The Story that Costs us Something

After eight years and two visas later, a couple of weeks ago I finally had the privilege of sitting my Australian citizenship test. Despite what every Australian told me, it did not hinge upon Donald Bradman’s batting average — though for the record, I did memorize it just in case, 99.94. Instead, it was a test on Australian values, history, and culture — in other words, the Australian story, the story Australia tells about itself, and the kind of people that story is meant to shape us into. And as I read through the testable material in the lead-up to the exam, I found myself both inspired and moved by the invitation of what it means to be Australian — not just as a citizen on paper, but to become a part of this story myself. One about a fair go, about equality regardless of gender or sexuality, culture or creed, about being equal under the law. There was even a section about mateship and how religious and cultural groups over the years have shown up to help when floods and fires would sweep through communities.

But before the document got deep into its values, governance, and laws, the very first section told the story that preceded all of this: that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were the custodians of this land for at least 60,000 years. A number that was given extra credit in the news this week as the oldest cave paintings were discovered in Indonesia, during a time in our geographical history when Australia wasn’t yet girt by sea. In other words, an Indigenous people who carry the most ancient human story we have on earth.

But even as these values, identities, and stories resonated deeply in my heart, I felt a tension, because they sounded less like a description of who Australia is and more like an aspiration of who Australia wants to be. Because we actually live in a country where domestic violence is rising, where women are still paid significantly less for the same work, and where cultural background continues to shape whether you are welcomed, passed over, or subject to discrimination. Where some minority groups are protected, while others continue to live with fear, surveillance, and the quiet weight of abuse, seclusion and violence on this land. One of those groups being the First Peoples of this land, a people who should be the most revered in this country and yet experience the worst kind of seclusion through dispossession, over-policing, and intergenerational trauma to name just a few.

It strikes me that perhaps all Australians, especially those in parliament, might need to take this test — not because they have forgotten the answers, but because they have not allowed the story they say they believe to truly change them.

And it makes me wonder whether so many of our present fractures are rooted in the fact that we have never truly faced or healed from the first wound in the society we now find ourselves in. When in 1788, 238 years tomorrow, the First Fleet arrived on this land, declared terra nullius — that it was empty — and in doing so not only took the land from its First Peoples, but inflicted unspeakable violence, while systematically stripping away culture, language, identity, and children. A story the testable material in the citizenship test notably left out.

A sin that none of us here committed with our own hands, and yet one from which all of us, in ways seen and unseen, have inherited advantage and security. A sin whose full consequences many of us will never truly comprehend, but whose living weight continues to be carried by First Peoples today. And yet, this story is not marginal to who we are; it is not a side chapter we can afford to ignore; nor is it a story we rehearse only to appear woke and relevant. It is central to the moral and spiritual formation of this nation that doesn’t just hurt First Peoples — but Second peoples as well. Because, as the Aboriginal activist Dr Lilla Watson put (and I paraphrase), our liberation is bound up with one another. And so, if we truly want to live into the story Australia tells itself, we cannot live in denial, indifference, or a dust-free version of our history. Because the best stories, the ones we feel our souls reaching for, always cost us something.

And it’s a story the Uniting Church in Australia has committed itself to acknowledging and responding to — through the establishment of the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress, through covenant, through the redirection of church resources, and, most recently, through announcing its commitment to respond to the recommendations of the Yoorrook Justice Commission. It was also a part of my ordination vows and, consequently, a vow I have a duty to live out in the life of this church.

And yet, despite all the commitments the UCA and the ordained in this church have tied themselves to, it simply does not go far enough. This is not because our initiatives are symbolic (which they can and easily become) but because we have not yet allowed a far greater story — the story of being a reconciled people in Christ — to reach deeply enough into our souls to unsettle, reshape, and re-form us as a church and as a people. A change that reaches not just our policies, programs, or pulpits, but a change that actually costs us something, in the same way it cost Jesus his life.

Which brings us to Paul, and to a young and fragile community struggling to learn how to belong to one another. A community made up of people with vastly different histories and social positions — rich and poor, Jew and Greek, slave and free — and it is not difficult to imagine how quickly competing stories about status and belonging would begin to shape their common life. And so, Paul pleads with them to be of the same mind and the same purpose, not in the sense of erasing difference, but in calling them into a unity formed by a different story altogether.

