26th January 2003
 

Rev. Yvonne Boyd, Pastor of this Church, Ambassador to the United States for The Bahamas Joshua Sears, Ambassador to Japan for The Bahamas Sidney Poitier, my friends Louis and Pam Harris, Ms. Janet Johnson and all her staff at the Ministry of Tourism Bahamas in Los Angeles, my travelling companions from The Bahamas, my fellow Bahamians, friends and members of this congregation.

It is truly good to be here this morning to be able to fellowship with you and worship with you in this morning’s service.  I bring fraternal greetings to you from the Christian churches of the Commonwealth of The Bahamas and to you all on behalf of the Government and people of the Commonwealth of The Bahamas.  I trust that God will bless the words and what you will hear this morning so that it will be for our mutual understanding and edification.

I need to say at the outset how grateful and thankful I am to be able to deliver this address this morning.  I said to your Pastor that I was too flattered to refuse, and I am happy that you were able to accommodate my schedule to allow for this visit to take place here in late January as opposed to late October of last year.  I am happy of course to be able to do so within the season of Epiphany, that is in my own church experience an important season indeed.

And indeed today in Nassau the Anglican communion celebrates St. Agnes’ patronal festival.  Sr. Agnes is the church of which I am member.

I have brought with me a number of Bahamians in my delegation from Nassau.  I would like to ask them to stand so that they might be recognized as such, and I would like all the other Bahamians who are here to stand with us so that you might see how appreciative we are that your church has taken the time to recognize the importance of our small country by your invitation here this morning.

And further, we are so pleased to have with us our most famous son Ambassador Sidney Poitier, who serves as our Ambassador to Japan.  He is soon to present his credentials in Paris to the United Nations Education Scientific Cultural Organization, UNESCO as The Bahamas' Ambassador there.  Ambassador Poitier was born in Miami in 1927 to Bahamian parents.  He spent the formative years of his life in The Bahamas before moving to the United States.  He is therefore both Bahamian and American and we are thankful that he is part of us and is here to be with us today.

And also by way of thanks, it is important for me to recognize and thank Louis and Pam Harris for their wonderful friendship with me over the past 32 years.  Louis and Pam will be married 30 years this year.  I was in the United Kingdom when they got married so I missed the wedding, but they were amongst the first people that I met on the campus of Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, Ohio back in the fall of 1970 and we have been fast friends ever since.   They asked me if I would come to do this and I was proud to do so.  They have built themselves a wonderful life, have a wonderful family and I am certain that God has truly blessed them over these years despite all the difficulties.  I am truly relieved to experience the divine healing that is taking place daily in the life of Pam who as you know has been seriously ill over the past few months.  But it is good to be here with them.

This morning, I hope that what I will say for these few minutes will be able to help the cause of international understanding and brotherhood.  The Bahamas and United States, one small, weak and developing, the other large, rich and developed.  Both independent, both sovereign, but both interdependent.  What I would like to address is the right of a people to exist, and how there is a biblical basis for an objective morality that grounds the rights of a people to exist, and for them to be able to develop their talents and skills to the best of their abilities.

Indeed the whole Christian message, that ousted the power politics of the Old Testament is that might is not necessarily right and that each individual is possessed of certain qualities, unique to him or herself and that each individual has a right to life.  Individuals express themselves in families and then in nations and so I believe it is not a stretch for us to conclude that nations, a people have a right to exist.

This is an important message in the world today, where it appears that power is the only fact.  Many of the smaller nations of the world find themselves perplexed by the message that is being sent forth throughout the present world that power as the only fact means that unless you compromise your way of life, you have no right to exist.  It bespeaks a certain kind of arrogance about which Pope John Paul has spoken many times.  He argues that there is an objective morality, a right or wrong.  This can be found in its highest form when one reads the ten commandments that prescribe a way of life, a code for living that transcends national boundaries.

But it is easy in this age to forget that there is someone more powerful than mankind, and the Bible shows us time and time again that when mankind rises to a level of arrogance where he or she thinks that mankind is in ultimate control, along comes the intervention of God who upsets the apple cart, causes things to happen that bear no logic.  The only consistent logic appears to be that when mankind thinks of itself as a law unto itself, then it will be struck down so that mankind will have to start again.

One of the great examples of this can be found in the book Genesis Chapter 1 which tells the story of the tower of Babel.  The prologue of that chapter is the fact that Noah has just saved the total destruction of the world after the flood, and mankind has begun to build itself up again.

Verse one says after the flood: “Now the whole earth had one language and one speech.”  And in the course of their development, the descendants of Noah proceeded to build a tower.  Verse four says: “And they said, Come let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth”

The operative line in that verse is “let us make a name for ourselves”.  But someone that is mightier is watching from above.  The Bible says in Verse 6 “And the Lord said, Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they proposed to do will be withheld from them…”

And it continues in Verse 7: “Come let us go down and there confuse their language, that ye may not understand one another’s speech. And in verse 8 “So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city.”  And that was the end of that.

Some people who literally interpret the Bible use that for the basis of the founding of the separate nations and languages of the earth, and argue that it was since that day that we have been trying to learn to understand one another, the different peoples of the world speaking in different tongues and languages have now to work toward understanding each other.

