Africa Rising In Our Souls

by The Rev. Stephen R. Stanley+, Chapel of the Cross, Chapel Hill, NC, June 16, 2002
(Note: This sermon was abridged at three services and printed here in its full text)

We came to Africa to awaken the mind of Peace in ourselves. We came on a pilgrimage called “Spirit, Soil and Voice,” to be bound up in a delicate and transitory network of interdependence with each other and with those who were recently liberated from three centuries of enslavement. We came to Africa to become new people ourselves because, as Bishop Tutu says in the African idiom called “ubuntu”, “a person is a person through other people.” We came to learn and to become what that African word means.

We came to see the world through African eyes and to experience Africa rising in our souls.

“Ubuntu” is what I experienced in this recent pilgrimage to Bishop Tutu’s indescribably beautiful homeland with Episcopal students from around the country and with Andy Dobelstein and two Johnson Interns, Marsha and Dania, of our parish. Ubuntu is difficult to translate into Western language or thought, but it speaks of the very essence of being human. But in a broad sense ubuntu means that we can look at any other human being, whether black of white, first world or third world, friend or enemy and say, “My humanity is inextricable bound up in yours.” Anything that subverts or destroys that delicate interdependence, such as the former racist doctrine of South Africa, called apartheid, not only dehumanizes the victim but the oppressor as well. That is why I was called to South Africa to spend two weeks in the deepest contemplation of the unimaginable horrors of three centuries of church-sanctioned racial oppression and the more unimaginable liberation of a whole people, both black and white - liberation from the evil that divided and enslaved them both. We went to Africa to bear witness to the healing of a nation, not its perfection mind you, but witness to the same power that redeemed the people of the Exodus, the same power that raised Jesus’ defeatist disciples into resurrectionists in a broken world. As Jesus gave his disciples authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out and gave them the power to heal, so this same Lord has given the South African people the will and the power to cast out the demonic ideology that has possessed them all for so long.

But for the nation to heal it must tell its story. It must not deny its past, but acknowledge it fully if it is to be free. Truth must become the necessary and sufficient precursor to reconciliation. All reconciliation, whether personal, social, national or international begins with repentance, which is not just claiming guilt but to “turn from our wickedness, and live,” as our prayer book used to say. South Africa had a choice to turn to total retribution on one side or the equally horrible prospect of total amnesty on the other. Instead, Bishop Tutu helped his nation turn to a third way, in between the others. It was a way which granted amnesty to those perpetrators of injustice, both black and white, that were willing to tell the whole truth of what they had done. Amnesty was offered to those who would face the survivors and victims of their crimes in a Truth and Reconciliation process, and tell bereaved widows and mothers what had really happened to their husbands and sons.

This was a torturous process for Bishop Tutu and the other members of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission or TRC as it is known there. Our pilgrimage group sat with Dr. Helen Burton, a member of the TRC and heard her first hand account of victims telling their searing tales and of former secret policemen in tears in the power their presence. We talked with former prisoners who were tortured unmercifully. We visited township that still reek of incomprehensible poverty and yet filled with generous people who have not yet given up on the hope of a better life. We were led by former resistance soldiers, many who had been raised in that same brutal township, where South African blacks and coloreds of Indian descent were forcibly exiled from their family homelands for over 40 years. It was so painful for them to tell us their stories, stories of lost homes and lost lives. The wounds of those memories were still too fresh. But we listened to them as intently as we could and we cried with them, and paused in each place where a government-instigated massacre occurred and remembered the murdered and lost young people and old women and even crossfire babies who could not live to see their liberation day. We visited a Christian Hospice called the Beautiful Gate where young terminally ill babies and children come to die of AIDS. A place where they are lovingly and gently fed and bathed and comforted and loved, perhaps for the first time and certainly for the last time in their tragic little lives. I stood at the pulpit of the Cape Town Dutch Reform Church, where the doctrine of Apartheid was crafted, sermon by sermon, Sunday by Sunday, year by year, and generation by generation by those Dutch Afrikaners who passionately worshipped that kind of God. I stood and held the bars at the cell door of Nelson Mandela, on the dreaded maximum security prison called Robben Island. There this great man of courage and conscience had been held for 18 brutal years with no bread or a bed, and made to dig limestone in the blazing African sun. But here Mandela secretly wrote and dictated his great autobiography, “A Long Walk to Freedom,” which was miraculously smuggled out a page or two at a time, giving witness to the fact that the truth cannot be imprisoned, even if the truth-teller might be. We know from these experiences that memory is sometimes too painful to bear and yet the healing of memory can only come by creating a safe space for the stories themselves to be liberated and set free. We visited a mental health clinic that was called the Center for the Healing of Memories, created for that cause. We visited St. George’s Anglican Cathedral in Cape Town where Bishop Tutu protected people against the storm troopers at the Cathedral door. These holy places represent the process of a nation freeing itself and healing itself from within, so well captured by a poem written by Despond Tutu during the darkest hours of the Truth and Reconciliation hearings of the past few years:

The world is wept.
Blood and pain seep into our listening; into our wounded souls.
The sound of your sobbing is my own weeping;
Your wet handkerchief my pillow for a past so exhausted that it cannot rest – not yet.
Speak, weep, listen for us all.
Oh, people of the silent hidden past,
Let your stories scatter seeds into our lonely frightened winds.
Sow more, until the stillness of this land can soften, can dare to hope and smile and sing;
Until the ghosts can dance unshackled, until our lives can know your sorrows
And be healed.”

