Category: James’ Blog

Boat-People, a taxi and ‘the shoreless conscience of our world’

Thursday, 21 July 2011 11:32 Written by jamesmacbeth 0 Comments

At a recent Men’s Long Table someone raised the vexed issue of ’boat-people’ and how we are to respond as Christians. The passionate discussion that followed revealed a real struggle within each of us to respect the laws of the land and show compassion – the tension between being generous and just. It also revealed how hard it is to understand where others come from and why they take such risks.

 A number of years ago I knew a student minister who drove a taxi part-time in order to pay the bills. He used to end his shift and hand over at 3am to a tiny Cambodian fellow. One night he asked him what he did when he’d get a taxi full of big, drunk Aussies giving him a hard time. The Cambodian man just laughed: “You guys have no idea what ‘a hard time’ is.” It turned out this man had had his entire family shot by the Khmer-Rouge before his eyes. He had fled and, somehow, made his way to Australia. He found this country to be a ‘strange oasis’ of peace and order, but also (and perhaps mercifully) ignorant of what was going on in neighbouring parts of the world.

I often think of that man when I see the footage of the boats towed in to Christmas Island and the faces of those sitting cross-legged on the deck. Where are you from? What has driven you away from home and out onto the water?

I know there are thousands who have waited in line, waded through the interminable beauracracy, and arrived according to the law. I know two Iraqi Christians in particular who came this way, then laboured long to help their family flee the warzone and come out by the right channels. I know it is a godly thing to respect the laws of the land (1 Peter2:13-17) and that illegal immigration draws precious resources away from an already stretched department. I know there will inevitably be those whose refusal to wait for official channels will also be reflected in dishonest dealings with the govenment once here (a long Australian tradition, I might add!). Letting others in before those who’ve applied and waited is not fair. 

And yet, I look at those faces and wonder. What if ‘official channels’ in their country have meant terror, violence and loss? What if they have never known a day when they could trust the authorities or have a voice in politics? If I found myself, Michelle and the kids in the rubble of Afghanistan or Cairo’s ‘city of the dead’, wouldn’t I do all I could to get us out?

I look at those faces and wonder about Jesus’ command to be merciful (Luke 6:36) and that vital fruit of his Spirit within us: compassion (Galatians 5:22,23). This is a readiness to look on the brokenness of another and not walk away or slam the door. It means loving and serving, as Jesus has loved and served us, well beyond any worldy guage of ‘fairness’. Grace isnt fair or even. It’s costly and utterly of God. In Jesus, crucified and risen for us, we see that tension between being generous and just played out in full. 

How this works through a secular government or any of the agencies working in this area, I do not know. There are so many tensions in this matter and I suspect last Tuesday’s Long table will not be the last word spoken on the matter. Yet I know this. I would rather live in a country that shows costly compassion to that Cambodian man, than a nation that slams the door on all because some abuse that grace.

I want to live amongst people who keep asking: Where are you from? What has driven you from your home and out onto the water?

 I’ll leave the last word to Bruce Smith

BOAT PEOPLE

Torn from

their moorings

by tempestuous events,

cast upon open seas

hoping for

distant kindness.

Crowded undernourished

ill-equipped

they float

under God’s eye

menaced by fears.

 

They drift

in the

shoreless conscience

of our world.

 

Their frail light

flickers

in ocean’s night.

Tribes, The World Cup, & A Third Race

Wednesday, 20 July 2011 05:42 Written by jamesmacbeth 0 Comments

I spent last Sunday afternoon with my guts knotted and my voice increasingly hoarse as I watched the Wallabies wrestle their way into the Rugby World Cup semi-finals. For those 2 hours I was almost entirely Australian in my focus, a passionate tribal member, willing the defeat of another tribe’s men. After the victory, I was both exhausted and pumped, with adrenaline flowing for some time afterwards. (Rugby is the only sport that currently has the power to capture me in this way. I used to feel the same way about the cricket – but then we started thrashing everyone and it got boring.)

Within an hour of that victory I was on my feet again, my voice raised in public. This time there was far less tension in my stomach and voice, but a much greater clarity and intent in what I said. I was speaking not as a mere Australian, but as a follower of Jesus Christ and, therefore, a member of the ‘Third Race’. This was a term coined by early Christians to reflect the radical change in identity that had come about because of Jesus. Having been dead in sin, dead to God, they knew what it was to be forgiven and made alive to him because of Jesus’ sacrificial death on their behalf. They had been drawn from every tribe, every strata of society and brought together in churches comprised of a ‘new humanity’ (Ephesians 2: 11-18). It was this that led Paul to write this explosive and wonderful truth in Colossians 3:11

      ‘Here there is no Jew or Greek, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.’

It was this removal of all the dividing walls, this onenss in Christ, that the early Christians were trying to capture when they used the appellation ‘Third Race’. They were still culturally Roman, Egyptian, or Sythian and economically slaves or free, but race and social status no longer mattered when it came to relating to God and each other. I’m sure they still followed their teams (and Pauls’ use of sporting metaphors suggests he loved sport) and even fought for their country in war (when justified), but this did not, in the end, define them. 

