Melbourne Unitarian Peace Memorial Church

I urge you Minister, to give serious consideration to these matters. Australia can lead by example with a policy of peaceful armed neutrality.

Abolish the Department of Defense

Address by Simon Moyle, Baptist Minister, Public Engagement Co-ordinator Urban Seed

Another World is Possible, Another World is Necessary, Another World is Already Here: Discipleship as invitation into an alternative story

Let me begin by acknowledging and honouring the traditional custodians the Wurundjeri, and their elders and ancestors.

And then let me say how very brave you all are in allowing a Baptist Minister to come and talk to you. You’re probably all bracing yourselves for the stereotypical hellfire and brimstone sermon, so let me reassure you. I am in the somewhat awkward position of taking the Bible seriously but not always literally, and therefore am often accused by liberals of being fundamentalist and by fundamentalists of being liberal. Regardless, I find in the Christian Scriptures my primary narrative, my story, and will be speaking out of that. If you don’t share that, I hope there will still be points of connection for you.

In the mid 1990’s, the congregants of Collins St. Baptist church increasingly found themselves stepping over homeless people sleeping on the doorstep as they walked into church of a Sunday morning. Wondering what to do about this they asked three young men from another church to come and live in the building, to make it their home. It was a time when very few people lived in the CBD of course, and so thinking of the city as a home rather than a workplace was a significant shift. These guys moved in and began to, as they put it, get to know their neighbours. The neighbours out the front sleeping on the steps, and the ones who used the laneway out the back for injecting heroin. And what better way to get to know them than to invite them over for lunch. But as they got to know their homeless neighbours, they also realised that their neighbours were equally those who came to work every day in the surrounding buildings, and we’re talking about some of the wealthiest businesses in town. Outside the front door of the church you will find designer stores such as Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Gucci, as well as businesses like Price Waterhouse Coopers and Mallesons. This lunch came to be known as Credo Café, and was the beginning of the organisation I work for, Urban Seed. Now for fifteen years, of any given weekday in the basement of the church, you will find homeless people and lawyers, drug addicts and accountants sitting around a table together enjoying a meal. Here is a community where status means little, where safety and mutual respect are sacrosanct, where healing of the extremes of greed and poverty can begin.

The community of Urban Seed and Credo Café is a place where the transforming love of God regularly breaks out. When Jesus begins his ministry he comes preaching that the Kingdom of God has drawn near, encouraging people to turn around and believe this good news. In other words the transforming presence of love has broken out amongst you, and you are invited to see the world with new eyes, and join in with it. In a world where we can often feel overwhelmed by the greed and selfishness and destruction around us this can seem pretty hard to believe. In fact, some Christians have been so overwhelmed that they’ve rejected the earth altogether, and insist that the Kingdom of God that Jesus talks about is just the afterlife, it’s when we die and we go to another place where God is in charge. But that’s not what Jesus says. He says the Kingdom of God has drawn near, is amongst you, is at hand. He teaches us the prayer, “Your Kingdom COME, your will be done on EARTH as it is in heaven.” In other words, another world is not just possible, nor is it merely necessary, but another world is already here. And you are invited to leave the old ways of the world, the greed, the selfishness, the divisiveness, and join in the revolution of love.

If this sounds like a form of self delusion or hopeless optimism, then at least part of the blame must fall to the Christian church because the church is called, in the words of the Mennonite theologian John Yoder, “to walk out now what God wills the world to be ultimately.” To be signs of the Kingdom, of a world transformed, here and now. To be sure, the Kingdom is not here in all its fullness, but the world shouldn’t have to wait to see glimpses of what the Kingdom of God will look like when it is here in its fullness, we are called to be signs here and now. That’s the way St John the evangelist puts it in his gospel – right through John we get this word often translated ‘miracle’ with all its unfortunate dualistic magic trick supernatural connotations is actually the Greek word semeion – sign. What do signs do? Signs point to things. What Jesus does are signs that point not merely to a heaven above the clouds, but to the reality of the inbreaking reign of God – hence Jesus’ signs involve broken and marginalised people being healed, restoring them to full participation in society, the hungry being fed, wealth being redistributed, violent self-righteous mobs being confronted with their own sinfulness and sinful people being confronted with grace and mercy. What the New Testament testifies to is that the long awaited redemption of the world has begun in Jesus and we are invited to participate in it through lives that give hope to the most vulnerable, to those who struggle most under the weight of the domination system.

