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.

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 Hebrew people brought to Canaanite land. For the lectionary text from Numbers neglects to mention what immediately preceeds this 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

The Kenosis Model: how the churches can reckon with their colonial legacy

Let me begin by acknowledging this country, Gadigal country, its ancestors and elders. Like my cousin Naomi, I am trawloolway. Our country is in the NE of lutruwita/Tasmania. We are privileged to walk on the lands of the Gadigal. Thank you for your gracious welcome.

Today I want to remind the churches you have a colonial legacy, and in five senses:

1. You participated in, and still benefit from, the stealing of our lands;
2. You have blood on your hands because those who participated in the massacres, the frontier conflicts, the genocidal policies concerning our people, were overwhelmingly Christian;
3. You took the lead in the attempted destruction of our spirituality, our way of life, especially during the missions period;
4. You participated in, and continue to be largely silent in the face of, the ecocide which accompanied the genocide: as you acquired country, you damaged it through your ignorance about how to manage it
5. Many of you continue to deploy an imaginative terra nulius regarding our people by effectively pretending that we don’t exist. Our voices are not there in the policy-making bodies of your councils, your agencies and your educational institutions. You are uncurious about the country you walk on and the knowledge we have of its ways and its spirit. There continues to be a lack of curiosity about our theology, which is different to your theology in fairly fundamental ways.

This account gives rise to a fundamental question: how are the churches to reckon with this colonial heritage. Well, to answer this (at least in part), I will appeal to the Pauline tradition as we have it in the New Testament: first in the Christological hymn of Philippians 2 and then in the exhortation towards an equitable distribution of resources in 2 Corinthians 8.

So let’s turn, first, to Philippians 2, which says:

If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.

Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord
to the glory of God the Father.

Now, I want you to notice three things about this passage.  

1. It is addressed to a bunch of Christians who are divided, one against another, who are selfish – who look out for their own survival and wellbeing at the expense of others. Does that sound familiar, at all?
2. The Apostle then contrasts this behaviour to that of Jesus. Who, though enjoying a certain ascendency in the cosmic order of things, empties himself (kenosis) of all such power and privilege in order to come amongst human beings as a slave who has no power at all (doulos). 
3. The passage then creates a model, a pathway, which Christian communities are encouraged to imitate and follow in order to be truly alive and vital. It is the path of kenosis. A dying in order to rise to a rather more elevated – thoroughly more other-centred - mode of being. A dying to all that is power-over, power-acquisitive, power-for self-alone. And a rising to power-with, power-giving, power for the wellbeing of others.

So, the question arises. How are you settler Christians, you immigrant Christian communities - you who have empowered and enriched yourselves at the expense of Indigenous people - going to let that power go? How are you going to redress the balance? How will you take the power you acquired by genocide and ecocide and return it to those you wronged, and continue to wrong?  (Note this: if you are Christians, then it can never be a question of whether you return such power. It can only be a question of how. For if you do not imitate Christ in this manner, can you really be called Christians at all?)

So, let’s turn to just a tiny bit of that ‘how’, beginning with some paragraphs from 2 Corinthians 8:

For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich. And in this matter I am giving my advice: it is appropriate for you who began last year not only to do something but even to desire to do something— now finish doing it, so that your eagerness may be matched by completing it according to your means. For if the eagerness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has—not according to what one does not have. I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance. As it is written,

‘The one who had much did not have too much,
    and the one who had little did not have too little.’

Now, the context here is that there are two church communities, one that is very poor and another that is quite rich. And we’re talking actual, economic, resources here. Not so-called ‘spiritual’ resources, intangible things like wisdom or humility. We’re talking money. Money and property.  The apostle appeals to the rich church to share its abundant resources with the poor church by invoking, again, that kenotic Christology. The argument, in summary, goes something like this:

• Remember the story of Jesus. He was rich, but he became poor for your sakes. So that you might acquire some of his riches.  (So far this could be about intangibles. But wait . . .)
• So, like Jesus, I’d like you to hand over your wealth, your money, to the poor church.  I’d like you to act with the same love, the same generosity of spirit, as that you found in Christ.
• Not, mind you, to the point where you become destitute and in need of help yourselves. Think, rather, that the excess you enjoy can provide what is lacking in the poorer community.  This is Paul’s ‘socialism’.
• The goal here is something like a balance, an equality, so that you both have what you need.

Now, obviously, there is no hint in this text that the rich church gained its riches by stealing its wealth from the poor church.  But, this being so, how much more ought the colonial church consider the ways in which it might return its stolen resources to the people from whom it was stolen?

Now, I’ve given talks like this before. And the question that arises, right way, is usually ‘OK, but what would that actually look like for our own local church community, our own denominational organization?’  Well, the answer to that might become the substance of treaty proposals, ways in which the deeply uneven balance of power between colonial and Indigenous communities might be rendered more equal.  So, I invite you, the members of the colonial church, to consider the following:

At the denominational level, plan to hand the properties you were given by the Crown without fee or compensation back their original Aboriginal owners, also without fee or compensation. Where properties were purchased from the Crown, or else from subsequent owners, arrange to vest the title of those properties in the name of the original Indigenous owners under a lease-back scheme. This makes both the use, or the disposal, of those properties a matter of negotiation and careful treaty between Indigenous people and settlers. Where purchased properties remain in the hands of the denomination because local mob do not want to become owners, contribute half of the commercial income on such properties to mob: 25% to local owners and 25% to Indigenous ministries run by and for our people. The same would apply when properties are sold. Split the proceeds of the sale.

