short thought

A letter to the UK from Italy: this is what we know about your future

The part that I found particularly pointed:

"Class, however, will make all the difference. Being locked up in a house with a pretty garden or in an overcrowded housing project will not be the same. Nor is being able to keep on working from home or seeing your job disappear. That boat in which you’ll be sailing in order to defeat the epidemic will not look the same to everyone nor is it actually the same for everyone: it never was."

As someone who has already experienced six months out of work and yet has only had to make marginal changes to their lifestyle, this speaks to me very eloquently. I am waaaaaay above the waterline compared to many of the people who've lost their work in the last two weeks, who will be desperate in another two. My experience of joblessness is not even close to the struggle that many people are going to experience. That is luck, or the grace of God - not His blessing, which is given with deliberation, but His grace - unearned, undeserved. There are doubtless people more worthy in much harder positions: I make no claim to being better or more righteous, just fortunate to have opportunities to have made good on the solid base I was given.

And it's not just 'class', but a whole set of privileges (yes, they are privileges) that gives And yes, this makes me think about how we can make opportunities for those who aren't so lucky to have a solid family of love, friends she can rely on, a godly community of God, no history of abuse, no major medical issues, the best education, in a society that at least legally counts her a person and equal to everyone else, however flawed it may be in the practice.

Christ and coronavirus

I'm not afraid of dying. I'm a little afraid of suffering.

I'm more afraid of having spread the virus to other people who might die.

I'm most afraid of not having done enough (or, really, anything) to bring people to Christ.

how to be 'church' in the midst of pandemic

'Reflections on community in the midst of pandemic'

A lot of churchgoers seem really worried that not meeting in person will somehow 'break' the church. Which...yes, community is at the heart of 'the church', but that community is not magically created by meeting together and it's not magically destroyed by ceasing to do so. It's the care and concern that can be communicated through phonecalls, requests and offers to pray or give aid, and loving acts that may be able to be done even when the recipient is not present.

Is it hard to have a worship service when everyone is in disparate locations? Yes, it rather is. But church? Church is the people of God working together towards His purpose. We can do that anywhere, anytime, not just in a church building at a worship service. It's just not 'church' the nice convenient way that we've become accustomed to doing it.

Change is not a bad thing, just a difficult one.

a continuum of sin: thought, word, and deed

Remember Hannah Clarke.

There's not Good Men and Bad Men, nor Christian Men and Ungodly Men.

It's not boxes that you're put in when you're born and you'll never end up in the other one.

There are only Men On A Continuum Of Gendered Violence. And yes, it's absolutely gendered violence, because the incidences of women abusing men in relationships is so small in comparison that it's like, say, Ghana taking on the USA in a financial throwdown. Yeah, it's there, but it's not even statistically significant.

The truth is that every man is somewhere between "has never gotten frustrated with his wife" and "sets his wife and kids on fire rather than let them walk away from him". Every man.

This is what I imagine Jesus meant when he said "to hate is as to murder". The first is the seed, the last is the full grown plant that harvests blood. It's not what goes into a person that makes them unclean, but what comes out of them: thought, word, and deed.

The man who gets angry with his wife and thinks that she's his property, that he should get to control her life and lifestyle, that she should submit to him...well, that's on the same continuum as the man who set his family on fire. Yes, it's a long way away from it, but even the trip of a thousand kilometres can be done by taking one small step at a time.

And, honestly sometimes I wonder: am I the only one who is terrified of the possibilities that live inside me?

I could soak the world in blood if I was given a reason and my conscience taken away. If I saw people as things or lesser, and didn't care about their feelings or their suffering.

Just about everyone who knows me will say that I'm a nice person. And it's not that I'm not. But I know the possibilities that live inside me, and they terrify me.

All I can think is "hoo boy, you have NO IDEA".

peculiar irony (also witness to the world)

Someone said something to me on the weekend; just a fragment right at the end of a social gathering. She mentioned my FB feed and how I posted interesting things on a Christian perspective: not just the standard Christian lines that are parroted by evangelical Christians (and, yes, misrepresented in a worldly context, but we exist in a worldly context), but Christians who are struggling with those grey areas that conservative evangelicals like to paint as black and white.

