Carols of Compassion

Why are we singing Christmas Carols here, outside the Department of Immigration?

Government employees, prison officers and border protection personnel – forget for the moment security guards contracted to private companies – are not theologically bound to love their enemies, to renounce retribution, or to act justly, to love mercy or to walk humbly.

As followers of Jesus Christ, however, we are.

We are bound to his way of love, justice, compassion and mercy.

A vigorous and necessary conversation among many of my friends and supporters of Love Makes A Way – who are organising events like this one around the country – is whether, or to what degree, we are seeking to represent a transforming alternative to the Australia’s practices of mandatory detention for boat arrivals.

OR, are we merely a moral complement which attempts to make the immigration system a little kinder and gentler where and when possible. (The same question presses upon many contemporary issues: climate disruption, responses to terrorism, and so on.)

One trajectory is the way of pragmatic reform.

Today many in our churches and community are working hard to bring practical compassion and alternative responses into the existing policies of immigration and the institutionalised effects of prolonged detention. Some of them are close friends and colleagues. Their challenge is to figure out how the moral values of Christian compassion, justice and reconciliation can be made workable in the real world of bureaucratised, politicised and even broken systems.

The other trajectory is the way of “social movements” or “moral imagination”. This is the work of those pesky activists sitting in the offices of MPs with prayer vigils and the rest.

This is our work here this afternoon. It is what public liturgies do:

• public liturgy witnesses to the compassion of Jesus
• public liturgy protests against compassion-less politics and policies
• public liturgy imagines an alternative, more compassionate Australia.

In the long term struggle for change, social movements and practical policy reformers depend upon each other to capture, sustain and recapture the moral compass Australia needs.

Public liturgy and justice—what do these two have to do with each other?

Our intuitions tell us that they are not meant to sit merely side-by-side in our Christian existence, but rather are meant somehow to interact with each other, authenticating each other, expressing and nourishing each other.

And so this afternoon we sing Christmas carols for justice, for compassions

• We sing because we have seen the transforming, compassion of Jesus.
• We sing because we have seen the harm done – and the deaths caused – by politics-without-compassion.
• We sing because want to see a more compassionate Australia.