Church Inanities - September post 2010

Yesterday, a week following the Christchurch earthquake of 4 September 2010, Anglicans held a morning service in Cathedral Square. It had to be alfresco -- bits were still dropping off the cathedral with aftershocks. We got to see a tiny bit of the service on TV news, and that bit featured a woman called the Cathedral Theologian, preaching. Cathedral Theologian...? Aren’t they all supposed to be theologians? Do they have this woman vicariously think about God for them?

Anyway, to my horror, this is what she plainly told us on national TV: “God was good to us. No one was killed...” I am not making this up, and I have not misquoted. And this is pernicious pietistic claptrap. Was God not good to the Haitians or the Chileans, when they had their earthquakes with many fatalities, or to the tsunami victims of Sumatra or Samoa? Or was that some other God? Where did they get this woman? And who thought this level of humbug was adequate for a service as important as this one was? Anyone who wants to know what a real Christian response to such disaster sounds like might read Archbishop Rowan Williams's teaching following the assault on the World Trade Centre in New York.

Embarrassing is what this was. It panders yet again to superstition and credulity. It exemplifies why so many thoughtful and perceptive people are conspicuous by their absence from the church. It might have made some sense to take the view of I Kings 19:11 -- “The Lord was not in the earthquake.” The earthquake happened not because God was sitting up there doing things, but because tectonic plates were in collision, as they always have been.

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Since I last had anything much to do with public worship, some meddler has invented a new Liturgical Season. It comes right in the middle of the Season of Pentecost, and it’s called Creation. Well that’s OK, I suppose. It does give a good chance to feature major ecological concerns.

But yesterday, at Snells and in Warkworth, there was a Litany of Creation which makes me wonder if we urgently need a Mahurangi Resident Theologian (an intellectually honest one). First we got:

We gather our animal family of Creation to worship with us,
All our kin living on this planet,
from the busiest bee to the tallest giraffe.

It’s well meant, of course, but it’s the kind of stuff which makes me grind my teeth and wonder if anyone has formed an escape committee. Our kin include also the cockroaches, wetas and great white sharks, but of course they’re not “busy” or cuddly. This is the dumbing down of worship, and one longs for Cranmer or Knox. But then came:

We remember our ancient relatives who became extinct,
Dinosaurs, dodos and the moa,
giant marsupials and the woolly mammoths.

I got into some trouble at breakfast this morning for venturing that that might indeed be an accurate description of my ancient relatives. But seriously, who writes this stuff? Is it for grown-ups? I am thankful I never actually met any of my ancient relatives on a dark night. (I did, now I come to think of it, have an aunt called Dodo.)

And so the litany continued, getting worse if anything. Well I’m sorry, but it’s too twee, too cute. And I don’t think it is worship.