.  For many, his light will be a threat.  They will name it ‘evil’.  They will do everything in their power to oppose and extinguish its power.  A third and final theme, and the one that concerns us most this morning, is a question that Luke’s text will always ask of its readers:  what shall you do with this Christ?  When the light reveals your own secret thoughts and agendas, will you allow God to forgive you, to free you for salvation and peace?  Or will you oppose and deny and obfuscate until the end?

So, let us examine each of these themes in a little more detail.

First to the idea of Christ as a sign or portal of God’s light in the world.  There is a long tradition in Israel of thinking about God as a very bright light.  It begins, apparently, with the story of the Exodus.  There God is consistently seen as a pillar of light that guides the Israelites from the darkness of their slavery in Egypt to the brightness of their freedom in the 'promised land'.  There is also a long tradition that associates the flame of God’s glory with certain human beings, those who take a lead role in the people’s salvation.  Moses’ face, we are told, glowed with God’s glory every time he returned from conversation with Yahweh.  Out of these traditions grew a view that the Hebrew messiah, when he came, would be like a sign or portal of divine light in the world, a conduit by which the light of God’s glory would be let loose to free everyone who walks in valleys of darkness or despair.  We read some of those prophecies a month ago when we celebrated the birth of Jesus.  So it is by this route that we come to Simeon’s prophecy over the infant Jesus, that he shall be the glory of the Hebrew people and a light for all peoples everywhere.  Jesus, Luke tells us, will be the messiah in this specific sense:  that he will save the people from their sins, that is, from everything that keeps them in a state of slavery.

But this takes us immediately to the central paradox in Luke’s gospel.  If the Christ is born a divine light to the gentiles and the glory of his people Israel, how is it that this light is apparently unrecognised by so many?  Why is it that so many oppose him from the beginning, and eventually have him killed?  Why do they not see who he is, why do they not fall down and worship him?  Luke’s answer is both literary and theological.  ‘Don’t take the metaphor of the light too literally’, he says, ‘for the light of Christ is a very different kind of light than you are used to thinking about.’  It is not the light that we human beings make for ourselves: it is not the glory of our kings and rulers, or the translucent beauty of the human body so celebrated in the sculpture of the Greeks.  Neither is it the light that accompanies everyone who fulfils the law of their community or culture, so that everyone looks to them as paragons of virtue or success.  No, the light of Christ is rather different.  It is an uncomfortable kind of light, a light that penetrates into dark places that are usually kept secret.  It is an ultra-violet kind of light, that glows with a subdued intensity to show up both the dark stains in the heart of those the world would look to as glorious, but also the hidden purity of those the world would dismiss and scorn, those who look to the grace of God, alone, for any sense of light or virtue.  

The light of Christ is, first of all, a light of uncovering or revelation.  It exposes and makes manifest the truth of our humanity and our inhumanity.  That is why it is the the poor and the desperate who first recognise the light of Christ.  These are people who know full well that our lives are broken.  They know full well that no matter how hard we try, very few are able to generate lives of apparent success and bathe, thereby, in the light of social and cultural approval.  In Christ we hear the word of God’s love and welcome.  In Christ we learn a way to live with generosity and joy, free from the norms of success or failure generated by our societies.  In Christ we learn how to live as though all that mattered was the mercy and kindness of the divine.  And so we learn to practise mercy, to give ourselves away as though nothing could possibly be lost in doing so.  

But the many others, those who refuse to recognise Christ’s light, are nevertheless exposed by that light.  In our clinging to the dominant norms of self-generated power and success, in our opposition to Jesus’ preaching about God’s preferential love for the poor and the powerless, we are shown up for who we are: people who were slaves of society and of fashion and of conventional morality, people who are unable to see that, in fact, it is the rich and powerful who are truly poor, standing in the most desperate need of divine mercy.

Jonah in a fish by Alma Sheppard-Matsuo
The light of Christ is revealed most surely, Luke tells us in chapter 11 of his gospel, under the paradoxical sign of Jonah.  In his temple blessing, Simeon said that Christ would be a ‘sign to be opposed’.  In chapter 11 we learn what this most offensive of signs is:  that, like Jonah in the belly of the fish, the Christ would lie dead in the earth for three days but would then rise as a sign that God had vindicated his cause.  The message of the parable is a scandal, a stumbling block for any who believe that the way of the messiah is that of power-over others, rather than power-for-and-with others, for anyone who looks to God for confirmation of their greedy and indifferent lifestyles.  For at its heart the sign of Jonah speaks of the willingness of God’s offspring, out of love for the world, to journey into the belly of empire where there is every prospect of being consumed.  Yet, finally summoning his courage, this Jonah-Christ figure speaks the truth and survives. Just. Marginally. For speaking the truth in the belly of empire can very easily end in death or, at the very least, expulsion. The sign of Jonah is therefore double-edged.  It tells us that the way of God in the world is that of love and grace and the sacrificial telling of the truth.  But it is also a sign of judgement on all who choose to ignore that truth and reject the mercy on offer.

And so, finally, we come to the question Luke asks of his readers:  what shall you do with this Christ?  When his light reveals your secret thoughts and agendas, will you allow God to forgive you, to free you for salvation and peace?  Or will you oppose and deny and obfuscate until the end?  ‘Obfuscate’ is a big word.  It means ‘to cover up’.  There are some who are privileged to hear the word of Christ and experience the enlightenment he brings who then choose to take up their cross and follow him, beginning always with recognition that they will never be truly free apart from divine mercy and help.  But there are many who hear Christ’s word and experience his light who then choose to obfuscate or cover up the truth that light exposes because, deep down, they are in denial of the truth and their whole lives are lived according to the logic of a lie.  What this lie amounts to, in the end, is an attempt to remake the world in the image of the unredeemed human heart, mistaking darkness for light, evil for good, and slavery for freedom.  

