Two thousand years before Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous I Have A Dream speech, two thousand years before Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela gave his speech when he came out of prison in 1990, the Apostle Paul wrote an epic letter of freedom to the Church in Rome. It was a letter so magnificent that probably in the annals of Christian history there is nothing to compare to it. The Book of Romans is one of the great statements of our faith, and freedom, and hope. He wrote it after being in the confines of jail through a scribe to a congregation he loved. He implored them to have this great sense of freedom, unity, and hope for the future because of Jesus of Nazareth.
Central to this great letter, in today’s passage, at the end of the Book of Romans, the Apostle Paul summarizes what it is that he wanted to say. He had a vision. His vision was that whether you are Jew or Gentile, you can worship and glorify the Lord God. This was because Jesus of Nazareth, a child from the Jews, a child who had grown up and been part of the soil of Israel, could lead the Gentile world to praise of the great God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Sarah.
The Apostle Paul had a vision that there would no longer be a distinction between people, that neither Jew nor Gentile nor slave nor free nor male nor female, nothing for Paul could separate people from the love of God in Jesus Christ or from each other in the worship of Jesus Christ. For the Apostle Paul, this vision was radical and earth-shattering. It challenged the Jewish Christians to accept their Gentile brethren and to treat them as equals. It challenged the Gentile Christians to accept the faithfulness of their Jewish brothers and sisters and to live in harmony with them.
Like all great lawyers, the Apostle Paul also drew on original sources to make his case. He goes right back into the Hebrew Scriptures themselves to suggest that even hundreds of years before him there were great leaders within the Jewish community who had a similar vision. The Jewish books are divided into three kinds: the works of the law, the writings, and the prophets. In this brilliant summary in the Book of Romans, the Apostle Paul draws from all three.
He draws from the Psalms, which are the wisdom literature that are part of the writings, from the words of David and David’s great hope that someday “I will praise the Lord before the Gentiles.” Quoting from the great law of the Book of Deuteronomy, he quotes this passage: “Rejoice, rejoice, oh you Gentiles in Him, in the Lord.” And then, from the great Prophet Isaiah, he hopes and he prays that from the root of Jesse, Gentiles themselves will be able to experience the hope of God. This is a magnificent work, a brilliantly woven passage! It appeals to Jews who know their Bible; it appeals to Gentiles who are getting to know their Bible. He says, “From these Scriptures, you may be able to see the glory of Jesus Christ.” For Paul, Jesus had brought them all together.
It was, however, more than just a vision of Jew and Gentile. It was a vision for the whole world. Paul’s picture of Christ was that of Lord, and because he was Lord there were no boundaries of time or place or language or culture that could divide the people of God who worshipped him. And, before Basilicas were built in Rome, before great magnificent statues were erected in Rome, before the works of Michael Angelo and Caravaggio and Raphael were in Rome, Paul wrote his letter to the house churches there and encouraged them to rejoice and to glorify God.
Here we are in this Advent season in the magnificence of this sanctuary called to rejoice and to glorify and to celebrate the presence of the living God that all creation is called upon to praise. Paul’s vision was that of the whole cosmos praising God. There is a wonderful African poem that I will be speaking about on Tuesday night, and the poem goes something like this – I love this!
All you big things, bless the Lord
Mount Kilimanjaro and Lake Victoria
The rift valley and the Serengeti Plain
Fat baobabs and shady mango trees
All Eucalyptus and tamarind trees
Bless the Lord!
Praise and extol Him forever and ever.
All you tiny things, bless the Lord
Busy black ants and hopping fleas
Wriggling tadpoles and mosquito larvae
Flying locusts and water drops
Pollen dust and Tsetse fly
Millet seeds and dried dagaa
Bless the Lord!
Praise and extol Him forever and ever.
Paul’s vision was that in the coming of Christ, the God who made the earth, the God who was before and above time, had come in a person, and in that person had caused humanity to have a reason for rejoicing and glory.
Two thousand years later, when a great Canadian and a Christian goes into space, Chris Hadfield wrote this:
The big pervasive feeling on board looking at the Earth from space is one of tremendous, exquisite privilege that it exists. But, I think what everyone would find if they could be in that position, if they could see the whole world every ninety minutes and look down on the places where we do things right, and look down where we are doing stupid, brutal things to each other, and the inevitable patience of the world that houses it, I think everybody would be reinforced in the faith, and maybe readdress the real true tenets of what is good and what gives them strength. Even from the cosmos, the awe that is inspired to celebrate and glorify God is there.
The great Evangelist Jonathan Edwards once said, “I want to resolve that all people should live for the glory of God, and resolve second that whether others do it or not, I will.” The Apostle Paul’s vision then was of the whole world, of all the peoples praising God, and that in the coming of the Christ child everything had changed. But, he also realized that there were two things that were desperately needed for the people of God in Rome. He uses those terms: one of them is “endurance” and the other one is “acceptance.”
The acceptance that I have alluded to already is that Jews for their rigor of the law must come to appreciate Gentiles who have not grown up in the power of the law, but see them through the lens of the Cross and the Resurrection of Jesus. The Gentiles, who thought they were intellectually superior, more sophisticated than their Jewish counterparts with all their myths and legends of Moses and Abraham so they thought, needed to humble themselves and see their Jewish counterparts through the lens of the Cross and the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
The Jew and Gentile needed to accept one another. Paul said, “You should accept one another as Christ has accepted you.” In many ways, it sounds as if he was echoing the words of Jesus, and the very words of Jesus were “I have come that you might have life. I have come that you might love one another.” And, he says in John’s Gospel, “that you might love one another, as I have loved you.” The passion for love and acceptance is in Jesus. We need to look no further than to find it there.
