SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER
29th May 2011
Graphics and cartoons & liturgical material appear only in the printed version
THREE'S COMPANY
A boozy husband was in the pub with his wife last week. She had decided that if ever she was to rehabilitate him she needed to be alongside him in his favourite drinking haunts. After he had downed a fair few pints he said, "You are really beautiful! I love you very dearly indeed." No sucker for boozy blarney she asked, "Is that you or the beer talking?" He replied "It's me alright, talking to the beer."
Biblical Literalism
Canon Andrew Neaum,
The press, especially the popular press, grabs the interest of its readers most readily and easily, by way of sensation, the unusual, the extreme. Just because our daily lives are made up, for the most part, of what is commonplace and ordinary, when we turn to the press we tend to look for and desire contrast. The press obliges.
Buffoons
It is little wonder then that the face of Christianity in the press is rarely a well rounded, considered or accurate face. The most widely held perception of Christians is that we are at best gullible and naive believers in the impossible, and at worst foaming at the mouth, kill joy, biblical- literalist buffoons.
This grieves me because I love the Christian Faith passionately. It is all but unbearable that what I love so dearly, and know to be infinitely subtle, nuanced, intelligent, life-enhancing and inclusive, should be widely and popularly portrayed and perceived as crude, stupid, hypocritical, arrogant, life denying and exclusive.
What can one do about this? Life is not made up of blacks and whites. Truth, of its very nature, tends to subtlety, is nuanced, elusive, ambiguous and paradoxical. In matters of faith, belief, religion and spirituality it is especially so, and therefore the press and its sensation hungry public are all but guaranteed, indeed are almost destined to get it wrong, and to despise us for being what we are not.
However one does and must attempt to do one's bit to redress the imbalance and correct the picture. Hence this brief look at biblical literalism.
There are, of course, literalists and literalists. When St John's Gospel has Jesus say: "I am the Vine," even the thickest of literalists is unlikely to suggest that we mulch him. Literalism is hardly ever totally literal.
But where does it come from? What is it all about? How is that so many Christians appear content to read the bible with a different brain to the one they use for any other sort of writing?
God-breathed
It is odd, because to take the bible literally is most emphatically not an essential, or even mainstream Christian tenet. No creed says anything about how to read the scriptures. The highest claim that the Bible itself makes for itself is when the writer of St Paul's letter to Timothy says that the Hebrew scriptures are "God-breathed". But then, of course, so too, literally speaking, was Adam, and he, you will of course remember, was very far from infallible.
We do call the Bible the "word of God" in our liturgies and conversations, but why should the fact that it is God's mean that it has to be read with naive absolutism? After all, the world itself is God's, is God spoken, God created, God conceived. If we are allowed to question, criticize and pull apart God's world, why should God's Bible be treated any differently?
As Christians we call the Church "the body of Christ" and so claim the Church to be God's too. Yet few biblical literalists or evangelical Christians could bear to allow the Church to be infallible.
The Protestant Reformation
The deification of the Bible, has its origins in the Protestant Reformation. Before then, the final authority, the ultimate arbiter and source of information in religious matters was the Church, with its ancient traditions and living experts.
When Luther and his friends opposed, and with good reason, the teaching of the Catholic hierarchy, they needed a superior authority to appeal to if they were to persuade folk on to their side. This superior authority was provided by the Bible. This is fine up to a point, but it can be taken far too far, and the bible itself become God.
There was a literalist preacher in the United States, I remember who said: "If the good book said, Jonah ate the whale, then Jonah ate the whale!" Some evangelical organisations, like the Southern Baptist Convention, have statements of faith in which the very first point is the Bible, before there is any mention even of God.
But the Bible, is static, is closed, is preserved as it were in amber, it can neither be added to or taken away from. Unlike the church, then, it can't answer questions, clarify earlier statements, arbitrate disagreements or deal with new developments. So those in search of religious certainty have to find it all in the text: nowhere else will do. If it says the earth was created in six days, or that gay sex is an abomination, those are the facts. End of story. It also, by the way, forbids charging interest on money, something usually quietly ignored, by biblical literalists.
A more reasonable way
We more moderate Christians don't put the Bible at the heart of the faith, nor do we put the Church at its heart either, as Roman Catholics sometimes appear to.
Rather, we put the enigmatic, compelling, elusive and lovely Jesus the Christ at the Faith's heart. We revere and deeply love the Bible for offering us invaluable and unique information and ideas about him, and as the very best signpost available to point us in his direction. But it is he, the Christ, we worship and who lies at the heart of our faith not the Bible.
