St George's Anglican Church in Dunsborough

Amnesty for the oppressed

This morning I collected the mail and saw amongst it the new communication from Amnesty International: a magazine called Wire.

I carried the mail back through the quiet streets to our house, saying ‘G’day’ to several neighbours on the way. I sat in a comfortable padded armchair to read the Wire, and reflected on how good it is to live in a nearly new house with electronic and electric conveniences throughout, with new comfortable and clean furniture. We live in a tidy street, always peaceful, ordered and law-abiding (more or less)! Our son-in-law calls it ‘Pleasantville’.

Many of us who live in the beautiful area around Dunsborough live in Pleasantville.  It’s true that some of what we enjoy is at the expense of other people around the globe, and that disturbs me, but for the most part, the delights of Dunsborough are the way the world should be; and very different from the world described in the Wire.

It’s easy to forget that in many countries people are tortured, beaten and imprisoned for saying out loud what they think of their government. Women and children are victims of rule by violence, raped and cast aside from their families and condemned to the pain and shame of those events for the rest of their lives. Civilians in Syria are cowering in their houses as their government shells apartment blocks. Sadly, reports Amnesty, the armed opposition are also riding roughshod over human rights, and need to be called to account as well President Bashir.

Amnesty International encourages its members to take action by writing letters protesting the detention of prisoners of conscience or signing petitions calling on governments to stop abuses. The effect these ‘actions’ have varies: sometimes Amnesty letters persuade prison governors to release detainees; often they achieve nothing directly. Amnesty’s important work, I think, is to give us an opportunity to show we care.

As Christians, we know that caring should normally move us from an attitude of care to actions, but we also know that God uses even our caring thoughts to transform the world.

Last year the BBC launched a documentary called Amnesty International! When they are all free. You can view this film online at www.bbc.co.uk/programmes, and you can find more about its work in Australia at http://www.amnesty.org.au/ 

Thank God that Amnesty ‘bears witness’ to abuses of human rights around our world and gives us the opportunity to respond by caring.

The Rev’d Ted Witham tssf

Earth Hour

Our Bible begins with an extraordinary poem of praise for the Universe which God creates for us. ‘In the beginning, God created…’ For the wonders of each day, Genesis claims, ‘And it was good.’ Praise for light and dark, day and night, sun and moon and stars, earth and sea, plants and animals and for humanity sparkle in the lines of this poem.

The resources God provides are there for our use, but within God’s generosity there are limits: things should be used for the purposes God intends. There are some animals and plants which should not be used by human beings: the wild things are there to signal God’s life-giving fecundity. They, like everything else in creation, lead us to praise.

We notice Genesis 1 these days because we notice the world around us for the wrong reasons. Since the beginning of the industrial era, human beings have over-used the provisions God has made for us: water, oil, arable land, have all been gobbled up in a race driven by our greed. We now face a crisis as we number seven billion souls. Can we continue to feed ourselves? Will our industries collapse as the oil begins to run out? These are sobering questions.

On this Saturday night, March 31, we are invited to turn our lights and electrical appliances off for the hour 8:30 - 9:30 p.m. to mark Earth Hour. Cities, towns and households around the world have signed up for Earth Hour. It may be that the electricity we save by switching off is token; the purpose of Earth Hour is to invite us to reflect on our use of the world’s resources.

As Christians, we can turn off lights and television and go outside to revel in the wonder of the Universe in the night sky, to praise God for the generous provision God has made, and to confess our greed in using them.

Our confession will be a true confession as we then reflect on how we can amend our usage of power, oil, water and food and live with a smaller footprint on this wonderful planet.

More information about Earth Hour is at http://www.wwf.org.au/earthhour/

The Rev’d Ted Witham

Tribute for Mathabo Lamola

Mathabo Lamola (pictured left) passed away on Thursday 15 March 2012.

My name is Desiree Snyman and I am HIV negative.  I am also HIV positive because I am a living member of the Body of Christ and the Body of Christ is HIV positive. If one member of the body suffers we all suffer; therefore I also am HIV positive.

