A sermon preached by Bishop Brian Farran at Grace Church, Joondalup, Sunday, October 20 2002.

It is not too dramatic to say that Australians are haunted by the images of the bombings in Bali. Those who have returned to Australia from Kuta have already spoken graphically of the horror. Totally unprepared for the massacre and human mutilation, fun-loving people had their night literally ripped apart by the bomb blasts.

All caught up in this tragedy recognize that the nightclubs were detonated into a war zone - only soldiers would have experienced similar devastation. So those who went as tourists to Bali have returned as if having been repatriated from a war, even those who escaped uninjured.

The Australian community will have so much psychological and spiritual work to do as a consequence of the hundreds of people affected by the dead and injured. C.S. Lewis once lamented, after the death of his wife Joy Adamson from cancer very soon after their marriage at her bedside, that no one had forewarned him about the sheer physical work that grief was.

My fear is that so many Australians will be unprepared for the very long and exhausting work that now lies before them as they come to terms with their deeply changed lives.

Relationships will be put under stress and strain, given the ordeal those who were in Bali experienced. They will be different people. Human beings cannot but be changed by such horrific carnage, by the shock, by the disruption, by the loss, by the insecurity injected so violently into their lives.

People will need space in order to learn how to live with the experience they had forced upon them by terrorists as yet unidentified. The inner work of adjustment can only be undertaken by the individuals concerned. No one else can do it for them. There is in the severest experiences an acute loneliness.

I certainly believe that people will require the benefit of sacred space, if they are not to do themselves further injury. Some psychological responses could further damage people, and in the damage of destructive attitudes, people will become longer term victims than they might have been. We need to guard against those public voices of hate and fear that will be as ever too simplistic, that will evoke the worst from the public mind, and that will fuel attitudes that hinder more than heal.

As I have tried to come to terms with the pictures of suffering and destruction, the distress and the carnage, I have thought of the instances of Christlikeness, of sacrificial actions or words by victims and rescuers alike. It is of course quite natural to expect instances of such Christlikeness, given that Jesus shared our humanity.

In fact, we ought to be very worried if we did not detect such Christlikeness in ordinary encounters. For then, the Christ would have been totally other-worldly, and much like a cosmic visitor to our planet. Such a visitor would inform us of our difference more than our likeness, and would remain remote as visitors invariably do, for they visit, they do not stay.

I began to think too of another similarity with Christ of those who suffered the bomb blasts. They absorbed the impact of the blast. Some survivors recalled being blown out of the nightclub into the street. Others were killed by the physical impact of shrapnel and other debris. And they endured all this in darkness and chaos.

The similarities to the final hours of Jesus are stark - sudden violence in the dark, terror for companions, solitary confinement in a disused cistern, his body violated by indifferent oppressors from a foreign regime, injustice, and tortuous death. All this in a silence of acceptance, as victim of an accumulated antagonism towards God that had erupted with the explosion of hate.

All the media reports have galvanized community sympathy to the agony of the waiting that families and victims have endured. Much love and practical care has been spontaneously evoked by the community"s understanding of the pain of this waiting.

One of the greatest minds, I consider, of the Church of England in the last century, W. H. Vanstone, wrote of waiting Awaiting can be the most intense and poignant of all human experiences - the experience which, above all others, strips us of affectation and self-deception and reveals to us the reality of our needs, our values and ourselves. (There are moments when one) waits in an agonizing tension between hope and dread, stretched and almost torn apart between two dramatically different anticipations.¹

Vanstone suggests that this was the very experience of Jesus who monumentally decided to wait upon the decisions of humankind. In other words, Jesus entrusted the outcome of his life to others, and thus became passive, accepting of whatever those others did to him. I imagine that such a decision and stance was yet one more dimension of Jesus" solidarity with the least and the last, the "little ones", the excluded, the forgotten, those crushed in spirit by their experience of being human.

Over the years - Vanstone wrote his book in 1982 - I have ruminated on Vanstone's insights, such as, Athere is disclosed in Jesus a free activity of God which culminates in the surrender of freedom, in the handing over of himself, in a willed transition to passion. ² The principal image of God through Jesus is that God is an absorbing God, a God who soaks up the pain, violence and evil of the world so that these never have the final word, that these are never ultimately in power, that humankind is saved from these forces that destroy and distort.

God in Jesus is the cosmic soak-well, taking away such evil so that it is not recycled or reconstituted, no matter how often humankind might try to make evil permanent.

To think of God in Jesus absorbing violence, pain, terror, evil, sin (whatever element of carnage you want to identify) is to think of a moral God, a God who is explicitly real love and not a heart-shaped version of self-interest. This consideration of God is light years away from the vindictive caricature of God that beats up Jesus on the cross to make God feel better, or to satisfy some system of justice that God seems powerless to sensitize. That version of salvation is the theological prisoner of shame and honour, dimensions that Jesus overturned constantly in his ministry of outrageous socializing and salvation.

Ever since the once and for all disclosure of the nature of God in the passion of Jesus, the God who risks all for the creation, humankind has been drawn into learning to live in this divine ambience of love and self-sacrifice. As Saint Paul once eulogized, There remain these three - faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love.(1Corinthians 13:13)

Now the Australian community must sustain this love, defined forever by the self-giving of Jesus, as we respond to those traumatized by the devastation in Kuta. Lives will never be the same either because the memories will have people, or people will live lives with gaps - gaps of relationships, of well-being, of physical alteration. So the community, and especially the religious communities, will need to exercise understanding, patience and love as we help others to bear the burden of their lives, just as our patient God, who is seen in the face of our Lord Jesus Christ, bears us as a burden, and is the God of our deliverance. (Psalm 68:19)

1 W. H. Vanstone, The Stature of Waiting, Darton, Longman & Todd, London, 1982, p.84.
2 Ibid, p.94