The Churches are sects. Each church contains and expresses some part of the spectrum of Christian truth and love. But no one church holds that truth and love in its fullness.

The Catholic Church does claim to possess the fullness of Christian truth. Certainly no Catholic would dare to claim that she possesses the fullness of Christian love. But in practice her truth also is narrowed and structuralised. She emphasises certain aspects of Christian truth at the expense of others. She becomes in practice a sect.

Once this is recognised, the word ‘church’ begins to mean: All Christians and what they may become by the power of the Spirit. The church then is a fish that has begun to show its back above the water. Only God can see its size and its shape. This is the sense in which I prefer to speak of the church.

The Maori church in this country is like a river that flows underground. Te Kouti, Te Whiti, Rua, Ratana and certain others are her prophets and fathers. The face of Te Ariki, the Maori Christ, has a special sweetness and a special strength. It is for us to wash that face in the places where it is being smashed by the blows of the hostile and the ignorant. We pakehas have to page 490 bow the head and learn from our elder brothers and sisters. Then the water may begin to flow in our dry watercourses.

The Church has married herself to Dives our capitalist Pharaoh. Her terrible lassitude comes from that source. Her ailments will begin to disappear as soon as she returns to her actual husband, the poor man Christ, who is also called Lazarus.

With great concern she cares for the children of Dives because Dives will pay for the schools and the stone buildings in which she teaches doctrine and celebrates the Ritual Meal. Let her go back to Lazarus and receive the warmth of his embrace. The doctrines will then be tested in experience and the Ritual Meal will be communal and joyful.

Again and again the affluent Western white middle class Christian speaks of the poor as These People. ‘How are we to help These People? The penniless, the squalid, the drug-users, the homosexuals, the urban street gangs, the workless and those who flee from work, the alcoholics, the jailbirds, the mental hospital patients, the lonely and despairing old – How are we to help them and make them like us?’

The question has no answer. These People are already us, people made in the image of God. And because of their afflictions they belong in a special way to the heart of the Kingdom. These People conceal in their midst the tribe of nga raukore, the anawim, the poor of God, the trees who have had their leaves and branches stripped off. Precisely because they exist and because God loves them, our culture is not permitted to wholly atrophy. God loves them because in the middle of their sufferings they love one another and share their goods.

The beauty of moving branches. They show to me the great purity of God. I see the twigs and branches framed by a window when I wake early at Hiruharama.

This beauty lives and moves. It is the beauty of freedom, of creatures doing what God intends them to do. The beauty of freedom burns in the heart of the Christian militant. It makes him refuse to treat people as possessions. It is what he is fighting for.

The notorious obsession of the castrated church is an obsession with sexual purity. Vacant houses become the habitations of demons. Why single out the demon of impurity? The obsession comes from the unholy marriage of the church to the affluent middle class. To fight for social justice would be to lose their support. But they have a wistful hope that their children will remain chaste even in the Kingdom of Pharaoh where sex is a commodity.

While pastors try to persuade the sons and daughters of the middle class not to sleep together, the daughters of the poor go down on the boats and a dozen men are bumming a boy of sixteen in Paremoremo prison under the jocular gaze of the guards. Let the daughters of the middle class, if they are Christian, live and work beside those who go down to the boats, and invite them to the Ritual Meal. Let the sons of the middle class, if they are Christian, imitate Tim Shadbolt and find a just militant occasion to go to jail and carry in their souls and bodies the pains of the prisoners. Then they will know what purity is.

Education is the death trap of the religious Orders. To educate the children of the middle class in the social fictions originated by our capitalist Pharaoh may not be a work of mercy at all. It may be a work of ruination.

A Christian school should give a clear and penetrating knowledge of social evils and their causes. It should be democratic with full pupil participation in decision-making. There should be communal houses available where the children could join with the teachers in practical social work. It is well within the possible scope of the religious Orders to do this. But they would have to be ready to learn from outside and from their own militant members whom God has sent them.

Failures will come. One can learn from failures. Failure is an inward page 493 success if the heart is changed by militant action. The founders of the Orders were in most cases Christian militants. They began their work in a climate of failure. The winter of failure made their spirits detached and strong.

If ‘obedience’ is an obstacle to the works of justice and mercy, then a nun might say to her Superior, ‘Obedience exists for the sake of greater availability. It is a sin of omission for me to neglect the poor. Mother, I did not join a cult. I became a nun to serve the people.’

Then she would have to act (perhaps by bringing houseless people under the convent roof) and wait for the consequences, ready to accept penalties without resentment. It is not militancy simply to leave an Order, or worse, to leave the church. One should remain and fight the battle on the ground God has given. This is to love one’s fellow Christians well.