At the local congregational level, contribute 10% of your annual budget to ministries run by Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people, for Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people, in perpetuity. Whether there is an existing denominational agreement for the lease-back of properties in place or not, approach your local mob with the question: could we form a relationship with you that includes your use of this space for community gatherings and programmes, without fee or compensation?

A more just sharing of the land you have stolen from us, including its commercial value, would obviously make a huge difference to the kinds of programmes Aboriginal Controlled Community Organisations could run to assist our people to escape from poverty and reclaim our rightful heritage as the sovereign peoples of this country.  It would also make a huge difference to our capacity to reclaim and pass on our practical wisdom and spirituality to the next generation, whether Indigenous or settler.  In the church, the sharing of these resources would provide a sure and reliable economic base for the work of our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ministries, and for our theological research and teaching.  The fruit of these ministries would make for stronger Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and higher profile for our spiritualities and theologies in the knowledge repositories of our nation. Knowledges that are desperately needed if we are to heal, and form a more mutually supportive relationship with Country. 

But land and resource justice is really just a beginning, a foundation.

At the same time, the churches would do well to allow us – for the very first time! - to set up camp in the centre of your corporate life: to allow us to migrate from the periphery - where we are out of sight, out of earshot, out of mind and heart - into the places where theology is formulated, and decisions made about ministry and mission. Because you need us.  Your churches are in decline because they are seen as either too irrelevant or too corrupt to make a meaningful contribution to solving the many problems that plague us.  Aboriginal knowledges, on the other hand, are on the up. Universities are including our wisdom about the earth, the stars, flora, and fauna, as well as the human body and mind, in their curriculums. Climatologists, botanists, and environmental scientists are consulting with us about how to better manage country. Fire authorities are seeking to learn about our fire-farming techniques. 

The churches need to get with the programme. You need us, and our perspectives, to help you deploy your theological and ministry resources in ways that help and do not harm, in ways that produce patterns of healing and care rather than wounding and indifference.  You need us. So why are we not on your councils, your boards, and your ministry teams? Why are we not amongst your bishops, your general secretaries, your moderators? Why are we not amongst your theological teachers and researchers?

For our theology is really rather different to yours. It is centred in:

• the community of creation, rather than the reduction of community to the purely human
• the ancestral divinity of country, rather than the restriction of divinity to a Palestinian Jew and (in some traditions) his followers
• the ethics of caring for country, rather than a limiting of care to human beings alone
• the governance of people by country (learning to imitate the patterns and processes of the non-human world), rather than the governance of everything by people
• The mission of country together with human community, rather than the mission of Christians
• Rituals which celebrate and make present the ancestral divinity of country, rather than a reduction of the divine to Christian symbols alone

Our theology is much older than yours, up to 120,000 years older. It is also deeply connected to how we live with the earth in general, but to this country in particular. If your theology is to ever leave the shores of the European enlightenment and come to live in this place, some really radical transformations need to take place. And you need us to help you make those transformation. Because to be frank, you don’t know what you don’t know.  And what you think you know is proving quite inadequate in the face of the damage you’ve done since you arrived.

So, let me be so bold as to suggest that the churches are at a 'kairos' threshold of decision: a right, critical or opportune moment. You are at a crossroads.  You can either continue on the path you have taken since you arrived here, the colonizing path: which is to make yourselves the centre of all things and therefore leading exploiters of both this land and its Indigenous people.  Or you can take a different path, a path which would mean decentring yourselves, giving up a lot of that power and status you have become accustomed to, and listening, instead, to the wisdom of country and its children; listening to those whom you have habitually harmed and ignored, to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, the people of this land.  

Allow me to conclude by citing the prophet Jeremiah (6.16):

Thus says the Lord:
Stand at the crossroads, and look,
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way lies; 

and walk in it.
Then you will find rest for your souls.

Perhaps the churches might now answer the divine voice differently than did the ancient Israelites? I quote again:

But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’

Garry Worete Deverell

Walking Together Conference

Gadigal country

October 22, 2022

On mourning, the Crown, and Anglican coloniality

Since the 8th of September, when Queen Elizabeth II of Britain died, our local Australian media have been covering the fact, and its aftermath in church and state, on a 24/7, 7 days per week basis. The coverage has been total, a veritable tsunami of reporting on the minutiae of royal goings-on, along with opinion pieces in their thousands on the Crown, its legacy, its rituals, and its future.  The ABC, our national broadcaster, has even required its presenters to don black, as a sign of sorrow.

