"A space that speaks of our shared worship, shared dreams..." - St Paul's Chapel, New York City

A sermon preached on the Fifth Sunday of Easter at St. Paul's Chapel in the Parish of Trinity Church Wall Street, New York:

Acts 11:1-18; Psalm 148:1-3, 7, 9-11, 13; Revelation 21:1-6; John 13:31-35

We hear these incredible words of possibility in our foundational texts today in a wonderful space, in a chapel and a parish that have towered over the city’s and the nation's history, whose graveyards hold the bones and the memories of some of its founding parents; a parish located in an area that once boasted a barrier, usually described as a wall, to keep out those seen as “the other”; a parish that witnessed the struggle to establish your democracy; and a chapel in which your forebears and your founding president thanked God for his inauguration. [Continues below the video...]




And of course more recently the inner sanctuaries of the churches of this parish provided refuge and ministry during and after that fateful day when the Twin Towers were attacked and then collapsed, a day forever etched in our memories as evil was let loose. Today, at a time when there seems to be a renewed threat of war involving this nation, I count it a particular privilege to be preaching here in St. Paul's, which in the difficult months and years after nine-eleven represented to the world the best of American values – values of hope and healing as you brought to your city and nation a ministry of pastoral care, of reconciliation and of peace.

Speaking of your contributions to the nation and the world, I cannot continue without referring to what you have meant to us in the church in Southern Africa, and indeed across the whole continent of Africa. We too were colonised by the Dutch, and people of my heritage were kept out of the suburb where I now live by a barrier – in our case an impenetrable hedge – by the Dutch. In our case too, the church has played a part in bringing about democracy, and you made a direct contribution to the inauguration of our own founding president, Nelson Mandela, by responding 30 years ago to the pleas of Archbishop Desmond Tutu to divest from companies which did business with apartheid South Africa. Responding to our plea for help probably ran counter to the instincts of Wall Street financiers, but you put your relationship with us, your partners, first and for that we are deeply grateful. I see in the congregation an honorary canon of our Province, Canon Jamie Callaway, and acknowledge the role he played in supporting us.

It is with pride and pleasure that I can report to you that the young democracy you helped us establish is  flourishing. It is true that until 15 months ago, we had a president whose influence badly corrupted the executive branch of our government, and that our legislature failed to hold him to account. But the combined power of the media, civil society and the judiciary forced his party to remove him from office before the end of his term, and our new president has begun to clean up our government. So we have faced huge challenges in recent years.

Beyond your contribution to our liberation, you have enabled and continue to enable important ministry in dioceses of the church in Southern Africa, and in other Anglican provinces in Africa. As the longest-serving Primate on the continent, I make bold to speak on behalf of all of us, and to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for all you have enabled the church in Africa to be and to do. By sharing your resources, you demonstrate that you are following Jesus' new commandment.

Returning to the witness of this chapel and of Trinity –   through the unfolding of the layers of history, amidst the contestation of ideologies and memories of walls, this place has continue to maintain its rhythm of prayer, to contextualise the sense of the Holy, to explore God's words and to discern its echo in the community of lower Manhattan. Above all you hold out, day in and day out, the promise of God which we pondered today: “See, I am making all things new!” “To the thirsty I will give water…” and “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

What an awesome sacred space! I feel that deep emotion that Jacob felt when he sensed that despite the limitations of his own history, he had a dream of a God who promised a new beginning, crying out: “Surely the presence of God is in this place, it is none other than the house of God, this is the gate of heaven!” It is for that reason, as well as the shared elements of our histories and of your sharing in love that I feel at home here today, in this space that speaks of our shared worship, shared dreams and a shared commitment to the work of making all things new.

The implications of our faith are that you do not need to engage the secrets of heaven, or fathom out deep theological propositions, or speculate endlessly on eschatological nuances. That won't help us see and understand God. It is much easier than that: experiencing God, to the degree that we humans can do so, is quite simply done in acts of love, even just in random deeds of kindness.

