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.

To the Laos – The Church Reclaims Her Prophetic Vocation – April 2014

Dear People of God

Firstly, a Happy Easter to you all. Christ is Risen!

Since Holy Saturday, when religious leaders carried out a Walk of Witness from District Six to Parliament to demand transparent governance and accountability, I have been reflecting on what it is to be witnesses to God’s love in the world. At a meeting after Easter of the Central Committee of the SA Council of Churches, it became clear that I am not alone. I am grateful that the Church at large is reclaiming her prophetic vocation, committed like Christ to demand justice. It will not be easy but in Christ we trust and have our confidence and assurance.

In preparation for preaching on South Africa’s Freedom Day on April 27, I sent out an appeal through the Bishops for you to share with me what your dreams for South Africa were 20 years ago, and what they are now. Your thoughtful insights ran to pages and pages. Thank you all for holding my hand and equipping me to preach a homily at inter-religious “Jazz Vespers” at St George’s Cathedral in place of Evening Prayer on April 27. I offer you the text as preached:

Isaiah 43:8-13

Bring forth the people who are blind, yet have eyes,
who are deaf, yet have ears!
Let all the nations gather together,
and let the peoples assemble.
Who among them declared this,
and foretold to us the former things?
Let them bring their witnesses to justify them,
and let them hear and say, “It is true.”
You are my witnesses, says the Lord,
and my servant whom I have chosen,
so that you may know and believe me
and understand that I am he.
Before me no god was formed,
nor shall there be any after me.
I, I am the Lord,
and besides me there is no savior.
I declared and saved and proclaimed,
when there was no strange god among you;
and you are my witnesses, says the Lord.
I am God, and also henceforth I am He;
there is no one who can deliver from my hand;
I work and who can hinder it?

Thank you all for attending this service. Let me first start by thanking the Dean and his team for organising this service and for all the artists who are present here.

Tonight, we pause and reflect as we celebrate 20 years of democracy in South Africa. What is there to celebrate, some may ask? Celebrations are an opportunity to recall, to reflect and to recommit. Indeed, starting from the last point, they are for us, in this year particularly, an opportunity to recommit to the ideals and values for which so many fought and died, in order for us to enjoy and live in a democracy.

As an archbishop, I always have to drink from my own well, starting from scripture, before I reason and then move on to share and bring my and our experiences before God in prayer. Today’s text, Isaiah 43:8-13, a text that sustained me and many of us in apartheid times, reminds us of a God who interferes in the politics of His people. He meddles, because even “politics” is but an aspect of His created order. He intervenes and interferes in the plight of His people in exile. Those who have been displaced before, or have been in exile in its broadest sense, know the feelings of alienation that exile brings.

God says, I have noted and am pained by the brutality and fierceness of the Babylonians' repression and treatment of you, my people. I have heard your cry and lamentations. In Isaiah 43, 1 and 4, he says, Do not fear, I have redeemed you. I have called you by name, you are mine, and precious in my sight. You are honoured and I love you. God says, your dignity, freedom and destiny are certain, they are non-negotiable. No other gods will be allowed to oppress you and take you back into captivity. In verse 10, God charges us with the responsibility of acting in ways that demonstrate that “You are my witnesses... and my servant whom I have chosen". Do not succumb to the Babylonian state machinery, that blinds you even when you have eyes and makes you deaf even if you have ears to hear.

What are the implications of this clear message of restoration and liberation, and of our vocation to be God’s witnesses in the world? What are they for us here in the Western Cape and in South Africa, particularly as we celebrate 20 years of emancipation from apartheid and the dawn of our freedom?

At this critical point, post “Babylonia”, it is easy to forget the exile experience. It is easy to be seduced by power and wealth as well as status and forget God and the poorest of the poor. It is easy to turn a blind eye even if we have eyes to see, and it is easy to say “It is our turn to eat,” and focus on ourselves. It is equally easy to discount the sacrifices of many and to want to rush to what we call “normality”. It is easy also to adopt a "get on with it" mentality, for after all, some would say, "We are born-frees and do not want to be dragged down into our parents' issues."

Today, we pause. We avoid shallow analysis or politicisation of our pain for partisan gains. We pause and go down deep, where there is still fear, anger and possibly hate, yet where there is also longing, hope and a desperate need to let go of the past. We pause and reflect, as part of our celebration.

Going back to where I started: What is it about South Africa’s 20 years of democracy that demands celebration? What is it about marking these 20 years that demands lamentation, liberation and restoration?

There is much to celebrate. There is indeed a good story to tell. Even when we were at the point of a knife 20 years ago, it did not pierce our souls. It cut us, yes, and we still need to heal this cut, but it is possible to do so.

Today we can celebrate above all our Constitution, which guarantees us nearly everything else we laud as achievements: to name just a few, the right of black people to vote; equal rights for all individuals, black or white; the provision of housing, sanitation, water and electricity; and the independent institutions set up to guard democracy and promote good governance under Chapter Nine of the Constitution – the Office of the Public Protector, the Auditor-General and the Human Rights Commission.