That is how we get to the absurd situation we are in at present with ‘Australia Day’, for example. It is as though the whole nation is living in la-la-land, determined to celebrate itself as a place of peace and freedom when, historically, January 26 signifies nothing other than end of peace and freedom for those of us who were already here when the British arrived. And the beginning of what can only be described as a totalitarian annexation of Indigenous land and life under the twin signs of genocide and ecocide.  Australia Day is therefore a parable about the very essence of sin.  It is about the denial of the truth of who we are before our creator.  I submit to you that until we can tell the truth about our ourselves as a nation, and seek to make meaningful amends, we shall forever exist in a state of arrested development, of national adolescence. Wanting to be grown-up and responsible, yet unable to do so because of our continuing penchant for fantasy and self-deception.

So what will you do with this Christ, this bringer of truth?  When his light shines on your world and in your heart—on the way you do your business, on the behaviour that you model for your children and grandchildren, on the things that you treasure more than anything else in the world—what will you do?  Will you cover up the truth and oppose it?  Or will you fall at Christ’s feet and beg for his mercy, his peace, and his joy?  I promise you, that if you choose the latter, if you are willing to lose everything for the sake of the gospel, Christ will take you in his arms and give you a future hitherto unimagined, a future that shares in the sovereign inheritance of all God’s children.  But if you refuse his light, whether as an individual, a community, or a nation, you will reap only what you have sown: a whirlwind of Darwinian darkness in which the strong cannibalise the weak until all are weak, all are victims, and life is gone entirely.

Like the prophets of old, like Simeon and Anna and Malachi, I put before you the way that leads to life and the way that leads to death. Please, choose life.

Garry Deverell
Presentation of Christ/Candlemas

Sunday 12 November 2023

New book. Contemplating Country: more Gondwana theology

My new book, Contemplating Country: more Gondwana theology, has just been published by Wipf & Stock.

Contemplating Country
picks up where Gondwana Theology (Morning Star 2018) left off. It extends and deepens the ways in which Aboriginal spirituality and Christian theology may talk to each other. Employing the image of conversation around a campfire, Contemplating Country invites the reader to consider the ways in which Christian theology, community and practice may be transformed through a deep and profound encounter with Aboriginal ways of seeing, knowing, and doing. Such transformation is necessary, according to this author, if Christianity is ever to leave behind its euro-centric habits and truly arrive in the sovereign and unceded country of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations.

It is the second book to be published in a new series focussing on 'Faith and Justice in Australia' edited by Graham Joseph Hill.  I thank Graham for being willing to consider the manuscript for his series.

The painting on the cover was kindly provided by Uncle Glenn Loughrey and is entitled 'From the Depths, Life Rises'.

Some friends and colleagues have kindly shared their endorsement of the book. Here are some of them.
This important and compelling book establishes Garry Deverell (trawloolway) as one of the most creative and important voices in Australian theology. Deverell weaves together his own experiences and stories with deep christological reflection, analysis of Australian churches, political commentary, and calls for justice. All of us who are part of settler churches and societies need to read Contemplating Country and respond to its challenges.
Associate Professor Michael Mawson
Lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies
University of Auckland

This book is a thunderous Voice from the sovereign heart of country to the colonial void that surrounds it. Deverell interrogates coloniality in all its forms, from the independence of deep time wisdom held within the spiritual notion of sovereignty. Country holds all we need to live in a custodial relationship of reciprocity, responsibility, and respect. Country is wisdom without time. Country is at the centre of First people’s engagement with that which was here before we came into being. This is a book all we aspire to live out of country as it speaks what we have always known. This is a book for all who came here with the “truth” in order that they de-link themselves from the colonial memory and re-exist the wonder of what they have been wilfully blind to. A highly recommended must read.

The Revd Canon Uncle Glenn Loughrey
Wiradjuri man and Anglican priest

Garry’s book opens for the reader an Aboriginal perspective which reframes and decolonises received theological understandings of the Trinity, Christ, Scripture and—through his exegesis of country—the ecological crisis that confronts all Australians. Garry’s explanation of why we acknowledge country is exemplary, and his discussion of the parlous state of reconciliation in the churches simply prophetic. This book will be of great benefit to all Australians of good will and open heart, all who believe that redemption may have something to do with receiving and living a more ancient truth.
from the Preface by Professor Anne Pattel-Gray
Bidjara/Kari Kari woman and Head of the School of Indigenous Studies,
University of Divinity

Garry Deverell is one of the most creative, incisive, and uncompromising writers engaging the Christian tradition today. His scholarship shapes and stimulates the whole field of First Nations theology in Australia - and speaks to anyone seriously interested in in reckoning with colonialism as a structure. This is a challenging and generative book brimming with possibilities for a truly postcolonial theology arising from Country.
Dr Meredith Lake
author of The Bible in Australia: a Cultural History
and host of ABC Radio National's 'Soul Search'

The book can be purchased from the publisher, HERE.

Sunday 17 September 2023

A Voice for Country: saying 'Yes' to Indigenous ecological wisdom

When I was a teenager, I would go for long contemplative walks in the bush that still surrounds the small town in which I was raised.  This was, and remains, punnilerpanna country even though most all of the punnilerpanna were killed during the frontier conflicts of the 1820s. So, when I was a teenager, even though I knew little of that specific history, I would talk to the ancestral spirits who dwelt in the landscape. ‘Hello, cousin Wallaby’, I would say, ‘how’s the grazing today?’ Or, ‘greetings, Auntie River Gum, getting enough water?’. And they would answer. Not in English, mind, nor even in the lost language of the punnilerpanna. But, if you had the ears to hear, if you had the heart of a contemplative, you could hear them acknowledge and affirm your presence: the appropriateness of your being there in the matrix of that dreaming. For when I came to the bush as a kid, I came not to harm or destroy, as the colonists had done, but simply to commune and to learn. That is what contemplation means, in this tradition. To bathe in the ancestral voices that are forever alive and flowing about you as you walked through sacred country.  But also to learn the way of country—especially its ethic of kinship, of mutual care and reciprocity—that her ways might be imitated and passed on to others.

