On you really caring (but really only you)

‘Can these bones live?’

Ezekiel 37:3

When I was just getting started in ministry, serving as a youth pastor in Alberton, I attended a conference at a small Baptist church one town down from ours. It was led by a strident American, a bull of man. He had that quintessential look of aged success: silver grey hair, still thick and manicured, clean cut and skin slightly tanned – a man whose sheer physicality defied his age. 70 years old? No way! Him? He had written a slight though very successful book on evangelism; a book now nestling somewhere in the lower reaches of my bookcase. I sat alongside other eager beaver men of the ministry, young and old, willing to drink from this exotic fount of wisdom.

I found those two days quite disappointing; maybe I had set the bar too high, maybe this was the beginning of a discernment process revealing that I would have many passions in this multi-faceted faith of mine, but evangelism really wasn’t one of them.

But he did tell one story that stuck with me: as a young man he had been in a church that refused to do anything, no matter what he tried, what he preached, how many visits he did there was simply nothing forthcoming. It was dead as dead could be. Morsdood.

On one occasion, after calling a meeting that no one attended, he headed out into the churchyard. There was a bell on the property, set apart from the church, and out of sheer frustration he began to ring that bell, over and over he rang it, out there in the evening air, under that darkened sky with stars lighting the heavens he rang that bell. Late in the evening the sound of its clanging reverberated through the town. He never did mention how the town responded. He never spoke of anyone sitting inside their home, watching TV but momentarily distracted by that crazy preacher who had lost the plot; he never spoke of a woman sitting in a chair attending to some task but now staring quizzically through the window and down the road in the direction of that sound; or the young girl who stepped into the street, gravel and sand underfoot, dress catching in the slight breeze, who walked quickly spying through the trees that giant of a man tugging on that rope. He could hardly know.

He didn’t even end the story with any measure of success, as I recall. The church wasn’t miraculously full the next Sunday. Although I imagine it did have some kind of happy ending, he wrote a book on evangelism after all which means he must have turned the corner somewhere. (Otherwise it would be the worst book on evangelism ever written right?) Or maybe he did explain it but I lost myself in the sad romance of that story that I forgot to track the point of what he was saying. Or maybe he just spoke the story as it came to him and left it there, hanging. I can’t remember now but I hope he did that.

Sometimes stories exist for a very clear reason; the moral all but jumps out of them smacking the listener across the face with a two-by-four yelling Learn your lesson! Learn your lesson! And then there are other stories that speak to you but at such a depth you can’t really fathom it, as if the essence of who you are understands it but hasn’t bothered to inform the operating room of your life, your consciousness. So you are moved and stirred and you get emotional but you pray no one asks why as you would have a hard time explaining it.

What I do know is that sometimes I struggle to find passion in others for the passion in me and it is vexing in the same moment as I recognise each person is free to follow their own heart.

Do you ever feel lonely in what you care about? Do you ever wish that others felt the same passion for the same things as you?

I don’t know what to say to you but I can lend you a story about a man who felt the same and went out in the crisp night air and rang a bell relentlessly, disturbing his community and awakening his slumbering God; it is a story of a passionate man, a man who stood out there, his reputation as a sane individual on the line, alone, to remind you that you are not alone.

On the days before Easter, Easter, and the day after

Easter is pressure.

I’m not sure Easter is any minister’s favourite time of the year. If it is, they’re no minister I know of. I have a friend in the ministry and between the two of us we have agreed that Easter Monday is our favourite Easter day. It’s not that we don’t like Easter per se, of course not, on most levels, it doesn’t come better than Easter! But Easter never arrives at a minister’s door without asking for something substantial in return.

Very seldom is there this same pressure to perform as at Easter time and the services follow each other like a set of waves rolling in relentlessly off North Beach; no sooner have you kicked your way to the surface than the next one arrives ready to pound you back into the deep, leaving you scrambling and hoping that the direction you are kicking in is up. Only a few days ago I was staring down the barrel of 9 services in 6 days, one of which went on for 4 hours. Look at most ministers a day after Easter and you will notice the subtle signs of someone rather punch-drunk, speaking in monosyllables and dribbling from both corners of the mouth; someone who has attempted once again to deliver a familiar story in fresh and stimulating ways. A minister mate of mine is preaching 7 times in 7 days, enough preaching to make you question the existence of a loving God - an Easter irony if ever there was one.

I recall one bishop, sharing how we all feel from time to time, when in front of a group of ministers he whispered dejectedly while hunched over the lectern, ‘You know, eventually you get to a stage where you just don’t know what else to say.’

