Nobel Laurate Archbishop Tutu calls on Anglicans to accept gay bishop

[Ian David]

I strongly urge everyone to follow the link and read the whole thing.


Tutu calls on Anglicans to accept gay bishop
The worldwide Anglican Communion should support its first openly gay bishop, the Rt Rev Gene Robinson, Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu said this past weekend


Monday, November 14, 2005
by Spero News

The worldwide Anglican Communion should support its first openly gay bishop, the Rt Rev Gene Robinson, Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu said this weekend during a visit to the University of North Florida.

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Declared Tutu: “I am deeply saddened at a time when we've got such huge problems ... that we should invest so much time and energy in this issue…I think God is weeping.”

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“Jesus did not say, ‘I if I be lifted up I will draw some’,” Tutu said, preaching in two morning festival services in Pasadena, California. “Jesus said, ‘If I be lifted up I will draw all, all, all, all, all. Black, white, yellow, rich, poor, clever, not so clever, beautiful, not so beautiful. It’s one of the most radical things. All, all, all, all, all, all, all, all. All belong. Gay, lesbian, so-called straight. All, all are meant to be held in this incredible embrace that will not let us go. All.”

He continued: “Isn’t it sad, that in a time when we face so many devastating problems – poverty, HIV/AIDS, war and conflict - that in our Communion we should be investing so much time and energy on disagreement about sexual orientation?”

Tutu said the Communion, which “used to be known for embodying the attribute of comprehensiveness, of inclusiveness, where we were meant to accommodate all and diverse views, saying we may differ in our theology but we belong together as sisters and brothers” now seems “hell-bent on excommunicating one another. God must look
on and God must weep.”

<snip>

Source: Ekklesia
http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/


More:
http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?idCategory=33&idsub=128&id=2141

I don't usually solicit people to nominate my own message posts for top placement, but in this case I am making an exception. NOMINATE PLEASE!

Archbishop Desmond Tutu
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.


Desmond Mpilo Tutu (born October 7, 1931) is a South African cleric and activist who rose to worldwide fame during the 1980s as an opponent of apartheid. Tutu was the first black South African Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, and primate of the Church of the Province of Southern Africa. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.

Background

Born in Klerksdorp, Transvaal, Tutu moved with his family to Johannesburg at age 12. Although he wanted to become a physician, his family could not afford the training and he followed his father's footsteps into teaching. Tutu studied at the Pretoria Bantu Normal College from 1951 through 1953. Tutu went on to teach at Johannesburg Bantu High School where he remained until 1957; he resigned following the passage of the Bantu Education Act, protesting the poor educational prospects for black South Africans. He continued his studies, this time in theology, and in 1960 was ordained as an Anglican priest. He became chaplain at the University of Fort Hare, a hotbed of dissent and one of the few quality universities for black students in the southern part of Africa.

Tutu left his post as chaplain and travelled to King's College, London, (1962–1966), where he received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Theology. He returned to South Africa and from 1967 until 1972 used his lectures to highlight the circumstances of the black population. He wrote a letter to Prime Minister Vorster, in which he described the situation in South Africa as a "powder barrel that can explode at any time." The letter was never answered.

In 1972 Tutu returned to the UK, where he was appointed vice-director of the Theological Education Fund of the World Council of Churches, at Bromley in Kent. He returned to South Africa in 1975 and was appointed Dean of St. Mary's Cathedral in Johannesburg—the first black person to hold that position.

He has been married to Leah Nomalizo Tutu since 1955. They have four children: Trevor Thamsanqa, Theresa Thandeka, Naomi Nontombi and Mpho Andrea.

In 2005, Tutu will receive an honorary degree from the University of North Florida, one of the many universities in North America and Europe where he has taught.

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmond_Tutu

[mom cat]

1. I am honored to kick and nominate!

:hug:

[freestyle]

2. Bishop Tutu is one of the best people in the world.

South Africa was the first country to put equal rights regardless of sexual orientation into its constitution. There are few people with more moral standing than Bishop Tutu. He exemplifies what a man of God is supposed to be about. He also shows that the global south is not a monolith of condemnation. When many in the Anglican Communion are saying and doing all the wrong things, I can be proud to share a religion with someone like Bishop Tutu. We are all God's children.

[Helga Scow Stern]

3. I saw Tutu in Santa Barbara recently...here are notes from his talk:

I felt in the presence of true greatness.

Desmond Tutu. “Reconciling Love – A Millennium Mandate”

Santa Barbara, CA 11/04/2005

He opened his talk saying it was really “Reflections of a Wounded Healer,” and mentioned a book or study on this topic but I couldn’t make it out. (Could it have been Henri Nouwen’s The Wounded Healer, http://www.stnews.org/Books-1496.htm ?)