'Ancestors II' by Sarrita King
For the voices of the dead punnilerpanna were alive in that landscape. The echoes of their sorrow at all that had befallen them in the 1820s, certainly. But there are strains, also, of a yet more ancient choir. A choir of creator-ancestors, the powerful hybid beings—partly human, partly animal—that formed the landscape and now speak from it with wisdom and instruction for anyone who will listen.  These ancestral choirs sing a song of lament concerning the way in which country has been wounded, even crucified, under the impact of European colonisation. But that is not all you will discern in their song. For they sing, also, of the perseverance of life through death; indeed, of the necessity of death and loss to the creation of new life. They sing about the power of compost, and of electricity, that quantum-level medium for both life and communication. They sing about not giving up, even when the chips are most definitely down in the more-than-human world, and life seems spent. 

Sadly, much of the public conversation about the Statement from the Heart and the Voice to Parliament has failed to listen to the song of country, to the cadences of this ancestral choir. Arguments about whose voices need to be heard (or not) in the national constitution and around Canberra very often seem to completely overlook the fact that a voice for Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people implies a voice for country. For we are country’s custodians. We have managed and looked after this country for 5000 generations.  Country is not, and has never been, ‘wilderness’ as a European philosophy would imagine it. Country is not a human-free landscape where ‘nature’ grows wild and according to its own devices. Country is a place where human beings dwell in a symbiotic relationship with our feathered, furred, and scaled cousins. Country is our home, our dwelling place, our mother, father, sister and brother, our kin.  We therefore have a place within it and exercise a sacred vocation of responsibility for it. For country is the arena in which a radically reciprocal compassion is actualised. The dreaming lore that belongs to each particular patch of country and encoded, in songs and rituals handed down from elder to catechumen, are primarily about how to live sustainably, fruitfully, and compassionately within those places: country we are born to, country we carry in our hearts, country for whose flourishing we take responsibility, from the moment we are initiated to the day we die.  This is the way we lived in this country before colonists arrived. By practising a compassion that extended far beyond our human kin, embracing also rock and river and plant and animal in such a manner that country might flourish, not just for today, but for the 5000 generations to come.

What has happened in the last 235 years, however, has been catastrophic. The genocide visited upon Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people has been accompanied by an ecocide visited upon country. According to the Ecological Society of Australia, we lead the world when it comes to species extinction. Since the arrival of Europeans, over 100 species of animals and birds have become extinct and, as of 2019, 1790 species are listed as threatened with extinction. Major threats are invasive species (82% of species), ecosystem modification (74%), agriculture (57%), human disturbance (38%), and climate change (35%). Well-funded protected areas such state reserves and national parks certainly aid recovery, but 52% of species face threats outside protected areas. The Society estimates that Australia needs to invest $1.69 billion per year to recover threatened species through coordinated efforts across jurisdictions. The current level of investment is only $122 million per year, which means that Australia’s extinction crisis will only deepen in the decades to come.  

On the 18th of March this year, the ABC reported the discovery of a mass fish kill in the Darling River near Menindee in NSW's far west. The kill included several million bony bream, golden perch, silver perch and Murray cod. The overall volume of the kill completely eclipsed similar kills in 2018 and 2019 and was caused by low oxygen levels in the water after recent flooding, combined with atmospheric temperatures in the 40s (Celsius). Previous fish kills were apparently caused by drought and massive algae blooms. Menindee Local Aboriginal Land Council director Michelle Kelly is quoted as saying ‘the river is our lifeblood’,  but clearly that lifeblood is in deep trouble. Joy Becker, an associate professor with the University of Sydney, is quoted as saying that fish kill events could occur due to a sudden, severe or prolonged drop in water quality. "Ultimately, fish kill events happen because the quality of the environment cannot sustain fish life," she said. "Causes of fish kills can be environmental, chemical, or possibly related to infectious disease agents including opportunistic pathogens or a combination of all these factors."  Which is another way of saying that the mismanagement of country is to blame.  Barkandji elders have been saying so for decades, but their pleas have clearly fallen on deaf ears.  Signs of the ecocide that accompanies the genocide.

Similarly, with the management of bushlands, our mobs successfully used fire to farm both forests and grasslands for thousands of years. Using a range of techniques, now collectively known as cool-burning, we used fire to both mitigate against destructive, catastrophic, wildfires but also to cultivate food-plants that would provide for healthy and abundant populations of animals and birds.   Unfortunately, with the coming of European colonists, these lands have been mostly ‘cleared’ of both the people who knew this country best and the techniques we used to sustain its life. Fire-farming and loose-soil agriculture has been replaced by the mass-production of beef, lamb, wool and grain crops.  The importation of millions of cattle and sheep has resulted in the compaction of soil structures, with the consequence that water can no longer penetrate the soil substructure as it once did, and so it dries out and becomes less fertile.  Crop and herd farming has also massively reduced general biodiversity, with the twin consequence that, as many species of both plant and animal are already endangered or extinct, exponentially greater levels of extinction become all the more likely.  At the same time, surviving forests have been neglected as places that needed to be managed, with the consequence that bushfires of the catastrophic kind that we witnessed in late 2019/early 2020 are likely to occur more and more as the planet warms. Those fires destroyed over 19 million hectares of mainly forests and woodlands. In several places, the fires burned so hot that even the deep substructure of the soil was effected, bringing on a condition known as hydrophobia which prevents such soil from ever supporting the growth of plant life again.  The fires also killed well over a billion native animals,  a great many of which died because they could not find a way through the fences erected by pastoralists to keep their domestic animals from roaming. More signs of the ecocide that accompanies the genocide.

Certain parts of the bible talk about ecocide in terms of a 'defilement' of the land. Let’s consider just one small section at the end of Leviticus chapter 18 (vs 24-30), a chapter that appears, at first glance, to be primarily concerned with sex. Here it is, from the NRSV:

Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, for by all these practices the nations I am casting out before you have defiled themselves. Thus the land became defiled; and I punished it for its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. But you shall keep my statutes and my ordinances and commit none of these abominations, either the citizen or the alien who resides among you (for the inhabitants of the land, who were before you, committed all of these abominations, and the land became defiled); otherwise the land will vomit you out for defiling it, as it vomited out the nation that was before you. For whoever commits any of these abominations shall be cut off from their people. So keep my charge not to commit any of these abominations that were done before you, and not to defile yourselves by them: I am the LORD your God.

