Archbishop Tutu - 'Be the Spark!' by Brad Jersak

    Last night I attended Be the Spark at the Tacoma Dome in Washington State. The event featured a series of breath-taking performances by a variety of inspiring young bands, choirs, dancers, and singers. It also featured two 'talks' -- okay, full-on, no-holds-barred, hope-filled, cage-rattling preaching of the highest calibre -- by two seasoned world-shakers: Craig Keilburger and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. They brought together a message of spirituality and justice that neither I, nor my son Justice (and our friend Werner), shall ever forget.  

    Tutu blew my mind in what will be a truly landmark memory for me, and for 15000 mostly young people sitting on the edges of our seats. Here are a few highlights from that experience that need to be told:

    I need to start with the Archbishop's message because it ties everything together. 

    He started with this idea: When God created the earth, he did it completely without our help. But from the very moment that men and women first arrived on the scene, God did something completely astounding. He chose never again to act in the world without a human partner. He waits and watches and asks for human partners through whom he will do marvellous things.

    The Archbishop told the story of God's invitation to Moses, inviting him to partner with God to set free the Hebrew slaves. He recounted God's invitation to Mary, the mother of Jesus. Together, they would partner to give birth to the Gift who has given us redemption. He retold the story of Jesus, who underscored this point by partnering with the boy who donated his lunch to feed five thousand. In each case, God wanted and needed and acted with a human partner bring about God's will. He asks the same of us.

    It struck me the what Desmond Tutu accomplished in South Africa was the very same work that Moses was called to in Egypt. The end of apartheid and the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a miraculous historical event, on the same scale, with the same risks, and with the same fruit as the Exodus. Tutu isn't just a miniature version of Moses. In Tacoma, I witnessed a full-scale living Moses. Just like Moses became Israel's lawgiver, Tutu became the world's truth-and-reconciliation-commission giver, both in dynamic partnership with God.

    It struck me too that Tutu was right. God does not act on earth without a human partner. Jesus of Nazareth was God's greatest human partner (and much more, His Son). But God has always sought out partners through whom to work his love into the world. I don't always like this system. We sometimes suffer under it. According to Matthew 25, Tutu says that even God suffers under such a system, in solidarity with those who still await God's partners to feed them, clothe them, visit them, and free them. Until then, there are no hamburgers or Levi jeans falling from the sky onto the hungry and naked.

    Further, God suffers as some of his children conspire to kill others of God's children. Tutu also waxed prophetic, expressing the anguish of God through both the 9-11 massacre and the euphoria around Bin Laden's death. "Why do my children do this to each other? Why do we spend billions and trillions of dollars on instruments of death when a tiny fraction of that would provide clean water for every child on earth?"

    And in this lament, God sometimes finds a partner, and his heart ignites, and his smile broadens, and he goes to work.

    So, to summarize, God chose to create an order where he will not move without a partner, and we are invited into the partnership.

    If true, this explains for me all the evil in the world AND all the good in the world. It demonstrates both God's weakness in the world AND God's power in the world. Nor has he has delegated the work to us, merely standing by to watch and cheer us on as we do it. No, God is a real partner. Trying to change the world without the partnership of God seems futile to me. I've met enough ex-activists who were either burnt out by the overwhelming need or became bored because what they did wasn't sexy anymore. But for those activists who will partner with God, Tutu says they can expect to see spectacular miracles. They won't have to do spectacular miracles, but God will. They may, he said, need do nothing more than sit on a bus... and refuse to move (remember Rosa Parks?). But in our little lunch-bag offering to God we become a spark on which God breathes to ignite unquenchable fires. 

    Craig Keilburger is a living testimony of this. He spoke just before Tutu. When he was 12 years old, Craig was a regular Canadian boy, except that he had a speech impediment (like Moses). One morning, as he was perusing the newspaper for the comics, he saw the headlines of an article about a 12-year-old Pakistani activist who had been assassinated. As a 4-year-old, the boy in the story had been sold into slavery where he was put to work every day in a carpet factory, tying knots all day in the beautiful rugs that we pay so much to import into the West. When the boy was 10 years old, he escaped from slavery and began to campaign against child slavery, eventually traveling to Europe with his message. When he spoke publicly, the boy would hold a rug hook in one hand and a pencil in the other, demanding the rights of every child on earth to hold a pencil and be educated. Two years later, while back home in Pakistan, that boy was shot dead while outside his house on a bicycle -- assassinated by those who profit from the slavery of little children. 

    That makes me angry. But then what? Turn the channel? Look away? Try to forget?

    Not Craig.

    Craig was shaken into action. He went to school, read the article to his class and said, 'This can't happen. We must doing something. Who will help me?' Eleven 12-year-old students raised their hands. They formed a club which would eventually become Free the Children (and later also, ME TO WE)and they started campaigning. It became a youth movement that since that day in 1995, has gone global. The organization has built over 650 schools in 45+ nations around the world; they have provided clean water for over 1 million people; established 30,000 alternative income projects for assisting women and their children with sustainable incomes. They have also been putting on five conferences per year similar to 'Be the Spark' that fill stadiums. To attend, students cannot buy a ticket--they have to earn it through community service.

    A boy with a lunch to offer. A partner with God. Spectacular. 

    He challenged us as Tutu had previously challenged him: Don't view the tragic stories in the news as pure negativity to be avoided. Rather, understand that all those horrid headlines are is simply God's to-do list, delivered directly to our doors or computer screens as invitations to partnership. 

    After all of that, I had that typically churched-person feeling that someone should perform the ritual of closing in prayer. Sure enough ... the evening closed with Gospel singer, Crystal Aiken, singing over the crowd, "Holy Spirit, breathe on us."

    And from heaven I heard, "Oh, good! More partners!"

 

Comments

[Brad]

I agree with the last comment. E.g. church ushers.

1. My mom says that the first time she ever attended a church, what won her heart was not the music or the speaker or anything else that happened in the sanctuary. She has no recollection of that. It was the warmth and welcome she got from the ushers.

2. I heard a story about a time when Gandhi was in South Africa and intended to attend an Andrew Murray meeting. He was a leading evangelist at the time and very much about open access to God's presence. Unfortunately, an usher turned him away at the door because of the colour of Gandhi's skin.

[Shawna]

I heard a man speak this weekend about encounters he had when he was young and searching. He met a transit driver (a partner with God?). This transit driver shared a little bit about Jesus and told Patrice that should check Him out. He gave him a New Testament to read. The encounters that he had with the bus driver were very brief, but life changing. Patrice is now a church planter in the province of Quebec. Sometimes, I get to thinking about the things that others do for God and I do not think that I have much to offer but this was a good illustration for me that we never know how God will use us to fulfill his purposes. Partners with God, that gives me a lot to think about

[Jean]

Like )

[jan]

As much as this is heartwarming, I invite it to be life changing. It is all good and well to pray "God, please draw close to.."
but we are the ones in close proximity, we are His partners.

Thank you for this excellent reminder.