Women in ministry. Gays in the church. Abortion. You know, those things.

I wonder if 'the world' wants to see Christians struggling more with these questions. Publically struggling. Admitting they don't know the right/wrong of it, or even admitting that they have a right/wrong of it but being willing to let others make those decisions themselves, wrong though they might be.

Sometimes I wonder if our solidarity of belief as Christians isn't a deterrent as much, if not more than, our apparent behaviour. And not just coming to the easy blanket answer: "well of course slavery is okay, because Christians have owned slaves since the time of Paul, right? So it can't have been wrong..."

And, no, the media is not on our side. That doesn't mean they're always wrong about the ways that we're bull-headed and stupid. Just because Scott Morrison claims to be a Christian doesn't mean he's not also a complete shitwit with zero sensitivity and formulated compassion.

"Be cunning as serpents and innocent as doves," Jesus said. Naivete is not any kind of an excuse, and yet so often it seems to be the first Christian defence: "I didn't know."

We are to know the truth - the truth of the gospel, absolutely, but also the truth of ourselves and our world. To see the flaws in ourselves, admit to them, improve on them. No, it doesn't guarantee our salvation, but it pushes us slowly towards becoming made in the image of Jesus.

My mother's church friends told her that she was wrong to remarry, that she should wait and maybe God's direction for her life would become clear. She was okay to re-marry by our modern Christian mores (my father had been unfaithful to her which most modern ministers would say was okay because my father had broken the intimacy of the relationship and so she was free to remarry), but her husband-to-be was not because he and his wife had divorced for the modern "irreconcilable differences".

The church they went to would not let them get married in the building, so they left the church. All the church. For almost a decade.

Sometimes I think insisting we all toe the black and white and shaming people when they don't manage it does more damage than the admission that we're struggling with something, and trusting in God's grace in the meantime.

--

There are four women I was friends with a decade ago and more.

In the last three months, they have all turned up on my FB feed commenting on things that they disagree with (environmentalism), or things that they want to get 'woke points' for (not being racist).

The irony is that not one of these four women has extended an independent "Hi, how are you?" to me in that decade. They have made no overtures of friendship, asked no questions about my life - they haven't even hit LIKE on my FB posts. And, yes, I notice these things.

I notice the people who come by and comment on stuff - innocuous stuff, stuff that isn't Christian or political, which is just every day life. "I love your quilting work." "Ooh, nice garden!" "Are you okay?" These four women do not fall into the 'everyday friend' category - not even on FB.

They cannot be arsed to care about my life apart from when I post something that either makes them feel good about themselves, or which challenges their beliefs.

YES. I NOTICE.

And if I notice this about fellow "sisters in Christ", you can bet your blue, winged donkey that non-Christians notice this about the Christians who are intent on morally policing them.

High-up Christian leaders bemoan that people don't follow 'moral values' anymore, that the church is no longer a voice in the community.

Maybe - just maybe - this is because so few Christians are part of the community. And if Christians haven't done the hard yards of friendship, then non-Christians are not going to listen to them. That's the plain and simple truth.

Paul knew this - of course he did as one of a bare handful of Christians in a pantheistic society where worth was dictated by the gods, not by a declaration of human rights. To the Greeks, he became a Greek; to the Jews, he became a Jew.

And, no, a lot of people who we befriend are not going to listen to the gospel from Christian lips anymore. They've heard it all before and it's like the screech of nails down blackboard to their ears as high-profile leaders are shown to be abusers, to be bigots, to be willing to hitch their carts to the morally corrupt individuals in the name of political power.

What 'the world' will be willing to listen to is the language of love: an ear hearing their pain and sorrow and frustration, a voice crying out for justice for all people not just for the people who are like the voice crying out, a handhold - not even a 'hand-up or a hand-out' that our politicians like to dichotomise - someone to say "you are here, and maybe I can help by being here, too".

