Safe in the arms of Jesus 4

‘What led Cain to kill Abel? Murderous rage is not as we think a form of insanity. We’d like to think it is, you know: we’d love to imagine the urge to put another person to death is simply a species of madness, a break in the normal habits of human thinking. We really long for it to be psychopathic.’

Bryan’s tea cup rattled on his knee as spoke, sitting in the armchair in Graham’s study.

‘Or maybe the result of the forces that shape us as individuals – our deprivations or our upbringing, or perhaps even our genes. Wouldn’t that comfort us if we could in some way produce a kind of circuit board of causes for our actions tracing right back into the distant past, beyond even our own coming into being; if we could say, in the presence of a terrible present moment, as we see the body of the one we’ve killed fall prone on to the grave stone of some long-dead child, that this instant was already programmed in? That we had at that moment no other choice but to do what it was that we in fact did do?

‘These are not new thoughts’, said Graham. ‘The Greeks got there first, didn’t they?’

‘That they did, that they did. But this thought is pressing with particular force upon us in the present time, since the scientific academy is claiming that knowledge of genes and evolutionary biology will be able to provide a causal explanation for everything that is – which, in a way, is a way of blaming not ourselves but God himself for it all.’

‘I don’t follow you?’

‘Ah – well, like a huge field of toppling dominos, the domino that falls falls because the one before it fell, no less and no more. And the one before it, and so on, right back to the start so that you can in the end say that the only freely independent action is the first one – the act of creation itself. Which means the only single moral act in the entire universe ever was that first act from which all the others sprang and still spring. Cain thwarted Abel, but God made Cain. Whoever swung the blow that killed poor Ma’afu was simply the instrument of destiny. The horror of being human is that we are gifted with the ability to observe ourselves in the act which we cannot it seems stop, even as we do it. We have this feeling in our nightmares – you know those nightmares where you are sure you have done the most terrible of things and you cannot, even as you wake, shake the feeling that you have been exposed for the fraud that you undoubtedly are?

‘Well, yeah-’

‘But this is too convenient. Of course, theology tells us that we are to be held accountable for what we ourselves do – which implies that we are genuinely the doers of deeds. We do, we are doers, even as we are entangled in a web of causes and influences. Thinking apart from the theological it becomes difficult of course; though I am inclined to say that the experience of feeling as if we and others too ought to be held responsible for what we do is enough. Even if we can’t give a coherent explanation for that feeling – not yet – we still have to live within it.

‘So would you say that even if we found out that we were living within a dream, in a complete fantasy world, we would still be accountable for acting in that world-’

‘Well, yes. We are still conscious of making choices. Though we must admit that it is more complicated than that, we still bear the burden of making them, don’t we? Whoever cracked the back of Ma’afu’s skull is certainly a victim of living in the world. But you can be a victim and a perpetrator. We all are.’

Justin Welby

I've very much enjoyed reading Andrew Atherstone's bio of Justin Welby the new Archbishop of Canterbury.

It is a very readable and quick trot through the salient features of Welby's life and ministry thus far. Notably, Welby was converted at Cambridge through the CICCU and went to the Round Church (now St Andrew the Great, or 'STAG'). He then become very involved with Holy Trinity Brompton, the UK's leading charismatic Anglican church and the home of the Alpha Course.

This drives his evident passion for evangelism - which he clearly sees as different from 'mission' (more broadly defined), and which features in his parish ministry and in his work as Bishop of Durham. He clearly wants people to know Christ and him crucified.

But he has also spent some interesting times in interesting places - working for reconciliation and peace in war-torn parts of the world. Especially, he has a connection to the Church in Nigeria, forged over many years. So: he knows what is at stake for some people in committing to the gospel of Jesus.

Even given these roots, Welby is a man of an eclectic spirituality, and has spent a good deal of time in the company of Roman Catholic spiritual guides.

I finished the book wondering how Welby will go about promoting evangelism in the CofE in his new role, and at the same time manage the processes of conflict and change. That he is a practical man, plain of speech and not an academic, will be in many senses to his advantage.

Anyhow - grab Atherstone's book. It is a great read. And maybe as you read, pray for Welby and for the Church and the Communion that he now leads.

Safe in the arms of Jesus 3

IV

‘It appears that you have had something of a brutal intrusion into your day.’

The large, shabby figure of Rev Bryan Howe, strode towards Graham with a walk that came somewhere from the hips and appeared to involve no bending of the knees.  Threads of grey hair trailed behind him, and globules of sweat had formed on his temples with the effort of walking in the sun.

