Anthem: Panis Angelicus

Scripture reading. (KJV)

Isaiah 40: 1-5

Isaiah 58: 10

Matthew 5:7

1Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.

2Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath received of the LORD's hand double for all her sins.
3The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
4Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain:
5And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it.

10 If you extend your soul to the hungry
And satisfy the afflicted soul,
Then your light shall dawn in the darkness,
And your darkness shall be as the noonday.

7Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

“O miraculous thing! The hand of God shall nourish, even the poorest and the humblest of servants.” “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low.” These are wonderful words inherited from 2 of 4 important pillars of Christian living which I hope all of us are familiar with. It is written on our church website under “Principles of Community Life”. The latin text of Panis Angelicus was written many centuries ago by St Thomas Aquinas and today it represents the pillar of Christian tradition in what I wish to speak to you about. The bible passages we have read represent the pillar of scripture which we cannot do without despite many disagreements over it. Can these ancient texts possibly have any relevance today? My hope today is that I would at least be able to start all of us thinking about our own human condition if we have not already done so, about the notions of justice and compassion which these texts speak about. For myself, I have thought long and hard about these issues – they bother me a lot. But neither me, nor anyone else can ever claim to possess definitive answers. Everyone understands differently due to every single person’s unique life experiences. God most certainly understands this. As such, before I begin, it becomes essential that I urge all of you to make sense of what I have to say in light of your own personal experiences and come up with your own conclusions. If you agree with what I say, please tell me when you get a chance. If you don’t, please challenge me on it after the service so that I can learn from you too.

Is everyone equal?... Is everyone equal? Well as with all annoyingly immutable questions which refuse to render easy answers like that, there is a whole range of answers to it. But since we attend this church, I will have to assume that the answer is a resounding, unanimous “YES” before I can move on. But what exactly do we mean by “everyone is equal”? Surely, we’re not all the same correct? Take human intelligence for example, psychologists seem to have come up with a whole list of them. But we’re all different aren’t we? Some people seem to be good at everything while most of us mere mortals are just that: mere mortals! I think I fair quite reasonably at many of these. but those who know me well enough will know that my spatial/visual intelligence can’t go any lower than it already is. Time and again I have successfully managed to bewilder and piss off my friends when I fail to competently perform tasks that involve placing objects at specific locations or at rearranging chairs or decorating.

But it’s not just what’s up in the head isn’t it? Just look at each other! We’re clearly not equal! I’m this tall, and Jorg is way up there, then I feel like such a dwarf until I stand next to Elsa! Some of us, like me, look as though we’d be blown over by the slightest wind; some of us look as though a hurricane won’t move you! So what exactly do we mean when we say “First Realize Everyone is Equal”?

Again quoting from our church website: it says: “We believe that God desires to affirm the worth and dignity of every human being regardless of religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, economic status or physical or mental ability. All people on earth have an equal claim to life, liberty and justice. Therefore any ministry of outreach must affirm human dignity with authentic respect for human freedom.” Herein lies a clue as to how one might answer the question. Perhaps we are not equal based on some extrinsic quality like height or intelligence, but through some innate quality. Life, liberty and justice – these are not concrete, tangible things like height or size. They have something to do with the essence, or the soul or spirit of being human. Every human being has this essence. And in this sense everyone is equal. But what does this imply for the way we ought to be treating each other? Exactly how, in concrete terms, should this equality at a very core level of our humanness be translated?

Maybe it is best we use some examples and see if you can feel the level of fairness in each of them. I don’t know if you experience the same feelings as I do when I read our newspapers. I glance through the papers every day. And without fail, or at least 8 out of 10 times, I get very irritated. Usually not at the actual events that have been reported but at how they have been reported.