As one who grew up in places such as Alexandra Township in Johannesburg and Pimville in Soweto, and as one who has seen both rural and urban deprivation where I have worked in Queenstown, in Grahamstown and now in Cape Town, I acknowledge the progress we have seen. We have hundreds and thousands of new houses and many new clinics. I know some of our infrastructural development is cosmetic, and also that unscrupulous contractors sometimes build houses that fall down, but we really showed the world what we are capable of when we hosted the 2010 World Cup: the new stadiums, the upgraded airports and the improved roads.

Our considerable achievements, however, have to be seen against the backdrop of shocking levels of inequality in our society. There are huge differences between the wealthy parts of our cities and nearly everywhere else in our land. We live with massive disparities of income, largely based on race but increasingly based on whether you have made it into the middle class. Black economic empowerment in many instances is contributing to inequality rather than closing the gap between rich and poor.

The result is that your opportunities in life still often depend on who your parents are and whether they are privileged or not. If you are poor, the chances are that you will struggle to escape the kind of lives your parents lived. But the rich, whether black or white, will hand on to their children a legacy of privilege. Families who have resources will continue to have resources, those who have benefitted from patronage will pass down the benefits to their children, and the unequal distribution of power will still plague our economic and national life.

Despite experiencing after 1994 the longest sustained period of economic growth since World War II, we have not spread the results of the growth to the poor. Spatial apartheid still persists in our society. Whether you have adequate water and sanitation depends on your class and socio–economic status. A year ago, I joined a group of eminent South Africans to visit schools in the Eastern Cape and was shocked to find that, 19 years after the current governing party took responsibility for education, classes were still held in mud-brick schools with poor sanitation. The recent Carnegie Three report on poverty, and the multiple index poverty scale, evoke feelings of deep distress at the persistence of a sea of debilitating poverty around islands of the excessive wealth enjoyed by a tiny minority.

The poorest of the poor are losing hope of ever sharing in the dividends of democracy, and some are being brutally killed by the state when demanding basic services which the privileged take for granted. I am still struggling to make sense of how such a horrendous massacre as Marikana happened. Those killings are still a running sore in our national life, a wound in the side of democracy which reflects human lives being sacrificed for money.

This week I sent out a message to all the bishops of our Province and their dioceses. I asked them two questions: Firstly, What was your dream for South Africa 20 years ago? And secondly, What is your dream for South Africa for the next 20 years?

Paraphrasing some of their answers, they told me they dreamed of a South Africa where justice will not be determined by wealth and power; for God to raise up women and men of stature to lead our nation past where inequalities and injustices still prevail; of a South Africa where people no longer have to live in squalour and overcrowded shacks; where churches play a more active role and are more visible in moral regeneration; where we move beyond racial divisions and build one united nation; where we become the hands and feet of God to eradicate hunger, poverty, corruption and crime.

Where, then, do we go from here?

I have been thinking recently that one of our problems is that for the past 20 years we have had a ready set of answers to what we believed 20 years ago were the right questions to ask about our society. But I think the problem is actually not the answers, it is the questions.

Our questions are outdated, and therefore the answers are outdated. We need to be looking for new answers to new questions. Let me start by suggesting a few, starting with some broad questions and then narrowing them down:

Firstly, why has democracy brought with it such inequality? Why has the economic system that has generated so much growth been accompanied by so much poverty, and such a huge social distance between our leaders and their constituencies? Can we really be said to be enjoying the fruits of democracy? And is our current economic system worth holding onto if this is its fruit?

Another set of questions concerns our values. What are the values reflected in our Constitution? What are the values that Madiba's generation bequeathed to us? How can they be given expression in our current context?

Furthermore, how do we move away from a daily existence in which we suffer from a lack of transparency, not only in the Nkandla debacle but in other tiers of our government? Shouldn't we now be looking at all the Public Protector's past reports from before Nkandla and holding all those implicated to account? How do we nurture and rekindle a renaissance of trust and responsibility and be God’s witnesses as today’s scripture demands?

I want to end with two appeals, firstly one to young people:

You know that we hold this world and country in trust for you. Please engage with the way society and government is run, for your and your children's sakes. Be engaged: report corruption, care for the environment and hold yourselves and us accountable for the destiny of this country and your destinies.

Lastly, I want to go back to where I started and appeal to all of you:

South Africa is God's miracle. Make it work for God’s sake. Go and vote on May the 7th. As I said at the Easter vigil, too many people have suffered and died for us to stay away out of apathy. And while nothing stops you from spoiling your ballot paper in protest, you shouldn't have to: there will be 29 parties from which to choose on the national ballot. Examine the policies of the parties and the behaviour of their leaders and vote your conscience; make a choice of the one that best represents your values.

Fear not, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name.

YOU ARE MINE, declares the LORD.

Happy Freedom Day!

May the risen Christ be with you all. To South Africans, happy voting!

God bless you,

+Thabo