All Saints Sermons

 

Preached by The Rev. Randolph K. Dales
The Second Sunday of Lent, March 11, 2001

All Saints Church, Wolfeboro, New Hampshire

 

         A six foot, five inch tall Masai in Kenya comments about his excellent English. By the time I was eight, my father discovered that I was unfit to be a cattle herder and I was useless, so there was nothing to do but send me to school.

         In the capital city of Kampala, just two weeks before the Ugandan presidential elections, the campaign manager for the leading challenger is suddenly arrested by the government for his own good.

         A Sudanese bishops wife weeps as she speaks of the loss of her son in the unending Civil War.

         Driving the rutted dirt back roads (if you can call them that) in Uganda, we see young children after school, still in their school uniforms, carry water home from the streams so that their families can cook dinner.

         In Kenya and Uganda, when asked, every person, without exception, acknowledged the loss of at least one family member to AIDS.

 

It doesnt take long to realize that being in East Africa is very different from living in the United States.

 

My wife Lynn and I were in Africa for two weeks to learn. Our trip marked the beginning of a three-year learning process as part of my work with the national churchs Standing Commission on Anglican and International Peace with Justice Concerns. Thats a very long name for a very small, twelve member group given the task of proposing international policy positions to the Executive Council and to the next General Convention in 2003. But before we can recommend, before we can suggest policy, we must learn, and a significant part of our learning process requires face to face conversations.

The Lakes Region of Africa (the East Africa Community of the Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda) along with the war-ravaged country Sudan comprise one of three areas worldwide to be studied by the commission during this triennium.

We went to the Lakes Region to learn about: (1) AIDS and the Churchs efforts to combat it; (2) the plight of women and children and the role of education. We went (3) to witness the effects of globalization and urbanization on this part of Africa, and (4) to understand more about Christian-Islamic tensions and regional conflicts.

The astounding numbers associated with AIDS in Africa are almost beyond our comprehension. In Uganda, the Anglican Church, our sister province, is a leading force in the effort to educate people about AIDS and to respond to its scourge. Uganda has a population of some 20 million people, nearly 8 million of whom are Anglicans. But almost one and a half million people are living with AIDS in that country. There are already 1.7 million AIDS orphans in Uganda. And thats only one country. If you look at the whole of Africa, there are already 10 million AIDS orphans, and researchers tell us that within 9 years (by the year 2010) that number will grow to 44 million.

Forty-four million children orphaned by AIDS and most of them also infected. How can we imagine that number? Well, it is equal to the number of all the elementary school children in the United States today. And one wonders why there is all this fuss with people demanding that multinational pharmaceutical manufactures stop fighting efforts to bring inexpensive AIDS medications to Africa. Why are people up in arms? If we do not act, and act fast, the population of African orphans will soon be equal to our entire school age population.

Lynn and I spent several days in both Uganda and Kenya learning about the churchs work to fight AIDS and hearing about the way churches are dealing with the effects of the regional conflicts and wars that plague this part of Africa. But the main focus of this trip was on the country of Sudan and the crushing effects of some 45 years of on-going civil war.

Five of us from the Standing Commission were asked to make the trip this past month because Anglican bishops from 21 of the 24 Sudanese dioceses were meeting in Kampala, Uganda. They had traveled out of their war-torn country to meet in a safe place, and they wanted us to hear their story. Its a story that takes a long time to tell, much more than the space of one sermon. But it is a story of real people, people we have met and whose faces we can recall, the faces of those 21 bishops and their wives who pleaded with us to find some way to let the world know and care about their suffering.

 

The civil war that has raged on in Sudan since the country gained its independence from Britain in 1956 is a complicated conflict. It pits the north versus the south, a predominantly Arab population against the mostly black Africans. It involves an Islamic government, backed by the National Islamic Front, which pushes for the application of the radical Islamic law called Sharia, versus the mostly Christian communities in the west and south. But it is even more complicated than that. In the south there are at least two factions, one of predominantly Dinka tribes seeking reform and the other based in the Nuer tribes which seek full independence. The United Nations estimates that over two million people have died in this seemingly endless civil war, and unfortunately, all sides in this conflict have been guilty of human rights violations and the horror that is now called ethnic cleansing.

