Scotch College

The BeginningChaplain’s Reflection

‘The beginning’ seemed a good place to start the assembly readings this Term.

Our familiarity with the first chapters of the Bible means we easily slip into assuming we have nothing more to learn. With the Bible, this is seldom the case – it is after all described as ‘alive and active, and sharper than any two edged sword’!

However, if in time past we got caught up in the old arguments of ‘creation versus evolution’ we may have become locked into unproductive and misleading ways of interpreting these foundational passages of the Bible.

After all, the first two chapters of the Bible are essentially stories culminating in a man and a woman. We miss the insights into humanity if we dismiss the passages on account of outworn misconstructions.

So, the School Captain, Nathan Su, read the first five verses of Genesis to us on Friday. Seldom have so few words been read so eloquently and heard so attentively. I would have liked to have heard Nathan read the whole chapter but the heat was stifling in the Memorial Hall and in five verses we already had so many great ideas that it was difficult to decide which to speak to.

The gods of our age are subtly hidden; in my youth they were The Hidden Persuaders. I used my holiday visits to Chadstone Shopping Centre and the Gruen Transfer to help expose them. They move us to ‘scripted disorientation’ in shopping malls, so that ‘the consumer’s decision-making consciousness is enhanced by cognitive psychology and neuroadaptational evolutionary influences’.

We can sell almost anything. I liked the advertisers’ efforts at marketing a holiday in Baghdad: the ultimate experience in ‘extreme adventure holiday’.

In a story from ancient Baghdad, the Enuma Elish, intergenerational conflict between the old and the young (gods) is the creative source of the world.

In an ancient setting it promotes the idea that might is right and that greed is good and if you’re lucky, you might have the favour of the gods; ideas that we in the modern West have espoused.

Beyond the shopping mall and the Gruen Transfer, another local expression of this espousal of ancient Babylon’s gods is surely Melbourne’s 20th century ‘Southbank Cathedral’, Crown Casino, where the goddess Fortuna is pursued and adored.

Following the Bali bombings Michael Leunig drew a cartoon depicting a beer drinking character with a Bali T-shirt looking at some posters that had fallen from the wall. They read: ‘She’ll be right, No Worries, Comfortably Numb, Not a Problem, Chill Out’, and ‘Party!’ In his childish script across the top of the page he wrote ‘The Collapse of an Entire Belief System’. With the stock market collapse and the move into ‘uncharted waters’ a time has come to ask again about our values.

The ancient Hebrews told an alternative and gentler story of a more peaceful and ordered world and of a Creator who, in producing a good and pleasing world, first creates life-giving, truth inspiring and heart-warming light. It is a deity who, we will discover in a subsequent Assembly, at the story’s climax, is represented within his created world by the man and the woman. They are God-like.

We are challenged by these ancient stories to review our values, goals and identity. These reveal the god/s to whose character we are being conformed.

They tell whose we are and whom we serve.