SOUL SURMISE

THE LAST TIME I SAW JESUS...

“The last time I saw Jesus
I was drinking bloody mary's in the South...”

These are the provocative opening lines of Jesus In New Orleans which is probably my favourite song by probably my favourite band Over The Rhine and it’s profundity became a song incarnate one morning on the Guguletu township on the Cape Flats underneath the shadow of Table Mountain. I wasn’t drinking any alcoholic cocktail and I was a long way from a bar room in New Orleans but it was Jesus that I glimpsed in a blinding way. It was my Saviour’s face alright, in the lives of three women and it was disconcerting in that you knew, to quote a song written by another friend Juliet Turner, that you were “too close for comfort.” In the everyday ordinary living of Yvonne, Pricilla and Nancy my western Christian complacency took a beating and left me wondering if it was possible to be this Jesus-like in a world where our own pampered hearts were the sole ambition.

Yvonne is Director of Ministries at JL Zwane Church but when you spend time with her it doesn’t take long to realise that where job and life meet is a blur. When she leaves the JL Zwane Centre in the evening she finds herself sleeping with AIDS orphans who she tells us need the psychological care of a mother figure as much as they need the hamper of food that we have brought for them. Yvonne has an overwhelming compassion for the vast array of very young children looking after their brothers and sisters having lost their parents to AIDS. So, she becomes their psychological mother on her only hours off. On Saturday afternoon there she will be at the park with these adult-to-soon children giving them a tiny window of child normality under the gaze of a mother figure. Living such a sacrificial life in a township has one implication – 24/7 discipleship... and I see Jesus...

Then there is Pricilla, living in a tiny block house among the shacks of Guguletu as it becomes the more shacked up KTC township. Walk through Priscilla’s door and you are met with a wall to wall bundle of children. It is not long before you catch on that they are all physically and mentally challenged. And they are crammed in; cots, beds and lying on the floor. Some just lie staring up, others are more able to wrap themselves around you. It is an astonishing sight. Priscilla with whatever help she gets looks after these children all day long. She tells me that when her daughter was born with chronic spina bifida that she went looking for help and could not find anyone so she decided that she would be the help for other parents in the same situation. It is overwhelming in so many ways including challenge and inspiration. In the midst of debilitating poverty here are the riches of decadent love... and I meet Jesus again.

Just a few doors up the street from Pricilla we find Nancy. Another tiny house has children overflowing through the doors onto the street and back off the street. Nancy is mother to fourteen children in a one bedroom block house. Her reason is that they have a need. She was asked to look after an orphan and twins arrived. She felt she could never manage her own children, the oldest of which was in her twenties, lying on the sofa looking frail maybe suffering from HIV/AIDS. She took them and within days she had another emergency child. Eventually the crowd here today, living in a tiny two bedroom block box. Nancy is the mother of the street and there is little money coming in. Our small hamper might do a few days but then we are gone. JL Zwane will go on helping as much as they can but their funds are limited too. I’ve never met a Nancy at home. You are in the prescence of something other... you don’t have to look too close to recognise the face

In the end as you drive away from the intensity of this kind of self sacrificial love, you become more and more aware of the unlikelihood of meeting Jesus in the carers at home in the wealthy west. Care of the magnitude of Yvonne, Pricilla and Nancy would be well funded and waged in Belfast. We do care, and many do it well, but most go home at the end of the day to their own leisure time, holidays and materialist gain. To go back to the chorus of Jesus In New Orleans:

“But when I least expect it
Here and there I see my Saviour's face
He's still my favourite loser
Falling for the entire human race.”

And I didn’t expect it; I was there to be Jesus to them! But then the Saviour’s face in these women showed me that it is all about losing; our arrogance, our comfort, our lives. It is all about love, for whoever we are asked to give all of our lives to. It was the last time I saw Jesus and it’ll take me a while to work it through my spoiled, self indulgent western soul.

Walking Down Dada Street

 

It is a warm winter South African morning and I am alone, walking casually down Dada Street, wondering how on earth I got here and my broad smile gives away the ecstasy of the epiphany in my soul. “Malo” I say to those I meet along the road. It is the only word (apart from Bafana Bafana!) I know in their language. It is enough to feel the deepest sense of connection. I am on the Khayelitsha township, where my skin would have been a crime big enough to hand me down an execution just over a decade before. Indeed, it is a place that most of the white South Africans I meet tell me I need security still. Luckily, indeed blessedly, for me I know these streets a lot better than they do even though I have come 6,000 miles to walk them. As I walk, feeling as happily content as anytime in my entire life I ponder on the miracle of this place and the joy of feeling a part of it and I toss up a prayer that that miracle might continue as these people that I have come to love with all of my heart fight the enemies of the shack, poverty and now HIV/AIDS.

HOW DID I GET HERE?
So how did I get here? Well I think it all began in the early 1980s when the Students Union at Queen’s University in Belfast where I was then a student and am now a Chaplain changed the name of the McMordie Hall, where the likes of U2 played in their earliest days, to the Mandela Hall. It was the first time I had heard of Nelson Mandela, though at the time the Protestant community where I spent my formative years would have seen him as a terrorist and associate with the IRA. His cause would have been dismissed. It took the likes of Little Steven with his Sun City single and album to make me suddenly aware that something was askew that 87% of the population of a country had no right to vote. Peter Gabriel’s song about Steve Biko’s torture and death at the hands of his white oppressors whipped up some rage within me and U2’s Silver and Gold raised the ideas of sanctions and brought Bishop Desmond Tutu out of the shadowy reputation I had been given of him. There were then the Mandela Day concerts and his release from prison that I followed with excitement and a sense of history. It is interesting to me that it was not from ministers in pulpits that I heard of such injustices but in the songs of a radical and prophetic rock stars. That may be a book for another day.

Next in the chain that brought me to this place where I belong so comfortably was my then girlfriend and now wife coming to live in South Africa. Janice’s parents were involved with a missionary organisation that Janice later worked for. Of all the countries in southern Africa where they worked, Janice got to do short term projects in South Africa. The second of these in 1993 caused me to come and visit. It was an interesting time. The week Janice had arrived Chris Hani was shot dead and Janice was nearly sent back home in the midst of a brewing bloodbath between Mandela the former Prisoner and Mandela the future President.

UNCOMFORTABLE BEING WHITE
My time in Peitermaritzberg was enjoyable, stimulating but ultimately very uncomfortable. I had never been in a place where I sensed that my being there was at the expense of the black people I met on the street and knew that there was a chasm between us. I felt wrong just being there. I had a strong opinion of getting out and dragging everyone with my colour of skin with me. The only way to live here would be to relate and be part of the black community and culture. To live in the white culture would be to be part of a horrendously unjust regime. But the chances of being allowed to merge into the black community was an impossible dream. My Irish shining white skin would be conspicuous and how would I have a valid reason to interact in townships like the one I visited with Janice when she went to do her knitting class in Hopewell. Well here I was, walking down Dada Street with a sense of deepest connection.

HABITAT FOR HUMANITY
When Habitat For Humanity came to Belfast in the early 90s I knew little about its work but soon took advantage of being able to mix with those in the opposite end of the cultural divide from me as I went to dig foundations and paint bedrooms in the predominantly nationalist Iris Close in west Belfast. When I got around to thinking about an overseas trip for the students I work with they were the obvious organisation and when I heard they built houses in South Africa I knew that that was where I needed to go. I’d holidayed in Cape Town and loved it. Let us go there. Let us make some kind of a difference and let us look at division and reconciliation, so necessary in our own place, as we do so. So, back in 2000, we went. Fifteen of us came to Khayelitsha and built two houses and the foundations of another. It was so good to be back.

