Below is a copy of my Final Address to the General Assembly which was given this past Saturday.
THE UNITING PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH IN SOUTHERN
AFRICA
SATURDAY 14 JULY 2012 14h00
THE RETIRING MODERATOR’S ADDRESS
Readings: 1 Samuel 2: 1
– 10; 2 Corinthians 1: 3 – 11.
The
power to change
Rod – it’s been great to have some power. One phones
the Central Office and one is greeted as “Moderator”. I thought it was quite a nice thing to have a
surname so hard to pronounce that everyone just called me “George”, like “Cher”
or “Madonna” – just “George” but then the power came ... and I become
“Moderator” or “Mod” or even “MōGA”. The office of Moderator is powerful.
You get to sit at the top table, next to Presidents, Premiers and Bishops. (The
Premier of the Eastern Cape leaned closer and said: “Call me Zukie”.
We wear beautiful robes. When recently attending the
General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, the leaders of Churches, Edinburgh’s
judges and City Councillors were robing in the Signet library (next to St Giles)
and a colleague representing the Presbyterian Church in Trinidad and Tobago and
I were walking through the room with robes hanging up on either side. We passed a beautiful scarlet robe with a
white woolly trim. “Oh”, said my colleague, “I didn’t know that Santa Clause
was coming.” The trappings of power for the Moderator of a Conciliar Church?
Every now and then you notice how much we look like
the world. It was you who once told me about former President Nelson Mandela
who was visiting a home for elderly people in Sea Point. In a conversation with
one of the old dears, President Mandela leaned close and said: “Do you know who
I am?” To which the lady responded: “No, dear, but ask Matron, she will tell
you who you are.”
Moderator, when I wrote to one of our ministers soon
after becoming Moderator, I signed the letter, “Just George”. At the end of his
gracious reply, he wrote that his wish for me was that at the end of my term, I
would be known as “George the Just”. Here I am Moderator, by God’s grace, just
George again.
A
powerful Church
The Church, Moderator, is powerful. We carry with us a
Gospel that is not only Good News but also powerful
news. This Gospel has the power to change lives, to set people free from all
manner of social ills, from addiction and (thank God) from narrow mindedness.
We claim to wield the power of
forgiveness – the capacity to set aside the past and liberate the future. We
are known to have performed miracles, healings, and supernatural acts.
We are a powerful
church, Moderator.
And our witness has been powerful too – defying governments
who thought they could dictate who we should marry in the sight of God and with
whom we should meet and where we should hold our assemblies – powerful, Moderator.
We are masterful practitioners of power.
But we have also mistaken the power of the world for
the power of God. In our search for words to describe God’s reign and our
desperate desire to express God’s kingship, we have taken on the language of
the world and the categories of a kingdom with no future. Can we change the way we use power?
The word “God” is a power word, Moderator. As revealed to us in scripture, our God is a
powerful God:
-
Liberating Israel from Pharaoh with bloodshed and
violence, routing the Canaanite tribes so Israel could take possession of a
land arbitrarily chosen to be theirs.
-
‘A mighty hand’, ‘an outstretched arm’: “let his
enemies be scattered”.
The powerful song of Hannah (Heb. “The gracious one,
the favoured one”) tells the story of a powerful God:
My heart rejoices in the Lord;
In the Lord my horn (my
strength) is lifted high.
My mouth boasts over my
enemies,
for I delight in your
deliverance.
There is no one holy like the
Lord;
there is no one besides you;
there is no rock
(righteousness) like our God.
Who would have expected that the birth of a humble
Jewish boy should elicit such a vibrant song of joy? Who would have expected?
Of course a deliverer even greater than Israel’s Samuel would one day cause his
humble mother to express a Magnificat!
This is so much more than deliverance from barrenness
– the song of victory that Hannah sings is a song for a myriad of voices.
God’s power is not absolute (what will the Doctrine
Committee say?) it is self-limited. God’s
power is never arbitrary (like the God of the Philosophers!)
Hannah sees the power of God at work:
In the birth
of child and in death,
In the grave
and in resurrection,
In poverty
and in wealth,
In honour
and in dishonour.
Mostly, she observes the power of God as God works for
justice in human life.
The Lord
weighs our deeds. (vs3d)
Arms the
stumbling (v4b)
Feeds the
hungry (v5b)
Gives
life to a barren womb. (v5c)
It’s the marginalised; it’s the downtrodden ones,
those that live where the paparazzi cameras don’t flash. That is where the
power of our God is revealed.
This is where we observe the limitedness of God’s
power:
-
Creating the earth but not another world;
-
Interconnecting things that seem to conflict;
-
Creating moral persons whose intentions and actions
conflict;
-
Always in relation yet hard to find.
God’s power is limited by God’s gracious wisdom and God’s
creative purpose. God’s power is not brute force but also not laissez-faire.
God’s power is generative, it is attractive. God’s power is liberating.
How
about the church?
Paul, writing to the Ephesians, begins to unpack the
nature of the power that the Church wields. “I pray that the eyes of your heart
may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called
you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably
great power for us who believe.” He goes on to explain that the power is
resurrection power, the power to glorify (enable us to see the significance of
Christ) and then explains that the power of God is really only for the Church.
As a last thought, Paul connects Christ with the Church, calling it Christ’s
“fullness”.
We wield power badly. We’ve taken our cue from the
world and we are a poor copy of worldly power. Kings wear robes, we wear robes.
Kings have great heraldic badges. We took the only thing we could find (the
cross) and made it a badge and by grace, God called our bluff and made this
badge an antithesis. A badge of glory becomes a badge of shame; a badge of
shame becomes God’s badge of glory.
