Ted Witham

No deal on debts

The most ferocious parable Jesus told was one about two debtors. The lord calls in the first of the debtors, who owed a colossal sum, and demands he pay up. He threatens to thrown the slave in prison and enslave his family. The slave begs for mercy, for time to pay. The lord has compassion on him, and gives him more than time to pay: he forgives the debt and released him.

This forgiven slave then leaves the lord’s presence and meets a fellow-slave who owes him a much smaller debt. He throttles him and demands immediate payment. The fellow-slave falls to his knees and begs for mercy. The first slave refuses to respond. When the lord finds out how the forgiven slave has behaved, he reverses his generosity and has him tortured until he repays everything he owed.

‘And so,’ concludes Jesus, ‘will my heavenly Father do to you if each of you does not forgive brother or sister from the heart.’ (Matthew 18:35)

Kenneth Bailey describes the economic back story. In each village in the Middle East a principal landowner controlled all the cropping and grazing in the village. This abu or sheikh was like a feudal lord. Every aspect of economic life in the village derived from the sheikh.

Jesus makes first a comparison between this village economy and the economy of God. The lord in the story demonstrates a generosity that goes far beyond justice when he ignores the request for time to pay, and instead releases his servant and forgives the debt. This lord is not behaving as a prudent sheikh would behave. A prudent sheikh would be generous by making a deal. This lord reveals instead the divine generosity, which gives total freedom to those who seek it.

The expectation is that those who are graced with freedom should reveal the same generosity in dealing with others. The forgiven slave in the parable acts in the opposite manner than the lord expects and so receives the worst punishment the lord can inflict on him.

But as in the challenging parable of the dishonest steward, Jesus foregrounds the absolute generosity of the lord, the sheikh of the village and not so much the behaviour of the servants. Can you imagine the sheikh of your village forgiving the debt absolutely? If so, can you imagine a little of the extraordinary generosity of the divine economy? Once you start to get this picture of God you can begin to participate in the generous economy.

Imagine if we treated our sister or brother not simply with justice, but by releasing everyone from all the claims we might make on them. Our village, our community, would be marked by a wonderful freedom and genuine intimacy one with another.

At its best, we can glimpse this divine economy at work in our church and even in other communities.

But this parable holds up a mirror to the messy world of commerce as well as God’s economy.

Jesus’ attention is caught by the differential between the first and second slaves. The first slave owed his lord ten thousand talents. My Bible notes that a talent was equal to 6,000 denarii. One talent is what a labourer could earn in 6,000 days. The debt, 10,000 times 6,000 denarii, is in the order of eight billion dollars in contemporary money. Let’s not forget that this is a parable, and there is an element of exaggeration, but even so, the money owed by this slave is tying up at least the economic operation of this village, or more. The Gross National Income of our neighbour East Timor is only 2½ billion dollars.

Jesus contrasts this figure with the debt of the other slave: 100 denarii. This is about $14,000. It is not a trifle for someone who might earn only 300 denarii a year, but it’s a possible debt. The sort of debt I know people have on the credit card or in car finance. If I owed $14,000 and was asked for immediate payment, I could make it, but with difficulty.

Note the contrast in the debt: billions to hundreds. The economy of a nation contrasted with the economy of a small household. The first slave owed six hundred thousand times what the second slave owed.

This differential rings bells: the Institute for Policy Studies says that CEO’s are paid 340 times the average worker in 2011, compared to 42-1 in 1980. (The Institute calls itself a ‘progressive think-tank’, which probably means that is to the left politically, but its figures are compelling.)

Jesus understands the economic system where the sheikh holds the life of every villager in his hands. Everything is the ultimately the sheikh’s gift, and villagers can suffer enormously under greedy or incompetent village management. But surprisingly, Jesus does not criticise the system. His fierce words are for those whose greed exploits the system whatever it is, for those who feel entitled to hundreds of thousands times more resources than his fellow-citizens.

The system, Jesus seems to say, may evolve and repair itself slowly. But whatever the system the urgent wrong to right is the exploitation by the rich of the poor.

The system itself will reward greed: what is asked of us is to express our moral outrage that people feel so entitled.