TWO YEARS ON
There have been many good changes in the two years since I last walked these streets. The aim in this suburb of the vast Khayelitsha township known as Harare is to get rid of the shacks by 2005. When they first shared this slogan with me, I laughed. There was no way that was going to happen. It was a crazy dream. Yet as I walk down Dada Street today I notice the steady encroachment of real brick houses. I believe now that they can achieve it and we can move on to some other area to continue the eradication of this particular enemy.

THE SHACKS
In some ways for those of us who visit, it is a sad thing. The shacks are so colourful. They are so unique. So artistic. The spell out an individuality on the skyline that is sadly erased by brick and mortar. They photograph with a beauty and sadness that is hard to match. But they do not do well when the Cape Doctor comes to call with its stormy gales and heavy rain. For us they are an intrigue but for those who live in them they are no shelter. Neither are they a home in the truest sense of the word. I did say in township Churches where I was given the privilege of sharing a few words that we were no building homes and that the love and sense of relationship that make up homes could be just as alive in shacks as in bricked walls, but for the Xhosa people of Cape Town most have come from eastern cape looking for work and the shack will never make them anything but a migrant people without root or sense of belonging. Maybe the solidity of a house might allow them to sense a home and a stable future.

That is what I am doing on Dada Street; heading from one house that my student group are building down to another one. Mixing some cement, bagging a few walls, carrying some bricks, making the trusses for the roof and being general labourers to the black builders. There again is the revolution. White labourers working to black builders would have been unheard of in the old South Africa and in some ways does not sit easily with the black builders whose conditioning will take time to unravel but it is our contribution. Turning how it has been upside down to conjure something else. It is trying to bring new order of things in this place where the old order was so unjust, uncivilised and just plain unbelievable.

WHAT IS THEIR STORY?
Indeed, we try to imagine sometimes the lives of those we work with and become friends with. Did these men, some of whom cannot read or write and have lived through apartheid ever dare to think that they would know any kind of freedom from that evil. As an aside in a meeting with FW De Klerk he pointed out not as a way out of the blame but as an excused to the sin that all the National party in South Africa did was to write down and make law what the rest of the world and particularly the United States Of America were doing with colour division in the late fifties and early sixties, so let us all repent of our past racism. Anyway, after five weeks walking down Dada Street, I wanted to ask everyone their story. What was life like for you in the apartheid years? How were you involved in the emancipation? What has it been like since 1994 coming to terms with the new ways of things, the good things and the disappointments of realising that it would take years to undo the poverty and psyche of a people caught up in such a regime. Certainly it takes a nimbleness of mind gymnastics for these builders to see us on level terms. That is another of the positive signs that we see two years on. The builders we built with last time have developed in so many ways and there is less of a problem in connection. Time is probably not moving fast enough for these people but it is moving. We just want to be part of the acceleration.

Of course if the poverty of the shack or the evil of apartheid were not enough enemies South Africa is feeling like Job before God again, as the horror of HIV/AIDS strikes. During our few weeks in Cape Town South Africa rose to the top of the HIV/AIDS league tables and most of the cases are right here in the township communities around Dada Street. It is an every day reality and friends here have the every day dilemma to date someone or not and how to pick a husband or wife and stay alive.

SPIWO XAPILE, GUGULETU AND AIDS
Our Aids awareness came through the other part of our trip. As well as building houses we wanted to look at issues of reconciliation and by seeking out Rev Dr Spiwo Xapile we opened up a new visit of Cape Town experiences. Spiwo is quite some man, brought up in rural Eastern Cape at Ngqeleni near Umtata, he is now the minister of JL Zwane Memorial Presbyterian Church in Guguletu. A charismatic man in and out of his pulpit he has not shirked the challenges of being a pastor in an Aids ridden, impoverished and divided society but instead thanks God for the privilege of having to make the words he preaches real in the actions he does. That includes reaching the hand of forgiveness to the white man oppressor, educating his people to take up their roles in the new South Africa and caring for those with Aids while seeking to educate those who still have the chance of avoiding it. As well as deep satisfaction in what he does he has among other things won the prestigious Presidents Award for community development for the Community Centre that he and a white Africaaner Professor from Stellenbosh University built with vision, energy and the ability to sell their mission to people with money.

That his colleague Jan Du Toit was working in Stellenbosh University is quite a story in itself. A bastion of apartheid it was the very University that the theology of apartheid was designed and yet when Spiwo went seeking help for a student from Guguletu who was struggling with language problems he got more than he asked for and more than he dreamed. Jan is an Africaaner and the two men though deeply fond of one another and comrades in the trenches are never slow to admit the huge chasm between them. They come from very different conditioning on how things are done and Spiwo can become too pushy for Jan while Jan can be too patient for Spiwo. They had every reason not to start working together and in the journey they have come many reasons to walk away but their desire to change things, to give hope and a future to their people both in Western Cape where they live and in Eastern Cape where they are from and have begun another project drives them on, to give and take with each other for the higher goal. It is inspirational in the scope of the dream and in the nitty, gritty of how it works out.

FORGIVENESS AND THE FUTURE
That focus on the future is maybe what we from Ireland were most taken by. The forgiveness of the past in order to reach that future is what overwhelmed us. As I walk down Dada Street getting those people who had been oppressed in the vilest of ways by people with my colour of skin why would they greet me with the whitest and brightest and warmest of smiles? As we built houses why would they want to befriend us, laugh with us, share their conversation with us? Why would the children make us into popstars? How can this welcome be? Why and how can they forgive? I am not saying that there are not those in the shacks of the Cape Flats who would not be so welcoming and who would perhaps harbour a grudge and act upon that grudge but none of these people should give us the time of day and yet they gave us all that they had. They have an ability to forgive that is a miracle of humanity itself.

I guess as you walk around Robben Island and see where Nelson Mandela spent so many years of his life, peer in at that cell with its bucket and cup and mattress and room for little else and imagine how he was not broken by the hostility of that prison regime but instead turned it into a factory of magnificent souls you see in one man’s story the story of millions of others. These are a people who can love their enemies, who can pray for those who hate them, bless those who cursed them and do good to those ill treated them. South Africa is a modern miracle and the people of streets like Dada Street are those who have made it so. They are an inspiration and challenge to all of us who live in divided communities. They scream at us in their gentle humility that there can be another way. As Spiwo Xapile says it is a privilege to be a Christian in a place where you get a real opportunity to do what the Gospel is about and forgive people so his people become a shop window to the world of how the cross of Christ and the teachings of Jesus can be lived out to make a world of difference.

MORE DIFFERENCE NEEDED
And yet there is still a huge need for more difference. Every Sunday in Spiwo’s Church there is an Aids testimony. Someone infected by the disease or affected by it shares their story and where God might be sought and found in their tragic experience. We listened one of the Sundays we were there to a woman whose sister died of Aids and whose niece a gorgeous five year old girl who was HIV positive. She shared her anger with God her struggle to care for her niece in case she or her family would catch the virus but how God had given her then deepest love to change her attitude from the girl being a disease to being her little treasure. It is moving stuff and everyday life. A doctor in Spiwo’s congregation is out caring for people dying of the disease 24/7. It is again a tragic scenario that allows the grace of God to be shown in a moment by moment reality.

