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.

Alf Garnett is our third “hobgoblin”. As most of us know, Alf was the main character in the British TV series “‘Till Death us do Part”. Alf’s character had a few spinoffs over the years. Archie Bunker in “All in the Family” was an American version of Alf Garnett, while Ted Bullpitt in “Kingswood Country” was Alf’s Australian alter ego.

Each was the same character: a bigoted loudmouth who imposed his views in anyone who’d listen (and frequently on those who’d rather not.) Alf, Archie, and Ted were prejudiced against just about anyone, and never let the truth get in the way of a good rant.

They were tyrants within their families, as well. Alf called his wife a “silly old moo”, and referred to his son-in-law as a “Scouse git”. Archie called his wife a “dingbat” and his son-in-law a “meathead”, usually with reference to the son-in-law’s Polish background.

At the end of each episode, Alf (… or Archie… or Ted…) usually got his comeuppance and learned a bit of tolerance … at least until the next week’s episode.

Alf (… and Archie … and Ted …) were classic bigots. And as I say this, I need to explain the difference between a racist and a bigot.

A racist is a person who believes that his (or her) own racial, ethnic, or cultural group is innately superior over all others. And, using this definition, actual racists are pretty rare.

When most people use the term “racist” today, they normally mean to say that the person is a bigot. Bigots are much more common than racists. A bigot doesn’t go so far as to say that their own racial, ethnic, or cultural group is superior over all others. A bigot merely holds irrational prejudices against some people based on their race, religion, or culture. While actual racists are pretty rare, bigots are much more plentiful.

Even more common than either racists or bigots would be the sort of person who, even while they hold no real ill will toward groups other than their own, still says stupid things about various racial, religious, or cultural groups. Usually they make these comments as part of a general pattern of crude behaviour, coarse language, and juvenile humour. It’s better not to confuse this behaviour with serious racism or serious bigotry.

For all of us, as it was for old Alf, some prejudices are very difficult to overcome.
• For most Christians (and for many other people in western societies), it’s been very difficult to overcome the prejudices many of us have learned against Jews.
• For many Christians (and many other people in western societies), our far more recently acquired prejudices against Muslims are proving to be just as persistent as our older prejudices against Jews.
• For many of us (some of whom have grown up within Protestant churches and others of whom have grown up in a consciously non-religious world-view), an old-time prejudice against Catholics may be particularly hard to shake off.
• And then, for any of us with a rather pale sort of complexion, there is the old prejudice that light-skinned people have had against dark-skinned people, whether Aborigines, or Africans, or anyone else.
Each of these prejudices are very difficult to overcome.

For many of us, when we think we’ve conquered our prejudices – and then, there it is again – popping up at the worst possible time and getting in our way.

A biblical story about a person who let his prejudices get in his way (big time) was the story of Jonah. The main point of the story was Jonah’s prejudice against the people of Nineveh. God wanted Jonah to go and share God’s message with the people of Nineveh. Jonah then went in the exact opposite direction. Jonah’s adventure with the fish was all about getting him back travelling in the right direction.

After Jonah bit the bullet and went to Nineveh, he thought that, at the very least, the people of Nineveh would reject his message, God would get seriously annoyed with Nineveh, and Jonah would see some fire-and-brimstone action.

After Jonah preached to the people of Nineveh, they responded well to the message and changed their ways. God forgave the people of Nineveh. And Jonah’s response was to go off and sulk. Jonah was disappointed to miss the grand judgement being delivered to those so-and-sos in Nineveh. Jonah’s sulk gave God the opportunity to deliver the punch line of the book of Jonah. (Read it when you get home.)

For many of us, when we think we’ve conquered our prejudices – and then, there it is again – popping up at the worst possible time and getting in our way.

One of the reasons why these prejudices are so resilient is that we learn these prejudices from the same people from whom – in our early lives - we also learned many good things, or who have done other good things for us.
We bundle these prejudices together with the other things we associate with them as part of a package deal.

You may have learned to dislike Catholics from the same person who taught you to tie your shoelaces.

You may have learned to dislike Jews from the same person who taught you the Lord’s Prayer.

You may have learned to dislike Muslims from the same person who taught you to tell time.

You may have learned to dislike dark-skinned people from the same person who read you your bedtime story each evening.

We need to know that we are not disloyal to the important people in our early upbringing when we reject their prejudices. We best honour them by embracing with thanks the many good things they gave us, but not when we embrace their foolish prejudices.

When we do this, we are well on the way of nobbling the hobgoblin of Alf Garnett.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Next week’s sermon in this series is: “The Hobgoblin of Despair: nobbling Hanrahan.”