--

I saw a phrase via Michael Frost’s FB last year: ‘once born’ and ‘twice born’ Christians. ‘Once born’ Christians find their faith and never question it. God is there, he is holy, he is great, he is good. They hold to that all their life and it’s not difficult. ‘Twice born’ Christians find their faith, but they might struggle at some point, lose it, walk away, grieve, and in the end come back to the faith again. It’s not an easy journey, but it’s a faith rooted in trust in God and his promises, not in the reality of their lives.

I don't know that I've been twice born; I've never lost my faith, although I drifted away from the church. But I am very grateful for those years spent drifting, learning ways outside the traditions of my childhood, discovering people living on the fringes and the edges of the world that I was brought up in. I like to think it's given me compassion and understanding, and the ability to walk into greyscales that I don't think too many Christians are comfortable walking in - and as a result, they struggle to do anything but black and white the situation and other people's choices.

And maybe someday one of my non-Christian friends will be able to say, "Well, I don't know that I agreed with Sel, but she managed to love me in a way that made me feel valuable and said it was because of Jesus, so maybe I'll give Jesus a(nother) go..."

my world's on fire, how about yours?

Interesting dichotomy: living in the now but also living for the future. Not an easy transition to make as any Christian knows. The temptation to live in the now is nigh undeniable, but we can't just pretend that these things aren't happening. And we need to have a conversation about how we're going to avoid this in the future.

A bunch of links about the bushfires.

ABC News
Arson Is Not The Biggest Cause Of Australia's Fires
Are hazard reduction burns effective in managing bushfires? The answer is complicated

Climate Council
Explaining Bushfires and the link to Climate Change

Facebook posts
Jonathan Happold: Melanoma Country, a poem
Hazard Reduction of Backburn? A post by a fiery.

Sydney Morning Herald
This Is Not Normal: What's Different About The NSW Megafires - 2019-11-10
Experts Warn More Hazard Reduction Burns Are Not The Answer - 2020-01-07
A Seminal Moment In Climate Change Opinion - 2020-01-10

Sarah Wilson
Australians Are Angry At Scott Morrison And That's Okay - Jan 2020

Note: there's a temptation to defend Morrison simply because he claims to be a Christian. This is dangerous and short-sighted. Christians have done terrible things, in the name of power and in the name of God. They may not bear the punishment for sin for those things that they've done, thanks to grace, but those things were still not rightly done just because they were done by someone who has been saved by grace.

Also, this smacks of "defending Israel Folau because he agrees with conservative Christians on some points". No. Defend him for the matter of 'free speech' (and then bloody well acknowledge that he can say what he likes, but there may be consequences, even if he comes to it from a place of honesty).

Buzzfeed
A list of unverified and false information about the Australian bushfires 2020

summersongs: advent among the bushfire smoke

I haven't really ever followed Advent. Like Lent it's not a tradition I ever engaged in. I feel like I wouldn't mind the ritual of it, though - the pattern, the practice, the thoughtfulness and reflection.

The structure, I guess.

The world is fire in so many dimensions, the comforts that a generation has known are being taken away. There's a defiance to so many people: it's my life and I'll live as I want it - not just in terms of sin, but in terms of selfishness and social justice.

Today, Greta Thunberg was named TIME Person of the Year - the person who's been the most influential across the world. And considering nobody even knew her name last July while this year millions have marched in a protest she began with just one sign outside the Swedish Parliament, she deserves it.

As a general rule, my church doesn't like to talk about climate change. We're not those "social justice" kind of people. We believe in individual prayer and practice, not in systemic change. The political things that we believe in speaking up about in a church service are gay marriage, gender orientation, and scripture in schools. Yes, it's a very conservative church, and sometimes a rather uncomfortable one for someone like me who's out on the social fringes, with a liberal bent.

--

Four weeks later, and the new year has rung in - and with the last month of the year towns and houses and lives have gone up in flames.

