The last two paragraphs, in particular, of the following Letter to the Inner Circle from the pastor of the Wayside Chapel really summarise what is happening in our country right now. A real christian getting stuck into the pseudo ones who are running the country. It is a long post but well worth a read. Dear Inner Circle, Not 20 minutes ago a young, good looking man was sitting out the front of Wayside. As I went past I asked him how he was doing. “You didn’t care about me the last time we talked,” he said. I’m pretty certain I’d never set eyes on this fellow before. I sat next to him and asked how I’d disappointed him. “I needed help, I needed advice and you didn’t give it,” he said. The anger eventually left him and I sat talking to a sad and unwell man. A profoundly disturbed young man has found himself in a world that makes no sense. All of his relationships have broken down and he is truly alone and sleeping rough. Our workers are on it as I write and I hope to hear soon that they’ve found the right path for him. He’s someone’s boy. Our homeless population in this city is dramatically increasing. The City of Sydney has reported a 26% increase of people sleeping rough in the past 12 months. It doesn’t seem that long ago that we had government ministers visiting homeless shelters and talking about abolishing homelessness altogether. Could homelessness be eradicated? Of all the problems facing modern western democracies, surely this ought to be one of the simplest to sort. Compared to putting human beings on the surface of the moon or making progress with climate change, putting a roof over everyone’s head should be relatively easy. The problem is in understanding the cause of homelessness. The trouble is that we are blinded to the real cause by our fashionable tendency to blame victims of ills for the ills themselves. It’s clearly the fault of homeless people themselves. They should take responsibility for their own lives. Gosh that’s easy to say! The problem is that “responsibility” is a noun that describes the activity of “responding”. In an interesting verbal double flip, we excuse ourselves from responding to homeless people and then blame them for their lack of responsibility. I am not arguing that the community should supply homeless people all they need without effort on their part but I am arguing that “connection” is the key. We create homelessness. We don’t desire homelessness but we create it by what we desire. It’s pretty clear that what we desire is ever increasing inequity. By any measure the gap between the rich and poor grows relentlessly. Does this happen by accident? Is some kind of Darwinian force of the strongest grinding the weakest into the ground at play here? Or is it just what we want? I promise you that we will get what we want. We’ll reward the super rich; we’ll watch executive pays skyrocket while ordinary pays are diminished. We’ll make welfare payments to the super rich and we’ll cut the poor from benefits where we can and all of our ills will be laid at the feet of the poor. Our shock jocks and our shock journalists will keep pouring venom on those who can’t defend themselves and we’ll learn to despise those we refused to help. Fasten your seat belts, this could get ugly. So you, our inner circle, are the hope of this country. I urge you to cling to a high view of our culture and of our shared human goodness. I urge you to get out your feather and fight. Insist that by doing what is right and humane, we build a country and a culture worthy of our children and our grandchildren. Hold on tight. We must resist our current trend that is turning our familiar “fair go” into a message of “f’n go” or “get out of my sight”. It isn’t just refugees who will be banished. If our leaders deny humanity, it will be up to us to rescue it, insist upon it, see it and bring it to being. My beloved inner circle, we’ve got a job in front of us. Thank you for being part of this inner circle, Graham Rev Graham Long Pastor and CEO The Wayside Chapel Kings Cross
Posted on: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 02:23:25 +0000
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