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 think we’re all familiar with our first hobgoblin, Ebenezer Scrooge. In Charles Dickens’s story A Christmas Carol, Scrooge was the hard-nosed miser who refused to celebrate Christmas, who never gave to charity, who underpaid his employee, and whose response to appeal to his own better nature was “Bah! Humbug!”

Dickens’s story was the tale of Scrooge’s transformation, with a bit of supernatural assistance, to a greater level of generosity in his life. But, before the transformation, we can see Scrooge as a rather miserable character, as quite a “hobgoblin”.

At one level, there is Scrooge’s lack of any generosity toward others. When two men came collecting funds for the poor, Scrooge threw them out of his office saying, “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” Scrooge was a great believer in the market economy and in the notion that “Greed is good.” Ayn Rand had nothing on Scrooge.

But, in addition to this economic greed, we find a severe joylessness in Scrooge’s life. Dickens said that people avoided him in the street, and even the guide dogs for blind people would pull their owners out of Scrooge’s way to avoid contact. Scrooge was:

Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever drawn out generous fire; secret and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.

Scrooge had this tendency to live “on the cheap”. He took the old virtue of thrift and made a deadly vice out of it.

Contrary to what you may have been taught, thrift is not always a virtue. Frequently it is a deadly vice.

I realise that there may have been some venerable elders from back in the time when this church was a kirk turning in their graves so loudly that you couldn’t hear my last point, so I’ll repeat it: Contrary to what you may have been taught, thrift is not always a virtue. Frequently it is a deadly vice.

I believe living “on the cheap” is a serious trap for individuals and for churches today. We need to recover the Christian virtue of gracious extravagance, reflecting the overflowing extravagance of God – that extravagance without which none of us would exist.

Contrary to what you may have been taught, extravagance is not always a vice. Frequently it is a gift of God’s grace.

One biblical example of this gracious extravagance is found in the account of a woman who used some incredibly expensive perfume to anoint Jesus’ head or feet (depending on the particular gospel in which you read the story).

In one version of the story, the woman who anointed Jesus was Mary, the sister of Martha. In another version, she was unnamed.

In all versions of the story, she was criticised (either by Judas or by the whole group of disciples) for not doing something more practical with this expensive resource, but Jesus strongly defended the woman’s extravagant act.

Contrary to what you may have been taught, extravagance is not always a vice. Frequently it is a gift of God’s grace.

An example more close to our own times can be seen in that most Christian of films Babette’s Feast. This film is set in a small Danish village in the 19th century. Two pious spinster sisters – daughters of the village’s former Lutheran pastor, now deceased - live in the village and provide a charitable service to the poor: austere, joyless meals, accompanied by a similarly austere and joyless religion, also accompanied by a high level of condescension toward the recipients of their charity.

Into this scene comes Babette, a younger French woman who once ran a café in Paris. Babette was a refugee from some violent political turmoil, violence in which her husband was killed. She was told by a Frenchman who once lived in Denmark and knew the two sisters that she’d find safety there. She began working as a housemaid for the sisters.

One day, Babette won a lottery and found herself with a great deal of money. She decided to host a grand, French-style banquet for the sisters and for the poor whom they fed. After some resistance, the banquet was a success. The poor enjoyed themselves immensely – even the spinster sisters relaxed a bit.

The radical nature of Babette’s gift to the people of the village was only realised when it was revealed that Babette spent her entire lottery winnings on the banquet. Only then did the spinster sisters realise the extent to which Babette and her feast reflected the overflowing extravagance of God.

Contrary to what you may have been taught, extravagance is not always a vice. Frequently it is a gift of God’s grace.

Sometimes we only learn this lesson the hard way:
• Scrooge,
• The two spinster sisters in Babette’s Feast,
• The disciples watching the woman supposedly “waste” the expensive perfume.,
• Ourselves:

It’s difficult to nobble the hobgoblin that calls us to live our lives “on the cheap”.

We see the examples of overflowing extravagance in the life of Jesus.
• We see this overflowing extravagance in his praise of the woman’s supposed “waste” of the perfume.
• We see this overflowing extravagance in the loaves and fishes. A little boy’s simple lunch results in baskets of leftovers … overflowing extravagance par excellence.
• We also see this overflowing extravagance in the sacrament we celebrate today.

I’ll make a suggestion now. As a way of celebrating God’s overflowing and gracious extravagance, and as your way of declaring your intention to be a participant in the divine extravagance, as the bread is passed around at Holy Communion, please don’t feel you need to restrict yourself to a tiny, almost microscopic bit of bread. Instead, please take a decent-sized piece as your way of saying to God, “Thank you for your extravagant grace. Please help me to be extravagantly gracious and graciously extravagant as well, and help me to nobble the hobgoblin of Scrooge.”

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Next week’s sermon in this series is: “The Hobgoblin of Snobbery: nobbling Hyacinth Buckét”

Copyright: Robert J. Faser, 2011.