It is even harder when you are in a church where there is a certain expectation; things have unfolded so well and for so long you feel the need to improve on the tradition year in and year out, or at least not falter, like a team on a winning streak where the thought and inevitability of a loss is strangely increased off the back of every victory. All it takes is one person to say, ‘Can’t wait for that sunrise service pastor, always so special that one!’ I’m inclined to pinch them. Hard. But lovingly, you know, like Jesus would. Every positive comment of experience in years gone by settles on your shoulders like a weight. Every year at our Taize service I have to refrain from the urge to burn bigger and better candles. ‘Like last year people, only brighter!’ Already our church is lit up in a way that would bring our insurance policy under review.

It doesn’t help that Easter is also holiday season; people move off to do all sorts of things. Young families head off into the Drakenseberg for a few days. ‘Oh, we are off to Champagne Sports Resort.’ I want to weep. 

When the pressure is on I ask, ‘Can I come along?’

‘Haha!’ They reply.

‘No really.’

‘Oh.’

And so it goes.

We have this sunrise service. It takes a lot of logistical effort to set this thing up. I mean a lot. We have to cart a cross down from the church that, no kidding, is not that much different to how the original cross might have been; it is the mother of all Easter crosses. We have to prepare posies to place in the cross at a moving moment in the church service. (Here I am employing liberally the royal ‘we’, having never personally prepared a posy in my life.) Every year we drive it, tied precariously to the back of a bakkie, down to the view site. I’ve often wondered about the spectacular effect of that cross coming off the bakkie. I’ve imagined someone, at Easter, driving along and praying to God, ‘Dear God if you would only send me a sign!’ only to see this air-borne cross with flowers floating around it appearing on the horizon. Now that would be an Easter story. 

We have to get sound equipment down there. We have to arrange electricity and so we have to schmooze one of the neighbours to steal a line from their house. It also leads to canvasing the neighbourhood, dropping flyers and letting people know that, if they hear strains of ‘Christ the Lord is risen today!’ penetrating their bedrooms before sunrise, they are to please refrain from phoning the cops. 

Oh, and we have to get to the view site at 5am.

I mean, this is a mission.

But then alongside all this something else happens almost every year: The sound system has worked, people have received communion and placed flowers in the cross, and now sit happily tucking into hot cross buns cradling warm cups of coffee, and in that moment, it is special. There is little obligation in that moment, less on your shoulders. Sure, the main Easter service is an hour away but there’s a sense that this is under control and the finish line in sight. And in that moment, with the flowers in the cross, and the sun kissing it and all before it ever so gently, it feels a little like Easter. Like most, I’m a sucker for a cool breeze and a rising sun, and a silhouetted cross.

Be kind to your minister this Easter wherever you are. Easter will mean many things to you, but it almost definitely won’t come with nearly the amount of pressure felt by your clergy. The best a minister can hope for is a few moments in a whole week where it all kinda feels right. And I don’t think any of us should necessarily expect more; after all Jesus was dead and then he was alive - One astonishing moment, a blink of an eye easily missed that birthed a new world of possibility.

When that person says, ‘Cant’ wait for sunrise it is always so special!’ Part of me wants to respond with, ‘Urgh.’ 

The more redeemed part of me thinks, ‘You know, it really rather is.’

On poop and Palm Sunday

This coming Sunday is Palm Sunday. It is the week before Easter, the Sunday on which we celebrate the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem. As anxious onlookers, we await the various fights we know are coming this week before the final showdown on Golgotha. As a preacher, it is hard not to cover the same ground over and over when the text offers such an obvious reading: Jesus rides into town on a donkey, not a horse; he does not gallop in on a steed, he is not brandishing a sword and there is not a swarthy army of willing fighters chomping at the bit waiting to tear into the religious leaders and Roman oppressors. If you do your homework on passages like this you realise that Jesus wasn’t even the first to ride into Jerusalem in a revolutionary fashion. This comes as a sad surprise for people who would like to paint Jesus as a one-of-a-kind maverick. There were others who came into Jerusalem as an act of rebellion? Yes, and more than one. There were other rabbis? Yip. Plenty. Thick on the ground they were. Surely Jesus was the only one claiming divinity? Uh-uh. 

When you know a story as well as a seasoned Christian does, it becomes harder and harder to enter the surprise of it all. Especially, perhaps with Easter. He dies on Friday, but don’t worry, by Sunday he’ll be back. You can’t begin to consider the agonising position of not knowing that accompanied those first disciples, stuck in that Upper Room, or before that, Mary at the tomb. When Peter rushes in, pushing John out the way, we can dawdle a little – we know what he is going to find, or not find. No. We know the story, we run our fingers along the grain of it like seasoned carpenters for whom no piece of wood holds any real surprise. We are at home with the warp and woof of things. No surprises here; It’s a donkey! We know. He has no army! Yip, I’m aware of that.

