Nobbling the Hobgoblins (4):
The Hobgoblin of Despair:
nobbling Hanrahan
a sermon by Bob Faser
St. Andrew’s Uniting Church, Bacchus Marsh, Vic.
23rd October 2011

Hanrahan is our fourth and final “hobgoblin”.

We meet Hanrahan in the Australian bush poem “Said Hanrahan”, by “John O’Brien” which was the pen name of a Catholic priest named Patrick Joseph Hartigan, who spent most of his ministry in the southern New South Wales town of Narranderra. Hartigan wrote a great deal of light verse about the various characters he met around the Narranderra area, particularly his Irish-Australian parishioners.

Hanrahan, as you’ve heard in the poem, was the classic pessimist. Whatever was going on in the world or (particularly) in the weather, the response was always the same:

“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“Before the year is out.”

And even when they all weren’t “rooned”, the next time a challenge came around, the response was still the same:

“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“Before the year is out.”

Hanrahan was the classic pessimist. You know they say that if you show someone a glass with water in it half-way up to the top, an optimist would say that the glass was half-full, while a pessimist would say the glass was half empty. (As well, some say that an engineer would say something like, “You know, you can do that job just as well with a much smaller glass.”)

But leaving engineers out of it, Hanrahan was a pessimist, a “glass half empty person”.

And I don’t think it’s any accident that Hanrahan made his gloomy predictions outside a church – as the congregation chatted before worship. Sadly, churches have always had far more than our share of Hanrahan-type thinking.

“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“Before the year is out.”

Talk to many worshippers in any mainstream denomination, particularly those who are old enough to remember the “golden” postwar era of full pews, and you’ll hear many stories of how things have declined in their congregations.

Ask why the churches are declining, and you’ll hear a range of theories as to who or what is to blame: Sunday sport, Sunday trading, out-of-touch denominational leaders (either too conservative or not conservative enough, depending on the denomination – or the individual making the comment), a poor quality of clergy training, a poor quality of clergy, parents who don’t force their children to attend Sunday School, and so on.

Ask what can be done about it, and you’ll hear a range of possible remedies, ranging from turning the church’s clock back to 1954 to copying slavishly the patterns of worship that seem to be working for some other congregations with a much different age profile (or socioeconomic profile) to adopting the latest worship gimmick from the States or the UK. (These gimmicks are often called “fresh expressions of church.”)

Actually, to look at the first question, I believe there are two main reasons why mainstream churches have declined since the ’50s and early ’60s.

The first and most important reason is that there is no longer any pressure for people to attend church for non-religious reasons. So the people who would have attended church for non-religious reasons a generation ago have stopped coming to church.

The second reason is that there are now a greater range of religious choices for those of us who want to be involved in worshipping God alongside other people. A generation ago, people who wanted to attend public worship here in Bacchus Marsh would have had a choice of five Christian denominations: Methodist, Presbyterian, RC, C of E, and Baptist. Today, in addition to the Uniting, Catholic, Anglican, and Baptist churches, there are Jehovah’s Witnesses, Baha’is, the Progressive Home Church, and around four Pentecostal churches. That’s more than double the number of groups gathering for worship (whether Christian or otherwise) here in the Marsh, without even counting those living in the Marsh who choose to travel to other communities to attend other congregations.

This happens in communities all over the western world. People have a greater level of religious choice, which I believe is a good thing. This however means that mainstream Christian denominations, who were once the only game in town in many communities, have a much smaller slice of the pie than was once the case.

Therefore there is this sense of decline for those of us in the mainstream Christian churches.

I don’t believe either of those factors are going to reverse themselves to any serious extent in our lifetimes.

To look at the second question, what can we do about the decline of the mainstream churches, there is no magic formula. Nevertheless, open-hearted and generous congregations, who continue to ask their wider communities, “What can we do to serve you?” will always have a future. On the other hand, congregations whose message to the wider community is “Here’s what you can do to serve us” have very little future.

Because of our support of such things as Soul Food, our network of about eighteen playgroups, our Monday Lunch, and Narcotics Anonymous, I believe that this church has a future in this community. This future may look very different from our present, just as our present reality already looks very different from what this church was like in the “golden” 1950s.

Looking at a biblical tie-in to this theme, I am struck by the figure of Jeremiah. For years, Jeremiah was a classic “Hanrahan”, telling all who would listen that bad times were on the way. In fact, the traditional term for a sermon, a speech, or any other piece of writing that was an exercise in unrelieved doom-and-gloom was a “Jeremiad”, named after Jeremiah.