The singing on a Sunday morning in JL Zwane Memorial is something you could never dream of hearing. It is the sound of heaven itself. Xhosa with all its clicks is a language of great poetic sound to begin with but when this Church starts to sing there is a melody that rises and surrounds you to almost consume you with an angelic whoosh! However, in the midst of the singing, it would not take long though to see a similar problem to Church life back home in Northern Ireland. There is a serious lack of men. And so the Church is helping Ace through college as a football coach. Ace is a former professional soccer player and an all round dude who has been mentored well by Dr Xapile. He exudes warmth and respect and has down to earth relational skills that draw you to simply want to be his friend and most people are! Ace is attempting to reach out through soccer to the young men of the township. It is a difficult task. When our students played Ace’s team a match, the rematch had to be against another team because one of his team had been shot dead days before the game. It is again the reality of the place of the dreams but the dreams go on and the dreams will come true. This is the kind of place where that is easy to believe in the most impossible of situations.

LEAVING OUR HEARTS AND A FEW HOUSES
So what did we do? In truth; not a lot. We built six houses, three on Masiphumelele out near Fish Hoek and three on Khayelitsha. We also built a few walls in the KTC township and helped lay the slab in Mandela Park at Hout Bay. In the midst of a country, even a city so vast this seems like very little but when you do what some of us had the privilege of doing and visiting houses you had built two years previously you sensed that you were doing something. People appreciated the effort. In the end I would say that in all the preaching I have done over twenty years, these weeks of helping top build houses are the only useful things I have done in my entire life. Hopefully we broke down stereotypes of whites, maybe we encouraged South African whites to go into places they would have been fearful to tread had the Irish not gone first. Maybe we encouraged those bringing about miracles to keep on going. In the end though we brought back to Northern Ireland more than we took away. We brought back serious challenges about what it is to live out faith in Christ and not just talk or preach about. We brought back hope that our wee corner of the world might end up a place of miracles too. We brought back friendships that will never end and challenges to help those we met and became friends with in the longer haul. We came back determined to go back and to help make a difference in some ways until we do. When we asked Spiwo what we could leave he answered as simply and profoundly as usual – “your hearts.” Spiwo and Ace and Lucas, Vusi, Tyholani, Vuyisile, Bom Bom, Nsoka, Grant and Donné you can be sure that our hearts are there and we will be coming back to join them soon.

CONCLUSION
As I walk down Dada Street untangling all of his epiphany and smiling to myself at all this of which I have the privilege to untangle, there is one lingering thought that will haunt me for some time, provoking my spirit and searching me deep to the soul. When FW De Klerk shared with us the lessons he had learned in the South African peace process he told us that the first one was to search yourself right down to the bone for your motives and sins and weaknesses. Lesson two was to make sure that after you’ve searched you did not delude yourself that you had done it. That is a life’s work in the personal and in the political realm. It is not just vital to peace but whatever else we hope to do that is useful during our time here on earth.

Fair Trade - the Stories in your Shopping Bag

 

We found ourselves on a Fair Trade vineyard near Stellenbosh in South Africa. A worker came to tell us of the many advantages Fair Trade had brought. They had bought their own land and indeed some of the vineyard. Their children got education right through to University and there was also education available for them. But there was more…moments later and just a few hundred yards away we were standing by a fence in their village. On their side of that fence were beautifully painted houses and carefully groomed gardens. There was a little school and a play area. There was colour and beauty and all of that freedom and ownership we had just heard about was bursting with life. But on the other side of the fence…was the neighbouring vineyard. There was literally the thinnest breadth of wire dividing. And on that other side there was dirty, faded, paint peeling houses. There were rough dust and dirt paths between them. There was no colour, no energy, no pride and no sense of hopefulness.

It was a stark contrast. It was the most challenging piece of land I had ever stood upon. The choice was clear and stark. Buy into one side of the fence and there is a sense of care and justice for the workers. Buy into the other and there is simply exploitation, disregard and neglect of workers and their children. When my students stand in their local Co-op to buy coffee, sugar, tea, chocolate or whatever they now know they now have a visual aid to help them decide what products to buy. Their decisions have suddenly become a whole lot bigger and a whole lot clearer. There is a thin line between justice and oppression and we stood right at the sharpest part of the fence. Which side will we be investing in? What side of the fence best describes the redemption of heaven? Which side is God most thrilled with? What does it mean in our everyday shopping for us to bring God’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven?

God advises his people constantly about the dangers of wealth becoming a greed that distracts from more eternal. In Isaiah 3 he sits in judgement on the rich using and abusing the poor for their own decadent comforts, “it is you who have ruined my vineyard; the plunder from the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people and grinding the faces of the poor?” Ezekiel tells Israel what her sister Sodom’s sin was, “She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.” The rich/poor divide in our world is something God ranted has about for thousands of years. It is not his way and it doesn’t happen in heaven; a heaven we pray in the Lord’s Prayer will come to earth.

In the book edition of How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, U2 front man and political activist Bono spells it out, “Shopping is politics. You vote every time you spend money.” He points out that of course trade is good BUT only when it is fair. The Hewson (Bono’s real surname) family are not just talking about trading fairly. Bono’s wife Ali has just launched a Fair Trade fashion line. Edun is a partnership between Ali’s vision of world revolution through what people wear and New Yorker Rogan Gregory’s fashion designs. Street fashion with a story that doesn’t make us guilty of greedy exploitation and a style that is deeper than the outward appearance. So Ali in recent interviews echoes her husband, who I suspect might be echoing her all along, “The revolution is happening in your house, in your purse, in your wallet, how you spend your money...Shopping is politics."

We could wrestle in cerebral and spiritual discussion about these things for some time. It is scandalous that in trying to switch America on to justice issues like debt relief, HIV/AIDS and trade issues both Bono and Ali have had to prove what advantage it would be to America rather than the good idea of ridding the world of poverty, injustice and millions of senseless deaths. In Making Poverty History Bono has been showing how good it would be to America’s security as well as the advantages for trade. In the concept of Edun one of the aims is to prove that it can be profitable so that other companies, whose bottom line is greedily increasing profits, might see the benefits. This is the vomit of the modern malaise of selfishly getting more with no moral or ethical conscience to give. In the end though where Ali in particular and Fair Trade in general hit the nail on the head is in every day actions, not in the intellectual ether.

For Ali there is a dilemma. As a mother she doesn’t want to think that another mother’s child was exploited in making her children’s clothes. She doesn’t want to think that she or her children wear the stories of injustice. Companies who leave factories and the souls of their workers desolate to set up elsewhere in order to save a few cents per t-shirt is not a story that she wants her children to be wearing. Clothes that say we in the west walked over the poor to feed our greed might look good but they should feel bad. The whole of Africa had 6% of world trade in 1980 and by 2002 that had dropped to 2%. To increase Africa’s trade possibilities and give jobs to the people of that continent is a more lasting way to make poverty history than debt relief and charity though we should never give up on those. African writer Ben Okri wrote, “Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals live by and tell themselves and you change the individuals and nations.” Wearing clothes with positive and life changing stories could be infectious.

The United Kingdom have been trail blazing in the Fair Trade market. There was a 50% increase in sales last year alone with sales topping £140m for 2004. The number of Fair Trade certified products rose from 150 in 2003 to 834. Café Direct the Fair Trade marked coffee has now 19% of the gourmet coffee market. It is only a decade since charities like Christian Aid encouraged people to campaign in their local supermarkets to have Fair Trade coffee on the shelves. It seemed such a small token of activism and yet today all major chains carry various Fair Trade products and the Co-op’s own chocolate brand for example is totally Fair Trade.

In the UK there are no excuses. The stories in your shopping bags (environmentally friendly of course!) can be intravenously purifying the blood of the nation’s soul never mind your own. There is no need to go to Africa or central America to change the world. That is good news and bad. The good is that we can all do something today. Making your impression can be tangible. It also means that there are responsibilities and no chance of hiding your head in the sand. To not make decisions about changing what and why we buy is making a decision to keep the poor, poor. To make poverty history is within the grasp of this generation. As Bono said at the Labour Party Conference back in November, ““We are the first generation that can look extreme and stupid poverty in the eye, look across the water to Africa and elsewhere and say this and mean it: we have the cash, we have the drugs, we have the science -- but do we have the will? Do we have the will to make poverty history?” Do we? And do the American people have the bravery to do what the UK has done so far and put Fair Trade on the map of the land of the free.