To put the Bible at the heart of the Faith means that to read it is to enter the Holy of Holies, making it all but impossible to accept any normal human ambiguity or inaccuracy in its words.
We, however, read the Bible to find Jesus and Christ in spite of it, as well as because of it. It veils and conceals as well as reveals. So the sorts of questions that we probe the Bible with are not only of the pious, subjective and personal sort like: "What is St Paul in the Galatians saying to me now?" But rather: "What was St Paul saying to the Galatians?" This is a question which leads us on to all kinds of critical queries such as: "How would first-century Asia Minor have understood these words?" "Would Paul have phrased it differently to a church he was less annoyed with?" "Would other witnesses have recalled the events he describes differently?"
Literalism, biblical all-or-nothingism, on the other hand, allows biblical criticism no part in bible reading, won't accept that biblical writers were fallible human beings, capable of being one-sided, of writing myth, of exaggerating, of guessing, of having opinions it's impossible to agree with. Because the Bible has all but displaced God as god, they fear that to allow any fallibility or a single mistake into it would call into question the whole Faith enterprise,
Getting Personal
I personally can make no sense of the Christian Faith and no sense of Jesus and his Incarnation without the help of serious, reverent and considered biblical criticism. To have to accept the bible as inerrant and infallible, would mean that I could not be a Christian. This is because a too literal and superficial reading of the Gospels seems to me to render the Crucifixion, for example, as less a heart-stoppingly moving and life changing wonder, than a play-acted charade.
I love Jesus of Nazareth. I love the Christ of Faith, I love the Church, I love God. I love the Bible for revealing my beloved, I love biblical criticism, reason and research for unveiling my beloved when he is obscured by a fallible Bible.
I love too even biblical literalists if, above all else, they are Christlike and so are tolerant of other points of view, like mine. (The above article plagiarises, just here and there, an article on the same topic by Steve Tomkins on the excellent website “Ship of Fools”, for which many thanks.....)
http://www.shipoffools.com/features/index.html
LONG GOODBYES
It is never any good dwelling on goodbyes. It is not the being together that it prolongs, it is the parting. Elizabeth Bibesco
FOLK TALE
Prayers like gravel
flung at the sky's
window, hoping to attract
the loved one's
attention. But without
visible plaits to let
down for the believer
to climb up,
to what purpose open
that far casement?
I would
have refrained long since
but peering once
through my locked fingers
I thought I detected
the movement of a curtain.
R S Thomas
EMPATHY
From a review by Charlotte Moore of the book, "Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty" by Simon Baron Cohen in last week's edition of "The Spectator"
......‘Extremes of evil are typically relegated to the unanalysable,' Baron Cohen says, but they shouldn't be. Evil, he believes, is best understood as absence of empathy. We are all situated at some point on a bell-curve of empathy. Those at zero degrees are people who can treat another human being as merely an object — those who cut off a living finger to steal a ring, kill a stranger with a broken bottle, turn a Jew into a lampshade. Those at zero degrees fall into subgroups: psychopaths, narcissists, and people with ‘borderline personality disorder'.
Baron-Cohen writes convincingly about the ‘internal pot of gold' provided by loving, attentive parents in our early years, that stock of positive emotions that allows us sufficient emotional resilience to extend sympathy and generosity to others. Adversity cannot, he says, completely destroy the wellbeing of the securely attached child. He calls empathy our most precious resource. Emotional abuse and neglect warp the structural development of infant brains; ‘evil' people are made, as well as born........
CONGRATULATIONS
Birthdays:
Eileen Kelly 30th May
Janet Kiddle 31st May
Gloria Wayman 2nd June
Wedding Anniversary
Alan & Hilary Akers 3rd June
PATRONAL FESTIVAL
Many thanks to all who attended the Patronal Festival last Sunday, and better still worked hard to make it a success. It was as always a lovely and friendly occasion and Bishop Darling was most impressive. This annual event is as important to the life of our parish as are birthdays to each of us and should never be treated casually or ignored without good reason.
WELCOME
We welcome to our 10.30am Eucharist today Imogen Maskell, her parents Luke & Jody-Lee and all their family and friends. Imogen is to be baptized.
CONFIRMATION CLASSES
Junior Confirmation Classes take place on Tuesdays at 4.15, in the Library. It is not too late to sign up!