After the worst happened, the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem, and many leading people were taken into exile, Jeremiah became a voice of hope.

He wrote a letter to the exiles in Babylon (which you can find in the 29th chapter of Jeremiah) urging the exiles to keep on living and to be positive about it. Build houses. Plant gardens. Get married if you’re single. Have kids. If you already have kids, encourage them to get married and have kids of their own. Seek the welfare of the place where you are and be a positive influence there.

He did another thing which you can read about in the 32nd chapter of Jeremiah. He bought a block of land. That doesn’t sound too radical. He bought it from a cousin because he was the next in line to own it under the traditional Jewish style of native title that had been in place for a long time.

However, there was another issue in play as well. Jerusalem was under the control of the Babylonians. One Jew could sell a piece of land to another Jew under Jewish law and that would have meant precisely zippedy-doo-dah to the Babylonians who were running the show.

By buying his cousin’s block of land, Jeremiah wagered on hope. He said that this was a sign that, “in God’s good time” (using Fr. Hartigan’s phrase, not Jeremiah’s) “in God’s good time” … “houses and fields and vineyards will once again be bought in this land”. (And those were Jeremiah’s words.)

We have a choice: either to dread the unknown future and to see it, like Hanrahan, as the source of our ruination, or to wager upon hope, like Jeremiah.

When we wager upon hope, we are well on the way to nobbling the hobgoblin of Hanrahan.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Nobbling the Hobgoblins (2):
The Hobgoblin of Snobbery:
nobbling Hyacinth Buckét
a sermon by Bob Faser
St. Andrew’s Uniting Church, Bacchus Marsh, Vic.
9th October 2011

Hyacinth Buckét is our second “hobgoblin”.

If you’ve seen the TV programme “Keeping up Appearances”, you’re familiar with Hyacinth Buckét. In the series, Hyacinth managed to terrorise her husband Richard, infantilise her adult son Sheridan, and turn her next door neighbours Elizabeth and Emerson into nervous wrecks.

While Hyacinth was highly offended by the coarseness of the appearance and lifestyle of her sisters Rose and Daisy, and Daisy’s husband Onslow, they were more amused than anything by Hyacinth’s snobbery and pretentiousness.

Hyacinth saw herself as being a noted hostess, renowned for her “candlelight suppers”. But her prospective guests viewed an invitation to any of these evenings in roughly the same light as the prospect of an afternoon in the dentist’s chair. She wanted to hobnob with the elite – preferably with the titled - but military officers and their wives would do – or failing that, the local MP or mayor – or even the vicar in a pinch.

Hyacinth created her own fiction about herself and her family:
• Her father – a fairly unremarkable older man – was “one of the great minds of his generation”.
• Her rather unstable (and economically dependent) son was a misunderstood intellectual with a sensitive, artistic temperament.

Ultimately, Hyacinth’s fictionalising of her background can be seen in her transformation of her married surname from the honest, non-nonsense “Bucket” to the more francophone “Buckét”.

Hyacinth exemplified the title of the series in which her character appeared: “Keeping up Appearances”. If Hyacinth’s life was about anything, it was about “keeping up appearances”, even when the appearances that were kept up had little to do with reality.

In a real way, there’s a lot of Hyacinth in each of us. We all try to “keep up appearances”.

It’s a bit like the children’s story The Emperor’s New Clothes. In this story, almost everyone was being fooled by their vanity.
• The Emperor was told by a con-man posing as a tailor that his new “clothes” were made of a special cloth that could only be seen by those who were of particularly refined tastes. The Emperor didn’t let on that he couldn’t see them himself.
• The courtiers and the crowds were told the same thing by the con-man. They, too, didn’t let on that they couldn’t see the Emperor’s new “clothes”.

The crowds, and the courtiers, and the Emperor himself all were engaged in self-deception. They didn’t want to admit that their tastes were insufficiently “refined” to see the Emperor’s new “clothes”, so they all allowed themselves to be conned, in the interests of “keeping u0p appearances”.

It took a small child, one who hadn’t yet developed a sense of personal vanity to ask the Emperor that crucial question: “Uh, pardon me, Your Majesty, but why aren’t you wearing any clothes?”

In a real way, there’s a lot of Hyacinth in each of us. We all try to “keep up appearances”.

