Fifty Years Chasing Truth and Justice

Eternal God, who tarries often beyond the time we hope for, but not beyond the time appointed by Thee; from whom comes in due season the truth that cannot lie, the counsel that cannot fail; make us faithful to stand upon our watchtower, and wait for what You would say to us. Amen.

As I reflect on the past fifty years, I realize that truth and justice have been a recurring theme in my ministry, characterized by two questions: Whose truth is it, and whom does it serve at whose expense? The first question establishes the truth, the second justice. Fighting for truth and justice over the years has made me a little sympathetic with old Pilate when he uttered those immortal four words you may remember: "Truth? What is truth?" We all think we know what the truth is when it's going our way, but is it really the truth?

What follows is a personal story, so please bear with an excess of personal pronouns. It begins in 1958 in my senior year at UCLA, when upon graduation I traded a childhood dream of a career in medicine for the priesthood and headed to the Big Apple for seminary. Filled with youthful enthusiasm, I headed east to conquer or convert the world, whichever came first. I remember the naïve boldness with which I took up the cudgel, even before my studies began. It was a mild summer day in New York City, and I happened upon a young lady "in her cups," as the British would say, drowning her sorrows in an upscale restaurant in Central Park. I recall with embarrassment my determination to straighten her out. After all, thought I, weren't priests meant to fix people and straighten them out? She was drunk, and this young kid was on a mission to save her. (Since then, one of my favorite bumper stickers became the one that says, "Jesus, save me from your followers!") You see, I had the naïve notion that if truth is logical and most people are rational, then all I needed to do was find the right combination of words to explain to her the enlightening truth of Christianity and the damsel in distress would see the light and amend her ways. In my youthful enthusiasm, I believed that truth would convince if it was explained correctly. What I didn't yet fully appreciate was that truth isn't always logical and people aren't always rational.

In my naïveté, heart went before head, and I believed sincerity could convince and the Christian Faith would sell itself. What I also didn't yet understand was that sincerity is sometimes more entertaining than convincing, and what makes Christians is not what you say but what you do. I was years from understanding T. S. Eliot, who once said that Christianity doesn't always convince people or soften the edges of life—it just makes them more cutting. And I was a lifetime from understanding the wisdom of Amos Elon, who made famous the notion that hell is the truth realized too late—a wisdom I have come to heed and appreciate. However, I did soon come to abandon the foolish notion that there is any sweet reasonableness to truth, for generally there is not. Truth is only sweet and reasonable when we want it to serve our own ego. And over the next fifty years I would learn that truth usually stands alone, sometimes bravely on the gallows and sometimes alone on the Cross, but rarely at center stage and never at our beck and call.

Upon graduation from seminary, with a wife on one arm and a baby in the other, I sailed off to save Africa from God knows what. I had learned a little, but not much, about life and had a mixed-up notion that Christianity has something to do with saving people, but I wasn't quite sure of my part in it. Years later I became friends with a New Yorker cartoonist who, in the days when saving the whales was the Great Cause, drew a cartoon showing two whales spewing off the coast of California and saying to each other, "But can they save themselves?"

Out of over fifty African countries, I chose to go to one of the most troubled. Known now as the peaceful Republic of Namibia, it was then governed illegally by the apartheid government of South Africa. To refresh your memory, apartheid was a vicious racial system forced upon sixteen million blacks in South Africa by a tiny white government. Under that regime, I discovered truth in a totally new guise in the strangled voice of an oppressed black majority. Recently I came across some old notes scribbled to myself shortly after I arrived in Africa: "SWA, beautiful country, beautiful people, hateful race relations; struggling to learn new words and phrases of African languages; never experienced the power of evil as in apartheid; feeling great frustration and anger at the racial situation; don't know if I'll be able to make it here." We did make it; but we didn't turn out to be very good citizens, because that meant you had to live by the rules of apartheid, by which truth and justice were perverted to serve the white minority. For most whites that meant simply, "My country, right or wrong." T. S. Eliot once said that living in a crazy environment like that is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober ... she's my mother, so I'll support what she does." We were living in a land of total denial where everyone was indoctrinated to believe that whites were superior to blacks and born to be their master. I thought a lot in those days about how it must have been once upon a time in Nazi Germany.

