The Prophetic Voice of Country

Texts: Uluru Statement from the Heart; Wisdom 7.25-8.1; Matthew 13.31-32

Voice and ‘Spiritual Sovereignty’

The Uluru Statement from the Heart (2017) says, in part, ‘We call for the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution’. While that Voice would take a particular form – most likely an elected group of national Elders who would offer advice to the Federal Govt on all matters affecting Indigenous people – let us not mistake the Voice for simply one voice amongst many voices.

The Uluru Statement claims that the Voice would speak from a place of sovereignty which, it says, is a ‘spiritual notion’:

the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished.

The voice is therefore, first of all, the voice of what our mobs call ‘country’. Country, for us, is a complex matrix of family or kin: land, waterway, sky, flora, fauna, and human beings. Country is made, in our dreaming stories, by powerful creator beings who both shape the landscape and indwell it. As human-animal hybrids, they are the common ancestors of both the human and non-human realms. They are also the connective tissue which makes all life part of one family. 

Linda Syddick Napaltjarri Desert Eucharist

Importantly, this matrix of inter-relatedness creates a sense of moral reciprocity between all the parts of the whole.  Country cares for us. Country provides everything we need to sustain life for ourselves, our human communities, both now and for countless generations to come. Equally, country needs us. We, as humans, have a responsibility to care for country, to ensure that country is managed sustainably, that we take only what is needful and work hard to live in harmony with the lore that country teaches us through its complex biospheric interactions.  Traditionally we have learned how to live sustainably as part of country by listening for its wise voice in plant, animal and season. That is why our dreamings and our ritual storytelling are full to overflowing with the adventures of our feathered, furred, beaked and scaled cousins.

In Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander society, if you want to know who you are, to whom you belong, and what you are called to become, you listen to country. And the voice of country is interpreted by Elders who have lived within this eco-social imaginary all their lives and know its voice intimately. We do well to listen to our Elders, if we truly want to hear what country is saying.  But we should not expect Elders to speak with one Voice. For the Voice of country is pluri-vocal. Only by listening to the many and discerning its larger themes will you hear the One across and through the many.

Voice and Wisdom

There is, perhaps, a legitimately drawn analogy between ‘country’ and the figure of Wisdom we encounter in the book called ‘Wisdom’ from the Hebrew scriptures. 

Wisdom is not simply a creation of the Creator made, as it were, from the pure imagination of the divine. Wisdom is an ‘emanation’, the ‘breath’ of the divine. While differentiated from the divine as a feminized figure and form in and of herself, therefore, Wisdom is clearly derived from the divine in some deeply interfused manner. ‘Emanation’ suggests that Wisdom shares in the ontology of the divine creator, the very imprint of the divine DNA. ‘Breath’ suggests that she shares in the animating life or ‘spirit’ of the divine. Here we have the prototype of the emanations or processions of God that Christian theologians (principally from Cappadocia) will later call ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’ and identify with the Jesus and Holy Spirit of the New Testament writings, principally in the Johannine and Pauline discourses.  It is as though Wisdom takes on a body which includes the whole world, the whole biosphere, and animates the whole living cosmos with divine breath or Spirit.

Amongst the works of Wisdom in the hymn we have read is this:

. . . in every generation she passes into holy souls
and makes them friends of God, and prophets;
for God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom.

These three lines tell us three interesting things about the way in which Wisdom raises her voice in the world. 

She raises her voice, first, through generations. Not, that is, just the once, in some especially holy and esteemed moment in history, but ever after silent. Some Jews and Christians would like to read the biblical material that way. No, Wisdom, we are told, speaks in every generation.  This means that we can legitimately listen for her voice in every time and place.

She raises her voice, second, by entering holy souls who become friends of God, prophets. Prophets, in this Hebrew tradition, are of course those who are chosen by God to be God’s voice, the voice of Wisdom. They do not choose this path for themselves. Indeed, they often run away from the very notion because allowing themselves to be so deployed will usually cause both they, and their communities, great trouble and suffering. For the truth Wisdom wishes to speak, is often the very opposite of what is good for either ourselves or our planet. We are an acquisitive and self-deceiving bunch, by and large. Indigenous and Hebraic peoples share a great many stories which are designed to dissuade and warn us away from giving in to our worst impulses. Which is why confession and lament form an important part of both traditions. The prophet, by contrast, is called to come close to the divine in ‘friendship’, to listen to Wisdom’s voice, to be remade in the image of divine country and therefore an agent of transformation for others as the prophet passes what they hear on to others.  By doing so the prophet becomes one who centers their sense of being in the whole cosmic unfolding of divine being, rather than in any sense of single-in-itself individuality. 

