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...