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CANADIAN FRIENDS DINNER, ONTARIO
SATURDAY NOVEMBER 15, 2014.
My Dear Friends, allow me to begin by offering you an apology for some circumstances that have been entirely beyond my control. In his letter of invitation sent to me in late August of this year, Canon Garland had this to say: “As you may know, we usually have a Bishop from the Anglican Church in the Caribbean as our guest speaker and he brings us up to date on the latest direction of the Church there and tells us of any new mission initiatives in the area.” Accordingly, my apology speaks for itself – I am not a Bishop, and will never become a Bishop. So my apology is that you are not getting the real thing this year; and you have only yourselves to blame for that! Nevertheless, after having heard from Canon Garland on that very important point of your tradition, and not wanting to disappoint Leonard Leader who has tried for several years to get me here, I decided to ask the bishops in the CPWI what they wanted me to say on their behalf.
Now they happened to be meeting in solemn retreat in Florida, and I asked Archbishop John Holder to glean from them what I should be pointing out to you on their behalf. They very carefully andgraciously discussed the matter, with the usual gravity of purpose and depth of spirit for which all bishops are well known.They eventually agreed on eight very important issues that I was authorized to submit to you on their behalf. So tonight, although I have never been, and will never be a bishop, I am pleased to speak to you with the authority of the bishops delegated to me just for half-an-hour or less. To assume the dizzy heights of the purple is not an easy venture by any means, so if you notice any wobbling on my part at the end of this address, please be assured that it will not be from the effects of strong drink, but only from the effects of the purple spirits.
Of course I am also mindful of the fact that this annual event is under the named patronage of Bishop Arthur Brown and Bishop Basil Tonks. Bishop Tonks forged his early ministry in the Diocese of the Windward Islands along with his brother Dennis – both were Codringtonians. I also am a proud Codringtonian, as well as an honorary Canon of the Diocese of the Windward Islands and a Commissary to that Bishop in the USA. Bishop Brown had long been an icon of West Indian Anglican admiration, not only for his passionate support for many significant causes and persons, but also for his robust pastoral leadership amongst the people of faith whom God has blessed with ebony grace. I was honored to share ministry with him when we dedicated the Church of the Nativity in 2002, the first Anglican Church built by Afro-Anglicans in this country, in Scarborough, under the dynamic and visionary leadership of my fellow countryman Canon Donald Butler.
It is always a joy and a pleasure to be invited to Canada to share in the faithful witness of fellow Christians, and to affirm the significance and value of what it means to be strangers and pilgrims in this land of promise and fulfillment. Indeed, it was from this land that the Anglican Church sent the financial resources for me to be trained at Codrington College. It was there that I happened to become the first person of color to lead the College at a very crucial transitional point in its history. That was the same College that eventually trained the person who would become the first Black Anglican Bishop in this country, Bishop Peter Fenty, whose presence and ministry we endorse and celebrate with great pride and admiration. It was also in this country that I met the late Dr. Lawrence Jones, then Dean of Howard University School of Divinity, who invited me to consider joining his School faculty. I did so in the summer of 1983, and the rest is history.
For millions of us whose umbilical cords are buried in islands and regions far from our current places of abode, we have often come to concede with some feelings of regret that the lands that gave us birth were not always able to sustain us with bread. We have had to say with the psalmist that our salvation has come “neither from the East, nor from the West, nor yet from the South.” But that has not meant in the least that the land of our bread is in any way more crucial to our existence than the land of our birth. Our ongoing task is always to ensure that the integration of both spheres of our existence, places of birth and places of bread, however distant they may happen to be, is a never-ending obligation for sustaining our own sense of worth and identity. It is also an obligation for the creation and maintenance of cultural moorings and shades of belonging amongst the generations of those who are yet unborn. For not only must we never forget where we have come from, nor fail to tell the story to our offspring, but we must never neglect to link our patterns of growth and success to the unmerited grace of God, nor must we turn our backs on those we left behind, whose fortunes have been strangled by forces of circumstance, or by surges of bad luck. They too are objects of God’s gracious and providential love, and they also know how to count their blessings in ways that can be as strange as they are mysterious.