The African nation I chose to live in had become a moral swamp. The depth of the swamp was seen when the government conjured up biblical justifications for their claim that blacks and whites were not created equal and even had separate heavens; and for the next half century podiums and pulpits all over the land supported the twisted evil of apartheid. The pounding on many podiums and some pulpits never convinced the blacks, but it would still be decades before they would see their freedom. And when the torch of freedom was finally lit in South Africa, what did they call the Nelson Mandelas and countless others who had been banned, hounded, jailed, and executed in the cause of racial equality ... what did the white South African government call those who lit the torch of freedom? They called them terrorists. Nelson Mandela, the first freely elected president of South Africa, was called a terrorist. Even Margaret Thatcher called President Nelson Mandela a terrorist!

It's important to understand that the hideous darkness that fell over those two countries for fifty years was engineered not by bad men, but by upstanding Christians like you and me who were convinced they were right. It is said it was the same in Nazi Germany. Chesterton once observed that the diabolical operates in the modern world through people of good character but for whom sin is not real; and whenever there is no awareness of sin, truth becomes relative and serves only those in power. Misguided truth, however sincere and even prayed over, is no truth at all. Now, please understand this point: those who constructed the racial system of apartheid were God-fearing people who thought they were doing God's will. They said their prayers and went faithfully to their Dutch Reformed Church. But praying and going to Church will never turn wrong into right or falsehood into truth. Never.

I remember hearing Africans say of the Godly Bishop under whom I served, "He cares for us in our suffering, and if he's a communist [as the government claimed], then I want to be a communist." He was no communist, and the Africans knew nothing about communism; but they knew about love, and they recognized people who were kind and cared, even as the South African government called such people subversive. Actions still speak louder than words, and a skeptical world continues to say to do-gooders, Christian or otherwise, "Talk is cheap, so don't tell us the truth you believe in; show us. Don't preach to us that God is love; show us." And this I say to you: don't trumpet too loudly how much you or your Church love people; just show them, for if you don't show love, words mean nothing. Truth will always speak for itself.

I was learning that speaking for truth and standing for justice had a terrible price. It was costing the blacks their lives and the whites their freedom. After years of lodging formal protests over police treatment of the African students in our mission schools, I was visited by a high-ranking member of the South African Police, Major Pretorius, who said to me, "Padre, I suggest you watch what you say and do, because you're courting disaster." Courting disaster could mean many things, none of them good. One African leader had recently courted disaster and died mysteriously in his police cell in Pretoria. That was Steve Biko, whose unexplained death made international news. Courageous journalists were courting disaster and being banned or put under house arrest. My Bishop had courted disaster and was deported. Was I next? One of my favorite books in seminary was by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, entitled The Cost of Discipleship. It was about the cost of living the truth in Germany during World War II, which cost Bonhoeffer his life. And now it seemed like the ghastly racist evil of Nazi Germany had been reborn in the racist evil of South Africa, and blacks were paying with their lives as the Jews had paid with theirs. In this setting, however, while the blacks were paying with their lives, the whites never did. There was a "white truth" and a "black truth": the one got you off; the other got you killed. I realized that Pilate's question was now more relevant than ever, and I was beginning to wonder if there was any truth left.

By now we had moved to South Africa, and after ten years the ax finally fell. After preaching a Lenten sermon about truth and justice in a prominent cathedral in South Africa, I was given ninety days to get out of the country. Biblical truth had infuriated the authorities, and for preaching it I was now on the growing list of banned undesirables. I had learned that following the Gospel can be a costly business, and seeking too much truth and justice can really mess up your life. My wife and I had five kids at the time, all in school. Africa was the only home they had known. Where were we to go, and what were we to do? We had to get out of South Africa, but we didn't want to leave Africa without the chance to live and work in an independent African country.

