The Sixth Sunday of Trinity, 7 July 2024
Eldroth, Clapham
In the West Sussex town of Crawley, three weeks ago, the council turned Northgate Community Centre into a temporary shelter for 77 people who had arrived from Mauritius, via the nearby Gatwick Airport.
For more than two weeks Crawley Council ran the rest centre, with the support of other agencies and charities, and many council staff volunteers. Then they announced that they couldn’t keep this up, and run the general election at the same time; that central government would offer them no support; and that they ‘reluctantly therefore had to inform those using the centre that it will now need to close.’
A woman from the group, Mary Elysee Douce, was reported as saying, “We don’t have anyone here. We don’t know anyone. Where will we go? We have no place.” [1]
The arrivals are Chagos Islanders, or Chagossians, people with family connections to the island archipelago down in the Indian Ocean. They have UK passports and are entitled to British citizenship after the UK took ownership of the Chagos Archipelago in 1965, renamed it the British Indian Ocean Territory, forcibly removed all the islanders and then leased it to the United States to use as a military base. Today, thousands of Chagossians live across Mauritius, the Seychelles, and the UK. Like migrants everywhere, in these places many face extreme poverty and discrimination, so they shelter together for comfort and support - Crawley has become home to the UK’s largest community of Chagossians, approximately 3,500 people. [2]
If we speak of them in biblical terms, the Chagossians are exiles, the Northgate Community Centre being their rivers of Babylon, where they sat down, squashed together on rickety camp beds, and remembered their Zion, the island of Diego Garcia, where their fathers’ and grandfathers’ old fishing boats have disappeared and in their place US warships sit in concrete harbours, and B-52 bombers leave for exercises over the Strait of Malacca and bombing raids in Yemen. [3]
Now, Ezekiel was an exile; one of those taken to Babylonia by Nebuchadnezzar II in 597BC. And as Chapter One, Verse One of his book says, in his thirtieth year, in the fourth month on the fifth day, while he was among the exiles by the Kebar River, the heavens were opened and Ezekiel saw visions of God. These visions - of astonishing heavenly creatures appearing in wheels in the sky, appearing like the glory of the Lord - caused Ezekiel to fall face down, in awe and fear and wonder.
Then he heard the voice of one speaking. ‘O mortal, stand up on your feet, and I will speak with you.’ He got up, stood up, and took God’s commission to tell the people to expect first suffering, then redemption, and eventually the end of their exile and the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem.
This is the God who earlier in Israel’s history had said to Joshua, “Stand up! What are you doing down on your face?’ and sent him to lead his people into the promised land. [4]
This is the God who told another Babylonian exile trembling on his knees, ‘Daniel, stand up, and consider carefully the words I am about to speak to you.’ And Daniel stood up trembling, to receive the commission of God to prophecy of the fall of Babylon and the rise of God’s kingdom and salvation for his people at the end of days. [5]
And famously, as we are always reminded in Advent, the prophet Isaiah passes on to a downcast people this message from God: ‘Arise, Shine, for your Light has come, and the glory of the Lord rises upon you.’ [6]
The musician David, in Psalm 20, says, ‘Now this I know: Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God. They are brought to their knees and fall, but we rise up and stand firm.’ [7]
And in our own time, a musician of faith, steeped in the Old Testament scriptures, translated God’s message to these exiled and oppressed peoples into a song which became the anthem of many contemporary struggles for freedom: Bob Marley’s ‘Get up, stand up, Stand up for your right; Get up, stand up, Don’t give up the fight.’ [8]
Bob Marley’s song describes a God who wants us to fight for life in its fullness in the here and now, rather than impotently waiting for a better afterlife: ‘Almighty God is a living man’, he sings. A man who, in Ezekiel’s experience, wants us to stand on our feet, to talk with him and tell his words of freedom to the dispossessed people, to share his gospel of hope with the wretched of the earth.
And so today we give thanks for Mary Elysee Douce, an ordinary woman who stood up as spokesperson for the Crawley Chagos Islanders, to tell their fears of homelessness to news reporters, in hope that their story would be heard, and some compassionate help be offered. [9]
Today we give thanks for the leaders of Crawley Council who, despite being in a housing crisis which may bankrupt them, have stood up for the Chagossian people, speaking of how they understand their ‘deep sense of injustice… their belief that they have still to be compensated properly for the loss of their homeland.’ [10]
We are thankful that The Secretary General of the Anglican Communion, Bishop Anthony Poggo, last year stood up before the Provincial Synod of the Church of the Province of the Indian Ocean to affirm that the worldwide Anglican Church supports the UN General Assembly and the International Court of Justice in their rulings that the Chagos Islands must be decolonised and returned to Mauritius. [11]
And we are thankful for the witness of Crawley’s Voice of Deliverance Church, a Chagossian and Mauritian congregation open to all nationalities standing together, whose services in English, Creole and French are a festival of hope and joy. [12]
As we saw in the way that Nazareth’s people treated Jesus, prophetic messengers are not always welcomed. If we take a short-term view of the the Chagos Islanders’ situation, we may think that they have no hope of returning home, for the American military are determined to hold on to Diego Garcia as their Indian Ocean base, and successive British governments have repeatedly reneged on their promises to Mauritians and Chagos Islanders to abide by international law. [13]
But if we take a biblical view, we know that even the most powerful kingdoms eventually fall; and we see that God turns his head towards all who are on their knees, all the weary, worn and dispossessed people of this world, to tell them, ‘Stand up on your feet’; to convince them that the future will be theirs, and to encourage them to share this news with others who will join the fight to bring about that change.
Notes
[1] Chagos Islanders 'terrified for the future' as Crawley Council shuts rest centre. ITV Meridian, 26 June 2024; Tanya Gupta, Juliette Parkin, Emergency centre for Chagos Islanders to close. BBC News, 27 June 2024.
[2] Wikipedia: Chagos Archipelago; Crawley Borough Council, Chagossian arrivals in Crawley. 14 June 2024.
[3] Psalm 137.
[4] Joshua 7.10.
[5] Daniel 10.11.
[6] Isaiah 60.
[7] Psalm 20.
[8] Bob Marley and the Wailers, Get Up, Stand Up. Songwriters: Peter Tosh / Bob Marley, 1973.
[9] Chagos Islanders 'terrified for the future' as Crawley Council shuts rest centre. ITV Meridian, 26 June 2024.
[10] Crawley Borough Council, Chagossian arrivals in Crawley. 14 June 2024.
[11] Anglican Communion Secretary General praises the role of the Church in the Indian Ocean. Anglican Communion News Service, 2 June 2023.
[12] LVD Church UK.
[13] Nitya Labh, Why Diego Garcia Matters. Foreign Policy, 30 May 2024.
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