Tutu preaches gospel of reconciliation at WCC meeting

ATLANTA (UMNS) - Delegates to the U. S. Conference of the World Council of Churches' annual meeting Dec. 9-11 paid tribute to a martyr, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and heard from a living legend, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, as they examined the role of churches in bringing reconciliation to a divided world.

"This is what God is saying to you as you enter this new century: help all of these my children as if they are your brothers and sisters, as if they are members of the same family," Tutu said in historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, where both King and King's father served as pastor. "That is the radicalness of the gospel we have been asked to preach."

Earlier in the day, WCC representatives gathered at the crypt of the slain civil rights leader to honor his legacy to the causes of nonviolence and justice.

Following the reading of Psalm 85 and a prayer, WCC General Secretary Konrad Raiser placed a wreath in front of crypt.  He was assisted by the Rev. Kathryn Bannister of Kansas, a United Methodist clergywoman and president of the U.S. Conference of the WCC, and Marion Best of Canada, vice moderator of the WCC's Central Committee.

The WCC meeting came on the heels of a Memphis civil jury's verdict that there had been a conspiracy to assassinate King and a decision the week before to build a national monument to him in Washington.

Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient like King, reminded the WCC delegates of Christians' checkered history in support of the causes of unity, justice, and peace for all of the world's citizens.

"It was Christians, not pagans who supported the slave trade ... who were responsible for the Holocaust ... who were responsible for the sort of racism here that lynched people, burned and destroyed, frequently in the name of Jesus Christ," the Anglican archbishop said.  "It was Christians, not pagans, who gave the world apartheid."

"How could we say," he asked, "that we are the ambassadors, that to us has been committed the ministry of reconciliation?"

Despite these blots on history, Christians have also been advocates for equality and justice, Tutu said. "We have an incredible capacity for good.  We are able to forgive, to be magnanimous and generous.  That is what we are meant to be."

South Africans were the recipients of that kind of compassion during the struggle against apartheid, he said.

"I had the incredible privilege of being one of those who went around asking, 'please help us so one day we can be free,' and we got an incredible response. ... I don't believe there has ever been a country that has been prayed for as much as we were prayed for.  Our victory is really your victory, and it is a privilege to be able to say on behalf of millions, 'thank you.'"

In the first action of the WCC meeting Dec. 9, Bannister was elected and installed as moderator of the organization's U.S. Conference.  At last year's WCC assembly in Harare, Zimbabwe, she was elected as the youngest of eight regional presidents of the WCC.  The 29-year-old clergywoman is the pastor of a cooperative parish of four churches in rural west Kansas.

A Methodist from another tradition, Bishop McKinley Young of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Atlanta, was installed as first officer.

In a meditation during the opening worship service, Bannister brought her own perspective to the annual meeting's theme: "Reconciled in Christ: The Churches' Ministry of Reconciliation."

She described everyday situations of brokenness that she deals with as a pastor:  an 80-year-old woman who lives alone and is estranged from two of her children; divisiveness in one of her churches resulting from a forced merger of two congregations; and racism that emerged around a hog-processing plant possibly locating in a neighboring county.

"While the hog-processing plant was not a popular idea for good environmental reasons," she said, "it was a problem because of our inability to welcome the kinds of people who work in hog-processing plants.  Suddenly racism was everywhere in people's comments."

While the gross atrocities of war and genocide demand the attention of Christians on a global scale, people of faith also have much work to do in their own communities and communions, Bannister asserted.  "What a huge task the church ... has in modeling reconciliation in big and small ways, (in) being a means of grace ... to remind us truly of who we already are in Jesus Christ."

In his address to the gathering, Raiser described the act of reconciliation as a mutual one in which each side - the oppressor and the victim - gives up something. "It requires a kind of self-denial, of repentance from the act of injustice on the part of the perpetrator and a readiness to forgive and not ask for vengeance on the part of the victim."

He discussed South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which sought to bring about healing in the country after decades of overt and systemic racism.  In order to uncover the truth, people who confessed to crimes were granted amnesty from prosecution.

As people work to uncover the truth, Raiser said, the shame of the perpetrator and the hurt of the victim are both revealed and can be equally devastating.  Danger exists in opening up victims' wounds, while perpetrators can become immobilized in guilt.

The three essential dimensions of reconciliation, he stated, are justice, forgiveness and truth.

"These three essential dimensions do not constitute a linear sequence where one clearly follows the other, but rather a circular process that continues and goes back to the beginning until the genuine chance of relationships is achieved on the moral, spiritual and social (levels)."

Another speaker, Miroslav Volf, a professor of theology at Yale Divinity School, discussed his personal dilemma as he has examined his Christian convictions in light of the 1991-1995 war Serbia waged against his native Croatia.

Since reconciliation of humans with God is at the heart of the gospel message, "reconciliation between human beings ... must be at the center of the mission Christians pursue," Volf said.

At the same time, he pointed out, a natural tension exists between Christians' support for justice for the oppressed and the forgiveness and redemption the crucified Christ offers to the oppressors.

Volf described two means of "false" reconciliation: "cheap reconciliation" or "pacification," whereby justice is abdicated for the sake of peace; and "first justice, then reconciliation," in which the pursuit of strict justice brings about rectification for past wrongs but does little to bring about healing.

A true melding of reconciliation and justice, which he described in the terms of an embrace, has four components:

• the unconditionality of the will to embrace one another;
• the commitment of truth and justice as a precondition of the embrace;
• the will to embrace as the framework in which the search for truth and justice is carried out; and
• the embrace itself as the horizon toward which both parties strive.

"The hope of the world," he said, "lies in those who, despite the humiliation and suffering, have not given up on the will to embrace.  This is the extraordinary power of the victim, the power to transform the world."

*Smith is executive director of the Georgia United Methodist Communications Council.