I give thanks to God that God has been that good to me that I have had the blessing of calling MATHABO LAMOLA friend. I have the deepest respect for Mathabo because she is a true and radical disciple of Jesus Christ. She lived the Gospel.

Since her diagnosis as a person who is HIV positive Mathabo has been a gutsy, tireless, courageous and compassionate leader. Many know of her work in helping to start the Maskopas Support Group for women living with HIV and Tholoano Tsa Kopano (“seeds of unity”) that offers effective services to help those most affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Mathabo did this at a time when the support for HIV positive people was almost non-existent and the stigma surrounding AIDS blinding. What is so incredible and remarkable is the way she tore apart the silence, owned her status as a person who is HIV positive and empowered so many other women. She truly was a pioneer. Mathabo took the very worst thing that had happened to her and made it the best thing. Mathabo said this:

“But I’ve got this thing inside me and I promised God that I am going to do something that is the first time that I started to work with the community. I never worked with the community before. And then since then, I never had a job or something to do that makes me happy like now. I am working with the women, motivating them, I am working with the disadvantaged children, I am working with the home-based care women and men. So I am very happy and that is for the first time in my entire life getting something that makes me feel happy and prouder everyday; and when I wake up every morning I’ve got something to do and I know what to do”.

The generosity of Mathabo allowed me to partner with her on a number of projects in the work that she was doing. In the course of working together with Mathabo I joined the Maskopas and helped facilitate their support group meetings.  I worked with Mathabo on a number of other projects including support for orphans and assistance with the school she started. Her energy, creativity, leadership and initiative were remarkable. Having learnt the art of partnership from Mathabo I then introduced many others to Mathabo and she continued to work with them also.

I had to say good bye to Mathabo when I left South Africa for Australia in 2010. She came to my farewell service at St George’s Parktown. Although many eloquent speeches were made at this event for which I remain very grateful, what I will take with me for the rest of my life is her presence at the event with a young orphan who sang for me. My highest accolade is that Mathabo and friends from Orange Farm stopped calling me Sister Des and referred to me as Mamma Des – a high honour indeed! This goodbye was not enough and so I saw her again; Mathabo was one of the last people I saw in South Africa where she gave me a picture that hangs proudly in my study.  Mathabo has achieved so much in so short a time and I mourn her passing.

Goodbye my sister. Rest eternal in the embrace of God Mathabo Lamola. Know that I love you and respect you. I salute you Mathabo, you will always be an example to me of authentic, empowering, community leadership. My children bear the names you gave them: Mpho and Sipho. These gifts remind me always of the gift that you have been to me. Mathabo, I am who I am because you are who you are. Ubunthu Ngumuntu Ngabantu.

By The Rev’d Dr Desiree Snyman.

Praise God for women clergy!

March 7, the Feast of Perpetua and her companions, is for me, a red letter day each year, and especially this year 2012, when we mark 20 years since the first ordination of women to the priesthood in Australia.

It almost didn’t happen: the last few days were a fever of court cases, injunctions and high feelings in the Anglican family. The 10 women and one man were isolated as much as possible in their retreat, but even they were touched by the ill-feeling of opponents.

The ordination itself swept aside many of these feelings. St George’s Cathedral in Perth was packed, and an overflow crowd in Burt Hall was also able to view the service. I recall especially the waves of emotion when the newly-ordained priests were presented to the congregation: the people applauded for over five minutes!

The Perth priests were not the first women in the Anglican Communion to be ordained. During the cruel occupation of Hong Kong by the Japanese, Bishop Ronald Hall ordained Florence Li Tim Oi in 1944. Two more Hong Kong women were ordained in 1971, five years before the Philadelphia Eleven in 1976. These Episcopal Church ordinations caused controversy because they were in effect irregular, not waiting for the legislative processes of the Church. Nevertheless, these were all significant milestones on the way to the Anglican Communion, where culturally possible, accepting women priests.

