New Testament Reading: Hebrews 11:1-16

Gospel Reading: Mark 8:27-38

Preached Canberra Baptist Church 5/7/09

When a friend of mine in the commonwealth public service first heard I was moving to Canberra he said "I hear you are going to the Holy City". I want to take you today to another Holy City – the Holy City of Jerusalem. It’s about the same size as Canberra – geographically at least. The greater Jerusalem area is roughly the same size as Canberra but with twice as many people. And it is a city divided - a city of two peoples – Israelis and Palestinians. It is hard for us to imagine just how divided are the two communities and how the city has evolved over the last 60 years.

It is a complicated kaleidoscope of change but I’d like you to imagine a scenario where the people of Queanbeyan are the Israelis and the people of Canberra are the Palestinians. Originally they lived together much as we do with our friends from Queanbeyan. There was a border that was just a line on a map. There were different planning authorities, different coloured number plates but we could move freely between one another’s communities. But then the Queanbeyan authorities decide to move in on Canberra’s territory. Let me tell the story as if it had happened here.

In the early stages the Queanbeyanites left Civic and the northern and southern suburbs to the native Canberrans but moved in along Canberra Ave to take over Fyshwick and Narrabundah, Kingston and Barton, and the Parliamentary triangle, with the rest of Canberra left for traditional Canberrans. That’s roughly what Jerusalem was like from 1948 to 1967.

However, in 1967 there was a war and in the aftermath of the war the Israelis annexed all of central Jerusalem. Imagine if you will our Queanbeyan friends taking over all of Civic and North Canberra, Woden and Weston Creek. There are too many Canberrans for them to take over the entire city so Tuggeranong in the south and Belconnen and Gunghalin are left as almost exclusively zones for the native Canberrans, and there are still many Canberrans living in the central part of the city. If we were in the other Holy City, in Jerusalem, Tuggeranong is about as far from central Canberra as Bethlehem (the centre of the southern Palestinian area) is from Jerusalem and North Belconnen/Gunghalin is as far from central Canberra as Ramallah (the capital of the West Bank and centre of the northern Palestinian neighbourhood) is from central Jerusalem.

As the years pass life becomes more and more difficult for the Canberrans trying to live in the central part of Canberra. For a start the new Municipal authority allocates only 13% of the land of Canberra for native Canberrans to live in. Up to 40% of Canberra’s land will be set aside for settlers moving in from Queanbeyan. To try and keep the Canberrans within that 13% land quota the council rejects 94% of all building applications from native Canberrans. Needing to live somewhere Canberrans build or extend their homes without legal authority. Sometimes three or even four generations will live together in one extended house. Every year dozens of Canberra’s homes are demolished – some to punish the residents, some for security reasons and some for ‘administrative reasons’. The houses are bulldozed, sometimes in the middle of the night. In a minority of cases the people who live there are allowed to remove their possessions before the house is flattened, but only sometimes.

It’s not only physical housing that is a problem. Native Canberrans now need a "Canberra ID" card to live legally in the city. People from Queanbeyan don’t need it but if you are a native Canberran you must have an ID card to live in your own city. If you travel internationally you must satisfy some re-entry conditions to Australia or your Canberra ID will be cancelled. If one partner in a marriage has Canberra ID card and the other doesn’t, one can legally fly out of Canberra airport but the other must go to Melbourne or Sydney to catch a plane.

If a woman has Canberra residency and her husband doesn’t none of their children will have Canberra Residency. Their births will be registered to Sydney or Melbourne even if they are born right here in town. If the father has Canberra residency his children will be granted local birth certificates and they will have the right to live in the city of their birth. But even this can be difficult. One family I met three weeks ago in Jerusalem was celebrating the government finally granting a birth certificate to their baby. The father holds Jerusalem residency and a Jerusalem birth certificate was the legal right of his child but the government was reluctant to issue the certificate knowing the residency rights that would flow from it. With the birth certificate the child could access education and other government services in the city and finally choose to live there himself. At the time the certificate was finally granted the baby was 17 years old!