The ’defilement’ in the first line refers to sexual practices which are seen, by the editors of Leviticus, as fundamentally abusive. These include various forms of unfaithfulness to one’s marriage partner along with intra-family incest, each of which would accord, broadly, with our contemporary standards also. But the list of forbidden relations ends with a condemnation of what has been called ‘cultic sex’, that is, sexual relations which take place within a religious framework designed to guarantee the fertility of one’s land. This is a concept considerably more foreign to the modern imagination. In the ancient middle-east, you see, there existed forms of religion which posited a close symbolic connection between the human body, especially the fertile female body, and the fertile body of the land. You can find traces of it in any number of ancient sources, but also here in the bible. In this particular passage, the editors clearly assume that such a connection exists, even as they condemn the phenomenon of cultic sex. At the social level they are concerned that cultic sex is inherently abusive because the people who served as sexual partners at the shrines were invariably slaves who earned money for their owners. At the more complex symbolic level, they are concerned that abusing the bodies of cultic slaves is a metaphor for the abuse and misuse of the land.

For the land has agency in this passage. It is not just a thing that is without animus or life or intention. She is able to expel, to ‘vomit’ out from her body, any object or person that might threaten her life.  She is able to fight back against abuse.

Surely there is a parable here for those of us who stand at the edge of an environmental apocalypse. If the land is truly alive and has agency, as both the Hebrew and Indigenous imaginations would have it, then our continued abuse of country will have its consequences. There will come a time when we have so poisoned the well on which we depend that our own lives will be at risk. Country may well vomit us out, judging that our rapacious presence is ultimately a threat to her capacity for fecundity and renewal. 

There is a little-known appendix in the 2017 Report of the Referendum Council (which also gave us the Statement from the Heart and the roadmap known as ‘Voice, Treaty, Truth’) entitled ‘Rom Watangu – the Law of the Land’. It was written by the late, great, Yolgnu elder, Dr Yunupingu. I’d like to read just one paragraph from that work:

There is always something wanted by someone who knows nothing of our land or its people. There is always someone who wants us to be like them, to give up our knowledge and our laws, or our land. There is always someone who wants to take something from us. I disapprove of that person, whoever he or she is. There is no other way for us. Our laws tell us how to live and lead in the proper way. Others will always seek to interrupt my thinking, but I will tell the difference between their ways and my laws, which are the only ones to live by. I am mindful of the continuing attempts to change all that is in us, and I know that it is not workable at all. It cannot work. We are covered by a law of another kind and that law is lasting and alive, the law of the land, rom watangu – my backbone.

Here the great man is speaking from the very heart of his Yolgnu culture and spirituality. His words remind us that any formal voice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is always, already, a voice for country. For those of us who are Indigenous do not speak primarily for ourselves, and our own merely human interests. We speak for country—for its spectacular plethora of plants, animals, waterways, landcapes, heavenly bodies. We speak the wisdom we have seen and heard from walking in country, the wisdom whispered in our ears by the Old Ones, the ancestral creators who yet live and are one with its body. We speak of the necessity of caring for country, after the manner that country cares for us, so that we might continue to share a life of joy and abundance together.  We speak of the pain and the suffering of country under settler colonial management, and the need for a compassionate response from human beings so that country may be healed of its grievous wounds. 

In all this, First Peoples acknowledge that we are too few to accomplish this healing on own own. Especially when so many of our young people languish in schools and gaols and other institutions designed to draw the very life from one’s spirit. We recognise that healing must be the responsibility of everyone who now lives in these lands, whatever the legitimacy or illegitimacy of that presence historically or ethically.  But that is why the call to support a body which can offer a more substantial voice for our people is so centrally important. A voice for us, however conceived, is also a Voice for country. We are her voice, the voice of our mother earth. An invitation to say ‘Yes’ to the voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is also, therefore, an opportunity to say ‘yes’ to country and to exercise a commensurate compassion for country.  If you hear that voice at all, even faintly as a whispering in the trees or in your hearts, I beg you to take is seriously. To listen, to learn, and to act for our common future in this communion of being to which we all belong, whether we are aware of it or not.

Garry Worete Deverell

St Michael’s Uniting Church, Naarm/Melbourne,
October 10, 2023

Sunday 3 September 2023

Voice of Country, Voice of the Divine

Texts: Isaiah 55.10-13; Mark 9.2-8

Last night I made an airport run to pick up Lil. The plane was running late, as usual, so I parked in the official waiting area which is adjacent to a large field of grasslands. No doubt, before too long, the grasslands will be lost to parking or some other kind of built encroachment. But, for the moment, the grass survives. And so do the wallabies that depend on its being there.  Last night a mob of about six or seven of them chose to graze right in front of me, occasionally raising their heads when there was a loud noise or a flash of lights, but otherwise entirely engrossed in getting some nutrition on board. The mob remained there peacefully until a carload of humans decided that snapping some photos was the thing to do, at which point the wallabies bounded away.

There's a little parable in this, for those who have the ears to hear. The divine is like these wallabies grazing on the edge of town. They are unique and beautiful in form and movement. They move together as one, each individual tuned in to the extended senses of the mob as a whole organism. They are one in purpose. They take what they need from country, but no more. They live together in peace, looking out for each other. They have no interest in fighting other species. When danger arrives, they move on. They look for another place of safety. Most interesting of all, to my mind, is the fact that wallabies have no loud voice or call of their own. Their vocal cords are barely there, so they communicate by making soft clicking noises, or by gesture or posture, or by pounding the ground with their feet. So wallabies are truly creatures of the margins. They live on the edge of town. They communicate with still, small, voices. They move on when they sense danger.  There is surely something of the divine in this marginality. For have we not exiled the divine voice to the margins of our human concerns, to the darkness at the edge of our towns?