20 years on, we celebrate the work of the many women priests in this Diocese and  Province. In parishes where there was resistance to women being priests, this was often overcome when congregations got to know women priests as individuals who could be embraced, rather than just the abstract idea of women clergy. There are many notable scholars, pastors and teachers who would not have been able to have their gifts so widely known and used if they had not been admitted to the priesthood.

I think we also celebrate the new dimensions women bring firstly to the ministry of their male colleagues, and more broadly to the whole church. It’s true that male priests before 1992 were known to be nurturing pastors, but women have contributed to the culture to strengthen that sense of nurture. Women enable team ministry in a way that was not easily done with just men. Women bring a different sense of professionalism, and enable men to be more ‘human’ as ministers.  In these and other ways, women priests have changed and are changing the culture of the church, and I praise God for it!

The Rev’d Ted Witham

Making the World a Better Place - Charles Dickens

Another birthday … the 200^th birthday of the English novelist Charles Dickens.

Dickens’s reach is amazing: there would be few people alive who have not read a Dickens novel or seen an adaptation for film or stage of one of his stories. The characters of Oliver Twist (‘Please, sir, I want some more’) and A Christmas Carol, Scrooge and Tiny Tim have become part of the language.

Charles Dickens was a social reformer. He believed that he could use his fiction to bring change.  I was surprised when I re-read Oliver Twist recently by the anger Dickens expresses, not so much at the poverty that children (and others) experience, but by the two facts that some middle class people couldn’t care less about poverty and that others actively exploit the poor. Dickens describes the parish system with its beadles and work-houses in the most negative terms.

Dickens did not restrict his social reforming to fiction and journalism. As he became rich, he was generous to individuals, not only giving them money, but also providing ongoing personal support for them. With the fabulously wealthy Miss Coutts he founded a Home for Fallen Women to rehabilitate prostitutes and equip them for a good life in Canada or Australia.

I’m really enjoying Claire Tomalin’s new Charles Dickens: a life, which you can borrow through the public library system.

Dickens had a conventional belief in God. He probably attended church only for weddings and funerals. It would be wrong for us Christians to claim Dickens as some kind of saint: the 19^th Century did produce saints who were inspired by their Christian faith to battle poverty and injustice.  Charles Kingsley and Elizabeth Fry come to mind; as does Florence Nightingale, who though a highly unconventional Christian, was deeply inspired by John’s Gospel.

However, I believe as Christians we are called to work with not only other Christians in the fight against injustice, but also to work alongside others engaged in similar work. In this light, we can celebrate Charles Dickens, social reformer, as one who translated his outrage at the treatment of the vulnerable into real change. Dickens made the world a better place, and if we hear his anger now as we read his novels, his influence can continue.

Happy birthday, Wolfgang!

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27 in 1756. There’s an old joke which goes like this: What would Mozart be most famous for if he were alive today? Answer: His longevity!
(He would actually be 266 this year.)

But I celebrate Mozart – of course – for his music. His Alleluja (from Exsultet Domino) lifts me to joyful praise that takes me right out of myself.

Music can do this. Scientists who study these things believe human beings started communicating in music before we invented language. Music takes us to deep places of ourselves, stirring and confirming emotions that enrich us profoundly. Mozart, like other musicians, is credited with the ability not only to make us feel more deeply, but also to think more accurately and effectively.

When human beings sing together, their brains produce the hormone oxytocin, the chemical associated with bonding and love, particularly the love of husbands and wives for each other and for their babies. When we sing together, we trust one another more deeply. We become family – close family.

I cannot imagine our worship without music. We listen to music in church that stirs deep emotions, often deeper than any words. We share in music making in different ways, acknowledging the common language music creates. We sing together, and, especially when we sing enthusiastically, and we feel the togetherness of the people of God.

Music affirms that God has made human beings to feel deeply, to be open to love, to thrive in mutual trust, and to lift up our souls to God in joy.

