Caritas Sri Lanka - SEDEC

The great delusion of the evangelistic and fundamentalist Christians, both in and outside the mainstream churches, is their blind zeal to “find a place for Christ in this world” instead of “creating a world which has a place for Christ”. The reason for this misplaced zeal is their failure to perceive the crucial role that our displaced brothers and sisters play in the drama of salvation, as illustrated in the birth, life and death of Jesus.

For, Jesus alone of all humans, could choose the place and manner of his birth. He chose to be born, not in a home of his own, but on the wayside, in the backyard of somebody else's house. He did not inform anyone about his birth except the shepherds, the homeless and placeless nomads whose children, like their God, were born in makeshift tents in the fields. He “pitched his tent” amongst them. When carrying out his mission, he “had no place to lay his head on” and after he accomplished his mission, he had no place of his own to lay his dead body in. He was mostly seen in borrowed spaces.

Be sure that by choosing the plight of the displaced, God did not in any way justify people's displacement; on the contrary, the message is that it is God who is displaced and marginalized each time the least of God's children is deprived of a place to live; and that such displacement is a crime against God. It is from among the placeless people that God is seen and heard to pass the last judgment here and now: “I was homeless, and you did not create a social ethos in which I felt at home!” Creating such an environment is a requisite of salvation and, therefore, a necessary condition for authentic evangelization.

The purpose of the incarnation is clear: since the world we have created has no place for its original Creator, he came to re-create a world which has a living space for homeless ones, who are his body, his person, his “Me” in the words of his final judgment of nations. Until we strive to join this project of our Creator, the true aim of evangelization would remain an anti-gospel expansion of the church through proselytism rather than a “discipleship of nations” characterized by a country's sharing of the earth and its blessings in such wise that no one is excluded from the land which belongs to all by God's design.

Our country is notorious for having produced a countless number of refugees during the last sixty years beginning from the late 1950s. The first thirty years saw a series of anti-Tamil pogroms; the next thirty years saw the Tamils taking up arms as an alternative to failed dialogue. That option ended up in producing even more wounded and displaced people and now the war may seem to have ended but displacement continues. Even those released from IDP camps have not all found a home! Add to this the fresh evictions of the poor from the capital to make it a safe haven for the social and political elite.

In responding to this situation, let us remember, with the Scripture scholar G. Lofink, that in the traditional Jewish understanding family mores, the expression “as yourself” in the second love-command, really means “as one of your own family”. The displaced outsider is a neighbor whom God wants us to love by opening our home to him or her. Does this sound an exaggeration? Listen to the following story:-

Ho Chi Min was a Marxist and did not believe in God, and therefore would not say “Lord, Lord,” but nevertheless “did the will of God” in the way he handled the displaced children, the victims of four cruel wars that external aggressors waged against his country. It is unbelievable but true that North Vietnam, which at that time counted the biggest number of war-orphans in the world, is said to have ruled out the option of housing them in orphanages.. Ho Chi Min appealed to the Confucian virtue of family devotion and invited the North Vietnamese to show their solidarity with the war victims by welcoming the displaced children into their homes, as privileged family-members. The people responded with great enthusiasm. These children were integrated into various families as honoured additions. How evangelical!