By Kim Thoday for the Gordon Stirling Lecture of Churches of Christ Adelaide, May 2005

* Marginality#

[I’ve been called a ‘mongrel’ more than once and by a few of you here tonight. But I accept that now; its no-longer offensive or even a term of endearment. For mongrel is surely a personification of the postmodern era, more than ever we know we are products of varied influences, some once marginal and opposing lines of pedigree. Tim Winton, the Australian novelist, says of his Christianity: ” … I’m still an ambivalent church-goer of mongrel impulses. Part of me wants to kneel in a Gothic cathedral to pray in a cloud of incense. Another piece of me wants to burn that same edifice down and worship in someone’s home without all the fruit and aristocracy.” ‘Zadok Perspectives’ (No 74 Autumn 2002)]

The prophetic call of Christianity has always been one of marginality; of being a people, not at the centre, but on the margins. (in a sense: “in the world, but not of the world;” as the more pious would remind us: I would give assent to this, if we could lose the pietistic interpretation). The prophets tell us that being ‘in the world’ is precisely that: having our being ‘in’ the world; not ‘in’ some religious recluse. And they tell us that being ‘not of the world’ is to resist the violence and self-interest (idolatry) of our world; that is of our collective human being. A prophetic hermeneutic at this point embodies the distinctively Christian ethic.

What does marginality mean? In socio-political terms living on the margins means having limited access to power, resources, opportunity and even basic human rights. But being on the margins can also mean having a certain liberty, freedom, critical distance, explanation, living in a space of hybridity.

Unless we are totally disengaged, we are now powerfully aware of our Christian marginality. Just as the edifice and infrastructure of ‘Colonial Empire’ has been so eroded to the point of marginality by the winds of postmodernity; so too, is the edifice and infrastructure of Western Christianity. Some signal the effects of this erosion as the post-Christian era. That may be so for a type of Christianity; for a ‘Christianity writ large;’ for a ‘self-centered Christianity;’ for a ‘once centered-Christianity.’ But is it so for a marginal Christianity?

*Recently Migrated (Stuart Hall, a Black British Jamaican migrant and postmodern writer)

Stuart Hall, a Black British Jamaican, (“Minimal Selves” Identity Documents 6, London 1987, pp44-46), himself a migrant, says, welcome to migrant-hood, welcome to marginality. Hall’s adjectival description of the postmodern experience as being “recently migrated” has helped crystallize my experience. The once permanent cultural landscape of God, King and Colonial Empire has fragmented so much, the metaphor of ‘the migrant,’ is somehow movingly apt. ‘The migrant’ with his or her struggles to understand new language, a new culture/s, of grief for the old ways, of hope and aspirations to create a new life. Surely, by degree we have all been affected by the relatively sudden shift (migration) into a new, largely uncharted, perhaps terrifying, strange land.

But Hall is also saying something else: now that ‘you’ all feel so dispersed and de-centered, paradoxically, I now feel centered! He is saying to us that the experience of marginality, ironically, is now the representative experience (though there are degrees of this). Marginality now has the potential to be heard, to be identified, to be legitimated, to somehow share a space with other once ‘unspeakable’ stories or identities. He says: ‘Identity is formed at the unstable point where the “unspeakable” stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history, of a culture.’ Once-unspeakable stories of identity can be heard with the decline of the efficacy of modernism’s grand narratives. Now it is harder to ignore them or silence them or subvert them or kill them.

* ‘Identity is formed at the unstable point where the “unspeakable” stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history, of a culture.’

There are two classic questions every migrant or asylum seeker faces. “Why are you here?” and “When are you going back home?” Hall says you never know the answer to the second question until you are asked. But when you are asked you know deep down that you are never going home. And if you do ever go back or are forced back, there is never a return to what was, (with no apologies to Howard, Vanstone, Ruddock and co.). The first question is as mysterious as the second. Perhaps for an asylum seeker the answer is more straight-forward. Why are you here? – in order to flee persecution or war or poverty or injustice and very often all of these. But in a sense isn’t that what defining identity is about also. Don’t we need to migrate in order to define self? Is that one of the universal experiences? Is that why we leave our parents? Identity is constructed across difference.

* Our Identity: ‘Why are we here?’ and ‘When are we going to go home?’

The question then of the identity of Australian Churches of Christ is as interesting as it is complex. Once we may have been able to speak about some hegemony across our Churches. But we have become a microcosm of postmodernity. We are many identities. Some are very different to each other. Certainly to speak of ourselves as a Movement is like suggesting that g-strings were made for comfort. We are many movements or associations, some harmonious; and some, behind the rhetoric of “unity in diversity,” not so compatible. We are margins within the margins; fragmentations within the already fragmented. We are neither a denomination; nor a movement; perhaps an association: marginal against the wider Christian community that in turn is marginal in proportion to the wider secular community and all in a global context of cultural and religious relativism. This realization may come as a blow: like being forced to move from a pre-Capernicum cosmology to Douglas Adam’s description in the introduction to his, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: ‘Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.’