Our Gospel says that Jesus saw the crowds that were “harassed and helpless.” Looking at the tiny faces of the township children and those places for those who had AIDS, the haunted stories were all too much to bear at times. Our group leaders helped us to try to express our feelings in non-verbal ways through art done in silence at each of the sites. Perhaps the most moving and personal moments for me were with the people of Protea Village. There a small Anglican Church called Good Shepherd is all that is left of a thriving community of Africans, who had lived on that land for many generations. In 1967 all of the Protea people were expelled under the Group Areas Act, which declared there ancestral home as a “Whites Only” district. With less than 24 hours notice families were separated and shipped away to the barren outskirts of Cape Town and left with nothing while their homes were being bulldozed away. I had met some of these Protea people, Jenny, Cecil, Stella and Eileen, in Coventry Cathedral two years ago at an International Cross of Nails meeting. Their story told then had moved me to tears. But now being with them in their church, which they travel many, many miles to attend, and walking with them the boundaries of the place where there ancestors once lived, as said as I preached on that day. “We cannot erase what the evil day has done to you, but we can tell you are not alone, your brothers and sisters in Christ will support your efforts to come home. You are not alone, God is with you and so are we.” Ubuntu calls us home. Ubuntu calls us together, because God wills it to be so again. Their church is now a Center of the Community of the Cross of Nails, and now we join with them in a long term covenantal relationship along with St. Paul AME and soon, we hope the local AME church there, to offer prayers and help and support. Their legal claim for restitution is progressing, but they have so far to go to redeem the land and rebuild. It will take years, maybe a generation to do. But the spirit and the hope and the promise of Protea Village inspired us all to want to stay with them until the end. A Protea Village Trust Fund will soon be instituted to receive gifts for the eventual raising of a small community center: then one cottage, then another and another, beginning with those for the eldest villagers, like Frances, who at age 93, has been waiting 47 years to come home. We shall also invite their pastor, Paula McKenzie, who is now in Chapel Hill doing a five week clergy exchange with Holy Family to come and speak with us. We shall invite a few Good Shepherd members to come and visit us some day. We hope that a future pilgrimage of some of us and some St. Paul members might someday go there and assist in the rebuilding as we have done in Costa Rica in the past. Cross of Nails will hear more about this on June 23 and we hope to share more of this African story of redemption than a sermon will allow. In the meantime there are a few pictures posted in the dining room with more to come. I think we stand as the Exodus people stood, hearing the will of the Lord, that we see our delicate interdependence with His world, that we commit ourselves, not just to us and our own, but to do some “beautiful things” for the Lord, as Mother Teresa said.

Our collect today calls us to proclaim God’s truth with boldness and to minister his justice with compassion. Truth, justice and compassion – that is the reconciliation which Paul says we have received from Christ. As we were God’s enemies, Christ has overcome our bondage to our own separation and given us the hope of “ubuntu.” That we might live together in Him. That is the faith that is bringing black and white together in South Africa. That is the faith that is bringing people of different races and faiths together here at home. The call to heal the wounds of the world, one person or one village at a time. The harvest is great. The harvest of new life and new hope of a better world. But the laborers are few. Too few who care beyond their own borders. Too few who see, not a call to wholesale efforts at redemption, not to messianic pretensions, but just to ministry, to help in the ordering of God’s world, in ways that we can. Not just for the benefit of the oppressed but also for the wholeness of our own souls. For as Bishop Tutu has said, “We are all wounded.” Gods says that the healing of each one is a healing of us all. So we must speak the truth with boldness and minister justice with compassion, for that is no less that God’s covenant with us and with the world, waiting to be fulfilled. When Moses issued God's call to the Exodus people, they said, “And all that the Lord has spoken, we will do.” When that happens the Kingdom of God is at hand.

In two weeks I was shocked and filled with revulsion at times to hear of the depths to which we have sunk in our inhumanity and our denial of other’s pain. But I was more filled with the indomitable spirit of Africa, Africa rising, Africa liberated, Africa made new. All of this is captured in the National Prayer of Africa, so short and so simple and yet the cry of freedom, which is prayed and sung at the end of every church service and on every occasion of civic ceremony, by what I can only describe as a Resurrection people in the land.

GOD BLESS AFRICA
GUARD HER CHILDREN
GUIDE HER LEADERS
GIVE HER PEACE.

Let us live that Ubuntu-inspired prayer for Africa and pray it for our own land and live it for the new world, which God has risen from death to claim.