If it was never clear before, it is clear now: we are a colony.  Our head of state is the sovereign of Great Britain. Our politicians, along with our judicial and military officers, have to swear their allegiance to that sovereign. The legislation generated by our parliaments requires royal assent. When the Queen died, our Prime Minister suspended parliament and declared a national day of mourning, to be observed on Thursday the 22nd of September. He, the Governor General, the Leader of the Opposition, and a carefully selected group of prominent Australians, will attend the Queen's funeral in London.  We are a colony.

Most people I know personally, regardless of ethnicity and origin, seem able to distinguish between a certain sympathy for the royal family and the British people in their grief and loss, and the Crown as an institution and arch-symbol of empire.  This distinction enables them to generate real feeling for those who mourn, without, at the same time, losing the capacity for critical assessment when it comes to the brutal legacy of the Crown both at home and in the colonies.

I'm aware of many others, however, who will abide no critique at all, who see every word of critical analysis as an attack on the person of Queen Elizabeth herself.  Much of this sensitivity comes, in my observation, out of a belief that her late Majesty was a person of exemplary moral integrity who (unlike some members of her extended family) could do no wrong. This moral integrity is then able to, through some syllogism of the imagination which I struggle to comprehend, cover the institution of the Crown as well. Elizabeth was good. The Crown was Elizabeth. Therefore the Crown is good. Something like that.

Several commentators* point out that the imputed 'goodness' and homely 'ordinariness' of the Queen is not something that can be easily and independently established. For the almost hagiographic image we have of the Queen is most likley that which the Crown, and the Crown alone, has sought to project.  The Queen's image, in other words, has been carefully constructed by the Crown over decades with the willing complicity of Her Majesty's Government and the world's most influential media. In fact, very few people know the Queen as a person in much depth at all. And those people are most unlikely, given the positon of the Crown at the apex of power in Britain, to succesfully offer a counternarrative.

The 'goodness' of the Queen as a person, insofar as that can be independently established, contrasts rather starkly, however, with the institution of the Crown, which is clearly and incontestably one of the most evil and exploitative institutions to have ever walked this earth. Even if one were inclined to separate the Crown from the actions of the British government during the colonial period - during which millions of Indigenous peoples had our lives, lands and cultures stolen from us at the point of a gun - there can be no doubt that the Crown has benefited enormously from such exploitations. Forbes estimates the Queen's personal wealth at something like $500 million US and the total assets of the Crown at roughly $28 billion US. Amongst the many assets personally belonging to the Queen (and now to King Charles) are artefacts - jewellrey, for example - stolen from the colonies. Significantly, the Crown pays no land, capital gains or inheritance tax. And it receives substantial salaries for the principle royals from the government of the day.

The distinction (if there is one) between the person who was Queen Elizabeth and the Crown as the principal symbol and beneficiary of an empire that raped and pillaged its way across the globe, also seems largely lost on Anglicans, even Australian Anglicans. Of course, I can understand members of the Church of England doing so.  For they are bedfellows, with the Crown, in the Establishment. Their bishops sit in the House of Lords and their monarch is the 'Supreme Governor' of the Church of England, who must assent to the appointment of any new bishop. This means, amongst other things, that the Church is required to preside at many of the key ceremonies of State. Weddings, funerals, coronations and the like. It also means that the Church is culturally attached to the Crown. Its official liturgy encourages prayers for the sovereign to be said at least weekly. And the royal anthem, 'God save the King', a victory song of empire, is regularly sung in ceremonies presided over by the Church.

But I've been suprised at how much of this liturgical royalism also pertains to Australia, and to the Anglican Church of Australia. Apparently many Anglican cathedrals are quite happy to accede to the expectations of state, and especially of Governors and Governor-Generals, when it comes to the celebration of the Crown. St Paul's Anglican cathedral in Melbourne, for example, recently held a service of 'Solemn Choral Evensong to give thanks for the life of Her Majesty Elizabeth II' which was attended by the Premier and the Governor of Victoria, along with many civil servants. Bishops and cathedral deans from elsewhere in Victoria also participated in the service. The usual service of evening prayer was modified, in this instance, to include the following:

• a lowering of the Aboriginal flag, at the entrance to the cathedral, to half-mast along with the flag of the Commonwealth of Australia;
• a modification of the usual acknowlegment of country to exclude any reference to Aboriginal sovereignty or the illegitimacy of colonial annexation of Kulin land. The usual affirmation to work for a 'more just settlement for Indigenous people' was also removed.
• the singing of two colonial victory songs at the conclusion of the service: the national anthem of Australia (which declares and celebrates the doctrine of terra nulius) and the 'royal anthem' (which celebrates the sovereignty of the crown in the territories of empire, and the victory of the sovereign over his/her enemies).

As an Aboriginal member of the cathedral congregation, these modifications shook me considerably. For the cathedral administration made it clear, in this instance, that a relationship with the state and its expectations was of more importance that a relationship with us and our aspirations towards justice.  In conversation with the dean afterward, it also became clear that he regretted that this was so, and was open to a conversation about doing things rather differently the next time around. And yet. The status quo became starkly and alarmingly clear.