(Forgive the sketchiness of my recall. I took notes, but it was dark and I ended up with practically as much ink on my white shirt as on the page.)

Tutu talked about the program in South Africa, Restorative Justice, in which perpetrators of apartheid atrocities are granted amnesty if they publicly tell the truth about all the evils they have done. They have to come forward, accuse themselves of their crimes, and be heard by groups of the victims of these crimes, those who had lost loved ones or who had been injured in the violence.

Outrage provokes a reprisal. Retaliation is endless. It never ends and goes through the generations, with one act of revenge always followed by another. In South Africa they considered using the courts and penal system to punish perpetrators of apartheid atrocities, but there were far too many crimes, so they had to come up with something else. They came up with the idea of amnesty in exchange for the perpetrators’ full disclosure of what they had done. Having to apologize can be more difficult than dying, and Tutu admitted his own immense reluctance to apologize to his wife, even in the privacy of their bedroom.

Restorative justice provides closure for people who otherwise have none. For instance, closure is the burial of murdered loved ones. A woman begged for at least one bone of her son so she could bury it and have some kind of end to her grieving. They never found her son’s bones, but they could offer the reconciliation process. There were many secret burial places on farms. A man looked into one of these mass graves and said, I recognize my brother because I bought him those shoes.

There is a deep, deep longing in the heart for peace. While some were afraid there would be an orgy of bloodshed and violence once apartheid was defeated, that wasn’t the case because restorative justice is actually much more appealing to the human heart than revenge. Forgiveness and reconciliation are such amazing gifts of the spirit, such sweet things to savor in life, that they gave meaning and acceptance to those who had lost loved ones and were injured in the violence. A man who had been blinded said after a public reconciliation hearing that his eyes had been returned through the reconciliation process (although he was still physically blind.) Another man who had lost his son said that it was not in vain because in the end it contributed to this amazing process of collective forgiveness. The worst thing for anyone who has suffered an injustice is for it not to be heard, for anyone to pretend that it didn’t happen.

Truth is a necessary part of reconciliation. Forgiveness has to be confrontational. You can’t just let bygones be bygones, or those bygones will come back and haunt you. A pain remains in the pit of the tummy, and this pain must be articulated and acknowledged or it will constantly fester. It will erupt in violence when least expected, at the least likely provocation. Forgiveness is a community process, which requires work, confrontation, self-accusation, and telling the truth. There is a deep, deep longing for peace in the human heart. It is far more satisfying to have reconciliation than revenge.

There is no future without forgiveness.

Humanity needs to be recovered, not further trampled upon, in a system that has trodden callously on people’s rights, dignity, and lives. The perpetrators need the victims to help recover their humanity. A person is only a person through other persons.



Presubmitted questions for the end of the talk:

Is violence ever justified?

We must learn to see the good in the world and stop focussing only on the horror. Love is happening all the time, all over the place. We need to pay a lot more attention to it. Look at the huge upswelling of protest in response to the Iraq war. You think it made no difference, but it did, even if not to the Bush administration. (Even he begged the White House to give the weapons inspectors more time, to no avail.) This war has brought an outburst of active compassion into the world in the form of these protests. (He had thanked us for demonstrating for sanctions against the apartheid government. When we mildly clapped in response, he waved a magic wand over us to turn us into South Africans who wanted to clap for the Americans who had helped end apartheid. The crowd went wild.)

In an ideal world, there would be no killing, not even for religious purposes. (This brought a huge laugh and wild applause.)

Because sometimes it is necessary to stop someone like Hitler, there are moral rules which must be followed for war to be considered:
1) It must be sanctioned by a legitimate authority.
2) There must be absolutely no other option.



What are the chances of healing the pain of racism and ending racism in this country?

Tutu was shocked on his first visit to the US in 1972 to sense the bitterness among African Americans. This is a pain you don’t learn about as an African American, it is taken in with mother’s milk. The only hope of healing racism and the devastation of Native Americans and all displaced indigenous peoples is to take a full account of what happened. He had just come from Greensboro, NC, where the town is attempting a restorative justice project, truth and reconciliation, around events that happened November 3, 1979 (involving Native Americans?)



What could Christianity learn from other religions?

Tutu shot back, “That God is not a Christian!”

Tell me that God is going to look at someone like the Dalai Lama, say he is one of my finest examples of a human being, someone who can fill Central Park even though he can’t even speak English properly, and then say, but sorry, I can’t admit you into heaven because you haven’t accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior. What utter nonsense!

Last question:

If you had but one wish to accomplish one more thing in the world in your lifetime, what would it be, and how could we help?

How about ending poverty? (With that he bowed, paused for a second, and walked off the stage.)

[nofurylike]

4. thank you for posting this, IanDB1! Great! nom and kick eom

[xchrom]

5. i love bishop tutu -- and i am thrilled he's an episcopalian!

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