Paul Clifford | 10 August 2010
Isaiah 63.1-6 and Luke 12. 32-40
As some of you know, I’ve worked for the past 12 years at Christian Aid, just down the road from here. During that time I’ve visited some of the world’s poorest communities, and I’ve seen for myself the wretched conditions in which so many people live. Very often I’ve returned from overseas trips filled with anger – because so much of what I’ve seen is preventable, like the waste of life in countries affected by HIV and AIDS, and because at least some of it is down to basic human intransigence, an unwillingness to reach out to our brothers and sisters in dire need.
That was the case for me a couple of weeks ago when I was in Beirut. Among other things, I went to visit one of the Palestinian refugee camps in the poorest part of this otherwise rich and flourishing city. These camps were set up after the formation of the State of Israel back in 1948, and some of the people I met had lived there since then. They are deliberately temporary structures – that was the condition on which Lebanon accepted the refugees in the first place. But they are permanent in the sense that the vast majority of people who live there have never known anything else.
Borj El Brajneh is a place of contradictions. There are some well qualified people living there in horrible conditions because the Lebanese Government will not allow most of them to work. Not because it wants to safeguard jobs for its own people. Rather because it fears that to give Palestinians the right to work would lead to further demands from them for Lebanese citizenship – and that would upset the already delicate ethnic balance in the country as a whole. It seems to be a pretty groundless fear. What the refugees really want is just to go home. I was reminded of a Sudanese peaceworker I met years ago in Nairobi, where her children were in school and where she enjoyed a good standard of living. She told me then that “I would rather be sitting under a tree in my own country than living in luxury in a foreign land”.
The saddest thing, though, was the children. In the camp I visited, every inch of space was taken up with basic housing blocks and little shops. The streets were narrow tracks, and in the heart of the camp there was no natural light because the tumbledown buildings were so close together. There was absolutely nowhere for a child to play. And it was dangerous. Because of the lack of infrastructure, temporary electric cables and water pipes were all clustered together. It was horrific to look at, and to know that a good few children had died because of them.
So once again I came home angry. Now anger is not a comfortable emotion and I suspect we peace-loving Christians are particularly uncomfortable with it. The idea that God can be portrayed as angry and vengeful does not sit well with us either. Yet in my current mood I find those verses from Isaiah 63 strangely appealing. This is the portrayal of an apocalyptic battle: one individual – who may or may not be God himself – is pitched dramatically against entire nations. The speaker is on his own: “I looked but there was no helper; I stared, but there was no one to sustain me; so my own arm brought me victory and my wrath sustained me.” Is this God? One understanding, and I think the reading I prefer, is that God is the “arm” who alone supports the speaker in his anger. If this is right, then surely it follows that God will be with us in our anger and enable us to direct that anger to achieving a just outcome.
Because those Palestinian refugees, and countless other groups like them, need our anger. They need our voices to be raised, to cry out against the injustice that afflicts them. Of course they are angry too. And theirs is not only an anger that rails against injustice. They have a more dangerous anger, one that is born out of frustration – the knowledge that they are being denied their basic rights, a right to health, to education, to work and so on, rights that pretty much everyone else in Beirut takes for granted. And we can hardly be critical of them for that. The other week I asked myself the same question that I put to myself in Palestine last year: how would I behave in their situation? What would my anger make me do? I rather dread to think.
Our Gospel reading brings to all this a message of hope. Jesus’s teaching about the slaves waiting for their master to return from a banquet is not a call to hang around in mild expectancy, with no greater demand on us than to keep the lights on while we wait. Jesus tells his disciples “be dressed for action”, and “be alert”. While we anticipate and expect the coming of his Kingdom we are called to a kind of active waiting. And I believe that includes being angry at injustice, being unafraid to reveal that anger, and, above all, allowing our anger to drive us to fight the cause of justice, whatever the cost may be. The children walled up in a squalid camp deserve nothing less. Amen.