So my mobs, both my workplace Urban Seed and the intentional community I’m part of, inspiral, attempt in some small and humble ways to do this, to be signs in our own neighbourhoods of the inbreaking Economy of God. And as we do this, the New Testament comes alive, not merely as fairytales about people two thousand years ago, but stories in which we are found and changed, stories that we inhabit and which inhabit us. So we’re sharing food with tax collectors and notorious sinners as Jesus did, or perhaps drug addicts and lawyers might be a closer approximation, we’re welcoming people who have been rejected by society, we’re actively resisting injustice and war and their root causes wherever they are found. And we do these things not because we’re special or any better than anyone else but because we recognise that we too have participated in these destructive ways of living, and want to no longer. Rather than self-righteousness they become acts of repentance that are caught up in this inbreaking transformation Jesus called the Kingdom of God.

But as we begin to inhabit the life of Jesus, to “fit our life into Jesus’ life” as the Jesuit priest and activist Daniel Berrigan describes discipleship, we begin to find that they are not easy paths to follow, in fact, these paths are costly, just as they were for Jesus, because while another world is already here, it is not yet here in its fullness. In fact, he describes faithful discipleship, in terms of the cross – if anyone would be my disciple, they must deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me is what Jesus says in Mark 8. The church has often tried to privatise and spiritualise the notion of taking up your cross, but the political ramification for the early Christians was clear as it should be for us – crucifixion was reserved for those whose loyalty was to a regime other than Rome. It was the price of sedition. But the difference is, the Kingdom Jesus spoke of is not a regime that comes with a sword to wipe out its enemies. This is a regime which wins by the power of nonviolent suffering love, as Martin Luther King Jr. used to put it “the sword that heals”, a path vindicated in resurrection. And we too, as we follow Jesus faithfully, will find that our loyalty to the Kingdom will frequently clash with the demands of our government, and that we will need to bear the consequences.

So we’re not talking about a naïve optimism, nor is it a disengaged separatism, it’s a way that accepts that engagement with the injustice and messiness of the world will be costly and which chooses it anyway, because God has given us, the average, ordinary person like you and me, the privilege of being involved in the redemption of the world.

So we’ve been experimenting with ways to do this, by witnessing to the nonviolent transformation of all creation. That has seen us inviting police and protesters at the G20 meetings in Melbourne to sit down together to a freegan meal, transforming disused and overgrown backyards into permacultured gardens and overeducated, underskilled city slickers into urban farmers, and earlier this year leading a hundred Christian young people to confront the world’s 3rd largest weapons manufacturer.

But possibly the biggest experiment I’ve been involved in has involved Exercise Talisman Sabre. Can you just put your hand up if you’ve heard of it? Ok, Talisman Sabre is a huge joint military exercise involving the Australian and US armies, navies and airforces engaged in live fire, about 30,000 troops altogether. They call it war games. It takes place every two years and is spread around Australia, but most of it takes place in a huge military base called the Shoalwater Bay Training Area just north of Rockhampton on the central Queensland coast. Here Australian and the US engage in what they call interoperability exercises – essentially fusing their forces together to work as one invasion force.

So if those of us who are called to follow Jesus are to be faithful to his call to put down our sword, love our enemies, be blessed peacemakers then it seems to me that not only must we be nonviolent in the way we interact with people and with the earth, but we must also resist war wherever we find it, and so resisting these exercises has been one way I can begin to live out this call of Jesus.