An hour after I’d yelled myself hoarse as a member of the Wallaby tribe, I was standing with a group far more varied, yet far more precious. A very different tribe, a sample of that new humanity that Jesus came to create – a  Third race defined by our forgiven state, our love for the Lord and our common access to the heavenly Father.

When the Wallabies run onto Eden park for that semi-final I will be with my precious tribe, celebrating our oneness in Christ, preaching the glorious mystery revealed in Ephesians 3. A couple of us will catch the game later and we will once again emotionally rise and fall with the fortunes of our men in gold. But win or lose, my mind will eventually go back to the earlier meeting, to my most defining tribe, to those of whom this rings eternally true:

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” ( Galatians 3)

 

Real-Estate, Relationships and Beetles

Tuesday, 19 July 2011 21:20 Written by jamesmacbeth 0 Comments

I’m writing this in a grand old mansion surrounded by rolling lawns and mature trees in a beautiful part of Sydney. This house has been given by successive generations of Christians at St Bede’s to the incumbent minister and his family – currently the Macbeth clan! There is not a day when we fail to thank God for this home and remember that many will never taste such space and beauty here on earth.

I’m also conscious of the danger such a home presents – the danger of isolation from other family members and our neighbours. The more rooms we have, the greater the opportunity we have to withdraw into private space, even as a family of five. Paul D, a friend and heritage architect, has observed that the move towards homes with multiple rooms instead of largely common space is a distinctly  modern Western trend. The bigger the lawns and private back-yard, the less likely we are to run into our neighbours.

 The basic link between increased wealth and expanded living space is, of course, an ancient phenomena. I have walked through huge castles and estate homes in Europe with rooms that were never occupied. Last Wednesday we drove past a building site where one of Sydney’s wealthiest men is either demolishing or incorporating neighbouring properties he has bought in order to make them all into one home.

My question is this: Does the desire for more money and a bigger home carry within it a subtle or open desire to withdraw from the the uneven, challenging and costly reality of relationships with others – even others within our own family?

In The Great Divorce, C.S.Lewis’ portrait of Hell is a grey, bland endlessly expanding city  where everone moves further and further away from each other. One of the searing criticisms God made of the wealthy class in Jerusalem was their tendency to create massive private estates at the cost of other’s land and homes. Isaiah 5:8,9 says this:

Woe to you who add house to house, and join field to field, till no space is left and you live alone in the land. The Lord Almighty has declared in my hearing: “Surely the great houses will become desolate, the fine mansions left without occupants….”

This refers to a particular moment in history and God’s particular judgement on their empty religiosity, but John Oswalt makes the brilliant observation on this passage that ‘covetousness is always self-defeating in the final analysis. To acquire is to lose, to give is to get…So the great houses that were built after all the smaller ones were bought and razed will themselves be abandoned and desolate. Nor does there need to be some historical or political upheaval to cause this. How many of the world’s great castles and mansions have been lived in for any appreciable time? They are simply too pretentious to be borne. By their very immensity they reduce their owners to beetles scuttling about inside them. So they shortly become museums, monuments to human acquisitiveness, and thus under the ban of God’. (John N. Oswalt – The Book Of Isaiah, Chapters 1-39, TNICOT, p159)

The larger our context becomes, the more we need to be deliberate about relationships. The more we have, the greater the opportunity for generous, sacrificial engagement with others, not merely private and too often selfish acquisition.  This home is at its best when the people of St Bede’s are all over the front lawn on a Sunday (with a jumping castle!). We love this house most when our lounge room is full and our kitchen table surrounded by friends sharing the Word of God and praying. Then we have a taste of that great home prepared for us, our Father’s house with many rooms, alive with people and rich beyond imagining with Christ centered relationships. John 14:1-4

A wedding, surgery and the way Jesus loves

Saturday, 16 July 2011 07:38 Written by jamesmacbeth 0 Comments

I’m getting ready tonight for Matthew and Miranda’s wedding tomorrow morning. As always, I’m struck with the weight of the words these two are about to utter in public and the sort of love captured there – a deeply sacrificial love that rises to the heights, plumbs the depths and applies to everything in between – a love Michelle and I committed to 13 years ago. Its the sort of love Jesus has for us. Here is a great passage from Kent Hughes to illustrate it:

Dr Richard Selzer tells of performing surgery to remove a tumor and of necessity severing a facial nerve, leaving a young woman’s mouth permanently twisted in palsy: ‘Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed, and together they seem to do well in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private. Who are they, I ask myself, he and this wry-mouth I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously, greedily. The young woman speaks. “Will my mouth always be like this?” she asks. “Yes, it will. It is because the nerve was cut.” She nods and is silent. But the young man smiles. “I like it,” he says. “It’s kind of cute.”….Unmindful, he bends to kiss the crooked mouth, and I, so close, can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works.”[i] 

Here is a husband’s sacrificial love in the face of permanent disfigurement. In a more profound way, Jesus has bent down to you and me and gone to that permanently scarring place, the cross, because he loves us so much. The things that others would turn away from, he confronts head on.

Looking forward to tomorrow.

[i] Disciplines of a Godly Man, R. Kent Hughes, Crossway Books: pp38,39

From twitter…