It is possible to hold several views together.
1. Britain has historically settled on a system of government with strong affection for its monarchy and today demonstrates a smooth transition. It works for them.
2. Queen Elizabeth II seemed to be a person of dignity and diligence to duty across a lifetime reign, often though silence and restraint.
3. Charles seems a charming and progressively forward-thinking guy on a range of matters, albeit not without human flaws.
4. England’s culture has offered much to the world in literature, music, architecture, academia, and industry. I relish it, particularly the music.
5. Australian society has ultimately benefited from the overwhelmingly significant British influence politically and culturally, not the least through vast immigration and the fire of war. The cultural connection with Britain is strong and affectionate. A proud sense of nationhood and connection can be a good thing, a sense of broad identity, even family, that need not tip into exclusive or triumphant Nationalism.
6. However, it is also to be recognised that historically the British Empire, like all empires, was lustful for new territory to build its wealth, and embarked on presumptive occupation of territories around the world.
7. One of these territories contained 500 nations of people made in the image of God, living in the general revelation of their creator through law and custom. The Empire did not see that the Holy Spirit was already in the land revealing God to the people through law, custom and ceremony. The same love and grace that was finally and fully revealed in Jesus Christ sustained the First People’s. But the British Empire proclaimed it ‘terra nullias’ except for a ‘few natives’ along the coast and took possession. They turned it into a colony for its unwanted prisoners.
8. Missionaries from the British Empire, and other European countries, came with good intent and also with faithful diligence, but others were too wedded to the colonial project that did not follow the rhythm of the gospel in its method, and were complicit in the injustice that resulted in many of the First Peoples being dispossessed from their land, their language, their culture and spirituality, becoming strangers in their own land.
9. As the colonies grew in remarkable prosperity, largely from the ‘fertile’ land (full of gold, ideal for sheep) and waves of multinational immigration occurred (each bringing gifts from their culture), the status and numbers of the first peoples who had sovereignty over the land diminished significantly through disease, massacre, dispossession and paternal govt policy.
10. The British Parliament and Queen Victoria passed the Act of Australia 1900 presuming to create a “Federal Commonwealth under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland” from its multiple colonies, (“possessions of the Queen”).
11. The Act, enforced as the Constitution of Australia, made no mention of the 500 nations (750,000 people) who had nurtured the land through the providence of God who, the New Testament proclaims,
“From one ancestor made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps fumble about for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us.” (Acts 17)
12. The lie in the Constitution is systemic sin, a denial of truth, and a self-serving justification for the greed of empire. The complicity of the church in this project of the British Empire is judged by the gospel itself, which declares the supreme standing of a rightful King who will enact the perfect will of God, who,
“…has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.”
13. This includes a promised reconciliation and renewal of all things in Christ, a recreated world with systems put to right. The churches role is to serve that end, to be a fellowship of reconciliation, alerting the world to the fact that Jesus is Lord, and praying (with certain hope) that his will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
14. To prayfully consider what God’s will is for Australia is a big and serious question, which cannot avoid, at the very least, rectifying the lie of the empire, that this land is “possessed” under the Crown of the British Monarch. It is based on a false premise, a myth.
15. Renewal and healing in Australia can begin to occur when this myth is rectified, when the first people’s voice is included, and reference to Legislative Power being vested in the Queen (Victoria) and her heirs and successors is removed.
16. We can today watch England put on a spectacular coronation for their new King, with its strange mixing of OT, Roman, medieval and modern ritual, bewildered how it occurs in a church but thankful the words over the altar declare Revelation 11:15, which reads, “The kingdoms of this world are to become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ.” We remember that will mean the British kingdom will ultimately be held to account for where it has fallen so very far short of the Kingdom of God and the reformed faith the King vows to defend.
17. The first act of King Charles III should be a confession before God for the past sin of his kingdom around the globe, and a humble plea for forgiveness from the first peoples of so many nations, including those in what we call Australia. Such an act, with the King of Australia bowed low before representatives of these many peoples, would follow the rhythm of the gospel and the example of Jesus where kings serve – even die – for their people, and demonstrate a greatness of service that the pomp, privilege and years of red boxes and ribbon-cutting with witty inconsequential speeches will not compare.
18. This act of servant leadership would help many nations, including his own and ours, move toward greater reconciliation and renewal in their own identity, truthfully dealing with the past. The King has previously shown himself to be quite relaxed about Australia’s conversation regarding its identity and future – more relaxed than we are, perhaps. He has the opportunity to set a tone that would help all Australians deal with its history and move toward its future.
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