Of course, I have no objection to Christian people praying for the royal family and the British people in their grief.  I'm just astonished that a church which makes no mention of the British Crown in its constitution would want to celebrate that Crown in ways that so unfeelingly rub British coloniality in the faces of those of us who have suffered most at its hand.  Particularly, I might say, in a service of evening prayer in which the revolutionary words of the Magnificat (as recorded in the Book of Common Prayer) are regularly sung:

He hath put down the mighty from their seat:
and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things:
and the rich he hath sent empty away.

I'm aware, also, that the St Paul's service was by no means the worst example of such ongoing obesience. There are many others, services in congregations the land over, that went (and will go) much, much further in their royal fervour. One example is a 'Requiem Eucharist for Her Late Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II' held on Sunday morning, Sept 11, at St John's Church in Malvern, Victoria. In addition to the inclusion of the royal anthem, this service also displaced the ordinary for the day from A Prayer Book for Australia and included an intercession for 'our Sovereign Lord, the King'. There was no acknowlegment of country whatsoever.

These recent liturgical outbreaks of colonialism in fact reflect a deeper and more difficult problem in the Anglican Church: it's almost complete disregard for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and our attempts to be part of the church - not as honorary whites, but as ourselves.  Despite guarded acknowledgments of the Church's willing partnership in the genocidal actions of the Crown in days gone by, the Church struggles to do anything meaningful when it comes to designing a more inclusive and just future. 

Yes, the Church now has NATSIAC, a national council of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. But this body is massively underfunded and has no constitutional or practical power to do anything else than meet.  Individual dioceses, and the General Synod itself, can completely ignore what it says, and regularly do.  Most of the members of NATSIAC are also appointed by diocesan bishops rather than elected by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.  And the numbers are heavily weighted toward the north of the continent, where so many of our people still live out of a 'mission mentality' when it comes to relationships with the Church. These factors mean that NATSIAC remains a fundamentally conservative body when compared with the more progressive work of Indigenous organisations outside the church.

And, yes, we have a National Aboriginal bishop and upwards of twenty deacons and priests around the colony. But most of those priests and deacons work in mainstream white or multicultural congregations, because there are few mechanisms in the Anglican Church for supporting us to work in communities with higher proportions of Indigenous people, or even to work on special projects seeking to progress the fortunes of our people in the Church.  Those who work in remote communities, for example, are rarely paid. They depend upon aged or disability pensions to put food on the table.  The National Aboriginal bishop, himself, is funded for two days per week. Two days to offer care and encouragement to Aboriginal leaders across the entire continent. Two days!  And, despite the NATSIAC canon making provision for one, there has not been a National Torres Strait Islander bishop in many, many years. Apparently the money is simply not there, which is church-speak for 'not a priority'.

So we are a do-nothing church when is comes to improving the lives and meaningful participation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.  If the Church really cared for us, it would gather the resources to do at least some of the following:

• pay our clergy a just stipend to care for our own Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, wherever they might be
• mandate the presence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices in every council or board of every Anglican organisation or diocese in the colony
• fully fund both a National Aboriginal bishop and a National Torres Strait Islander bishop
• fully fund NATSIAC (with staff and a secretariat) as a hub for ministry and leadership development for our people
• mandate the teaching of Indigenous theologies in our clergy-training institutions
• mandate the teaching of Indigenous knowledges in our schools
• fund the development, authorization, and dissemination of liturgical resources which reflect a First Peoples perpective and experience
• hand properties gifted to the church by the Crown back to local Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander custodians.

Just for starters. In the Province of Victoria, Aboriginal clergy put such things on the table back in 2018. Neither diocesan councils, nor the Provincial council, have yet troubled to respond.

'How could such ministries be funded?', I hear you ask?  By asking congregations, church organisations and dioceses to 'pay the rent' on stolen land by contributing 3.5% of their annual budgets to recognised Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ministries. And by contributing 10% of all property sales to recognised Indigenous ministries. 

We could do this, if we wanted to. If we really and truly believed in justice rather than in the continuing sovereignty of the Crown over those it raped and plundered.

Garry Worete Deverell

* For example: Edward Owens, The Family Firm: Monarchy, Mass Media, and the British Public 1932-53 (London: University of London Press, 2019); Christopher Hitchens, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish, Diamond Jubilee Edition (London: Vintage Books, 2012); and Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil (Melbourne: Penguin, 2022).

Why Thinking Indigenously is Important for Australian Theology

As I get around the Australian churches and their theological institutions I notice that most Christian theology remains culturally captive to a white western perspectives and means of production.  Senior denominational leadership remains steadfastly white, as do the core teaching staff of theological schools. The reading material set for classes in history, philosophy, theology, biblical studies and even so-called ‘practical’ or ‘missional’ theology is produced by white people for white people.  There are exceptions of course. I recognise, for example, that south-, east-, and south-east-Asian staff and perspectives are slowly finding their way into theology and even into the senior leadership of some churches.  I welcome the growing strength of Eastern European and North African Orthodoxy in Australia, as these communities remind white Australians that Christianity was a middle-eastern and north-African religion long before it was European.  Having said that, it remains the case that theological leadership in this country is overwhelmingly white. This is so despite the citizenry of Australian churches, consisting of those who actually turn up to corporate prayer and mission, increasingly and rapidly becoming anything but white. The same is true for our theological colleges. Increasingly, students who wish to study theology or train for ordained or commissioned ministries, come from more recent migrant communities.  In many colleges white students are very much in the minority.

