delivered 30 August 2009
by Rev. Dr John Evans
James 1:17-27
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Arthur Calwell greets newly arrived migrants to Australia in 1947
The migrant and refugee has always had a special place in the heart of God. The Hebrews were enjoined to care for the orphan, the widow and the alien in their midst. They were never to forget their own refugee experience of being aliens within Egypt when their crops had failed and they had to move to the Nile for a better life. Then within the Christian story, Jesus and his parents are refugees, again to Egypt, as they flee the wrath of Herod. Indeed when the Evans family visited Egypt several years ago, we were there around the time of the Orthodox and Coptic Christmas – 6th January. The Churches we visited had sort of crib or manger scenes like we might set up here, except all the scenes featured not a cave or stable and farmyard animals, but a man, his wife and child obviously fleeing and a collection of pyramids in the background.
The church, this church has had a special mission towards the migrant and refugee. Just around here there is the Ecumenical Migration Centre, the Asylum Seeker project, and still the work we are doing here with folk who live on the Carlton Housing Estate. Sadly however, immigration and refugee policy continues to be a highly politicized issue. It strikes me we collectively cringe as the Australian nation every time a boat is discovered off the north-west Australian coast. We are embarrassed by it. We feel we are being forced somehow to make an inappropriate decision about someone else wishing to seek a better life. In the resources that have been provided for today, we learn that as of May 2009 there are now 618 people in immigration detention (greatly reduced from what it used to be). . . . of whom about a fifth are detained out in the community. But less than half of these people are actually boat people. The majority are overstayers, breaching their visa terms, and even 62 of them who have arrived by plane without necessary documentation.
However, it can be very difficult for migrants and refugees. . . something many in this congregation can attest to. And as each new wave arrives on our shores – it as if a new group descends to the bottom of our national pecking order and they have to make a long climb up towards acceptance. Currently at the bottom are our African neighbours, but they are no different to the middle eastern people, folk from Asian, and the southern European migrants before them. On a day like today, we as a church need to recommit ourselves again to this mission of hospitality and welcome those who arrive within our midst.
However, from our reading in the gospel, I am prompted to think of a particular group of migrant people who face an interesting and often difficult time as being apart of migrant communities in Australia.
Our gospel reading this morning returns to Mark, and while Jesus continues with his teaching and healing ministry around the north of the country, in Galilee a group of religious leaders, scribes and Pharisees, come up from Jerusalem to check him out – and as we see in chapter 7 – complain. They complain that his followers do not observe all the ritual and traditional practices, particularly as they relate to food and washing before eating. They ask, or whinge:
“Why do your disciples not live according to the traditions of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?”
With this text in mind, the group which I wish to think about are the second generation migrants. These are usually the young people, perhaps born here in Australia, or arrived here very young. They are caught between two cultures: the culture of their parents and their homeland, and the very different Australian culture. They wish, or need, or are required, to show loyalty to their elders and their ways while at the same time, they are being educated, trained and work in a very different environment. They have friends outside their own culture and commitments beyond their own community. The clash is often too much to bear and there is discord and social dislocation.
The presenting issue is often around language. The younger folk do not want to learn or see a need to learn the language of their parents. So, for example in migrant ethnic church groups the language is preserved in worship – which is fine, and it is what we did here in our translation of the service into community languages. However, as time passes, the younger ones don’t relate to that service, they literally don’t understand them. Here every Saturday night we have the Arabic Christian Fellowship meet. Worship is in Arabic. There is however a vibrant youth and young adult group – about 20 of them, who meet over in the drop in centre. They are young professionals, students, young people who do not speak Arabic. And when I have met with them, they just feel torn – almost guilty. They fell betwixt and between.
One could perhaps say, this is just a passing phase – the old community languages will just die out. All in that community will soon be speaking English. After all, how many Dutch speaking congregations do we have left in the Uniting Church? I know in Sydney there was only one, and that was in a Dutch retirement village. But I am not comfortable in just saying let the community languages die out – I think we loose something of our true multicultural identity.