Freedom before Freedom came

 

It is quite pleasing to the eye on a tourist bus. The lime quarry is bright and driving into its ravine with the cave in front of you. It would have been a very different place had you been brought out here day after day in the heat of the South African sun to toil for little or no reason in regimented tediousness. The eye got a very different experience, with the glare of the sun off limestone. But it was here that Nelson Mandela and his colleagues came. Their eyes would be damaged permanently. When they operated on Mandela’s eyes late in his life they found a layer of lime dust from these particular years of his incarceration.

It was here though that the prisoners of Apartheid turned their chain gang into a University. It was here that they taught their comrades to read and write, to add and subtract, to develop their political acumen. It was here, when their white warders wanted to stop their lessons, that they coined the concept of reconciliation and welcomed their captors into their open air lecture hall. White prison guards on Robben Island had the inmates to thank for the many qualifications they earned on the island. It truly is a remarkable place.

It was another of the post graduate prisoners who threw out a phrase that maybe unlocked the secret of this place of worked out redemption. He said to us, “We were getting ready for freedom before freedom came.” In this place where any hopes or dreams of freedom were delusional at the very best here were guys who no matter what the circumstances lived with hope and belief and a resolute confidence that freedom would eventually come. It was their job to get ready. That Nelson Mandela left a prison cell and within a few short years had become the most respected President and world leader in decades if not centuries is evidence enough of the success in the University of Robben Island.

I don’t think it is too contrived for me to make a comparison from these captives on Robben Island believing with conviction in another Kingdom where they would take places in government to those of us caught up in the chains of the temporal, fallen world dreaming dreams and seeing visions of another Kingdom where redemption is complete; heaven a reality. Those of us claiming to be on a journey, following Jesus to heaven, need to be about the business of getting ready for heaven when it arrives. That is our life work. Theologians call the personal aspect of the getting ready “sanctification” and the social aspect “mission.” If Christianity is about anything it is about putting into our hearts and onto our earth the indelible marks of heaven. Preparing for who we will be and how the streets of the city will look on that glorious day.

We need to be as committed to this and as convicted in our belief as those prisoners on Robben Island. It kept them alive, literally, in the midst of the injustice and brutality but it did so much more. As they prepared for freedom, for that moment up ahead when the sheer ecstasy of freedom would be announced, they brought little flashes of freedom into their midst. Like that education that they earned. Like those wardens who learned alongside them in a world of ridiculous reconciliation. Like the hope in their hearts that all things utterly impossible would some day come to pass. And so as we ready ourselves for the other side we will leave a trail of transcendent moments when love, justice, mercy and grace touch this cruel world with kindness. An HIV/AIDS infected mother will receive the medication, a pot bellied child will eat food, a worker will get a fair wage for the groceries that make us so fortunate, an enemy will know the reaching out of a forgiving hand and God will know his creation better looked after with more thought to the environment. People get ready...

The Poor ... Blessed?

 

There was no blessing in the poverty of the cemetery in KTC, the name given to the edge of Cape Town’s Nyanga township where we were building houses for a few weeks in June and July. For those weeks this cemetery was a constant land mark keeping me from getting lost in the vast shack infested sprawl of the Cape Flats. My photographer friend Gordon Ashbridge has a fetish for the image of graveyards and I always said, “When Gordon comes we must go in there.”

When we finally came the weather had turned and there were dark ominous judgemental clouds nestling over Table Mountain. The Cape Flats where the old apartheid government had dumped millions of black people in the 80s is bleak enough in its sandy flatness. On this particular day the barrenness was added to by the wind and the blustering sheets of showers that it carried. Gordon pointed out that graveyards are notoriously desolated and boy desolate had never been more desolate than on this particular winter’s afternoon.

There was a separate depravity to the desolation. There were scatterings of decent head stones and one or two that in the context looked more than decadent. One of the most luxurious marked the grace of someone whose epitaph read “PEACEMAKER”. Ironically it was protected behind bars and barbed wire; the freedom to rest in peace was unavailable in a land of such seismic division. I also wondered about how there were some who could afford such extravagance in deaths contextualised in the make shift shacks that surrounded the burial ground. I remember someone telling me in Khayelitsha that life membership of the Kaiser Chiefs’ supporters club gave life insurance policies that paid for your funeral etc.

It was the majority of graves that raised our sorrow and anger. It was the little frail graves, just little mounds of sand with a few rocks sitting haphazardly and little home made make shift markers, mostly wooden crosses, with felt tip markers scrawling names and ages and dates of birth and death. Little bits of rusted corrugated iron with rough scratchings of paint were all that some could afford. There were few flowers and little grass; just scenes from some old cowboy movie.

Then it got worse. We found ourselves in a sea of children’s graves…stillborns everywhere…a five month old here…a day old there. I took a photograph of four graves in a line and all four souls that lay just a few feet below the frail crosses totalled just over five months of living. Tears and anger fill the ether. This is naked poverty. This is the harvest of the seeds of apartheid but the injustices that caused it are not unique to South Africa’s inequalities. If you are white of skin, European of history and First World of comfort and convenience then there are questions to ask, confessions to face and evils to stand up to.

My friend Christian who was building houses with me a matter of a few hundred yards from these graves had told me he had read somewhere that Cape Town was a microcosm of the world. Here the poverty and the wealth that is built upon it sit cheek by jowl. For me in Belfast or Christian in Toronto our townships are hidden away. We don’t drive past them to go to the airport for our luxurious holidays like Capetonians do. Ours are thousands of miles away in Thailand, Malaysia or Mexico. Too easily we point fingers at our South African cousins asking how they can allow such poverty when we are unaware of our own culpability.

We stopped with Barrington, a local shack dweller, who was digging graves. He was telling us that they bury the children at weekends and what depth the children’s were compared to the adults. When we asked why so many children he avoided the AIDS word; it was poverty and disease. He said that sadly even the little crosses were sometimes stolen for fire wood for the nearby shacks in the winter chill and then people couldn’t find their loved ones.

Whatever Jesus meant by “Blessed are the poor…” it had nothing to do with this. This was the poverty of Amos’s prophetic rage. In a world where it seems religion was pietistically strong with the faithful committed to their places of worship, religious festivals and praise songs Amos had a message from God that was sobering to say the least – away with the noise of your songs I want justice and righteousness. The accusations of injustice are clearly the oppression of the poor. Jesus of course took up the theme of the prophets that takes us to the heart of God. The poor were his first priority whether it was the poor spiritually, physically or materially. Indeed what we do with the poor he told us in an apocalyptic vision of the separation of the saved and the damned at judgement was what we did for the poor. It was a long history of places and moments like this specific square of history in this particular plot of land in Western Province, South Africa that has fired God’s anger and his compassion for the poor.

No, this is not what Jesus meant when he said “Blessed are the poor…” This is what he meant when he said, “But woe to you rich for you have already received your comfort.”

The Fence that Divides Fair Trade and Oppression

 

It was a more remarkable learning curve than we could ever have imagine, more provocatively challenging than we could have planned. For some time we had been a community interested in Fair Trade. In fact we had been endeavouring to make our Presbyterian Chaplaincy as Fair Trade as possible and are campaigning with Christian Aid and Tear Fund to push Queens University to become a Fair Trade University. So we had a rough idea. Fair Trade proponents and pioneers The Co-op had put us in touch with a Fair Trade vineyard about an hour’s drive out of Cape Town towards Paarl and though for many involved in a Presbyterian Chaplaincy a Vineyard might not have been a first choice, off we went to investigate.

