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The reverend Martin Baker has practised as a minister for several decades and currently holds a position as the Assembly Executive Secretary of the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand. But, despite his experience (or maybe because of it), it is still a simple interaction at a supermarket checkout that spurs a wave of religious and philosophical questions.

Declined.
Accepted.
Declined.
Accepted.

Who tells us that? What god of salvation or damnation awaits at the end of that EFTPOS cable? How many of us, for no particularly good reason, have a momentary sense of anxiety as we wait for one or the other of those words to appear? Our interactions with this technology provide us with daily judgement days.

Seventeen-year-old Hanna, the operator on checkout four at Roslyn New World, with a restful scene of the orient skilfully inked up her left arm, blushes slightly as I explain to her why I have been declined. It sounds more like a confession. Have mercy on me, tattooed and pierced Hanna, for I have sinned.

Put it back in your pants for a moment, that plastic card, which you keep inserting into things. Step away from Hanna and ask, “what’s going on here?” How have we got to this point? When did we sign up to an agreement, which said that our very participation in this society would be determined by a transaction between a plastic card and some financial database god somewhere in the cloud? How many of us even know where that private book of life information is stored?

And we take another step back from Hanna and ask, since when was my essence, the core of my identity, summarised, described, limited in the naming of me as “a consumer?” Apparently the answer to that question can be easily worked out – sometime in the early 1960s, “consumer” became the word of choice, rather than “citizen,” to describe the individual’s relationship with the state. It is no coincidence that this shift in human naming happened pretty much at the same time as the growth of neo-liberalism with its emphasis on privatisation, free markets and the intrinsic value of providing individuals with spending choices in an ever more competitive market place. Just think how much more difficult it would be for advertising to appeal to our sense of duty and obligation and the rights and responsibilities of being a citizen, rather than foisting on us the belief that there is yet another thing that we simply must consume? We are now, more than ever, what we eat.

You see, I can’t say to Hanna that I’d rather swap two dozen eggs from my chickens for a six pack of Speight’s, nor can I appeal to her moral sense of fairness and shared humanity to explain that my hungry flatmates desperately need a couple of loaves of Vogel’s, which I have no money to pay for. She would call the manager or the police in either scenario. The declined of today, like the sinners of old, always cause trouble, they are always the blameworthy. Or maybe I’m just hung about who names us. I am a preacher. It is one of those pauses-in-the-conversation moments just after you answer that terrible question, “So what do you do?” The same thing happens to undertakers, cops and for one of my brothers, who is a venereal disease specialist.

But someone must have said something good about preachers. Take Charlene’s 1982 treacle dripping hit “I’ve Never Been to Me” – which made it to number five here in Aotearoa. The song contains the words “taking the hand of a preacher man and making love in the sun.” What a nice thought. After all, Charlene was quite a looker in her time, and if she finds preachers attractive, then what is wrong with that? But then we have, in the same song, her crooning and gasping over seeing “things a woman ain’t meant to see” (what is she talking about?). Which, perhaps incidentally, is the reason, albeit with the preacher lovemaking, “I’ve Never Been to Me” has been voted as a song with the top ten dumbest lyrics of all time. However, if I do want to look for a song that evokes a better impression of a preacher it is hard to go past the magnificent Dusty Springfield’s 1968 “Son of Preacher Man,” which makes it into Rolling Stone’s Top 25 Songs Of All Time list. My father was not a preacher man but at least it offers some comfort for my own son, perhaps – and, yes, I did come within a hair’s breadth of calling him Billy-Ray – how cool would that have been?

So what does come to mind when we start talking about religion? A while back an advertising agency captioned an image of the crucifixion of Jesus with the title: “just another carpenter who said he would come back to finish the job?” The ad brought with it a degree of controversy – not from those who weren’t Christians but from within the Christian community itself – some seeing it as trivialising what they considered the day of greatest significance in world history. Others, however, saw it as a helpful way of getting some kind of discussion going about the relevance of Christianity. While Pope Francis has done more than perhaps any recent religious leader has to give the faith some good press, you don’t have to look too far to see in the media the world’s main religions getting a pretty bad wrap. I remember one politician remarking that when he sees a minister he asks himself “who have you been molesting, I wonder?” Where do you go with that?

Although people go on to me about how New Zealand is not a religious country, or has become very secular, I don’t really buy into that line of thinking. I don’t think New Zealand was a better country in the 1950s because a lot more people went to church then than they do now. Nor do I think that people who don’t go to church have some lesser kind of beliefs than those who do. I don’t think there is a person alive who has an absence of belief or a faith in something, or some sense of, the more elusive to describe, spirituality. The much more interesting discussion I want to have with you is, what do you believe? What gives you a sense of value; purpose meaning fulfilment? And what is the relationship between those beliefs and what you do? The choices you make? Or are you just what you eat?