You carry in your parish's name a commitment to live out practically and contextually our Christian understanding of the Trinity. At the heart of that understanding is the abiding truth about three persons in every way equal. It is the metaphor that the Gospel writers seek to express in different ways, but always by returning to a fundamental notion of “self-gift”. As that great African saint, Augustine, argued time and again, God loves because that is the divine nature, not because creation deserves it. In parable after parable, statement after statement, the “meaning of God” is revealed as the “One who is perfectly self-giving”. Thus the Trinity is also the story of self-giving in love and of belonging in love. We become more fully what we are meant to become by entering into loving and life-giving relationships. In Africa we express this in what we call ubuntu, or in the languages to which I am closest, botho. We hear this at the very heart of the Gospel today.

The Lutheran theologian, Samuel Torvend, asks the question that we who gather for prayer must ask. He asks: “Who is hungry at the feast?” and then answers it for himself. “To be honest,” he says, “I think I am. I yearn for, I am hungry for the word, the image, the lyric and the prayer that will invite many others and me to redress the terrible injustices, deprivations and imbalances that surround us.” “Who is still hungry at the feast?” he asks again, and answers for himself: “The many who will never hear this sermon or read this text because they must work two or three jobs each day, six days a week in order to feed their children in a society that rewards the wealthy and stigmatises the working poor.” Who is still hungry at the feast? “The people of this world deprived of food, capital employment and land.”

One could and should add to that litany the victims of domestic violence, the women and children who suffer abuse, refugees from conflict in places such as Bangladesh, and – as we have seen in our own sub-continent of Southern Africa in recent months – those who are refugees as a result of the devastating effects of climate change.

In the last few years, the people of the three dioceses of our Province which lie in neighbouring Mozambique have been hit alternately by drought and by flood. Twice during April, I had to pay emergency visits to two of the dioceses and witnessed  the aftermath of Cyclone Idai. Homes, churches and schools in settlements and towns across the countryside were destroyed, people's crops were swept away and families had to climb trees to escape the water and wait for helicopters to rescue them. Hundreds died, many of them people who survived the hurricane but not the wait for rescue. Swathes of rural countryside were turned into vast lakes, and scattered rural villages have been replaced by concentrated tent townships to which people have been relocated. These agrarian communities are at risk of losing their identity and their way of life. Those who are worst affected by climate change are not the citizens of the materially wealthy countries who contribute most to it; no, it is those who are already poor and vulnerable.

Wherever we are in the world, in our churches every Sunday, let us remember that our worship is not merely an act of forgiveness, a spiritual sacrifice, a moment of thanksgiving, an intimate union with Christ, but that it is  an ethical practice that expands outward into the world, offering life in the midst of diminishment and death. St. Theresa of Avila captured this call to love, to be about the business of making all things new and providing fresh water, when she wrote: “Christ has no body but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassionately on the world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, the feet, yours are the eyes. You are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.” That’s the challenge of love.

The key moment in the post-Resurrection story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus came when, after recognising the Lord, they were faced with the choices that we all face. They could have sat back, finished their meal and congratulated themselves on the special epiphany they had received from the Lord. They could have created a safe, comfortable, spiritually warm place of personal intimacy and memory. Or they could have taken fright. After all, the Jesus whom they had just encountered was a wanted man in Jerusalem. It was a very dangerous moment and they might have decided to run away.

But no; instead they got up straight away and returned to Jerusalem, to the place where their dreams had been shattered, where hope was in short supply, and where their friends were locked in the Upper Room, imprisoned by fear. It was to Jerusalem they returned with their word of hope, with their testimony of new possibilities, with their vision raised beyond the exigencies of the moment, to proclaim that something new is possible. They did not have a blueprint and could not provide firm assurances but they could keep the good news alive.

Each of us can do that much. We do not know precisely who all those who are hungry at the feast are, and we certainly cannot do everything. Maybe like those disciples in Emmaus, all we can really do after every service of worship is go back into the city and look upon it and our fellow human beings with new eyes, so that our perceptions of generosity, humanity, justice and mercy become clearer and freer. For when that transpires, slowly will we become known by our love for one another.

