Thanks

As a mover of the original synod proposal in 2011, my thanks to Mark and other members of the group for the production of the report on Afghanistan, with its careful suggestions about developing a just peace.

I wish to offer comment about the report and proposals. It is a curious situation that, while there are a variety of reports and comments about Australian military insolvent in Afghanistan, there continues largely to be a widespread silence in our community about Australian participation in that war. To keep on raising the question comes across as almost boring to raise.

 I also express dismay at the studied caution in the Report concerning the question of Australian troops in Afghanistan. I do not propose to seek to alter the report, but I do want to make comment. I want to recall our memory of this war, and our own participation.

 Afghanistan

Memory: Can we remember that Australian troops are in Afghanistan as a result of invasion? True, in the first instance,  there were claims that it was necessary to deal with terrorism and Osama bin Laden. What might have been an act of international policing was initiated as war. Coupled with the war in Iraq, can we be anything but dismayed at the widespread continuing violence in both countries?

 Of equal concern is the way the ANZAC commemoration and myth is used to endorse Australian military adventures. When these invasions are admitted, and the deaths of soldiers noted, there seems to be greater acknowledgement of the impact on soldiers’ post traumatic stress and their families. Rarely does one hear that soldiers are trained to kill.

 Listening to the ANZAC gathering in Canberra, which used Christian prayers, hymns and preaching about self-sacrifice, it is clear that Christian faith and symbols are being employed in the service of militarism.

 What can and must Christian voices contribute to the developing militarisation of the Australian community?

 Grief of War

We must voice the grief and pain produced for all in war.  For civilians, soldiers and their families, for those invaded and those who perpetrate violence.

            Our task is to remember that our God hears the groans and cries of people weighed down and oppressed, is grieved by their pain. And that in Jesus Christ God enters our warring humanity to make peace.

            We must also acknowledge the pain and grief of every human community wracked by violence and slaughter. So we will be sensitive to young soldiers who bear the wounds of war.

We will also cry out for them as we admit the continuing scars and wounds which are handed from one generation to the next.

 ANZAC mythology

The church has a calling to speak and pray for a just peace. In Australia that means taking up directly the developing mythology that Australia ‘s identity was formed through military violence.

 We must address the key element as their training to kill strips soldiers of their normal human reluctance to kill another person. As a nation, therefore, we ask young people – men and women – to act in inhumane ways, and cover it with the rhetoric of honour. The church must be especially sensitive to the way Christian faith and living is being made to serve the practice of training to kill.  Does this sound like the ranting of an old and irrelevant voice?

 I certainly speak as one who has been gradually becoming stronger in the view that the church is called to be a radically distinctive community, whose practices lead to love of enemy and building bridges between those who would act violently toward the other.

 The Church’s claim on its members regarding in Afghanistan

The report before us speaks well about possible actions that will contribute to reducing violence and building peace in Afghanistan. If we can speak there why not also regarding soldiers and military activity?

 There are two communities the church addresses.

First, there are members of the church involved in military services, including chaplains. Here we must take the risk and ask church people to refuse to engage in warfare. So, to take what is likely to appear ridiculous – we must ask our Christian brothers and sisters to withdraw from military involvement there. We who know the cost of war on all sides, and God’s call to repent, will led us in this way. As a community, the church must seek to work with our international partners to assist such a process. Remember the Conscientious Objectors of Vietnam, and the protests by church bodies and people against an unjust war filled with suffering.

 Secondly, following that first step, as member of the Australian nation we may and must speak to our government, calling for an end to military action. So, again, we would first speak to politicians who are Christian, but also to the government as a whole to press for an admission that our invasion cannot be allowed to remain unchallenged. An essential component of redress is for Australia to withdraw its troops.

Wes Campbell

25^th April 2013

 Preacher: Wes Campbell Chaplain to the University of Melbourne

 Here you are in the first week of semester. You have survived the journey here and the hi jinks of O-week, and now you are negotiating timetables and lecture rooms, walking that path between the college and the campus.

 For some of you, the journey to get here has been a long one; others perhaps will have come from a few suburbs away. In what ever way you have arrived here,  you are, as we say these days, on a journey.

 The reading from Genesis reminds us that in the great stories from the past the hero takes a journey. Like Abraham and Sarah, the wanderer or pilgrim steps out onto a road that has dangers and unknown traps. Like Pilgrim in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress the traveller is constantly wooed off the chosen path, and then engages in a struggle to get back on track.

 That can be an issue for students too who have put great effort into getting here, will now be lured by parties and new relationships and experimentation of various kinds.

 You are on a journey of discovery.

 Some will tell you that you have achieved this by your own choice. With the French philosopher you might be inclined to assert, ‘I think therefore I am’. Or maybe you are closer to the French existentialists who insisted that you could only be true to yourself by acting: ‘I act, therefore I am’! There will be others who are more attracted to: I shop therefore I am. (Shortly after the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in September 2001, President Bush tried to deal with the shock to people of the United States by asking them to get back to normal: go out and shop!)

 In these pledges to think, or act or shop, the ‘I’ is at the centre. We have learned to assume that I is where decisions are made. ‘I’ make myself, and my world.

 You’ve probably been asked ‘What made you decide’ to be at St Hilda’s, or to take your field of study, or to join the sporting club.

Behind these questions lies the hunch that I am the maker of myself. When a great athlete, like cyclist Lance Armstrong, doesn’t play by the rules, we are puzzled for a moment, then realise that he is living out of that creed, to make himself.

 Are we really the maker of our self?

 Try this as experiment. Ask, did you decide which sperm and ovum would meet to make up your unique existence? Did you decide on the family you entered then? Did you shape the changes which took place for you and your community as you grew up? Did you really create your intellect?

 Of course, you made something with what you are given, but your actions and decisions depend first on what was given to you.

 Consider the figures of Abraham and Sarah. Out of the mists of ancient history, a family settled in a rich and fertile area is suddenly prompted to leave the settled city, and to step out into an unknown path. Abraham did not have plans to travel. He was settled in city life. Then from out of the blue a call comes, disrupting everything.

 Abraham begins a journey because a mysterious call made a promise, and gripped him. That promise calls him to become a nomad, heading for a new home.   

The promise Abraham receives comes from a mysterious Caller. And on that flimsy foundation he and Sarah  set out into the unknown. 

For Jews, Christians and Muslims Abraham who trusted the promise is the Great example of faith. 

Some other modern thinkers have tried to understand how life is given to us. Not that we produce our life, but we are thrown into being, drawn into new life.

 How far away is this from adolescents who think they are the world, the centre of the universe?  Queen knew about that: ‘I want it all, and I want it now’, Freddi sang. But I say, do not be fooled by the nonsense that treats you as a perpetual adolescent with the world revolving around yourself.

 It is true that being called by a promise is like ‘falling in love’. It can be a passionate thing, as you see in almost every movie now!

 But – wait – is this promise a passion for the Other, or is it just another form of focussing on that ‘I’ – on ’me’, ‘myself’? Are we talking about responding to Someone who is not ourself, or is it self-love where we use the other to make myself feel good?

