Sacrificial Community
Patronal Octave, 1st July, 2001
The Rev'd Dr Colin Holden
Assistant Priest and Archivist, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
St Peter's confession of faith, and Jesus response to Peter's confession in which He describes Peter, or rather his faith, as the rock on which the church is to be built, is of course the gospel for St Peter's day. I don't intend to offer a commentary as such on that dialogue between Jesus and Peter. But my subject matter nevertheless grows directly from it. That gospel talks of faith and of a believing community as basic elements in Christian living and in the maintenance of Christianity. That supposes that Christian communities do have some key beliefs and can be distinguished in some ways from other communities around them – something that might logically seem self-evident. What are they – or at least, some of them?
I want to look at some answers that grow out of responses to us from outside the church, from beyond the believing community. Taking seriously some of the responses of others, including the more critical ones, may sharpen our awareness of who and what we are.
The first response is that of the political machinery of modern democratic Western states such as our own – and of many people within their borders – to religious language, the claims made through its use, and the communities in which these statements originate. The political order irrespective of whether it be right, left, or centre, generally finds such statements awkward and out of place in public life. In the face of the presence of different and contesting claims made by different groups under the Christian umbrella and by other believing communities beyond Christianity, the political structure has to regard them all as equally false, because it claims to have no basis on which to assess truth, relative or absolute, in spiritual matters. And that such matters belong only to the realm of the individual and private, and what amounts almost to an atmosphere of embarrassment concerning religious language and references to religion in public, is a point of view that has wide currency beyond the political machinery of government. Typical of this phenomenon were some of the awkward responses to the appointment of Bishop Hollingworth as Governor General, and an unsophisticated level of comment in some of the media.
One solution is simply to accept the state's point of view. The alternative is the more difficult one. To follow in St Peter's footsteps, and those of many others, we are called to search for ways to state our faith. There are many ways in which this can be done, and some may not use overtly religious language, or even be verbal. But there is a point where non-verbal statements, or expressions that do not use explicitly religious language, are inadequate. The awkwardness on the part of many around us at anything that points to the transcendent or spiritual is important in reminding us of something basic to our identity. Making overt verbal statements is a basic element of Christian expression, even when there is also the recognition that that there is an element of the divine that defies all verbalisation and conceptualisation. This is not something which we can decide to run with, or leave to one side as the case may be, on a denominational basis; the very term word, for Christians of all kinds, evokes both the ultimate reality which we worship, and that verbalised proclamation and statement of one kind or another as a basic means of dissemination and propagation of the faith. St Peter's confession invites us all to speak about God, not to maintain silence.
I now want to focus on the public arena as one in which we must continue to express ourselves – both through our words, and in a variety of other ways as well. I want to refer to a term that Catholic theology has generally used of the distinctive act of Christian worship, the eucharist – the word is sacrifice.[1] Earlier, I referred to responses to us from those outside the church, from beyond the believing community. Whether you listen to Margaret Throsby (that scintillating jewel in ABC radio's interviewing crown), or pick up some of the more acerbic lines of Manning Clark concerning life-deniers, and beyond them, the observations of many less intelligent commentators; the identification of Christianity with sacrifice and self-denial is made over and over again. It is generally made as a criticism: self denial is equated with unhealthy repression, and there are plenty of instances in which psychologically unhealthy attitudes have been cultivated behind the guise of various kinds of Christian piety. Less often, there is the recognition that self-denial of one kind or another is not just an end in itself, but a matter of discipline that creates a degree of freedom and enables some other choices to be made, choices that would never be options if self-indulgence reigned. But the frequency with which self-denial and sacrifice comes up in non-Christian critiquing of Christianity remains remarkable, and an indication that at least from those on the outside, it seems to be something fairly basic (though by no means necessarily exclusive) to our faith.
Sacrifice, self-denial, and more positively, generosity in both attitudes and with our means, are significant elements in the way in which Christians of various traditions including our own, have contributed to the public life of our nation. It is one of the motives, though not the only one, that has led to the creation of agencies for delivering social welfare; of hospitals and the care of the sick and the dying in their homes; of many educational schemes, and of schools, specially those beyond the greater public school league.