God loves you and so do I. God bless each one of you. God bless America, and God bless Africa.

Amen.

An award for Bishop John Osmers; Sermon at Cathedral of the Holy Cross

Sunday was the day for parish visitations at ACC-16, and I preached at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Lusaka. We had two choirs—a formal and a traditional—and a band, and the service went well. The main body of my sermon follows below.

With Bishop John Osmers.

We also decorated the Right Revd John Osmers, the retired Bishop of Eastern Zambia, with ACSA's Archbishop's Award for Peace with Justice. Before he became a bishop, he served as a chaplain to South African exiles, first in Lesotho, then in Botswana and finally in Zambia, losing his hand as a consequence of receiving a parcel bomb from an apartheid death squad. In his reply, he moved people to tears as he explained how he was bombed. At the bring-and-share after the service he shared how the cadres queued to donate blood for him and how this saved his life. He also recalled funerals which he conducted for liberation leaders at St. Peter's in Lusaka, and how in spite of claiming to be communist most came to church and quoted the Bible.

Later we went to a local market, where I enjoyed wandering about and being hustled by vendors. To a bishop who told one vendor, “No thank you, I am just looking,” she replied, “Come in then, because looking is free.” Last night was our deadline in the resolutions committee for drawing up resolutions to be considered today.

The excerpt from my sermon:

John (John 10:22-30) states a most significant detail. He says that this took place on “the Feast of the Dedication,” the remembrance of that heroic event after the humiliating, oppressive reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, the Syrian ruler who violently suppressed anything Jewish, who destroyed holy sites, banned religious expressions, undermined their identity, and forbade any sign of their ancient culture and above all profaned the Temple, in a horrific rule of tyranny and brutality. At the height of this repression in 170 BC, 80,000 Jews were killed and as many sold into slavery, and 1,800 talents were stolen/looted from the Temple Treasury (a talent is worth about R4000). They were years of bitter and unrelenting oppression.

In time, as with any oppressed people throughout history, the oppressed slowly found their voice, recovered their hope and claimed their dignity despite the tyranny of the times. They began a slow but courageous, resilient resistance that, action by action, eventually overturned their oppression. The high point of their liberation was the restoration of the Temple and the re-dedication of the Altar. This event is what is solemnly remembered on this feast. The Hebrew people knew, as we in South Africa knew, that no matter how demonic the oppression, no people can be suppressed forever. As the old slogan of our anti-apartheid struggle said so powerfully: “Freedom or death, victory is certain!”

This feast was also known as the “Festival of Light.” The liberated people kept a light burning, remembering and celebrating that the light of freedom had come back to Israel. It also recalled the ancient legend that when the seven-branched candlestick was to be re-lit in the Temple, only one cruse of unpolluted oil could be found, yet miraculously there was enough in that cruse to light all the candles; a sign that God's faithfulness was present amidst the celebration of their liberation, in a sense validating the liberatory project.

For me to hold all of this in my heart in this city of Lusaka is doubly poignant. During the armed struggle against apartheid Lusaka was the “head office” of hope for liberation for most South Africans. When we were students, any message from Lusaka came with the feeling that the sunspot of apartheid would disappear. This hope, excitement and dream is fading away now and my earnest prayer is this that this is temporary; that we will once again rise above this period in our country, and rekindle hope and energy for a future in which we all share and our dignity is restored.

Our own struggle was nurtured over many decades in this city. The dream of freedom, the hope that one day South Africa would be a home to all her children, the belief that no people could be oppressed forever and that one day justice would prevail all found a home in this city. This city also paid a heavy price for holding this dream in trust for the people of South Africa. It was the place, if not the Festival of Light, it was the place that reminded us that God was with those who struggled. Just as every Jewish home placed a light in the window of their homes as a sign of hope, this city, symbolically, held the light of hope to those in South Africa at a time when hope was very fragile.