 What if we start where Abraham and Sarah did: with a Promise?

 Abraham and Sarah, unsettled and grasped by the Promise, step out into the unknown. The great prophets were gripped by the same call: they had to tell their people that they were not their own makers, but existed only as a result of a mysterious Creator who called them into being.

 Being called in that way did not come easily for those prophets; it was a terrifying experience: they were often beaten up, scorned, even killed, because of what they said.

 At this time of the church year in Sunday readings, Christians walk with Jesus as he turned toward Jerusalem (a city that stones and kills prophets) to go to his own death there. He was ready to give up everything, even his life, for his Father, and to call his people to turn to welcome God’s coming. Here, we may say, is his passion for the other.

 Going back to the question I posed earlier, about who made you, we can now admit that we have been given life by others. Mothers who bore you, parents who made space for you, sacrificed for you. You have had – still have –friends and teachers who gave to you. In this you have been given the gift of another’s love.

I am stretching the image here, but go with me: when you fall in love, called by a Promise, you will experience a sort of passion. It happens in love relationships, doesn’t it? And you may even start to make promises to someone else! Such passionate love may well burn as bright and hot as phosphorus.  For Romantic love that fire is the point. It flares up, and dies away. Then you are on the search for another encounter that gives you the same zing.

 For our biblical pilgrims, the passion of the first encounter is just the beginning of a new relationship. Abraham and Sarah make a new beginning. Hearing the call they put their feet onto a new path, and this is for a lifetime.  

 Consider Bob Brown: as a young doctor captured by the beauty of the Franklin River, led into a life of environmental commitment.

 Other people have followed this path of living for the other: Martin Luther King, Mahatma Ghandi, Mother Teresa, Mary MacKillop, Charles Perkins.

They saw people trodden down, in poverty, driven by conflict – and, you could say, they ‘fell in love’ with their people, and spent their life for it. Eddie Mabo, in his struggle for rights to his Land, was just such a person. And then there is Einstein, and others like him who have spent a lifetime seeking to appreciate the patterns of nature, the structure of life, the cure of disease: Fred Hollows, comes to mind; and mathematicians who create elegant solutions to puzzles; musicians who produce invisible beauty.

 Of course, the people you know will probably never be in the headlines. They raised families, changed nappies, cut lunches, cooked meals, went to work, hung out washing, visited family members who were sick, cared for ageing relatives. And then, more sharply, fought fires, rescued people in floods, rebuilt shattered communities, brought parties in conflict together.

 Not for them that self-centred I– rather they heard a call, saw a vision, and entrusted their future to a strange and compelling promise.

 Will your commencement here have that same compelling character? That life-long passion?

Will you listen to a strange call that comes uninvited, and disrupts all you had planned? And puts you on an unknown path?

Will you hear the call that simply asks you to hear, then step out, trusting the Promise of a world made new, a humanity healed, a planet at peace.

 Now, a final word about those who brought you into being, who care for you, and have brought you to this point, whether parents, or friends, mentors or guides. The rality is that they are human, flawed humanity at that. They did not always get it right. They will sometimes fail to meet your expectation. We need to learn how to appreciate what they have given to us, and to thank them. And, perhaps even more important, we must learn the art of forgiveness. So where they have failed us, or we have failed them, forgiveness will set us free to appreciate them. More tricky is when we have failed to live up to our own expectation, and have disappointed ourselves. The word to you is this: you will truly learn the art of forgiveness when you know you have been forgiveness. Made new. That is the gift of God to you. The promise is that such forgiveness sets you free for new life, for an open future. As I conclude my ministry with you at St Hilda’s, I thank you for the opportunity you gave me to offer words to you at Commencement and Valedictories. It has been challenging for us all alike. Now, I offer the hope that you will hear a call that disrupts and disturbs all you thought you knew, and sets you on a new path of Promise!

 Prayers  (Wes to pray)

 God, who created us and all life,  we offer these prayers:

• for all Students commencing the new university year, gathering in colleges and on campuses from all over the world;
• let us give thanks for all who have supported and assisted students to this point – families, teachers, friends, and pray for their continued interest and support;
• let us remember the challenges of the past, the effort and discipline required to arrive at this moment, and those challenges yet to come;
• pray for the university community, students, staff, administration;
• for the college community;
• and with this new beginning, we remember of all affected by the bushfires, especially those who have lost so much – families, communities and livelihood; may they continue to receive the support they need.
•  Let us  pray for each student facing the challenge of this commencement, meeting new people, discovering new places, feeling the unfamiliarity.
• Let each of us now in your own way offer thanks silently for the past, and take hold of hopes for the future.

As we offer the prayers of our own hearts, I pray for you all, as you make this new beginning, as I offer prayer in the name of Jesus Christ. AMEN 

An after dinner talk at the Council for Chaplaincy in Tertiary Institutions (CCTI)

November 2012

Be careful what you accept in a moment of weakness! It was just such a moment when I agreed to reflect on chaplaincy – in a room where there are other chaplains who have served for much longer than I! To date I have clocked up about five and a half years at Melbourne Uni. So I cast about for clues. What shaped my role and understanding of chaplaincy? And the more I dug around, the more I came up with. I thought I’d be talking to you about my time here – and I will get to that, but first there were unplanned experiences with chaplains in a whole range of places.

Unplanned Formation

My first contact with chaplains was at the University of WA 1968-1972. Heady days: I was a fresh faced 20 year old (actually experimenting with facial hair), faced with the prospect of conscription into the army for the Vietnam War. Three chaplains worked in a weatherboard shack on the edge of campus; two of the chaplains had recently completed their postgraduate studies, and taught part time in theological college. They offered support to the small Student Christian Movement and were available to have long conversations over instant coffee with a young student trying to make sense of God-talk and politics and – well – life. There was a third chaplain – Jesuit John Harte – who also gave lunchtime talks as part of the SCM program, was active in resistance to the Vietnam War, and offered friendship to me,  a Methodist theological student, who was trying to make sense of being in a relationship  with a Catholic girl – a practical exercise of ecumenism! Typically on a Sunday evening 20 or so students sat in a circle in the chaplaincy meeting room, discussed texts from the Gospel according to Mark (assisted by a Penguin commentary), then celebrated the Eucharist, handing bread and cup around the circle. There was another chaplain: an Anglican brother, who became a good friend: Jonathan Ewer SSM.

Moving to Melbourne and Queen’s college, in 1973, I experienced another chaplain in an intercollegiate chapel group, Deaconess Bev Bellinger. Students from Queen’s and St Hilda’s Colleges met –Sunday morning at 8.30am communion service, and on Sunday evening for a chapel service, where preachers were the professors of the United Faculty of Theology. Following the service was discussion with the preacher. Midyear a group went on a camp. In the following year I was chaplain at Queen’s College. Those were times of small congregations, and we asked whether we might replace the formal Sunday evening service with a discussion group. Fortunately, the Master Owen Parnaby’s resistance held out against such a notion!

