The house is on fire!


I was asked to open the 2019 "Bishop Zwane Memorial Lecture" with a reflection and prayer.
Below is what I shared on the "Care for our common home"
* * * * *
Paging the newspapers these past days I came across the following joke:
With his wife out for the evening, a father was trying to watch TV, but his young son kept coming in and asking for a glass of water.
After the seventh glass, the father lost his temper and yelled: “Go to sleep, I am watching TV”
But Dad”, he protested, “my room is still on fire!”
I found it very appropriate for today's gathering. The room was on fire! The father never realised about it and the son was trying to put it off one glass of water at a time.

Have you ever heard the name: Greta Thunberg? She is a 16 year old girl born in Sweeden. You could say she is just a teenage girl but it is more than that. She is on social media and I found out she has 600.000 followers on Twitter and over 800.000 likes on her Facebook page. It is not about her looks. She is passionate about the environment, she is passionate about our planet, she is passionate about this, our common home.
Last January, attending a very important international meeting on the economy she said: 
Our house is on fire. I am here to say, our house is on fire.
She is the voice of the young generation calling her peers and the whole world to wake up to the fact that
we are facing a disaster of unspoken sufferings for enormous amounts of people. And now is not the time for speaking politely or focusing on what we can or cannot say. Now is the time to speak clearly.
She says she prepares all her speeches. She is free to say things the way she sees them. In fact, she added: 
on climate change, we have to acknowledge we have failed. All political movements in their present form have done so, and the media has failed to create broad public awareness.
She feels that we – adults – do not really care about it because – it is a fact – we are on our way out. They are the ones who will feel the consequences of the world we are going to leave for them.
She said: Adults keep saying: 'We owe it to the young people to give them hope.' But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.
She is also hopeful:
Yes, we are failing, but there is still time to turn everything around. We can still fix this. We still have everything in our own hands. But unless we recognise the overall failures of our current systems, we most probably don’t stand a chance.
There is, though, a time frame. Unless we act soon, the damage will not be reversed.
I must confess it makes feel uncomfortable that a 16 year old girl can be so clear, so outspoken, so unapologetic to tell us that we keep on living as if all is fine when it is not. The house is on fire and that it is up to you and me to change it.

We, Christians, belonging to any denomination, believe that God created this world and he did a beautiful job. I would not say it is a gift. This planet has been entrusted to us. There is a difference between a gift and something being entrusted. With a gift you do as you please. I give you E100 and you decide if you want to buy airtime or food or give it to someone in need. When it is entrusted to us, we need to look after it and give it back in the same condition we received it or even better. That is not happening.
In 2014 some of us happened to meet in Rome Trevor Manuel – South African former minister of finance. He was there to talk to Pope Francis about the amount of plastic in the seas... seas where our fish come from.
The last few weeks saw cyclones affecting our neighbouring countries taking away lives, homes, crops...
We, ourselves, have gone not long ago through one of the worse draughts in history.
The house is on fire.

Some years' ago someone wrote:
I urgently appeal, then, for a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet. We need a conversation that includes everyone, since the environment challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all”(#14).
These are words from Pope Francis' document called Laudato Si – on the care of our common home. It was released in May 2015.
Not sure you noticed. He says: I urgently appeal. There is a sense of urgency in his words. It is something serious and it is urgent.
That is why we are here. The house is on fire and we want to start – or continue – these dialogue that needs all of us to reverse it.
I want to thank the Diocesan Commission for Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation for choosing this topic today as we gather to remember one of my predecessors: Bishop Mandlenkosi Zwane. We do believe he would have committed himself and the whole diocese in the care of this, our common home.

Let us now pray with the words Pope Francis wrote at the end of the letter issued in 2015:
Prayer
All-powerful God,
you are present in the whole universe and in the smallest of your creatures.
You embrace with your tenderness all that exists.
Pour out upon us the power of your love,
that we may protect life and beauty.
Fill us with peace, that we may live
as brothers and sisters, harming no one.
O God of the poor,
help us to rescue the abandoned and forgotten of this earth, so precious in your eyes.
Bring healing to our lives,
that we may protect the world and not prey on it,
that we may sow beauty, not pollution and destruction.
Touch the hearts
of those who look only for gain
at the expense of the poor and the earth.
Teach us to discover the worth of each thing,
to be filled with awe and contemplation,
to recognize that we are profoundly united
with every creature as we journey towards your infinite light.
We thank you for being with us each day.
Encourage us, we pray, in our struggle
for justice, love and peace.

Pope Francis

Photos from Flickr
Bp Zwane Memorial Lecture - 2019