Painting Fakes

This weekend I did one of my occasional preaching gigs at my church. The topic was “what is a good Christian?” and the passages Matthew 11:25-30 and Romans 8:1-17. It’s kind of an introduction to a huge subject which is at the heart of Christian teaching. The background to the passages is a religious environment in 1st century Judaism dominated by the Pharisees. In human terms, the Pharisees were not bad people – in fact, they could be seen as very good. They had a strict interpretation of the Jewish faith, believing it was essential to obey not only the entire laws of Moses, but various extrapolations, interpretations and additions to the law and prophets by Jewish rabbis. The result was 100s of different laws, dealing with issues from how to punish murderers to how men should cut their hair. Being faithful to God involved obeying all of these laws. There’s nothing unique about the Pharisees. There are plenty of Christian Pharisees around, whole churches of them in fact. A...

Theologians tell us that God is omnipotent (that is, all-powerful), omniscient (all-knowing), and that he (or she) is loving (or more so, that his nature is to love). If God had only one or two of these characteristics, Christianity would take on a very different character. For instance, if God was all powerful and loving but not all-knowing, he would do his best by us but would be inclined to make a lot of mistakes. If he was all-knowing and loving but not all powerful he would be consumed with despair. If he was all-knowing and all-powerful but not loving he would play with us, carry out experiments on us, even deliberately harm us. As it is, we are taught that God is all-knowing, all powerful and loving. He knows what we need, is able to give it to us, and wishes to do so. This generates one of the biggest problems people of all backgrounds have with Christianity. If God is like this, why is the world so filled with pain and suffering? Surely God has either got it wrong (he ...

For some strange reason I’ve been thinking this week about the movie Galaxy Quest, and its relationship to fundamentalism. For those who haven’t seen the movie, it’s a very funny send-up of Star Trek. The cast members of “Galaxy Quest”, a long-discontinued TV science fiction series, now eke out a soul-destroying career making appearances at fan conventions and answering inane questions about the show. After one such appearance the actor who played the Captain is approached by a group of people in Galaxy Quest uniforms saying they need his help to combat hostile aliens. Assuming it’s another request for an appearance, he accepts. It turns out that an alien civilisation has picked up transmissions of the show, and having no concept of fiction has assumed that they are “historical documents”. In order to win their own war against insect-like alien oppressors they adopt Galaxy Quest technology, building real spaceships on the pattern of the cheesy 1970’s SF sets, modelling their uniforms a...

Moses, the greatest of Hebrew prophets, was a member of the first Hebrew stolen generation. As such, he brings a message of hope to current stolen generation people in Australia and around the world. Moses’ Birth and Rescue At the time of Moses birth, the Hebrews were a minority race in Egypt, and Pharoah had decided to reduce their numbers by having all their newborn male children thrown into the Nile. No doubt over time the women would then have no choice but to marry Egyptian men, and the Hebrews would be gradually assimilated into the Egyptian population. Sound familiar? Of course the Hebrews didn’t just comply. Their midwives put themselves at great risk by failing to carry our Pharoah’s instructions. No doubt many mothers hid their children from the Egyptian authorities for as long as possible, and as we will see there would have been plenty of Egyptians who were prepared to help them. Moses’ mother was one of these resisters. At first she hid her newborn child from view. When he...

I just read one of those horrible books that everyone should read. It’s called Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade and How We Can Fight It and it’s written by David Batstone, former editor of Sojourners magazine and long-time social activist. Batstone reports that there are somewhere around 27 million slaves in the world today, even though slavery is not lawful anywhere in the world. This book describes how it happens. Beginning with his own discovery that his favourite Indian restaurant in San Francisco was staffed by slaves, he takes us on a tour of slavery around the world. He tells us about: Young girls from poor rural communities recruited to work as waitresses or domestics in the city, only to find themselves forced to work as prostitutes Family groups in South Asia imprisoned on the premises of brickworks or rice mills, forced to work long hours to pay off fictitious debts and hunted down if they try to escape Children abducted to serve as soldiers and “wives” in ...

While we were on holidays we visited Mt Gambier in South Australia, famous for its beautiful crater lakes. The lakes were indeed beautiful, and we had fun walking around them. They are the visible part of a much larger water system, most of which is underground in limestone caves and aquifers. It forms the main water source for the 23,000 residents of Mt Gambier town, and the amount of water taken out, along with falling rainfall, means that the water table has dropped and many places which were lakes when Europeans first came here are now dry craters with trees growing in the bottom. I’m tired of worrying about climate change, and besides I was on holidays. So instead, what caught my imagination were some of the other human interventions. Just up the road from our caravan park is a stone and concrete causeway, running along the side of the road cutting and looking out over Blue Lake. It’s a bulky structure, built entirely by volunteer labour straight after the Great War. A plaque ther...

I’ve recently read Melville’s Billy Budd and other tales . Melville, ex-sailor and adventurer, had a lot of success with his rollicking sea adventures. However from the publication of Moby Dick onwards he sailed into murkier moral and symbolic territory, lost most of his readership, and spent the latter part of his life working as a customs inspector. Most of these stories come from that later period, when he was struggling to make a living as a writer and with the nature of good and evil. Billy Budd itself was first published 40 years after his death and it shows – no living author would allow a story to be published with that many digressions! Yet the story is the best and (digressions excepted) most gripping example of the moral landscape Melville painted in a number of stories in this collection. Billy Budd himself is the “handsome sailor”, an innocent, a peacemaker and source of admiration. His opponent, Claggart, is a man “naturally depraved” who takes a dislike to Budd and...