In 1979 I found myself, a postgraduate student, with wife Beverley and one year old son, in Germany. I had several years’ parish experience, and was now a foreign student with relatively poor German language ability. We lived in a student village, near a local congregation (now called the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Congregation). We were a bit of an oddity, as Australians. The student chaplain, Wolfgang Wagner, a year older than I, was a sharp theologian, and a good pastor. He invited me onto the parish council to observe the functioning of the congregation there. He prompted discussion in his living room, and in the high rise apartments. There we heard Ernst Käsemann talk of the New Testament and Christian political engagement; we had an evening with a local community who supported intellectually challenged young people; we ate together of course (bratwurst) and baked potatoes. Those were the days of the nuclear missile crisis. Wolfgang initiated a weekly ‘Shalom Gottesdienst (a Peace Service) in a local church.

I am noticing in these recollections the way in which chaplains were opening up Bible investigation, theological discussion and political activity together. Eating, of course, and the formation of a group or ‘congregation’ was a key.

I returned to Melbourne in 1983, as the director of our synod (Victorian) social justice unit. It involved a mix of responding to public issues such as nuclear issues, Aboriginal justice, prisons, domestic violence, and so on. It involved not only working from an office in the city, but also working ecumenically with other social justice groups and ‘Christians for peace’, negotiating how Palm Sunday peace marches and liturgies would work, and engaging people in congregations around Victoria, in worship and discussion.

Little did I know that this Minister of the Word, whose formation had been largely directed toward Sunday worship and ministry with a congregation, was being equipped for a wider task. One much less structured, and one more lonely.

During the 1990s I was Minister in North Melbourne. Somewhere in the middle of that decade I received a call from John Bodycomb, chaplain at Melbourne Uni. John was concerned to ensure that the Uniting Church continued its commitment to chaplaincy in this university. We met, at his invitation, in University House and discussed the challenge of finding a way of ensuring that ministry here. It led to a church committee (you are surprised?) including the Master of Queen’s College, the presbytery (our regional council) and the congregation of North Melbourne. The chaplain would be appointed as an associate Minister of the Congregation (to deal in part with the isolation of chaplaincy), a house would be provided near the campus as a residence, and the chaplain would be free to develop the chaplains’ work as needed. I was the Minister of the congregation, and had some contact with students but, in fact, the campus remained a closed book to me.

Leap forward to 2007. I was appointed to be the ‘Uniting Church Chaplain’ within the University of Melbourne.

First impressions.

I experienced a loss. The drive toward Sunday, with the need to prepare the liturgy, arrange music, deal with pastoral events, write the sermon, check on preparation for baptism, conduct the planned wedding, preparing to speak to the children, discussion with the choir, etc, was stripped away. It was like being on annual leave. A sudden halt to activities.

So I took the time to set up my office and to meet chaplaincy colleagues. I found the Potter Gallery and introduced myself. I went to the Student Union and introduced myself. I went to the after work drinks at the Counselling services. I hunted out my letter of appointment and visited the VC’s office in order to prepare for security clearance. Then I went to assure my place of parking, and received my new proof of identity: as ‘Contractor’! I was too slow to ask for the title ‘chaplain’, but I suspect it wasn’t a current term. (Sometime later, when I had found my feet, I thought it would be a good idea to introduce myself to the VC. Reply from his secretary: he had no available time.)

I now live in Gatehouse St. No riding or driving to work. I can walk! So each morning I walk across Royal Parade into Tin Alley, then through the Student Union House, diagonally across the campus, down to Grattan St, then into Cardigan St to the corner of Argyle Place North. I remembered, of course, the chaplains building in Swanston St, but that was long gone beneath the new blocks of apartments. As I walked across the campus, heading east up Monash Road to Swanston St, I was struck with the sea of young faces, and mostly SE Asian at that! Perversely, I recalled John Brack’s painting ‘Collins Street at 5pm’: a yellow brown picture of Anglo workers cramped together in the city street. They were probably walking on the LHS of the footpath. In the crowd I faced, I weaved my way along the footpath, avoiding those who walked on the RHS of the footpath, watching for bikes, avoiding the numerous walkers who had a mobile up to their ear.

Our chaplaincy offices are well appointed. We have a computer and other stationery goods, printers and copiers. We also have a Community Room near our offices. We have space for meetings. But where are the people?

Occasionally in my first semester here I would arrange a conversation with students, only to discover that the 10 minutes from the campus to my office, and return, made regular meetings in the Chaplaincy building impractical. Then I discovered the value of the status as ‘Honorary Staff’. I was able to book rooms on campus, and did so for midday Bible reading and Daly Prayer.

One of the important folders in the filing cabinet was entitled Multifaith Centre. There were substantial plans for a Prayer space, ablution facilities, meeting spaces and chaplains’ rooms. When I arrived in 2007 there were serious discussions about the need for prayer space for Islamic students. A decision was made to provide such a space. But when a survey was conducted about the need for such a space for Christian and other traditions, there seemed to be little response. The Multifaith Centre came off the drawing board. Shortly thereafter a couple of rooms were discovered in the Union House, access gained by stairs tucked away behind the Noodle Shop on the third floor. These rooms have given chaplains a base on campus where we can gather for our regular chaplaincy meeting, hold group discussions and planning meetings. It sounds straightforward, but the offer of these rooms was quite exceptional. I am reliably informed by one of the security staff that in earlier years there was serious antagonism toward any Christian gathering in Union House. Now, much to our surprise, a staff member put his weight behind the proposal to tidy up the space for us.

Something else has emerged. Among the university staff – the admin staff, and the academic staff – are supporters of chaplaincy: they help us to find rooms for meetings, they attend one or other of our discussions and forums or prayers, some seek out private conversation, others accept the request to speak in a forum or a study group.

There is, you could say, a large invisible crowd of people of faith – Christian, and also Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, among others. But this crowd is not easy to detect. Mostly, they belong to an invisible crowd. My own observation was sharpened when I had members in my suburban congregation, active as leaders, elders, committee members and leaders of worship; but entering the university world they were good and serious academics, but like most Australians, they did not bear their faith visibly. There is, as I have learned to describe it, a learned ‘invisibility’.

That reflects to a degree the experience of many Christians who identify uni life with the century old student organisation called the Australian Student Christian Movement. When the history of the ASCM was published some years ago, Renate Howe described how influential the SCM had been on students of previous generations:  they were introduced to serious theological study, they were opened up to the countries of our region – Indonesia, India, the Philippines, and so on; they learned that the Christian message involved political action for social justice. At the launches of Renate’s book I began to be aware that the hey-days of the SCM in the 1950s and early 1960s was a time when Melbourne University was the only university in Victoria; it had perhaps 3000 students, church schools had SCM groups, so that the transition from school to University was accompanied by SCM camps, regular study groups and justice activities on campus. Those links were severely challenged by the generational change of the late 1960s. SCM shrank. This development was also true for the Newman Society.

If you walk around the campus these days, you will see a fair degree of advertising by the Christian Union and other Christian groups, but not now the SCM. When I arrived on campus, it was clear to me that the model I had experienced, where the SCM was an independent student run group supported by the chaplain as needed, was no longer possible. True, other groups like CU, overseas Fellowships and the like, do continue a pattern of this sort, as far as I can see, but not the students with whom a Uniting Church minister would normally work.

