Faith and Courage for the New Struggle - Address to Cape Town clergy

An address to a Clergy Conference of the Diocese of Cape Town:    

Faith and Courage for the New Struggle

The Most Revd Dr Thabo Makgoba

Archbishop of Cape Town

 

Friends, thank you for the invitation, and thank you for being here.

Some years ago I wrote a small book called Faith and Courage: Praying with Nelson Mandela. This morning I want to return to its question. What kind of courage does our country need now, and where does that courage come from?

This will be a conversation, not a lecture. I will ask you questions along the way. And I will leave you with things to do, not only things to think.

Let me begin where courage begins: on our knees.

 

Madiba wrote that he learned courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. But behind that public courage was an inner discipline. There was reflection and self-examination, and a faith first planted in a Methodist upbringing.

I was given a small window onto that inner life. In 2009, to my surprise, Graça Machel asked me to visit Madiba and to pray with him. So began a pastoral journey through his final years: in his home in Houghton, in Qunu, by telephone to the hospital in Pretoria, and in prayers that often ended our visits. Some of what passed between us remains a pastoral confidence, and it will stay that way. But I can tell you this much: the man the world saw as a giant knew his need of God.

In his final weeks, a message reached me from his bedside. It said simply: “Archbishop, hold my hand. I am weak.”

I could not speak. I went alone into the chapel at Bishopscourt and wept, and prayed, until my wife Lungi gently came to bring me upstairs.

Think about those words. The bravest man of our age, at the end, did not say “I am strong.” He said, “Hold my hand.” Courage is not the pretence that we are never weak. Courage is reaching for a hand: the hand of God, and the hands of one another. That is why it begins in prayer.

Listen to the order of God’s words to Joshua: “Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid… for the Lord thy God is with thee.” The promise of God’s presence comes first. The courage follows.

So let me ask you, quietly, for a moment: where did you last find courage you did not know you had? And what held you up?

(Pause.)

Courage is not reserved for icons. It is offered to every person who prays.

In 2015 I said that leaders who showed such courage in what I called the old struggle now punish those who speak out against their mismanagement. This morning I want to name the new struggle.

The Exodus story has two movements. The first, crossing the sea, was our old struggle, against apartheid. We crossed our Red Sea in 1994.

But the second movement is longer and harder. Forty years in the wilderness, learning how to live as a free people. And God taught them a new economy. In Exodus 16, manna fell every morning, enough for everyone. And anyone who tried to hoard it found it rotten by morning.

On 5 December 2013, when word came that Madiba had died, I took the old Prayer Book commendation for the dying and adapted it. It began, “Go forth, revolutionary and loving soul, on your journey out of this world.” And it prayed that his long walk to freedom would be completed by every South African.

That prayer is still unanswered. Madiba walked us to the edge of the promised land. The rest of the walk is ours.

That is our new struggle. It is not freedom from oppression, but freedom for dignity: bread, water, schools, honest leaders, a welcome for the stranger. It means building a society where there is enough for all, and no one hoards.

Beneath the new struggle lie three theological convictions. I ask you to hold on to them this morning.

The first is the imago Dei. “God created man in his own image… male and female created he them.” Not some of us: all of us. The image of God is not earned by citizenship, wealth, education or skin. It is given, and no one can take it away.

The second flows from the first: equal dignity. If every person bears God’s image, no one bears it more than another. Equality is not a favour the powerful grant to the weak. It is a fact God has already declared. Paul says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” Our Constitution echoes this, but the Gospel said it first.

The third is human flourishing. God’s purpose for us is not survival, but abundance. Jesus said, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” The Hebrew word is shalom: not merely the absence of conflict, but wholeness. It means bread on the table, a safe home, right relationships and a healed creation.

Image, equality, flourishing. Every arena I speak of this morning is a test of these three.

The generation of the wilderness is not a lesser generation. It is the generation that learns how to live free. That is us.

How do we do it? For more than a decade I have practised what we call courageous conversations. The model is the road to Emmaus. Notice what the risen Christ does first when he encounters Cleopas and his companion on that road: He asks a question. “What are you discussing?” He listens to their grief. Only then does he open the Scriptures. And he is finally recognised in the breaking of bread.

Our conversations follow four steps. We pray first. We make the space safe. We confess our own failures before we name anyone else’s. And we leave with shared commitments, not only speeches.

So turn to the person beside you. In one sentence: which conversation is your community avoiding?

(Pause.)

You do not need a bishop to convene a courageous conversation. You need a table, a prayer, and the courage to listen first.

Let me show you where that courage has been tested.

First, in the mining industry.