Thank you Wolfgang and the myriads of musicians through the years and in our parish who inspire us.

Praise God for the gift of music.

The God I Don't Believe In

I have just watched Episode 7 of Channel Four’s Christianity: A History - God And The Scientists, in which neuroscientist Colin Blakemore explores how a new understanding of science in the seventeenth century challenged the church. Professor Blakemore argues that science will explain all the mysteries of the universe and ‘make religion redundant’. You can find out more about the program here.

I agreed with much of the program. Science proceeds by observations and testing theories with observations. Some of the observations (‘facts’) of science appear to contradict the literal meaning of the Bible. Colin Blakemore interviews a scientist working at the Creation Science museum in Kentucky who states that if there is a conflict between science and the Bible, he will go with the Bible.

This horrifies Blakemore. He thinks he smells an intellectual conflict which cannot be resolved. Yet, when Jesuit Brother Guy J. Consolmagno, an astronomer at the Vatican Observatory suggests that there may be more sophisticated ways of reading the Bible, Colin Blakemore flatly disagrees with him.

Yet Christians have never stated that the only way to read the Bible is in a flat literal way. For the medieval Franciscan scholar Bonaventure, for example, the words of the Bible were the ‘skin’, its meaning the ‘real fruit’.  Reducing the Bible to its literal meaning is a strange way of understanding language.

Colin Blakemore talked about God as a person with design intentions. ‘If God wanted to create the world, he would have ….’ Christian children often believe in this God, if their drawings of an old man in the sky with a beard are a true indication of their beliefs. Grownup Christians have more sophisticated understandings of who God is and what God might be like. If Professor Blakemore wants to argue with Christians – I mean, if he really wants to discuss these things in depth – he would do well (a) to examine his own pictures of God and the Bible, and (b) to respect the views of Christians more sophisticated than his.

Professor Blakemore apparently doesn’t believe in the God I don’t believe in.

So I in fact agreed with much in the program, even Blakemore’s throwaway line when summing up his argument that science will make religion redundant. ‘Science,’ he said, ‘has the facts. Religion is left with song, music and some stories.’

I think he is undervaluing ‘song, music and stories’ as ways of knowing the world.

The Rev’d Ted Witham

Have a Messy Christmas

For many of us, the four weeks of Advent are a spiralling cascade of busy-ness.  It seems that each little sub-community we belong to puts on a Christmas party or dinner, and we run from one to the other. In between, we need to shop for presents and food to share when we gather as families or friendship groups.

This breathless bustle seems to smother Christmas. Carols, instead of opening our hearts again to the joy of the Christmas message, irritate us, and we wish the whole thing was over.

It’s true that Christmas has been highly commercialised. It’s true that the wider community hijacks Christmas for its own purposes. It’s true that this happens every year, and somehow we manage to remember the Christ Child and his amazing news of the Incarnation of God.

Garrison Keilor, the American comedian, heard a bishop complain that he had ADD – Advent Distress Disorder. We know instantly what he means.  

Rowan Williams Archbishop of Canterbury this year wishes everyone  ‘a messy Christmas.’ We should stop worrying about a perfect Christmas. Mary and Joseph after all had a messy Christmas. We should remember that God is already ‘there for us’. Even if we struggle to find a way to wait for God in Advent, God waits for us with infinite patience. He knows that joy is to be found in the mess. There’s no other place for it, because God is the “God of ordinary, untidy, surprising things.”

Whatever the mess, the secret to life is that God cannot stop blessing us. God blesses us in the birth of Jesus. God blesses us in the death and ongoing life of Jesus. God blesses us in our messy relationships. God is blessing.

May you know the joy of that blessing this Christmas.

Hope: the God of the Future

Already Advent Sunday is upon is. The beginning of the church’s year always seems to take us by surprise, coming four weeks ahead of secular New Year’s Day and six to eight weeks before Chinese New Year.