So, guess what, we are pretty marginal! Is that good or bad? Neither, I think. It’s the wrong question. The better questions are: Why are we here? and When are we going to go home? These are the critical questions of identity.

When are we going home? Well it seems likely there is no going back. Even though there will be the ‘neo-cons’ or reactionaries who want to restore the Church to some imaginary Golden Age. However, it appears that the forces of postmodernity will be irresistible in the long run.

“Why are we here?” We are marginal because the institutional Church has with many other traditional institutions become marginal. But in another sense we are marginal because the followers of Jesus have always been marginal. In the prophetic sense, Jesus calls his communities of faith to be ‘in the world, but not of the world.’ There is the very real possibility that the erosion of Christendom will have the affect of reminding us of Christianity’s pre-Constantinian heritage. Postmodernity may in fact have a very positive two-fold effect on future generations of Christian people. Firstly, causing us to reflect more consciously upon who we are; our identity. Secondly, it may help us to become a credible alternative system of belief and life alongside many other systems of the thought and belief. In our marginality there is the possibility that what we represent can be heard afresh; experiencing Christianity again for the first time; because we are marginal, like everyone else. We are no-longer operating from a position of moral domination, with an assumed right of superiority. We now share a more stable field of awareness, dialogue and difference. It is hard to know what affect you have, especially upon the distant margins, when you occupy the centre. The history of Christendom has often been one of devastation and destruction on those who are different, because we took the centre by thinly disguised violence and manipulation.

The demise of Christendom may allow the resurrection of Christian distinctiveness; that is, the unique life giving energy and saving power revealed in the life, ministry, teachings, Death and Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

* Embrace our marginality.

May we embrace our marginality. We are meant to embrace it. The followers of Jesus were always marginal, a part of the world, yet apart from it, related to it, but relative to it. We are called to be a people of God in a strange land; we always were. In the postmodern era we can perhaps see this with definition. But what does this calling look like? What will our identity be? How can we be faithful followers of the Christ (set apart) and yet relate to the many competing voices, lifestyles, politics, and sub-cultures (set as part) of our world? As did the followers of Jehovah once ask, so must we: “How can we sing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land?” The echoes of that song-line are strangely haunting for our time.

* “How can we sing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land?”

Look at any new movement or moment of great change, songs are composed, the story of identity is set to lyric and beat and melody. The song-lines of our ancient forebears of the faith came from times of captivity and exodus. In times of marginality, identity is forged; not just against the dominant culture, but in contrast with it. Black needs the contrast of white. Life needs the contrast of death. The distinctive nature of Yahweh was remembered in captivity. Our God is different to the pagan gods. Identity is defined in dynamic relation to difference.

Human-beings live by such stories and songs of identity. Making music is part of the celebration and vision of being human. A song that moves us has far more lasting affect than any sermon. Song affects the heart and soul. The ancient hymn writers knew this. Traditional aboriginal culture knows this. So did the song writers of the Reformation and the Revivals. So did the secular sages of the sixties. Songs were written in the early days by some of the pioneers of Churches of Christ. We need new song lines for the re-formation, the re-configuration, for our communities of faith.

So we need to get together from amongst our ranks the best story tellers and the best song writers. The neo-Pentecostals in our era have realized the power of the song-line, for setting vision and ethos. We need songs that speak about who we are and who God wants us to become. We need songs, hymns of faith, that remind us of our prophetic calling to be the faithful vessels of the transforming power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We need songs that tell real stories about real people in their struggles and joys and experiments and failures of being disciples on the margins. We need songs that express something of our distinctiveness. Not so much grand anthems about a heroic or ‘triumphalist Christianity;’ for they are the song-lines of a now ghettoed (and perhaps vetoed) past. We need songs that confidently express where we are and who we are: perhaps something like in the poetry and theology of, Teilhard de Chardin:

* “The age of nations is past, The task before us now, if we should not perish, is to shake off our ancient prejudices and to build the earth.”

We need songs that speak of our failures, that tell of our complaints, that name the ‘principalities and powers;’ that tell of our solidarity with the poor and powerless, songs that will give voice to the voiceless. Songs that will make the invisible visible (for in all our Western marginality, there are the invisible majority of our world, so marginal, they seem somehow confined to a temporal purgatory, like ghosts appearing as a some kind of backdrop of half-formed humanity, to the wars we fight over the precious oil we need to satisfy the insatiable appetite of our MacMurdock World). We need songs that retell the Gospel stories. We need songs that encourage us about what we do well. Not songs of self-congratulation. But songs that celebrate our specific gifts, gifts that we may well share with others, but those nevertheless that are about us.

* What do we do well?