‘Bryan, I really am terribly sorry – we said ten, did we? I got distracted. Anyhow, you’re here.’

‘Well I am most keen to see you and hear tell of the progress of your labours in the Lord’s vineyard.’

Bryan’s use of the pious cliché was fully aware of itself but it was not said sardonically. It was just there.

‘But that shall have to wait I suppose. It has transpired that this poor fellow has expired, no? Detective, what do you suppose has happened to this poor fellow?’

‘And you are -?’

‘Oh, sorry detective, this is Bryan Howe, a friend of mine. Actually, former teacher from my college days’.

‘Well, the poor bastard’s taken a blow to the head and that’s done for him well and truly. It hasn’t happened as he hit the ground, so I don’t think it is a brawl gone wrong. I can’t imagine he could have done it to himself. So it’s looking like foul play, I’d say. Big bloke that that – probably a bit slow moving, but you’d want to take him by surprise if you were trying to kill him. Probably shouldn’t say any more, but you gents are men of the cloth after all – I am sure I can trust youse guys.’

His phone rang, he raised an eyebrow of apology and turned away to talk.

Bryan Howe had a look of immense concentration on his face. Graham thought for a minute that he looked positively pleased.

‘There’s a calculation here. But also, anger. Rage in its purest form, allowed to simmer like a pot rattling on the stove, then released in an explosion of free action. The true soul, as Aquinas might have thought of it, expressed through the body’s action. This was someone’s deepest disquiet of the soul for a very long time. And yet – ‘

The spot of spittle that gathered on Bryan’s bottom lip as he spoke had started to build up.

‘And yet – they were able, it seems to focus all their energy into the one blow and refrain from any more. You hear of the victim of multiple stab wounds – seventy or eighty sometimes – and you think: why, there was a rage that could not be contained until it was spent. But here? No. Here was one singular, remarkable crack on the skull, enough to do for a man in mid-life. And then –‘

‘What?’

‘Well, if I am not mistaken from this distance, the body seemed rather tidy as it lay. Arms and legs in a somewhat neutral repose, not all hugger-mugger as one might expect. Now: is this a sign of sorrow or even remorse? Is this indicative of the horror of the slaughter? A moment perhaps in which the enemy of Ma’afu, gasping from the effort of smiting him down, looked tenderly on his quarry as he lay slain on the grave of another? What do you think?’

‘I am sure I have no idea. It is hard to imagine a rage so insane.’

‘That is because you lack the imagination on the one hand and the pastoral experience on the other.’

‘I see.’ The putdown was kindly, and Graham actually appreciated it.

‘Murderous rage is almost as old as humankind’.

Safe in the arms of Jesus 2

The area around the grave of Muriel Firmage had already been isolated by police tape strung between four gum trees that seemed to lean slightly in with concern. There wasn’t too much fuss being made by the police. Only one car was in attendance, and it had apparently disgorged the two uniformed officers of either gender and a detective who stood about showing no apparent interest in the prone body. The detective tapped into his mobile phone; the officers, their arms folded, chatted to pass the time.

Graham went first to the church office, where Glenda was in crisis mode.

‘Bob found him when he went to water the plants,’ she said. ‘Oh, and did you forget you were meeting Bryan today? He’s sitting in your lounge room.’

Graham nodded, fearing that perhaps she would add to the conversation a list of calls that had come in that morning already. It was, after all, his day off.

He grabbed his keys and walked off across the church grounds. He felt a bit sheepish- why hadn’t he seen the body that morning when he left the rectory? How would he explain that to the police? It was entirely an arbitrary habit that he had developed of driving around the left hand side of the church, which was ringed by a gravel drive. But this meant that the body had been entirely obscured from his view.

‘So – what’s happened?’ he said to the detective, who continued to press his smart phone with a ponderous finger.

The detective finally looked up at Graham.

‘You’re the priest here, then? Look, I don’t know if you can identify the body –‘

‘I’m the minister, yes. He’s definitely dead, then.’

‘Oh yes, no question about that. Must’ve laid there since at least two in the morning I’d say. Lonely place to die. D’you know him, reverend?’

‘No, no, haven’t seen him before. We’ve had a couple of homeless guys creep into the graveyard to die before. Is –‘

‘Not this guy. Ma-afu Kefu. Worked for the local council, a regular job. Part of their tree-felling and gardening team.’

‘And what happened to him?’