Centering oneself in personal power, rather than diffuse social and ecological power is, I would argue, the very essence of what the Christian tradition calls sin. Even the most well-meaning of liberation movements can be blind to the experience and suffering of others, whether those others be human or non-human kin. Indigenous scholars, for example, have critiqued white feminism for its serial forgetting of black, brown and Indigenous women, for its centering of liberation on whiteness and western-middle-class worlds. Such forgetting, far from being merely benign with regard to black, brown and Indigenous women, actually contributes to the suffering of these women, forming a constitutive part of the death-dealing structures of colonialism.

Finally, then, Wisdom raises her voice, by dwelling with prophets. Living with and around and in them so that the prophet is able to speak from a home bounded by God rather than a home bounded, for example, by a picket fence. Or a field. Or a mining company. Or a nation. Or a church. Or a white middle-class feminist collective.

That is not to say that Wisdom lives no where in particular, mind. Wisdom in fact lives everywhere in particular. And therefore prophets will also speak from a particular place and experience with Wisdom. Our mob say that you cannot speak to anyone beyond the tribe unless you have dwelled with the ancestors within the tribal boundaries of one’s given country. The universal, therefore, can never be address except in the particular. There must be enfleshment, there must be embodiment, there must be language, culture and place or country. Without these, there can be no voice.

To what end does Wisdom speak through the prophets?

To what end, then, does Wisdom (or, we would say, country) speak through Elders and prophets? Well, our recitation from the gospel according to St Matthew, offers one way of answering this question:

Jesus put before them another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.’

Now, as with most of the parables recorded in the synoptic gospels, Jesus is here taking something very familiar and making it less familiar, he is taking common wisdom and rendering it differently so that it becomes prophetic or counter-intuitive. In this case, the trope of seed growing into a tree and the birds coming to settle into its branches is common wisdom, but the naming of the mustard seed as the smallest of seeds and its grown form as the largest of shrubs is certainly not. For the mustard seed was certainly not the smallest of seeds in the ancient near-east nor was it’s grown form the ‘greatest’ of shrubs. 

So, something else is going on here, and I propose that it has something to do with the connection between the ‘kingdom of heaven’ - the region, that is of God’s reign – and the birds of the air. Remember that earlier in Matthew’s gospel, in the homily known as the sermon on the mount, Jesus refers to the birds of the air as ‘they that neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.’ In contrast to the citizens of the Roman empire, who are encouraged by social and political convention to cloth themselves with the symbols of wealth and privilege, the birds of the air are fed and clothed by God. They do not sow or spin as a sign of their striving after a greater share of colonial power and largesse. Instead, they await the gratuity of the divine, universally given in creation for the sustenance of life.

So whatever the size and greatness of the seed or the tree given by God, wherever it sits in the economies of colonial empire or the common wisdom, it is given simply to feed and to clothe those whom empire forgets. The lowly, the least, the communities who live close to the humus of the earth and depend upon her gratuity. 

Thus, the kingdom of heaven is roughly analogous to country, as our mobs would understand it. She is given to all and for all.  She gives herself for our feeding and clothing. Yet, because the gift is universally given, there is an implicit ethic to its use which resembles both the manna given to Israel in its wanderings and in the eucharist by which Christians are fed. We are to take only what is needed. We are not to hoard its fruit into barns for a rainy day or for the generating of surplus wealth. We are to take only what is needful for today. For she gives herself at great cost, the cost of life as it is poured out in death, so that all who eat of what is dead may themselves be sustained in life.