For those of us who are privileged to sojourn in the North, therefore, we should have no excuse for failing to keep in touch with our people in the South; and I don’t mean south of the border! This is why the reflections of the CPWI Bishops that I have been asked to convey to you are not only authentic for their substance, but also critical for our need to respond to, and share in, their concerns in multiple ways. As the Bishops discussed what they considered to be the critical issues affecting and impacting on their ministry, they agreed on eight focal points of concern. Here they are: 1. The economic conditions in the region – characterized mainly by enormous national debts, high rates of unemployment, a depletion of natural resources, and diminished opportunities for emigration. 2. The exponential rise in rates of crime, largely due to the deportation of criminals from the North. Here is one exception where not salvation but incarceration cometh from the North. It was shocking to hear of the three young men who robbed the members of the congregation at gun-point as Mass was about to begin at St. Phillip’s Anglican Church, Georgetown, Guyana on All Saints Sunday, two weeks ago. 3. The growth in human trafficking that has assaulted the very fabric of social relations and human dignity. 4. The negative influence of conservative evangelical theology on the region, whether by means of the media, or by the mushrooming of religious and quasi-religious groupings with dubious motivations. 5. The persistence of the drug trade coupled with the increase in gun violence. 6. The impact of climate change – the Caribbean has always been quite hot, so I suppose that the bishops are observing that global warming is making the region even hotter. 7. The bishops mentioned the contribution of Canadian companies operating in the region to the development of the region. It was not quite clear to me whether this was a positive concern or a negative one. So we might wish to seek some clarification about the contribution that Canadian enterprises are making to the region as a whole. My suspicion is that it was meant to be listed as a positive issue, and perhaps one that needed to be further strengthened and encouraged. 8. In spite of all the infelicities and challenges that are being experienced by the people of faith in the Caribbean, the bishops were still very thankful and impressed by the vibrancy of the peoples’ faith, and with their determination to keep on keeping on. God,for them, as indeed for us, is still in sovereign control.
I wonder what must have been going through your minds as I have relayed to you what the bishops asked me to tell you. I wonder if you noticed that there was no begging list, no items of need, no semblance of requests for help. This is quite a remarkable development in the quality of relationships between a developed region and a developing region, between the richer and the poorer sectors of the global community in general, and the Anglican Communion in particular. The tendency in partnerships between the rich and the poor has always been to place a lighterfocus on the verb “To Be”, and a heavier emphasis on the verb “To Have”, or “To Have Not”. So often in international relations the worth of peoples, and groups of peoples, is measured by the size of wealth, or access to wealth, rather than by the full measure of what it means to be fully human. For even though we have it on good biblical authority that a person’s life does not consist in the abundance of things which a person possesses, we are almost universally committed to the proposition that it is always better to say here it is, than where it is. So my understanding of the ongoing relationships between the Canadian Friends To West Indian Christians (CFWIC) and the CPWI are best pursued not so much on the basis of what Canadians can do for the West Indians at home, but rather on what are the patterns of common witness and mutual responses to the challenges we face. What are the possibilities for addressing them together? Partnerships rather than “Providerships” must clearly be the measure of these Relationships.
But having said all of that, I would be remiss if I did not draw to your attention one particular series of structural situations in the region. As I do this, I wish to invoke the spirits of two Old Testament figures – Nehemiah and Haggai. You may remember that Nehemiah was saddened by the fact that while he was living well as the cup-bearer to King Artaxerxesin Persia, conditions back in his homeland of Jerusalem were absolutely deplorable. The King asked Nehemiah why he was looking so sad when he was not sick. Nehemiah replied: “why should my face not be sad, when the city, the place of my ancestors’ graves lies waste, and its gates have been destroyed by fire?” The King immediately gave him leave to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the walls and to restore some semblance of social and religious order. My main focus on him is the high level of disquiet that he was experiencing in the land of his bread, while there was so much destruction and decay in the land of his birth. On the other hand, the prophet Haggai was decisive that things would not get better in Jerusalem until the House of the Lord had been rebuilt. Haggai asked the question: “Is it a time for you yourselves to live in your paneled houses while this house lies in ruins?” Haggai connected the hard times in Jerusalem with the ruin of the Temple, God’s house. Rebuild the Temple,he said, and things would get better.
Now although I would not wish to go as far as Haggai did, there is something that troubles my spirit to see that so many of our major Anglican church edifices in the CPWI are badly in need of repair and renovation. I refer particularly to St. George’s Cathedral in Guyana, St. George’s Church in Grenada, St. Michael’s Cathedral in Barbados, and St. John’s Cathedral Antigua, where I was baptized, confirmed, ordained, and installed as an Honorary Canon. The repair and rebuilding costs for all of these edifices are enormous, and our counterparts in all those countries are at their wits end to get on with the tasks before them. It may well be that there are fertile ideas and initiatives that can emerge from the CFWIC membership here that might aid the several tasks in those countries. Perhaps many of you can form yourselves into specific task forces to monitor what is happening with these buildings, and explore a variety of ways to engage in some practical and productive forms of partnership and expertise. Please note that no bishop has asked me to say any of this, but I have drawn my inspiration and courage from Nehemiah and Haggai. So you can blame them for any “boldacious” gestures on my part!