There’s an article from August 20th entitled “Into the Mind of a Serial Burglar”. I seriously do not like the way the article is titled, as though this person was a different species of human being altogether. Think about it: if you were in his situation, with similar dreams of achieving material success in this world but with monetary problems but with prior burgling skills. What might you do? Is he really that different from us? But this title makes it out that he’s not normal. It makes it an individual problem and hides other things you do not see. Does the problem really lie with him as an individual? Or is there a particular reason why many burglars or thieves are disproportionately from less well-to-do back grounds?

Consider this article that appeared on Thursday. It talks about how a runner for a loan shark ran away from court. Once again, poor family background. Not surprising. The way society works ensures that the poor remain poor. Every member of society is being fed the same message in schools, in families, and in the media. Work hard, succeed and lead a comfortable life. And everybody becomes dependent on money for survival. But do people from poorer backgrounds have the same opportunities as people who are better off? Would a bank lend the ah beng a big loan to open up a business downstairs here in Geylang? And everybody is taught the maxim “no pain, no gain”, and business requires risk. So the ah beng tries first to run a good proper business and so risks it by borrowing money from the only person who would lend him money – the loan shark! Loan sharks exist because there is a demand for loans which regular banks refuse to take a chance on poorer people. And if his business venture fails, the loan shark runs after him. Maybe if in great debt, he borrows from someone else to pay him off or worse yet, he steals. Maybe he might even try his luck at gambling… hopefully he can win the money to pay off his debts. Chances are, he won’t succeed and yes, he has emotions too and he gets depressed. So maybe he turns to alcohol and drugs. Do you see what I am driving at? All these “bad activities” – loan-sharking, gambling, robbery, drugs, alcohol are all interlinked! And our dear ah beng in my example got into all of that simply because he was following the dreams told to him by everyone else in society – that he needs to work hard, succeed and lead a comfortable life. You know, ever since Vietnam moved from being a communist state to gradually embrace dependency on money, this kind of illegal money lending began to flourish and people run for their lives when they can’t repay their debts. And the same thing happens, the banks refuse to lend the poor any money. Is this fair? If you do not start life with some advantage, it becomes very hard to compete. So much for meritocracy.

Consider our recently crowned Ms Singapore, Ris Low. She’s drawing a hell lot of flak for her poor English. I do not know about her profile or background but let’s just consider a hypothetical Miss Universe who speaks exactly like her. Did anyone consider that perhaps she might have grown up in a non-English speaking background? The standard of English demanded of our Ms Singapore is the kind of English that university-educated people might possess. But did anyone wonder that perhaps, the title is named Ms Singapore, not Ms university-educated Singapore? Is one trying to say that if one speaks mandarin or one of the even less privileged Chinese dialects as their main language, she does not deserve to be Ms Singapore? How is she any less Singaporean than a good English speaker? And why not allow Ms Singapore to speak in the language she is most comfortable with? What’s wrong with a Ms Singapore speaking Hokkien? Is there a reason we favour English for Ms Singapore? Because it rakes in the most money? Because it is the language spoken in the country we copycat Singpapore Idol from? Or maybe it’s because English produced masterful literary works from the likes of Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. I say, let her speak Hokkien if she wants to and they jolly-well provide her a translator. Language is capable of tearing a nation apart. It happened very bloodily in Bangladesh. It won’t happen here because non-English speakers are told that English is the preferred language. It happened in Bangladesh because they are very proud of Bengali. If dialect-speakers were more proud of their dialects, language can become very political. Perhaps then, we won’t have a situation like Ris Low is facing now. Must we be political before people will acknowledge us more equally? Can’t people just acknowledge each other more equally just because it is right to do so? The situation that Ris Low faces – is this fair?

Finally, consider homosexuals. Everyone is told by society that the dream is to find perfect love and the “right one”. Is a gay person able to do so with the same amount of ease as a straight person? Do you recognize these words? – “pro-family, anti-vice, conservative society, preservation of morality”. If you are a gay person sitting here today, do these strike a raw nerve in you? These words are in the larger society. They are part of the larger system. Is it fair?

