Sermon at A Christian Commemoration for Those Lost at Sea

Why are we here?

What a strange thing to do, it seems, to meet together, as we have done today, to commemorate the loss of people who were strangers to us.

By what trick of the mind can we pretend that we are remembering those we never knew? And by what right do we say that these people were ours to remember in the first place? Is it not presumptuous of you and me to think that by meeting here and offering our prayers and consoling one another we might do some honour to those who have died?

Perhaps it is presumptuous. All I know for myself is that the news of the sinking of this boatload of people has left me with a deep sense of unease – an unease that has developed into a real sadness that surprises me. The people who drowned, and whose bodies were left to founder ungathered, seemed not to belong to anyone. There was no-one to claim them; no embassy to seek their welfare. Who would mourn them?

By now we know that the victims belonged to the Hazara people of Afganistan, a Shia minority persecuted by the same Taliban against which our own soldiers have been fighting these many long years of war. There is a Hazara community here in Sydney; they are, it turns out, our neighbours.

Even so: it was not deemed expedient, for whatever reason, to retrieve the bodies of the drowned.

One of the great poets of this city, Kenneth Slessor, served as a war correspondent in the Mediterranean during the Second World War. He wrote the poem “Beach Burial” as he watched as the bodies of dead sailors, both friend and foe, being washed in to the beach on the morning tide; and he wrote:

Between the sob and clubbing of gunfire
Someone, it seems, has time for this,
To pluck them from the shallows and bury them in burrows
And tread the sand upon their nakedness…

Even in the midst of war, the dead bodies of enemy and ally are honoured, revered and buried. Slessor writes:

Whether as enemies they fought,
Or fought with us, or neither; the sand joins them together…

War, so it seems, conveys a nobility and a dignity upon the dead, even upon an opponent. But nothing seemed to have conveyed that same sense of nobility and dignity upon the drowned Hazara – a people simply seeking a home where they would not be persecuted for their culture and beliefs. For many in the Australian community, I am ashamed to say, those who died lost their legitimacy as human beings the minute they set sail in a leaky boat. We would have preferred it if they had attacked us with guns, than that they tried to land on our shores merely seeking a peaceful home.

We did not know them, it is true. But they were known.

They were known to their creator. Psalm 139, the psalm we heard earlier, is an intimate picture of our dependence on God. He completely encloses us:

You hem me in behind and before,
    and you lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
    too lofty for me to attain.

We are known by the Creator even more deeply than we know ourselves. We are encompassed by him:

Where can I go from your Spirit?
    Where can I flee from your presence?
 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
    if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
    if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
    your right hand will hold me fast.

This is both comforting and disturbing. On the one hand, it is comforting because I am known by God – remembered in tenderness by him, even were I to forget myself. On the other, it is disturbing because that other person – those other people, who seem so alien to me – is also known by him. 

They too are created by God; they also, to use the Bible’s language, bear the image of God. They will give account to him as their judge, as we will. He takes them as seriously as he takes you and me. Though they carried no passports, and have no known grave, and are not it seems recorded in any ledger of the dead, they are not forsaken by God.

The psalmist knows too that, being known by God, he cannot then hide from God:

If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
    and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
    the night will shine like the day,
    for darkness is as light to you.

This a God who sees even into the darkness of the waters.

But from the Christian point of view, our solidarity with the dead we mourn today has another dimension: for the Son of God took upon himself the human flesh that is common to us all. Jesus was, as the New Testament puts it, ‘like us in every way, but without sin’; which means, he was like them in every way. He was, as we know, hunted down in his childhood, and forced to flee as an exile to Egypt. He lived in a nation occupied by a foreign army, with all the humiliation that that entails. He suffered rejection in his home country – despised and rejected by those he came to serve to death, even death on a cross.

The New Testament tells us the coming of Jesus was the great moment when the tribes that so divide humankind are transcended. At one level this is not good news: the appearance of the Son of God among us in human flesh tells us that our common plight is deeply tragic. We have a common saviour because we share a common need. God does not have favourites: we are all, we may say, in the same, sinking boat, adrift at sea. The God of Jesus Christ is not some tribal deity, but the one with whom we all will have to reckon.

And yet, in his love for all those he has made, the God of Jesus Christ extends his offer of reconciliation to all those he has made – to those of each and every tribe, and nation, and tongue.

And this fellowship of all people is not defeated even by death. ‘Even if I go down to the depths, you are there’, said the Psalmist. Jesus’s resurrection from the dead was not some conjuring trick, but a picture of our common future beyond death. As the Book of Revelation depicts it, on the final day, the dead will rise, and ‘the sea will give up the dead that are in it’ that they too may stand before God. 

The Christian, therefore, dares to hope that the tragedy in the sea is not the end; even as the people we remember today disappear from our view, because of Jesus Christ, we know that God has a much wider horizon than our own.

Why are we here?

Firstly, because the gospel of Jesus Christ overthrows our tribalism. From a merely human point of view those lost at sea were not our people; they did not belong to us. However much they wanted to belong to the Australian community, they did not achieve it – and so they are not our responsibility. 

And yet, in the gospel of Jesus Christ we find that they do belong to us; they are our responsibility. We find ourselves at one with those who died because we were made by a common hand, known by a common mind, answer to a common judge, and loved by a common Lord. It is right to mourn their loss, since they were in fact ours.

And secondly, we are here because in Jesus we can say that the lonely verdict of the remorseless sea is not the last word. In our second reading we heard John’s vision, from the Book of Revelation:

Then I saw "a new heaven and a new earth," for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Look! God's dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away."

There is something not right about a world in which this tragedy could happen. There is something badly broken about a world in which a group of men, women and children are hounded by the human community into the mouth of the sea, despised and rejected.

But there is something new coming: the old order of things is passing. There is a home, and there is a homecoming: a place where people will live together with God and God with them, and so, they with each other; a place where human beings find that harmony that seems to elude us at the moment; a place in which all that human life promises us is made good, and all that threatens it is removed. The people on the boat were right to long for a better world; yet they would not have found that world here with us, however good it is. That better world is still to come.

We are here then, you and I, because we ought never to be satisfied with a world in which a boatload of people perish for want of a home. Woe betide us if we ever find ourselves unmoved by such events. Whatever you have found in your heart today that has brought you here, do not let it pass. Do not let that uneasy feeling fade away. Your heart is telling you true: you are sad for the lost, because it is sad that they are lost. We should grieve because it is tragic.

But there is a hope given to us to cling to amidst the despair. This broken world has not been forsaken by its creator. He has remembered it; and he is coming to make all things new. There is a new home, and a new land. Our sorrow should be profound; but in God a deeper joy awaits.