Anzac Day | Grief and Hope

About halfway through the movie 1917 there is a haunting scene of exhausted young soldiers slumped down listening to one singing the song: “Wayfaring Stranger.” 

It’s the view of World War 1 from from the perspective of an insignificant shell-shocked trooper in the trenches.
It's Anzac Day again, and many of us will rise early to recall the Great War and the millions of lives that were lost.

The human cost of World War 1 was enormous. More than 9 million soldiers and an estimated 12 million civilians died in the four-year-long conflict, which also left 21 million military men wounded.

There was also a human cost in a larger sense. The war remade the world for the worse in every conceivable way. It ignited the Russian Revolution, it laid the ground for Nazism. It made World War II pretty certain. It’s hard to imagine the second world war without the first. What is unmeasurable, is the huge personal and emotional toll on a generation in terms of ongoing grief and trauma.

Each generation — and each of us personally will in some way — experience grief and trauma. Whether its the loss of a loved one; or surviving a natural calamity like a massive bushfire or flood, or a life- threatening illness — or maybe by having the rhythms and hopes and dreams of our lives derailed by some unexpected and inescapable shock or crisis — the great depression or nine-eleven for some, the repercussions of the COVID:19 crisis for others, the war in Ukraine or the Gaza crisis or grinding poverty or oppression.

Regina Spektor - "Laughing With God."

No one laughs at God in a hospital

No one laughs at God in a war

No one's laughing at God

When they're starving or freezing

Or so very poor

No one laughs at God when the doctor calls

After some routine tests

No one's laughing at God

When it's gotten real late

Their kid's not back from that party yet

No one laughs at God when their airplane

Starts to uncontrollably shake

No one's laughing at God

When they see the one they love

Hand in hand with someone else

And they hope that they're mistaken

No one laughs at God

When the cops knock on their door

And they say "We got some bad news, sir"

No one's laughing at God

When there's a famine, fire, or a flood...

But God could be funny

At a cocktail party while listening to

A good god-themed joke

Or when the crazies say he hates us

And they get so red in

The head you'd think they're about to choke

God could be funny

When told he'll give you money

If you just pray the right way

And when presented like a genie

Who does magic like Houdini

Or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket

And Santa Claus

God could be so hilarious

Ha-ha

Ha-ha

No one laughs at God in a hospital

No one laughs at God in a war

No one's laughing at God

When they've lost all they got

And they don't know what for

No one laughs at God on the day they realize

That the last sight they'll ever see

Is a pair of hateful eyes

No one's laughing at God

When they're saying their goodbyes

But God could be funny

At a cocktail party while listening to

A good god-themed joke

Or when the crazies say he hates us

And they get so red in

The head you'd think they're about to choke

God could be funny

When told he'll give you money

If you just pray the right way

And when presented like a genie

Who does magic like Houdini

Or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket

And Santa Claus

God could be so hilarious

No one laughs at God in a hospital

No one laughs at God in a war

No one laughs at God in a hospital

No one's laughing at God in a war

No one's laughing at God in a hospital

No one laughs at God in a war

No one's laughing at God

When they're starving or freezing

Or so very poor

No one's laughing at God

No one's laughing at God

No one's laughing at God

We're all laughing with God

We Are the Music-Makers

We are the music-makers, 

And we are the dreamers of dreams, 

Wandering by lone sea-breakers, 

And sitting by desolate streams. 

World-losers and world-forsakers, 

Upon whom the pale moon gleams; 

Yet we are the movers and shakers, 

Of the world forever, it seems. 

With wonderful deathless ditties 

We build up the world's great cities, 

And out of a fabulous story 

We fashion an empire's glory: 

One man with a dream, at pleasure, 

Shall go forth and conquer a crown; 

And three with a new song's measure 

Can trample an empire down. 

We, in the ages lying 

In the buried past of the earth, 

Built Nineveh with our sighing, 

And Babel itself with our mirth; 

And o'erthrew them with prophesying 

To the old of the new world's worth; 

For each age is a dream that is dying, 

Or one that is coming to birth.

By Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy (1844 – 1881). British poet

STILLNESS

Early this year, on a cool summer's day, I found myself down on the beach, a few kilometres past Lorne. I was all alone with the wind and waves, reflecting on the year that was passing and on the New Year about to dawn. I was thinking about the never-ending and overwhelming changes washing like waves around us: 

Flooding up in north eastern Australia; the seemingly insoluble Gaza crisis, the brutal war in the Ukraine, the post-covid economic challenges, high mortgage rates, global warming, the Myanmar civil war, cost-of-living pressures, the newly emerging risks of inadequately controlled generative artificial intelligence, instability in U.S. politics and on and on!

I was also reading the following: “Come and see what the LORD has done, the desolations he has brought on the earth. 
9 He makes wars cease 
to the ends of the earth. 
He breaks the bow and shatters the spear; 
he burns the shields with fire. 
10 He says, “Be still, and know that I am God; 
I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.” (Psalm 46: 8-10 NIV)

It is hard for us to “be still” in the modern world, and yet it is what we need to learn if we are to be effective.

There was a fascinating feature article about stillness written some time ago, that I noted and kept: “The Joy of Quiet” by Pico Iyer. What would happen if we made the practice of ‘stillness’ a priority in 2024? 

Pico writes:

‘About a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness...” .... 

Intel (of all companies) experimented with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. (The average office worker today, researchers have found, enjoys no more than three minutes at a time at his or her desk without interruption.) During this period the workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. A majority of Intel’s trial group recommended that the policy be extended to others.

The average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book “The Shallows,” in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing). ....

The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. 

“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s [sic] problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone. 

... Henry David Thoreau reminded us that “the man [sic] whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.” Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting that “Man [sic] was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” but by also acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister. ....

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.

Maybe that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga or meditation, or tai chi; these aren’t New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two journalist friends of mine observe an “Internet sabbath” every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation. ....

It’s vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world, and to know what’s going on; I took pains this past year to make separate trips to Jerusalem and Hyderabad and Oman and St. Petersburg, to rural Arkansas and Thailand and the stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima and Dubai. But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it. 

For more than 20 years, therefore, I’ve been going several times
a year — often for no longer than three days — to a Benedictine hermitage, 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don’t attend services when I’m there, and I’ve never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it’s only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I’ll have anything useful to bring to them.”

Pico Iyer is the author of “The Man Within My Head.”

Orthoducksy or Orthopraxy?

There is a story attributed to Soren Kierkegard, the 19th century
Danish religious philosopher, about a town where only ducks live.

There was a little town of Ducks. Every Sunday the ducks waddle out of their houses and waddle down Main Street to their church. 

They waddle into the sanctuary and squat in their proper pews. The duck choir waddles in and takes it place, then the duck minister comes forward and opens the duck Bible (Ducks, like all other creatures on earth, seem to have their own special version of the Scriptures.) 

The duck-minister reads to them: “Ducks! God has given you wings! With wings you can fly! With wings you can mount up and soar like eagles. No walls can confine you! No fences can hold you! You have wings. God has given you wings and you can fly like birds!” 

All the ducks shouted “Amen!” And they all waddled home.

Called and Sent

I remember some years ago, as Sunday morning service where
we interviewed, commissioned and prayed for a young family who were heading overseas to serve as missionaries with an aid agency in a difficult cultural setting. We reminded them that we would stand with and encourage them as they went, but, they needed to be mindful of their calling and accountability to the broader church community and to God! They represented Jesus and his Kingdom out there in the world -- and that's not to be taken lightly.

It was a touching service and afterwards one of our church members, a successful local businessman came up to me and asked: 

"How come you don't do that for the rest of us?"

"How do you mean?"

"Well, aren't we all called and sent? Don't we all need prayer and encouragement to serve God out there? Don't I too need to be accountable for how I live my life, use my money and represent Jesus to my colleagues?"

A great question! Why do we single out 'real' missionaries or 'ordained' pastors for call and commissioning - but the rest of the faith community are not held accountable or supported in the same way?

So the very next week we called him and his household up the front, interviewed and commissioned him to be called and sent into his secular workplace!

