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It is right to take time today
to reflect on the meaning of these events. Although Marrickville
has suffered less than some parts of Australia, we can’t
be unmoved, we can’t be untouched by the losses to so many
families.
Just as we were horrified at
the deaths at the Maccabean Games a few years ago, and last year
at the WTC, we are horrified today that so many young lives have
been lost. The last figures I saw were 4 people from our area
probably killed and at least one seriously injured.
So, first, let's think about the fact that we are not the only
ones to have suffered. Though the numbers of Australians who
gather around this time of year in Bali meant that such an attack
was bound to hit Australians hard, we can’t forget that
Indonesians died that day. We can’t forget that Americans
and British died there, that Germany and France lost nationals.
We can’t forget that the whole world is in shock.
And don’t forget that, along with many pagans, many Christians,
many Hindus and more than a few Muslims died. Bombs are indiscriminate;
terrorism cares for no one.
So we pause for a moment and think of the lives snuffed out.
We have seen the grief of those who have lost a son, a brother,
a daughter, a sister, a wife or a husband or a parent or partner.
There were those sad, sad stories, the two little girls, nine
and six, waiting for news of their mother; the bereft parents
whose son died, saying, “We lost his twin a couple of years
ago to an accident...”
Let’s pause and reflect silently...
[Pause]
Let’s also particularly
think of the people Marrickville has lost. No deaths have been
confirmed, but no trace has been found yet of
Debbie Borgia of Tempe, nor of her 14–year–old
daughter,
Abbey Borgia.
Debbie’s son is still searching in Bali, hoping they are
alive somewhere. Abbey was a student at Casimir College.
No trace has been found of
Robyn Webster of Marrickville.
Robyn’s daughter got out with a badly broken arm, and is
home now.
No trace has been found of
Louiza Zervoz, 33, of Marrickville. She was one of several
bridesmaids who had gone to Bali with the bride and groom, who
I believe, were killed.
Louiza's friend,
Christina Betmalik, from Croydon, is also missing, presumed
dead.
But don’t imagine that the
pain stops with those five. Don't forget that people we’ve
never heard of, people from Perth or the UK or anywhere else,
were brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, parents of people
who live among us.
Australia has lost, proportionately, roughly as many people as
the US lost in the WTC attack. That means that the same percentage
of our people were personally touched by this tragedy as were
personally touched in the US by that one.
Evil, once set in train, scars
the face of the entire earth.
But I want to talk to us as privileged
people, because we weren’t there; most of us were only momentarily
brushed by the cold hand that ripped lives apart that night.
So let’s remember that privilege brings responsibility.
We know that. Our teachers taught it to us in school.
We are privileged.
We have seen, we have shared the experience, even we have suffered
— not nearly as those whose lives were forever ripped apart
by this calamity have suffered. Yet, when one suffers, all suffer.
As Donne said, speaking of the bell at a funeral,
Ask not for whom
the bell tolls —
It tolls for thee.
We have been far enough away
to see more clearly, and that privilege brings responsibility
to each of us.
About ten years ago, a little boy was killed by a car. The family
was well known in Marrickville, and there was a lot of anger
against the driver. He was driving too fast, he wasn’t watching.
Some said the police shouldn’t have looked after him when
they came to the scene; they should have let the family and the
neighbours lynch him on the spot. Why did they push the driver
into the paddywagon and disperse the crowd so that he wouldn’t
be harmed? Several local hotheads actually planned to give the
driver a beating.
A few voices stood for a different approach. My wife, Chris,
was one; I was another; a local Arabic worker was yet another.
We understood the grief and the anger. We had all been close
to people who had lost their children in accidents.
Finally reason prevailed.
It was a good thing, too.
In court, it emerged that the boy’s father had been working
on his car in the driveway and left the child playing behind
the car. It had never caused a problem before, when the three
year old played on the street without supervision. But this time,
drivers could see nothing because of the parked car. The driver
would have had about 5 feet to stop in. He probably didn’t
even see him before he hit him.
If the people had lynched the driver, they’d have killed
the wrong man.
We all feel we know whom to blame, but we who haven’t lost
so much have the responsibility to maintain objectivity. We feel
we know; we don’t actually know. We can empathise with those
who grieve, but we dare not join in if they rage and thirst for
vengeance. Because rage will come, and thirst for vengeance will
burn within them, but
“...vengeance
is mine: I will repay,” says the LORD.
I am glad that our Government
hasn’t followed the Bush pattern, that both parties realise
that this is above politics, and above revenge. I am glad that
justice is the focus, because that is what we need. I have felt
at times that I could go and personally shoot that bloke in Indonesia,
Bashir -- but, until all the facts are in, we don't know. We
are not God.