Again, the sense of being stripped bare was acute.  I would arrive at my office at about 9am on a Monday ready for a week, and was acutely aware of being a small island in a sea of activity. After some time – weeks, perhaps – I asked my then Catholic colleague Teresa (who had been a chaplain for some years) how she survived. Two things had helped her, she said. First, having been a nurse, she was used to walking quickly, close to running. Walk slowly, friends advised here.  And, secondly, regard this as a contemplative ministry. Good advice but so challenging to an activist Minister. It was, in fact, crucial advice.

It began to prepare me for a long haul.

As a supervisor of trainee Ministers, I had warned them that being a Ministry of the Church is a solitary task. I had experienced that to a degree within congregational life – now I had to swallow my own advice.  I had been used to taking the preparation for Sunday as my daily Scripture and prayer life. The Lectionary gave shape to my week. Now I turned to the Daily Prayer of the US Presbyterian church, to begin the day in my chaplaincy office.  The solitary prayer in my office was a necessary discipline, where I began to pray for the university, in silence, on my own. I would have to trust what I had long held for ministry – it would involve a planting of seeds without being around long enough to see the growth of the plant.

It has been five and a half years. I have experimented with some patterns of activity. I have been the Coordinator of chaplains. And I am now doing my best to prepare a handover to my successor with significant continuity between what I have discovered here, and what that newcomer will do.

Out of these years I have tripped over some learnings, and offer them briefly to you now.

Inverting the SCM model

I arrived on campus and was able to meet about five students with some connection to the SCM and/or the Uniting Church. They requested a Bible study, and daily prayer. Discovering that Tuesday was the only free lunch hour, and that rooms could be booked in the Old Physics conference centre, we began a pattern of Monday and Wednesday.  I led a study on the Gospel set by the Lectionary and a brief daily prayer, including (dangerously) a Taizé sung prayer!  I soon followed those lunchtime sessions with the beginnings of a Thursday Forum. The forum was designed to do what the SCM would have done: binding together theological and justice themes, faith and science, resurrection.

I discovered colleagues, such as Stephen Ames, on campus. I invited theological staff from the United Faculty of Theology to speak. I used my ‘honorary staff’ status in order to find meeting rooms. These groups were modest. By advertising through various networks (and local UCA congregations) we attracted sometimes 6 at other times 20 people to the forums – students and staff; mainly post grad students. . Over the years, a group has emerged to plan the forums with me; we have continued the attempt to respond to the current issues, such as ‘Occupy’ and ‘Happiness and Struggle’. With Beverley, my wife, I invited people who met in these groups to gather at our home for an Agape Meal, where we met one another talked of light-hearted and also deep things, then broke bread and ate together. These will be a most marked memory. Supported by local UCA congregations, we also developed an ‘Orientation Picnic’. 20 or so students (some of whom have just arrived in the country) were invited to a bus trip to the bay and a barbecue. Some who were on their own found their bearings, and companions. This activity did not lead to new attendees at Sunday services, but it was an act of hospitality to these new students.

An inversion of the SCM model? In the sense that the chaplain is a key organiser, sends and receives emails, and works with other local church folk. Students are not the organisers here.

Friends of the Ecumenical Chaplain

I am very aware that I have built up a bundle of knowledge and contacts in this university. My question is how to hand it on. I am currently planning a gathering of 15-20 people, if I can muster them, to associate with chaplaincy. As Friends they will be directly related to the role I hold as Ecumenical chaplain. I hope that other chaplains might also see the point of this group of supporters. I expect some are staff who recall the importance of the SCM. I hope there will be students who have benefited from this contact. (As I say this and prepare to leave, several students who have provided the core of support are themselves moving on to jobs or other universities – which makes the question of continuity even more pointed.)

A Public Ministry for the University

In my early years, I was repeatedly reminded that this is a ‘secular university’. That ‘warning’ was issued in gentle ways as a reminder that ‘religion’ had been divisive and remains problematic on campus – especially when politics is also involved.

However, when it came to the Bali Bombings, the Japanese earthquake, the Tsunami and the Victorian Bushfires, requests came for a public marking of these catastrophes. Here the chaplains were invited into an opportunity to offer public prayer and reflection within and on behalf of the whole campus. This does not happen at regular university events, such as Commencement. But here in these times when death and grief needed expression we were invited in. It involved planning to ensure a Welcome to Country, psalms, prayers and poetry from various traditions, words offered by the chaplain, and appropriate ritual actions. The same happened recently with the Anatomy Faculty who offered a service of Commemoration and Thanksgiving for body donors. As chaplains we were invited in to offer prayer and a blessing.

We are aware that chaplains here are still predominantly Christian. In such events we seek to leave space for other voices to be heard.

And there are other ways we have been invited in: one remarkable for its unusual approach. Would we contribute to the unit on Sex, Science and Society by speaking about contraception? After a searching discussion one of our chaplains spoke about the theology of the human person; and managed to suggest specialists in the area of IVF and bioethics.

Pastoral Care

Acts of personal care, conversation and private support for students and staff who are being bullied, anxious about exams, experiencing grief, and so on: these are the normal stuff of ministry. What to do when a process of restructuring is causing serious hurt and upset? When this did happen at Melbourne Uni, it was clear that chaplains needed to be present at the meetings where staff were learning of their future. When it was clear that questions were in the room but could not be asked by staff members, chaplains had the task of asking the questions aloud. In 2011, for most of the year, we lived through cuts to staffing, resignations, and significant trauma to the whole student services.

This was an unexpected role:  some of us attended Union meetings, met with groups of managers trying to contribute to the process of change. As Coordinating Chaplain, I was asked to be there. In most meetings I have something to say. In these meetings I was reduced to silence. Once I offered an apology for not being able to contribute much other than presence, and the staff simply said that they were glad I was there!

Religion in the University

I have said how people of faith are largely invisible on campus, and the warnings about being ‘secular’!

Note, however that there are institutes or Centres of Islamic Studies and Jewish studies, and a variety of other traditions encountered in history or fine arts. There is the course on ‘God and Natural Science’. How do we make sense of this? In late 2011 about 20 interested people agreed to meet to begin to explore the theme of ‘Religion in the University’. It led to a day conference in May this year, then a further gathering in Newman College in October on the theme of a ‘Secular University?’.

A mapping of ‘religion in the University’ led to a substantial account of ways in which religion is present on campus – academically, and also socially as in chaplaincy. These discussions have only just begun: they have raised the question of a chair of theology in Melbourne University, an e-list of people interested in the topic, and regular conversations will be held on the theme of ‘A secular university?’ Early days, yet a substantial discussion, building on those which have gone before.

To Conclude

What a rich five plus years. I have not said much of my chaplaincy colleagues who work together on this campus. Without them I would not have survived.   Add to that the opportunities for meeting and eating that CCTI provides, together with TCMA, and you open up another strong network of support for the ministry of chaplaincy. We are on the cusp of learning more about working as chaplains amongst varieties of traditions, not only the smattering of Christian communities but also Islamic, Jewish and others.