In the end, Jesus does suggest a subversion of the system: rather than make generous deals with debtors, debts should be forgiven so that no member of the community is beholden to another. The existence of power of one brother or sister over another especially through indebtedness threatens the free functioning of a just and loving community.

We are challenged to make sure that we do not have claims over other people’s lives. Are there debts we can forgive? If there are we should forgive them now. Do we hold a sense of entitlement to things that should belong to all? What does it mean that I can live modestly on $30,000 a year and over a billion of my brothers and sisters are struggling to live on less than $2 a day? How can I let go of that claim?

When the parable is held up as a mirror to the messy world of commerce, these are some of the questions that are revealed. The big question is: How do we parallel the generosity of God?

Jesus tells the parable of the two debtors

Christian power: an oxymoron?

Yesterday the residents’ association of our village held elections. There was quite a tussle over the position of Chairman of the Social Committee, with arguments about the Constitution and fights about procedure. The sub-text was reasonably easy to discern: two strong people clashing and both leading with their shadows!

This made me reflect on the nature of power in Christian communities. You can’t avoid the reality of power and it usually plays out in the dance between leader and community.

When St Benedict wrote his Rule – or re-wrote that of the Master – he envisaged the Abbot as God for the monks. They owed him total obedience and he was elected for life. His absolute power was balanced by the requirement that he act to further the needs of the community.

Benedictine communities could become dysfunctional. When they did, some believed it was because of the lifelong dictatorship of the Abbot. When St Francis of Assisi in the 12th Century, some four hundred years later, came to set out his ideal community, he made sure that its leaders had limited terms. When they had finished as leader, they went back to being a little brother again. Franciscan leaders are called Ministers, and their focus is to serve their brothers and sisters. Power, for St Francis, was exercised always by giving it away.

The downside of Franciscan leadership is that it can be chaotic, and when Franciscan communities are dysfunctional, it often manifests in fights that no-one has the authority to resolve.

Roger Shutz arrived in France from Switzerland during World War 2 looking for a site near Lyon to establish a community of reconciliation. By 1945, the community at Taizé was working, with Brother Roger as its founding Prior. Leadership, for him, was that of Prior, first among equals. He was evidently aware of the shortcomings of both Benedictine and mendicant leadership, and his Rule shows a new emphasis. Not only should the Prior consult with the majority of the community, but should also pay special attention to those in the community without power: the young, the voiceless, the marginalised, and allow those voices to be celebrated and followed.

Brother Roger’s style of leadership resonates well with our era. Its downside is that it requires a great gift of discernment to hear the voice of Christ when it is not the voice of mainstream members of the Christian community.

I beleive that the heritage of Christian leadership has much to teach us. We are, we claim, the Body of Christ, and the way in which we exercise power should reflect Christ’s way of power.

Firstly, Benedict teaches us power is for the community more than the individual. Francis teaches us that power becomes oppression when it is held for oneself. Roger of Taizé reminds us of the ways the Bible holds up the little one.

These styles of exercising power can be seen in parishes and all Christian communities. There are some parishes where the priest is Father, and Father knows best what is in the interest of his parish. Father initiates people in Christian faith, particularly in the sacrament of baptism, and Father prevents the nasty nature of some people from dominating the parish agenda.

Other leaders are very conscious that their time in the parish is temporary. The minister is there to coach the ministries that were there before she came and will continue after she leaves. She is an enabler, and an encourager, and above all, she models the way in which Christ gave away his power to others.

In other parishes, the smallest member is heard. Children are on worship committees, clients of the soup kitchen design the ministry for the hungry, and the majority give way to the smallest voice with grace and gratitude that in them they have heard the voice of Christ.

Of course,no parish is purely one or the other of these leadership styles. But I hold them up like this partly as a warning that each can be dysfunctional. If we know that Abbots can become dictators, Ministers can be disengaged, and Priors can so honour the voice of the little one that they desert the way of common sense.

Power can spoil any community, and understanding how it works in the Body of Christ can lead to vibrant community living.

