Border "Control": a thought about language

Governments regulate their borders. "Control" of borders is like saying police should have "control" of the streets. Yes, crime should be regulated, but if you repeatedly emphasise the need for police to always have control, then it's not too long before you have tanks on the streets. The language of "control" is part of the problem as it implies "by whatever means necessary". Police and the criminal justice system regulate criminal activity, but not by whatever means necessary. Only according to law.

Political authorities may legitimately regulate their borders, but not by whatever means necessary. There is much about Australian immigration policy that has departed from this. Australia is doing the immigration equivalent of putting tanks on the streets.

So the dichotomy between "control" and "open borders" is a false dichotomy, which results in the false dichotomy between drownings and deliberate abuse.

On imagining the future: Human action is reaction

"Come now you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.' Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, 'If the Lord wishes, will live and do this or that.' As it is, you in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin."

- James 4.13-17 (NRSV).

If making confident assertions of the likely course of my personal life is arrogance that ignores the fact that I am not in control, then expanding such claims to society as a whole seems sheer hubris.

Nonetheless, it is important to note that this passage from James doesn't rule out all expectations of the future playing a role in decision-making. It is not that Christians are forbidden from considering the future or making plans based on such considerations, but that all our plans must be written in pencil, not ink. This requires a certain chastisement of imagination, or perhaps better, imagination's acknowledgement that it is imagination. The future is uncertain; it is an arrogant boast to confuse pictures of a possible future with our desires for the future and assume that we can (or must) ensure the realisation of those desires.

The future is not ours to seize and shape, but God's to give and take. Our role is humble receptivity, trusting thankfulness, loving perception and hopeful prayer.

Does this stance foster passivity, a resignation in the face of suffering and so a complicity in failure to secure liberation for the oppressed? It can and all too often has. But it need not. And a thorough account of human action will be more open, more honest, more creative and more effective for taking the priority of divine grace more seriously. God initiates, we respond. Human action is reaction. That is the lesson of James.

This does not require passivity, rather an openness to the unfolding possibilities of loving God and neighbour, an openness in which we take seriously our situation and take just as seriously the Spirit's power to breathe new life into hearts of stone.

Each of us is thrown into a concrete historical situation that is neither of our choosing nor our fashioning, born within a family and culture that we can only receive. Rejection or reformation are, of course, forms of reception. We do not begin with a blank slate, even if we wish to shatter or erase what is written. We are born amidst a broken glory. Unbidden, we both rejoice and suffer as a result. Our world, our selves and our time are not creatures of our will, to be made into whatever image we desire. We receive them. And we receive them as the gift of God despite the flaws evident in them, giving thanks for what is good, trusting that what is not is not beyond redemption.

No deficiency in my self or my shared world or the span of time for my life is excluded from this trusting acceptance because at the heart of the world, self and time which I receive lies Christ, who is the hope of healing, of new life in the deadest of ends, of space to breathe.

And so the gift received is my life: my self, my world and the time of the former amidst the latter. And the hidden centre of that gift is Christ, who is the image of my true self, the founding principle of creation and the alpha and omega of time. Human action begins in humble receptivity towards and trusting thanksgiving for that gift.

Yet I am also called to account for what becomes of my self, my world and my time. The gift brings responsibility. Not only is the gift to be received, but understood, entered into and explored. The gift invites not mere submission of the will, but the delight of the heart, the joyful harmonising of the affects. Coming to know this gift involves not simply the intellect but crucially love. Only a participation in God's passionate concern for his creation (whether or not this is how we conceive it) enables us to see what is actually around us. The dispassionate observation of objective inquiry is frequently a necessary step in this process, but it is a limiting of focus that occurs within a broader framework of care. We learn about the world and ourselves and the time available to us because we care what happens, who we are to become. We are responsible for the gifts we have received.

And having become responsible, we therefore care about possible futures, about paths that open before us, about the destiny of the good things entrusted to us. We face future prospects because we cannot do otherwise without closing our hearts and hands. And faithful imagination requires the abandonment of false hopes, as well as the rejection of myopic assumptions that things must remain as they are. The pursuit of responsible care for the gifts we have received may require of us the rejection of utopian fantasies, but also the questioning of the status quo. What we may hope for along the way is neither ease nor comfort, but that the road we walk will not, ultimately, be a dead end, that our labours of love will not be in vain.

The future is not ours to seize and shape, but God's to give and take. Our role is humble receptivity, trusting thankfulness, loving perception and hopeful prayer.

