SPEAKING FROM HEAVEN — A MUCH NEEDED VOICE IN THESE TIMES

I‘m not sure how many of you knew about the life of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, or more specifically, about his death on the day after Christmas last year. I remember it. Not much attention given to one of the globe’s spiritual giant, a saint in our midst with a reputation as a sage and a prophet. And this reputation is growing by the day! 

But it’s today … Today that I need to hear that squeaky squawky voice of meekness and calm in the middle of chaos and fear. Doesn’t that sound like a voice we need to hear today? These words below, taken from his Nobel lecture, are both gripping and convicting … urgent and compelling.

Please delve right in! And then lets … ???

Peace <>< Pastor Bob

                     “Let Us Work to be Peacemakers”

                                              By

                         Archbishop Desmond Tutu

We are now much closer to a nuclear holocaust than when our technology and our spending were less.

Most nations are engaged in a mad arms race, spending billions of dollars wastefully on instruments of destruction, when millions are starving.

And yet, just a fraction of what is expended so obscenely on defense budgets would make the difference in enabling God’s children to fill their stomachs, be educated, and given the chance to lead fulfilled and happy lives.

We have the capacity to feed ourselves several times over, but we are daily haunted by the spectacle of the gaunt dregs of humanity suffering along in endless queues, with bowls to collect what the charity of the world has provided, too little too late.

When will we learn?

When will the people of the world get up and say, Enough is enough?

God created us for fellowship. God created us so that we would form the human family, existing together because we were made for each other. We are not made for an exclusive self-sufficiency, but for interdependence, and we break the law of our being at our peril.

Unless we work assiduously so that all of God’s children, our brothers and sisters, members of our own human family, enjoy basic human rights, the right of a fulfilled life, the right of movement, of work, the freedom to be fully human with a humanity measured by nothing less than the humanity of Jesus Christ himself, then we are on the road inexorably to self-destruction, we are not far from global suicide; and yet it could be so different.

When will we learn that human beings are of infinite value because they have been created in the image of God, and that it is a blasphemy to treat them as if they were less than this, and to do so ultimately recoils on those who do this?

In dehumanizing others, they have dehumanized themselves. Perhaps oppression dehumanizes the oppressor as much as, if not more than, the oppressed. But they need each other to become truly free, to become human. We can be human only in fellowship, in community, in koinonia, in peace.

Let us work to be peacemakers, those given a wonderful share in Our Lord’s ministry of reconciliation. If we want peace, so we have been told, let us work for justice. Let us beat our swords into plowshares.

Taken from by Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Nobel lecture, 1984.


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