And the role of coordinator? It is a surprisingly a rich one. I am invited into the inner workings of the Student Services, with all the financial and institutional challenges faced here. And from that place, I have to learn how to represent my own tradition, and others, to listen carefully to what is going on in the university, and be ready to step into unfamiliar territory which sometimes feels a universe away from my role as Minster and Christian theologian! That is just one place where I am continuing to discover that chaplaincy as tertiary ministry is a very rich and provocative arena for ministry. That has been my experience of it. And it will be no different for chaplains who follow.

Wes Campbell

14^th November 2012

Wes Campbell

October 2012

The Christian proclamation involves a radical approach to unity. Those who differ are held together. The unity refuses to blur differences. Differences are not abolished. Perhaps it has become a commonplace that we live in diversity. Can those who are different live together? Is it possible for those who differ to co-habit without killing each other?

This reflection is prompted by the debate in the Uniting Church concerning the place of homosexual people in church leadership, and a longer essay I have been writing. As author I have been reminded that this was not the first time the question of difference presented itself. We have been taken into questions of difference and unity by international theological figures, such as Miraslov Volf (Exclusion and Embrace) whose own theological work was shaped by his experience as a Serb. His work prompts me to consider where we might ground our Australian discussion.

In my pre-teen years I lived in a country Western Australian town. I made friends with an Aboriginal (Noongar) boy of my own age in the same school class. As fond as I was of him, we did not sit together on Friday night in the local cinema. It was an unspoken rule that Aboriginal kids sat in the front rows and we halfway back. I hardly grasped that he lived on the edge of town in the ‘Reserve’ (which I never did see), and that the notices on the town toilets prohibiting ‘Natives’ from using them were directed at him. Much later – recently only – his prohibited life was given language- or, better, gave me a language – ‘terra nullius’, dispossession, land rights, stolen generations. (See one of now many attempts to speak: Chris Budden, Following Jesus in Invaded Space: Doing Theology on Aboriginal Land, Princeton Theological Monograph 116, 2009.)

In my teenage years I joined the school cadets, playing at dressing up, polishing boots and brass, and even learning anti-terror methods of moving through the bush. An army officer told us of the threat of the northern Vietnamese, as we learnt how to hold and fire automatic weapons. In a few years I was faced with the prospect of becoming a conscripted soldier. A friend, who had served in the medical corps in Vietnam, returned to Australia a shattered man and shortly thereafter committed suicide. The deep divisions of that war hardly prepared us, after September 2001, then the bombs in Bali 2002, for ‘terror’, the military firestorm of ‘shock and awe’ in Iraq, the weeping wound that is Afghanistan, and the trauma of soldiers exiting their war service. (Major General John Cantwell, Exit Wounds: One Australian’s War on Terror, 2012) How poorly prepared we (not only Australians in general but also theologically educated bystanders like me) were for the new wave of immigrants (and refugees) whose women covered their heads and even their faces. That same unpreparedness was exposed in the congregation I ministered to in the 2000s; it exploded in a dispute over the use of the Australian flag in a funeral conducted by a Christian Minister in the church!

When in the late 1960s I was in a university college, one of the neighbouring students dressed in very outlandish fashion and decked out his room in a gaudy fashion. The dismissive label, half uttered, was ‘poof’. One Friday evening on the river front, near public toilets, I came across a group of men forcing another man into the water. Blundering in I asked in a stern voice what was going on, only to be hit in the face by a clenched fist. The dismissive voice had become a violent punch. I had stumbled into a place that was a regular pickup place for homosexual men, and was therefore also a place for other men with spirits on their breath to plague and do violence to gay men. The gulf that separated me then belonged perhaps to the same gap which has led church people into years of attempts to respond to the otherness of ‘homosexual’ people, who as members of the church are seeking to offer leadership.

In my country primary school of the 1950s one student was a Lutheran. He was not a Baptist or Methodist, and certainly not a Catholic (they had their school up on the hill), although he did join the Anglicans for RE. I had no awareness of the church Reformation headed by the German Martin Luther In childhood games we were at war with the Germans and the ‘Japs’, wearing some of our fathers’ uniforms. Our war-play was shaped by Friday night ‘pictures’ and adventures played out on the evening radio. It would be three more decades before the distorted and skeletal bodies of the NAZI camps impinged on my play world through the writing of German theologians and Jewish survivors, such as Elie Wiesel. Those Germans as theologians, the enemy other, prompted my journey to that soil and culture. (I have a Dutch-Australian friend who resists going to Germany, such is her collective enmity.) I arrived in 1979 Germany, just as the US series Holocaust was televised, and was exposed to the fierce wave of questioning that arose in response – questions posed by my generation of their parents about their part in NAZI Germany. I visited death camps in both West and East Germany, now museums, grassed and pristine, with the ovens intact. Two films are showing in the cinema now, one that reports on the journey of German children in 1945 through the waste of a defeated German landscape (Lore), and the second that tells of a successful Aboriginal singing group, The Sapphires, who played to Australian soldiers in Vietnam. Such a curious interweaving of various ‘others’. My time in Germany led me to see the experience of Aboriginal people in Australia as the akin to the ‘The Jews’ of Germany, and – more honestly and broadly – to the ‘Jewish outsider’ (Sherlock) of European Christianity.

I am led, as these bits of biography expose, to the interplay of otherness and difference. It is by no means static. The person or group who was other can ‘morph’ into a known and, even, a friend. Equally, the familiar friend can change from a benign neighbour to a foe, an implacable enemy. (Consider the former Yugoslavia, and Miraslov Volf’s account in Exclusion and Embrace of what I suggest might be called the neighbourly enemy.)

These fields of division and collision take us the question of diversity. It has become a cliché that we live diverse lives; that was by no means the norm. Rather unity and similarity have been the norm (John Updike) in which folklore teaches that ‘birds of a feather flock together. (Jürgen Moltmann)

As the Uniting Church Assembly attempted to deal with a discussion that would not go away and could not be resolved into harmonious union, it resolved in 2006 to accept that there is diversity in the life of the Christian community and our experience and discussion of sexuality. The Assembly adopted a form of words that suggest a diversity that does not simply exist in a social or ethical or existential way, but involves the deepest character of Christian faith. The phrase adopted was ‘theological diversity’. Does such diversity exist simply at the level of relationships between church members? The experiment in my essay is to explore how far diversity exists in the basic expression of Christian faith, namely in our confession of the reality of God, in Jesus Christ, in the life of the Christian community and in Scripture itself.

The reader is invited to acknowledge, as I have above, the way in which we live with a muted awareness of those things which divide us (while we give primacy to unity and homogeneity), and to search that terrain to discover what diversity implies for God, church and the world.