Spitting at capitalists

Tax and God
Calls to destroy capitalism and boycott Facebook and Google resonate well with Franciscans. They are a way of dealing with our anger at the greed of corporations and the selling of our personal lives to advertisers. My Facebook wall is filled with slogans against this consumerist plague.

But slogans are not an effective way to critique capitalism. Slogans have no hope of achieving their purpose, because capitalism is so entrenched that its power permeates everything we do. Our slogans will simply accrue to capitalism’s benefit as we use Google or Facebook to shout them. Religion scholar George Gonzalez puts it this way, ‘Capitalism buys and sells futures and shares in the ideas of its own enemies.’

A more thoughtful response will admit the value of capitalism. In the 19th Century, wealthy Christians wanted to respond to the growing urban poverty, and used the new technologies of the industrial revolution to raise many out of poverty into respectable working lives. They poured money into enterprises that not only gave workers the financial means to house and feed their families, but gave them consumer goods, infrastructure like electric lighting, and the sense of well-being that only meaningful work can supply.

The surplus money generated recycled into this system, and most of us in the West have seen the final results of this Christian endeavour in our living standards. Think of the difference in housing, consumer goods, entertainment, and communications in the last fifty years. These are the fruits of capitalism, and few of us protesting its evils are willing to give them up.

In the urbanisation of India and China today, we are seeing millions being lifted out of poverty annually, as the benefits of capitalism trickle down.

When I was young my parents taught me that I should always spend real money that I had actually had earned or owned. I should restrict debt to buying a house, and I should ensure that any shares I owned were shares in real life productive industries.

A rule of thumb current in the sixties was that CEOs should earn no more than four times the wage of their lowest paid employee, and that virtuous companies produced useful goods or provided useful services.

Most people failed to acknowledge the importance of the creative tension between unions and bosses. For this system to work at all the employers need to insist on making a profit to continue the operation of the industry, and the workers’ associations need also to insist that workers are paid fairly and that conditions uphold human dignity.

This ‘modest capitalism’ works. I am neither Calvinist nor conservative, and I believe, for example, that relying on the ‘trickle down’ effect is an abrogation of responsibility, but I understand that this system has its value and should not be easily abandoned. What makes me angry is the distortion of this system. We know the symptoms:

1. Executives paid thousands of times more than their lowest paid employee.
2. People exposed to risk through virtual money, derivatives and futures which relate to nothing in the real world.
3. The commodification of human beings to be sold by giant corporations to advertisers.

These expressions of greed should be condemned, but slogans are not sufficient. We need to understand more fully how the system we have inherited actually works and to thoughtfully articulate good reasons why these practices despoil the vulnerable and destroy our community.

I submit that the responsibility of Franciscans (who are called to be sensitive to the use and abuse of money) is to grow in their understanding of economics, to be real about how capitalism lifts people out of poverty, and from that position of understanding articulate their critique of greed.

Planks and Splinters

Wood shaving lodged in a man’s eye as he sawed.
It hurt, looked nasty, might be infected.
His mate drove him to the emergency ward
of the Royal Hospital to have it inspected.

The triage nurse made the doctor race.
He arrived – and obvious for all to spy –
A railway sleeper protruded from his face,
Embedded deeply in his left eye.

He stretched to help the patient – but in vain he tried.
The plank was longer than his reaching finger.
He had no binocular vision to guide
Tweezers and needles to the splinter.

The plank, buried deeply in his skull,
Had also caused massive brain haemorrhage.
The doctor was totally dull,
Not knowing his capacity to damage.

Grotesque metaphor, slapstick simile.
It rivals the Doug¯Anthony¯All¯Stars.
The Jewish clown claimed our refusal to see
Our plank in their splinters seriously mars.

Ted Witham 1996

Published in Studio: A Journal of Christians Writing

Learning to Talk the Talk in the Community of Faith

Learning to Talk the Talk in the Community of Faith
Review Essay

Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991

Reviewed by Ted Witham

Christian leaders desire to have Christians fully prepared for ministry and mission. They desire a church engaged in activities appropriate for Christian faith, especially worship, service and learning, a community of practice where people go beyond simply identifying as Christian.