Even if she were not permitted to remain in her Order, such a nun would obtain the blessing of the warrior Christ and the reward of becoming more thoroughly human.

A drunk man is lying in a Wellington street, with blood and vomit coming from his mouth. The people step over him and round him. One goes to phone the police. But before the police arrive, a young man of homosexual temperament has called a taxi and put the drunk man into it. He takes him home and washes him and gives him his own bed to sleep in. He feeds him and lodges him for a week.

The young homosexual is saving Wellington from becoming the city of Sodom. The fault of the original Sodomites, as the Rabbis have told so plainly, page 494 was their lack of the virtue of manuhiritanga, that is, the practice of mercy and respect to the guest and the stranger. We Christians are often Sodomites. Let us beware then in case God leaves us to our sins.

The Communist Pharaoh is not our master. It is the job of the people in Communist countries to deal with him. At least he has fed and clothed his people. And he has had a dream that the State will wither away at the end of history. May that dream be fulfilled soon.

Let us deal with the capitalist Pharaoh, the rider who is on our own backs.

The people allowed the Communist Pharaoh to have power over them, because he drove out the capitalist Pharaoh who was oppressing them bitterly. With some success he solved by the use of centralised power the problems of production and distribution.

In our own country, under the capitalist Pharaoh, the problems of production are already solved. The country is affluent. Yet most of the people live in anxiety and some are destitute. Distribution is our problem. Our Pharaoh willnever solve it, because he needs the economic pressure as a whip for the backs of his slaves.

In the East the people lie down in the streets and die of hunger. In this country people go mad at the desks and work benches. In the affluent capitalist pyramid structure the evil effects of slavery are predominantly mental. Our mental hospitals are full because we are not free men and women.

Let the people who need the land take it and use it. In so doing they should accept Maori leadership, because the land was taken by the capitalist Pharaoh from the Maori people during and after the Land Wars. Crown lands should be the first land occupied, to avoid undue conflict with the farmers, who do use the land they occupy.

God made the land for the use of the people. They do not have to wait for Pharaoh’s permission.

‘You are free men under me,’ says Pharaoh to his overseers. He persuades them that they are not his slaves. He gives them good houses and many page 496 luxuries. In return he buys them and owns them from the crown of their head to the soles of their feet.

On the TV sets in their houses they can listen to discussions about pyramid-building: whether the pyramids should be built of stone or concrete, whether they should be triangular or rectangular, or even a dispute about the differences between the capitalist and the Communist pyramids.

But if you leave the pyramids to stand or fall, and go into the desert, and set up camps where you share your goods and look after one another, then Pharaoh’s police will follow you with whips and drag you back to the slave market and the jails.

Pharaoh is a liberal. He lets you discuss anything you like. But when you touch his power structure he becomes the tyrant and slave-owner that he has always been.

Four inventions of Pharaoh: destitution in the midst of riches, the brothel, the slave market and the whip. Destitution does not have to be absolute. A slave’s dole for the workless will keep them alive so that they will creep back, when they are needed, to lick the boss’s arse. The brothel does not have to be obvious. Men and women can sell themselves in subtle ways, for security, and poison their lives by so doing. A moderate pornography is part of the atmosphere of Egypt. As long as women are undressing in front of the cameras for money, Pharaoh can have a peaceful mind. There is no part of human behaviour that his money cannot buy.

The whip does not have to be visible. Fear of the loss of material security is a whip that coils around the bowels and the brain. The slave market is omnipresent. It is most powerful at the intellectual level where a man employed by Pharaoh dare not speak the truth for fear of losing his job or his promotion.

The pyramids are an invisible structure. They rest on the backs of the people.

Free milk, free butter, free potatoes, free bread, the simplest kind of free shelter: at the present time, in our affluent country, these could be given to the people whether they work or not. Then the diseases of malnutrition would disappear. Those who wished to get other goods could work for them and buy them, and the other goods could be highly priced to balance the cost of the free kai.

If Pharaoh will not provide these essentials free, let the people of God combine to offer them, in a thousand Friendship Houses like those established in America by Dorothy Day. Then we will be within sight of the day when the pyramids can disappear. It is within our power to do these things.

Today, if the people have no food, through sickness, through the poverty of age, through the lack of work that is other than slavery, or through lack of page 497 an adequate dole or any dole at all – these things are increasingly common in our country – then go with the people to loot the warehouses. Act in an orderly fashion. Break nothing you do not have to break. Take no more than the people require. It is best to go to the warehouses. The little shop-owners are only one step above the people.

Let the capitalist Pharaoh reimburse the firms. It will only be a fraction of the debt he owes to the people.