To my mind, the piece that is missing in the shouty debate about the Voice to Parliament is the relatively still, quiet, voice of country: of the lands and waterways which, in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander dreaming stories, are fecund with the wisdom of the ancestral beings who gave life to us all. We hear these ancestral voices in birdsong and the breezes though the trees, in the rush and trickle of water, and in the clicking of wallabies as they talk to each other. Their voices speak to us of Anaditj,* the 'way things are', and our right and proper place in this way. They show us, if we will trouble to learn their language, how to live sustainably in country as kin or family, rather than annexing, using and exploiting country as though it were our slave. The voices of the ancestors show us how to take from country what we need, but no more. They reveal to us the dangers of making ourselves kings over country rather than citizens of her commonwealth.  

It is intriguing to me, as a trawloolway man, that the wisdom of the Christian Scriptures so often aligns with the wisdom of country. Consider, for example, the last part of Isaiah 55, where the word of God is compared to the rain and snow that water the earth and make it fruitful. The joyful return of the exiled Judahites to their own land is compared to the restoration of a ravaged and neglected countryside to its former glory. The trees are said to 'clap their hands' and the mountains and the hills to 'burst into song' when country is restored. There is divinity in country, you see. When country is alive and well, when we as human beings are singing with its songlines rather than against them, the presence of the divine is easily discerned and celebrated. But when we ignore the voice of country, when we can barely remember its ways, country languishes and then we languish. And the still, small, voice of the divine is exiled to edge of town.

When the divine voice calls out, atop a mountain in St. Mark's Judea, saying that Jesus is the beloved of God and that we ought to listen to him, Aboriginal readers hear a call to listen to country. The usual historical-critical reading of the story is that Jesus, having preached and healed his way around Galilee, here consults the law and the prophets to figure out what he ought to do next.  The law and the prophets, here represented by Moses and Elijah, tell him to turn his face toward Jerusalem, and to do so in the confidence that his death at the hands of evil men will nevertheless reveal a persisting divinity, a fundamental perseverance for life, that even death cannot overcome. Thus, the transfiguration is understood to be St Mark's version of the resurrection. A momentary shining forth of the promise of things to come.  Which is all well and good, if you think this story is primarily about human beings.

Walls of Jerusalem national park
But this trawloolway reader thinks there is something else going on here. For the story takes place in the mountains, which are usually alive with ancestral presence. And there Jesus meets with the 'old people', ancestor-creators, who share with him their knowledge of the ways things are, of the dreaming, of things that were, and are, and are yet to be. And Peter recognises that they are divine beings, and that Jesus is a divine being, for he proposes to make a tabernacle for each of them, that symbol of divine dwelling from the history of the Exodus. And the voice that addresses the disciples, at the apotheosis of this strange encounter, comes not from a person at all, but from a cloud. It is the voice of country, of the other-than-human world, who identifies Jesus as it's voice, it's kin, it's wisdom made flesh.

So, as the referendum on a voice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people approaches, let us indeed listen to Jesus. For, in his parables, he speaks for and from country, he speaks of country as the place where the will and way of the divine can be discerned. Whether his metaphors are taken from the birds of the air, or the fig tree, or the making of pearls, Jesus assumes that country is our teacher. And when he speaks of himself as the seed that must die to live and be all the more fruitful, he identifies himself with country (Jn 12.24).  That is why, in the theo-poetics of native peoples, Christ and country stand in for one another, represent one another, speak for one another.

That is why I say to you now: to listen to Jesus is to listen to country. To listen to country is to listen to the oldest and the wisest of our First Nations elders. To listen to the oldest and wisest of our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elders is to give country a voice. And that, I would submit, is the most important thing to realise about the coming referendum. For, in the colony of Australia, we lead the world in destroying our environment and endangering the future of our furred and scaled and feathered kin. It is time we stopped. It is time we listened. It is time we wised up.

Garry Worete Deverell

* 'Anaditj' is a concept in  Adnyamathanha language, brought to my attention by Auntie Denise Champion in her book of the same name.

First preached at a gathering of SCM Melbourne,
at St Stephen's Church, Richmond,
on Sept 3, 2023

Sunday 20 August 2023

How to be Steadfast When Hope is Fading

Text: Genesis 50.15—Exodus 1.7

Today’s homily begins by recounting the bad behaviour of Joseph’s brothers. Back in chapter 37 of Genesis, Joseph had attracted the hatred of his older brothers because he was clearly their father’s favourite and because he was inclined to call out their shortcomings before their father. He also shared with them two of his dreams, which implied that one day they will all bow before him. Joseph was, in other words, your typical younger brother. He was annoying and knew how to play his doting father like a violin. The response of the older brothers, however, was completely out of proportion to this. For their sense of irritation at the young fella festers and grows until it is has become a hatred. A white, burning, hatred. So much so, that when the opportunity arises, the older brothers conspire to sell Joseph into slavery. They then concoct a lie to account for his disappearance: Joseph, they said, had being killed by a wild animal.

Fast forward, then, to today’s sacred reading when the brothers indeed prostrate themselves before Joseph, because he is the viceroy of Egypt. Much has happened to them all in the meantime, which I will not recount, but suffice it to say that much change has come over the brothers. Joseph’s trials and tribulations have made him wiser and more circumspect in dealing with those who have power over him.  His brothers, too, having experienced the sorrow that took hold of their father Jacob at Joseph’s ‘disappearance’, come to repent of their wrongdoing. When they come to Egypt in time of famine and find that they are being tested by Joseph (without at this point knowing who he really is) the eldest even offers himself as a slave in order to spare their father the further sorrow of losing Rachael’s other son, Joseph’s brother, Benjamin. 