Wes Campbell

October 2012

The disturbing photographs of young soldiers displaying body parts have unleashed understandable feelings of revulsion, and predictable condemnation. What are we to say about such callousness? Lamentably this is not the first such incident. Recently soldiers were reprimanded for urinating on corpses. In 1968 the My Lai massacre in Vietnam led to the conviction of Second Lieutenant William Calley. The pattern is predictable. Citizens, far removed from the theatre of war, are shocked by practices that can only be described as inhuman. Politicians and military commanders alike join in condemning the behaviour, declaring, ‘This is not who we are!’ But can we non-soldiers so easily separate ourselves from these young men and their behaviour? After all, they serve the nation;  trained in military arts they engage in battle on ‘our’ behalf. Stanley Hauerwas, an American ethicist, considers the sacrifice these soldiers have made. In order to be ready to engage in war they have had to sacrifice their humanity. They have stepped beyond the limits of normal human behaviour where killing is forbidden, into an area where killing is normalised. The nation has asked them to go beyond the boundaries of ‘civilised behaviour’. Only in this way are they capable of brutal acts of war. Hauerwas suggests that there are various ways in which the soldier is compensated (eg. medals, ceremonies, public monuments). These sustain the divide between the world of civilian and soldier. They also permit the soldier to move from one world to the other. In the photographs the wall between these worlds has dropped for a moment. We glimpse in them the normal behaviour required in war. It is not just to condemn the young soldiers alone. We must ask why we accept the act of war altogether.

The editorial of the Sunday Age, ‘Four Corners’, letters to the Editor, and retired military leaders, are saying it is time to recognise the failed military effort in Afghanistan.

My reflections are not based on a military strategy – the professionals do this well enough. My considerations come from an adulthood of attempting to make sense of war and efforts for peace.

I did not begin as a pacifist. As a teenager I was in the school military cadets, and theologically convinced we should honour the decisions of government to oppose the enemies of our society. Then came the Vietnam War, and a growing conviction that that war was wrong. In the 1980s the anti- nuclear movement convinced me that we are to care for the future of this planet – and it is necessary to oppose nuclear weapons. Was I a pacifist at that time? I was attempting to work this through by wondering what a Christian response involved. In the past two or three decades I have come to the conclusion that we must break the cycle of violence – and the primary Christian stance is to show the practicality of peacemaking. So, I end up opposing military adventures, training for violent conflict and military planning for all war. Which now makes me a pacifist.

What does that mean for Afghanistan? First, admit the futility of attempts to resolve conflict with military means. And a recognition of the history of Afghanistan.

I believe it is necessary to remove our troops from Afghanistan, and to  do every thing in our power – non-militarily – to end the conflict.

Be suspicious of the latest explanation as to why our troops are there.

And cry out in pain with and for all who have been killed and maimed and traumatised by this war.

What of the church? Why are we not raising our voices in anguish at the waste of life? Crying out to God to convert our hearts of stone to hearts of flesh!

Soon, later this month (25th April) we will be asked to honour military adventures, told that this is what makes us Australian.

Let the 25th this year be different: an outcry of grief, and a cry of longing for peace between those called ‘enemy’.

Wes Campbell

15th April 2012

God and Occupy

The Socialists are holding their annual Easter conference not far from where I sit, having listened to the Good Friday readings of Jesus’ betrayal and capture, interrogation and torture.  In various conversations, I am reminded of the past week and our discussion of the ‘occupy’ theme.

In this piece of writing I am attempting to hold together God who raises the dead, and ‘Occupy’, a loosely defined movement that has sprung up around the world during the past months, meeting attack from financial, civic, political and church leaders; and, if not attack, at least a closing of the doors. I have seen ‘Occupy’ gatherings in the former city square in Melbourne but did not actually sit with them; in part because we were due elsewhere but, more honestly, because starting to sit with ‘Occupy Berlin’, or Melbourne or… would require a commitment of time and thought and energy. So, having walked past on the street, I am nevertheless inquiring into the theological resources which can help us to engage the polemical division between the 1% and the 99%.

In the week since walking past the Occupy people in Melbourne I have been involved in a variety of activities, some of which address the challenge posed by them. I hope that as I engage in this act of recalling I will be drawn more creatively into this movement, and will have the opportunity to engage with others who are challenged too. The primary question posed in the week of preparation before Easter, concerns the God associated with Jesus Christ; and it also addresses the church.

Beginning the week: a Crucified God?

On Monday at lunchtime our book reading group met to consider chapter three of Moltmann’s The Crucified God, concerning questions asked about Jesus. Clearly of central interest is the question of who Jesus is: truly God, truly human, the one awaited by Israel, God’s witness risen from the dead?  This is not only the disciples’ question, nor only the Baptist’s question, but also Jesus’ question about himself, intensified (as we remember this week) in the Garden and on the cross.

On Monday evening we saw Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s brutal adaptation of an Italian tragedy, exploring how the son is the captive creature of his warring mother, where the characters are set upon paths of conflict and (self-) destruction. Dressed in modern Balkan military guise the film dragged us into the too many wars taking place now. (After Coriolanus the study of the collapse of Lehman brothers and the beginnings of the Global Financial Crisis in ‘Margin Call’, appears benign, but the truth is that the powers at work in both are the same.)

A Movement with a Past

An article sent out by Ian, recalling the origins of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), reminded the reader that the issues posed by ‘Occupy’ are not new. That attempt at revolution had predecessors in earlier social movements – in the US on campuses, as well as in Europe in both non-violent and violent forms.

God who does not Occupy

On Tuesday the third lunchtime forum took place on Melbourne University campus. We were about 15 people, some of whom had been at earlier forums giving an account of ‘Occupy Melbourne’, and posing questions concerning economics and development.  Chris offered observations about God who is ‘edged out of the world’, both as a sociological description by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (April 1944), and as a theological claim concerning Jesus’ crucifixion: the God ‘who does not occupy’. While drawing on Jürgen Moltmann’s work, limited connections were made in the presentation between theological and political setting; indeed, more stridently, the claim was made that the crucifixion so ends the ministry and teaching of Jesus that the ethical teachings of the Gospels are of no substantial interest. Members of the forum disputed such a claim, one stating that the Beatitudes are crucial in his living out the faith, and another saying that for her the identifying of Jesus with the poor, naked, thirsty, etc, is essential for her living in faith. In another conversation the observation was made that the fact of Jesus’ entry into the temple in his last days, and his actions (reported in the synoptic Gospels) of clearing the forecourt, is of crucial importance for our discussion of occupy.  We are here dealing with the God who comes into our life in Jesus Christ (incarnation); we may also explore what it means to say that we are ‘in God; that is to say, as those  -  creatures of God- given to occupy space bodily. Moltmann, for example, argues that God has created space within God for the creation. Thus we may say that humans, and the whole of creation, may be understood as occupying space ‘in God’ (‘panentheist’). More of this later.

