|
BY GRETCHEN KEISER
Staff Writer
ATLANTA--God, too, has a dream, said Archbishop Desmond Tutu, speaking at
the church where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was once the preacher.
“God, too, has a dream,” said the Anglican archbishop from Cape
Town, South Africa, “of a world where people matter more than things,
where there is more laughter, more joy, more sharing.”
“We are sisters and brothers, we are members of one family, God’s
family,” the diminutive Nobel Prize winner continued, gesturing with his
arms spread open wide and his smiling face looking up. An estimated 1,200
people spent their lunch hour at Ebenezer Baptist Church Sept. 8, listening as
Archbishop Tutu and local leaders conversed about how people of faith, from all
religions and denominations, can impact the city of Atlanta for the common
good.
The interfaith conversation was co-sponsored by the Interdenominational
Theological Center and the Christian Council of Metropolitan Atlanta.
“We are people who pray not ‘my Father,’ but ‘Our
Father.’ We are people who look on one another and see not black, not
white, not Native American, not Asian, but my sister, my brother,”
Archbishop Tutu said.
People of faith must remind society “of profound spiritual realities
… We are finite creatures made for the infinite … Each one of us has
a God-shaped space and only God can fill it. Nothing less than God can satisfy
it.”
The archbishop, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his outspoken
opposition to apartheid in South Africa, said that what is legal is not always
morally right and people of faith must speak against unjust laws.
“Anti-affirmative action is legal, but legal is not the same as moral.
Jim Crow was legal, but it was not right. Apartheid was legal, but it was not
right. The Holocaust was legal, according to Nazi law, but it was not
right,” Archbishop Tutu said.
“We have to be there with the underdog and the underprivileged because
that is where our Lord and Savior is to be found.”
He headed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa following
apartheid, at which people, both ordinary citizens and leaders, told their
stories of suffering, unjust imprisonment, torture and the murder of loved ones
and family members. The stories were told, however, with the intent of bringing
healing and forgiveness to South Africa as a basis for the future. Speakers and
hearers wept openly at the hearings and the nation witnessed “people
willing to forgive even after suffering grievously.”
“We learned in South Africa, at the Truth and Reconciliation hearings,
that healing seems to come when people are able to tell their story of
anguish,” he said.
In the United States, and in Atlanta, the same may be true, the archbishop
observed.
“We must speak the truth in love. This is a land where in many, many
ways, the sky is the limit. But we must be honest. Racism is still alive. There
are moments, like in the O.J. Simpson trial, when you saw the fault that split
the nation down the middle. We must name the disease if we are to have any hope
of curing it.”
Archbishop Tutu is spending a year teaching at Emory University. He was
asked by the local interfaith community to give his observations of Atlanta and
particularly to comment on how people of faith could help set a moral compass
for the region in the new millennium.
He commended the strengths of Atlanta, which he called “a great city, a
bustling city, a city with a warm heart welcoming a huge diversity of people
from all over the world.” But he said it is also “a city of
contrasts, possibly sharp contrasts. There is beauty. There is squalor and
disease. This kind of contrast is found in many cities and many countries. The
tale of two cities--the haves and the have-nots, the affluent and those who can
barely keep body and soul together.”
If the city of Atlanta is to move closer to realizing God’s vision of
one community, rather than a society broken and divided, people of faith must
show the way, he said. “Where there is no vision, the Scriptures say, the
people perish.”
“Remind God’s people we are made for the transcendent, we are made
for the sublime, we are made for the beautiful, we are made for the
truth.”
After he had spoken for about 30 minutes, Archbishop Tutu responded to
questions posed by speakers representing the Jewish, Christian and Muslim
communities, and various civic organizations.
In response to a question from the Concerned Black Clergy about how to
influence the National Rifle Association to limit the availability of guns to
children, Archbishop Tutu pointed out that members of the NRA are, in many
cases, people who sit in church pews on Sunday morning.
“Because they disagree with you vehemently, they are still God’s
children,” he said, encouraging pastors to find ways to win people over
with honey rather than vinegar.
Asked by a Presbyterian minister and by a Muslim leader about how people of
different faiths can work together, he spoke of God’s prodigal love that
exceeds human definitions.
“Every single one of us matters to God,” he said. “God is not
going to ask if you are a Christian before he loves us. He loves us
first.”
“I wish we could sometimes relax into the goodness of God, into the
all-embracingness of God,” he responded later to a similar question.
“If only we could be purveyors of what is essential in the heart of God in
every faith—that is, love.”
|
