WNC Programs: Archbishop Demsond M. Tutu Address

Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu Address
Washington National Cathedral
November 13, 2007

Preamble

It is a great privilege to have been asked to deliver this public lecture to mark the Centennial Anniversary of this great Cathedral Church. Heartiest congratulations to all on attaining such a significant milestone in the history of the Mother Church of the Episcopal Church in these parts. May I also add my deep appreciation at being awarded the first Cathedral Prize for Advancement in Religious Understanding and Action. I am truly humbled by this distinction which I received representatively because those you would honour are the millions of my compatriots who astounded the world with their magnanimity and generosity of spirit. Those others who should by rights be receiving plaudits are the many in the liberation movements of our anti-apartheid struggle and members of civil society who mooted a truth and reconciliation commission type of process for dealing with all that had to be dealt with in the post-apartheid period. I was not involved in all of that, others must get the credit. Do not go away with the notion that I am being modest. I am not conventionally modest. I like telling this story: A few years ago my wife and I visited West Point Military Academy. The cadets presented me with a cap to commemorate the visit. When I tried it on it did not fit me. A nice wife would have said, “The cap is too small.” But Leah, who presumably must know said, “His head is too big.”

The Heart of the Christian Gospel

If we were to ask most people, “What is the heart of the Christian Gospel?” I expect that the vast majority would say, “Love” and nobody would want to gainsay that. And yet we could say also quite accurately that because of the existence of sin and the alienation it caused that the heart of the Christian Gospel is reconciliation, at-one-ment.

God’s Liberation—The Divine Intention

During some of the darkest days of our anti-apartheid struggle in the late 1970's I was General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches. The apartheid regime regarded us as an annoying thorn in its flesh. As part of its machinations against the Council it appointed a judicial commission, the Eloff Commission named after its Chairperson Judge Eloff. I addressed the Commission in a theological presentation, providing the raison d’être of the Council and I gave it the title The Divine Intention in which I sought to demonstrate that the Council’s work was to co-operate with God to help accomplish God’s objective which was fundamentally to recover “Paradise Lost”. Before I proceed may I add an important parenthesis: It was often quite exhilarating to be involved as we were in the struggle. A large part of our exhilaration stemmed from the fact that we belonged to the Church catholic spread over the face of the earth. We had sisters and brothers most of whom we would not meet this side of the grave, who upheld us with their love and fervent prayers. I recall on one of those fraught days getting a letter from the pastor of a Lutheran Church in Alaska who enclosed the bulletin of his church and they had a list of the names of the staff of the Council of Churches. We were being prayed for by name in Alaska! What chance did the South African Government stand?

Bishop John Walker of blessed memory decided that we would have the support of his diocese and so when I was Bishop of Johannesburg he forged our formal link relationship between our two dioceses and when I became Archbishop of Cape Town the link went to Cape Town too. Then it became tripartite with Honduras as the third partner. Many demonstrated on our behalf, others were arrested on our behalf for demonstrating at the South African Embassy here in Washington. Many more boycotted South African goods and worked for divestment. We owe so much to you—we would not have won our victory against injustice and oppression without you. Thank you. Had the struggle been too protracted it might have become more violent and it would have been more difficult to walk the path of forgiveness and reconciliation. You made it more possible. That’s quite a parenthesis but a very important one.

What was this divine intention? In the first book of the Bible we have some charming stories about God, about human beings and the rest of God’s creation. They are wonderfully imaginative and poetic but convey profound spiritual truths about us, God and the rest of creation. These stories assert that you and I, all of us whatever our station in life, regardless of wealth, education and all that might serve to split us into different camps, all of us, each one of us is made in the image of God. We each have a worth that is intrinsic, coming as it were with the package; our worth is infinite and does not depend on biological and other attributes. We are like God, meant to imitate God. A little more about this later.

We are like God in our creativity, we are like God in our freedom, so we are thus moral agents, free to choose good or evil and God has such a profound reverence for this freedom that God had much rather we went to hell than compel us to go to heaven. That in part answers those cries of anguish after some catastrophe, like the Holocaust, or the Rwandan genocide, or Bosnian ethnic cleansing, “Why does God not stop it?”

