Just as we are about to break for a few days of Christmas, Battles continues with A Christian Theology of Ubuntu.
Most explicit for Tutu's context, the beatitude fo Ubuntu is that it provides an alternative to vengeance. Tutu states, "I saw it in Zimbabwe yet again last week. It is what has allowed Mr. Smith to survive in a post-independence Zimbabwe." South Africa - black and white - can be human together and will defy tyranny only by first living together. Again, perspective determines actions and Ubuntu provides an invaluable perspective in which white and black people may see themselves as more than racial rivals. "When you look at someone with eyes of love," Tutu believes, "you see a reality differently from that of someone who looks at the same person without love, without hatred or even just indifference."
"Only by living together." Most pressing within the ELCA community these days is the reality of how there are some in the church who will not allow this to take place. The fear of living together with people not like me is amazing. For us in the ELCA, we are watching a number of people panic because the doors have been opened to saints whose sexual identity does not fit into a heterosexual model. Often folks will say that it is not biblical to welcome such people into the full life of the church. I would have to say that we read what we want to read. Enough people have stepped forward to say end the divisions - cease the warfare - stop the badgering...and let's start being the church of Jesus, the Messiah of God. That church is one in which we look at the other "with eyes of love." To do that demands that we let go of the lenses we like to use to see differences and then to make those differences into reasons for their to be divisions and reasons for judgments to be made. Living together is tough - yet is it necessary or the world will never see glimpses of the Reign of God that will erupt, as always, out of the ordinary mix of life into which the Christ-child was born. "Only by living together" do we begin to step within the land of forgiveness and reconciliation and peace. When we walk away from what potentially might divide us, we most certainly walk away from the God who is always seeking to bridge the divide through a life together. Tutu's Ubuntu is a word we need to use in the ELCA. If we are going to turn to the African church as reason for dividing, we need to turn to the African church of Bishop Tutu and see the miraculous power of the Christ who makes all things new - even within a world that knows only how to live divided. The new world of the Christ is one in which even the most powerful forces for division are overcome - all of them...without exception.
Connection: Let's get on with being the Church of Christ, Jesus - Lord of All.
Come Lord, Jesus. Come and pull together all the parts that attempt to go alone with each other and without you. Grant us the wisdom to walk in your peace and love even as we would rather choose to arm ourselves for warfare. Amen.
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