Monday, July 16, 2012

Final Goodbye

Regrettably, keeping up with this Blog has been an impossibility as the responsibilities of Moderator increased, and for that I offer my apologies. I loved sharing my experiences with you and I loved receiving your comments. My thoughts and prayers are now with Rev Rod Botsis as he starts his term of Moderator. This is a difficult time of change and reflection for the Church, keep our Moderator and the members of the UCPSA in your thoughts and prayers.

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.

George U UPCSA (2010- 2012)                                              Soli Deo Gloria

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