Living in a previous house, one morning we looked out our dining room window and there we saw it. A great big hole. It wasn’t there the night before. We hadn’t spontaneously decided to install a swimming pool, at least as far as we remembered. But there it was: a hole.
Long story short, it became apparent that an underground council waterpipe had been leaking, obviously for quite some time, and eroded the soil. Then the grass gave way and we saw the hole in all its emptiness. It was big enough to stand up in. It took the council workers several days to repair the hole, closing the street in the process, much to the delight of our neighbours. The council workers who arrived said helpful things like “wow! We’ve never seen a sinkhole that big before!” which only magnified our feeling of dread, doom, and despair.
The hole was far enough away from our house that we, thankfully, didn’t have to move out, and the house itself wasn’t damaged. Because it was of the council’s doing, they footed the bill, much to our relief!
I was reminded of that incident by today’s well-known gospel reading about building houses on rocks rather than sand. It’s what I like to call a subterranean parable! Everything can look fine on the surface, as it did in our backyard for the years before it didn’t, but underneath things are falling apart, subsiding, eroding, and the whole edifice is at risk of crumbling down.
Here’s another story.
I was in my previous role, and it was Monday morning. A big news story had broken over the weekend that impacted my team. We didn’t have forewarning it was coming, so it landed on us like an unwelcome guest. Our staff meetings were always 9am on Mondays – over 40 of us, coffees in hand, some having just arrived after the school run, all gathered in our staff room. Usually, we had an agenda but today I decided the best thing to do would be to throw the agenda out the window.
We needed to talk.
We needed to listen.
I said to my team ‘here’s a chance, right now, for people to share what your feeling, and it’ll take as long as it takes, and we’ll listen, without comment, without editorialising, without judgment’, and so that’s what we did. We’d done quite a lot of work in the years prior to create a safe enough space where people knew they could speak up, knew they could disagree well, knew that they would be listened to, be heard.
The reactions of my staff to the media story were wide and varied. There was anger. There was sorrow. There was compassion. There was silence. There were questions. There was grasping for simplicity. All the things you’d expect were there and more. The usual people who always spoke at a meeting, spoke up. The ones who didn’t always speak up, they spoke up too.
And it took 90 minutes, and much had been aired, and spoken, and heard. The next day my leadership team and I distilled down what we heard and wrote it up and sent it out. That exercise took even longer, because we wanted to hold carefully what we heard, listen attentively to what we didn’t hear, try and capture the themes without oversimplifying it, provide clarity and direction without pretending there wasn’t still ambiguity. It was a fine, delicate balancing act. It took energy and time and prayer and conversation.
It was, as I reflect on it now, our own act of reconciliation.
The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has written a wonderful book called The Power of Reconciliation. He says reconciliation has four parts: incarnation, crucifixion, new life, and completion.[1] In other words, it makes Christ visible, requires sacrifice, must be lived out and grown into, and will be completed at the end of all things when perfect justice rules the earth.
Reconciliation takes time. It is more than just the shaking of hands where we may part as friends. Making Christ visible through reconciliation means intentionally, deliberately, with every effort, going across the aisle to those who may hold a different view to us, walking in their shoes a while, getting to know them as people with passions, families, hobbies, languages, cultures, diets, preferences, as people.
That’s where reconciliation becomes sacrificial. It requires us to get out of our comfort zones, to step down off our hobby horses, to alight from our pedestals, to pack away any self-righteousness, and to embrace another, to call one another not just friend, but brother or sister.
Reconciliation requires us to do subterranean work. It means attending to those things that normally are out of view but are crucially important. In an Evensong service here recently, I talked about how I think the Anglican church runs on cups of tea. I have a friend who talks about teapot diplomacy. In other words, we talk, we share, we listen, we get to know one another while drinking tea from a pot, sitting down at a table sharing a meal, passing the plate, breaking the bread, drinking the wine.
That’s true when we cross cultures, of whatever form they take.
Attending to this subterranean work means that we have firm foundations. Te Pouhere, which we mark today, is the constitution of the Anglican Church of Aotearoa New Zealand. It is the foundation on which our three tikanga, our three cultures of Pasifika, Māori and Pākeha sit. It is the table at which we eat together, the place where our partnership forms and from where it flourishes. Like at any table there’s great debate, strong views, difference, lively discussion.
But here’s the thing: we stay at the table. We keep sharing stories. We keep breaking bread. We keep listening. We keep learning. We keep understanding. We remember and honour those who sat at this table before us. We make sure the foundations are strong enough for the generations that are yet to come.
It’s hard work, takes time, is costly, requires patience, means we learn how to disagree well and forgive often. The result is joy and flourishing. We come to learn that it is always better to come together to the table than to sit apart. As we do that, we make Christ visible, we set aside our own ambition for the greater good, we live out and grow into new life in Christ, and we get a glimpse of that glorious day when all will gather together, when perfect justice will rule the earth, when all will be well and all manner of things will be well. Oh, what a day that will be!
In the meantime, we have bread to break, wine to share, and cups of tea to drink.
Amen.
[1] Justin Welby, The Power of Reconciliation, London, Bloomsbury, 2022, p.34.
I remember this day well. A real turning point in the team culture! I love the idea of stepping into that space of hospitality to understand others, very in tune with this year's Matariki theme.