The path of faith, hope and love - that is, the path of true human action in the way of the crucified and risen Christ - is narrow, dangerous and often not immediately perceptible. It can only be walked with prayerful dependence and an ongoing openness to correction and further guidance. But it is a journey into life.

How to be rich

"For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich."

- 2 Corinthians 8.9.

We are rich, wealthy beyond measure, because of the gift of Christ. Born amongst beasts, dying amongst thieves, he came into our poverty to bless us with grace upon grace. We are recipients of life we did not earn, forgiveness we did not deserve, a Spirit who blows where he will, all from a God we cannot control. We share a living planet we did not create, a family we did not choose, a history we did not fashion and a future we cannot determine. We are gifted with divine promises to trust, neighbours to bless and possibilities to imagine and implement. All these treasures and more are ours. We are wealthy beyond measure.

Our riches cannot be placed in a bank, fluctuate with the stock market or depreciate with excessive use. They are multiplied by sharing, accrue interest when given freely away.

One man who seemed to grasp something of this was philanthropist Andrew Carnegie when he said, "To die rich is to die disgraced." Our wealth lies not in what we hoard, not in what we earn, but in what we receive without deserving and what we joyfully share or give away. So pour out your life for others, for it is rich and full and overflowing. Pour it out because the Spirit of Christ has filled you and cannot be dammed. Pour it out because then you walk in the footsteps of Christ and share his blessings. Pour it out and become a child of God who receives every good gift from above.

Merry Christmas!

How to avoid thinking about climate change

Climate change is not an environmental issue. Of course, it has ecological implications (including making the bleak outlook for biodiversity considerably worse), but it is also an issue of justice (especially international and intergenerational), of national security, of resource (especially water) management, of economics, of agriculture and so of food security, of public health, of national and international law, of geopolitical stability, of refugees, of urban management, of energy generation, of cultural continuity, of archeology and so on, and so on.

Yet labelling it an "environmental" issue enables those who would rather not think about just how large and scary a threat it is to put it in the basket with other "environmental" causes and so to treat it (in accordance with some ideologies) as a "luxury" issue that we will get to with the time and resources left over once we've thought about the more important issues of the economy and, well, okay, the economy some more.

Here are some common strategies used to deflect or defer the matter from being a topic of common reflection at the dinner table, over the back fence or on the train (if any of these social interactions still occur in an age of T.V. dinners, local estrangement and iPods):

1. Metaphor of displaced commitment: "I protect the environment in other ways".
2. Condemn the accuser: "You have no right to challenge me".
3. Denial of responsibility: "I am not the main cause of this problem".
4. Rejection of blame: "I have done nothing wrong".
5. Ignorance: "I didn't know".
6. Powerlessness: " I can't make any difference".
7. Fabricated constraints: "There are too many impediments".
8. After the flood: "Society is corrupt".
9. Comfort: "It is too difficult for me to change my behaviour".

- S. Stoll-Kleemann, Tim O'Riordan, Carlo C. Jaeger, "The psychology of denial concerning climate mitigation meaures: evidence from Swiss focus groups", Global Environmental Change 11 (2001), 107-11.

Do any of these sound familiar? Each of these strategies may sometimes be founded on a half-truth, but even when that is the case, most of the time they are simply employed to avoid having to deal with an issue that is much more conveniently placed into the "too hard" basket.

The good news is that Christian discipleship, although not (of course) designed to prepare us for responding well to climate change, actually prepares us for responding well to climate change. Or at least, it ought to if we are sending down deep roots into the life-giving stream of God's grace. Each of the above strategies is countered by convictions arising from the gospel narrative.

1. "I protect the environment in other ways": Since we are saved by grace, there is no need to justify ourselves through our actions. Therefore, we are free to take the actions that will actually love our neighbour and glorify God, not simply do those we feel duty-bound to do to meet some minimum standard.

2. "You have no right to challenge me": Since our judge is also our saviour, we fear no one's condemnation. If others are making accusations against us, we can consider them soberly, without needing to jump to our own self-defence. Similarly, since God has poured out his Spirit on all flesh, we can never safely write off anyone's speech, since it may be a divine word addressed to us.

3. "I am not the main cause of this problem": That may be partially true, but if you are reading this blog, it is highly likely that you have enjoyed at least something of the kind of lifestyle that has cumulatively got us into this mess (this also applies to #4). God's forgiveness of even those who have sinned much means an honest acknowledgement of liability can become the first step into sanity. But even where it is largely true that my contribution to the problem has been small, loving one's neighbour isn't done out of obligation or based on quid pro quo. We love because God has first loved us, an experience that brings an unexpected realignment of our priorities such that even enemies are included within the scope of our care. Insofar as we have been forgiven much, the small debts that others may owe to us are no grounds for a diminishment of love towards them.