And so it is from this city on this Sunday morning that we too must hold out the candle of hope to those on our continent who continue to suffer, who are mired in poverty, whose democracies are short-changed, those who live under the yoke of marginalisation and in countries whose greedy rulers have robbed them of a decent life. The message is abundantly clear: God never abandons God's people, God is always amongst those who struggle to free people from bondage, encouraging them and strengthening them and making every small or big action a sign of hope that the future will be different. Indeed John adds another detail. He says that “it was winter.” For many on this continent it is winter, not in the meteorological sense but in the political and economic sense.

The outlook is bleak, growth is near zero and the cold of political exclusion freezes the spirit in dehumanising ways. It is incumbent on us to be the Lusakas, the lights for those who are exposed to life’s winters: to shine for them and hold a candle in the window to encourage them. “It is indeed better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” Ours is always a ministry of encouragement.

Let me briefly share my journey to Mtendere this week. There I saw a different Lusaka from the one I am staying in, one no different to the squalor of Alexandra township, Johannesburg, where I grew up. The structural inequality contradicts the meaning of “Mtendere” – the conditions there make for anything but peace. Just as Mark's Gospel describes “crossing to the other side”, let us cross over to Mtendere, plead for its light and hold a bridge for them to cross over, as you did for South Africa, Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia.

As I wrote in my blog this week, the oneness of Communion is a gift for all Christians and all beyond the Christian world. We need more than “Anglicanism” and “Instruments of Communion”, we need faith in the God who liberates and who sends us back to Mtendere to help it “cross over” from squalor to the abundant life promised to us all. Mtendere reminded me that the issues around us are complex and the crisis we face is about inequality of opportunity, access and justice. These are not only justice issues but moral and spiritual matters that we as disciples of Christ need to urgently attend to if we are to flourish together.

Paul in the readings from Acts underlines a testimony of encouragement. We see that despite Paul’s thorn in the side, despite his afflictions, he presses on. He will not allow the dream of God to be deflected and he uses every opportunity to encourage those who are listening to him. Indeed as a personal encouragement, Paul reminds us that he did not allow any personal negativities, any personal shortcomings or even any health challenges to stand in the way of bringing about the Kingdom.

A close reading of the text shows that he is encouraging people to hold onto eternal life, not in the sense of life that knows no end, but in the sense that it is an invitation to live in the never-ending, always unfolding purposes of God. It is an invitation to see beyond the limits of the here and now, beyond life’s ups and downs and hold on to the bigger picture, of growing into God's plan for fully human lives for all of us. Irenaeus once said that “the glory of God is a person fully human, fully alive!” In the light of that, it always worth remembering that our daily acts of justice, our loving attitudes, our right relationships are in themselves instalments in the unfolding of a better tomorrow.

Paul’s second encouragement is the acknowledgement that Christ is the culminating point of history and therefore, unlike the stoics of old, we live with the certainty that history is going somewhere. Contemporary cynics hold that history is nothing more than an inventory of human sin and failure. But in Paul’s insight, history moves towards God's appointed end and that end is being incorporated into and extending loving relationships. We are therefore optimistic about our history and every time we do not, in the face of adversity, fail or falter, weaken or tire we are involved in moving history towards God’s appointed end. William Jennings Bryan once said: “Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.” There is a similar sense running through Paul's encouragement.

Finally Paul encourages us not to grow weary in doing what is right and in practising justice and in encouraging those bowed down, because as he says, even when human folly and selfishness forces people to make absurd decisions and plunge history into abysmal lows, God will not be defeated. Paul sees the resurrection as the surest proof of God's determination to “love us back into life.” St. Augustine put it well: “What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has the eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of people. That is what love looks like.”

This is our roadmap for making love real. Real love is surely the candle which holds out to others, it is the content of the hope that we keep alive for those who feel they dare not hope. Lusaka has fulfilled this prophetic role at least once in the history of this continent. Now it is our task to take the candles of our hope, our courage, our commitment to be intolerant of political corruption and wrongdoing, the candles of encouragement, from Lusaka to the towns and the villages where each of us lives and to hold them before the poor but also before the powerful, to ensure that in the end history is indeed His story!

God bless you.