But we still have a Christian leader in charge of our country, and he's about to legislate the legal right to tell gay people that they're dirtybadwrong so long as we do it from a place of honest belief, so it's not all bad, right? We get to be Christians in public without having to pay that price for following Christ that we love to talk about (except in the mainstream media which we know is full of godless sodomites and YAY we are hated by the world when really the world doesn't care about the message we have at all, because they firmly believe that we don't actually care about them. Telling them they're sinners and need God is not even close to 'caring': caring costs the carer time and energy and effort, and ain't no suburban Christan got time for that).

I haven't asked my friends what they believe as regards climate change. I'm scared of the answer. Cowardly, I know. I can do all things in Christ who gives me strength...but I'm not comfortable with making a social pariah of myself among my friends. Well, who is? But that doesn't make it right, does it? It just makes it common...

What can Christians do about the fires? Pray for rain, of course. But I think we need something a little more uncomfortable than merely the thoughts and prayers. We need petitions - not to God, but to our politicians who have been very bad at doing anything other than murmuring platitudes before the cameras and being utterly tone-deaf to anything but their donations base.

Look, at least in Sydney, three of the strongest conservative electorates are in the church-heavy suburbs of the north. They're not the 'hippie' beach suburbs of the northern beaches, or the 'chardonnay swilling elites' of the inner west; they're the bible belt of the city, full of conservative church members who just want everything to be the way they've gotten used to it being: from being able to use resources as they please and throw things away without feeling guilty, to speaking their mind, even if it's to keep asking a non-white woman where her family's from, but get offended when their answer to the return question is "Australian" and she asks what indigenous group they hail from.

We like our creature comforts.

Maybe it's time to be less comfortable - at least when it comes to prayers and actions.

We need to pussyfoot less around the people "protecting our Christian rights" and demand more action from them. Things like, oh, funding the RFS, ensuring that Centrelink beneficiaries who are fighting fires continue to get paid their benefits, having evacuation plans for all cities and towns, not selling our water rights away, insisting on the conservation of town water supplies in all towns and cities across the country, encouraging the uptake of both rainwater tanks and greywater systems...and these are the really conservative-friendly ones.

I haven't even gotten to the controversial topics like reducing our carbon footprint, offering tax breaks to companies that reuse recycled plastics, having a Coal Exit Plan in place and activating it sometime before we run out - and not moving promptly to Nuclear Will Save Everything Oh And Look, The Mining Companies Who Profited From Coal Can Switch Their Operations To Uranium Instead. (My stepfather went on at length about The Greens holding back Australian progress in the form of nuclear power because apparently nuclear power is 'clean' while solar panel making is pollutive.

There are no good choices in late-stage capitalism; but he won't believe that. He doesn't like The Greens - Rupert Murdoch has taught him that the Greens are Evil and trying to Obstruct The Path To The Future, and so he has learned his lesson well and will regurgitate it at every opportunity like it's the very gospel itself.

Yes, we pray, but sometimes God says 'no'.

If God says 'no', then what do we do?

We work with the 'no' He has given us. We act as though drought is going to be our persisting future, as though fire is going to be our endless summer, as though our world is temporary and we should do what we can to save it as long as possible. "Does grace mean we can sin as we please?" Paul asks the Ephesians (I think it's the Ephesians). "Certainly not! We seek to live grace-filled lives as a sign of the grace that we have, no longer thrashing about in the sin that we were steeped in."

We have environmentally sinned as we please for the last 150 years, but in this age we have been granted the vision of how sinful and fallen we are. We have the opportunity to live in grace - in the holding back of the inevitable by nothing less than an unexpected and undeserved wake-up call.

The question is whether we will?

It's too late for advent as I write this: the time of anticipation of God coming near has passed. He is not just near, but here.

The kingdom of God is at hand, the renewing of the world is not just spiritual but surely also in the temporal now. We are the agents of His work - those who brought health care to the Roman empire, those who decided to educate the uneducated so that they might better know and understand and comprehend the salvation of Christ, those who claimed the right of humanity for women and slaves who were made in the imago dei as surely as white male landowners, and so many more fights for justice through the ages.

Will there be Christians at the forefront of the grace of climate action?