My friend Janelle Koenig, who is a comedian and radio host here in Perth recently recounted a story of a childhood visit to her Grandma.
‘One school holidays when I was 9, I had read all my books and was pestering Grandma to give me one of hers to read. She grabbed the biggest, thickest book she had on hand at the time, never thinking I’d even attempt to read it.’
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We are observing the first Sunday of Lent today, having observed Shrove Tuesday on Tuesday and Ash Wednesday on Wednesday. Like every Lent, our language and customs point us towards our sinfulness, brokenness and weakness – both individually and corporately. This also happens to be the Sunday when Sandy from Koolkuna is joining us to remind us of the important work they do for women experiencing violence. By coincidence, perhaps, this is the end of a week in which Brittany Higgins, who worked in Parliament House, exposed her experience of violence and abuse at the hands of a male colleague. We have seen the political and systemic response, and it has been clearly lacking.
Back in the distant days of my youth, there was a kid in my church youth group called Joel. We called him Rolly Polly Joely. Children are cruel. Anyway, Joel went on to become a bodybuilder and here I am, rotund as ever. He really showed us.
The prophet Joel, or JOH-EL is one of the minor prophets, which is hardly a nice way to describe someone. There’s almost nothing we can know about him, and we have just three chapters of text attributed to him at the tail end of the Hebrew scriptures. He gets two moments in the sun, really. Firstly, Joel includes the text:
In the last two weeks, like most of you I have work a face mask when I left the house. I wore a face mask to walk the dog. I wore a face mask to Spotlight. I wore a face mask to Bunnings. Twice. I wore a face mask at the podiatrist and I wore a face mask to pick up six cinnamon donuts at Donut King. I took my mask off to eat them.
Scientifically, I fully support face masks to stop the spread of aerosol viruses. As a practical matter, I suspect that like many Western Australians, I experienced the mask as a shock to the system. It was constrictive. You had to learn to breathe differently. The facial recognition on my phone didn’t work and I discovered how much I rely on lip-reading to understand what people say. Today is our first day without face masks, and I feel like John Keats on first looking into Chapman’s Homer.
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The author Fran Lebowitz features in a new Netflix special called Pretend It’s a City. She’s acerbic and sardonic, and throughout the short series she is interviewed by Martin Scorsese to whom she spits observations about New York and feminism and whatever else she can think of. In one of the interviews she recounts a story from her childhood. Nine year-old Lebowitz was around at her friend’s house, just hanging around and playing as children do. While she was there, her friend’s Father came home and announced that he had received a raise! He was going to be bringing home an extra $50 a week. This was the late fifties, so it was a lot of extra money. The family was excited – there was much rejoicing as they celebrated their good fortune. Little Fran went home and, as children do, she recounted this story to her Mother. ‘Janie’s Dad got a raise. He’ll be earning an extra fifty dollars a week. They’re so excited!’.
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It was 1843, and in the French village of Roquemaure the church organ had just been renovated. The parish priest was looking for a way to celebrate, and he landed on the idea of approaching a B-grade celebrity who had been born in the town. Placide Cappeau sold grog for a living, but he also wrote poetry. He wrote it with his left hand, because his right hand had been blown off by his best friend when they were eight years old and playing with a gun. Cappeau was an intellectual. He studied at the Royal College in Avignon. He was a secularist – he had little time for the authority and prestige of the church and clergy. And he was a socialist – committed to equality and the redistribution of wealth from rich to poor.
Giving someone a reward can be a good motivator. We see it most obviously in children, but it works on nearly anyone. ‘If you get a good school report, Mummy will take you to Adventure World’. ‘If we get through the whole grocery shop without you whining, Daddy will buy you a Bertie Beetle’. We do it because it works. When there’s a reward involved, humans become more driven. The whole concept of being paid for work is basically a system of rewards. ‘If you meet your sales targets, you’ll get paid. But if you exceed your sales targets there’s a bonus coming’. ‘If you work hard, then you might get promoted to Deputy Sub Vice Manager which brings an extra 11c an hour’ – the rewards don’t even have to be significant! They don’t even have to be real. We get a little buzz from buying raffle tickets and lottery tickets which bring only the chance of reward. That’s how much we crave rewards.
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In Advent we jump all around the scriptures. The appointed readings are all tied together by common Advent themes, but sometimes it’s hard to work out how they all mesh together.
Today we have another account of John the Baptiser, this time from the gospel of John (hey are two different Johns). John’s gospel was written late in the first century or early in the second century – so 70-80 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. To put that in context, it helps to imagine the differences between, say, 2005 and 1935. In 1935, most houses in Perth didn’t have electricity. There was no TV in 1935. In 1935, ABC radio was three years old. The difference between 1935 and 2005 was the difference between when Jesus was crucified to when the Gospel of John was written down. The technological advancement wasn’t quite as fast, but the world had changed a heck of a lot.
This Advent, I’m preaching a sermon series with the cheery title ‘Getting Ready for the End of the World’. Last week I talked about how Christians have approached our beliefs about the end times and the return of Christ. I think where I got to (though honestly, who can say?) was that the way we think about the end of the world affects how we live our lives in the here and now. If we believe that the culmination of ‘all this’ is love and justice, then that is going to shape how we live in the moment right now.
Advent is a jolly time of year. The decorations go up on the tree and around the house. There’s a party every other day for some group or another. There’s all the fun of shopping for presents. Advent Calendars are particularly jolly. Every day there’s another chocolate, or, more recently, a small bottle of gin to get you in the Advent spirit.
So in that jolly spirit I have decided to preach a sermon series entitled ‘Getting Ready for the End of the World’.
This week, after years of investigation, the Brereton report was released. It outlined credible information that 19 Australian soldiers had ‘illegally killed’ 39 people in Afghanistan and ‘cruelly treated’ another 2.
‘Illegally killed’ means murdered.
‘Cruelly treated’ means tortured.
These were not unfortunate, inevitable deaths in the heat of battle, though even that kind of death haunts the nightmares of soldiers. These were cold-blooded executions of prisoners who were already restrained. Some soldiers carried ‘throwdowns’ – evidence that could be planted on a victim to suggest that they were dangerous. Some soldiers, particularly junior soldiers, were pressured by their superiors to shoot prisoners in order to get their ‘first kill’ in a practice known as ‘blooding’.
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Last Saturday, footage began to circulate of Trump supporters in Philadelphia waving Trump flags and dancing to Killing in the Name, the iconic song by rock band Rage Against the Machine. For those who are not across music that was hip with the kids 27 years ago, Rage Against The Machine stands in the long tradition of protest music. Killing in the Name is their protest against racism in police forces and the military-industrial complex. It was inspired by the murder of Rodney King in Los Angeles. ‘Some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses’ they sang in protest . When he saw the footage of the Trump Supporters dancing to the song, guitarist Tom Morello had a characteristically terse response: ‘Not exactly what we had in mind’.
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Do you know what code-switching is? It’s when you change your communication style depending on the context. Kids learn how to code-switch early on – they know (usually) to speak to the School Principal in a calm and polite way, which is quite different to the way they talk to their friends in the playground, and completely different to the way they talk to their parents. Nurses in the break room speak differently to nurses on the ward, and anyone who deals with customers knows that you put on a different voice and manner for customers than when you’re out the back or at home. People who belong to minority groups find themselves code-switching all the time. Sometimes it’s to do with the language they’re speaking, or else speaking more loudly or softly or making more or less eye contact or using more or fewer hand movements.
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