Our hostess at the Sonop Vineyard was more than helpful and took the team on the regular wine making tour. It was pretty much a whole new world and the sci-fi design in a vast and almost empty plain out towards the mountains gave it a James Bond feel which was capturing the groups interest much more than how the vats worked! Anyway after a few moments of the tasting session the message was loud and clear. We did not know how to nose, sip or what on earth the bucket was for…she quickly rearranged her mindset and said, “Maybe you are much more interested in the Fair Trade aspect of our work.”

Meeting the workers was an inspiration. They were so excited about their work but more importantly about their new found freedoms. They spoke about their ownership of land; they own their homes and have their own land where they have their own vines that they tend and sell on to the mother company. In South Africa, of course, land ownership is a raging issue. For the non-white to own land is a whole new sense of security, dignity and freedom. No longer could they be tossed out of their homes and sacked on a white man’s whim. Yet more than that, education is so vital to the new South Africa. That which the oppressed used as a protest against apartheid by boycotting has now become the very avenue to consolidating the change by making sure the children get the education that their parents never had. So we heard about the nursery school in their own village, the Primary School where the bus takes them and the possibility of University – all paid for! Even the adults are getting all kinds of practical schooling. It is a world not dreamt about ten year ago but very much a reality. The sense of dignity, self worth and driving purpose of these workers as they develop their land is a joy to inhabit.

But there was more…moments later and just a few hundred yards away we were standing by a fence in their village. On their side of that fence were beautifully painted houses and carefully groomed gardens. There was a little school and a play area. There was colour and beauty and all of that freedom and ownership we had just heard about was bursting with life. But on the other side of the fence…was the neighbouring vineyard. There was literally the thinnest breadth of wire dividing. And on that other side there was dirty, faded, paint peeling houses. There were rough dust and dirt paths between them. There was no colour, no energy, no pride and no sense of hopefulness.

It was a stark contrast. It was the most challenging piece of land I had ever stood upon. The choice was clear and stark. Buy into one side of the fence and there is a sense of care and justice for the workers. Buy into the other and there is simply exploitation, disregard and neglect of workers and their children. When my students stand in their local Co-op to buy coffee, sugar, tea, chocolate or whatever they now know they now have a visual aid to help them decide what products to buy. Their decisions have suddenly become a whole lot bigger and a whole lot clearer. There is a thin line between justice and oppression and we stood right at the sharpest part of the fence. Which side will we be investing in? What side of the fence best describes the redemption of heaven? Which side is God most thrilled with? What does it mean in our everyday shopping for us to bring God’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven?

(If you want to know more about Fair Trade and more importantly to buy products that literally change the world then there is a new Fair Trade Shop in The Spires mall in the centre of Belfast with a wide wide range of items...Choose to free not oppress!)

Where is Jesus? A Habitat trip to South Africa

 

Today was a day of all days. Life changing. Never to be forgotten. Mystical. Spiritual. Emotional. Beyond reason. Beyond words.

I have the most vivid picture of this township. From the steps of the Habitat office there is a panoramic view underneath a bright sun – a winter sun – but sun! A millions people live in my panorama. Shacks, huts and dotted brick houses that tell us that the new South Africa is brick by brick getting slowly better than the old one. And off to the right are the mountains topped with snow. The majesty and grandeur of God and beneath their wing and constant gaze those he most cherishes – those made in His image – the native African people of western Cape. To be truthful most of them have resettled from Eastern Cape to find work in the gardens and kitchens of Cape Town.

My senses were on overload as the children descended. Post-aparthied children with smiles and eyes so alive that they might burst with life and happiness. The Habitat homes; so basic but so wonderful. The singing, first of Church worship and later a local choir rehearsing. The fans of the Kaiser Chiefs. The community characters. A deep sense of community that wealth seems to stamp upon in it’s clamour to remove unseen connections with the dull lifeless desire for possessions.”

This is my diary entry for July 16th as I arrived in Khayelitsha as part of a fifteen person team from our Presbyterian Hall of Residence at Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. We came with our reasons to be here. To see our Christian faith caress and collide with another culture, to do our little part to be part of God’s Kingdom coming and his will being on earth as it is in heaven, to learn from the new relationships in this previously divided land and apply it top our divided homeland, to develop the relationships of a community that live together back home and in the midst of those four purposes we were hoping that God would use this experience to mould and shape us in our discipleship to never be the same again.

As I write this I am now home. The team has had it’s final prayer of thanks at Belfast International Airport and we are enjoying being back with friends and loved ones, trying to reintegrate into our everyday ways and missing one another’s banter and love. The Cape Town 2000 Build is over. There has been an ending. What matters now is the new beginning.

Thankfully there will be a new beginning in Khayelitsha as two families will move into the houses that we were privileged to help build. We came to be a part of answering that ancient prayer “Thy kingdom come and Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Jesus hinted that heaven was full of mansions and so it is not on earth as in heaven that people should live in shacks. It was a deep honour to be part of the Kingdom coming as Habitat For Humanity obey Christ in their attempts to rid our world of the hell of housing poverty.

Labouring for the black man we are told is not what has been the norm and as well as whatever labour we were able to lend we hope that we moved psychologies as well as bricks. It was one of the many things I considered in my weeks in Cape Town – how the decades of apartheid must have infected the minds of white and black and coloured and Indian alike. Those years of conditioning need reconditioned and we hope that the presence of these zany white Irish who could only describe geographically where they were from by saying it was a 12 hour flight, will help change some attitudes in the Cape Flats.

Of course we needed changes of perspective as much as anyone. For us the new beginning has to do with how we deal with the divisions of our own country where though there’s no easy colour code there’s a similarly entrenched division that needs deep seated reassignment. The welcome we got on the township, the waves of the people, their smiles and the allegiance of the children was a real challenge to how we react to those who we feel have been our enemies. They in so many ways showed us what it is to love your enemies and forgive. We need, now at home, to follow such an example.

It is a new beginning for us as a team too. We live together in some sort of community in Derryvolgie Hall in Belfast. As the Dean of that community my longing is for deep relationships and interconnections that show something of what Jesus spoke about and died for. A care and concern for one another, a harmony and unity against all the odds of each others’ foibles and eccentricities. For me the seeming down time on site when we were unable to do much in the way of physical labour were very active times in the development of friendship. All but two of our team will be back living together in the year that is ahead and I hope that the entire community of 92(that includes myself, my wife, child and one on the way!) will benefit from three weeks in South Africa where if our living together was not exactly perfect it was very impressive indeed. I know that look forward to the year ahead with great anticipation.

I told all my students that all the other issues we were trying to deal with would hopefully tug and tear at their own souls. I hoped that above all the whole experience would be used by God for the honing of our souls into the likeness of His Son. Building houses beside shacks in the morning and then swimming on a beautiful beach a few miles away in the afternoon underneath some of the most luxurious houses in the world needs pondered upon. How do we live ina world divided in it’s resources and riches. Indeed What Would Jesus Do?

For me there is another challenge and spiritual dilemma, that has been a dog at my heel, since my return. It happened sitting in Claremont Methodist Church on our first Sunday evening. It was a very pleasant, very white and very middle class, which is fine because it was very like my home Church in Belfast. The worship leader used those words that so often I have in the past – “where two or three are gathered I am there in the midst”. I agreed. However, just that morning I had experienced that diary entry at the top of this article. Jesus had also said that “if you do this to the least of these my people you do it to me”. I realised that as well as finding him where two or three are gathered you can also find him among those with poor housing and without the advantages of those of us in middle class churches.

