those who think difference is the child of disease

Different people will have varying tolerances for difference. You will find a few people who will match you on every matter that is important. You will find others who don't. It is your choice to engage with or disengage from them - but some soul-searching is going to be very much needed. And this is where privilege becomes clear: are you disengaging because they make you feel uncomfortable? Or because they actual threaten your being or the being of someone close and personal to you?

I'm not talking about people who are active threats; I'm talking about 'nice people' who don't really see the problem. And yes, it involves taking a risk that they do become a problem for you.

For instance, I'm in a local Christian community - conservative, evangelical. I'm in Australia, which has a better degree of 'communalism' than places like America. The people I know are not vengeful, and mostly have compassion for the underdogs. That said, a lot of them are bound by the rules of our society - it won't occur to them that those rules can be used for ill and not just good until after the damage is done.

Truly told, it also wouldn't occur to me for the most part. Things like ICE raids, or targeting trans people? But I've had the fortune to be on lots of 'resistance' accounts for the last decade: there are topics that I have learned that I will need to avoid - not for my sake, but for the sake of other people around me. If I am to be an ally - a safe space even - I need to not give up others, even though people may not extend the same generosity to me.

Remember: do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

But also, if you can hold the line on a matter of difference that isn't a threat to you - personally, legally, may I encourage you to do so.

Cultural Influencers

I'm a Christian in a conservative space. I know lots of people who are increasingly uneasy at the waning cultural influence of Christianity in our society. The 'hot topic' issues such as gender and sexuality are things that they are concerned about - the idea that you can't say it's wrong or a sin: that we need that language for people to repent.

I hold a rather broader view of 'sin' - sin is not what we do, it's everything that we are when you define 'sin' as simply "choosing not to follow God's way". That can involve snapping at someone you live with because you had a bad day, and it can involve cheating on your partner. It can involve cursing someone quietly from behind your steering wheel when they cut you off in traffic, and it can involve punching someone out because they cut in front of you in line.

It can also involve simply living your life in an ordinary way without any reference or consideration of what God wants for your life. It's living as though God doesn't exist. Which, let's be honest, all of us do at some point in time during the day.

'Sin' in my books is way bigger and more encompassing than most people's definition of it. But also: it is what it is. I don't feel 'guilt' over it - not the way that most people tend to assign guilt. It's not a feeling of badness or wrongness. I might regret that I'm not more God-focused, but also, I do and don't give God the glory in my every day life.

the good samaritan on tiktok

I think it was Michael Frost who first introduced me to the idea that the story of the Good Samaritan was an illustration of how we fail to love God by loving our neighbour.

"But who is my neighbour, really?" asks the young techbro, grinning broadly as he spreads his hands wide either side of the mic.

"You are still your brother's keeper," says Jesus.

"Of course. I care more about my family than about strangers," says the influencer, rolling her dough into little balls before carefully indenting them with one perfectly manicured fingertip.

"When you belong to my kingdom, your family is strangers," Jesus tells her.

"You didn't tell us not to do those things, though," insists the guy, tipping his cap back from his forehead to show that the ruddy shade of his face is not merely complexion.

"Didn't I say do unto others as you would have those others do to you?"

"But you didn't really mean that, right? Like, it's all metaphorical. Like a parable!"

"'Go you and do likewise' is not a parable."

"What if I don't want to?"

"If you love me, you will keep my commands," Jesus murmurs. 

Used For His Glory

Used For His Glory

If we lined up all the men who 'achieved' something
Who 'created' something
Who 'started' something
And we looked at their records - not of achievement
Nor of what they're credited with creating
But of the women in their lives
Wife Mistress Daughter Assistant Housekeeper Servant
(or perhaps, more correctly: property property property property property property)

Women who were
unacknowledged for the work they did
dismissed in the ideas they had
beaten for infractions
enslaved for the colour of their skin
raped for having an orifice
impregnated for having a womb
divorced for convenience
Along with all the other sufferings as they were used for his glory

Could we count the men of achievement who treated women like they were humans...
Would it take all our fingers and toes? Or just one hand? Just one hand...and not use all the fingers?