People who get vengeance generally are less happy about it than
people who get justice. That’s why the Bible says,
An eye for an
eye
and a tooth for a tooth
It doesn't allow us to demand
an arm for a tooth, a body for an eye. Justice is just, it is
equal to the offence. It is satisfying, because it does not leave
anything unresolved.
I think Walter Mikac said it well, as he buried his wife and
two little girls, victims in the Port Arthur Massacre:
“Remember
that the power of love and creation will always triumph over
the power of destruction and revenge.”
As people privileged to feel
for the victims but to have that level of objectivity, we have
a duty. We must seek to limit vengeance, and we must constantly
cry for justice.
Australia may, as I said, have lost as many people per capita
as the US lost in the World Trade Centre. It is a massive blow
to our country. If we feel the grief, but act with our heads,
the evil men who did this will never be able to justify further
atrocities, and those who wavered about joining them will say,
“The Australians were fair, no matter what. We have believed
lies about them. We will repent.”
But there is also a lesson for
Australia in all this.
After the World Trade Centre attacks, some Evangelical leaders
came forward and said, “America has suffered because it
has abandoned God. It must repent if it wishes to find God’s
favour again.”
I have no problem with that, and I doubt that you would, either.
It doesn’t take a lot of nous to grasp the fact that terrorists
have hated the US for thirty or forty years, mainly because it
has meddled in countries where it had no right to meddle. And,
too often, Australia has gone along for the ride.
Don’t swallow the propaganda
that it’s jealousy of the freedoms we have in the west.
People don’t blow up a couple of hundred civilians because
they want to have more Coca Cola.
People who take absolutely wicked
measures are people who believe that they have very good reasons
to be so extreme.
And let me say that, whilever one faint reason remains why someone
might hate us, whilever the slightest reason remains for anyone
to say, “Your country has hurt me!” then we need to
repent. We need to be able to say that we are clear of any debt
to anyone.
If someone attacks us then, we will say with the full backing
of God, “You have wounded us without cause. Our blood is
on your hands.”
But I want to say that those
evangelical leaders were sadly, I might almost say, “demonically”,
wrong.
It is not drug–taking, it
is not abortion, it is not single mothers on welfare which are
the cause of our suffering.
These are symptoms, not causes. These are the victims, not the
villains.
When we blame the people who are life’s failures, we perpetuate
terrorism. Islamic radicals terrorise us, we terrorise the poor,
the failed, the outcast. We say, “You have no place in our
world. You are to blame for our problems.”
That is evil, too.
In the passage we read from the
book of Judges, we see a pattern. Each time Israel abandoned
God, he let them fall into the hands of their enemies. And each
time they cried out to him in their distress, he sent them a
judge, who rescued them from the hands of the oppressors.
If we have fallen into the hands of our enemies, to what extent
is it because we, as a nation, have abandoned our God and relied
on our own strength, on our own qualities and powers?
I am not talking about personal
sins, but about national sins. In Israel, there was drunkenness,
there was a level of prostitution which would have scandalised
the average resident of Marrickville, and I'll bet that there
were some people who could get quite a beat going on a ram's
horn, a lyre and a goat-skin drum. Yes, they had their sex, drugs
and rock and roll.
But what did the prophets attack?
Traders who used unequal weights. One deal for the rich and another,
worse one, for the poor. Oppression of the powerless and neglect
of the helpless. Following idols and forgetting God.
But let justice
roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!
wrote Amos.
In an interview given after his
recent charges of sexual abuse, Dr George Pell said that, for
the Christian, there is an unique perspective, that God can bring
good out of the most evil of situations. He said that, even if
that good is not for yourself, it is there for others.
What good can come out of such
unmitigated evil as what happened near Kuta Beach a week ago?
I urge us, as a nation, to repent.
I urge us to seek a new unity under God. I'm not saying, “Persecute
those who refuse to conform, set up a theocracy where Christianised
Ayatollahs dispense instructions to the faithful and brimstone
to the infidels.”
I urge us to become a nation
of people who earnestly do right by each other, who seek good
for even the least in the land, so that everyone can be included,
and no one is an outcast anymore.
I urge us to become people who
are Christ–like, who become united and one because we look
beyond today, beyond this situation, beyond our own interests,
and see the face of Christ in our neighbour.
I urge us to become people who
will not waver in bringing hope and love and justice and peace
wherever it is needed.
When we do, no black hand can
reach after us from the Pit and try to drag us in. When we do,
we will once again become a strong and a peaceful nation. When
we do, we will have a way of living, a sense of community, which
will spread far beyond ourselves, and reach into all the places
where people despair, into all the places where wickedness prevails,
into all the places where the light fails.
May it be so, for the sake of
those who died, so that they will not have died in vain.
And may it be so, for the sake of Jesus who gave his life to
ransom us all from death by faith in his name.
And may it be so, for the sake of a world which desperately needs
hope.
AMEN and AMEN
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