As we sat singing songs that have never before sounded so self indulgent and insipid I wondered of the two where is Jesus really found? I became even more impressed with the leadership of this white suburban Church who took themselves into this township to find Jesus and yet I wondered how that arm of outreach in any way related to this worship service. I bring home that challenge above all. As Claremont Methodist wrestle with it in the new South Africa I have to find in my own life and ministry how to deal with it in the new Northern Ireland.

I would like to thank Habitat For Humanity Northern Ireland, Habitat For Humanity South Africa, Claremont Methodist and the people of the Khayelitsha for allowing myself and my students to enjoy the amazing place that Cape Town is, to spend so much time as members of a transforming South African township and to engage with one another and God in ways that will lead us into a whole new beginning. Thank you too to Jesus who was there on the township long before we arrived. I know he will be there long after we have gone. I pray he will be with everyone on the lines and between the lines of this article as we step out into our new beginning.

Fair Trade - the Stories in your Shopping Bag

 

We found ourselves on a Fair Trade vineyard near Stellenbosh in South Africa. A worker came to tell us of the many advantages Fair Trade had brought. They had bought their own land and indeed some of the vineyard. Their children got education right through to University and there was also education available for them. But there was more…moments later and just a few hundred yards away we were standing by a fence in their village. On their side of that fence were beautifully painted houses and carefully groomed gardens. There was a little school and a play area. There was colour and beauty and all of that freedom and ownership we had just heard about was bursting with life. But on the other side of the fence…was the neighbouring vineyard. There was literally the thinnest breadth of wire dividing. And on that other side there was dirty, faded, paint peeling houses. There were rough dust and dirt paths between them. There was no colour, no energy, no pride and no sense of hopefulness.

It was a stark contrast. It was the most challenging piece of land I had ever stood upon. The choice was clear and stark. Buy into one side of the fence and there is a sense of care and justice for the workers. Buy into the other and there is simply exploitation, disregard and neglect of workers and their children. When my students stand in their local Co-op to buy coffee, sugar, tea, chocolate or whatever they now know they now have a visual aid to help them decide what products to buy. Their decisions have suddenly become a whole lot bigger and a whole lot clearer. There is a thin line between justice and oppression and we stood right at the sharpest part of the fence. Which side will we be investing in? What side of the fence best describes the redemption of heaven? Which side is God most thrilled with? What does it mean in our everyday shopping for us to bring God’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven?

God advises his people constantly about the dangers of wealth becoming a greed that distracts from more eternal. In Isaiah 3 he sits in judgement on the rich using and abusing the poor for their own decadent comforts, “it is you who have ruined my vineyard; the plunder from the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people and grinding the faces of the poor?” Ezekiel tells Israel what her sister Sodom’s sin was, “She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.” The rich/poor divide in our world is something God ranted has about for thousands of years. It is not his way and it doesn’t happen in heaven; a heaven we pray in the Lord’s Prayer will come to earth.

In the book edition of How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, U2 front man and political activist Bono spells it out, “Shopping is politics. You vote every time you spend money.” He points out that of course trade is good BUT only when it is fair. The Hewson (Bono’s real surname) family are not just talking about trading fairly. Bono’s wife Ali has just launched a Fair Trade fashion line. Edun is a partnership between Ali’s vision of world revolution through what people wear and New Yorker Rogan Gregory’s fashion designs. Street fashion with a story that doesn’t make us guilty of greedy exploitation and a style that is deeper than the outward appearance. So Ali in recent interviews echoes her husband, who I suspect might be echoing her all along, “The revolution is happening in your house, in your purse, in your wallet, how you spend your money...Shopping is politics."

We could wrestle in cerebral and spiritual discussion about these things for some time. It is scandalous that in trying to switch America on to justice issues like debt relief, HIV/AIDS and trade issues both Bono and Ali have had to prove what advantage it would be to America rather than the good idea of ridding the world of poverty, injustice and millions of senseless deaths. In Making Poverty History Bono has been showing how good it would be to America’s security as well as the advantages for trade. In the concept of Edun one of the aims is to prove that it can be profitable so that other companies, whose bottom line is greedily increasing profits, might see the benefits. This is the vomit of the modern malaise of selfishly getting more with no moral or ethical conscience to give. In the end though where Ali in particular and Fair Trade in general hit the nail on the head is in every day actions, not in the intellectual ether.

For Ali there is a dilemma. As a mother she doesn’t want to think that another mother’s child was exploited in making her children’s clothes. She doesn’t want to think that she or her children wear the stories of injustice. Companies who leave factories and the souls of their workers desolate to set up elsewhere in order to save a few cents per t-shirt is not a story that she wants her children to be wearing. Clothes that say we in the west walked over the poor to feed our greed might look good but they should feel bad. The whole of Africa had 6% of world trade in 1980 and by 2002 that had dropped to 2%. To increase Africa’s trade possibilities and give jobs to the people of that continent is a more lasting way to make poverty history than debt relief and charity though we should never give up on those. African writer Ben Okri wrote, “Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals live by and tell themselves and you change the individuals and nations.” Wearing clothes with positive and life changing stories could be infectious.

The United Kingdom have been trail blazing in the Fair Trade market. There was a 50% increase in sales last year alone with sales topping £140m for 2004. The number of Fair Trade certified products rose from 150 in 2003 to 834. Café Direct the Fair Trade marked coffee has now 19% of the gourmet coffee market. It is only a decade since charities like Christian Aid encouraged people to campaign in their local supermarkets to have Fair Trade coffee on the shelves. It seemed such a small token of activism and yet today all major chains carry various Fair Trade products and the Co-op’s own chocolate brand for example is totally Fair Trade.

In the UK there are no excuses. The stories in your shopping bags (environmentally friendly of course!) can be intravenously purifying the blood of the nation’s soul never mind your own. There is no need to go to Africa or central America to change the world. That is good news and bad. The good is that we can all do something today. Making your impression can be tangible. It also means that there are responsibilities and no chance of hiding your head in the sand. To not make decisions about changing what and why we buy is making a decision to keep the poor, poor. To make poverty history is within the grasp of this generation. As Bono said at the Labour Party Conference back in November, ““We are the first generation that can look extreme and stupid poverty in the eye, look across the water to Africa and elsewhere and say this and mean it: we have the cash, we have the drugs, we have the science -- but do we have the will? Do we have the will to make poverty history?” Do we? And do the American people have the bravery to do what the UK has done so far and put Fair Trade on the map of the land of the free.

Blessed are the Poor - A Meditation

 

In a few weeks time many of us will be walking around the ambiance, the smell and the harsh reality of poverty. It will be palpable. We will feel it. There will be all kinds of feelings to deal with. There will be fears, uncertainties, surprises, challenges, inspiration and hopefully, by the end, satisfaction. Our prayer as staff members is that it will be a life changing experience. It has been for many of the hundred plus who have gone before. It has been for us as leaders. Personally it has changed my life and I expect that change to be depended even more over the next weeks.

I want tonight to meditate in the decadent luxury of a Church that is situated on the trendiest shopping street of our country. Yesterday on the Lisburn Road there was money spent that could transform the townships that we go to work in. That money was lavishly thrown away on a label or a needless product or an extravagant meal. It is hard on such a street to ponder the words of Jesus… Blessed are the poor… That in itself is our first problem. We have removed ourselves so much from Jesus environment that to understand, never mind obey, his words becomes more and more fraught with difficulties for us.