Christian leaders in fact spend much energy and time in finding ways of forming Christians, and these ways are often introduced to Christian communities as programs. In my experience, these programs are often resisted. It is very difficult, for example, to establish the catechumenate in an Anglican parish despite its track record as a powerful tool for deepening people’s belonging, believing and acting.

The catechumenate for new Christians, Education for Ministry for Christians seeking to exercise a ministry of leadership in a local community and the preparation of local leaders for ordination as local deacons and priests have been a large part of my professional life. In addition, as a Third Order Franciscan, I am engaged in the formation of novices as they become professed members of the Order.

I have, therefore, a large personal stake in improving the systems by which we introduce people to ministry.

I thank my colleague and friend Craig Mitchell for drawing my attention to Situated Learning. The premise of this short book is that the process by which people become effective in a community of practice is more like socialisation than schooling.

Apprentices learn through their connection to a master, appropriate access to the ‘artefacts’ of their trade, and joining in the talk about their craft. Jean Lave discusses apprentice tailors in West Africa, meat-cutters in US super-markets, and midwives in Mexico. Difficulties with the meat-cutters’ apprenticeship are analysed, and apprentices fail to learn, for example, where there is not a ‘space’ where they can comfortably watch the saws as they are used by journey-men or masters.

Initiates to AA start with a problem with alcohol and end up as members of AA (non-drinking alcoholics) through a stepped process of listening to life-stories and shaping their own.

Situated learning works well when being a full part of the community of practice is more than learning a list of skills and supporting knowledge. Rather than focusing on the learners themselves, situated learning examines the total context in which the learners become members of the community of practice through their initially limited participation in it. As new-comers, they learn from old-timers and gradually become old-timers themselves.

The notion of participation thus dissolves dichotomies between cerebral and embodied activity, between contemplation and involvement, between abstraction and experience; persons, actions and the world are implicated in all thought, speech, knowing and learning. (p. 52)

The key concept of Situated Learning is legitimate peripheral participation, where learners are placed at the edge of the community of practice and they learn by staged participation.

Most of the examples have some rite to mark the beginning of this learning and phase and another at its end where they are recognised as full members of the community of practice. They become practitioners. The rites mark each person as a liminal member of the community, a member, yes, but not yet fully a member.

Rites not only mark the status of individuals, they are also powerful in renewing whole communities, as they focus attention on the role of the community in the formation of its new members. The Lenten rituals of the catechumenate, culminating in baptism (or renewal of vows) provide these markers for catechumens. The ceremonies of novicing and professing mark the beginning and ending of the formation of a Third Order novice.

In situated learning, a mentor may be provided for the learner: a sponsor or novice counsellor. As with an apprentice’s master, this mentor may not actually teach the learner anything about the community’s practices. Their function is to provide the mentor with one exemplar of a member of the community, whose life can be observed by the mentor, and to be the focus of the learner’s connection with the whole community.

In the highly relational community of practice of ministry (as lay, clergy or tertiary), the provision of a mentor highlights that relationships are the central act of all ministry. A sponsor or novice counsellor literally loves the learner into full participation.

Dr Lave surprisingly concludes that a learner becomes a full member of the community of practice when he talks the talk. This conclusion is helpful when the practice in question is ministry as a Christian, as a Christian leader, or as a Franciscan Christian.

It implies that the learner has been exposed to the teachings and stories of the community and reflected on them, and is able to continue that reflection by talking about them. It implies that the learner can participate in worship, either in the pews or the sanctuary, or in the specifically Franciscan practice of the Community Obedience, and that the learner’s ‘talk’ in worship is meaningful and life-giving.

It implies that the learner has had access to the ‘artefacts of the craft’: she has, for example, been able to reflect on what it means to receive Holy Communion in this community, to contribute meaningfully to the service this community engages in, has the tools – Bible, Prayer Book, Third Order Manual – on which her practice is now to be based.

