Ordinary III: A Thanksgiving for Australia

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. 

A Prayer Book for Australia contains a prayer called “A Thanksgiving for Australia” and it is written by aboriginal priest Lenore Parker, whom some might remember as a visitor to this parish two years ago.

The prayer goes:

God of Holy Dreaming, Great Creator Spirit,
from the dawn of creation you have given your children the good things of Mother Earth.
You spoke and the gum tree grew.
In the vast desert and dense forest, and in cities at the water’s edge,
Creation sings your praise.
Your presence endures as the rock at the heart of our Land.
When Jesus hung on the tree you heard the cries of all your people and became one with your wounded ones: the convicts, the hunted, the dispossessed.
The sunrise of your Son coloured the earth anew,
and bathed it in glorious hope.
In Jesus we have been reconciled to you, to each other and to your whole creation.
Lead us on, Great Spirit, as we gather from the four corners of the earth; enable us to walk together in trust from the hurt and shame of the past into the full day which has dawned in Jesus Christ.
Amen

“A Thanksgiving for Australia” stands out as one of the few examples of contributions to the prayer book made by women, and the only contribution made to the prayer book by an Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander person.

The prayer is loved by many because of its evocative language, which recalls the thanksgiving language of the psalms, its re-framing of the redemption narrative within an Australian context, and most of all its core message of hope that within the Body of the Christ the painful shattering of relations between settlers and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people might be reconciled.

But what few people know about this prayer is that when the Diocese of Sydney refused to adopt A Prayer Book for Australia, it cited Mother Lenore’s prayer as one of the reasons why APBA was unsuitable for use among believing Anglicans.

The commission whose job it was to assess the orthodoxy of A Prayer Book for Australia prepared a report in which it outlined, in detail, its reasons for recommending that Sydney not adopt the prayer book.

Most of these reasons were centred on what Sydney considered to be profound shifts in Eucharist theology that the proposed prayer book contained, in particular the Second Order of Holy Communion, which Sydney argued was too Catholic.

The Commission believed that the structure of the Second Order of Holy Communion resembled the Roman rite too closely, and was particularly objectionable because it implied Christ’s word and Holy Spirit operated on the Eucharistic elements to change them from being simply bread and wine.  

The commission’s objections to Mother Lenore’s prayers were different—and more cultural than theological.  

While expressing ‘concern for the reconciliation of indigenous and non-indigenous Australians in Christian terms” the commission took issue with A Thanksgiving for Australia on the grounds that it was, a way, too Aboriginal.

The Commission noted “The claim that God has revealed ‘[His] purpose in [the land’s] cycles of death and renewed life’ reflects a natural theology foreign to the Bible.”

Before we unpack this, it might be useful to understand what Sydney meant by the term natural theology.

At its most basic, natural theology, is a system of belief in which the existence of God can be deduced from the experience of nature.

In other words, God can be known definitively through His creation: the earth, the sky, the elements of water, fire, etc.

It’s often contrasted with revealed theology, in which God’s existence is largely or exclusively deduced from scripture.

Within this worldview, the natural world is an imperfect, even false mirror of Divine purpose. It is fallen as humanity is fallen.

Scripture alone is carrier of truth—the only reliable means by which God’s revelation can be known.  

Of course, in the Jewish context of the psalms, including our psalm today, there wasn’t a part of the natural or political order that wasn’t intimately connected with the purposes of God, or which didn’t prove God’s intervention in the world.

The narrators of the psalms didn’t always understand what those purposes were, but they were proved by triumphs against the enemies of God’s people, and by the beauty and bounty of God’s creation.

They were even proved by God’s apparent indifference to the sufferings of his people.

And this brings us to an important point.

Our understanding of God, which is shaped by our Tradition, is not culturally neutral.

Because it is made up of an inherited Jewish tradition, and subsequent Hellenic and Roman traditions—to name only a few—it is in fact culturally diverse.

Consider the suffering of Jesus at Gethsemane in Mark, versus the more Stoic Jesus at Gethsemane in Luke.

These aren’t merely different takes on Jesus the man. They are different understandings of what Jesus’ kingship looked like, informed by the cultural assumptions of different audiences.

Therefore, it begs the question: why is A Thanksgiving for Australia, grounded as it is, in an Aboriginal relationship to country, unacceptable to the kind of Christianity that Sydney represents?

Might not an Aboriginal understanding of country be, in fact, an essential starting point for healing historical relations between Christians and Aboriginal people?

This question is thrown into sharper relief by the events of this summer.

I think we might be in a different place, as a country, if we saw our connexion to country as connected more meaningfully to our connexion to God.

Perhaps, favouring the clean world of Scripture above the flesh and the world is a kind of spirituality we can no longer afford.

The Incarnation itself, I believe, challenges us to re-think this spirituality.

The Word was not made flesh so that flesh might be condemned, but rather that it might be raised to oneness with God.

The summer we’ve seen vast swathes of our continent burn. We’ve seen the destruction of animal habitats and human communities. Our largest cities have been choking under a thick blanket of smoke.

The evidence is indisputable: changing climatic conditions, caused by human factors, will make these types of environmental catastrophes more common in the future.  

And it seems the Church is ill-equipped, in many ways, to theologise loving the earth.

And that’s a problem.

Because if we believe God created heaven and earth and appointed us as stewards of His creation then we must also believe that heaven and earth reflect God’s purposes truthfully—if mysteriously—and that our relationship with creation has a sacred underpinning.  

If we believed this, we might be better stewards of this ancient land.

If we had the humility to acknowledge that Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders understood better how to live in and love this land—while still being fallible humans like us—we might be more faithful Christians.

“Lead us on, Great Spirit, as we gather from the four corners of the earth; enable us to walk together in trust from the hurt and shame of the past into the full day which has dawned in Jesus Christ.”

Amen