More telling perhaps:
Would we excuse their sins?

As though the use of another human being like they're a thing can be passed over when 'achievement' is made?
As though the broken flesh of women who were never named, never claimed is an acceptable cruelty in exchange for 'greatness'
As though being 'man enough to do the job' is the sewn skins that will hide a shame
That dates back to Adam giving his wife a name
(like she was one of the the animals)

If we lined up all the women who were forgotten would their cries matter to us?
Does their suffering count? Or would we say 'yes'
even as we wagged our heads in disapproval of her choices?

Yet the slave-woman named Him the God who sees
who sees her pain
and grieves
and comforts
and honours

The daughters of Zelophelad claimed their portion from the Lord
before all the people
before history
before the rights of husbands not-yet-chosen

A woman of valour was lionised in scripture
For business acumen
For compassion on the hopeless
For responsibility to her own

God took women and made them evangelists
sent from the well
sent from the tomb
sent across the empire

Even if not at first believed, even if not acknowledged, even if denied the title the name the dignity
Women have always been entrusted with the Empire of the LORD
They pondered these things in their hearts
knelt as a student at a teacher's feet
wept as a mourner before He Who Sees

Their presence in the scriptures
Even a little bit
Even for a moment
Just a mention
Not forgotten, tossed aside, left behind, ignored.

But remembered for
magnification
perfume
faith
healing
forgiveness
discipleship
witness
and participants in the joy that comes of being used for His glory.

Overseers or freedmen?

An awful lot of people would rather be overseers in a slave system than freedmen alongside populations they despise.

The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant? Is a story of one who saw himself as an overseer in a slave system.

The king had given him freedom from the crushing debt he was owed. But the king had given him freedom…alongside one whom he saw as his inferior, someone who owed him.

And the Unforgiving Servant saw it as his job to demand what was owed to him, when what he owed had been forgiven.

The truth is, we all have the chance to stand alongside our fellow freedmen. It's just that many won't because they see themselves as essentially superior to 'those people'. Sometimes we call them immigrants. Sometimes we call them criminals. Sometimes we call them spics. Sometimes we call them chinks. Sometimes we don't even label them, we just call them 'those people'.

The story of white supremacy? Overseers in a slave system. So many could have chosen to stand alongside freed peoples, even if their skins were a different colour, but they wanted what scraps of power they could gain to lord it over others who were just like them.

Those people blathering on about how the only good Australia is white Australia? Overseers in a slave system.

But so, too, are Christians who think our mission is to stamp out the 'sexually immoral, adulterous, drinkers, thieves, liars, etc.' - the Christians who would rather be God's Police than servants of their fellow humans.

From a worldly wise perspective, everyone would rather be the slave overseer, with authority and dominance over the slave.

From a godly perspective, too many really don't see that we are slaves in the same system, trapped all together, and our job is to be the underground railroad. Less questioning, more getting them out.

a theology of resurrected bodies

Decades ago, I learned a theology of "resurrection of the body" that told me that someday I'd be in a resurrected body that was identifiably me but also not.

New creation means a new body - which is a whole new interesting thing. My body works as most bodies should work. Maybe it's not as pretty or as sexy or as shapely as our society thinks a woman's body should be, but it does pretty much all the things I've needed to, and when it 'malfunctioned', it was something that could be dealt with.

What about the friend I have who died twenty years ago, wheelchair bound? The theology of resurrected bodies that I learned wasn't one with a space for non-standard bodies. Does Abby get a 'new body', too? Will it still be her body? Was her body - her physicality - innately sinful, then, for being "non-standard"?

Or does her body just do all the things she needs it to do in the new creation, her physicality no longer a binding upon her in the next life as it was in this life?