I’m told that when people are responding to public opinion surveys, many of us try to make ourselves look good and exaggerate our better points.
• Many people make more money in their answers to surveys than they do in real life.
• Many people weigh less in their answers to surveys than they do in real life.
• Many people get more exercise, read more, attend public worship more often, and watch much less TV in their answers to surveys than they do in real life.
• If the survey is a political poll, some people are a bit more left-of-centre in their answers to surveys than they are when they step into the ballot box.

Like Hyacinth, many of us are very concerned about “keeping up appearances”.

Similarly, in the western United States, there’s a saying about a person who has gone to great trouble to cultivate a certain “cowboy look” in their dress, appearance, and speech, even if they’ve never had any experience of working with actual livestock. They say that such a person is “all hat and no cattle”.

This happens in our faith as well. There are people who are “all hat and no cattle” in their faith.
• They may talk about their faith a lot.
• They may have very clear opinions about what is “correct” belief and “correct” behaviour for a person of faith.
• They may be very willing to speak about the inadequacies of other people’s faith and practice.
• In many ways, they come across as being much more “religious” than you or I.

But, when it comes to putting their faith into practice in the midst of the real world, they are just as confused as you or I.

Throughout Jesus’ parables, we are challenged to a greater level of authenticity in our practice of our faith. For example, the tax collector who was honest about his faults (as numerous as his faults were) made far better use of his time in the temple than did the community leader who merely catalogued his virtues (as numerous as his virtues were).

The Scots poet Robert Burns wrote about such a person as that community leader in his poem “Holy Willie’s Prayer”. It was about a very rigid elder in a Scottish kirk, who loved to point out the shortcomings of others, even though he himself was a bigot, a drunkard, a lecher, and highly dishonest in his own business dealings. In terms of his own faith, he was “all hat and no cattle”.

But this is not merely a problem for fictional characters like Hyacinth or Burns’s “Holy Willie”. It is also an issue for you and I. We also need to strive to make sure that our actions are consistent with the faith we profess, and that this is shown in the way we treat each other … and in the way we treat people in our wider community … and our wider world. Otherwise, we run the danger of becoming “all hat and no cattle” in our own faith, merely “keeping up appearances” for the sake of “keeping up appearances”.

In another one of his poems, Robert Burns said:

And would that God the giftie gie us
To see ourselves as others see us.

May God give us this gift,
• so that we approach our faith as the people we really are, rather than as some fictionalised self that has no grounding in reality,
• so that we may not be “all hat and no cattle” in our practice of our faith,
• so that our faith may be a matter of more than just “keeping up appearances”,
• so that we can nobble this further hobgoblin we call Hyacinth Buckét.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Next week’s sermon in this series is: “The Hobgoblin of Bigotry: nobbling Alf Garnett.”

I’ll give this introduction to my sermon series “Nobbling the Hobgoblins” at the beginning of each sermon, for the benefit of any person who starts the series in the middle, or even at the end.

It all began one Saturday morning a few months ago. A man rang the manse doorbell. At first, I assumed he wanted some emergency assistance and prepared myself to hear his story.

Instead of requesting assistance, however, the man came with an offer of assistance, even if the offer sounded somewhat strange to me. The man claimed to be an exorcist, and he said that he had assisted a number of churches to rid themselves of various “demons”.
Walking past St. Andrew’s, he noticed four “demons” lurking about and offered his services in ridding ourselves of them.

Being rather sceptical of such things, I took it all with the proverbial grain of salt, thanked him politely, and encouraged him on his way.

Not long after that, when preparing a worship service, I was reading John Bunyan’s hymn “Who would true valour see …”, and came
across the classic affirmation that:

Hobgoblin nor foul fiend
can daunt their spirit.

In this context, I thought of my Saturday morning visitor and thought that, even for those of us - like myself - who don’t believe in literal “demons”, there are those symbolic “demons”, those symbolic “principalities and powers”, those symbolic “hobgoblins”, if you will, that plague the life of all people, including the life of people of faith.

I thought of a few “hobgoblins” that were particularly relevant to mainstream Christian churches in our own time and place, and named these “hobgoblins” after a few figures from our popular culture:
• from English literature, a “hobgoblin” named Ebenezer Scrooge;
• from Australian bush verse, a “hobgoblin” named Hanrahan;
• from television, a pair of “hobgoblins” named Alf Garnett and Hyacinth Buckét.

In all of this, I hope to provide some encourage for us as we seek to nobble the “hobgoblins” in our life of faith.

At the end of each sermon, we’ll sing Bunyan’s classic hymn and affirm Christ’s victory over each of these “hobgoblins”.

Copyright: Robert J. Faser, 2011.