KATANDRA: ST. MARY'S ANGLICAN GUILD & THE UNITING CHURCH
We are invited to a Soup, Sandwich & Sweets Luncheon in the Katandra West Hall on Wednesday 15th June at 12noon. Admission $10, trading table, lucky door, raffle & marvellous entertainment.
NEXT OUTREACH DEADLINE
Get your pens and keyboards ready – articles for the next edition of "Outreach" are due in to Helen by 29th May please – either email to hmalcolm@bigpond.com or leave at the parish office.
TEA AND COFFEE BAG TAGS
Kate and John Horder are staying at Ryder-Cheshire Homes in Ivanhoe while John attends treatment at Peter McCallum. John has completed his 2nd week of treatment, 5 to go, he is doing alright at the moment. A family connected with the home are working towards a wheelchair for their child. They need to collect the child's equivalent weight in tea bag tags. Could everyone please save their tea/coffee bag tags, leave them at the Parish Office and Kate or John will collect them and pass them on. Many thanks. Kate
UGANDAN MARTYRS: MEN'S & WOMEN'S BREAKFAST
On Saturday 11th of June we celebrate the Ugandan Martyrs with some of the good folk from St Brendan's. We meet at 8.00am here at St Augustine's for Morning Prayer and will then repair to the Hall for breakfast. This will be a cooked breakfast as we are combining it with a "Men's Breakfast", though not just for men. Please sign up if you intend coming to what is a most worthwhile ecumenical venture, there is a list in the Narthex.
ELIZABETH WOODYARD
Elizabeth Woodyard, our organist at 8.30am on Sunday's goes off on a well deserved holiday for three months on Monday. She is the most willing and loveliest of organists and Christians. I will miss her enormously and trust she has a most enjoyable break travelling much of Australia. Fortunately Christine Evans has agreed to step into the breach, though we hope to relieve her of some of the load with help from elsewhere if we can rouse it. Many thanks indeed to Christine, another lovely and willing musician and Christian.
CAMBODIA
David Bryce will be talking at the Wednesday Eucharist on the 8th of June. Instead of a sermon there will be a 20 minute power-point presentation on what he and Ruth are doing in Cambodia. This should be inspiring as well as interesting and I trust as many folk as are able will be present to listen and then stay on for a cup of tea and chat.
PASTORAL CARE
This Wednesday, the 1st of June, the Pastoral Carers are having a lunch meeting at the Cafe on the Lake. Could those who are coming (hopefully all Pastoral Carers and Home Communion dispensers) place their names on the list on the table in the Narthex, please?
ANNUAL RALLY FOR ALL WOMEN OF THE DIOCESE
The Rally takes place at the Cathedral, Wangaratta on Wednesday 15th June. It starts with Morning Tea for travellers at 10.30am and then at 11.00am with a Eucharist for which the Celebrant is the Right Reverend Bishop John Parkes and the Preacher The Very Reverend Michael O'Brien. Lunch at a cost of $10.00 is at 12.15pm. The Guest Speaker at 1.30pm is Fr. Tom Leslie, Assistant Priest at the Cathedral. Lunch must be ordered, let the office know if you'd like to attend.