‘What does it matter’, many persist in asking, ‘if theology is taught by white people?  Isn’t theology just theology? Don’t all potential church leaders, whatever their ethnic profile, need to have a basic understanding of the theological tradition in order to guide their people through the complexities of modernity?’  Whilst I heartily agree that every potential church leader needs to have a foundational understanding of theological tradition in order to help their people navigate the complexities of modern Australian life, I am not at all convinced that teaching a white version of that tradition is going to do the trick. For ‘theology’ is always and everywhere perspectival. The tradition does not speak with one voice, especially if that voice is taken to be white or western. Theology is forever shaped by the places, people and cultures in which it is written or performed. That is as true of the foundational theological texts found in the bible as much as it is for every subsequent iteration. And it is as true for so-called ‘second-order’ theology (academic-sounding reflections upon theological art or narrative) as it is for the more primary, symbolic, forms such as poetry, oracle, parable, painting, sculpture, architecture, dance, sacrament or ‘liturgy’ (a term which arguably encompasses all the others). Most white, western, theology recognises this fact as formally true. At the same time most white, western, theology appears blind to the powerfully unconscious filters at play in its own means of production, filters which seek to reduce and simplify as well as to appropriate and colonise theological formulations that come from other places and peoples.

This seems especially true when it comes to white, colonial, engagements with Indigenous people.  Here in ‘Australia’ (itself a colonial fiction) white theology has pretended for nigh on 200 years that Indigenous people do not exist. For 200 years the theology of the coloniser has worked hand-in-glove with the legal fiction of terra nulius which asserted, and still asserts in many pockets of the white church that, upon arrival, this continent was entirely without people or culture, that it was effectively a blank canvas which God had provided for the painting of an entirely white future. In this respect, white theology is, as a matter of historical record, remarkably similar to the Australian Constitution, which makes no mention at all of Indigenous peoples, either Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. White theology, like the Constitution, was habitually written in the service of an entirely white, colonial, people with white, colonial, concerns. Many modern observers, particularly those who have come to Australian more latterly, may wonder at how theology could be as complicit in the Great Australian Silence about Indigenous people as the disciplines of history and politics, yea, even more so. But the reasons for this are obvious, are they not?  In addition to that more habitual form of white filtering that accompanied, and still accompanies, the expansion of colonial empires, here in Australia theology has been silent because of a secret shame that can barely, even now, speak its own name. The shame of knowing that – against every ethical principle that may be legitimately derived from the teaching of Jesus or his apostles - the churches were willing partners and agents in the attempted genocide of an entire people.  The colonial churches, and/or prominent members of those churches, both enabled and enacted the massacres, the removals, the enslavement, the incarcerations, the ‘re-education’ and the wholesale destruction of Indigenous agriculture, language, kinship systems, cosmologies and spiritualities. The churches did this, but their shame at having done so has rendered them silent, especially insofar as the church speaks through its theological performance. It is far easier to speak of the sins of others than of our own sins. It is easier, to cite a prominent example, to endlessly discuss the German theology that emerged from the Nazi holocaust in Europe, than to engage the reality of Australia’s original sin and founding act of violence. Or, indeed, its contemporary consequences across a myriad of social and spiritual indicators.

It is no coincidence, then, that white ‘settler’ theology in this country has barely begun to engage with Indigenous people. Arguably, it has only begun to do so because we, that is the Indigenous citizens of the churches, have begun to cast off the imaginative shackles made for us by our white gubbas and find our own voice.  Doing so is, of course, immensely complicated. For every Indigenous person in the country has been colonised, whether we are personally conscious of the fact or not. The tentacles of colonisation extend not only to the stealing of land and the destruction of culture, but also into the hearts and brains of colonised people. The colonial prohibition against talking and speaking and acting ‘like a native’ is, at the same time, a constant and unrelenting pressure towards adopting a white view of the world, a white social imaginary.  I personally know Aboriginal people who identify themselves as evangelical Christians and/or political conservatives who, whilst insisting they are genuinely Aboriginal, also seem to be completely comfortable with unreconstructed, entirely white, accounts of who and what they are, even to the point of baldly stating that colonisation was in fact God’s way of punishing Aborigines for our supposed wickedness.  In Aboriginal English, we call such people ‘coconuts’: black on the outside, but white on the inside. 