Those stories of the beginning times speak especially of a primordial, pristine harmony. Adam lived happily with the animals, the frisky lambs gamboled with the lion. There was no blood shed, not even for religious sacrifice for all were vegetarian. Adam and Eve enjoyed an attractive innocence expressed in their nudity and God was one not too remote who came for an afternoon stroll with God’s creatures. We were meant for togetherness, for harmony, for family.

And then tragedy struck. Sin erupted and shattered the primeval harmony. Where there was love, now there was hate, where there had been intimacy came alienation, where closeness a huge chasm resulted. Enmity, the snake would bruise Adam’s heel and he would crush its head. Adam and Eve quarreled and hid from God. Nature was now red in tooth and claw. Adam’s sin had devastating consequences for the rest of creation. The ground now produced weeds—who can doubt it as we must deal with the devastating consequences of global warming and of a wanton destruction of scarce and irreplaceable natural resources? There was disharmony, alienation, hostility, separation abroad all crying out for reconciliation, for atonement.

We can say that forever thereafter the story of the Bible is of God’s attempts to recover the harmony, the togetherness, the community that were God’s intentions in the first place for all of creation. Sin in its essence alienates, separates, is fissiparous, centrifugal pushing things apart away from the centre so that we get the story of the Tower of Babel where human community itself becomes impossible since humans can no longer communicate and they are scattered abroad as hostile entities.

The God project from then on is to reverse this catastrophe, to recover the pristine harmony which was God’s intention from the beginning. Hence, as in Isaiah 11 when it will be as in the idyllic times when the lamb will again lie with the lion and a child will play over a snake’s hole and be unharmed. A German scholar, noting this said, “Endzeit ist urzeit”—the end time will be as the beginning time. God tries various strategies. God calls a people to be a light to the nations, a servant people which shrinks through disobedience until the remnant is but one who stretches out His arms on the wood of the Cross having declared I if I be lifted up will draw all, not some, but all to me in a divine embrace that will not let us go. The curtain is torn from top to bottom and access is possible between God no longer inaccessible and God’s creatures. And the Holy Spirit is poured out on those assembled in Jerusalem—who come from many nations, reversing Babel—there they were scattered apart. At Pentecost they are together in one place. There they could not understand one another, here they could hear the wondrous tidings of God’s doings in their own language, there they were plotting to storm heaven, here heaven comes in the form of tongues of fire to draw them into a community, into a body where there was neither Jew or Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, but they were all one in Christ. Amazing once their society had been the most stratified, slaves and owners were now members of one family and a former persecutor could be called ‘brother Saul’. This Jesus by his obedience on the Cross broke down the middle wall of partition making of two former enemy communities one family.

Ephesians exults in proclaiming that it was God’s intention to draw all things in heaven and earth into a unity in Christ. The work of Christ is centripetal, drawing towards the centre, as the effect of sin had been centrifugal, splitting away from the centre.

I asserted that the raison d’être of the South African Council of Churches, and so really of the Church was to be enlisted in this divine work since after all we have been entrusted with the ministry of reconciliation. As ambassadors of Christ, we are each meant to contribute, to participate in Christ’s reconciling work. It is as daunting as it is exhilarating. We are in the forgiveness business because our God and God’s Christ are in the forgiving business.

Be ye Perfect as Your Heavenly Father is Perfect

I said at the beginning speaking about Godlikeness that I would return to that aspect anon. We have sometimes wondered whether there might be atrocities so unspeakable in their horror that they should surely qualify for being unforgivable. Yes there are many of these—what about seeing your children, husband, wife, etc. mown down before you, or made to watch as these awful creatures were raping your wife in turn, then mutilating her? There have been many such, and worse atrocities. Would not some qualify for being unforgivable? We should not be too glib and facile. There are many, many things which are unspeakably egregious. But can we say unforgivable? Yes, humanly speaking there must be a threshold. Humanly speaking—but you see we are those who have the incredible privilege, we puny sinful creatures to call God ‘Father’, ‘Abba’, using the child’s intimate form of address—daddyGod, hiPops. God the One who dwells in light inaccessible, before whom the Angels and Archangels veil their sight and ceaselessly cry, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’—we can call this one Father and Jesus says, “be ye perfect even as your father in heaven is perfect”, this one who lets the rain fall on good and bad and lets the sun shine on all. We are meant to emulate God. We who were created in God’s image are exhorted to resemble, to emulate, to imitate this God, to forgive not only seven times, but seventy times seven, to be as the Jesus Christ who as he was being crucified could pray for those nailing him to the Cross who had not asked for his forgiveness could pray that his Father would forgive them and provided an excuse for them to boot. Phew. We are meant to be Godlike knowing that God’s grace would always be sufficient for us.