My father was a self-supporting minister who travelled as a clothing salesman through the mining towns west of Johannesburg. I grew up knowing miners’ lives.

Job 28, the Bible’s great mining poem, marvels at people who cut shafts into rock for treasure, and then asks, “But where shall wisdom be found?” You can extract wealth without wisdom. The church’s task is to ask what the wealth is for, and who pays its price.

Eighteen years into our new democracy the nation was shocked by the events at Marikana. On 16 August 2012, thirty-four mineworkers were shot dead by police. Marikana showed us, in blood, what happens when wealth is pursued without wisdom, and when those who dig it out of the earth are treated as less than fully human.

So in 2015 we invited mining CEOs, unions, communities, NGOs and government to Bishopscourt. We began with Evensong. We named mine safety, environmental damage, social cohesion and the gap between rich and poor. And we began by confessing how the churches had failed.

Afrobarometer, the continent's leading opinion survey, has found that two in three Africans trust religious leaders, while fewer than half trust political leaders. That trust is not a privilege. It is capital, and the church must spend it on the poor, and underline the fact that a miner who works in stifling heat in small spaces deep underground bears the image of God as fully as a chief executive in an air-conditioned boardroom.

Second, our schools.

Here the imago Dei meets the ground. Every child is made in the image of God. Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me.” So what are we saying to a child who must use an unsafe pit latrine at school? We are telling her, through bricks and holes in the ground, that she matters less. Sanitation is not only plumbing. It is how a society says who is fully human.

In 2013, with Equal Education, I led a delegation to Eastern Cape schools. Of 5,676 schools in that province, 3,160 used pit latrines, and 395 were built of mud. At Ngangelizwe High School, some of our delegation nearly fainted at what they saw.

That was thirteen years ago. In July this year, Parliament was still warning that pit latrines remain. One school’s new toilets were so badly built that learners went back to the pits.

This is unfinished business. And it is unfinished business we can finish.

Third, the stranger.

Israel was commanded to love the stranger as themselves, “for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Our faith begins with a refugee family: Mary, Joseph and the child Jesus, fleeing across a border into Africa. And Christ will say on the last day, “I was a stranger, and ye took me in.”

The stranger bears the same image of God, and therefore the same dignity, as any citizen. A passport does not decide who is human. I am proud of my roots in the Tlou clan of Makgoba’s Kloof. But I have always said that I am South African first, and a member of my clan second. And before both of those, I am a child of God, as is the woman from Zimbabwe selling vegetables at the taxi rank. During apartheid, Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique, Lesotho, Botswana and others sheltered our exiles, often at great cost. Ubuntu cannot stop at our borders.

This July, our Diocese of Cape Town Synod did something hard. It apologised, with deep sorrow, to brothers and sisters from across our continent who have met fear, rejection or hostility here. And it apologised for our own silence about hate speech and xenophobia.

Who in your street is a stranger? Do you know their name?

Repentance is not weakness. It is the courage that makes reconciliation possible.

Fourth, the economy.

Scripture never treats poverty as natural. Leviticus 25 builds release into the economy itself. In the Jubilee, debts are cancelled and land returns to families, so that no one is poor forever. And in Matthew 20, the workers hired at the last hour still receive a full day’s wage. God’s economy measures need, not only merit.

South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies on earth. Inequality on this scale is not only an economic problem. It is a daily denial of equal dignity. Part of the cause is ours: corruption and failed delivery. Part is global: debt that drains budgets from clinics and classrooms, profits moved offshore to escape tax, and trade rules written by the powerful.

Through Christian Aid, which I chair, we press for fair tax rules and for debt relief, so that poor countries can fund their own schools and clinics instead of paying creditors abroad.

What human beings have designed, human beings can redesign. That is the hope of Jubilee.

And fifth, right here, and beyond, Isaiah 58 says the fast God chooses is the fast which to looses the bonds of injustice, shares bread with the hungry, and brings the homeless poor into your house. Then “thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in.”

Look at the breaches in our own Western Cape. Spatial apartheid still keeps the poor far from work and opportunity. I know something of this in my own blood. My people were dispossessed of Makgoba’s Kloof, and the settlers even bent its name into “Magoebaskloof”, the name still on the map today. Land and names carry dignity. Restoring them is part of the new struggle, so when the church holds land, how we use it is a test of our faith.

In other breaches in our part of the world, children on the Cape Flats are recruited young and caught in gang crossfire. Farmworkers still wait for fair wages and secure homes. Gender-based violence and drugs tear families apart. And fire, flood and drought tell us the climate crisis is already on our doorstep.