Derek Webb who we’ve listened to a lot this year sings: -

“poverty is so hard to see
when it’s only on your TV and twenty miles across town
where we’re all living so good
that we moved out of Jesus’ neighbourhood
where he’s hungry and not feeling so good from going through our trash”

But I want to try and get inside this phrase of Jesus. So that it might do two things. Give us an empathy with the poor that we might join God is his mission for their justice, liberation and salvation… and more importantly be challenged by the poor so that we might join God in his mission for our justice, liberation and salvation.

Let me read a poem. I have wrestled with these two poems for two years. When you meditate on this verse it throws up all kinds of dilemmas and near irreconcilable contradictions. So I haven’t put one on the web page before I finished the other. Blessed are the poor is a two edge sword. Both edges are needed and we need to respond to both…

POOR MAN’S RENT
There’s a mist across Table Mountain
Like a veil to hide the hell
Beast’s ransack of such beauty
It’s a hard truth to sell
The wind howls too worldly wise
Trying to blow the knowledge away
The rain drives like freezing tears
Making desolation more desolate today
When he said “Blessed are the poor”
I’m sure this isn’t what Jesus meant
Fama’s baby being laid to sleep
In the sandy grave of a poor man’s rent.

Black crows crowd on death barbed wire
Like the devil is signing his art
Evil despises his neighbour’s child
As he pampers his own wealthy heart
And I think if I stared any longer
The sacred sadness would blind my eyes
Or maybe I’d see the cry of God
Condemning my own deluded lies
When he said “Blessed are the poor”
I’m sure this isn’t what Jesus meant
Fama’s baby being laid to sleep
In the sandy grave of a poor man’s rent.

Me and my friend Gordon spent an afternoon in the cemetery on the Njanga township just a few hundred yards where we built houses for Mandisa and Mrs Umte. It was a bleak day. The mountain, always so strong and awesome, was shrouded in mist and the rain was blowing in. The cemetery was bleak at anytime and we bumped into Barrington who was digging graves. Tens and twenties were marked out in rows and he was digging them out. He explained the depth of adult graves and then more harrowingly the depths of the children’s graves. That is where we were stood as we chatted to him. There were rows and rows of still births, children a few days old, a few years old. It was sombre. It was tragic. And I meditated as I had been doing on “Blessed are the poor.” “No!” I silently screamed a God in this Biblical landscape and Psalmist moment. No. This is not what Jesus meant. This I thought was the place of Amos’s poor; the prophet’s poor.

AMOS 3 v 13
"Hear this and testify against the house of Jacob," declares the Lord, the LORD God Almighty.
14 "On the day I punish Israel for her sins,
I will destroy the altars of Bethel;
the horns of the altar will be cut off
and fall to the ground.

15 I will tear down the winter house
along with the summer house;
the houses adorned with ivory will be destroyed
and the mansions will be demolished,"
declares the LORD.

AMOS 5 v 11 You levy a straw tax on the poor
and impose a tax on their grain.
Therefore, though you have built stone mansions,
you will not live in them;
though you have planted lush vineyards,
you will not drink their wine.

12 For I know how many are your offenses
and how great your sins.
There are those who oppress the innocent and take bribes
and deprive the poor of justice in the courts.

13 Therefore the prudent keep quiet in such times,
for the times are evil.

14 Seek good, not evil,
that you may live.
Then the LORD God Almighty will be with you,
just as you say he is.

21 "I hate, I despise your religious festivals;
I cannot stand your assemblies.

22 Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
I will have no regard for them.

23 Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.

24 But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!

There are 2000 verses about God’s interest in the poor and oppressed in our Bibles and if I can confess a sin on behalf of the preachers of my denomination we have been lax in preaching the word of God with any kind of prophetic power or challenge. I stood by children’s graves and prayed to God that he would hold me by the throat if I didn’t pray and preach and live my life for those who have no voice or no nothing at all.

In the in between time U2 who loom large in my pathetic little legend wrote a song called Crumbs from Your table which asks keeps hold of throat…

“Would you deny to others/what you demand for yourself…”

This line moves our engagement with the poor away from charity, or development even, to revolutionary justice. If the 4 year old up your street had no food to eat tonight would you do something about it. Well justice declares that the children of the poorest countries on earth are equal to the kids on your street. God loves them as much and demands we do too. Amos has shown us that God gets angry when we live in our decadent splendour at the cost of the poor who lives in hard board, cardboard and tin.

Some will ask of our Capetownship project. Is it Christian? What they mean is, is it evangelical? I would suggest that the question belies a serious error in the Scriptural understanding of Northern Ireland evangelicalism. The belief is that only preaching the Gospel is evangelistic. Anything else, particularly social action is dodgy if not unchristian. This flies in the face of following a Jesus who was quick to heal and deal with physical realities, sometimes indeed quicker than he was to preach. For Jesus there is no difference between acting out God’s love and speaking out God’s love. There is a blend and blur to his ministry and mission that we would do well to follow as that is what he asked us to do.

I don’t know what building a house for someone will do to their relationship with God though I reckon it cannot do any harm. I believe though that in the hands of the Holy Spirit it can be used just as powerfully as any words of explanation because the Holy Spirit moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. Not that I will not take the opportunity to share the Gospel when I get the chance and when you put yourself in places of poverty you will find that those opportunities come up much more regularly than if you hang out on the Malone Road.

But there is something else here. Meditating on “Blessed are the poor” has much to say to us in our chains of wealth.

BLESSED ARE THE POOR
Blessed are the poor
For they have to love their neighbours
The wages of selfishness is death
Survival depends on collective labour
Blessed are the poor
For they cannot afford a fence
Their homes are nothing like a bank vault
To store up their independence.

And every day I get to meet Jesus
And be Jesus to everyone I meet
Here God doesn’t live an empty Church
Here God lives on the crowded street.

Blessed are the poor
For they aren’t torn between distractions
No internet or iPod or DVD
Just the simply joy of their children’s affection
Blessed are the poor
Without products to help safe their face
Who you see is what you see
With a higher value of mercy and grace.

And every day I get to meet Jesus
And be Jesus to everyone I meet
Here God doesn’t live an empty Church
Here God lives on the crowded street.

And the poor smile as if their happy
For the westerner that’s kind of funny
I’d don’t think that its poverty that makes them laugh
I think it’s their lack of money.

As I meditated on “Blessed are the poor” among the poor I couldn’t help but notice some things that sat awkwardly in my own life. One day we gave Xulani and Lucas, our favourite builders, sleeping bags. The next day we asked Xulani what he had done the night before. He waxed lyrical about that sleeping bag and wrapping up with his children on the settee. It was extravagant luxury for him. And I thought of the difference for Xulani as a father and me as a father. For him there is little to do but spend time with his kids. For me, my life is filled with so many options, as are my children’s. I can go to the internet, do my emails, watch a soccer match, listen to my Ipod etc etc. They are all the vestiges of wealth that keep me away from quality time with my children. Blessed are the poor!

You see very quickly on the township the lack of desire for privacy or independence. You also find the need for dependence upon neighbour. There are no stupid behavioral manners that fill life with false airs and graces. Who you see is what you see. There are no slaves to fake here. This is community. It is honest. It is relational. It is dynamic. Blessed are the poor.

Mark, our old Resident volunteer, said to me one evening, “As the man said, ‘It is not their poverty that makes them happy. It is their lack of wealth’” “Who said that?” I asked him. “You” he replied! Wow! Cool! Wealth is a dangerous thing. In its purity of course it has many advantages but it is tainted and I believe I watch it eat up the souls of my students and me more and more every year. My greatest concern these days is the great fracture that is occurring in the lives of my students. They are the wealthiest and most spoiled generation in history. The impact of that is terrifying.