We chose Uganda, then a relatively peaceful and somewhat prosperous country—until the week before we arrived. That was when General Idi Amin seized power. Our timing in moving to Uganda couldn't have been worse, but it promised plenty of excitement. But, alas, there was no use looking for truth or justice in what was about to become a bloody military dictatorship. And here I discovered a great irony: whereas in South Africa there was not always a community supporting Christian principles of truth and justice, in Uganda there was. People don't generally know it, but Uganda is over 90 percent Christian, and the Church is a vibrant force, except in matters of politics. In those days the Church was led by courageous clergy who spoke out against Amin's injustice and were being systematically eliminated. Bishops were disappearing and being executed. Archbishop Janani Luwum, a happy friend to everyone, was assassinated by Amin personally and found later with four bullets in him in the shape of a Cross. All hell had broken loose in this Christian nation, and the faithful looked on in disbelief, powerless but defiant in their condemnation of what was happening. Many a day I anguished over truth and justice and even wondered if God was dead. Day after day, truth was dying valiantly but violently at the barrel of a gun. Fear and terror were everywhere. After two years of this horror I gave up searching for truth and settled for survival. We had to flee Uganda for our lives, and my dream for Africa was in tatters.

God's ways of working have never been stranger than when we left Uganda, discouraged and despondent. As that door closed, a most unlikely one opened in a newly independent African country, where I was called to be their first Bishop. When we arrived, the Republic of Botswana was barely six years old but already had one of the most enlightened constitutions in the world. God had done His thing, and at last we found a place where truth and justice prevailed. The next seven years in Botswana were good, and there was plenty of truth and justice. But my old nemesis was not far away: South Africa was just next door, always there to remind me I was still a prohibited immigrant in that country. They took delight in visiting that curse upon me every time I traveled outside Botswana and had to pass through South Africa, but by now it didn't matter.

Pilate asked a good question, and we need to ask it too. What is truth? Sometimes the Church gets God's truth right, and sometimes it doesn't. Vestries and Church councils at all levels can be guilty of betraying the truth when they have a hidden agenda, and sometimes they do. No human institution is free from hidden agendas. But the greatest betrayal of truth comes when religious institutions get the truth wrong and think they are right. That's when the Church is most dangerous. There's an ancient prayer that says, "From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth, O God of truth, deliver us." We need that prayer a lot these days.

Like God, real truth is not always our best friend, for it confronts us in our attitudes and prejudices, our habits and addictions, our relationships and the way we live our lives. I think this is what Jesus was talking about when He said, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free" (John 8:32). But for many the cost is too great to be set free, and they settle for limited freedom and let the truths they live by go unexamined. Still others settle down with comfortable prejudices and communicate the limited truth of their lives with a wink and a nod.

I have learned that in civil societies like our own, falsehood can masquerade as truth, where it often parades as "conservative truth" or "liberal truth." One is truth unexamined, the other truth undigested. The one says, "The Bible (or the Church) says it, and that's it for me." The other says, "The Bible (or the Church) is irrelevant, and that's not it for me." A conservative's truth wonders why people don't behave as religion dictates; a liberal's truth wonders why they do. Chances are neither is entirely right. Unexamined truth is as dangerous as undigested truth, and swallowing the truth half-chewed is as bad as swallowing it whole.

And today in corridors of power and places of prayer, where is truth to be found? One wonders. Only a few months ago a major newspaper carried a front-page headline that read, "Most Governments Lie to Each Other" (USA Today, June 16, 2011). Imagine that! That's us, folks. And we, the people ... when will the lying stop, and where? We don't like to hear it, but to keep quiet and not seek truth and justice is a form of lying. And here are the results of that: when we lie, the ancients tell us, we shake trust, we generate stress, we lose self-esteem, and we corrupt our character. All that happens when we lie. Imagine that.