Actually, the situation is far more complicated than that in contemporary ‘Australia’.  For many of our most capable, and most radical, spokespeople ‘look’ white on the outside, but have decidedly black hearts and brains. The paradox here, which routinely seems to bamboozle even the most intelligent coloniser, is that the strongest contemporary critique of whiteness is today coming from Indigenous people who have studied history or cultural studies at the margins of white educational institutions, those ever-fragile margins where black, or other scholars of colour, have enjoyed a measure of freedom to interrogate who they are in their own terms. Here is a particular instance of modernity’s inherent capacity for self-contradiction.  By making even the smallest room for the other, even if that room is nothing more than a crack in the concrete that composes an urban footpath, in time that gap can enable a seed to grow, a seed that, in time, will transform itself into a large tree which, ultimately, may displace or even destroy the concrete slab. 

The Indigenous academics who tend such seeds are doing two kinds of work, simultaneously. We are seeking, first, to recover and reinterpret what can be known about our traditional, precolonial, way of life. In my own field of theology, this means that I soak up as much as I can about the cosmologies and spiritualities embedded in ‘dreaming’ stories, especially those that may be recovered from my own country. This work is frustratingly difficult, especially in the case of lutrawita/Tasmania, because the sheer ferocity of the war waged on our people in the early 1800s came very close to completely obliterating our knowledge systems. What remains, in the accounts of white colonists such as George Augustus Robinson and in a small number of articles apparently coming from the hands of my ancestors at the Wybalenna concentration camp, has to be read with a healthy dose of scepticism. Finding the authentic Indigenous voices woven between the layers of prejudicial memory and commentary is painstaking work.  But the usefulness for my people of what can be uncovered is beyond priceless. It helps us to understand how our ancestors lived out their sacred relationship with earth, waterway and sky. It also helps us to understand the ways in which our ancestors sought to share this knowledge with the invader, to translate that knowledge so that someone from another culture might begin to understand. There are clear analogies here with the work of historical-critical biblical scholars, who seek to recover and reconstruct more ancient voices and debates within the highly redacted texts we actually have.

The second way in which Indigenous scholars seek to water the seeds of a more just future is by offering a critique of the dominant paradigms, the white colonial ontologies and epistemologies by which truth is recognised and evaluated. This, too, is immensely complicated work. The first place from which such a critique might be oriented is, of course, our traditional knowledge, the weave of ritual storytelling that is now called ‘the dreaming’. But, as we noted above, recovering the tradition from its colonial overlays is quite difficult. Very often the Indigenous researcher simply has to rely on their innate capacity to discern a continuing voice, the voice of the ancestors, in order to find where the truth lies.  And you do not develop that innate sense unless you spend considerable time on country watching and waiting and listening to its wisdom, especially as that country is interpreted by its custodial elders. In my theological work, country certainly comes first when it comes to constructing a model of truth and truth-telling. And that means that my critique of other forms of theology, white colonial forms most prominent amongst them, also begins with country. For it is in country, first of all, that I discern the voice and activity of the divine. Country is, if you like, an Indigenous Christ.  It teaches us who we are, to whom be belong, and what our responsibility or vocation in the world might be.  By listening to this voice, I can offer a critique of the white-male-human centred theology that continues to dominate both the church and the society it helped to form. I can analyse their complicity in the destruction of the biosphere as well as its gender prejudice and racism. I can re-read the biblical texts so that they work with our people and what we know, rather than against us. I can uncover, under all the violence in Scripture, the voice of a God who loves the world and its people, and longs for their flourishing, their freedom, and their peace. I can identify there a God who is like our wisest ancestor-creators. I can even speculate that, perhaps, the God of Scripture and our ancestor-creators are one and the same. Though whether this is true or not, I could never say for sure.

Let me conclude, then, with some brief comments about why the study of Indigenous ways of doing Christian theology might be of first importance not only for my people, but also for the white colonial majority that still runs our churches. For Indigenous people, who remain invisible to much of the white church, the possibility of pursuing a sense of Christian vocation via an Indigenous-led pathway says, quite simply ‘we see you, we love you, we accept and acknowledge your world and your ways.’ Indigenous-led theological study will help us to raise our people from the pits of despair to which we are routinely relegated by white colonial programmes which say, in effect, ‘you and your ways are not welcome here unless you change and become like us.’ When Indigenous students can study with theologians who have trodden the same or similar paths themselves, they find that they are no longer alone and that there is, indeed, a place for them in academy and church. Which is very good news, I assure the reader, breathtakingly good news!  But that is not all. Studying Indigenous approaches to theology can also be good news for white colonists, the kind of good news that Jesus shared with Zacchaeus in Luke’s gospel (19.1-10). For it is clear now, is it not, that white ways and white knowledge have brought the whole of the world to the brink of ecological disaster and social and political implosion? The churches, with their dominantly white-male-human centred theologies, have contributed a great deal to the making of that world, a world in which even wealthy white men will find themselves the unwitting victims of their own blindness. The only way out of this bind, it seems to me, is to turn. To stop listening to the voice of empire and start listening to the people that empire enslaves. For our ways are not the ways of empire. Our ways are about honouring the earth and making sure that every creature under heaven knows their part is preserving its life. In that all people, even white people, will find their liberation and their joy.