One underlying quality of all missional churches, is a strong sense of seeing themselves, the whole community, as being called and sent: 

“All the church does and is should live out God’s life in the midst of the world; missional people should practice God’s life before a watching world. This includes worship, preaching, communion, loving one another, social justice, caring for the poor, and sharing Jesus’s gospel. Being missional is about all of it, not part. This is the missional imagination. All of God’s people are on mission to engage their surrounding neighbourhoods, not just a few who are sent outside the church to do something called missions.” (R&B, 54) 

Church conversations should move away from churched-culture assumptions and toward a focus on God’s work in and dream for the world. This is similar to the three-way conversation proposed by missiologist Lesslie Newbigin that considers first the relationship between the gospel and our culture (context), and only then progresses to reflection on issues of church. 

By putting gospel and culture first, it means we shape our 
church out of what God (gospel) is up to in our context (culture). If we start with church, we often end up either ignoring gospel and culture - or trying to force them to fit with our church traditions and structures.  

We no longer live in a Christian context. The western world is now a multicultural, pluralistic marketplace. This requires that we as the church-community follow Jesus, who pitched his tent 'out there', in the village. We too need to dwell in and become aware of our neighbourhoods. We need to be incarnate in our neighbourhoods. “God is only known in the particularity of place and time.” (R&B, 77).  

For us, the world has shifted from the church being on the central platform in society to being on the periphery. Often congregations have responded to this with strategies that operate as if the old church-centred culture were still the reality that we need to somehow get back to. But, we’re not in Kansas anymore. We’re not going back to 1950s Christendom modernity any time soon! The early church too, was powerless and poor and on the periphery of a great multicultural and pluralistic empire - one that was often hostile to these ‘followers of the way.’  

Missional Imagination

I remember some years ago talking to the leadership of a
smaller inner city church. In the 1950’s they had been a large vibrant congregation with a huge Sunday School that brought in all manner of kids from the neighbourhoods, and in time their parents too.

So in an attempt to reboot what was an old (dying) church they had employed a person to be two day a week Sunday School superintendent and spent a mint marketing the re-birthed Sunday School (same in format to the wonderful 1950s one).

They were sharing with me how sad and confused they were because no one had showed up. “People just don’t care about God’s ways anymore,” said one. “We should have prayed them in harder,” said another. “We even spent big bucks fixing the old pipe-organ, ready to sound out the great revival hymns!”

Trouble was no one had noticed that the church was now in the midst of a vastly changed suburb. Most of the first-generation locals actually spoke English. They couldn’t actually read the flyers distributed door to door. Most were of other faiths. Most were struggling with migration issues and putting food on the table. Many were at the bustling Sunday morning farmers’ market getting supplies and meeting up with friends. And - had any of them wandered in to the old church, well, pipe-organ music really wasn’t there thing.

In the last article we concluded by saying that there is no point in the history of the church that provides us with just the right pattern and formula for creating missional churches. We can’t just go back to doing it the way “they” did it!

Each meaningful fresh expression of church that has emerged was really important and effective for its time and place, and we can learn important principles from each of them, but they are not the absolute template. for all time.

Instead, as Alan Roxburgh & Scott Boren put it: “Those on the missional journey are wanderers, and we need to develop skills for reading the winds of the Spirit, testing the waters of the culture, and running with the currents of God’s call so that we are not lost on the journey. To some it might look like we are lost when we cannot point to a model that can be easily applied anywhere. Instead we are participants on a journey in which we have to learn from one another as we move toward becoming God’s missional people." [Introducing the Missional Church: What It Is, Why It Matters, How to Become One. Alan J. Roxburgh & M. Scott Boren, Baker Books, 2009. P. 25]

The phrase: “missional imagination” is a good way to describe the posture — a transformed way of seeing the world. That’s better than trying for a cut-and-dried dictionary definition of missional church. It’s more elusive than that.

It might actually be easier describing what missional church isn’t!

• It is not a label to describe churches that do cross-cultural missions. 
• It is not a label used to describe churches with a suite of local outreach programs. 
• It is not another label for church growth and effectiveness. 
• It is not a label for churches that are effective in doing evangelism. 
• It is not a label to describe churches that have developed a crisp mission statement with a vision and a purpose for their existence. 
• It is not a way of turning around ineffective or outdated forms so they can display relevance in the wider culture. 
• It is not a label that points to a primitive or ancient way of being the church. 
• It is not a label describing new formats of church that reach demographics outside traditional church structures. 