So I leave you with this. There are analogies between Indigenous notions of country and the Jewish-Christian divine. I don’t believe we can ever legitimately claim that one IS the other in any literal one-to-one equivalence. What we can say, however, is that the realms of Wisdom and the kingdom of heaven are a lot like country. If we can therefore center ourselves in the home they create for us, rather than the little empires we would construct for ourselves against fear and chaos, we may well find that what is given us in country is enough; that the Voice we find in country and her prophets is enough. And perhaps we may finally, therefore, find the kind of justice that is able to make our broken humanity whole once more.

Garry Deverell

The kingdom of God is near!

Texts:  Jonah 3.1-5, 10; Psalm 62.5-12; 1 Corinthians 7.29-31; Mark 1.14-20 

After John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the good news and saying ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.’ 

These words represent Mark’s summary of Jesus’ ministry.  They are his shorthand way of summing up the whole of Jesus’ purpose and ministry in that obscure 1^st century province of Rome known as Galilee.  This morning I should like to dwell for a moment on how these words might change things.  How did they change the world of Jesus’ first hearers?  How did they change the world of Mark, as he repeats them to his small, fragile, congregation around the time when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans?  And finally, how might these words change things even for us today?

So,  let’s first ask how the coming of Jesus into Galilee changed things.  That things did change, and pretty radically, is clear from the passage we read about the calling of the first disciples.  There must have been something very compelling about this young Rabbi, Jesus, something very compelling indeed!  For it was a very big deal in that time, and in that society, for young men in the prime of their working lives to leave the family business and follow a religious teacher about the countryside.  When Simon and Andrew, and James and John, leave their boats and their nets they also leave what most of their contemporaries would have regarded as their most basic obligation in life—to care for their families and assure their survival in the world.  So even though there was a precedent, in Jewish faith and story, for people to do such things, by the time of Jesus such actions were regarded as irresponsible and even immoral.  So, things changed immediately for these families when Jesus came by.  ‘Follow me,’ he said to their menfolk.  That they did so would have had an immediate impact, socially and economically. 

But we must ask ‘Why?  Why would these men in the prime of their working lives risk both their fortunes and the disapproval of their peers like that?’  According to Mark, it had rather a lot to do with who Jesus was, and the message he brought with him.  From the beginning of his gospel, Mark leaves us in no doubt that Jesus in the Messiah, the one anointed by God to set Israel free from its bondage to decay.  He comes, then, as the bearer of good news and the advance glory of the kingdom of God.  Jesus, according to Mark, is a sign in dark times that God has heard the cries of his people’s distress, and will soon put right all that has gone wrong in the world.  All that follows in the gospel confirms this reading.  By his healings, his exorcisms, by the miraculous feedings and his sacrificial death for the sins of the people, and finally by his resurrection, Jesus shows everyone that God has indeed come near to save them.  Jesus himself is that nearness.  He is the human face of God, God with his people in the form of his Son. 

So that is why the fisherman abandon themselves, all that they are worth, to follow him.  That is why they repent of the way of life they had lived up until they met Jesus; that is why they believe in the good news that he bears; that is why they leave their nets and follow him, all the way to Jerusalem and the tragedy that unfolds there.  Because in Jesus they see that God is both near them and for them, turning the world upside down for the sake of the poor, the downtrodden and for all who had become lost in the lust for wealth and power.  In Jesus they saw a light to illumine a very cruel and dark world.

And yet, as Mark is recounting all this for his congregation, the world does not feel like it has changed much at all.  In fact, for Mark’s congregation, it is difficult to see that the coming of Jesus has made any difference whatsoever.  For they are a small and fragile group of Jewish Christians who fled from Jerusalem when it was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70.  It is likely that they lost their homes and their livelihoods.  It is also likely that many of their number were killed.  So now, as Mark tells his story, they are overcome with grief for what has been lost, and are full of uncertainty about the future.  Where, they ask, is Jesus now?  For there is little sign of his presence and power anywhere.