Paul also realized there was a great need for endurance, a great need to face suffering and difficulties. He knew that those early Christians were going to suffer for what they believed, and he desperately wanted them to care for one another, to support one another and to encourage one another. It wasn’t just in the high moments then, but it was in the low moments that were still to come that the real challenge lay.
Over the last forty-eight hours, I have been reflecting a great deal on this incredible passage from the Book of Romans. And like so much of the world, my mind has been on the passing of Nelson Mandela. The conscience of a nation, the one who brought people from darkness into light has left this world. I thought back to the times when I lived a few miles away from him. I lived in a city of over a million people, and he lived next door, but he was over on an island in prison off the coast of the city.
On a clear day from Table Mountain you could see the island where he was incarcerated for twenty-seven years. His name could not be mentioned even though he was so close to us. To mention the name of Nelson Mandela was to inflame the power of the anger of the State that wished to crush and suppress any mention of his name. When it was whispered in the townships, there was joy. He was Tata Madiba: he was father.
For so many, his name could not pass our lips. Even when one tried to find out more about this man who mysteriously sat on an island across the water from Cape Town, you couldn’t read books about him because they were banned and you couldn’t write essays about him for they would be stopped. I recall writing an essay on Nelson Mandela and it never reached my professor’s desk. The security police had intercepted it.
People in Beijing and Stockholm and Toronto and Boston, Massachusetts, knew much more about Nelson Mandela than we who were studying in Cape Town at the time. It was 1978 and 1979, and you could not mention his name. Children would try and say it, but they would say it quietly. In worship services every now and again people would pray for him, but they did so knowing that they were doing something very risky: Nelson Mandela’s name was a terrifying name to those who maintained the oppression of apartheid. But for those who opposed it, it was a rallying call for freedom.
People do not understand that the South African state at that time was a police state. People were banned for talking about a change to apartheid, children were shot if they demonstrated against it, students were banned, magazines were shut down, schools were closed, ministers were intimidated, and churches were placed on the periphery and made pariahs. If you whispered his name, Madiba, you were in trouble.
The penultimate thing that I ever did in South Africa was to join in a protest that called for his release. Yet, across that water something incredible was happening. Unbeknownst to us, the man who had gone on to Robben Island as an angry man, a man who had headed up Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the ANC, a man who was known as a terrorist, changed.
In 1995, I went back to South Africa, and along with a group of clergy, went back not only to the city that I loved, but to Robben Island. Before Robben Island was open to the public and while it was still a prison, clergy people like myself, under the leadership of Desmond Tutu and Beyers Naude, were taken on to Robben Island to see the cell that Mandela had been in, to experience the lime quarry that he worked in. The view of Cape Town that we had in the distance: a city of freedom for some, a city of great poverty and great wealth, of magnificent beauty, but from his cell he could not touch it or walk on it.
How could you not feel anger? How could you not feel that such a large part of your life had been taken away from you? How could that hatred in a cell like that in forty degree temperatures not make things worse? But, he changed while he was there. He changed to realize what the Apostle Paul had realized in the Book of Romans that hatred and division does not build the kingdom of God and does not build a society. Only by reaching out to people who are different than us can that world be a brighter place.
Both in his conversations with his guards, some of whom we met over a luncheon, who missed him now that he was free from that prison, and those who had pastored him and visited him in the darkest days when he was there, there was a sense in which Mandela had changed. He would be the first to say, “I am no saint!” He was imperfect in many ways, but he had something. And, what he had, I always will believe he was given by God. To lead a people who had otherwise been suppressed, a people who had barely a name, for people who had lived in subjugation and poverty, a people who were not allowed to go to the great universities and colleges of the country, to a people with whom we as whites were not allowed to worship and associate with freely for many years, and still, in the midst of that, to come out and forgive.
He did so much more than even history can recount. But what now South Africa, what now that Madiba is gone? To those who exercise power, maybe it is time to revisit his vision and to stop the foolishness of corruption and self-interest. Maybe the vision of an equal South Africa where the poor can actually live a life with dignity in great numbers is needed. As my former colleague and professor, Charles Villa-Vincencio on PBS NewsHour on Friday night said, “It is as if we have revolution delayed and it needs to be kick-started.”
It needs to be kick-started so that all South Africans can enjoy the benefit of what is surely one of the richest and most glorious countries in the entire world. I love what a friend of our family, Adolphus Magwaza from Cape Town once said, “If God can make this city, God must be beautiful!” That is so true! When God gives us so much, is it up to us to make sure that we share it, to make sure that we use it wisely, to make sure that we give it as well as keep it.
The President of the Student Union of the University of Cape Town, who is a young black Hausa woman, wrote in our University newsletter this week and said: “It is now up to us to carry the mantle of Mandela. It is no longer us who have him around as if he can somehow come and rescue us; he is gone. It is now up to us to pick up the torch of freedom, of endurance, of justice and of truth.”
She is right! Is that not like the Apostle Paul, who in writing to the Romans said they had to do the same thing? It is up to your generation to uphold and glorify and praise the Lord. God speaks to us in every era and in every country and in every race, and he says the same thing: that all the nations might glorify the Lord.
Tonight, in St. Georges Cathedral in Cape Town there will be a service. The text for this evening is from the lectionary that we read today: from Romans 15, the same passage. Tonight, those Chriistians who will gather to celebrate the life of Nelson Mandela will read these words of Paul: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
iNkosi.... Busisa... Madiba....Tata. Amen.