The late David Foster Wallace gave what is considered one of the great speeches of our time to a Kenyon College graduation. He pointed out that the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people because of each person’s different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. For example, I am a terrible backer of trailers. I will do almost anything to avoid being placed in a situation where I have to back one. My trailer often has a small aluminium boat on it, called Laura Palmer. One day, I am at the boat ramp at Blind Bay and I have mis-read the tide chart. I can’t just drive down on the beach, back the trailer a few meters and drop Laura Palmer into the water. I’ve got to back down a ramp – a long, narrow, concrete ramp. And, of course, things don’t go that well. I don’t want to talk about it now. Except whenever I get into this situation, I feel a type of inadequacy, which may even raise questions about my masculinity. What’s worse, whenever I am in that situation, an audience appears as if from nowhere. Three or four minutes of back and forth, back and forth, and I notice a Ferguson with a much larger boat waiting to back down, and then (to my horror), two long wheel based Land Rovers also waiting with their much bigger boats. I close my eyes and say “God, what am I going to do?” And into my short prayer intrudes the voice of my fantastic neighbour, Kevin – and the most gifted trailer backer this side of the black stump appears. “Need a hand?” He asks. Seconds later, Laura Palmer is sliding off the trailer into the warm waters of the Colville channel.

Was Kevin an answer to prayer? Yes? No?

Of course, as educated people, we want to accommodate all views. But what happens if one is right, or more right or less wrong, than the other? How would we decide that? Where do our beliefs come from? You weren’t born knowing the answer to the prayer question so how did you come to a decision about whether or not Kevin was, one way or another, sent by God? What I’m really interested in here is how we construct meaning.

And what really gets me, either way in all this, is the arrogance, on one hand, of the person who is totally certain in his or her dismissal of the possibility that Kevin had anything to do with my prayer for help, or, on the other, of the arrogance and righteousness of the person who claims to be both religious and certain of their own interpretations. Both share an equal amount of ugliness. As Foster Wallace would say, the worst thing is the “blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he or she is locked up.”

“How’s the water today?” says the old fish to the young fish. The young fish says, “What is water?”

You may not have read much by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others who are part of the “new atheism” movement. They are considered brilliant thinkers, writers and commentators, and, I guess, I lack the intellectual depth to argue against such “pillars” of rationalism. The only thing I do have is a view that contrasts significantly with their assertion of God’s non-existence. No matter how such views may confront the teachings of orthodox Christianity, what I fear most about things of faith and belief do not emerge from the diatribes of such doyennes of modern thinking, but evidence of the overwhelming power of some beliefs and ideologies that allows individuals and communities to inflict such unspeakable harm on others.

A couple of months ago, I read perhaps the most troubling book I have ever read – Timothy Snyder’s 2010 book called Blood Lands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. The book details (it’s a long book and it details a lot) the mass killing of around fourteen million non-combatants by the regimes of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany between the years 1933 and 1945. Most died outside the two regimes’ respective concentration camps. This happened in a region comprised of what today are Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and the Baltic states. One of Snyder’s important arguments is that we should never resign ourselves to the temptation to, for want of a better word, “conceptualise” these events – to describe them, for instance, simply as evil. This was planned killing. There was a budget, a strategy, a bureaucracy, a business plan, and a vision. The fourteen million deaths are fourteen million stories of individuals who lived lives, people who wrote letters, scratched messages, sang, or cried before they were executed. The people who did the killing also had stories. Some of these executioners were people who lived their lives as neighbours, friends and even colleagues of those who, one day, they felt reason or justification in killing.For Dawkins and his colleagues to champion the values of a secular society almost seems a negation of that fact we all have beliefs, and all of those beliefs have an associated spirituality. Even though I would not want to attempt a definition of “spirituality,” I think it is something we all have, and it is to do with the words and thoughts and deeds that express the things of most profound importance to our sense of meaning, identity, value and purpose.

There in an old Bob Dylan song called “You’ve Gotta Serve Somebody.” I know it has been voted more recently as Bob Dylan’s second worst song of all time, even though it did win a Grammy back in the day, but it also motivated John Lennon into writing “Serve Yourself” – as a kind of protest to Dylan’s message. And that’s what I like in this. Dylan versus Lennon – let’s talk (or sing) about what we believe and see where that takes us. I think Jesus would have ended up sitting down and eating and drinking with both of them – and I still ponder why doing that was one of the things that got him executed – his powerful enemies kept going on about how he “eats and drinks with sinners.”

Now, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I could burn my Visa card, occupy Wall Street, share a beer with a tax collector or a prostitute. But I think, without wanting to sound too much like a preacher man, that it might start with working on some degree of self awareness – a sense of the choices and decisions you’re making, and thinking about the beliefs that underpin our decisions and priorities. In the end, I think power is all about not only making choices, but also realising that there are choices to be made.