While all of these may be legitimate calls when properly understood, they do not individually or collectively capture the essence of the “missional” church.

When you think about all the many metaphors, similes, images, pictures, stories, and parables about the kingdom of God in Gospels, it’s actually pretty hard to read them and distil down one clear definition. “How do you write a definition of the kingdom when Jesus tells us it’s about mustard seeds and vineyards and cheating servants?” (R&B, 35)

Maybe a better picture is to imagine is of a great river to represent the flow of God’s work happening in the world down through history.

Roxburgh & Boren suggest that to be part of the kingdom, is to enter the flow of this 'missional' river with its many twists and turns and to align ourselves with three powerful currents moving through the rive: They call these currents: Mystery, Memory, and Mission.

Mystery – Why did God choose us? This is always “an irreducible mystery, a surpassing wonder.” Thus, “to participate in the missional journey is to embrace this mystery and allow this reality to overwhelm and supersede the pressing matters of being a successful church or growing church, which seem to dominate our imaginations.” (R&B, 42) 

Memory – Biblically, memory is the “reliving and reenacting of past events in the present because these events continue to have power and are the primary shapers of life.” Passover and the Lord’s Supper are examples. Yet, in the age of modernity, participation in these events “limits the Lord’s Supper to a memorial – a modern remembering of a past event.” Yet, biblically, “memory forms us into the people of God who live an alternative story whose power shapes the present. As such, this community formed in the mystery of God’s choosing is being shaped as a parallel culture because it is grasped by a present, lived memory of the story.” To be re-membered is the opposite of being dis-membered — it is to be made whole.(R&B, 44)

Mission – Mission grows out of mystery and memory, It’s an extension of our being. Roxburgh & Boren: “Mission is the outgrowth of mystery and memory. …Mission is not an action or program but an essence the pervades all the church is. God calls the church to be the demonstration of what all creation is to be. Likewise, the church is the new Israel (Luke 12:32; 1 Peter 2:9-10), called for the sake of the world. Mission is not something the church does as an activity; it is what the church is through the mystery of its formation and memory of its calling. The church is God’s missionary people. There is no participation in Christ without participation in God’s mission in the world. The church in North America [sic] to a large extent has lost his memory to the point that mission is but a single element in multifaceted, programmatic congregations serving the needs of its members. The gospel is not a religious message that meets the needs of self-actualizing individuals. But the North American [sic] church is being invited by the boundary-breaking Spirit to discover once again its nature as God’s missionary people. This will mean going against the stream of most church life at this moment in time.” (R&B, 45)

That means we can’t reduce mission to a formula: “… missional church cannot be codified in a simple definition. It is more than a new word for evangelism, church planting, or meeting someone in a coffee shop for conversation. It is not about restricting or a new program. Missonal church is about an alternative imagination for being the church. It is about this transformation toward a church that is shaped by mystery, memory, and mission.” (R&B,45) 

The church I mentioned at the start, paused and reflected on it’s journey. Members started reaching out and slowly forming friendships with their new neighbours. Shared food helped form bonds even when language was a bit of an issue. They discovered a real need for people wanting to learn conversational English - so some of them made themselves available to do so at the community centre. 

They provided assistance in helping locals understand complex

welfare and migration paperwork, they helped find housing and food, they joined in celebrating cultural festivals, they eventually facilitated a non-english speaking gathering. Their imagination’ and their lenses became missional and they built genuine relationships that led to authentic conversation and wellbeing in their community.  

The journey along the missional river is expressed in many different forms, traditions, structures, and sizes. The forms might be emergent churches, traditional churches, rural congregations, megachurches, and denominations. The structure is less important than the posture.

“… the missional conversation has entered almost every stream of the church. The Spirit of God is moving in the church in creative, generative ways that call the people of God to engage their neighbourhoods and display God’s kingdom in everyday life.” (R&B, 52) 

More about that next time.