Abby died around two decades ago. My fully-abled and very physically-capable cousin Tina died around one decade ago. Both Christian women, from very different traditions, with very different bodies, but very steadfast faiths. And one night I dreamed of them both dancing before the Throne - Tina as she loved to do, Abby as she never had the opportunity to do. Did I see what kind of body Abby had? Nope. Apparently it was beyond my comprehension as limited by this world, and so my brain lacks the ability to think beyond the bound of the society it was raised in - where Abby's body was "wrong" for not being capable of all the things that my body and Tina's body were capable of doing and being.

Or maybe I just made it all up in my head. Always possible.

A theology of disability - of "differently abled bodies" - is an interesting one, because it forces us to confront that if the flesh is not inherently sinful, then having a body that doesn't fit our social expectations isn't a sin either.

OT laws vs NT laws vs Laws Of Love

Not eating shellfish? Isn't a matter of "love thy neighbour". Providing opportunities for those who aren't born into them? That's a matter of "love thy neighbour".

The NT Laws we recognise as being more about 'loving people around us' than the OT Laws, but also, the NT laws are rooted in a culture and a time and a place and issues that the church was facing at the time when those answers were given. They give us the shape of "loving our neighbour" but not necessarily the specifics.

The way the OT law worked was a lot of ancient society wisdom - not eating things that were risky-disky in terms of cleanliness or biosecurity, or which could be mistaken for the religious practices of the peoples around them - AND a lot of stuff that went against the codes of the ancient societies around them. Slaves and servants being granted a rest day off? The sexual abuse of a woman being punishable by either her legal right to your entitlements (as happened for women through the contract of marriage) or your death? Welcoming those who flee their lands of origin?

Those are pretty weird by the standards of the day. And sure, we can argue that 'people should have known better' but we have the experience of some nine-thousand years of human thought and experience and knowledge, transmitted by myth, legend, story, and parable, and then by fairy-tale and epic narrative and collective chant, and most recently by print and recorded media. So, yeah, we know now, but we didn't know then. Just like children start off with very simplistic understandings of the world and grow into complexity with adults. (Sometimes. Sometimes they don't. That's part of the issues we're facing right now: people who want childlike solutions to problems that have been woven by generations of humanity.)

Basically, the OT laws that carry on to the NT, and the NT mandates that we still cling to today, are entirely and without exception those that dignify our relationship with God and with other human beings. We have corrupted them in the modern world with our legalism and our tricksy wordses of online defensive discourse, but in the end, what we are asked to do is to love and care for and succour and support others in ways that lift them up in everything they are, not merely 'spiritual'.

Which is why we don't take the entire literal books of the Torah as our laws. We take the spirit of what they say in them and not the specifics - to respect our fellow human beings as co-created by God, to do right by the created world He gave us to look after, and to do right by the other created beings He put in the world with us, and to give due place and presence to the creator God.

I don't think that we should be focused on "the spiritual" so much as "the spirit".

When "Colourblind" Is Still Blind

(And why Jesus came to make the "colourblind" see the full spectrum of His image)

--

You've heard it. I've heard it. You've even said it. Some of you have said it to me.

"I don't see colour."

It's supposed to be an encouragement - a declaration of equality. "You're just like me, just with different skin." 

And at one level it is. At another, it's just blindness.

I grew up in a church of people like me - East Asians, mostly, out of South China in the waves of immigration that preceded and succeeded the Communist Takeover.

Some were born here, bred here, like my father and myself. Some came to Australia and converted to the faith from their ancestral spiritual leanings, like my mother and two of her brothers. And some came from Christian families out of Asia - a great panoply of believers by way of James Hudson Taylor and CMS and all other missions throughout the Asian archipelago. A wondrous history and culture of believers.

In my childhood, we all worshipped together before the Lord - we were one, we were many, and from all the lands of Asia we came.

But we also understood that our different pathways to come here meant that we thought differently about things. That the Chinese-Malaysian family out of Kuala Lumpur had a different perspective on nation-states than did the brother-in-Christ out of Singapore. That the Indonesian sister had a different experience of bigotry to the Chinese sister. And yet, we were all one family of God worshipping together on a Sunday, sharing meals together at social events on weekends, calling each other during the week.