We bludgeon each other with words and deceitful deeds.
We lobby, we caucus, we plot to bring the other side down. And you, Moderator,
will be witness, this week, to a display of power run amuck... We forget that
the only bit of power we have is as a result of a scandal in which the power of
the world was collapsed into the body of our God, disguised as a Jewish mystic
– battered to death for the liberation of us all.
-o0o-
I would be telling only half the story, Moderator, if
I stopped here – leaving you in your mind’s eye amid the carnage of the
Church’s power gone wrong. I have seen beautiful expressions of power in these
last two years. The power of God in the Church expressed in feeding the hungry,
clothing the naked and giving the abandoned a new chance.
Moderator, every township church in Central Cape
Presbytery and most of the white Churches, has a soup kitchen, a feeding
scheme, a poverty alleviation project. I’ve seen humble people elected to
office in our church. I’ve seen Moderators and Clerks make wise and brave
decisions. I’ve seen Presbyteries care and serve and mourn. I’ve seen women and
men wearing white and black jackets and hats worshipping enthusiastically side
by side before the King and Head of the one powerful Church.
I have been powerfully moved by a powerful Church.
“It’s not by strength that one prevails” sings your Hannah; “those who oppose
the Lord will be broken.” (1 Sam 2: 9b & 10).
The
power to change
The Song of Hannah is about the miraculous birth of
Samuel, one of the most significant figures of Israel’s early history. Samuel
was a humble Jewish boy who became one of the most significant religious, moral
and political leaders of his day.
Samuel is our mythological hero with flowing robes,
and a long white beard – the stuff that great movies are made of – the Gandalf
of JRR Tolkien and the Dumbledore of JK Rowling. Always wise, always there when
we need him, always good.
On closer inspection, though, Samuel is a careful
choice. He is a manager of change.
When we read the history of Israel, it becomes clear that the world in which
Israel lived was “a changing”. Israel in Samuel’s day was a country in
transition (in flux) from a loose federation of tribes to a monarchy.
It was inevitable. They needed a King for cohesion,
for their own security. Had they not had a King, how would they have gathered
an army and without an army, they would have been overrun.
So, Samuel was the change manager who helped Israel
through its transition. No wonder his birth causes his mother to sing. As Walter
Bruggemann puts it: “His birth is not a private wonder but a gift of
possibility for all Israel.”
A gift of possibility ... to be more than they had
been before ... but the change for a King changed everything – the way Israel
understood its relationship with God, the land and one another.
“Listen to all that the people are saying to you,
Samuel.” Says the Lord. “It is not you they have rejected, but they have
rejected me as their king” (1 Sam 8: 7).
The world was a changing and instead of putting a stop
to it, Yahweh says: “Let them have their King.” (v22) Perhaps he will turn
their symbols of power into symbols of shame? Or perhaps their shame into
instruments of great power?
The world is changing,
Moderator. People don’t fear the Church like they used to. People don’t have a
fear for the burning pits of ‘hell’ like they used to. People are not impressed
by our doctrine or by our fancy ways to prove that Jesus was raised. They’re
not interested in “evidence that demands a verdict” or the philosophical proofs
for the existence of God. They don’t believe because we say so.
Their faith, if they have any, is much gentler and
embraces the mysterious.
The world is changing Moderator and we need to be taught
how to manage change.
The Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner, once famously
wrote: “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or not a Christian at
all.” Rahner should not be misunderstood. He was not predicting the death of
God or of the Church but simply predicting a time when we Westerners will not
be socialised as Christians anymore, when the Church will not be powerful
anymore, when we Moderators will not be seated next to Presidents and premiers
anymore.
The parish Church is gone. The State Church has died.
We are sojourners in the world once more, Moderator. We are people of no fixed
abode.
The world is changing, Moderator, and we need to be
taught how to manage change like the great Samuel whose greatness was above any
of Israel’s Kings because he relied on the mystery at the centre of all things.
Samuel called this mystery YHWH and to you and I, he is Jesus.
Recently, I represented this powerful church at the
Assembly of the Council for World Mission on the island of American Samoa. I
bought a skirt, Moderator, a “lava lava” and I wore it. We’re of a similar
size, I can loan it to you, Mod.
The people of the village of Leone tell the story of
the day the missionary came. It was a fearful thing, Moderator, for the
missionary to come among the Samoans. They are big, Moderator, even the ladies.
In ancient times, some were cannibals and others made human sacrifice. But John
Williams came to proclaim the powerful Gospel of Jesus the Jew.
It’s a humbling story, Moderator. We’re told that John
Williams sent this simple message to the ‘High Talking Chief’ of the island of
Tutuila: “The servant of the Lord is here.” Well, that might have been the end
of him.
In the ancient mythology of the Samoan people, they
learned to expect a messenger who would one day herald the coming of the high
king. The ‘high talking chief’ recognised John William’s message as a sign and
they welcomed the messenger of the Lord of all the earth.
The time is coming, Moderator, when we will trade our
robes for rags and like the humble Lazarus of parables, be welcomed home. Will
we have the power to change?
to become marginal but not lost;
peripheral to the world but central to its liberation;
Unimportant, ridiculed but not insignificant and
certainly not impotent;
Subversive, colourful, meaningful ....
Will we rejoice, Moderator? We in rags lying in envy
of the robed ones? Perhaps the words of St Paul will ring in our ears: “But
this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises from
the dead. He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us.
On him we have set our hope...”
May there be glory to the Father, to the Son and to
the Spirit
as there was in the beginning,
is now in the Church
and shall be world without end.