Mark’s gospel can be seen as an extended sermon, a sermon in the form of a story of narrative, which has been specifically designed to answer his community’s questions and suggest a way forward.  In answer to the question ‘Why has God suffered us to lose so much by the hand of our enemies?’ Mark answers:  ‘You are followers of Jesus.  Jesus did not shrink even from death at the hands of his enemies.  You have lost almost everything, some even their lives, but you have not lost all.  You have not lost God, the only source of life and health and happiness.’  For Mark answered the related question of where Christ had gone in this way:  ‘In Jesus the reign of God came near, but it has not yet arrived.  Yet, we carry the promise of that coming with us—in the memory of Christ and his teaching, in the values we live by in our community, and in the ritual of the Eucharist, by which we believe Christ continues to feed us for the pilgrimage of faith.  So let us recall, dear brothers and sisters, that while Christ has not yet come in all the fullness of his kingdom, he has yet given us a portion of his Spirit to sustain us.  Christ is with us, then.  But not in a form that we can possess and manipulate for our own pragmatic ends.  He is with us as his resurrected self:  the promise of a future that is gift, not possession.’  And finally, in answer, to the question about what they should do now, Mark says this:  ‘My beloved people, let us go to Galilee where Christ once walked amongst us.  Let us establish ourselves there as refugees and start to rebuild our lives.  But let us do so after the pattern of the community that Christ formed with his disciples.  Let us believe that the risen Christ will do so again, let us ask him to so form our community in the values of the kingdom that we, ourselves, will become a light for the world, even as Jesus was.  So then, let us become Christ’s body, in whom the very Spirit of Christ is at work.  Let us make repentance, faith and the following of Christ our life’s work and vocation.’  With these, any many other words, Mark encouraged his fragile community.

But now we must turn to what difference all this might make to our own lives, our own world, if any.  For we are not fishermen by the sea of Galilee, and we are not (at least not in this particular congregation) a community of refugees.  Still, we are a Christian community.  By our baptism, the risen Christ melded us into himself, into his life, his death, and his resurrection, that we might no longer live the futile life of those who imagine they can live without God.  We are called to pursue, instead, the risen life of Christ, and to do it communally, in concert with the sisters and brothers God has given us in faith.  In this community at Boronia, we are called to be so possessed by the Spirit of Christ, so vulnerable to his work in us, that his life and vitality becomes evident to all, overflowing with compassion, giving and thanksgiving. We are called, in short, to become 'fishers of people', witnesses to the freedom Christ brings in our families and communities. So, you see, the call of Jesus to those first disciples was not only for them.  Nor was it only for Mark’s little community.  It is also for us.  We, too, are called by Jesus to repent, to believe in the good news of God’s deliverance, and to follow Christ in all his ways.

To repent means to let go of anything in your life that gets in the way of your devotion to Christ.  When Paul tells the Corinthians to live as though their present circumstances were of little account, he does so believing that their devotion to comfort and convenience is misguided.  He does so believing that their present circumstances are not absolute, are not God, and are therefore passing away into nothingness.  What matters, he says to them and to us, is the coming kingdom and its ways.  For it is the kingdom, and not our present comfort or convenience, that is permanent.  So live according to the kingdom and its values, live as though the kingdom was already here, in all its fullness.  Repent of all that prevents you from doing so, put it aside in favour of your faith in the coming kingdom, where the rich will no longer be rich and the poor will no longer be poor.  For the kingdom comes not to destroy us utterly, not to take away all that is of lasting value or significance.  On the contrary, the kingdom is the arrival of God’s deliverance.  It comes to restore our lost equilibrium and peace.  It comes to resuscitate our flagging spirits, sucked dry, as they are, by the vanity of the present world system. 

And if you are unsure about how to go about all this, if you feel so entangled in your present circumstances that you can see no way out, take heed of Christ’s call to the disciples, “Follow me.”  To follow Christ is to learn his story and his ways, and order your life to imitate or ‘echo’ his.  In the early church, people were taught how to do this when they were preparing for baptism.  Our own Uniting Church, however, has tended to assume that people will learn the way of Christ my osmosis, or by some mysterious appearing of such things in the brain.  No matter.  If you want to respond to Christ’s call, you can.  Christ calls you whether you are young or old, healthy or ill, bright or (how should I put it), a few pennies short of a full quid.  What is important in following him, you see, is not your own capacities, but his.  ‘When Christ calls us,’ wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘he calls us to die.’  To die to our own plans and to live by his; to die to our own powers, and live by his; to die to our own pattern of life, and live as though the free gift of the kingdom were all that really mattered.

And so I conclude where I always conclude.  What will you do with this call from Christ?  Will you respond with your whole heart and soul and strength, or will you hedge your bets?