Of course, in our imagined Holy City people from Tuggerong and Belconnen and Gunghalin do not have free access to the main part of Canberra. They are living in our version of the ‘West Bank’. They certainly can’t live in the Holy city, and if they work somewhere in Canberra they need a work permit. Somewhere north of Bruce right across through Watson and then south of Mawson right across to Queanbeyan a concrete wall 8 metres high has been built cutting the city into zones. That’s almost as high as the front wall of this church. It is manned by armed guards with observation towers every few hundred metres. Any native Canberran can live freely outside the walls but you need a permit to come into town. To get to work you have to queue with up to 1500 fellow Canberrans to go through huge security check points at the gates through the wall. In the security terminals at the check points armed guards walk above you on elevated catwalks. There are three stages of security with another queue for each stage. The first is to check your work permit, the second to go through a bag X-ray and search and personal metal detectors and in the third you are digitally fingerprinted and compared with the records in the government’s centralized computer system. The checkpoint queues start forming around 3am on most work days. You go through that system every day you go to work.

We tend to think of our way of life as normal, not having to go through military check points to go to work, or having to fight the government to get a building permit or a birth certificate. And yet in many ways Jerusalem today under Israeli occupation is much like it was in Jesus’ day under Roman occupation – all armies and restrictions and officialdom with an undercurrent of struggle and violence.

And yet I would not be too harsh. Our own Holy City also has its down-side and limitations – it too imposes pressures and restrictions on it citizens.

There are pressures of work. We may not have to get up at 2 am to get through the checkpoint to go to work, but some of us are still up at 2 am finishing work for the various deadlines that define our work lives.

There are pressures of life. We may not have concrete walls defining where we shall live or the razor-wired checkpoint queues channeling us where to go, but many of our choices are channeled by advertising, by the subtle social pressures that are no less real for being much less visible.

There is absence from family. It may not be a restrictive ID card system that makes us live at long distance from home and family members but for many of us Canberra is not where our extended families live.

While we can move around freely, and do not fear the army with its bulldozers arriving at 2am to flatten our homes and destroy all our possessions, there is in our very freedom and security something that locks us in to a life a long way from the simplicity and commitment that Jesus enjoined on all of us who would follow him. We have good careers and comfortable homes and the right to fly off on holiday from any airport we choose – how can we possibly understand what it means to deny ourselves, take up the cross and follow Jesus?

Yet that is our calling and we must be faithful to it.

In 1983 I spent four months living and working among the poor of Colombo in Sri Lanka. I lived in a village and bathed at the well. I taught in a school in a shanty community. Some of the troubles between two communities of that beautiful land - the Singhalese and the Tamils – had recently flared up just months before and the country was tense. (That long-standing struggle has just in the last weeks reached some sort of conclusion in the war in the north of the country and the defeat of the Tamil army.)

When I left that country and came home Jane and I spent two days in Singapore. There were more taps in the en suite bathroom in our hotel room than served the whole community of 5,000 people in the shanty. The cheapest main meal on the restaurant menu was more than a whole month’s salary for the people I had been working alongside just hours before. I was coming up against the challenge of discipleship, how to live as a follower of Jesus in a land of plenty, in the Holy (?) city of wealth and privilege.

That challenge faces us all. We don’t have high concrete walls to map out the injustices in our society and our world. We don’t have machine guns in our faces challenging us every day as to which side we are on, or the kind of daily indignities and humiliations that might give some tangible shape to self-denial and the way of the cross. We have to make choices about lifestyle and life direction, about where we stand in the world’s pecking order, about what faithfulness to Jesus means in a world where we have interesting jobs - but our time seems so constrained, where we are well remunerated - but life is very pressured. Our lives are very different to the Palestinians of annexed Jerusalem or the poor of the world’s shanty towns: how can we live amid plenty as those who deny themselves and take up the cross of Jesus?

Over the next few weeks we are going to explore those themes. We are going to look at how Jesus challenges us to follow him and find the joy of being his disciples. When we offer our lives and our time, our effort and our resources, our loyalties and our choices to God as the first-fruits, not the leftovers, of our days we find the freedom and the empowerment that comes from denying ourselves and following Jesus.

Ultimately the Holy city of Canberra, or even the Holy city of Jerusalem is irrelevant, because God has prepared a city for us (Hebrews 11.16). It is that city for which we prepare ourselves, which is the goal of our journeying and the compass of all our decision-making. Beyond the comforts of Canberra or the travails of Jerusalem, or the way that any earthly city shapes the lives of its citizens, the people of God travel on and model their lives on the city which is to come, that city of salvation and wholeness, of justice and peace. May God grant us the vision to see that city and the faith to follow in the way that leads to it.