And there are some new threats that are being posed to these kinds of expression of our faith in the public arena. One comes from the application of market forces standards by government instrumentalities to the delivery of social services by the churches. Until recently, there were occasions in which church agencies determined their sphere of work by noting the areas in which other agencies (including those of other churches) were working, and tried to establish new operations in areas not currently covered by existing agencies. The 'gentlemen's agreements' so concluded prevented the waste of limited means through unnecessary duplication. But more recently, government regulation has obliged church agencies to submit competitive tenders not only against other non-religious deliverers, but against one another. While it is argued that this ensures the maintenance of standards, in practice it squeezes agencies already operating on limited resources. What were once 'gentlemen's agreements' are now illegal, interpreted as collusion. While governments praise diversity in some areas of community life, in practice, governments coerce potential variety into becoming uniformity. There is only one model, into which all sizes must fit.
Another threat comes from the acceptance of government funding. While this is often necessary in order to maintain or expand operations, independent study has shown that, in practice, this process often results in the diminishing of the distinctive elements in the organisation and philosophy of religious organisations that deliver social services.
Conversely, when it comes to the issue of sacrifice, self-denial or plain generosity, there is a kind of circumstantial negative evidence of the importance of the presence of Christianity in our public culture, at least until recently. Those involved in monitoring the funding of a number of welfare agencies note the conspicuous absence of generous giving from among the new wealth generated by corporatisation and economic rationalism: a group which, as a class, is notable for its lack of connection with the Christian churches. This pattern suggests that until recently, despite a considerable degree of nominalism, the churches exerted an influence in the public culture in reminding its citizens of the responsibility of the whole community to support its less privileged members.
Thus there is both positive and negative evidence that sacrificial living can be one of the key concepts for us in expressing our commitment to a distinctive lifestyle that will distinguish us from an element of the culture around us. Generosity with our means, as well as in basic attitudes, needs a philosophical base. It certainly contrasts with the kind of attitudes that are part of the current emphasis on the creation and display of conspicuous wealth. A recent issue of a journal distributed through many of the well to do suburbs south of the river gave a breakdown of the expenditure of households with an annual disposable income of one million dollars. It identified the expenditure of two thousand dollars or less on charitable and benevolent causes as a normal and acceptable level.[2] If this represents an accurate reflection of the spending of that cross-section of society, it indicates that the funding of many of our benevolent or philanthropic organisations comes from the middle class and working families. The text never suggested that the enjoyment of wealth should be linked with social responsibility.
The divorcing of gain from community responsibility, and the worship of the great gods commerce and unregulated market forces as ends in themselves, are all expressions of a largely unquestioning acceptance of materialism. We may feel as though we are speaking in a vacuum, but it is as a challenge to this, amongst other things, that we must refuse to be silent in public about the priority of the transcendent and the non-material.
To return to our starting point. St Peter's confession directs us to declare our faith in a public arena. Likewise, the eucharist – interpreted as sacrifice – offers us a fundamental philosophical basis from which an important component of Christian action can be justified. It provides a context in which we place human work. 'The work of human hands', as we describe the eucharistic bread in the offertory prayers, is located in the midst of community, community understood as an existential reality, not a convenient construct. Thus understood, the eucharist also sees work neither as an end in itself, nor for purely economic gain, but something whose means and ends must both be considered in terms of a greater context – the fulfilment of the purposes of God.
We are invited to declare our faith publicly, and to resist the pressure to be excluded from public space in so doing. The proclamation of the gospel is no Protestant aberration, but a Catholic fundamental. And the doctrine of the eucharistic sacrifice is not part of the temporary baggage of the Anglo-Catholicism of the Congresses, to fade away along with the disappearance of birettas, but is an equally basic ingredient in Christian self-definition in the face of a potentially very differently articulated culture.
Notes
- When liturgical renewal was reaching its peak in the 50s and 60s with both liturgical texts and ceremonies, the late Dr Michael Ramsey offered a timely warning about modern offertory prayers that could express a shallow attitude, encouraging the worshippers to think of sacrifice primarily in terms of the visible liturgical symbols and actions, or what they were doing. Nothing, he reminded his readers, should distract from the perception that Christ's own action at Calvary was the only sacrifice; if the eucharist was sacrificial, it was so only inasmuch as it had a direct relationship with that primary sacrifice. (Michael Ramsey, 'The Parish Communion', in Durham Essays and Addresses) If Ramsey in the 50s and 60s warned of shallow sacrificial theology, it is much more likely today that students in theological colleges may at best be familiar with the term sacrifice as one appearing in debates several hundred years past, and not have even the shallow understanding that Ramsey deplored. A significant loss? I suspect so.
- 'Rich in Melbourne: How Much Money do you Need?' in Inside Melbourne, vol. 3 no 37, 24/9/2000.
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