My view is that regardless of how you use the message from that Biblical passage, the prescription is clear.  You cannot, no matter how powerful you are, become a law unto yourself.  Each must be guided by the fact that we all depend on one another to advance the cause of our human survival.  And it appears that the wider lesson is that we must govern our behaviour so that even as we respond to wrong doing, we do so as much as possible within scale, the scientists describe it as an equal and opposite reaction.  Not an overreaction.  World leaders today can take note.

And the lesson of having to understand the languages of each other, inherent in the story of Babel, in my view means not just understanding Spanish to English, or French to Chinese, it means even within those who speak English have often to struggle to understand each other.  Many times, you know in your own experience that you may be speaking the same language but the words you are saying mean different things in different cultures and may cause serious misunderstandings and problems.

Nowhere does this seem more problematic to me than as Foreign Minister of a small country that appears often to be speaking a language to the developed world that the developed world does not comprehend or understand.  Some argue that they do not want to understand because after all, power is the only fact.

But it is clear that power must come with humility.  The Bible again is replete with stories of how God has exalted the humble and the meek and the mighty he has put away.  The entire Christian message is about humility and sacrifice and respect for the weak, the poor and the dispossessed.  The powerful then in the Christian tradition have a responsibility not only to use their power to protect themselves but also to be the protector of all those who are under their wings so to speak, not seek to bully or bludgeon even your friends into submission when they seek to voice their honest opinions.

The Bahamas is a country of some 300,000 souls stretching from about 70 miles off the coast of West Palm Beach, Florida to 90 miles north of Hispaniola, the island on which Haiti and the Dominican Republic are found.  The land mass is a total of some 4,000 square miles, roughly the size of Jamaica.  But it is spread out over 100,000 square miles of sea.  There are some 700 islands in The Bahamas chain, only about 25 of those are inhabited.  Our main city is Nassau and it is on the island where Nassau is located that some two thirds of the population now lives.  But The Bahamas is also the home to a temporary group of visitors that numbered in 2002 some 4.37 million people, mainly visitors from the United States of America.  I would say close to one hundred percent of those visitors had a good and safe experience.

Relations between our two countries are excellent, and whatever differences exist, are differences of style and nuances. The Bahamas seeks at all times to talk to our senior partner nation the United States and use language and methods that enhance our understanding.  And if we are to use Ambassador Poitier as a living example of how The Bahamas and the US are joined at the hip, you will see that we are close indeed.  His is the story of many Bahamians who have come to this country and made good.

Many of us are immigrants to this country.  And we see from the Biblical example of Joseph in the Bible how immigration can make a country strong and powerful.  And that just as the country that accepts its immigrants helps to make those immigrants and their children strong, the immigrant gives to his host country of his talents and skills.  It is a story of interdependence.

The message then is one of interdependence and to speak in terms of each nation trying to understand the other and how it thinks.  And to ask each of us to consider how we are citizens of the world in relating with one another for the common good, peace and security of the world, seeking to avoid war wherever and whenever we can.  Because when we fight wars, not only do we suffer, the entire human race suffers from the destruction of wars.

War, like most human activities brings with it certain unintended and unforeseen consequences, and so it must be a clear provocation indeed to promote war as a means of solving problems.  Pure bravado or simply because you are powerful is not the moral imperative to commence a war. That is why mankind invented the United Nations as an international means to cool passions and resolve conflicts between nations.  It was the great hope of the United States and the world as it emerged from the Second World War.

Small countries, poor countries, weak countries like ours have something in common with poor and dispossessed people.  They have a right to exist, but they also have their moral voice.  It is the voice that reminds us of the passage Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the sons of God.  Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. It is our responsibility to make our voices heard by speaking up for that right to exist and be heard.

And it is also clear that we have nothing to fear because the Bible also tells us in that passage made famous by the man who sits amongst us this morning: Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow and if God takes care of the lilies of the field how much more will he take care of us. The Bible says that he has promised to do so.  It is a clear and unequivocal moral imperative.  We must not fail ourselves.

The Old Testament has established that our arrogance led to the division of mankind into many nations and many languages. But in our quest for the right to exist, in our quest for understanding of each other, we will find a common language.  For the Christian it is clear that this is possible.  The common language is love, or in the King James version, the word is charity.  The common language the Bible says is being engulfed with the vision of the Holy Spirit.

The Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament provide a wonderful symmetry to the message in Genesis.  Now remember in Genesis, the Lord confused the language so that they could no longer understand each other.  But on the day of Pentecost the New Testament says in Acts Chapter 2 and Verse 4: “And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave utterance… ”  And in verse 6: “And when this sound occurred, the multitude came together and were confused, because everyone heard them speak his own language.”

I believe we can understand each other’s language.  I believe that the lesson of the New Testament reassures us that all and each of us have a right to exist – large and small, with mutual respect, admiration and love for the talents each for the other.  That is the message from a small country and a small people that I bring to you today.  We enrich you as you enrich and enhance our lives.  I believe all people of goodwill join me in that message.

I leave you with this prayer as I return to my home and as you go your to habitations.  It is adapted from a prayer for Africa by Bishop Desmond Tutu.