These, together with almost every other thing we have talked about – the way banks refuse to lend money to the poor entrepreneur, the way we are told which language is preferred, the way we are told everyone should chase dreams of love and wealth, the way we are told that no one should be satisfied and we should keep buying new things like the latest gadget, computer, handphone, car, fashion accessories, etc, etc thus making us want things we don’t need at all – these are all problems with the bigger system. These are NOT problems with individual people. These are problems in the bigger system. But just like the way the newspapers give titles like “into the mind of a serial burglar”, the people in power do not want you to think it is a problem with the system, they want you to think that whatever problems there are, it is the problem of the individual. This tendency, is in turn part of the whole problem in the system.

So, the larger system in society is not perfect. It creates problems systematically for various groups of people. And it places some at greater advantages than others. This creates oppression and suffering for various people to different degrees. Later, I will share how some of these oppressions and suffering are really extremely extremely bad. But for now, it’s enough to just recognize that for some people in the world, the results of imperfect systems can be very dire. This is exactly why we need human rights. Exactly because we believe that people are all equal at a very core level, we therefore cannot tolerate such huge disparities in oppression and suffering.

The system we live in, all these ideas of what is good and bad, what should people dream about and aim for in life, what cultural features are preferred like language, and who to favour when banks lend money, all these constitute the realm of order. And order, can be thought of as meaning “one size fits all”. Definitely there are some people who cannot fit inside these sizes very well and this creates oppression and suffering. In a world where 100% order reigns, it’s like a powerful magician mind-controlling everybody in the world. Everything is done the magician’s way, oppression and suffering affects a maximum number of people as a result because no one is exactly the same as the magician! So, oppression and suffering are the bedfellows of order. But what about its polar opposite? That of chaos. If order is thought of as one size fits all, then chaos is “different sizes for everybody”. But surely, I cant do anything I want. Can I be dictator of the world just because I wish for it to happen in my life? Can I turn up at a meeting anytime I want? Surely there are some limits.

So this is where human rights comes in. Human rights I shall define as that sphere of entitlements to an individual whose boundaries separate the realms of order and chaos. Order and chaos, I feel, are much more useful to understanding how to relate to each other and the environment as compared with good versus evil. That is because as we have seen, good and evil vary from period to period, culture to culture, and most importantly from person to person: illegal money lending may be evil to people not affected by it, but if it enabled someone to make a decent living? How would that someone view illegal money lending? Even in our own religion good and evil are not fixed. Slavery was justified perfectly in ancient times – it was good and natural. Today, it is pure evil. Just look at some of the things the bible and early Christians said:

Old testament:

When a slave owner strikes a male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies immediately, the owner shall be punished. But if the slave survives a day or two, there is no punishment; for the slave is the owner's property. (Exod. 21:20-21)

New testament:

Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ; not only while being watched, and in order to please them, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart. (Eph. 6:5-6)

Tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect; they are not to talk back, not to pilfer, but to show complete and perfect fidelity, so that in everything they may be an ornament to the doctrine of God our Savior. (Titus 2:9-10)

Early Christian teachers who are well-respected:

The slave should be resigned to his lot, in obeying his master he is obeying God... (Saint John Chrysostom)

...slavery is now penal in character and planned by that law which commands the preservation of the natural order and forbids disturbance. (Saint Augustine)

Commentary about American Christian teachings:

...when southern clergy became ardent defenders of slavery, the master class could look upon organized religion as an ally ...the gospel, instead of becoming a mean of creating trouble and strive, was really the best instrument to preserve peace and good conduct among the negroes. (Kenneth Stamp)

The churches who were anti-slavery were pretty much initially considered deviant churches. But did they change the existing order for the better by getting rid of slavery? Most today will agree so. How about FCC when we redefine the nature of homosexuality? We are deviant too! But are we trying to change the existing order of homophobia for the better? 50 years down the road we might be very right.