‘Yeah, well, someone was pretty upset with guy.  Blunt force trauma over the right ear. His workmates were expecting him to show up at six this morning to tidy up the median strip over on Lamech St. Not today, but.’ One of the uniformed officers had slipped unnoticed down to the café and now handed the detective a paper cup, from which he now sipped.

The ambulance now made its way up the gravel drive, rocking slightly from side to side over the uneven ground.

Safe in the arms of Jesus

I

Ma'afu Kefu lay hard up against the headstone of Muriel Firmage, 1837-41 - safe in the arms of Jesus. The warm and slightly stale air of the Sydney morning coughed gently over the unmown spider grass. The blowflies circled each other with no obvious intent. A magpie hopped onto the garbage bin at the side of the church and jabbed half-heartedly at the black plastic bag overflowing the rim.

Ma'afu’s bald head was slightly propped up against the sandstone. A trail of brown ants trudged its way from the top of the headstone, down across his pate and down behind his left ear on a journey to some hidden destination. His head was turned slightly to the right; his strong body, dressed in a blue singlet stained to white by the salts of his sweat, was simply arranged, with the arms and legs in alignment.

It was a Thursday, and Ma'afu was dead. 

II

The café was unusually full for a Thursday morning, which was Graham’s morning off. It was the only café on a quiet suburban road, and it filled up at about a quarter past nine with mums and the occasional dad having a post drop-off gossip about the teachers at the school and last night’s cooking shows.

Graham on his morning off did not look a good deal different from Graham on his working days. He sat with his Macbook open vacantly sipping the frothed skim milk off the top of his cappuccino, which was the quality of cappuccino made by a café with no visible competition for some distance. The small square table had a missing foot, which meant that, when Graham typed with any force into it – which did happen when he got lost in what he was doing and had a constant stream of thought that seemed close to something like an interesting idea – he was quickly diverted from his reverie.

On Thursdays, his morning off, Graham picked away at the detective novel he wished he had written years ago. He had never been a particular fan of detective fiction, but he had been an English teacher before he got ordained and somehow imagined that a foray into detective fiction on the side would be a relatively unpretentious and easy way to satisfy his literary urges. Starting his work without much of a plan, he had been surprised by how unpleasant the detective he had created was; his name was Mike Overhall, and he was a rather smug disbarred lawyer with an eye for the ladies, a wallet for the horses, and a nose for a decent red, and he was now trying to pay his alimony by solving mysteries. Overhall had kept his hair long beyond middle age – and dyed the grey out of it - did cryptic crosswords which he thought showed how clever he was and affected a supercilious smirk which was the effect of his surprising self-consciousness about his yellowed teeth. 

In a couple of short stories Graham had already written, Overhall had triumphed over himself and over the evil underworld of Sydney mostly by waiting for events to play themselves out. There was little actual solving of crimes. Overhall stumbled across murderers in the same way that he stumbled across corpses. This kind of detective narrative seemed to Graham the easiest one to pick off, since he didn’t have to do much by way of plot. He was hoping that the jaunty writing style and his gothic depictions of the Sydney underworld would make his pieces readable to someone somewhere.

On other days of the week, Graham sat in the same spot, but he was there writing his sermons or preparing other material for his parish. He liked to write his sermons out word for word so as to give full play to his rhetorical ambitions, which meant that he was a slightly aloof figure in the pulpit, and his parishioners did not feel they knew him intimately or that he gave himself to them overly much. As he wrote his sermons he sometimes had their faces in front of him, but very often he was more aware in his head of what his friends from college might be thinking if they dropped in on the off chance, or if they happened on his website and listened to the MP3. His sermons had in them little gestures to the crowd that wasn’t there, dropping in a hint that he knew that this passage was a controversial one in the scholarly world – not that his parishioners cared one little bit, but his classmates would have. 

But that was not today’s task. He was attempting to immerse himself in Overhall’s grubby life, hunched over his machine a little, with his legs tucked in under the chair with a loafered foot hooked over one of the cross bars. He wore a nondescript but nice pair of jeans, a collared shirt ironed only where it showed (cuffs, collar and buttons) and a corduroy jacket that wasn’t particularly new. The effect was less business than PhD student, and Graham didn’t mind that effect at all. It went with his short dark slightly woolly hair, kept short so as not to look unkempt. What people noticed when they met him (at least, was sure they did) was his pock-marked features, the result of a dire case of acne that had descended on him in his final year at school. It dinted his confidence then, quite badly; but his faith, kindled at a youth camp when he was 16, was not harmed by the pitting of his face. When people met him, they quickly saw that he was generally at ease with himself and the world and that his sense of humour was intact. 

