<html><body><div>Part the second:</div><div><br></div><div><font color="#000033" face="Arial" size="2"> Yet Martin Luther King, Jr., knew that this always come with a cost. He spoke quite plainly that his life would be cut short. He knew, because those who hated him and his message of justice, and love, and compassion, couldn’t stand to be accused, to be exposed for who they were and what they were doing.</font><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 51); font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Somehow, Martin Luther King, Jr., took on the mantle laid down by thousands before him, and accepted the role of leadership. Somehow, Jonah, after a very rough beginning, wore that same mantle, as did John the Baptist, and Jesus, and Philip and Nathanel, and Simon and Andrew, and James and John, and, later on Paul. Think about how each of these, and people in our own age, not only accept the mantle of God, but burnish it and hand it on to others lovingly, making sure that the mantle will never be set aside, but will be inspiring and encouraging.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 51); font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><u>THIS</u></b> is how God calls. Yet not only calls, but also provides a covering, a source of connectedness with those who’ve gone before, and listened, and acted for God. God calls and those who hear and accept cannot leave ministry aside. They cannot remain blind and deaf. Yet, no matter how much we may have our breath taken away by the lives of such saints, still we ask “Why did they do it?”</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 51); font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Pope Francis seems to have the same sort of charism as his predecessors in faith. He has the knack of speaking out, truthfully, yet having a bit of a sting to what he says, a challenge that can and ought to wake us up to what’s happening.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 51); font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>I’ve found myself wondering, sometimes, whether or not when Peggy reads the Gospel passage assigned for any given day, whether we should be shaken into a stunned silence. Usually, it’s <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><u>NOT</u></b> something that should leave us feeling warm, as if we’d just been cuddled. Even the so-called “good stories” have a challenge to them, despite the way that we can feel exhilarated by being called into Jesus’ Present.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 51); font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>In his first trip outside Rome after he became Pope, Francis visited the island of Lesbos, the Mediterranean island on which so many refugees had landed, dead or alive, and then the Italian island of Lampedusa, where camps were set up for those refugees fleeing persecution. He’d left what some might consider one of the great centres of religion on earth, where Peter and Paul had left the Gospel message, where Peter and Paul had both been executed for daring to suggest that the emperor was not God, and that power had to be shared.</span></p><p style="margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;background:white"><span style='margin: 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 51); font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Francis had left the opulence of the Vatican State and gazed out over the water through which people risked their lives in the faint hope that they might be free, and he talked of the “Globalisation of Indifference.” Actually, he didn’t just talk, he lambasted “</span><span style='margin: 0px; color: rgb(18, 18, 18); font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>the rich world for its lack of concern for their suffering and inveighing against (this) ‘globalisation of indifference’.</span></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; color: rgb(18, 18, 18); font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>“‘We have become used to the suffering of others. It doesn't affect us. It doesn't interest us. It's not our business,” he said. …</span></p><p style="margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;background:white"><span style='margin: 0px; color: rgb(18, 18, 18); font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>“The thought of their suffering had come back to him repeatedly like ‘a thorn in the heart’, he said.”</span></p><p style="margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;background:white"><span style='margin: 0px; color: rgb(18, 18, 18); font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>The pope “celebrated mass within sight of the so-called graveyard of wrecks, where fishing boats carrying migrants and asylum seekers end up after they drift ashore, their engines often having broken down at sea.</span></p><p style="margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;background:white"><span style='margin: 0px; color: rgb(18, 18, 18); font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>“He asked for ‘pardon for those who are complacent and closed amid comforts which have deadened their hearts’ and ‘forgiveness for those who by their decisions at the global level have created situations that lead to these tragedies’.” <sup>1</sup></span></p><p style="margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;background:white"><span style='margin: 0px; color: rgb(18, 18, 18); font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>This is the sort of thing that Jonah, the first time around, wanted to avoid – until he, like refugees on the same Sea today, saw how he was not simply being indifferent to God’s love for the Ninevites, he was denying them what God knew they needed. This was the sort of thing that John the Baptist, and the disciples, and the Son of God Himself faced – from some, a cold, bland indifference, and from others, swords, and ropes, and spears.