Good and evil does not take into account the larger system. Order and chaos on the other hand, gives us that better understanding because it takes into consideration the larger systems. Good and evil operates independently of larger systems and it is thus easily usurped by powerful groups in existing orders to define specific oppressive orders for the less powerful. Therefore, in this light, good and evil are in fact subordinate to order. They fall under order’s control and therefore, rhetoric on what is good and what is evil can be oppressive.

But now, so what are these human rights that are meant to protect every human individual from oppressive orders? What characteristics should they possess? I would like to suggest 5 traits they should possess: they should be universal (which means applicable to all human beings across all countries), intrinsic (which means they are your entitlements by virtue of the fact you are a human being alone), inalienable (meaning you cannot ever be separated from your rights), non-transferable (meaning no one can be a substitute recipient for your rights, if the rights of 10 others are being more than adequately met but yours are not, they cant ‘transfer’ their good fortune to you), and indivisible (these rights cannot be broken into ‘smaller parts’. One cannot have freedom of speech without being well-fed; conversely, we also know the harmful effects of a silenced populace in an oppressive system despite food available). Of course, in this line of thought, most people would agree that there should be some rights available to every single person. But what people disagree on is what exactly these rights should be. Some rights have very wide consensus, others don’t. We should know that right? We have a local law professor who claims to profess in human rights saying a lot of interesting things in parliament.

Currently, the document that is able to reflect as wide a consensus on exactly what rights there should be is probably the universal declaration of human rights. It lists 30 stipulations. Since then, many other rights have been debated and added to the corpus of rights. But to understand how we fair here in Singapore, I have selected a sample from this 30 to consider. This is where I shall be invoking the 3rd pillar of Christian Living – experience. I shall draw wherever I can, from my experiences in Bangladesh. Consider articles 3,4,5,9, 13, 21-26.

Article 3 states “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.” How many people in the world are in positions where the police turn a blind eye to their personal safety? Lesbians in South Africa might undergo what is called “corrective rape”. Do the police actively ensure their security? What about Singapore?

Article 4 states “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms” and article 13(1) states “Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.”Human trafficking occurs globally. It is happening right here in SEA. Especially young girls – they are being lured by attractive jobs overseas but when they get there, goodbye passport, u’re under the power of the trafficker. They find themselves in brothels. They cannot move about freely. Many of these young women are tricked by their own kith and kin: what is there to do? They need money! This is what global capitalism and the dependency on money has generated for many in poverty. What about us in Singapore?

Article 5 states “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” There are places in this world where there are lots of homeless children. The following story is not unheard of: a couple of men find these homeless children and bring them to shelters and feed them well, giving them a roof over their heads. The children are told that they are going to be trained to be good singers so that they can be stars. The men identify the good singers. In secrecy, they lure these children to isolated locations within the shelter away from the rest. They knock them out with chloroform, gouge out their eyes, turning them into blind beggars. Voila! They earn money. And part of it goes to these men. Once again, this is one of the consequences of global capitalism and the dependency on money which we here in Singapore don’t hear very often about. What about us in Singapore?

Article 9 states “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.” There are places in the world where there are peculiar constitutional laws. In Pakistan, article 295C of the constitution entails what is known as the Blasphemy Law. Muslim nations have grown very weary and worried of their own cultures and religions because of western capitalist expansionism as well as the so-called Christianization of the world. This law is pretty much in that spirit of self defense. The law allows the sentencing to death of anyone who disrespects Islam, prophet Muhammad or the Quran or anything symbolic to Islam. This law has been used to get rid of political opponents. It has even been used on children, the youngest was about 6 or 8 years old. How is a child capable of insulting Islam I really really wonder. How about Singapore?