SUNDAYS AT FIVE
There is an "alternative" monthly worship service held on the first Sunday of each month. This month there will be an exploration of the influence of music and how this evokes memories/emotions good and bad. It is planned to take a trip down memory land and the music for this service will be choruses. The service, held in the Narthex, from 5-6pm, will include supper
DATES FOR THE DIARY
June 3rd Synod
June 4th Synod
June 5th Sundays at 5 / Alternative Worship Service
June 11th Ugandan Martyrs (Men's & Women's Breakfast)
June 15th Katandra combined Guilds luncheon, 12noon
June 16th Parish Fair Planning Group meeting 4pm
June 14th "Moving On" Grief Support Meeting
June 18th Women's Breakfast
June 25th Garden Working Bee
July 12th Social Responsibilities Meeting 12.00 noon
July 17th Bishop's Visit
July 30th Garden Working Bee
Aug 20th Wedding
Aug 27th Garden Working Bee
Sept 3rd Women's Breakfast
Sept 10th Harvey Norman Sausage Sizzle (Fete)
Sept 17th Men's Breakfast
Sept 24th Wedding
Sept 24th Garden Working Bee
Oct 1st Wedding 2pm
Oct 8th Wedding 2pm
Oct 8th Wedding 3.30pm
Oct 22nd Parish Fair & Garden Party
Oct 23rd Confirmation
Oct 29th Wedding
Oct 29th Garden Working Bee
Dec 3rd Women's Breakfast
Dec 10th Men's Breakfast
Dec 10th Wedding
Duties for 29th May 2011
Readers 8.30 Pat Griffin, Victoria Heenan
Readers 10.30 Mary Pearson, Christine Jones
Servers 8.30 Michelle
Servers 10.30 Zeb Fernandez, Maddie & Sam Coates
Intercessors Victoria Heenan, Christine Jones
Euc. Assts 8.30 Bev Condon
Euc. Assts 10.30 Greg Pestell, Joe Fernandez
Welcoming 8.30 Bev Ralph, Heather Nichols
Welcomers 10.30 Volunteers please
Sidespeople 8.30 Trevor Batey, Joy Campbell
Sidespeople 10.30 Charlotte Brewer, Nola Brewer
Welcome Table Dorothy Cook
Altar Linen for May Bev Reither
Tea 8.30 Shirley Dean
Mowing None this week
Duties for 5th June 2011
Readers 8.30 Gwyn Cowland, Heather Fitzgerald
Readers 10.30 Charlotte Brewer, Jenny Moran
Servers 8.30 Michelle
Servers 10.30 Jenny, Vanita, Valerie
Intercessors Pat Griffin, Andrea Fisher
Euc. Assts 8.30 Heather Fitzgerald, John Griffin
Euc. Assts 10.30 Greg Pestell, Jenny Pleming
Welcomers 8.30 Anita Saville, Pat Griffin
Welcomers 10.30 Frank Steen, Sandra Simonis
Sidespeople 8.30 Joe Pearson, Norm Mitchelmore
Sidespeople 10.30 John Pleming
Tea 8.30 Pat Griffin
Welcoming Table Judy
Mowing 4th John Pleming, John Wellman
Altar Linen for June Gwenda Betson
REQUESTS FOR PRAYER
Nicole Ackland, Lorraine Ashbury, Deb Bagley, Liam Bognar, Kaye Boyle, Marlene Bovaird, Ian Carman, Collins Family, Tom Downie, Kath Grills, John Griffin, Frank Harder, Leigh Harder, Margaret Hoare, Katherine Holt, John & Kate Horder, Ross Judd, Hilder Lidgard, Lyn Morcom, Margaret Kidman, Albert Oxenbury, Isabelle Richards, Peter Swindells, Suzanne Singh, Patricia Sparkes, Florence Warren, Shirley Young, David, Bonny & Keith, Peter, Harry.
Rest in Peace
Ken Ross, Alistair Knox.
Anniversary of death
Roy McNair 29th, Rudolf Neff, Chase & Tyler Robinson 30th, Patricia Ramage, Vernon Auldrige 1st, Jack Shacklock, Florence Attwell 2nd, Vida Verran 3rd, Bryan Senior 4th.
THIS WEEK IN THE PARISH
Monday 30th May
Rector's day off
7.45am Mattins & Eucharist - Lady Chapel
Tuesday 31st May
7.45am Mattins & Eucharist - Lady Chapel
10.00am Playgroup
11.00am Eucharist Shepparton Aged Care
11.50am Luncheon with Access Ministires
4.15pm Confirmation Classes/Library
5.30pm People Supporting People
Wednesday 1st June
7.45am Mattins only - Lady Chapel
10.00am Eucharist - St Augustine's
4.00pm Eucharist - Banksia
6.00pm EfM
Thursday 2nd June
7.45am Mattins & Eucharist - Lady Chapel
9.30am Eucharists- Acacia & Hakea
11.00am Eucharist - Harmony
5.30pm Choir Practice - Rectory
Friday 3rd June
7.45am Mattins & Eucharist - Lady Chapel
11.00am Eucharist - Mercy
3.00pm Synod - Wangaratta
Saturday 4th June
Associate Priest's Day off
7.45am Mattins only - Lady Chapel
9.10am Synod - Wangaratta
6.00pm Vigil Eucharist - Lady Chapel
7th Sunday of Easter 5th June
8.30am Sung Eucharist - St Augustine's
10.30am Eucharist - St Augustine's
8.45am Eucharist St Luke's Dookie
9.00am Eucharist -St. Pauls Rushworth
11.00am Eucharist-Church Christ Murchison
5.00pm Sunday Alternative Worship Service