An Anti-War Vigil

More, because the next event on Tuesday was a vigil (4.30-6.30pm) at Flinders Street Station, calling for an end to the war in Afghanistan – or, at least, the withdrawal of Australian troops from there. It was a mixed experience: many people of mixed ages, cultures, colours and occupations,  flowed across the street, heading for the trains; some (often men and middle aged) looked stonily away; others – women, non-Anglos, frail, and varied – took the proffered flyer (eight or so reasons to leave Afghanistan, and actions to be taken). Some even took the flyer from my hand. Some  entered into conversation reflecting on the experience of the failed demonstrations before the Iraq war and the silence around this war; others  stood open-mouthed as they read, puzzled that Australia has troops there at all, some speculating that it has to do with oil, or some other vested interest.  We weren’t explicitly using the language of ‘occupy’ but were in a similar space to Occupy Wall Street; in this case it is our Australian (with other nations’) troops occupying space in a foreign country. Here the military serves interests and powers that regularly invade other countries  in order to protect the interest of the prevailing system and its powers.

Bread and Betrayal and Hidden Life

Wednesday began with the 7.45am Eucharist, with a Gospel reading of Judas’ betrayal of Jesus at the final meal; the scene where shared bread is being taken up into a movement toward the cross where the Son glorified the Father. A scene that might otherwise be reason only for despair and loss of confidence in Jesus’ way to the cross, paradoxically includes us in the way toward Jesus’ death that is not a passive, fatalistic and inevitable failure, not overcome by the powers of this world. By contrast, this is Jesus’ choice for his Father and for the world.  This Eucharist takes place in a bluestone church building in Carlton, off the busy main Lygon strip, hidden in a side chapel – much as the events of this last meal of Jesus were also hidden. The cross itself, though public, will also have this strange hiddenness at work, opened only to the small community of beloved follower and mother, and soldiers who divide his clothes. He will take charge, receiving the wine offered, declaring ‘It is finished/ accomplished’.

Later on Wednesday was a meeting of a small working group which is planning a day conference on ‘Religion in the University’. Its premise is that while the university is declared ‘secular’ there is hidden activity taking place involving teaching, research and pastoral care. Following on from the historical accident, where the self-definition of secular protected the university from sectarian dispute or an imposed ‘established church’, the present university has many spaces where ‘religion’ is present: in centres of study, prayer rooms, research and teaching in the classics, in music, health, law, medicine, indigenous studies, Asian studies, science, and so on. Hidden, yet dealing with the fundamental purpose of the university.

At the end of the day I was drawn into conversation about ‘table spirituality’, when I was questioned bout my commitment to meals as an expression of faith. We began with dad as a baker and Methodist ‘basket teas’ in 1950s, as a preparation for a discovery that Biblical narratives take place in food – whether in the desert, (Jesus actually fasts where the exodus people were fed), or in homes of tax collectors or Pharisees. Here, I recalled, we are prompted to take up Stanley Spencer’s fat Christ, and the four at the table in Rublev’s Trinity. Moreover, here is a connection between Jubilee, feeding the hungry (Jesus as Messiah headed to the cross), and the prophetic challenge of justice. And again, we are taken to where Paul remonstrates with his Corinthian people who cannot wait for the poorer members to arrive; and to Matthew where Jesus is identified with the vulnerable and hungry poor.

I am reminded that, when we were reading the Gospel according to Matthew a few semesters ago, Moltmann’s treatment in The Way of Jesus Christ of the Matthew 25 parable (also in Sun of Righteousness arise) understood the Christology concerning  Jesus to be intimately connected to global issues of poverty, justice , oppression, judgment and new creation.

That same night we went to the play ‘Red’, based on an episode in the life of Mark Rothko, the painter of abstract blocks of colour. In this show, red referred to blood, as also to Rothko’s attempt to make the painted panels live, offering a view of transcendence. Rothko faced a crisis. His paintings were to be hung in a high-class restaurant, where they would be co-opted into the excesses of the wealthy, conspiring to treat his paintings as mere decoration. In a dramatic moment, the artist telephones the restaurateur and refuses to prostitute his painting, refuses the sale and returns the money. (Judas returned his thirty pieces of silver when he realized what he had done!)

Continuing the Shared Meal around the Cross

On Thursday, another mixed group met in the Gryphon Gallery in the Graduate 1888 Building to follow the Stations of the cross, chaplains, Catholic, Lutheran, Uniting church, students of varying confessions and countries. The regular process of greeting, readings, reflections, prayers and stumblingly sung refrains, focused us this Maundy Thursday on the way to the cross. And from there, to a conversation with a serious questioner, a recent PhD graduate in Law and Development studies, wondering out loud how to continue at the university without selling out, how to raise basic questions where others read the situation as obvious, how to draw on the depths which bubble up as faith. That is a place where there are no final  answers to be had, only mutual encouragement in the Way.

And then, to begin the Easter weekend, a meal of soup and ‘crusty’ bread and fruit at Church of all Nations. Twenty or so sitting together, eating, then listening in increasing darkness to the Tenebrae readings; yet another entry into the narrative of the cross, with those who differ gathered to share bread. Then the church was ‘stripped’ and we left for home, to await Friday, called Good.

The Call to Peace-making as Church

A week ago, on Friday afternoon – the same day as passing by Occupy Melbourne – several of us met, invited by the synod commission for mission to form a working group to respond to a 2011 synod decision on  thetheology of peace and assisting a church response to Australian troops in Afghanistan.  So we have begun to collect material together for this task. A reunion of Clergy for Peace several moths ago agreed that we must continue to assist the church to pray for peace, and to act as peacemakers. Oddly, we are told, that church people (Uniting Church, at least) are not asking the justice unit of the synod to respond to Afghanistan. Those around the table, including a former soldier and an active military chaplains, a twenty-something philosopher and others of us who have a long track record in peace activism, have agree to talk together and to assist the church to pray and to act; on Afghanistan, certainly, but also asking how we will respond to the next conflict after Afghanistan. Why are we so a-pathetic? Why is every congregation not crying out in pain and longing for peace, on behalf of the people of Afghanistan? Does it have to do with clichés that fail to remind us how often the explanations of our military presence in Afghanistan has been revised? And, as a result of the war there, are we afraid of those who make a claim on us, also as refugees?

Prayer at the Cross

In the hymns, and prayers and readings of the past few days, I notice that there is a certain pious attitude taken to the cross and suffering. Rather than echoing Jesus’ action of taking up his cross, and calling his followers to ‘take up’ your cross, the piety seems to be more interested in forms of suffering that are ‘laid on us’, such as illness, cancer, and some other disability, including our dying at the end of life. Not the strident call of Jesus to take up the cross, to risk rejection with him, to face martyrdom, or to create a fuss, but a passive attitude, and perhaps at best a moral regret at our failure to trust Jesus. In his sayings I do not detect that passive fatalistic attitude. Certainly, he asks whether his death is ‘God’s will’. But this is the will of the God of the Lord’s Prayer, and the will of someone whose actions were so confronting that he drew revolutionaries (Zealots) to his band of followers and was finally crucified with insurrectionists.

Making Theological Links

Which brings us back to Occupy. No -  in the above account we have not departed from occupy, but it is now helpful if we seek out some more links.