If a Maori leader rose up, rite kia Mohi, to take his people away from the slave market and the jails, I would honour him and offer him what service I could give. But if he then built a pa with armed guards at the gate (however reasonable this might seem to him) my heart would be sorrowful – ‘E te pouri ana ahau.’

The pa would soon be smashed by Pharaoh’s army. The violence would come first from Pharaoh, because he is full of timidity and fears the growth of any authority other than his own.

Nga Tamatoa were demonstrating on behalf of Te Morehu. Pharaoh’s policy of extermination towards the Maori culture, carried out first with guns, then by the law, then by education, has borne and is still bearing its fruit of disease, death, crime and insanity. The issue is real enough. It warrants the strongest militancy.

We wore green branches on our heads and in our lapels. Therefore the spirits of the Maori dead accompanied us in our mourning for the continued destruction of the Maori culture and the seizure of the land in the Land Wars. After the demonstration our hearts were very high. It was from Nga Tamatoa that I learnt the meaning of Christian militancy.

To squat on Crown lands and build huts and till the ground. This would be a militant answer to the Government that devours the Maori lands like a dog gnawing a loaf under a table. The jail sentences would be short. The Press would speak out for the victims whereas it would speak strongly against demonstrators who used guns.

The mana of the victim is enormously greater than that of the man who uses violence. This is the political and social aspect of the magnetism of the Cross.

It would be a significant act to publicly wipe one’s arse on a ten dollar bill every New Year’s morning.

(‘What about Bangladesh?’ – ‘Brother, the act would free me to give more freely. And the people of Bangladesh need freedom from the capitalist Pharaoh more than they need money. He gives them only the imports that will keep them in a state of impoverished dependence.’)

Militancy must begin wherever justice and mercy lack a voice and hands. Let the pupils in the schools, strangled by boredom, join together to perform the works of mercy and demand a truthful education. Let the women who are not treated as equals behave as equals. Let the prisoners demand respect, protection from assault, a review of sentences and the liberty to reform the jails. Let the unions strengthen themselves. Let the workless join associations. Let us construct communal houses where mental hospital patients will be respected and treated as persons. Let the families in the suburbs open their doors to the guest and stranger, and share their lives, as, for example, through the Christian Family Movement.

The servant church should not only join herself to such movements. Through her members present in society she should initiate them.

Jesus, Gandhi, Lenin: when I saw their heads haloed together on the wall of a school in Madras, I objected inwardly to the Hindu syncretism. That was before the people of my own country showed me their smashed, desecrated hearts. It drove me into action. The pain of being a leper among lepers is very extreme. But the heaven of the poor is hidden in the hearts of the people. It is their love.

Gandhi loved the people. They refuse to forget it. Lenin loved the people. Yevtushenko described him as the man who found Mother Russia lying drunk in the mud of the marketplace, and wiped her clean and set her on her feet.

Jesus loved the people. He grieved when he saw them wandering like page 501 sheep without a shepherd. We have stressed his obedience to the Father. But obedience to Te Matua and love of Te Morehu are two words in the same breath. The love of Te Morehu led him to the Cross.

Perhaps Gandhi is nearer to Christ than Lenin is, because Gandhi did not use a gun. But the Indian educators who put the three of them together on the wall of their school were not mistaken. What joins them, despite the differences of ideology, is their love for the people and the people’s answering love given them in a profound hope and recognition.

Brothers, God tells us to be angry without sinning. What does this mean? There are two kinds of anger. One is anger against the evildoer. The other is anger on behalf of those to whom evil is done. We must run away from the first kind of anger. We must purge it from our hearts. It is the vice of hatred and it puts the soul inside a dark coffin.

The second kind of anger is a form of love. It comes when we hate the pattern of evil with a precise hatred, because it harms both the evildoer and those to whom evil is done. To hate Pharaoh means to hate the pattern of oppression which we call Pharaoh. Pharaoh is not a man.

I am a sinner and I hate my sins. But I do not hate myself. When I hate my sins the hatred comes from a true love of myself. I have mercy on myself, the creature God made, and though I may have his sins and joke at his stupidity, the grief that goes with this does not injure my soul. So I must have mercy on others, and love them tenderly, while I hate their sins and mine. This is the meaning of the saying that we should love our neighbours as we love ourselves.

If we hate our brothers, we will also come to hate ourselves. But if we love our brothers, our love will set aside sin and conquer it. At the bottom of our hearts we must be ready to die for our brother the oppressor as well as for our brother the oppressed. Then our hearts are free and our anger does not harm us.

Love one another and share your goods. This means also to share the pain and hope of one another’s inner being. To give oneself to Te Morehu is page 502 to become a loaf of bread that is eaten. It cannot be regarded as other than a terrible destiny.

Blessed be God. The law of Christ is simple – Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, there is no wheatstalk and no harvest.