The framework of legitimate peripheral participation takes into account the complexity of real communities of practice. It is:

Becoming a “member such as these” in an embodied telos too complex to be discussed in the narrower and simpler language of goals, tasks and knowledge acquisition. (p. 85)

The parallels between Lave’s concept of situated learning and the formation of Christian people for ministry are clear. The implications for action are more difficult to draw. This way of learning certainly takes the emphasis off the curriculum, what a novice has to learn, and places it on the community and the way it practices its ministry. It similarly de-thrones cerebral learning from the central place it might occupy and places it on the whole person. It suggests that learners should be allowed to do real ministry (as appropriate) and not learn facts about ministry.

This way of learning highlights the mentor-learner relationship, not for the transmission of knowledge, but as a simple symbol of the wider community.

Above all, this way of learning maintains the high importance of ministry to our community and its lived complexity. We attend to new members by building relationships with them at the same time as attending to the quality of our community of practice.

Programs like the catechumenate and EfM have their place, but they are not necessary to forming a more faithful community of practice. What is needed is the willingness of ‘old-timers’ – masters of the faith! – to engage new-comers in talk about ministry and faith, so that they too will come to talk the talk, and the walk will follow.

Christmas post

Christmas Box

Oblong, brown and sealed with tape,
the box appeared with its far-off postmark:
Sydney to Perth; David Jones to the farm.
Uncle Charl’s way of saying ‘Happy Christmas’, and
how much more there was in Sydney.

We all gathered, pushed back my Mum
with the scissors, ‘Wait.’

It was hard to wait. The tape was
cut,
the flaps were
lifted, and our
eyes
grew
large.

Inside, were
trucks of wood, trains and cranes,
clown masks and printing sets,
spinning tops and chemistry sets,
Meccano pieces and Monopoly,
dominoes and frisbies,
helicopters with parachutes,
books and bike parts,
marbles and more.

Vignette IV on Peace

VIGNETTE IV ON PEACE.

Wading birds on leg extensions delicately pick their way through the thrice-salty shallows of the Rottnest lake as if fearful that the hyper-salinity might bite or burn it. They dip their long beaks quickly to harvest a shrimp or tiny insect. Gently they cross the shallows. This is home and they are at home. This is the eternal present of their lives, the way it always is.

We rarely see the massed take-off when they leave for Siberia.

We never see them feeding, breeding on the snowy wastes of the far northern hemisphere – equally their home.

We see only one moment. We see what is.

Vignette III of Peace

VIGNETTE III OF PEACE

The email screamed, “Nine thousand Muslims are coming! Keep them out of our Christian country! They will pervert our children and destroy our way of life.”

The chaplain should not have forwarded the email to me, her boss, whether or not she knew my views on immigration and on Islam.

I should have ignored it.

But I had a gnawing unease. Unless I did something about it, I would go on thinking that way about that chaplain. She had lost my respect, and it was important for me to restore it.

I started refuting the email line by line. Bad plan. That made me angry and made me write angrily. That way inflamed the situation. My first intuition to ignore the email had reason. I stopped writing. I waited a day. I prayed.

Then I wrote back to her, “I am sorry I cannot agree with your email,” I said, “but is it not possible that God wants 9,000 Muslims to come to Australia so that we can share our Christian faith with them?” I sent the email and waited two days.

She sent one more email, “I hadn’t thought of that. You may be right.” And then she apologised, “I am sorry I sent you that email without thinking first.”

Next time I saw her, I thanked her publicly for the commendable work she was doing in a difficult school. In praising her, I felt good about myself.

Vignette I of Peace

VIGNETTE I OF PEACE
The sun warms the western end of the shearing shed, and my back, leaning on the iron corrugations, soaks up the warmth.
Inside, rouseabouts shout, “Ho! Ho! Move up there!” and the shed rumbles with the penned sheep shuffling each other.
The diesel engine throbs on and on, and I hear it whine as a shearer engages the hand-piece on a long blow across the sheep’s back. The shouts of shearers and wool-classers are indecipherable sharp noises above the never-ending rumble. The shearing shed shuffles about on its footings; a machine at work.
But the warm wall, a smoke and a strong cup of tea in my hands, keep it at a distance. Moisture rises from the lush marshmallow plants. Yellow dandelions and green clover carpet the paddock in front of me. A bee buzzes lazily somewhere nearby and I drift drowsily in the afternoon’s warmth.