Garry Deverell

This article was first published in Eureka Street (vol 31:9) on May 18, 2021. https://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article/why-thinking-indigenously-is-important-for-australian-theology

Forword to Duncan Reid's book 'Time We Started Listening'

What distinguishes white theology from Indigenous theology? This is not as straightforward a question as it might appear. Take the term' white', for starters. What, or who, is 'white'? In common parlance, 'white people' (meaning people with pale skin) are routinely distinguished from 'black', 'brown', 'red' or 'yellow' people. Of course, it is often said that 'white' people invented the categories, but that is not quite true. In fact, the people who invented the categories described themselves simply as 'people', with no qualifying adjective. For they saw themselves as the paridigmatic model, and everyone else as just a little deficient, somehow.  Later on, when those of us deemed 'deficient' learned to play this game, we started to call the game-makers 'white', which was both a clever move and a stupid move, at the same time. It was clever because it brought into focus the hitherto repressed fact that human beings participate equally in the ontological quality of humanness whatever subsequent qualifiers one might then apply, whether that be skin colour, ethnicity, gender, or whatever. It was stupid, however, at the very same time, because by playing the game in this way we who were hitherto 'deficient' conceded the game. We conceded, that is, that both the game and its most basic rules were legitimate.  We found ourselves, therefore, in an ethical double-bind: play the game, but by no means play the game.

A similar dynamic is at play in the word 'theology'. Those who invented the word were apparently residents of Athens in the fourth century before the 'common era' (itself a problematic notion which I cannot address here).  It was a term that found its way into Jewish and Christian thinking because of the colonisation of multiple regions and peoples - including Galilee and Judea - by the Greek empires of subsequent centuries. Following the destruction of the temple at Jerusalem in 70 CE, the franca lingua of Jewish and then Christian diasporas was Greek for many centuries: more permanently, of course, in the Eastern Roman Empire than in the West. But the Western (or Latin) forms, which came to dominate European Christianity from at least the 6th century CE, remained essentially Greek in character. Theology, as an intellectual discipline, might therefore be understood as a language game that is essentially colonial: an absorption and modification of first century events and stories from Roman-occupied Galilee and Judea into a larger hellenistic imagination. This leaves all Christians, even the few who remain in Galilee and Palestine to this day, with an unavoidable paradox: that the Jewish, aramaic-speaking, Jesus and his followers can only be encountered in their Greek versions. Which is to say, that the only Jesus we have is already a colonised Jesus. He is a 'jew-greek' hybrid. He is, as Derrida would say, onto-theological. Colonised by empire.

Thankfully the repressed is never entirely erased, and those rendered 'deficient' still have some agency. The crucified and risen Jesus was able to escape his colonial bonds and inspire multiple movements of liberation and release. Here in the lands now called 'Australia', Indigenous people are rising up to claim what has been repressed, destroyed or stolen: country, kin, dreamings. In doing so, some of us are claiming Jesus as an ally. For the colonised Jesus who, in the hands of missionaries and colonial gubbas alike, became a whip to keep us down, is also a gift from our creator-ancestors, a gift which can be deployed against our captors. In our hands, the Greek Jesus can become Jewish again by first becoming Indigenous. For he is like us, and we are like him. Together we belong to the great company of 'deficients' imprinted with his paschal story: 

We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed;
perplexed, but not driven to despair;
persecuted, but not forsaken;
struck down, but not destroyed;
always carrying in the body the death of Jesus,
so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.

                                                                                                      (2 Corinthians 4.8-10)

This tiny example of Indigenous theologising reveals, I hope, two things. First, that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples will never entirely escape the fact that we are a colonised people. I write in an Indo-European language. I am educated in European intellectual traditions. I am as much Irish and British as I am Aboriginal. I am a Christian.  But the second thing my theologising reveals, I hope, is that I have not entirely lost my trawloolway identity and responsibility to country. I am seeking to re-read, to re-interpret, to re-imagine as much of the colonial inheritance as I can within that frame, for the sake of my people, and for the sake of our captors. For our colonial overlords are as much the victims of their Greek thinking as we are.

I am privileged to be alive in an era when a small handful of Euro-Australian theologians have decided to re-evaluate their faith through the eyes of First Peoples. Some of you will know their names: John Harris, Rob Bos, Norman Habel, Mark Brett, Chris Budden, Grant Finlay. To that very short list may now be added the name of Duncan Reid. In what follows, Duncan listens to what we are saying, treats what we are saying seriously, and seeks to articulate some measure of understanding. He is motivated, it seems, by a profound sense of crisis around the impotence of European theological traditions in the face of genocide and, especially, our global environmental catastrophe. I congratulate Duncan for this beginning, for it is only a beginning, and encourage both he and his readers to stay the course into deeper and yet more challenging waters.

Garry Deverell

Bushfires and Colonial Mismanagement

The Australian bushfires that raged from late December to mid-January were the most destructive on record, destroying 8.5 million hectares of forest, farmland, town and residential country in the states of New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. If that number is hard to get your head around, my dear North American readers, think of an area the size of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island combined, then add a little bit more.  In some places, the fires burned so hot that stone structures melted and even the biomatter below the surface of the ground was utterly obliterated. Ecologists are now saying that in such places, nothing will ever be able to grow again. Even where this is not the case, in parts of the forest where regeneration is possible, whole ecosystems – millennia in the making - have been utterly laid waste. It is also estimated that over 1 billion native animals perished in the fires, many of them belonging to species already close to extinction such as koalas and mountain pygmy possums. A large portion of those animals apparently died either because the fires were travelling too fast or because they could not make their way through fences erected by property owners.