Has this anything to teach us?

This week we’ve had our own share of symbolic acts around South Africa. Which, like Jesus coming into Jerusalem, should be no real surprise – we are not as a nation, short of symbolic acts. Rhodes’ statue has become a source of dispute; #RhodesMustFall has been trending on Twitter (which is the gold standard in deducing the importance of things). Presented before us on TV was a shirtless student in overalls throwing faeces around the statue and blowing on a whistle. All sorts of thoughts and feelings and questions rose up in me: Haven’t we got other issues we should be engaging with? Shouldn’t we be focusing on Zuma and Nkandla? What about poverty and government graft? Education anybody? Is a statue really worth this kind of firebrand rhetoric? Couldn’t we just flush excrement down the toilet rather, and find other ways of protesting? Is it just me or are public-forum, faeces-based acts of disobedience on the rise? And questions like this.

Part of my frustration is born of Apartheid Fatigue. Our whole lives have revolved around this word, this concept and, in this country, there is no escaping it. I wanted to complete a Masters degree on the writings of Marilynne Robinson (who happens to be an American). As it turns out my thesis is now rooted in African texts and postcolonialism. I’ve been shoe-horned into place. If we tap you this side and a little on that side, we really can wedge you into this round hole. Maybe this is why I think the way I do.

Or maybe it reminds me of my own days at Wits in the early 90s where rioting was the order of the day. While friends were attending O-Week on other campuses, finding creative ways to funnel booze out of a cap, our rude introduction to tertiary included diving into lecture rooms to avoid hearty bands of rioters, using the overly-thick Introduction to South African Short Stories as cover from shrapnel in the form of half-empty coke cans and last week’s cafeteria muffins; Oh yes and there was trash, loads and loads of trash.

Or maybe at the root of all of this is defensiveness. We are after all a divided country. There are events and issues that set us off: we don our colours, head to our corners, slap each other across the face like wrestlers about to go yet another round; we justify our positions, yell at each other in our own echo chambers, and nail shutters to the windows before the next howling storm of racial and cultural discontent.

But then Jesus comes into Jerusalem on a donkey.

I don’t know where wisdom comes from. Age can help to acquire it, of that I’m certain. I know lots of wise, old people (I’m in a Methodist Church after all). But that is also not necessarily true for there are enough exceptions to the rule - enough people who have all the years but no wisdom, as if they spent a lifetime doing a raft of things, but learning wasn’t one of them. Reflecting on experience is probably another: I love that saying, you don’t learn from experience but from reflecting on experience. Yes. But this again assumes age. I think young people can have wisdom too. I think a form of wisdom arrives when we decide to lay down our arms, when we decide to stop listening to only our own voices and we begin to listen to the voice of the Other, when we lower our tone and actively decide not to be offended. You can spot followers of the Palm Sunday Jesus a mile away: they tend not to get hysterical about very much for they are very rarely caught listening to only their own voice, which as we know is where most fear is born.

Who knows what will happen to Rhodes. What I do know is that I can’t just defend him because we seem to blame everything on the colony, and the colonialists are after all my forebears and so deserve some reprieve from this constant critiquing. I can’t defend him because of my own apartheid hangover. That is not good enough. I need to listen. If I listen long enough I might realise that the liberal voice that speaks the right words but is sluggish in action sounds a little like my own liberal voice.

Back to Palm Sunday.

When you read this story in light of just this week’s storylines, it is a little surprising. Worse than that, it’s offensive to the positions we would like to hold and the sensitivities we nurture so carefully. I wonder if Jesus didn’t ride into Jerusalem in this fashion because the enemy isn’t Rome. Like all empires, their little reign came to an end. No, he rode in without a historically relevant hit-list because he knew as we now know, in our most honest moments, that we really don’t have to look too far to find our enemy.

As Walt Kelly remarked through his cartoon character Pogo in a startling two-frame cartoon strip: We have met the enemy and he is us.

The greatest thing Jesus ever did for us was give us a New Identity. When he did this he graciously freed us to let go of all that stuff that weighs us down. You’re a child of God and as such you are free not to defend yourself so much. You are free not to get offended, and that, you know, is a tremendous gift. You can live into a New Reality. If you are like me, you are able to consider your own position of privilege and the discomfort that causes you – you become courageous not simply about the world, but about yourself.

You see God loves you and that is enough. He loves you so much that you are able to look at what once offended and you can decide to no longer get offended. You can meet it all with a surprising Grace, and you can apply yourself to being part of the solution, and you can learn along the way. I’m holding out that Jesus loves me enough that, when my Masters is done, he might even let me study the achingly beautiful writings of Marilynne Robinson, or anything other than postcolonial theory.