In forgiving we are engaging not just in a mundane act, we are sharing in the divine enterprise with cosmic consequences to advance or retard the work of bringing all things to a unity in Christ, to help draw all into the embrace of the Christ throwing out his arms to draw all to himself. We are involved in recreating the universe. Teilhard de Chardin spoke of how all things were moving from point Alpha to point Omega in a process he dubbed as Christification. When ultimately Christ will be all in all and then he will present it all to the Father as holy and without blemish. Isn’t that a glorious endeavour to be engaged in?

Forgiving is so wonderfully hopeful. It refuses to give up on anyone. It provides the perpetrator, the sinner with yet another chance to make a new beginning. God never gives up on us. When we fall God does not say, ‘good riddance to bad rubbish’. No, God comes to our aid, picks us up, dusts us off and says, ‘Try again’. And each time we fall, however many times, God comes, picks us up, dusts us off and says, ‘Try again’.

You see, God does not say, ‘once a murderer, always a murderer’. No, God says, ‘you have the capacity to be a saint—go for it’ and yes, God has lived by God’s words—a Saul becomes St. Paul, a prostitute becomes St. Mary Magdalene, a three-fold denier becomes St. Peter, the chief of the Apostles, etc, etc. A so reconciliation comes because we believe that the other has that capacity, that in fact an enemy is a friend waiting to be made.

Forgiveness is not a sentimental namby pamby thing. It is costly. It cost God the death of God’s Son. It is not for sissies. It has nothing in common with the facile expression, ‘forgive and forget’. No, forgiveness stares the beast in the eye, is confrontational. To name the hurt, the cause of the upset and then to refuse to retaliate—it is not retributive but restorative, it seeks not to punish but to heal. We remember so that we in our turn may not inflict the same wrong on another. Santayana said, “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it”.

In our culture we speak of something called ubuntu—the essence of being human, that my humanity is caught up in your humanity because a person is a person through other persons. We are meant to live in an intricate network of inter-dependence, to live in harmony. Revenge, anger, hostility are subversive of this good. To forgive then is not being altruistic, it is the best form of self-interest. It is good for one’s health. We know that its opposite, wreaking revenge actually does not resolve the problem—it leads to an inexorable cycle of outrage, reprisal, counter reprisal ad infinitum, as we see played out so horrendously in the Middle East. Forgiving turns out to be real politik for without forgiveness there is no future, not for an intimate relationship between husband and wife, between communities, and between nations.

Conclusion

We have been privileged in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to be part of a remarkable process. Many had feared that our land would be devastated by a racial bloodbath as blacks went on an orgy of revenge for all they had suffered. It did not happen. Instead the world was awed by the spectacle unfolding before their very eyes as victims of some of the most gruesome atrocities displayed unexpected magnanimity by forgiving their tormentors. We were frequently devastated by the revelations we heard—they took me from the cell to an office and stripped me naked. Then they opened a drawer and stuffed my breasts into it. Then they slammed the drawer shut on my nipples several times until white stuff oozed. We were so aware that we each had the capacity for such evil, all of us. And yet the thing I carry away after those years in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is the exhilarating knowledge that people are fundamentally good, that people are magnanimous or can be—Betty Savage was at a Christmas Party held in a golf club. One of the political groups attacked the club and threw hand grenades into the room. Many of Betty’s friends were killed. She was so badly injured that she spent several months in the intensive care unit. When she was discharged she couldn’t bathe or clothe or feed herself. Her children helped her. She still had shrapnel in her. And speaking about all this that had left her in this condition she said, “It has enriched my life”. Wow. As if that was not enough she went on to say, “I would like to meet the perpetrator in a spirit of forgiveness. I would like to forgive him, and I hope he forgives me.” Wow again. No doubt she was part of God’s cosmic movement. Yes, I was filled with exhilaration to discover that we are fundamentally good. Injustice, oppression, evil; those are aberrations—the norm is the good, love, compassion, laughter, generosity, caring.