All of which is to say that the brothers are now ready to say sorry and ask Joseph for forgiveness.  Which they do, first, by confessing the truth of what they have done, including an admission that what they did was criminal and did great harm to both Joseph and their father. They then beg his forgiveness. Indeed, they do so by adopting the most humble pose their bodies can make. Prostrate before him, with tears, the brothers beg to be forgiven. Then they offer to make amends for what they did by themselves becoming slaves for Joseph, so offering themselves up to the very fate that they had woven for Joseph all those years before.  

Joseph would have been completely in his rights, of course, to accept and require that offering. To make them slaves, as he had been enslaved, would have only been fair.  Yet, he doesn’t. Also with tears, he forgives them. He cancels their debt, declaring that he is not God and would not, therefore, assume power over them. Indeed, he goes on to theologise just a bit. ‘What you intended for evil,’ he says, ‘God intended for good, in order to preserve our people during this time of great famine’. As a consequence, the whole family is brought to Egypt and settled in the region of Goshen, where they become very numerous and strong.

Upon reading this text I wondered, as is my habit, how it might have been read by the Wurundjeri who experienced the invasion of their lands by the British? From 1835, there was indeed a famine in Kulin lands, a famine brought on by the importation of millions of sheep. The sheep compacted the soil making it impossible for Kulin food crops, which depended upon a loose soil structure, to survive. The sheep were accompanied by wave upon wave of real estate speculators who were either granted Kulin land by the crown or simply took it through force of arms. ‘Clearing the land’ became a euphemism for not only converting bush and grassland to pasture for sheep, but removing both its native animal species and its rightful human custodians through murder or forced relocation.  

We know that Simon Wonga, a Ngurungaeta or headman of the Wurundjeri nation, witnessed all this. He presided over the very last full initiation ceremony of the Wurundjeri at Ngannelong/Hanging Rock in 1851 and the very last gathering of the Kulin clans for sacred business at Warrandyte in 1852. After that, all the survivors of the frontier conflict were rounded up and incarcerated in various missions, most of them run by the Church of England. Wonga, and his cousin William Barak, proceeded to advocate for a protected homeland for surviving Kulin, eventually securing 2300 acres at modern-day Healesville for a reserve which, from 1863 would become known as Coranderrk. 

Wonga, who had learned bible stories from a Presbyterian missionary named John Green, referred to his plans for Coranderrk as a ‘Goshen’ within the empire of the British where his people might not only survive but thrive. He apparently presented himself to Barkly, the British governor in Victoria at the time, as something of a Joseph figure who, having seen the decimation of his people, wanted to create a homeland within the colony where his people might live unmolested.  And this was indeed made possible for thirty years or so, as Coranderrk grew into a thriving farming venture in which my own kinspeople, John and Louisa Briggs, also participated.

I’m not sure what Wonga would have made of the fact that it was Joseph’s own family who sold him into slavery. The only possible analogue I can think of is the Victorian Native Police, which was populated with Aboriginal men (mostly, it must be noted, from outside Victoria) and, from 1853, charged with rounding up freedom fighters. In fact, however, the Native Police often led their white superiors on a merry dance to ensure that suspects evaded capture.

And what of the forgiveness of Joseph towards those who did the enslaving? What are we to make of that? Should Wurundjeri people forgive the British? Did Wonga or his legendary father, Billibellari? Did William Barak? Apparently they did, but it was forgiveness with a strategic and pragmatic purpose. Just as Joseph forgave his brothers in order to preserve their children, and their children’s children, and their children’s children’s children, within the Empire of the Pharaohs, so Wonga and Barak forgave the British in order to preserve their people in Coranderrk. Had they continued to fight the British on an eye-for-an-eye, life-for-a-life, basis, their people would most certainly have been annihilated. This they could see. And so they turned conciliators, just as my own ancestor, Mannalargenna of the trawloolway, had done thirty years before in lutruwita/Tasmania.

Where was God, then, in all of this? Where was God in the enslavement of Joseph? Where was God in the dispossession and enslavement of the Kulin peoples? According to the editors of Genesis, God took the evil that Joseph’s brothers intended and turned it into the good of an eventually powerful brother who was able to preserve their people under the rule of the Pharaohs.  Could it be that God was also at work in colonisation? Well, it depends a lot on whether your theology relies upon the arrival of justice or not. Colonisation was a great evil, and remains a great evil, of that I have no doubt. I am also sure that the good wrought by Wonga and Barak at Coranderrk cannot be seen, in any sense, as a proportionally just recompense for that evil. God was certainly their partner and companion as they sought to preserve their people, but this God—the God we meet in the Genesis stories—is certainly no guarantor that an appropriate measure of justice will ever arrive.

Consider the facts as they are presented in both the story of Coranderrk and the story of Goshen in Genesis. The refuge that was Coranderrk lasted only three decades because white farmers became jealous of its success and petitioned the colonial authorities for its closure. It was, in fact, effectively closed down in 1886 with the passing of the Aborigines Protection Act, after which most of the remaining inhabitants were taken to the considerably crueller mission at Lake Tyers.  And the haven that Joseph made at Goshen quickly became, after his death, the main source of indentured labour for the Pharaohs as they embarked on their new building programme. So, having offered to become slaves, that is what the sons and daughters of Jacob in fact became.  Slaves for the Egyptian empire.

You’ll no doubt be wondering what the good news is, here. Well, the good news is far from world-altering, I’m afraid. The texts before us can only deliver a very modest helping of good news. The good news is that the divine Spirit is most definitely on the side of those who want to do good, who are willing to put aside their own wounds and traumas to work for justice and refuge for their wounded and traumatised neighbours.  Sadly, however, there may never be justice for the victims of unscrupulous people, not a proportional justice, anyway: a justice where the injured receive appropriate recompense for all their years of suffering. The most we might reasonably hope for, those of us who have been enslaved or dispossessed, is a modicum of justice; if not justice itself, something that occasionally resembles justice. 