So how did the fires start and why did they burn so hot?  The short answer is that the continent of Australia is on the front line of the battle over climate change. Increasingly mild ‘cold’ seasons and increasingly hot ‘warm’ seasons over the past thirty years have left the driest continent on earth (after Antarctica) even drier. Periods of drought, always an issue in this sun-burnt continent, have become progressively more severe over time to the point where even the wettest places on the continent - temperate and tropical rainforests - are becoming tinderboxes. When dry lightning comes along, therefore, there is little to stop entire forests, along with any farms and towns on their perimeter, going up in flames. And once the fires start, even the world’s most prepared and well-resourced firefighting services cannot stand in their way.  There is little to be done except to evacuate residential areas and pray for rain.

But how did we get to this point? How did an apparently ‘developed’ nation such as Australia, allow the situation to get so out of hand, possibly to the point of no-return?  Obviously climate-change is a global issue. Even if Australia had a progressive government which takes climate-change seriously (which it does not) the only possible mechanism that will make a difference to global policy is international treaty. And the world’s largest polluters have not yet signed any of the protocols generated by UN conferences such as Kyoto or Paris. Notwithstanding this fact, I believe it is incumbent upon nations such as Australia to recognise that we find ourselves in these catastrophic circumstances primarily because we have failed to recognise the wisdom of our indigenous peoples.

I am an Indigenous survivor of what some of us are calling, in Australia, ‘the apocalypse’.  Before the British arrived on our shores in 1788 CE, over 500 nations were already living here, and we had done so for more than 100 000 years. 100 000 years is a very long time by anyone’s estimation. When you’ve been in a place for that long, you get to know it very, very, very well. You get to know the moods and cycles of land and seascape. You get to know the seasons, the animals, the plant-life. You get to know the ecological systems which bind that land together and cause it to flourish with life. You get to know how to find food and shelter, and how to sustainably access those resources over many hundreds of generations. The other thing that you do when you’ve lived that long in one place is find a way to preserve the knowledge of previous generations and pass it on to your children. Doing so is crucial to survival. My people preserved their wisdom in a large body of knowledge we now call, collectively, our ‘dreaming’, which consists of songs, dances, paintings, stories and rituals which, together, show us how to live successfully and well in the lands and seascapes we call home. When the British arrived, they apparently did not see the value of our lore – indeed, after only a little while, they devised policies and practices specifically designed to destroy it - and this was the beginning of our apocalypse. During the 230 years of British occupation much of our lore has been destroyed and possibly lost for ever. Certainly we have been systematically murdered or separated from the specific places in which our various ‘dreamings’ belong. And that has meant, worst of all, that most of us are no longer able to fulfil the vocation given us by our creator-ancestors to look after and manage our homes in such a way that future generations may continue to enjoy and live from their bounty.

Of the many skills our ancestors learned and passed on was the management of landscapes and resources through fire-farming. When the British arrived, they thought that the land was ‘virgin’, empty of human presence, cultivation and influence. But nothing could be further from the truth. For thousands upon thousands of years, my people had been modifying the landscape on an epic scale. We had been using fire to create agricultural fields in which we could plant crops, fields where the soil was permeable by both air and water. We had been using fire to create grasslands which would attract game which could then, in turn, be harvested. Crucially, for the current discussion, we also set small fires in order to prevent wildfires. These would be set within large stands of trees, as well as in open fields, on a seasonal basis. The fires would be managed by burning small areas of grassland or forest undergrowth in a circle-pattern, with a large group of people lighting fires at the perimeter and then following the fire into a centre of convergence. The seasonal nature of the burning kept fuel loads under control, but also caused many of Australia’s native plant species to regenerate and therefore provide nourishment for a local ecosystem to survive.

By contrast, the British clearly did not know how to manage our lands sustainably. Within the first 50 years of annexation, they cleared the grasslands of its people, agricultural systems and animals, and replaced them with millions upon millions of cattle and sheep which compacted the soil and made it relatively impermeable to air and water. The soil, which could no longer breathe, became progressively less nutritious over time and, when it rained, less able to hold moisture. More grasslands for sheep and cattle were created by cutting down forests, but those stands that remained were poorly managed so that ‘bushfires’ became a feature of the ‘Australian’ experience. Today’s Australia not only has to content with wildfires, but also with deeply unwell river systems, dying coral reefs and fisheries, alarming levels of drought and desertification, as well as one of the world’s most mismanaged native animal populations.

Some policy-makers are becoming interested in the land-and sea management practices of our First Peoples. But they are few and far between. And so we pray to our creator for mercy, and for a change of heart and mind that is able to reverse at least some of the damage. And we do so, some of us, in the name of the one who loved even the lilies of the field and the birds of the air.