They are conditioned by a monster…
• The 3000 ads that bombard them everyday with stuff
• The internet pumps out all the information or ebay bargains that you desire
• The mobile phone allow instant contact and the ability to confront whoever or whatever in the padded comfort of texting
• The ipod allows you to carry around what I needed a whole room for
• The designer labels that can allow you to save your face
• The riches that middle class western kids enjoy
• Even in the Church we are safe and comfortable and encouraged to be

That is your world… it is an antithesis of the Gospel. If we are to seriously follow Jesus in the twenty first century we need a close look at what the raw materials are that he starts with. It is of a generation pampered and given all that they ask for and given it immediately. Those things that our parents thought were luxury have become standard. There is so much talk about pensions and what pensions mean to me and to my students are in a whole other galaxy than what my Grandparents were thankful for. Self gratification is not only possible but an everyday reality.

Where it goes wrong is that it causes us to drift, blandly away from the real meaning of life. The soul gets starved with what the body can do. The soul becomes marginalized. It is about material and physical attainment that we are focused. And when we find ourselves in relationships – and I mean with God as well as friendships, families and particularly marriage – that don’t cash in the cheques of our desires immediately like we are used to then problems set in. Wealth has consequences. And I am finding them more and more tragic. I ministered last spring and summer in a Church in the west end of Vancouver where people were so materially satisfied that God is not a necessity. Indeed he would have been a hindrance. When the rich hear God’s call they ask “How much will it cost?” When the poor here it they shout, “Look what He is giving me.”

Of course I am not saying – let us all be poor. Whatever Jesus meant when he asked us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” he didn’t mean what Gordon and I saw on a Njanga cemetery. We need to live our lives to bring a Kingdom where every man is safe in the shelter of his own vine as Isaiah prophesied.

But as we deal with poverty let us also deal with wealth. Jesus was not kidding when he said that we cannot service both God and money. He wasn’t kidding when he said that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to have a healthy spiritual journey to heaven. If these students are to do anything for God in their lives then the greatest danger to their achieving it is the wealth that will be available to them. It will ensnare, bland out, dull down and suck their souls dry. I pray they see this summer the blessedness of not being wealthy and will also see the cursedness of an unjust world that leaves some in terrifying danger of poverty and death.

COME DOWN OFF THE FENCE

 

Have you ever sat on the fence? Well I didn’t literally sit on it when it comes to Fair Trade but I did stand alongside a fence that divided mercy and exploitation and it changed my life.

The day started out as I might have expected. I had been interested in Fair Trade issues since 1995 when the Christian Aid Student worker at Queens University where I am the Presbyterian Chaplain encouraged my students to change the world. His idea seemed impotent enough to me. We were to buy coffee in the local Stewarts Supermarket (since bought over by Tescos who are heading to the US for an eye ball with Wall Mart!) and buy some coffee. After we paid for it at the check-out we were then to sign our receipt and ask the manager to consider stocking Fair Trade coffee. It would never work I thought. When a few months later the Fair Trade coffee appeared I was shocked, elated and still so concerned it wouldn’t work that I bought five jars!

By 2004 the UK had more Fair Trade products available to buy than any other country in the world and the national Guardian newspaper was making Fair Trade catalogues available as suppliments. As we planned t head to South Africa on a bi-annual trip that allowed students to build houses and investigate Reconciliation and Aids projects I asked Christian Aids Intern, the late Lindsay Anderson, to find us a good Fair Trade project to visit near Cape Town. She came up with Sonop Vineyard and after a fifty minute bus trip from Cape Town we arrived.

For the first hour we got exactly what Lindsay, my Assistant Chaplain Lynn and I had planned for. Lola, a female worker on the Vineyard met with us and told us about the benefits of Fair Trade to her, her family and fellow workers. These benefits were very tangible in the education available for all of the employees and their families. There was specific education for their roles on the Vineyard but also the possibility of their children having education right the way through to University, whether they intended to stay and work on the Vineyard or not. Indeed, Lola told us that we would see the little kindergarten that had been built in the workers village for the younger children. They also got to own their own land and houses. Land is a big issue in South Africa and owning their land gave long term security. Instead of living at the whim of a Landowner who could make them homeless at anytime, they could now put down some family roots.

You could sense that Lola herself was a spiritually transformed woman. As she invited us to walk with her the few hundred yards to have a look round the worker’s village that she was so proud of, you could see that her infrequent smile (from shyness more than any fearfulness) was breaking through a face carrying the withering effects of years of oppression and the resulting hardship. She spoke of how her life had been changed by the new Swiss owner who gave the worker’s their place and dignity. “We used to just lie around and do nothing on the Vineyard but now we work hard because we have a sense of ownership.” She also pointed to quite a few hectares of vine that was actually owned by the worker’s themselves. The pride in her voice and gestures were palpable and when she spoke of her teenage son’s success at school she was beaming within and without and it didn’t go unnoticed that this was a distant crazy dream as little as a decade ago. A Fair Trade Vineyard changed lives in a very personal skin, bone and soul sense.

And yet, we had seen nothing yet. As we walked through her village she informed us about the lovely little gardens, the hopes to build a little building for a sowing workshop, the beautifully painted houses and the solar panelled roofs. We went to the school and the children with dirty little noses sang to us and we watched teachers making a few resources go a long, long way; a lot longer a way than when they didn’t have a building or teachers. There were lots of smiles and photographs.

And then... then we turned a corner out behind the school and there it was… that fence. Our eyes widened, our mouths fell open and our minds were bombarded with a whole new prophetic reality. The fence was what separated the Fair Traded Vineyard and the Vineyard next door which had not taken on the Fair Trade mantle. And there were houses, the same as the ones we’d just admired but these ones were dirty and run down, there were no gardens or solar panels. There were no neatly groomed paths just the dusty barrenness of exploitation and lack of care. There were children looking more bedraggled and less secure. There was a fence that divided the world from those who are treated well and those who are still nothing but slaves. We stood on freedom’s side and looked through the gaps in the wire at the very real consequences of the consumerism that we make decisions about every single day of our comfortable western lives.

It was like standing on the border between heaven and hell and knowing that personal decisions needed made right there and then. Those who had been Fair Trade advocates were prodded to another level of commitment and belief. Those who were not quite convinced were converted. Shopping would never be the same again because now you didn’t only believe you might be doing some good by buying a Fair Trade product but you knew you were involved in some unjust evil by being linked with the exploitation that is not Fair Trade.

God advises his people constantly about the dangers of wealth becoming a greed that distracts from the eternal. In Isaiah 3 he sits in judgement on the rich using and abusing the poor for their own decadent comforts, “it is you who have ruined my vineyard; the plunder from the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people and grinding the faces of the poor?” Ezekiel tells Israel what her sister Sodom’s sin was, “She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.” The rich/poor divide in our world is something God has raged against for thousands of years. It is not his way and it doesn’t happen in heaven; a heaven that we pray, in the Lord’s Prayer, will come to earth.

In the book edition of How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, U2 front man and political activist Bono spells it out, “Shopping is politics. You vote every time you spend money.” He points out that of course trade is good BUT only when it is fair. The Hewson (Bono’s real surname) family are not just talking about trading fairly. Bono’s wife Ali has just launched a Fair Trade fashion line. Edun is a partnership between Ali’s vision of world revolution through what people wear and New Yorker Rogan Gregory’s fashion designs. Street fashion with a story that doesn’t make us guilty of greedy exploitation and a style that is deeper than the outward appearance. So Ali in recent interviews echoes her husband, who I suspect might be echoing her all along, “The revolution is happening in your house, in your purse, in your wallet, how you spend your money...Shopping is politics." The next time you shop come down off the fence, and when you come down ask yourself which side of the fence you are on!