All Christians are #Asylum Seekers

Mr Holdsworth discusses the Church Militant, the Pilgrim Church on Earth, as asylum seekers, which we are indeed.

A loose transcript:

If you, like me, happen to live in a place like Canada in the 21st century, then you have won the lottery of privilege. We are so lucky that anything I try to say to make that point will still be a pathetic understatement of that reality. We enjoy comforts and pleasures that our richest and most powerful ancestors would envy. Even simple things like music. Whenever we want. We can listen to it in bed, while exercising, while riding our electric skateboards, or while driving. Oh yea… did I mention we have cars. Travelling to the nearest state used to take months and most people would get eaten by sabretooth tigers along the way. We can jump into our cars and be there in a few hours and if that’s not fast enough, we can strap ourselves into an airplane and enjoy the miracle of human flight while we complain about having to turn our phones off for the 10 minutes it takes to send us soaring above the clouds. We have advanced and affordable healthcare, education, housing, food, and freedoms that are simply unheard of in the scope of human history. Of all the people that have ever walked on this planet, we are undeniably the luckiest. In spite of that, no matter how good this life can be, it never seems to satisfy, and we have it far better than most. We can probably all identify with the words of Mic Jagger when he wrote about the futility of finding satisfaction. If Mic Jagger can’t get satisfaction, with all the resources he has at his disposal, what hope is there for the rest of us. To be a Christian is to be keenly aware of that sense of lacking. We believe that there is a better life elsewhere in Heaven where there will be no more pain, sadness, conflict, gossip, no more lies, abuse, lust, or greed. Our hope is that we can seek asylum from this life so that we can live in peace and harmony with God and others. But there’s a problem. Most of the adversities that we would like to leave behind are of our own making. If we all died this very moment and expected to be let into paradise, what makes us think that we wouldn’t continue generating those same problems and if we did, then it would not be paradise at all. I think it’s perfectly reasonable, for people of many faith traditions, to concede that Heaven has an immigration policy. There are countries in the world in which corruption, crime, ignorance, oppression, and inequality are a familiar part of life and if you think that’s a narrow-minded assumption, then spend some time talking to people who visit or immigrate here. That’s a constant theme I’ve heard in those conversations. They say that things are different here. You can’t interact with law enforcement where they come from like you can here. You can’t leave your garage door open without people raiding it. Or even little things like courtesy in traffic. If you opened the borders of a place like Canada to a country with those problems, then Canada would inherit those same problems and cease to exist as it does now and we wouldn’t be offering newcomers a better life here; just the same life in a new, and probably colder, place. So what makes us think that we, as Christians, should be entitled to asylum in the better place that God has prepared without first being compatible with our destination. If we can’t be consistently perfect, then our lives in Heaven won’t be the perfect promise that we are looking for. So what is God’s immigration policy then? He can’t accept us as we are without compromising the perfection of his country. Somehow, we must become perfect. Jesus says, “be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” However it is that people become perfect in order that Heaven be perfect is a matter of debate among theologians, but the one thing that we all agree on is that is an act of God’s mercy that he does help us to become what we need to be in order to live in perfection.
So the point I’m trying to make with all of this is that it’s not unreasonable and it’s not immoral to have an immigration policy that is designed to protect the peace and prosperity of a nation so that the hard working people of good will that want to seek a better life there will actually find one when they arrive. And for Christians, as we develop our own opinions towards asylum seekers, we need to be mindful that we ourselves are asylum seekers and that our asylum depends on the mercy of someone else. A theme throughout the New Testament is that we will be treated the way we treat others. We will be shown mercy if we show mercy. Whatever we vote for and whatever we support, mercy needs to be a considerable factor but it also doesn’t need to disregard logic and common sense.