</span></p><p style="margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;background:white"><span style='margin: 0px; color: rgb(18, 18, 18); font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Why <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"><u>DID</u></b> all these people <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><u>DO</u></b> this? Why Francis? Couldn’t he do more if he sat on the throne of Peter, safely tucked in his palace?</span></p><p style="margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;background:white"><span style='margin: 0px; color: rgb(18, 18, 18); font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>David Milibrand, former Foreign Secretary from Britain, picked up and used this very phrase, “Globalisation of Indifference”, to describe what he sees so missing from our lives. He’s written and talked about his mother and aunt who lived in Belgium and were told to report to the train station in Brussels. Guessing exactly what was going to happen – the attempted extermination of an entire race – Milibrand’s mother and aunt ran from the city and found their way to a farm in a small village. There, the farmer hid them, and, eventually, seventeen other Jewish families, for the duration of the Second World wat.</span></p><p style="margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;background:white"><span style='margin: 0px; color: rgb(18, 18, 18); font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Milibrand, when he was about ten or so, was taken by his family to visit Belgium, and the found the farmer still alive, still living on his farm. Milibrand said that the only thing he could think to say was, “Why did you do it?”</span></p><p style="margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;background:white"><span style='margin: 0px; color: rgb(18, 18, 18); font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>In French, the farmer replied, “One must.” <sup>2</sup></span></p><p style="margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;background:white"><span style='margin: 0px; color: rgb(18, 18, 18); font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Why did Jonah, why did John, why did Jesus, why did Philip, why did Nathanael, why did Simon, why did Andrew, why did James, why did John, why does Francis; why, when they were called to follow Jesus, did they do what they did, regardless of the cost to themselves?</span></p><p style="margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;background:white"><span style='margin: 0px; color: rgb(18, 18, 18); font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>“One must.”</span></p><p style="margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;background:white"><span style='margin: 0px; color: rgb(18, 18, 18); font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>And now Jesus calls us to ministry. Will we too speak with Monsieur Maurice, and say “We must”? </span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'> </span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>NOTE:</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'> </span></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0px;"><sup><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>1</span></sup><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span><span style="margin: 0px; color: rgb(63, 63, 63);"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/08/pope-globalisation-of-indifference-lampedusa" target="_blank"><span style="margin: 0px; color: rgb(51, 0, 153);">“globalisation of indifference” - The Guardian</span></a> </span><span style="margin: 0px; color: rgb(0, 117, 66);"><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/"><font color="#0000ff">www.theguardian.com</font></a> <b>› </b><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world" target="_blank"><span style="margin: 0px; color: rgb(0, 117, 66);">World</span></a> <b>› </b><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/pope-francis" target="_blank"><span style="margin: 0px; color: rgb(0, 117, 66);">Pope Francis</span></a> </span></span><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/profile/johnhooper"><span style="margin: 0px; color: windowtext; text-decoration: none;">John Hooper</span></a></span><i><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 10pt;'> in Rome </span></i><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>Mon 8 Jul 2013</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 72px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'> </span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>2</span></span><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><span style='margin: 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 51); font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>“Rescue: Refugees and the Political Crises of our Time”</span></i><span style='margin: 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 51); font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'> by David Milband, TED Books, Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York, N.Y. © International Rescue Committee, 2017<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>and TED Talks Sunday 14<sup>th</sup> January, 2018, OPB Radio <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/01/12/577436190/david-miliband-whose-responsibility-is-it-to-solve-the-global-refugee-crisis"><font color="#0000ff">https://www.npr.org/2018/01/12/577436190/david-miliband-whose-responsibility-is-it-to-solve-the-global-refugee-crisis</font></a></span></p></div><div><b><br></b></div></body></html>