Now please note I’m using the word nonviolent here, not pacifist. There’s a significant difference. Nonviolent is a term Gandhi coined, and it goes far beyond pacifism. Incidentally, Gandhi says everything he learned about nonviolence he got from Jesus. He was a devotee of Jesus, read the Sermon on the Mount every day for the last 40 years of his life. Said he would’ve been a Christian if he ever met one, which to me is a real challenge.

So pacifism on the one hand is the refusal to be involved in war or violence, it’s often, though not always kind of a passive stance, so it doesn’t usually entail active opposition. But I want to go further than that and say to follow Jesus we need to be nonviolent. Nonviolence means that you refuse to be passive in a situation of violence, oppression or injustice, you must act, but neither do you mirror your opponent’s tactics by retaliating violently. So nonviolence is active, creative action which attempts to transform ones opponent rather than defeating or hurting them. The sword that heals. So when someone talks about nonviolence and says well that just means you don’t do anything or just let someone walk all over you, they’re not talking about nonviolence, they’re talking about being passive.

And so inspired by Jesus and the visions of the Kingdom of God in the prophets of the Hebrew people, visions which speak of a day when weapons of war will be beaten into farming tools and war will be studied no more, we wanted to experiment with what it might look like to transform these preparations for war. And so in June 2007 a group of us went north to Shoalwater Bay to nonviolently witness to such a world.

One cold wet June morning four friends and I crossed the fence marking the military boundary and after a 3 hour walk through the rain we arrived at the Samuel Hill air force base, the main command centre for Shoalwater Bay training area, and walked down the middle of the runway. The presence of civilians on the base means the exercises have to stop, so we made our presence as obvious as possible. We figured since these guys were playing war games, we’d invite them to trade them in for peace games, so we brought a frisbee with us, and we invited the first soldiers we saw to play. To our great surprise they did play with us until the rain got a bit heavy and they brought us into the hangar where we shared some food and drink and some conversation. Again, this sacred sharing of food and drink bringing people together. About an hour later the police arrived and charged us with trespassing on Commonwealth property.

It was almost a year later that we faced court, and after arguing our case for the necessity of our actions were found guilty. We came away with two convictions that day – one a legal one, but by far the stronger one was how easy this had been for us, how relatively costless – and therefore how much more we could do to resist militarism and war, particularly considering the millions of people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan who are presently suffering under the weight of invasion, with no respite. The great Jesuit priest and peace activist Daniel Berrigan says, “As Christians we have assumed the name of peacemakers but we have been, by and large, unwilling to pay any significant price for it. And so because we want the peace with half a heart and half a life and will the war, of course, continues. Because the waging of war is total, but the waging of peace, by our own cowardice, is partial.” And so we’ve had to ask ourselves whether we are prepared to devote the same kind of discipline and self-sacrifice to nonviolent peacemaking that armies devote to war.

In just 3 short weeks from July 6-26 Exercise Talisman Sabre 2009 ramps up, coinciding with the latest surge in the Afghanistan/Pakistan war. Once again we will seek to bear witness to Love’s transforming presence in the midst of US and Australian empire building. We’d love it if people, whether they can come to Queensland or not, could take this opportunity, could take every opportunity, to get on board with the inbreaking reign of justice and mercy and love. To build communities where there are no victims, where there’s enough for all, where everyone can sit in peaceful economic self sufficiency and no one will make us afraid.

Closing Words

Ethics must somehow be based on an appreciation of human nature—on a sense of what a human being is or might be, and on what a human being might want to have or want to be. If that is naturalism, then naturalism is no fallacy. No one could seriously deny that ethics is responsive to such facts about human nature. We may just disagree about where to look for the most telling facts about human nature—in novels, in religious texts, in psychological experiments, in biological or anthropological innovations. The fallacy is not naturalism, but rather, any simple-minded attempt to rush from facts to values.

Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Service conducted by Lev Lafayette