In the meantime however, questions arise in my mind about what happens in between the Annual Dinners of the CFWIC. I would want to refuse to believe that you only meet to eat, and that once a year. I am sure that there is much more to the movement and spirit of an organization as critically important as this. In her letter to me last month, President Elsa Jones referred to the ministry of CFWIC as a supportive ministry, that is, a ministry that can be supportive of the Caribbean clergy in North America, supportive of West Indian Anglicans in North America, or supportive of West Indian congregations and clergy in the Caribbean. At least, that is my assumption. My vision of a robust program in which CFWIC is actively engaged would most certainly include those three areas of support to which I have just referred, but it would also embrace a much livelier and more energetic range of internal activities that would strengthen and sustain a variety of partnerships throughout Canada and the Caribbean. The most critical asset that CFWIC enjoys is that it has Nehemiah status, it is located in the North, it knows what the King has to eat and drink, it knows what the King knows, and it knows how to share partnerships and be in fertile solidarity with those who are not that close to the King. You may well ask, “What King is he talking about?”
Let me hasten to say that I am not referring to the Head of State, even though Canada continues to be a Monarchy. It is not a Republic like the southern neighbor. By “King” I am referring to the source of Power, Privilege, Property, and Possibility. Nehemiah-minded people know how to leverage the power around them. Nehemiah people know how to push the envelope with the access to the privileges they enjoy, not only for themselves, but also for others who are deserving of sharing in them. Nehemiah people know the true value and extent of the property around them and the means at their disposal for extending the benefits of that property. Nehemiah people know how to explore the possibilities within them and around them, and how to spare no effort in activating such possibilities for their almost limitless potential. Why? Because Nehemiah people know how to make a very little go a very long way, they know how to share in their benefits of prosperity, chiefly because they were brought up to know how to share in the agonies and tragedies of poverty. Nehemiah people never forget where they have come from, even if they are determined to work very hard at not returning to those days of hard times and dark nights.
To carry the Old Testament motif a little further, Iam talking about a King of Persia, rather than a King of Babylon. Nehemiah lived in Persia, and Persian kings were favorably disposed to God’s people. Cyrus, King of Persia was spoken of as God’s anointed, God’s messiah (Isaiah 45); while the kings of Babylon were not friends of God’s people. In their Babylonian Exile, the people of God were so hurt that they sang this song: “O daughter of Babylon, wasted with misery, blessed shall he be that taketh thy children and throweth them against the stones.” (Psalm 137) So Nehemiah people how to avoid turning their sojourn in Persia into a Babylonian exile. Persia keeps in touch with the homeland, but Babylon prefers to ignore and destroy it. Persia allows for rebuilding the homeland, while Babylon drains the homeland. It is for all the members of CFWIC to determine tonight whether they will activate their Nehemiah status – with all the power, privileges, property, and possibilities around them, or whether they will sit down and weep besides the waters of Babylon, yearning for, and yelling about their homeland,especially in the ice and snow, but doing little or nothing about it. I urge you, my Dear Friends, do not turn your Persian possibilities into Babylonian impotence.
What then are some of the Persian possibilities? Let me very briefly suggest seven of them before I close. Perhaps you will recall that I said earlier that Partnerships and not “Providerships” sustain good Relationships. I am unswervingly committed to the proposition that out of the crucible of strong partnerships of resilient faith, active hope, and mutual love, God always will provide.
First, if CFWIC does not already have an authentic and up-to-date Website, then one should be set up shortly. Additionally, CFWIC should engage in a Facebook Group, open to members and Canadian and West Indian congregations, where information and concerns can be shared systematically and persistently. Canon Stephen Fields and his lovely wife, Lucy, are very ardent and active sharers in the Facebook culture, as well as are many clergy-persons throughout the CPWI.
Second, CFWIC should seek to establish chapters in Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver, and British Columbia, for expanding the mission and movement of the organization, and in the further implementation of its Vision and Mission Statements, which I assume are well in place, and widely promulgated.