His mobile phone, resting flat on the metallic table, buzzed now and then. Graham didn’t mind leaving it on for his day off – in fact, it was nice to be contactable, and it felt good to be able to tweet something if a piece of wry wisdom came to mind.

Flicking a glance at it, he noticed he had an SMS from Glenda in the church office:

NEED YOU TO COME UP TO THE CHURCH. POLICE HERE.

Anglicans and sacraments 1

There is no question but that the evangelical Reformers of the sixteenth century saw themselves as making a deliberate and conscious move away from the view of the sacraments that had prevailed in the medieval church. They were in loud agreement that the sacramental system had become an avenue for the worst tendencies in medieval Christianity – an expression of a soteriology that made no sense, a celebration of what seemed to them to be abhorred in Scripture, and even the re-institution of the very things that the apostles had railed against in the New Testament. As they were, the sacraments were indicative of an entire theological system that needed to be dismantled and reconstituted from the ground up. And yet this proved more elusive to them. The Reformers could not find agreement on a positive account of the sacraments, especially the Lord’s Supper. 

Most famously, Luther and Zwingli clashed at the Colloquy of Marburg in 1529 – even though they had been called together by Philip I precisely for the purpose of presenting a united Protestant front. The division was irreconcilable: in the end Luther simply refused to acknowledge the validity of Zwingli’s position. The fifteenth point of the colloquy recognized this sharp difference of opinion:

Fifteenth, we all believe and hold concerning the Supper of our dear Lord Jesus Christ that both kinds should be used according to the institution by Christ; also that the Sacrament of the Altar is a sacrament of the true body and blood of Jesus Christ and that the spiritual partaking of the same body and blood is especially necessary for every Christian. Similarly, that the use of the sacrament, like the word, has been given and ordained by God Almighty in order that weak consciences may thereby be excited to faith by the Holy Spirit. And although at this time, we have not reached an agreement as to whether the true body and blood of Christ are bodily present in the bread and wine, nevertheless, each side should show Christian love to the other side insofar as conscience will permit, and both sides should diligently pray to Almighty God that through his Spirit he might confirm us in the right understanding. Amen

There was substantial and noteworthy agreement. The Reformers together rejected the understanding of the Mass as a substitutionary sacrifice in any way making a propitiation that only belonged to the cross of Christ. They also agreed that the elements should both be offered to the congregation (the practice of offering communion ‘in one kind’ was ubiquitous by the time of the Reformation). They were strongly agreed that to take the Lord’s Supper was something an obedient Christian ought to do. But they were vociferous in their disagreement about what occurred in the rite itself. Luther wished to assert that Christ was present at the Lord’s Supper, whereas Zwingli did not. The other Reformers present at the Marburg Colluquy – among them Martin Bucer, who would go on to have a significant influence on the English Reformation in the 1540s and 50s – leaned more to Zwingli’s position while still wanting to affirm a ‘spiritual presence’.

The English Reformation was somewhat of a latecomer to this discussion. Even following the break with Rome in the 1530s, Henry VIII did not permit a significant development of teaching on the sacraments. The Ten Articles of 1536, though it affirmed justification by faith alone, also upheld the necessity of baptism, the sacrament of penance and the substantial, real and corporeal presence of Jesus as the Eucharist under the form of bread and wine. The text of the Bishop’s Book, designed to accompany the Ten Articles, reads

under the form and figure of bread and wine, which we there presently do see and perceive by outward senses, is verily, substantially, and really contained the very selfsame body and blood of our Saviour Jesu Christ.

This position was affirmed in the Six Articles of 1539, in which the practice of withholding the cup from the laity was also defended. 

Thus, the Henrician church cannot claim to have moved to a recognizably Reformed or Lutheran position on the sacraments. The theological building blocks for a change were nonetheless beginning to be put into place, since the doctrine of purgatory to which the mass was linked was being attacked, and since the doctrine of justification by faith alone did not allow for the same role in the salvation of a person’s soul as was formerly in operation. Futhermore, despite the official caution of the leading bishops, more radical views had certainly been circulating in England for at least two decades before Henry’s death in 1547. William Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man had briefly expounded a view of the meaning and purpose of the sacraments that pre-empted later Anglican accounts, arguing that the sacraments were chiefly signs of God’s promises, apprehended by faith as the accompanying word is preached.[1]

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[1] William Tyndale and David Daniell, The Obedience of a Christian Man, Penguin Classics (London ; New York: Penguin, 2000), p. 108-9.