The Song of the Emu
by Cavan Brown
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 62
Spring/Summer 1998/1999

Part 3

There is much in creation that is orderly and consistent. The sun rises in order, the moon goes about its business with unquestioned regularity. The stars are fixed for people to find direction and, for most people, that is the way we like life. But in creation, and particular in Australian creation, God has chosen to create outside the world of the human predictability and order. We are suddenly confronted with odd bods-a platypus, an echidna and an emu with an odd feather.
In that odd feather lies a Song.

It is a Song to be sung when an inconsistency arises-a family tragedy, the birth of a Down's syndrome child, a mentally ill person, a teenager from a 'good' home that goes wild-and the order of the godly life seems threatened. On the wider scale, it may be a famine, an earthquake, a civil war. Like Job, we are forced to probe the ways of God, ask questions, say, like Job, "If only he would speak to me."

Finally, God did speak to Job and in that divine encounter, Job moved into a mature faith through dealing with the unusual. Job's friends did not seek God. They had their world sorted out and they were not prepared to contemplate the possibility that life may cave in on them one day. It was too painful-too disturbing to their consistent, orthodox, nine-to-five, programmed, set-in-concrete theology. From beginning to end they come nowhere near Job's desire to meet God and sort out the unusual and so they lived through the whole experience retaining their simplistic human perspective of consistency: 'all misfortune is caused by sin and as long as we don't sin we will be all right'.

The inconsistencies that entered into the life of Job brought him to ask the right questions and to see eventually the clearest vision of God in the Old Testament. In the Song of the Emu, God says to Job that it is extremely dangerous for us to make predictions about God's world by putting everything into neat categories were birds fly and mother's mother and good people live happily ever after. God has created the different, the odd, the unusual alongside the ordinary. Every evil ruler in history wants to get rid of the unusual and make a world were everything fits into a narrow pattern. Conversely, where Christianity is healthy, the unusual is accepted and is given a place of honour.

Thinking about the Song of the Emu, I think about Eric, an 'intellectually handicapped' member of my church community. It took some time for people to accept Eric but now he is highly valued. In his simplicity, Eric can say things that others cannot. He can ask someone "Have you got Jesus" and no one is offended.

He is different yet, if our church had a coat-of-arms, he would be on it somewhere. I knew that his differences, his odd feathers, had been fully accepted when someone asked, "Should we ask God to heal Eric?" Another person in the church thought about the question for a while and then asked, "What's wrong with him?"

To: Perspectives Issue 62

Cavan Brown Cavan Brown is the minister of Geraldton Baptist Church, WA, and is the author of Pilgrim Through Barren Land, Albatross, 1991, and the forthcoming The Blackfellas' Friend: a life of John Gribble (Access Press, 1999).