In the meantime, we can take some comfort in knowing that the divine Spirit is both the friend and partner of every victim. In every steadfast refusal of the temptation to give up, in every act of advocacy for our broken neighbours, in every act of care or of love, and, most radically of all, in every act of mercy or forgiveness we may feel moved to offer to the guilty, the Spirit is with us. For in each of these acts of defiance, whether great in the eyes of the world or so small as to beneath the notice of most, the divine Spirit is indeed our help, our refuge, and our support. As the choir sang from the appointed Psalm for this evening:

For though the Lord be high, yet hath he respect unto the lowly:
as for the proud, he beholdeth them from afar off.

                                                                 Psalm 138.6

Garry Deverell

Evening Prayer,
St Paul’s Cathedral, Naarm/Melbourne
Proper 15

Sunday 28 May 2023

St John's Pentecost

Texts: Acts 2.1-22; Psalm 104; 1 Corinthians 12.1-13; John 20.19-23

If, in the Christian calendar, the feast day of Pentecost celebrates the first outpouring out of the divine Spirit on the infant church, then the Scripture readings set for today record not one Pentecostal event, but two.  The more familiar of these is created by St Luke in the book of Acts, the one associated with dramatic signs like the sound of a tempest and tongues of fire. Here the outpouring out of the Spirit is closely associated with the Jewish festival of Shavoat, or ‘Weeks’, which celebrates both the annual harvest of grain and the giving of the law to Moses at Mt Sinai. It occurs 50 days after Passover: a number which, in Jewish numerology, signifies the time of Jubilee when alienated land is returned to its original owners, debts are forgiven, and slaves regain their freedom.  It is also the time when Israel finds its true identity as a nation and seeks, in earnest, to live by the law of God.  

St Luke redeploys these Jewish meanings for Christian purposes. There are 120 disciples of Jesus gathered in Jerusalem for the festival, 10 for each of the 12 tribes of Israel. When the spirit is poured out, they will become the seed of new Israel, a new people of God. A new law is also given, the law of Jesus, whose spirit will break the strong social and political bonds of slaves, of women, and of younglings. No longer will it just be venerable old men like Moses who receive divine law and proclaim it with authority; from now on it will be everyone, even slaves and women and younglings. All who listen to the spirit and take her breath into their lungs will now become prophets whose larynxes and lips will form divine words, words of Jubilee, words of freedom, in a thousand different tongues. They will go out from that place and bear witness to this freedom in Jerusalem, and in Samaria, and eventually the whole known world.  All very dramatic. All very apocalyptic. All very beautiful. The stuff of movies and concerts and rock operas.

But there is another ‘Pentecost’ in our readings, the Pentecost recorded by St John in his gospel. Here the outpouring of divine spirit is reserved not for a crowd of 120 confidently awaiting the sure fulfillment of divine promise on the Feast of Shavoat, but for a motley remnant of scared and bewildered disciples huddled together in a locked room for fear of being discovered by their enemies. For, in John’s timeline, Jesus had been crucified only three days before, and most of his disciples have fled the city for fear of being rounded up and executed in a similar manner. Those who remained were therefore far fewer in number and, notwithstanding the report of Mary Magdalen that she had seen and spoken to an apparently resurrected Jesus, they were terrified.  For they dared not believe Mary. Her story seemed too fantastical. ('Perhaps it is the grief speaking?') Still, it is right there, in the midst of their terror and their doubt, that Jesus turns up. Right there. Through the locked door. Through their fear-locked hearts. Through their sceptical minds. Right there. And he says two things to them straight up. Showing them the wounds of his crucifixion, Jesus says ‘Peace be with you’. Twice. Then, as he breathes upon them, he says ‘As the Father sent me, so I send you: receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’ Let’s spend some time meditating on these words.

At one level, ‘Peace be with you’ is little more than a common greeting. It’s how every Jew would have greeted every other Jew at the market or in the field. That greeting is preserved in the Arabic phrase ‘A-salam alaykum’ used by Muslims and Palestinian Christians even today: ‘Peace be with you’. The traditional response was, and remains, ‘wa-alaykum salam’: ‘And also with you’. We use the formulary ourselves as we approach the eucharist in Christian worship. Which should indicate that the greeting is far more than a social nicety, a way of saying ‘hello’. It embeds and bears witness to the way of the divine spirit in the world. The spirit who, according to the Psalmist, both creates and renews all living things (Ps 104.30). The spirit who, according to St Paul, binds the community of Christ—with all of its diverse ministries and modes of service—together as one organism, one body (1 Cor 12.4, 12).  The spirit who creates and renews and binds all living creatures together in a cosmic body characterised by shalom, salam, peace with justice. The body of Jesus present in our story, a body risen and yet still bearing the marks of crucifixion, functions as an arch-symbol of this social and cosmic body in which we all participate by the spirit. On the one hand, the body is bruised and broken, marked by the grievous wounds we inflict upon each other and upon the earth. On the other hand, the body is resilient. It can heal, it can rise, it can overcome such sins through the power of the spirit who knits every sinew together in peace.

For peace, in both Jewish and Islamic teaching, cannot be reduced to something like a nice inner feeling of calm or equanimity, as in many popular forms of mindfulness. No. Peace is about the recognition that all life, whether human or animal, plant or mineral, thrives and renews itself only insofar as we recognise our need of each other, our interdependence in a divinely charged cosmos knit together by the spirit. 

In the human community, this means attending to the many injustices we visit upon one another in our quests for power, ownership and control. It means righting the wrongs, healing the wounds, and redressing the social and economic imbalances, so that we might be reconciled. In the ecological community, it means human beings attending to, and taking responsibility for, the devastation we have wrought upon our leafed, furred, scaled and beaked kin, and upon the land itself.  It means calling a halt to practices that maim our environment and committing, instead, to practises of repair, healing and renewal.  

For peace is essentially about tending the relationships we are given in creation, the matrix of care and reciprocity that the spirit has woven into our DNA. It is about justice, equality, and the integrity of creation.  It is about letting go of fear and exploitation and living, instead, as though we all mattered. All of us. Even black people. Even Muslims. Even Aboriginal people. Even gay, lesbian, trans and differently gendered people. Even koalas, even frogs, even deserts and rivers and rainforests. All of us. All our kin. Imagine that. 