This is what it means to "see colour".

My experience of being an Australian Christian differs to a white-passing Australian Christian's experience. My understanding comes from my incarnation as a non-white body, female and Asian, and the presumptions enfolded into a culture which prizes and prioritises whiteness and maleness, even in the church and often from the pulpit. And so, you might not see me as "different" to you, but my experience of humanity, of society, of culture is entirely different to yours.

I've experienced racism. Both the nasty kind and the nice kind.

The nasty kind is easy to deal with. But the nice kind? That really cuts. And it's difficult to explain, because the nice racists can also be nice people, who don't realise that they're part of the problem.

Maybe you think this doesn't make a difference - after all, the gospel is the gospel, right? And yet Paul's teaching is both very specific to the cultures he was writing to - some of them culturally Jewish, some of them Greek, or Macedonian, or some of them a mish-mash of whoever had been baptised in the household when Paul came - their hang-ups, their idealisations, the way they looked at the world. "The Jews want to see fantastic signs and wonders, and the Greeks think Knowledge Is Everything, but we preach a Christos Yesous ('saviour' in both language groups) - who the Romans consider a criminal!" 

Paul lived in a cultural melting pot as much as we do, and closer to it, I think. So reading him with the lens of a 'melting pot culture' is surely a better way to think of his teachings than the monochrome culture of eras past?

I've attended Anglican churches since I was 18. Moved away from home, joined a local church that was Anglican, ended up sticking with the Anglican denominational churches since. Solid teaching, good people, a certain type of worship and service and expectation... Those things suit me, brought up in Sydney Evangelicalism as I was (my childhood church was in the Sydney Evangelical union of churches) but they may not suit someone from another background. It's not for everyone, and sometimes more important than the particularity of the teaching and the preaching is the ability of the congregant to connect with the pastor who is their church's spiritual guide week after week. 

For someone of a non-white background who needs this, they're not going to find it in the Anglican church. A high priest who is able to sympathise with our sorrows and struggles... Not so much at the (very excellent) church I attend. That *is* okay, you know. The reason there are so many churches done so many ways is so that the broad and multitudinous People Of God can find somewhere that they can be comfortable in...before they go out and work on their discomfort.

When I was young, I imagined that there was something like a 'waiting room' for heaven. You know, after you die, while you're waiting for the judgement day, we all get around to talking to the people who are also waiting for Jesus to come again and get to know each other. (Look, I could only think in linear time in those days, and I'm an ambivert. Getting to know and chat with people sounds like a lot of fun to me, while to others it probably sounds like a version of eternal torment.) 

These days, I think heaven is going to be an eternity of not only meeting other believers from all times and spaces, but learning their languages and praise songs, sitting in their cultures and hanging out, worshipping God the way they worship God, loving each other the way they were taught to love their neighbours. Only, you know, perfectly. 

I do not want an eternity of Anglicanism. Apologies to any and all ministers I have known and listened to and served under and been ministered to by! But, yeah, nah.

A whole world history of new culture and new practices, of people who have new depths to give the gospel and the preachings and teachings of the ages? A whole new understanding of who God is, of the Father, of the Christ, of the Holy Spirit? Of who my brothers and sisters are? Of who we were made to be in His image? All of us, varied and different, through the aeons, from Rahab running her inn and wondering at the God who welcomed a non-traditional woman into his people, to Selina who lives in a world where she can be non-traditional in so many ways Rahab couldn't have imagined and still not stand out?

WOOHOO. Sign me up, for lo, I am there!

And that's why "colourblind" is such a problem to me. Because to not see the variety, the wondrous expanse of God's creativity in making people different, in guiding our cultures, in enabling all of us to come before him dressed in robes of the finest grace? Is, to me, to be truly "blind" to the Kingdom of God - an empire not defined by borders of geography, but by those who open the borders of their heart to a God who requests entry, and who accept Him and his multitudinous family with Him.

All the 'little children' of God's world.