So what about us, Churches of Christ, even in our diversity? What do we do well? At our historic best: we witness with our lives to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. At our best we are incarnational, Jesus with skin on, finding new language and life-style to express the radical values of the Sermon on the Mount. In proportion to our size, we have done exceptionally well as a witness, in terms of the practical out working of Christianity; our anti-clericalism, our social justice and social welfare conscience, our roles in chaplaincy, in inter-church co-operation, in our many attempts to re-invent the way we are Church in order to at once be relevant to the culture and transformative of the culture. This being incarnational is our great strength. God calls us not to give up on it. We do have an ethos that is different. But how defining an ethos is tricky, when it is by nature so intangible? Perhaps ethos can only be captured momentarily in a story or a song or a piece of poetry. Tim Winton, can somehow capture these things. He tells of the story of his first real exposure to Christianity….

This witness is the kind of thing we do well. There is something here of our basic DNA; our spirituality type, that needs further refining and defining but most importantly living. There is something about our incarnational heritage that at once connects us with the historic Christian Church, yet sets us apart, and has the potential for us to make an ordained contribution to contemporary Christianity. Somehow there is a thread from the days of our pioneers that extends to us in the present. It is a thread that has molded us. This thread is a spirituality type that is not especially Evangelical or Liturgical or Charismatic or Activist or Ecumenical or Relational. Yet it shares in and borrows from these. It is a thread of spirituality that suggests that it is * how we treat neighbor that stands above all else, above our worship, above our prayer, above our doctrine, above the Bible, yes even above what we think and feel about God. It is interesting that John Howard Yoder (the Mennonite theologian, therefore sharing in our same heritage) says that the two consistent ethical impulses that hold in every strand of the NT literature are: servant-hood and forgiveness. Servant-hood, he says, replaces dominion. Forgiveness, he says, absorbs hostility. These are the Christological and ethical distinctives. They are the ecclesiological marks of marginality.

At our best our historical ‘tap root’ is perhaps most closely aligned to the Relational type of spirituality. This spirituality experiences God as primarily a God of love, with salvation working through the acceptance of God’s unconditional love and the Church being an extension of that love in the world (e.g. Karl Barth and Emil Brunner and existentialist theologians). This spirituality expresses much about who we are as Churches of Christ. But an incarnational spirituality expresses a deeper dimension of our identity. Incarnational spirituality has to do with how we love, how we are vulnerable, how we treat our neighbor. * It is the practice of choosing to be powerless. It is the practice of real dependency on God. It is Jesus expressing a divine power upon the Cross, by surrendering all power, privilege, status, gender dominance, dignity, life itself . in order to love humanity, to love humanity especially in its marginality.

* Jesus embraces Absolute marginality

Surely the ultimate marginality is extinction, the death of self. Jesus embraces Absolute marginality and in this embrace is the embrace of God on all humanity. I remember a sermon by that wonderful Bible scholar, Eduard Schweizer. It was about the great song-line of the Prodigal Son. Schweizer’s scholarly gaze fixed not on the two sons, but with typical Germanic precision, upon the Father. He said when the son demanded his inheritance; the father was quite within his rights to deny it. Or, says Schweizer, he could have exercised some liberty, a provisional vulnerability, and come to some mutual, relational, agreement. Maybe he could have given the son part of his inheritance, an inheritance due technically to the son once his father had died. But instead, within the cultural and religious context of the day, the father chooses to do something so counter-intuitive, so counter ‘common sense,’ so indiscriminate, it beggars belief. The almighty father chooses to become powerless. His love for his son is so great, he chooses to forego all privilege, status, gender dominance, dignity, common sense, even life itself (culturally speaking he is as good as dead). The father embraces his marginality and eventually, so the song-line goes, and as a consequence of his costly love, will come the time when he will again embrace his son – the son in all his marginality; having found his identity, is re-united with the father in a new creation. So, there can be a return, but it will never be a going back to what was; for the once unspeakable stories of the powerless prodigal and the powerless father collide at the unstable point with the dominant culture, symbolized by the reaction of the Elder son.

* Embrace the sacramentality of our own marginality.

Our identity will emerge with vigor and vitality as we recognize and embrace the sacramentality of our own marginality. The prophets always knew that the most vulnerable, the most marginal, the poor and the persecuted are a sacrament. In the postmodern era we are in a position to be in solidarity with a marginal, recently migrated world. Now is our chance to sing of our identity with a renewed confidence. May our songs be the anthems of the most marginal in our communities and in our world. May our songs reflect the nature of the One we follow, Jesus of Nazareth. The One who lived a fully human life, immersed in human potential, totally giving, vulnerable, resolute, strong for the weak, passionate, open, full of grace and truth, raging against evil and injustice, funny, outlandish yet with dignity, outrageous and indiscriminate in generosity. Jesus, the One who became powerless for our sakes. In short, Jesus, the most human One who ever lived – shorter still, the One full of God’s glory. Here is a song to sing in a strange land.

KIM THODAY, HEWETT COMMUNITY CHURCH OF CHRIST http://www.hewett.org.au