The Christian people, our Anglican sisters and brothers we talked to, are not asking for military support. They dont want arms and munitions. They want the world to find some way to stop the war. As Bishop Daniel Deng put it, I was born in the war, and I am getting old in the war. Many of our children for generations have had no schoolingWe are losing our language, our culture, because we have been at war for almost half a century. When is the world going to come and rescue us? In Kuwait, two million people didnt die. In Kosovo, two million people didnt die. Our people are asking, After 35 years of fighting, why cant the U.S. intervene?

Those are hard questions to answer. And one suspects that the racism which infects our culture clouds our perception of where American interests necessitate action.

 

Our lessons this morning began with Abram camped out under the starry skies of the Negev desert confronted with the unrelenting voice of doubt. God had promised that he would father a new nation. He had left his homeland, but he and his aging wife had produced no children, and the people of Canaan did not appear willing to hand over their land to a yet-to-be-born nation. How could he find the faith to go on? How does one wait patiently when the odds seem stacked against us?

In his letter to the Philippians, Paul exhorts the Christian community to stand firm and patient for the coming of the Lord. And he reminds them, Our commonwealth is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior. Our commonwealth, our citizenship, is not Greek or Roman; it is not Sudanese or American. We are, first and foremost, members of Gods kingdom, our citizenship is in another realm, with a ruler far different from the rulers of this present age.

How can we wait patiently? How can we trust in Gods ultimate victory when the world seems so powerfully against us?

 

The most amazing thing that we witnessed in our days in Africa, more striking than all the differences we could point to, was the faith, the absolute trust that people put in Christ. The mother who lost her son, the bishop who has watched his people abducted into slavery, the elderly man who fears that he, and perhaps his children and his childrens children, will never know life without war all speak with a clear conviction, We are sustained by Christ.

How does one wait patiently? How does one find the strength to go on? How can we be sustained by our commonwealth, our citizenship, in Gods kingdom when the powers of death and destruction seem to rule?

 

Jesus, in todays gospel, grieves for the citizens of his countrys capital, O Jerusalem, O Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not.

Why didnt Jerusalem respond? Why did the well-to-do remain closed to a message that was so readily welcomed by the common folk of Galilee? Was it because their lives were so secure? Was it because they had nothing to fear, their religion and their culture telling them that all was O.K.?

In the final weeks of Epiphany we heard Jesus words to those who were ready to hear: How blest are you poorhow blessed are you that hunger(and) weep now How blessed are you when men hate, revile and exclude you. Jesus was speaking to people who were aware of their sufferings, women and men who knew the oppression of political domination and the power of disease to kill the body.

Somehow because they were aware of their suffering, those people were strangely blessed. For they were open to the kingdom; they were ready for its good news. For they knew they had no strength in themselves, no one to save them, but God alone.

And how much are we, you and I, like those people of Jerusalem?

The other day I read a little piece about the transitory nature of our faith. Paul Wilkes wrote that, the life of faith is a pathetically uneven adventure, with great moments of surety followed by doubt that paralyzes our very ability to think And we wonder why God slips away from us? He answers his own question. If our lives are crammed with noise and activity; if our psyches are so well defended and protected; if our reading is mind-numbing, banal and crass; if our acquaintances chase aspirations rising only to the worldly and transitory what can any of us expect?

For Jesus, it was the poor, the suffering, the downtrodden, who were blessed with faith, for they knew the reality that ultimately their hope rests with God alone. That faith, that blessedness, we witnessed in the people of the Sudan.

What are we to learn from them, apart from the obvious need for us not to ignore their plight? What have they to teach us about being Christian people?

Paul Wilkes tells of Viktor Frankl, the Jewish psychiatrist and philosopher, who, as a prisoner in a German concentration camp, concluded that everything save one thing could be taken from us. When all choices were denied, all options closed off, in reality only one thing remained: the ability to choose ones attitude in any given set of circumstances.

Frankls attitude is just another word for faith, an approach to ones life that flies in the face of adversity and war, of illness or emptiness. What we learned from these men and women from Sudan is that nearly everything can be taken from us, but ultimately faith cannot.

You and I may never know the pain of war or the suffering of an epidemic like AIDS. But every life knows circumstances that shatter our resolve, mock our confidence and leave us feeling that there is no escape. Yet no matter what life may take from us, it cannot take our faith. And thus we can say with St. Paul, and with those from Sudan, So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day.

That is the powerful message of faith shared with us by the seemingly powerless Christians of Sudan. Thanks be to God. Amen.