Desmond Tutu

[Photo credit: PLU]

Saturday night my husband and I had the honor of joining two of our friends and driving up to Tacoma to hear the Archbishop Desmond Tutu deliver the keynote address at a "Be the Spark" event sponsored by the Greater Tacoma Community Foundation. The archbishop preached perhaps the best sermon I have ever heard -- and despite the wider mission of the overall event, it was definitely a sermon.

The "Be the Spark" campaign is a movement co-sponsored by the GTCF and the local universities, Pacific Lutheran University (our alma mater -- Go Lutes!) and the University of Puget Sound, that is geared toward encouraging greater dialogue, interaction and engagement among the citizens of the Tacoma region. Tacoma has seen tremendous revitalization over the past ten to fifteen years; work remains to be done, and the idea behind "Be the Spark" is that citizens of all ages and from all walks of life must be drawn into the wider community if this exciting work is to continue. As a former regional resident returning to downtown Tacoma for the first time since 2001, I was inspired and exhilarated by the transformation underway, and I hope "Be the Spark" helps continue to drive this transformation forward.

Back, however, to Tutu. The central thrust of his message was this: God created the world and everything in it--without our help. God is omnipotent. And yet: God not only created humanity; he relies upon humans to be his partners in doing his work on this earth. He works through us; he has chosen to need us to be hands and feet, voices and actors.

Tutu recounted the stories of Moses and of Mary ("Knock, knock... who's there? Gabriel... Gabriel who? The archangel Gabriel..."). God working through humanity. He described the pain God feels when humans fail to heed his call, or when violence is perpetrated upon them -- and the pleasure God feels (illustrated with a little dance) when we take up his charge to be salt and light to the earth, to work for peace and justice, to take care of God's creation and all that is in it.

An unprepossessing physical figure -- he is, after all, an elderly man, and he might be 5-foot-4 on a good day -- Archbishop Tutu's oratorical power, his spiritual presence, and above all, the strength of his message had a sold-out Tacoma Dome hanging on his every word. Tutu is a man who has seen the worst of what humanity can do under the influence of corrupted ideology and attendant fears, but he has placed his body, his faith and his positions of worldly authority on the line in the deeply held belief that hope remains for humanity. God still works, and he works through us.

Thankfully, in his lifetime Tutu has seen at least some proof in his own country that this is indeed the case. From a position of seemingly interminable oppression, hope has sprung forth. And it has come as a result of people like him and many, many others who acted upon their faith in God and in humanity.

A final thought: in the interest of obtaining background and perspective, I (in typical nerdy historian mode) have been reading a biography of Desmond Tutu, and in the section devoted to the construction of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission following the end of apartheid in the 1990s, I came across the African concept of ubuntu (in Nuguni) or botho (in Sotho). It's a concept westerners of an Enlightenment background haven't really had in our linguistic arsenal, but it's one well worth appropriating. As Tutu explained it as early as 1981, rather than the western notion, originating in the work of Rene Descartes, of "I think, therefore I am," the African notion would be "I am because you are; you are because we are," or "A person is a person through other people." Tutu would go on to develop the following formulation: "None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, or walk, or speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings.... The solitary, isolated human being is a contradiction in terms."

Ubuntu. Humaneness based in the understanding that we do not walk alone. We exist in community with our Creator. We exist in community with each other. God working through us. Each of us impacting the other. Amen.

Quotations from John Allen, Rabble-Rouser for Peace (New York: Free Press, 2006), 347.