4. "I have done nothing wrong": Extending the previous answer, the good Samaritan was neither the main cause of the victim's problem, nor had he even done anything wrong, but he saw himself as the wounded man's neighbour and so helped him anyway, even at personal expense. Christ invites us to go and do likewise.

5. "I didn't know": Ignorance is not bliss; it can be culpable. Knowledge of God leads into deeper knowledge of and solidarity with the groaning creation, opening us to the vulnerability that comes from paying close attention. We may find that we are no longer merely observers, but get caught up in the action. As we begin to learn about the world and its fractures, what we do with what we know matters. Acting upon the (limited) knowledge we have is a privilege and an opportunity to learn more.

6. "I can't make any difference": In Christ, we are liberated from the impossible burden of saving ourselves. Our actions may not preserve a stable climate or rescue civilisation from collapse, but they can indeed make a difference. Empowered by the Spirit, the seeds that we plant or water may indeed grow into unexpectedly fruitful trees of great beauty. In the Lord, our labour is not in vain.

7. "There are too many impediments": Impediments to total solutions there may be, but the possibility of non-trivial action is secured by the Spirit's work opening the path before our feet to keep trusting, loving and hoping. Our actions need not secure ultimate ends to remain worthwhile.

8. "Society is corrupt": All too true. Yet it is the nihilism of despair to conclude that we ought therefore to eat, drink and be merry, to play the whole corrupt game because if you can't beat them, you may as well join them. Such despair overlooks the divine commitment to even this corrupt society: "For God so loved the corrupt world...".

9. "It is too difficult for me to change my behaviour": On the contrary, it is too risky to remain comfortable. The attempt to freeze history, or at least to distract oneself sufficiently from the rush of ongoing change to preserve the fiction of stability is one of the surest ways of losing all that one holds dear. Clinging onto one's life means losing it, seeing it ossify and decay from the very grasp with which one attempts to preserve it. Only letting go of control of one's life is the path to discovering that life is granted anew.

Our culture is not materialist enough

"It's been said often enough but it bears repeating, that in some ways – so far from being a materialist culture, we are a culture that is resentful about material reality, hungry for anything and everything that distances us from the constraints of being a physical animal subject to temporal processes, to uncontrollable changes and to sheer accident."

- Rowan Williams, Ethics, Economics and Global Justice.

Matter matters to God. Christians are not anti-materialist (though we may be anti-consumerist). Williams identifies here an important dynamic in our attitude towards the good things in life. We do not actually enjoy them. We generally do not stop and give thanks, nurture contentment and joy with the good gifts we already have, but rush on to acquire more, consume more, experience more, as though if only by accumulating enough we can somehow transcend the fact that we have limits. It is not possible to have every experience, to hoard every treasure, to play with every toy. Let us enjoy what we have and be content.

For Williams, so much comes down to whether we will admit our creaturely status or whether we will continue to try to be gods. To put it another way: will we face reality and embrace the good gift of mere humanity? If we will, then we are free to drop the pretense of invulnerability and our delusions of control and finality and embrace responsibility on a human scale.

Life out of control

"In a culture of fear we must take great care not to assume that our attempts to become invulnerable to threat are necessarily consistent with God's purposes. In fact, as I will argue below, divine providence, rightly understood, teaches us to trust in God's future so that we may release our desire for control."

- Scott Bader-Sayer, Following Jesus in a culture of fear
(Grand Rapids, Mi.; Brazos, 2007), 123.

Do you sometimes feel your life is out of control? Do you always want to be "on top of things"? Is your primary concern to ensure that you and those you love are safe?

There is great liberation in acknowledging that life is always lived out of control. I am not able to ensure the removal of all risk and threat. In fact, sometimes situations of danger and uncertainty are precisely the opportunities for new paths forward. Vulnerability is not only being open to pain and loss, but also being open to new life.

Of course, the opposite temptation is to abdicate responsibility, to go with the flow and be a puppet of whatever forces you don't want to look at.

What is "normal" life?

"To us things are normal when they are going well. Health, affluence, peace - these are normal, so convinced are we of our own righteousness, of what is our due. But Scripture teaches the very opposite. Unfortunately what is normal now that man is separated from God is war and murder, famine and pollution, accident and disruption. When there is a momentary break in the course of these disasters, when abundance is known, when peace timidly establishes itself, when justice reigns for a span, then it is fitting, unless we are men of too little faith, that we should marvel and give thanks for so great a miracle, realizing that no less than the love and faithfulness of the Lord has been needed in order that there might be this privileged instant. We should tremble for joy as before the new and fragile life of a little child."