For this reason Jesus’ tussle with the Scribes and Pharisees over cultic traditions, the traditions of one’s elders caught my eye. This tussle is really like the plight of our second generation brothers and sisters. They, like Jesus, are accused of forsaking their elders. However, we need to be very careful. We cannot use this conflict over – this tension between law and grace – as some justification for some Darwinian progression here: some survival of the fittest, that the prevailing western, secular, English speaking Australian culture should win out, over a Tongan or Eritrean insight or understanding. . . let alone, how we should respect and treat the culture of our indigenous brothers and sisters. It is to simplistic to just say “the elders are always wrong”, or a get with it, “this is a way of the future”. I do not think this is what Jesus is on about.
Jesus was actually on about something very profound, but before he gets to this key point, he makes some telling observations in passing about the way of tradition, the way of the elders. He quotes from Isaiah 29:13.
1. The first is the human propensity for being hypocritical. The almost universal phenomenon of saying one thing, and then doing another.
“This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”
The author of James saw the same issue. He reminded us
“Be doers of the word and not merely hearers.”
Congruence, integrity with what we say and do is essential. The Scribes ad Pharisees failed on that account. Don’t be a hypocrite. Our elders can be like that too.
2. The Scribes and Pharisees also failed because
“In vain do they worship God, teaching human precepts as doctrines.”
There then follows a rather technical argument, (an argument we jumped over in our reading) perhaps a little too clever by half argument, that shows that what the scribes and Pharisees require of the people is not in fact God’s teaching through the law, but really “human precepts”. All this stuff of tradition and food laws, is in other words made up and not God’s requirement.
But these two arguments aside – Jesus is on about something more significant. He seeks a new humanity, a new way of being; he wants people to have a new relationship with God – and not a relationship that is dependent upon “the elders”, or one’s “cultural identity” or some relationship, perhaps even family relationship, which purports to determine your fullness of life. Jesus is not going to join the culture wars; of having one culture or langue grouping better than another other. What he seeks is all people to have a relationship with God; a full and life giving relationship with God.
Jesus wants to assert that this fullness of life is given to you from God through his own ministry; ultimately it will be shown through his selfless love for us on the cross. Of course, that is not the question here, and it is not so much Jesus himself who develops these ideas but people like the apostle Paul. For Paul it is because of Jesus’ love, and not our observance of the law, we all become children of God and share in Jesus’ own humanity. So in the great Romans chapter 8
“When we cry Abba Father it is (the Holy) Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God and if children then heirs, heirs of God, joint heirs with Christ.”
Yes we are children of our parents, our culture, of our tradition – but through the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit graciously given to us, we are children of God – a new humanity – amazingly even on a par with Jesus himself.
However, in talking with the scribes and Pharisees – Jesus is usefully a little more grounded or prosaic about all of this. He takes head on their anxiety over food laws and related customs. He simply says
“There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”
Jesus is saying it is not the externalities of life that break down our relationships with others, and with God. It is not our keeping of customs about what we eat, or how we wash our hands that ultimately matter. It is actually what comes from within us, our intentions, that cause the problem or bring the joy. And so from within our mind and heart, evil and things that break relationships come: things like inappropriate sexual relations, theft, murder, adultery and avarice etc etc.
Jesus is clearly saying that religion is not just a matter of inward piety rather than external behavior, and that one’s private spirituality is valued more highly than one’s physical life in the world. Rather, Jesus warns that sin arises from within, and leads to these destructive deeds such as theft, murder, and the like (vs. 21–22). The lack of holiness, the lack of this new humanity is marked not by breaches in the cultic code, but in evil acts that spring from evil intentions and the reverse is true too – the new humanity, that gift of God in Christ, comes from within as well.
Immediately after this encounter with the scribes and the Pharisees, the ensuing stories of healing for the daughter of a Syrophoenician woman and of the restoring of hearing and speech for a man of the Decapolis depict the gracious way God operates and offers new life: this gift of new humanity.
The challenge for the church in responding to the needs of migrants and refugees, and perhaps particularly for second generation migrants, is not to assert some vague multicultural ideal that all cultures are as good or as bad as each other; or worse extol a shallow so called Australian culture as our ideal. Our task is to share with the migrant and the long time Aussie alike the new life offered in Christ. We are to offer and live out a life in which all of us are children of God, in which there is mutual respect and in which the full humanity, like the selfless life of Jesus, is the ideal.
