First there was What Would Jesus Do? Then came What Would Jesus Drive? With the Australian Federal Election less than a week away, I’m sure there are bloggers around the country posting on How Would Jesus Vote? I’m not one of them. I’ve never found WWJD, etc. a particularly Christian question – although it can form the basis for some good t-shirts:
Who Would Jesus Bomb?
Soren Kierkegaard
Reflecting on yesterday’s post, I went back to a favourite quote from Soren Kierkegaard. It’s from the preface to The Sickness Unto Death:
“Everything essentially Christian must have in its presentation a resemblance to the way a physician speaks at the sickbed; even if only medical experts understand it, it must never be forgotten that the situation is the bedside of a sick person.”
One take on Kierkegaard is to assert that all Christian theology needs to be pastoral; that its primary ethical mandate – like that of the physician – is to “do no harm”. This obligation may at times necessarily override other significant ethical commitments, even to “the truth” or to one’s own personal integrity.
The Tour de France has just finished, and cycling friends have been debating the merits of seven-times winner Lance Armstrong. Egomaniac or altruist? In his defense, someone drew attention to the latest awareness-raising tactic of Lance’s anti-cancer foundation Livestrong: free stickers for your bike that say “I ride for…” You fill in the blank with the name of a cancer survivor. Eg:
Fill in the blank with the name of a Survivor
Damaging a grave must be one of the few remaining acts of “de-sacralisation” that our society acknowledges. (That and defiling ANZAC day or The Flag in some way.) When young people (and they’re usually young) are caught vandalising headstones, adjectives such as “sickening” and “disgusting” come out in force, as well as others like “senseless” and “motiveless”.
Maybe I’m sick and disgusting too, but wandering around Newcastle’s Christ Church Cathedral recently, I think I came up with one possible motivation behind an evening of headstone-smashing. (I’m not talking about so-called “satanism” here, but the kind of act that even those who engage in it would probably call “random” – something to do when you’ve had a few too many.)
Loving apes as I do, I was charmed by pictures of a baby gorilla recently born in Prague zoo. Reading the report in a local newspaper, I was struck by a passing reference to “the as-yet-unnamed baby”.
Considering the intelligence of gorillas, their sophisticated social system, and the bond evident between mother and baby in images such as the one below, I truly wonder at the anthropocentric nature of that statement.
"Unnamed" baby gorilla
Adapted from a reflection on 2 Samuel 1:17-27 given at Holy Trinity Anglican Church Port Melbourne on Sunday in June
My cousins in Cairns loved watching the organised crime TV show Underbelly – while it was banned down here because of a court order. The tropical rellies relished the idea of Melbourne as a true-life film-noir set, and when they visit at Christmas, no doubt we’ll be taking them on an Underbelly tour – Crown Casino, Lygon Street and – Ascot Vale.
As one wit said recently, why do so many gangsters live in Ascot Vale? So jail won’t seem so bad!
Adapted from a reflection on John 2:13-22 given at Holy Trinity Anglican Church Port Melbourne on Sunday.
We began by reading from a short story called “The Sad Heart of Ruth” by Australian writer Jennifer Paynter. It opens with a contemporary suburban couple and their friends anxiously preparing for a visit from Jesus:
“Aren’t you nervous though, Ruth? Aren’t you worried He’ll think you’re too rich? I mean you have such a divine home, Ruth. All the Venetian glass you collected on your overseas trips… And this kitchen. What’s He going to think of this Customtone kitchen, Ruth?”
Prince Harry’s most recent controversial video started me thinking. Not the bit where he refers to one of his fellow soldiers as “our little paki friend”, but where he pretends to be ending a telephone call to his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II: “Bye… God save you. Yeah that’s great. See you, bye.”
“Bye… God save you” is the rarely heard second person version of “God save the Queen”, which until the middle of last century used to conclude almost any communication of importance.
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Being (still) a U2 fan, for a while there I thought that “Looking for baby Jesus under the trash” was a pretty darn cool definition of the theologian’s task. Now I’m not so sure. Baby Jesus is kind of, well, infantalising, and as for trash – surely one person’s trash is another’s treasure. So what is theology? The Queen of Sciences, as it ws known in the Middle Ages? An esoteric discipline concerned with how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Or something much more foundational? That’s one of the questions this blog will concern itself with as it slowly forms itself into some kind of shape.
