SOUL SURMISING PART 1 - SIN'S HARVEST GROUND

Fri 19th Sep 2008

Stocki surmises the reality that sin has more potential to demonically bloom around injustice and poverty...

Just as the seeds of truth have a different potential depending on the ground on which it falls from the sower's throw, as Jesus told in the parable, so sin will thrive or be curtailed depending on the soil we allow it. I was surmising this thought as I sat chatting with my friend Sandi in a Belfast cafe. Sandi is from The Cape Flats and grew up in the townships around Khayalitsha. As we talked about how critically important education is on townships, to give young people a chance of not being drawn into crime, it dawned on me that praying we are not led into temptation and delivered from evil has pragmatic implications we must pay more attention to. Our evangelical theology of sin that begins with the Fall of man and understands that sin is deep within us from the point of conception has perhaps caused us to ignore other truths about sin that we need to strategise against. Perhaps our battle against Karl Marx's flawed notion that sin could be healed by a change of environment has caused us to dismiss the need to effect environment in order to not cure sin but to curtail its full potential.

To show what I mean let me invite you into Sandi's township wisdom that I so often find invaluable in my own relationship with the Cape Flats. Sandi was talking very openly about his own peers, as he was growing up, and how good they were as people but how they got drawn into crime, sometimes the most violent kind, because of the circumstances they were in. Living on townships with the daily implications of the injustice of poverty can literally give some people no option. Now if you are immediately repelled by such a thought it is likely that you have not lived or spent time in places of such poverty and often the hopelessness that goes with it. African townships are not a level playing field with the wealthy west; even an education on a township can lead you nowhere as the money for further education is not available. When you get to 18 and there is no work or anywhere to go then crime seems to be the temptation to acquire what they need or desire? Poverty and injustice harvests crime.

Thus the social justice mandate of the prophets, Jesus and the early Church are about more than helping people. Changing people's circumstances eyeballs sin's demonic force and allows the kind of social conditions for redemption to begin to bring the Kingdom of God creeping in. And so what Sandi and I were really talking about; dreams of a day when those young people on the Cape Flats might have options, might have an environment where they can be torn away from the temptation of crime and delivered from the evil that is a daily reality. Our prayer would be that as well as preaching the need for individuals to repent from their sin that the Church would be a revolutionary movement to create the environment to give the redeemed tangible opportunities to be delivered.