What are we to make of Jesus’ teaching in the Gospels, and Paul’s and other apostles’ ‘ethical’ guidance? It is true that Jesus’ ministry and movement was met in the end with collapse, most markedly voiced in his dying cry of abandonment. But the teaching we have now is recorded and read by the post-Easter church. The sayings of Jesus in the New Testament do not simply repristinate old sayings of Jesus. I contend that they are now to be understood as sayings from the risen Jesus, instruction and guidance by the living Lord of the Christian community to his body, his community, on his way of the cross.

So, the Beatitudes which declare the politics of the kingdom, are to be understood as the risen Jesus’ instructions to his church, in which he expresses firmly an option for the poor, merciful, peacemakers, reviled and persecuted who are brought by the risen Lord (who died a condemned and godless death) into the ambit of the reign of God – for which he died, and was raised by God because of it.

In the light of this approach (resisting movements and attitudes which diminish our material self and our space in this world, such as Docetism and Gnosticism), Occupy matters because, along with Wall Street, church buildings and cathedrals have become implicated. It must shock us that the very buildings designed a visible celebration of the God who chooses to ‘occupy’ our space in our flesh, our human conditions, and also the condition of being made ‘inhuman’ by his torture and death shut their doors against the people of ‘occupy’. The space God inhabits in the Word Jesus Christ, also described as Incarnation, moves beyond  a ‘pre-Easter’ consideration, to the activity of God who is active in our space (as Word and Spirit) to give birth to a renewed, healed, new creation. Further, here is  the reminder that Jesus Christ calls for a community in which people will not dominate as the ‘Gentiles’ do – but will seek to give up domination, and to serve: in the name of the one who became least and last.

Jesus who Occupies

There is much more to be said, but let us now take a pause: with the conviction that the God who does occupy our flesh, and the prison and the execution chamber (cross), even though Jesus is now not to be found in the tomb, promises  – not the abolition -  but the completion of our humanity. As the one who has no place to lay his head (even to be born) he is the origin of a renewed humanity, the healer of a broken and unjust humanity.

What does it mean that Jesus took up political forms to enter Jerusalem? While it was probably somewhat hidden in the crowd of pilgrims, Jesus nevertheless acted out a political claim and style, provoking opposition, and prompting rejection.

What of the temple? Does Jesus occupy the temple? Or does he replace the temple? In Mark, after his entry into Jerusalem, he first simply goes in to look and then (because it is ‘late’) returns to Bethany. Later, however, is the stinging critique of the temple system, the oppression of its functionaries, the crushing of the poor. And then the clearing out of the forecourt to give access to other nations to the God of Israel.

When we were returning home from the Good Friday service, my attention was drawn to a man sitting on the hut outside the local park. He is a well-known figure in our neighborhood, as he pushes his supermarket trolley, walks and talks to himself. We suppose he has some sort of shelter. But that very musing reminds us also of prison populations which consist largely of mentally ill and disabled people. What would it mean if ‘occupy’ also meant emptying the prisons and finding places of comfort and dignity for the freed prisoners to live?

Bringing together Occupy and God has pressed a wide range of questions and experiences. I have attempted to put together one week’s experience and reflection on it, as a way into the question of ‘occupy’ – with the question of how we are to re-orient the structures of wealth and ‘possession’ on this planet by reference to the God who has chosen to inhabit our life now and, especially, into the future. And it poses the question: might the Occupy movement, a tentative and fragile movement, mostly hidden and ignored, be a sign of resurrection?

Wes Campbell

Good Friday 2012

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/11/cia-drones-marked-for-death/

It was bad enought with B52s flying high and carpet bombing.  Cluster bombs are delivered indiscriminantly.

These drones are becoming more sophisticated, I’m informed, so that they will  ‘decide’ who to attack.

In the Lukan Christmas readings we hear of  ‘hosts of angels’: that is armies of  God.Pray for peace this CHritmas.

Wes

This is a personal greeting to you connected with my role in chaplaincy this year of 2011.

My musings  are my thanks to you, across our various communities and beliefs.

The season of Advent begins the Christian year, marked by powerful images of cosmic upheaval, and a longing for God’s action. In a year when drones have flown over Afghanistan and Pakistan, delivering death from a remote controlled control room in the United States, that longing is easily diverted into resignation: ‘that’s all there is’! By contrast, the Biblical view is a ‘hope against hope’, which forms communities, who pray and speak and act for a world at peace, renewed and filled with justice. I wish you that hope; all the more pressing when Australians still resist the stranger who comes to our shores.

Nativity PanelThis has been a different year. Four and a half years of chaplaincy: I have my bearings but am constantly caught off guard. We started O-week with a picnic – a new idea – with 30 students. Then a Student Services restructure called for a different presence as an advocate for staff. On Mondays we read The Peaceable Kingdom (Hauerwas) and The Politics of Jesus (Yoder); on Wednesdays we read Matthew and Genesis 1- 11. In Thursday Forums we explored Education (Wisdom after Wikileaks), and various issues: Afghanistan, Refugees, Sustainability, surrounded by Agape meals, afternoon teas, a Hiroshima/Nagasaki vigil and remembrance on September 12^th and 11^th November. Add to that personal/pastoral conversations, involvement in the Council for Chaplaincy in Tertiary Institutions, and a visit to New Zealand chaplains’ conference, along with my role as Co-ordinator of chaplains – an Ecumenical Chaplain. The year concluded with a conversation about ‘Religion in the University’, and has set us off on a project which ‘maps’ the teaching, research and presence of ‘religion’ in the uni. And, together,a number of us are continuing (in line with the ecumenical spirit of the Student Christian Movement) to explore how we form ‘ecumenical Christian community’ on campus.

Wes       December 2011

Advent, the season of hope. What is this hope?

Listening to the readings of the First Sunday of Advent  (Isaiah 64:1-9, Mark 13: 24-37), the reader has to be struck with their utter strangeness.  The call to YHWH to ‘come down’, to tear open the heavens. And in Mark the very thing: the expectation that the cosmos will burst into cataclysm.

These readings sound like the world we live in: where B52s carpet bombed in a previous generation, now unmanned Drones deliver remote controlled death. Cities are wiped out – as were Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the hidden legacies of radiation from failed rectors seep unseen into tissue and bone.

When these readings are heard in church, what happens? Gone are the apocalyptic expectations which have Judge Jesus descending from the sky. Gone, too, is the urgent and radical expectation what the prophets name – a world transformed. Hope turns into mild hankerings for a quiet life, or a social policy that alters our living arrangements.

How will we reclaim the passion for the peace of God, the strong and demanding expectation that the living god acts and alters our world: ‘intrudes’, in language offensive to progressive ears?  As the prophets were driven to declare against their predilections, are we not also to declare the message that the living God will  alter all we know, all we are. That the planet will be healed. That the death we deliver will be confronted and broken. Aren’t we, with Jesus who staked everything on this, to stake all we have and are on him?

With the Yes to that, we must form communities of faith that are honest, where we confess to our neighbours in this community how alien all this is, and yet encourage one another to believe, and act, in the certainty that Jesus the Judge has claimed us at the cost of his life, and promises not to give up until all is renewed in his image.

What would Advent look like if we gathered like this, and ate bread and drank wine as the promise of new life for all?

Wes

30th November 2011