And beyond our borders, conflict engulfs the eastern DR Congo and northern Mozambique. There, brave activists nurture Peace Huts in the Congo and Peace Clubs in Mozambique. We need to emulate them with appropriate counterparts in our own communities, just as we need to continue praying for peace in those nations as well as in Sudan, in Gaza, the Occupied West Bank and Israel, and in all the world's forgotten wars.

Which of these situations is closest to your own front door? God does not call us to fix everything. God calls each of us to repair one breach.

A church that calls the nation to justice must first practise it at home. Scripture says judgement begins with the household of God.

So our Provincial Synod this year, under the theme “A Church Held by God’s Steadfast Love and Renewed for Faithful Witness,” turned to our own house. It considered a disability champion in every diocese and guild. It considered ending the collection of church dues from those among the frail and housebound who cannot afford them.

These are small acts. But faithfulness in small things is how a church earns the right to speak about great ones.

Now, to our city. On 4 November we vote in the local government elections.

Jeremiah wrote to exiles in Babylon: “Seek the peace of the city… and pray unto the Lord for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace.” These elections will decide who gets proper taps, decent toilets and good roads.

The Church will not tell you whom to vote for. It tells you to vote, with a conscience formed by the Gospel. And it asks you to put three questions to every candidate. How will you fix water and sanitation in our poorest wards? How will you keep every resident safe, citizen and foreign national alike? And how, and when, will you report back to us?

The ballot is not the end of your citizenship. It is the beginning of your accountability.

Let me now speak personally.

This year I held my last Provincial Synod as Archbishop. On 6 September next year, in Cape Town, I will lay down my crozier and pastoral staff. I lay down the office. I do not lay down the call. And I do not lay down hope.

Paul, near the end of his ministry, wrote, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.” A leader’s task is not to finish the race for everyone. It is to pass the baton on their successor well.

So let me name a hope for each year ahead. May 2026 be the year we have been renewed for faithful witness. In 2027, may we hand on well, with a Lent of hope and a new Archbishop chosen in prayer. In 2028, may every parish be rooted as a safe and inclusive church. In 2029, may a renewed vision be owned by every diocese in our Province of Southern Africa. In 2030, may care for creation be measured and pursued instead of just being an issue identified for resolution some time in the future. And by 2031, may young people be leading, and may no child in our region use a pit latrine. That is what flourishing looks like.

When Lungi and I stood at Madiba’s coffin at the Union Buildings in 2013, we prayed, “May your soul rest in peace and rise in glory.” He had run his leg of the race. He handed the baton to us.

A transition is not a vacuum. It is a relay, and the baton has now passed into your hands too.

When Moses handed leadership to Joshua, he said before all Israel, “Be strong and of a good courage… the Lord, he it is that doth go before thee.” They are the same words we began with this morning. Courage is handed on with the office.

So what do I hope for in the next Archbishop? I will name no one. But I pray for a pastor who prays before speaking, and a prophet who listens before judging. I pray for a bridge across our nations, languages and convictions, and a guardian of a safe and inclusive church.

Because the mission is God’s, not the Archbishop’s. Pray for the electoral process, and for the one God is already preparing.

Archbishops come and go. The mission of God continues, and it continues through you.

This coming Lent, our whole Province will reflect on hope. Paul prays, “Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing.” Hope is not optimism. It is trust that God keeps promises.

And because the Church is one body with many members, there is a hope and a part for each of us to play. For clergy, it is to be rested, faithful shepherds who listen first. For laity, it is to own the mission, not watch it from the outside. For our guilds, it is to care for the elderly, for survivors and for creation. For young people, it is to lead now, not later. For children, safe schools and safe churches. And the part to play for each of our our partners, including those of every faith, it to work for the common good.

Find yourself in that list. What is your hope, and what is your part?

I leave three questions on the screen for you to carry home. Which conversation is my community avoiding? Whose dignity is denied within walking distance of me? What fear must I pray through to act?

Take them to your parish council, your small group, your family table.

And because faith without works is dead, here are five courageous acts for the weeks before Christmas. Pray daily for your municipality and its councillors by name. Vote on 4 November, and bring a neighbour with you. Visit a local school and ask about its water and toilets. Learn the name of a neighbour from another country. And convene one courageous conversation in your parish.

None of these needs permission. All of them need courage. Each of them is within your reach this week.

Let us pray.

(Pause.)

God of the Exodus and the empty tomb, who made every person in your own image, you walked with Madiba through long years of waiting. Walk with us now. Where we are weak, hold our hand; where we are afraid, give us courage; where we are silent, give us voice; where we are divided, make us one. Bless the one you are calling to lead this Province next. Make us repairers of the breach, until all your children flourish, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Thank you.