The next slew of articles has to do with the right to equal vote, to social security, freedom of employment and favourable working conditions, food, housing, medical care, and primary school level education. In Bangladesh, I had the privilege of personally encountering brothel sex workers in their home environment – the brothel. The stink from pollution in the streets is unbelievable. The sex workers have families living in the brothels – there are children who grow up in the brothels and many of the boys become drug abusers and committing all sorts of crimes while many of the girls grow up to be sex workers themselves. The children walk and play in what looked like black sludge to me on the streets… barefoot. From what the locals tell me, sex workers are not entitled to vote. Even if they are, one wonders if they have understanding and knowledge of how to. Do you think they have any social security? CPF anyone? Their customers may not even pay them and there is nothing they can do about it. How about healthcare and free primary education for their children? You think any school is going to accept children of sex workers? How does this compare with our experiences in Singapore?

You know, there are many sad stories of how they ended up in the brothel. Some were dumped by their husbands when he ran away to another woman. The position of a single divorced woman in South Asia is quite appalling. Some have nowhere to go after that so they end up in the brothel. Some were tricked into entering the brothels and families refuse to take them back after that. Or some like Rena, one of the brothel workers I met, told me how she came on her own simply because she was too poor. Naju is a very resilient young lady. She tells me she probably will not ever get married because she needs the freedom to be able to support her mother and sister. She tells me, at a very young age of 26, that her life is finished. She only hopes she can do enough to support her young niece, perhaps send her to school so she can have better opportunities than herself, not to say that sex work should be an undignified job in the first place anyway! It is very frustrating that Naju’s noble intentions for her niece, which she intends to achieve through sex work, has not fully been able to help her look at herself as a perfectly dignified and noble woman. The stigma associated with sex work still forces her to look at herself as “her life is finished” despite her good intentions achievable only through sex work. It really is frustrating and infuriating to have to hear the words “my life is finished” from a lively 26 year old. Shanti is 18 years old, she was a domestic worker at 7, and had her first sexual encounter at 11. She lives in the brothel with a 1 month old baby.

Finally consider, garment factory workers in Bangladesh. Article 24 states “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.” They are already underpaid and overworked as it is. These women are in such vulnerable positions that sexual harassment and advances from their supervisors are not uncommon. Those who lose their virginity may end up having to become sex workers because of the way the society looks at unchaste women. They have no recourse for they need their underpaying jobs badly. They have no knowledge of labour laws and they do not know how to ask for extra pay for overtime. It is in the interest of the capitalists of course, to ensure they remain knowledgeless. Technically they are entitled to 16 weeks of pregnant leave, but in reality, when they return, their jobs may be gone. How about Singapore?

Dear friends, I have taken great pains to demonstrate to us various of these human rights violations and how we here in Singapore compare to the rest of the world. Many of us still feel unfulfilled, there are lots of things we still want. Many of us want a nice comfortable home, with a handsome or pretty, well-to-do life partner, a well-paying career etc. But stop for a moment and look at others in the world, how do we fare in comparison to them? Capitalist-consummerist culture, which is part of the larger system or order, has a way of making nobody satisfied… it has victimized the poorest in ways as we have just seen that are simply deplorable. Could it have victimized us in the first world in ways that never make us satisfied too? Could it be that it has made us chase after unreachable dreams for ourselves so much so that we have nothing left to spare for those who really need our surplus cash? No prizes for guessing where I stand on this issue: but I want to encourage all of us to think about this carefully. Maybe my diagram is not perfect, but looking at the links here… could it be that our comparatively lavish ways of living is directly contributing to exploitation of the 3rd world?

