People of the Holy Name

ADDRESS GIVEN BY BISHOP GARRY WEATHERILL, WARDEN OF CHNin the Community House Chapel on Holy Name Day, 7.8.13.

Come, Holy Spirit, giver of life and love, grant us for our hallowing thoughts that pass into prayer, prayer that passes into love and love that passes into life with you forever.

In 1974 I was one of 600 students who enrolled in Anthropology 1 at the University of Adelaide.  The topic had never been offered at the university before.  It was the sort of thing that every trendy young 1970’s person wanted to do: to understand about humanity and to look at foreign cultures and to try and understand a bit more about ourselves.  And so with six hundred others I crammed into a small lecture theatre – if you didn’t get there at least twenty minutes early, you didn’t get a seat.  We sat all over the steps, and stood at the back, and listened to amazing lectures about the Trobrian Islanders and witchcraft among the Azandi in Africa and reading chickens’ entrails in Nigeria.  It was marvellous!  I loved it!  I went to every tutorial, and the Tutor was a man called Anthony.  He was a New Zealander, and he insisted on calling me Peter.  For some reason he thought that, in the class list, I was Peter White and Garry Weatherill was another person.  So he would write on my tutorial papers, “Well done, Peter. An excellent effort.” - even though it said Garry on the front.  About half way through the year I got a letter from the university saying that as I hadn’t submitted any work or attended any tutorials, I was precluded from sitting the exam!  So I raced up and said to Anthony, “I’m actually not Peter.  I’m Garry.”  He said, “Oh, aren’t you Peter?”  I said, “No, I’m not.”  So that was cleared up (but I didn’t do very well in the end of year examination). 

About twenty years before that, I learnt about my own name, Garry.   I found it very hard to say as a baby, and apparently I used to call myself Gug; so in the family I was known as Gug.  My father insisted on calling me Gug everywhere – “Come on, Gug,” he’d say – until I was about seven, when I said, “For heaven’s sake, Dad, my name’s Garry!  Get it right!”

The university story is about recognition and understanding.  The story about my dad is really about recognition and personhood, about maturity and recognising who I really was.  I was no longer a baby who couldn’t say his name.  I was somebody called Garry.  I might’ve only been seven, but I was trying to understand who I was and how I fitted in the world.  An important part of that was knowing my name was Garry.

These days, of course, anybody called Garry is recognisably from about 1952 to 1965.  There are not many modern Garrys.  I guess it was the influence of Garry Cooper on a generation of parents.  But that’s what I’ve got, and so I’m a Bishop Garry – sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? – I should be Bishop Simon or Bishop Charles or Bishop Roland.  Not Garry!  But it’s the name my parents gave me, and it’s bound up with my identity as a human being, and about my maturity as a human being.  This is who I am.       

Today we celebrate the Holy Name of Jesus:  Joshua – God saves; Jesus, the Son of God, the one who is at the heart of everything we do and are as Christian people; the Name that means so much to us, and the Name that’s all about our identity and our maturity as well as about the identity and maturity of the Lord himself.  I think we don’t need to worry too much about his maturity.  I think it can be assumed.  But as we seek to be his disciples, those people who are marked as belonging to Jesus, people of the Holy Name, Paul gives us some deeply uncomfortable reflections, doesn’t he?

In that wonderful passage to the Colossians which is normally read at weddings (that’s where you hear it most) he talks about the characteristics of the people who carry the Holy Name.  Listen to those characteristics again: “Forgive each other; clothe yourselves with love which binds everything together in perfect harmony; take on compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience.”  I’ve been around the Community of the Holy Name long enough to know that sometimes you see compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience; sometimes you don’t.  I’ve belonged to enough communities - my own family and other communities – to know how hard it is, in the rough and tumble of everyday life, to be patient with the people who drive you crazy, to be meek when you know that you’re right, to be humble when you should be celebrating your many gifts, to be kind when you’re just exhausted, to be compassionate yet again when you’d rather just give up.  Above all, Paul says, put on that hard thing, forgiveness, which is at the heart of every Christian relationship. 

If we are truly to reflect the nature of Christ and are to come to the full stature, to maturity in Christ, we need to be experts at forgiveness when we fail in those other characteristics – and how hard it is to forgive people when we are truly hurt.  It’s easy to forgive little hurts.  But at those times when we feel deeply rejected by the ones whom we ought to be able to trust, when we feel that our love is not returned, when we feel that we are taken for granted, it’s hard to forgive.  And yet those of us who seek to be followers of the Lord Jesus need to take these invitations very seriously indeed:  kindness, compassion, humility, meekness, patience and that hard thing, forgiveness.  Yes, we can sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, and do all sorts of things in the name of the Lord, but unless in our everyday relationships, in the rough and tumble of going down the street, or in parish communities, unless it’s in those ordinary, everyday relationships, that we see real Christian maturity, we will never reflect the true nature of Christ.

Over this last weekend the Diocese of Ballarat has had three consultations, with over a hundred people participating, as we looked at the possibility of ordaining women to the Priesthood.  And I’ve been deeply encouraged by the kindness and the meekness and the humility and the compassion that people have shown to others with whom they disagree.  Twenty-five years ago a Ballarat priest said on National Television, “You might as well ordain a meat pie as ordain a woman.”  That sort of rudeness and pain and deliberate damage to other Christians ought never to be part of our common life.  I was deeply encouraged over the last three days by the real sense of Christian maturity that people who have deeply differing opinions about this important matter showed to each other in their careful and respectful conversations.  I don’t know what the outcome is going to be – I know what I want it to be.  But we don’t always get what we want – not straight away, anyway.  But I know that in that time together the people in my Diocese who participated in those conversations were actually living the life of the Lord, in their giving way to each other, in listening carefully and respectfully to each other, in praying with each other, and in not reacting with flash or with pain when difficult things were said.  And I have great hope that we might actually move towards some common ground in the Diocese of Ballarat.

Now that’s no different from every other Christian community.  All of us from time to time flash unkindly at others.  Yet if we are truly to be people of the Holy Name we need to reflect the nature of Christ and the maturity of Christ, and live lives that are thankful, and based on that hard thing, forgiveness.  If we do know how to base our lives around giving way to each other, it might actually just be possible for us to “do everything we do in the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ”, and so come to the measure of the full stature of Christ, to true maturity as his sons and daughters, as his brothers and sisters, as his friends.