- Jacques Ellul, The Politics of God and the Politics of Man
(trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Eerdmans, 1972 [1966]), 178-79.

What is more normal: health or sickness; peace or violence; prosperity or adversity? Ellul is right to highlight the way we can complacently assume the world owes us a living. Every moment of sunshine is a gift to be thankfully received, not a birthright to be demanded. We are not the makers of our own reality; our survival and flourishing are contingent upon so many factors beyond our control, often even beyond our influence. And where we do exert our influence, it is so often ambivalent. Even our best intentioned acts often cause unforeseen harm. Seeking to tread lightly on our path, we trail destruction and confusion behind us. Any good we manage to briefly enjoy is always threatened by dissolution or contamination. It is normal to experience frustration and guilt, disappointment and pain. We live broken lives in a world out of joint.

But there is a deeper reality than even sin and human brokenness. God is not a god of chaos, but of peace. In Christ a new world has dawned. The Spirit therefore teaches us to be discontent with our discontented lives, to treat as normal not the passing age of pain, but the coming kingdom of healing. In light of this future, the ubiquity of evil has been unmasked as a grotesque aberration. To be normal now is to live amidst the dying as those who live again. To be normal is to reject the presumption of my own innocence and yet to be freed from guilt by the vindicated one. To be normal is to love the loveless and accept grace with thanksgiving. To be normal in these days is to be extraordinary.

Finitude is a gift

Faced with ecological threats of various kinds, many people would rather not think about them. They retreat into denial, or a security based in the possibility of technological advances or the allegedly inevitable forces of the free market. The broad popularity of reaching for hope in the market or technological fixes can be seen in the frequency with which politicians draw upon these themes. We are comfortable and our inertia draws us to answers that require little thought and less change. We trust that the explosive economic growth of the last few hundred years is now the normal trajectory, able to be extrapolated into the foreseeable future.

Wendell Berry has written an excellent article titled "Faustian economics: Hell hath no limits" reflecting upon our collective obsession with the myth of infinite growth. He argues that the pursuit of limitless consumption, unbounded knowledge and endless control is not only a dangerous illusion destroying our planet, but an attack on our very humanity. We will ultimately lose not just the planet, but also our soul. He rediscovers a life-giving alternative (though he doesn't say so explicitly) in a Christian conception of creatureliness. Here is a taste of the essay's opening:

"The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning. The strategies of delay, so far, have been a sort of willed oblivion, or visions of large profits to the manufacturers of such 'biofuels' as ethanol from corn or switchgrass, or the familiar unscientific faith that 'science will find an answer.' The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves.

"This belief was always indefensible—the real names of global warming are Waste and Greed—and by now it is manifestly foolish. But foolishness on this scale looks disturbingly like a sort of national insanity. We seem to have come to a collective delusion of grandeur, insisting that all of us are “free” to be as conspicuously greedy and wasteful as the most corrupt of kings and queens. (Perhaps by devoting more and more of our already abused cropland to fuel production we will at last cure ourselves of obesity and become fashionably skeletal, hungry but—thank God!—still driving.)"

The full article is not short (approx. 4,000 words), but well worth reading and re-reading. H/T Roberto.

The Word became flesh: looking again at Jesus V

A sermon from John 1.1-14: Part V
2. LIGHT – shining in the darkness

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

- John 1.1-5.

The generously conversational God spoke the world into being. He is the source of all that is. Nothing can avoid being in relationship to him via his creative word. If you exist, if you’re alive, you’re already a recipient of his grace. Your very life and breath is a gift from outside. I didn’t ask to be born. I didn’t earn the right to start breathing. Every time the sun rises on a new day, all we can do is receive it with empty hands and thanks. Like the sun, the source of our life streams relentlessly into us from a source beyond us, a source we cannot control and can only accept.

Let’s listen to one artist’s thoughts on this theme. This is from a track called “You are the Sun” by Sara Groves.

You are the sun shining down on everyone
Light of the world giving light to everything I see
Beauty so brilliant I can hardly take it in
And everywhere you are is warmth and light

And I am the moon with no light of my own
Still you have made me to shine
And as I glow in this cold dark night
I know I can’t be a light unless I turn my face to you

Shine on me with your light
Without you I’m a cold dark stone
Shine on me, I have no light of my own
You are the sun, you are the sun, you are the sun
And I am the moon

Twelve points for the first to guess the Scottish location in the photo.
Series: I; II; III; IV; V; VI; VII; VIII; IX; X.