In conclusion, let me summarize what we have talked about today. Human rights is that sphere of individual entitlements that should remain unmolested by order – be it from governments, mass media ideology, or even our own religious teachings. Most agree there should be such rights but we disagree over what they are. But some of these rights have got more consensus than others – these include the right to safety, security, shelter, health, education, and of course food. Some people in the world have all of these, most do not. Human rights are universal, intrinsic, inalienable, non-transferable, and indivisible. We in Singapore have largely shied away from using the term “human rights”. We think it’s a largely western concept where there have been cases where a son has sued his parents in court for giving birth to him because they did not seek his permission to be born. Clearly, I do not need to make my opinions known about such a case. Human rights are not about these self-centric uptight notions of individual freedom – they are really about the most basic of things, dealing with real human suffering and exploitation. I’d say either Singaporeans are genuinely misguided about what human rights is about, or somebody somewhere prefers it that Singaporeans understand human rights in a negative way. I lean very much to one of these 2 cases: I shall not say which one. All this in turn stems from our fundamental belief that everyone is indeed equal and this cannot be just something we say, it must translate into concrete actions which is what human rights is about.

I have also approached this using the 4 pillars of Christian Living as endorsed by our church website. Scripture and Christian tradition cannot be considered in isolation from our own experiences in this world and from the shared experiences of others. A pastor I respect once said that one approaches spiritual life bible in one hand, Straits Times in the other. In what I have done today, I have related to you the experiences of the sex workers Rena and Naju. They count too in our understanding of our roles and callings as Christians. After all I have said today, how does the verse “Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill made low” sound like to you now? How about “Blessed are the merciful for they shall be shown mercy”? How about “If you extend your soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul, then your light shall dawn in the darkness, and your darkness shall be as the noonday?” When St Thomas Aquinas said “Heavenly bread that shall be the bread for all mankind… the hand of God shall nourish even the poorest and humblest of servants”, what does it mean to you now? Take a moment or 2 to reflect. And the final pillar, the one which is my personal favourite: reason. I’ve been using this throughout the entire sermon. But reasoning does not even have to be complex reasoning. Just think about it: how can it ever, be plausibly correct or even remotely reasonable, that while there are so many in the world who would rummage through garbage dumps for a peach pith, that we in the first world are capable of manufacturing “medical conditions” like anorexia and bulimia? While people starve, there are others who eat perfectly healthy meals and throw it all up intentionally. Here’s another example: how is it that we can have situations in India where there are intentions to privatize the water supply? Elsewhere, it is also not unheard of that huge companies deliberately make the seeds of crops infertile so that people will depend on them for food! And how about this one: while there are countless homeless people the world over, how is it that there can be 17000 golf courses in the USA alone? There’s enough land there, in the words of George Carlin, to build 2 Rhode Islands and a Delaware’s worth of houses for the homeless! Even someone with the remotest sense of logic, would have to agree with me that there is something very wrong with this picture. Where on earth do we get our values from?

So what can we do as Christians? I wish to caution all of us first that no official institution or the newspapers are ever going to highlight these issues the way we highlight them in this church. In other words, for these issues to remain on our minds, we have to constantly remind each other and remind ourselves. Personally, I force myself to remind myself about the larger picture everyday. It is heavy, but it is very sobering. But if all of us remind ourselves and each other of the larger picture every day, it is possible my friends to put human rights high on our government’s agenda. We do not have to be anti-government or deliberately subversive to achieve change. All we need is a shift in social attitudes. Mutual education. That is my answer to you as to what you can do as Christians. Mutual education and active talking about human rights is the best thing you can ever do. Because one person alone, you will not be able to achieve change. But if there is talk about it in the air, if a social movement within Singapore can be achieved, human rights will be placed on the government agenda because their legitimacy will depend on their performance on it. As individuals we cannot change much, but the government can! Make a commitment today to educate each other. But that is not to say that’s the end of the story. Helping others entails sacrifice. If the government takes on this role, are you willing to pay higher taxes? All humanitarian work is non-economically productive, but all profit-generating work entails a propensity to exploit. If you’ve benefitted from the economic market, chances are you’ve benefitted from someone’s exploitation. How does one balance that out? Again, this is something that requires careful soul-searching.