Advent points to not only the One who is to come on Christmas Day, but all that is to come. Advent reminds us that we find God reliably in the future.

True, we find God in the present: in the love given and received between people and between human beings and creation. We sing rightly, “Ubi caritas et amor, ibi Deus est.” (Where there is love and people really care; where there is love, God is truly there).

In the present, we seek for God at the heart of our being. As I come to know better who I am in relationship with God, I come to know God now. As St Paul wrote, “It is no longer I who lives, but Christ who lives in me.” (Galatians 2:20).

We listen for God in the present as we study the Scriptures. God’s voice can show us how God’s presence in power with God’s people in the past is still with us today.

But on Advent Sunday, we recall that God also comes looking for us from the future. God promises God’s people a future that is better than the present.

I enjoy my life at present, and I have a duty and a joy to give thanks for it. But every day, I experience severe pain. I rejoice that God – through my faith, through doctors and medication, through psychologists and common sense – helps me to live victoriously, to be on top of it. But what an encouragement to know that a time will come when the pain will no longer be there!

I am grateful to God for the lover who has been my wife for 33 years. I am blessed with fantastic friends and friendly communities around me. But I know I fumble my love. I hold it back. I treat people less kindly than I intend to. I betray people. I am encouraged by God’s promise that there will come a time when I can love freely and fully, intimately and deeply.

Advent reminds us to celebrate all that is coming from God.

We do not know what this future will be like. Will “the new heaven and the new earth” (Revelation 21) be like this world of matter and energy that we know so well … or think we know so well? Or will it be alien, strange and different, just as God is alien and strange when compared to the creatures he has made?

 C.S. Lewis, in The Great Divorce, plays with the idea that heaven is like the earth we know, but challengingly different.

The Jesuit scholar Teilhard de Chardin envisages a future when consciousness, spiritual and evolutionary processes will gather all life together in Christ at an Omega Point.

The future is by definition unimaginable by human beings. But the God of the future can and does imagine a future for us that is even more wonderful and joyous than the present. The good news of Advent is that the God of the future comes looking for us and invites us onwards into God, into God’s future.

Even so, come, Lord Jesus! Take us with you on your journey into a new creation.

The Rev’d Ted Witham

When the Saints Go Marching In...

These days of All Saints (Tuesday 1 November) and All Souls (Wednesday), which we will also mark at St George’s on Sunday, give us an opportunity to reflect on a two-part question: which Christians do we most admire? and what’s a Christian community anyway?

All Saints sets us thinking about the official Saints so designated by the Church, those people who have died and whose title Saint is marked with a capital ‘S’. There are so many, both in the Roman Catholic calendar, and in local Anglican calendars that we are spoiled for choice!

St Francis of Assisi, of course for me as a Franciscan, shows me a radical way of being a disciple of Jesus, by following closely and giving up any pretensions to be anything else but my little self.

But John Wollaston, local saint and hero, also gives me much to admire. As Archdeacon of Western Australia in the 1840s and 50s, he visited Anglicans tirelessly on horse-back, encouraging them in this strange place to live as Christians.

So the question is for you: of all the official Saints, who do you admire, and more importantly, why? What it is about that Saints that excites your admiration?

On All Souls, the same question is asked, but more intimately: who have you known personally who, in their life-time, nurtured you in your Christian walk? I think of my Nan who prayed that I would be a priest and who fanned every little evidence of my interest in godly things with a gentle enthusiasm. But if I think of my Nan, is there someone in your experience who did the same? A parent, perhaps, or a priest, or a friend?

Saints with a capital S, and saints without a capital S, all souls, draw us more closely into the community of Christ. They shed a light on the type of community they were building, and ask us to consider what Christian community is for.

In saints of all sorts, we see a glimmer of the life of God. But God cannot be contained in individuals. God is always community, always Father, Son and Holy Spirit, always Trinity, and God’s life shines forth in the communities we build with the saints.

Let us give thanks to God for those we admire and for the strength to follow their good works