And into this fragile and divided community, Paul confronts both their tribal loyalties and their polished storytelling — the kind of thinking that can sound convincing while quietly justifying their continued separation from one another. A kind of religion that keeps them safe within their own cohorts: the rich with the rich and the poor with the poor, Jews with Jews and Greeks with Greeks, slaves with slaves and the free with the free. In other words, a kind of clever narrative and clique belonging that blocks them from receiving the costly, unsettling story of the cross — a story that is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved is the power of God. A story, in other words, at the bedrock of what it means to follow Christ, but a story we might not automatically be drawn to ourselves.

Because this story costs something. And the church has a word for this: Kenosis — from the Greek keno, meaning “to empty.” A self-emptying of one’s own will, so as to become entirely open to God and to the will of God. Not a self-emptying that denies or diminishes culture or identity, but a self-emptying that, strangely, reveals our true selves and our true story wrapped up in God’s — freed from the fables that tell us we must protect, possess and puff up in order to belong and in order to be safe. And Paul names this same movement when he speaks of the foolishness of the cross, of a God whose power is not found in grasping or conquering, but in love that gives itself away over and over again. A love that overcomes division, distance and indifference. And a love that empties itself into the muck, the mire and the matter of one another’s lives.

Last week I was speaking with one of you about how your Christmas went and you shared how precious this season was to you — you shared your love and anticipation during Advent, the story of a baby in a manger, the well-known carols, and the kind of getting-together that happens with loved ones because of this story. Families gathering across distance and difference over glazed ham and gifts the same way we might imagine Mary and Joseph gathered over gold, frankincense, myrrh, and a newborn child. It’s a story easy enough to get on board with and emulate ourselves. But the cross? Crucifixion? Death? This is not a story where many, if any, will form memories of soft and cozy nostalgia around. And yet, they are not separate stories, but one and the same. The foolishness of God made flesh is the same kind of foolishness as the cross. And we, as Christians, are not just invited into the former but also the latter. Because the cross is not just the mechanism by which Jesus dies — it is what he lives his life by. Because from Jesus’ birth through his life, death and resurrection is a common thread: the God who empties God’s self out into our stories and our lives again and again and again. In other words, kenosis in the darkness of an unmarried Jewish teenager’s womb. Kenosis in teaching, in healing, in loving not only the poor and the persecuted, but also the teachers and the tax collectors. Kenosis into the hands of an angry empire and its murder machine. Kenosis as a stone is rolled away and a tomb is left empty. And kenosis into the wild breath of Spirit who lives amongst us here and now. And if this is how God chooses to be with the world, then this is also the pattern of life we are being drawn into as Christ’s body — a people formed not by comfort, but by costly love.

And so, I find myself returning to the story of Australia, to what it means to be Australian, but also to the quiet question that was at the heart of the citizenship test: what kind of story do we want to be a part of? Paul would say that for those who follow Christ, the answer can only be found in the strange and foolish story of the cross — a story that forms us not through tribal loyalties, polished theologies or posturing but through love poured out. A story that calls us to be of the same mind and the same purpose, not because we are the same, but because we are all being called by the one love God gives us: kenotic love.

And if that is the story that forms us, then reconciliation in Christ cannot remain an idea we affirm with clever knowledge, comfortable distance or as a means for our individual salvation. It must become a way of life we are willing to enter with one another, even when that way is costly. Because the best stories, the ones we feel our souls reaching for, always cost us something.

And on this land, that cost must include truth about the first wound in our national story, and a willingness to let the oldest story — the story etched into the dirt beneath our feet, the air we breathe and the waters we drink — the story of the First Peoples — reshape how we understand ourselves, our faith, and our future together. Because God does not hover above us, untouched in some sort of holy and heavenly realm; God enters into the muck and the mire of our matter.

For this is the foolishness Paul speaks of.

And so, on this Day of Mourning, the question before us is not simply what story Australia tells about itself, or even what story the church tells about its practices of reconciliation, but what story we are willing to let shape our lives. Because to follow a kenotic God on this land is to become a people who do not rush past grief, who do not settle for reconciliation that costs us nothing but symbolism, but, rather, who trust that the best story — the story of God’s kind of love — is what makes us into the one body of Christ.