So. When the risen Jesus greets his terrified disciples in this story from John’s gospel, when he places his peace upon them not once, but twice, this is the meaning that is carried and implied in that word ‘peace’. All of what I just said. Every bit.  Nothing less.

Which leads us to what Jesus does next in John’s story, which is the explicitly ‘pentecostal’ bit.  Let’s recap. Having greeted them with peace and shown them the wounds of his crucified body, the risen Jesus says: ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ He then breathes upon them and says, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’ Here we have three extraordinary examples of what JL Austin calls ‘performativity’. Performativity is when something you say also does something, changes something, makes something happen in the real world. Like when a marriage celebrant says, towards the end of the ceremony ‘You are now married’. By saying that phrase, the marriage is brought into being. It is made real.  So it is with these three saying of Jesus here in the locked room. 

When Jesus says, first, ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you’ he changes the identity and purpose of the people in the room.  They are no longer the scared remnant of failed religious movement, hiding away from their enemies. They are a community with a mission: to leave that room, that place of fear, and imitate in their thinking and behaviour all that Jesus has done in their midst. Just as Jesus had imitated what he saw his Father doing in the world. Just so. 

When Jesus then breathes upon them and says, second, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’ he changes their relationship with the divine power that is at the heart of every living creature. Rather than being alone and cut off from that power, hidden away in a locked room our of a fear that they will lose their lives, the disciples are changed into a people who breathe in that power, and are therefore reconnected with the life and animation they are given in creation: a liveliness, a spirit, and a divine kinship network that can never be extinguished. A few chapters earlier, afterall, Jesus had said ‘The hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each one to his home, and you will leave me alone. Yet I am not alone because the Father is with me. I have said this to you, so that in me you may have peace. In the world you face persecution. But take courage; I have conquered the world!’ (16.32, 33). So here—with the breathing in of the spirit, and in the wake of the extraordinary resurgence of life in the crucified Jesus—the disciples find their power to reconnect with the divine as Jesus had done. And they are emboldened to persevere with their mission despite the inevitable persecution that will come their way.

Finally, when Jesus says ‘If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained’ the disciples are changed from a marginal community with no power whatsoever into a marginal community with the power both to forgive and not to forgive. Marginal still, mind. But marginal with an important new power. Remember that, in the most dominant forms of Jewish theology at the time, it was only God who could forgive; and only through the mediation and sacrificial system of the temple priesthood.  In time, and in the aftermath of the destruction of the temple, that theology would change in Judaism. But, for now, the idea that unordained people (as each of these disciples undoubtedly were) could be granted the power to forgive sins, was rather radical. It is still just a bit too radical for some. Even in a Christian context.  

But think about it for a moment.  There is a sense in which the power to forgive, or not, is the only power of the Christian community. The only legitimate power, you might say, the only power given it by the Jesus of John’s gospel. It is endlessly interesting to me that Jesus did not say ‘Here, receive the power to annex the land of evildoers’, or ‘Receive the power to deprive evil doers of their liberty’. If Jesus had given the church such powers, which he didn’t, I suspect we would have used them for evil purposes. We would have used them to empower ourselves and our mates and exclude those we don’t like, for whatever reason. Reasons of ethnicity, social caste, economic status or gender, for example.  (Of course, the history of the Christian church shows, quite starkly, that the Christian community very often takes such powers to itself, regardless of what Jesus might have said about it). 

Still, the Jesus of St John’s gospel grants us only the power to forgive or not to forgive. Which I take to include a responsibility to discern when someone has truly repented of wrongdoing or not. So, let’s be done, I beg all of you, with every doctrine of forgiveness that pretends to be ‘unconditional’. Love can be unconditional, but forgiveness cannot. You must truly repent and amend your behaviour if you want to be forgiven and reconciled to the one you have wronged, whether that be God, the earth, or other people.  If you seek to be forgiven without repenting and changing your behaviour, the one you have wronged has a right, but also a responsibility according to these words of Jesus, to ‘retain’ your sins rather than to erase them from the ledger. For, if forgiveness is granted in a pre-emptive manner, abuse and bad behaviour is both rewarded and encouraged.  Which is incredibly discouraging news for those of us who are the victims of such abuse. And it does not make for peace as we defined it just a moment ago.  Peace is what you get when victims are heard, recognised, and properly supported on a journey of healing. Peace is what you get when serious attention is given to repair, restitution and the restoration of justice.  Peace is certainly not a ‘Pax Romana’, a ‘peace’ imposed by abusers and designed only to silence the voices of victims.

So then. This is St John’s ‘Pentecost’. A spirit poured out not 50 days after Easter, in fulfillment of a great many dreams and grand story-arcs, but on the evening of Easter itself: in the middle of dreams shattered and rumours of hope which, as yet, make no sense at all.  It is a Pentecost not for the strong, but for the weak. It is a Pentecost not for the centres of worldly power but for the exploited, wounded, periphery. St John’s Pentecost is for everyone who knows that they are broken and alone and in need of reconnection and healing. It is a Pentecost for everyone who feels that their community has become dysfunctional and there seems little chance that things will ever turn around. It is a Pentecost for the victims of injustice and abuse who are right here in our midst and all around. It is a Pentecost for the ravaged and crucified earth, which mob call ‘country’, our Christ. 

If I might be permitted to make the implicit in what I’ve said quite explicit—recasting all I have said just now in an entirely Aboriginal frame—imagine for a moment that country has a voice, and that voice is amongst us, here in this cathedral, here on this sacred meeting place of the Kulin nations. The voice says something like this to us:

Peace be with you.
See the wounds of colonisation?
Still, peace be with you.
As the dreaming has sent me, so I send you.
Receive the spirit of country.
Receive power to forgive the repentant.
Receive power to resist the abusers.

These are the gifts of St John's pentecost. All that remains is that we receive and enact them. 

I wish you all a blessed and truly transformative Pentecost.

Garry Worete Deverell

St Paul’s Cathedral, Naarm/Melbourne,
Pentecost 2023