Another thing we can do is to recognize that a lot of our desires for material things and wants are really not needed – lies told to us by capitalist-consumerist culture. My dad has always told me as well as my siblings, “live simply that others may simply live”. This is one of the greatest lessons upon reflection that I have learnt in life thus far. And it does stand with intellectual merit upon scrutiny as I have demonstrated in the sermon. Instead of channeling your hard-earned cash to profits for capitalists, why not use it to support the efforts of human rights activists and NGOs which aid the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. The vulnerable of the vulnerable are precisely what FCC engages in – sex workers, foreign workers, HIV positive inmates. These are people who need their rights the most. If you cant spearhead an initiative yourself, at least support the efforts of others. In 2007, NMP Siew Kum Hong risked his personal reputation to speak on the glbt community’s behalf and hand in that petition, I hope that if such an effort happens again, the very least you would do is to add one signature to that petition, complete with your address. Of course, it would be even better if you would seek signatures from others on your own. If we ourselves do not speak up, no one will speak up for us. Likewise, if you do not speak up for the most vulnerable who experience multiple violations of human rights, you do them a great injustice. Jesus Christ was not someone who took sides with the powerful. Not the politicians, not the religious leaders, not the Pharisees; but with the foreigner, the prostitute, and the tax-collector. These days I find it harder and harder to refer to myself as a Christian, for if a Christian is one that follows Christ, then this is what I need to do. It is not just about professing a belief – which is a simplified watered-down version of Christianity which many mainstream churches like to preach about because once again, this kind of Christianity is pro-establishment, along with all the subtle and not so subtle oppressions that accompany it. It is about action. Miak shared with us a few weeks ago that it is much easier to believe in Christ than to follow Christ. I concur. Rev Yap also shared with us 3 weeks ago – that Christianity should be more about a way of living rather than about debating about tenets of our beliefs, so too did Jesus Christ say to us, leave everything behind, take up your cross and follow me. I have not done that. How can I so easily carry the burden of the label “Christian”? Gandhi once remarked:

“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. “
Mohandas Gandhi

On Youth Day service, Mark spoke about a debt of mercy. We here in FCC have been shown great measures of mercy in the way we have come to be accepted as lgbts. At least within our small community, our rights as sexual minorities are fulfilled to some extent. We can be ourselves relatively openly and freely. Don’t we owe it to the rest of the more vulnerable populations in the world to do something for them? They don’t even have the most basic of their rights met let alone the more niche rights such as gay rights. How would Jesus answer this question? Being gay in Singapore gives one a chance to experience injustice from existing systems: unless that is transformed into good for others, the blessings of that experience is for naught. Finally, I would like to share something with you. This is attributed to Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) about the inactivity of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their chosen targets, group after group:

"First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me."

It has been many years since the last world war, since the world experienced human suffering together. Many years have elapsed and a lot of people have forgotten. People have become more and more self-interested. Especially since this latest recession and even before, there has been a trend of the world swinging right. Governments the world over are gradually becoming more conservative, a little more focussed on pumping resources into profit-generating mechanisms rather than notions of equity. A little less friendly towards outsiders too. Is there anyone who is going to speak up? Let someone else speak up for you? What if everybody thought exactly like that? Take our own church for example, its establishment required a measure of stepping beyond comfort zones and risk too, perceived or otherwise: we are not gathered here as a congregation today by chance – we reap what those who came before us have sown. Are we not obliged to sow back in return?

The real question is not what we want to do with our lives for surely there is a divine calling at some level we need to submit to. It’s just like couples! There’s more than one person in a relationship like a couple. Really it is a life of mutual oppression because you need to develop some kind of order between you 2. You need to give each other their own “space” which really is just another word for “rights”! And you can’t just do what you want to do! Neither is the question what we must or should do with our lives for God has not made robots! He made us human beings capable of a sense of justice and compassion. The question is what we can do with our lives. Mother Theresa had high levels of compassion for others. Think about what she had to say. And with that I thank you and end my sermon.

“God doesn't require us to succeed; he only requires that you try.”

“If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one.”

“If you want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.”