I am delighted to be here today in the Mother City to celebrate our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ who died so that we might live. I come amongst you not as a political leader, but as a fellow child of God. I have come to the nation’s shining ‘city on the hill’ to proclaim with you:

How beautiful on the mountains
are the feet of those who bring good news,
who proclaim peace,
who bring good tidings,
who proclaim salvation,
who say to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!” 

Isaiah (52v7) 

There is no other message in heaven and earth as beautiful in its unadorned splendour as the one captured in the Book of John, chapter 3, verse 16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life”. Our Lord, when faced with His terrible choice and lonely vigil in the Garden of Gethsemane chose to lay His life so that our sins might be forgiven. One my favourite pieces of classical music – I am sure you all know it - is the chorus “All we like sheep have gone astray" from Handel’s Messiah.  

“He was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities,
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.”  

Isaiah (53v5) 

The overarching arc of the Christian narrative is ‘God is love.’ Without love, the very essence of God would disintegrate. If one was asked what the most needed commodity in South Africa today is, my answer would simply be to know the love of God.  

Each day, millions of South Africans are going about their daily lives – getting the children ready for school, taking the taxi to work, dashing to a meeting, shopping at the mall, - and they're coming to the realisation that something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness, is not enough.  

They want a sense of purpose. They're looking to relieve a chronic loneliness – the biggest disease of our time. They need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them - that they are not just destined to travel down that long road towards nothingness.  

Yet there is hope. The message that shines out through the pages of the Gospels is that every person is made in the sovereign image of God, and is special to Him. Our Lord said that even the very hairs on our heads are all numbered. What a dazzling ray of light in a world of despair and the broken hearted! 

As a man, who has served as a political leader for over half-a-century, I am deeply aware of the limits to what politicians can achieve.  They cannot address the chronic loneliness I just spoke of. A politician can only legislate for the rule-of-law, but only you, the Church, can teach the life of faith.  

The essential truths of our faith are infinitely precious not only because we know them to be true, but also because they provide the moral impulse which alone can lead to peace and reconciliation. 

It is clear my friends that our Christian beliefs have moral and social implications in our pastoral witness to governance. It also follows that politicians must be more accountable to the Church for what they do than they presently are. My party, the IFP, and I share Pastor Stevenson’s view that it is the role of politicians to answer to the Church and the community, not the other way round.  

But equally, it is expected of people of faith, like us, to express our viewpoints through our activities as citizens in the political life of our country. The fact that our convictions are rooted in our Christian faith does not disqualify us from politics. We must, however, argue for our beliefs in appropriate social and political terms in harmony with national values promoted by political means.  

We share this magnificent city and country with people of many other faiths, agnostics and non-believers, diverse lifestyles and walks of life.  We must strive to reconcile the beliefs of each with the good of all. 

I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but I do fear this is where politicians and Christians sometimes get their wires crossed. We, too often, miss each other. 

There are times, of course, when the Church must speak out, to sound the warning bells as it were, when political action falters. The campaign to abolish slavery in Britain in the eighteenth century and the fight against racial discrimination, in the United States and South Africa in the twentieth century, were such defining times. The present war we are waging against HIV/Aids and global poverty is also such a time.     

After all, the problems of poverty, HIV/AIDS, preventable diseases, joblessness and homelessness are not simply public policy problems. If only they were! But no, they are rooted deeply in both society’s indifference and individual selfishness. Historically, South Africans have too much faith (the pun is intended) in the power of the government. We must look beyond the roots of inequality and injustice within political and economic terms. It means looking to the deeper causes that lie within the human heart. 

Politicians, for sure, can build houses, but they cannot make a home. Politicians can distribute condoms and promote sexual health, but they cannot teach the values of commitment and chastity. Politicians can, as they should, build schools and invest in education, but they cannot arm kids spiritually and mentally for life’s challenges. 

Do you understand what I am getting at? Solving these problems will require changes in government policy - and we sure need that! – But it will also require changes in hearts and a change in minds: hence, we must build a bridge between the democratic state and churches and faith-based communities. And I have just had the privilege of seeing such a bridge.  

I am here with my colleagues Mr Ben Skosana and Mrs Suzanne Vos, who are the IFP members of parliament for Cape Town. Before this service, Ben, Suzanne and I visited your hospice which cares for people living, and I emphasize the word “living”, with Aids.  Your example of caring for people living with Aids is both inspiring and a call to action. Where there is pain, you have brought healing. Where there is sorrow, you have brought joy. Where there is fear you have brought hope.  

I can empathise with the patients and families because, as many of you will know, the disease struck down two of my children in 2004, Nelisa and Mandisi. I recall that they never succumbed to a ‘victim’ mentality, but fought the disease with the courage and spirit of those who never gave up hope. I saw that same hope in the eyes of the people I met today. It is immediately recognisable isn’t it brothers and sisters? It is the flicker of life which comes from our Creator above.  

The province of KwaZulu-Natal is the province worst affected by the HIV/Aids epidemic. In 2002, the IFP provincial government successfully took the Minister of Health to court in a joint class action with the TAC to compel the Department of Health to provide antiretroviral drugs to prevent mother-to-child-transmission of the HIV virus.

We did this despite the fact that I served in the same cabinet as the Minister of Health and a President who I said should recuse himself from the debate because of his denial-ism. “Denial”, as President Clinton once memorably said, is “not a river in Egypt!”    

You see, as a leader, I have observed how, almost unhindered, HIV/Aids is decimating our people, tearing apart our families, and uprooting our communities in KwaZulu-Natal and elsewhere throughout the nation. Countless mothers and fathers, children and siblings, each person representing “a world entire” to recall, the Jewish Talmudic teaching, have passed away.  

This is the time, brothers and sisters, for the Bride of Christ, the Church, in her witness to government to demonstrate the authority of the Old Testament prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah and Amos, and the agape compassion of the New Testament saints in equal measure. In the stirring words of Amos “Let righteousness roll down like waters and justice like a never failing stream” (Amos 5v24).   

Young people here today might not know that this was not the first time that I found myself challenging the prevailing “powers and principalities” which Saint Paul speaks off. During apartheid, I argued that disinvestment and sanctions would destroy the poorest of the poor, as well as the creation of future jobs and markets.  

The IFP and I paid a heavy price for this stance and I often found myself isolated within my own Church. But I don’t regret my stance then for a moment because it was the right thing to do. And, after all, our Lord was often alone in the company of one. 

I also took the long-term view that after liberation, rapid economic growth would be needed to reverse the apartheid legacy of chronic high levels of abject poverty, under-development and unemployment amongst the black and coloured majority. I don’t need to tell the fine folk of Elsies River that the investment lost by sanctions and disinvestment never came back and, till this day, the poor bear the brunt of this misguided strategy.  

The plight of the poor, we know, is the closest to the Father heart of God. As we read the gospels, we read time and time again of Christ’s tenderness towards the poor. Where ever he was, His first concern, so magically captured in the story of when He turned the stones into bread to feed the hungry multitudes, was that everyone had something to eat. Even His sermons could wait! 

I guess this is when we see Him, as God incarnate, at His most human, as it were. We must therefore invoke “the fierce urgency of now” in our witness to governance for the poor. This also means calling government to account for the high levels of corruption and mismanagement in the public service. We should judge government by the exacting standard of biblical transparency, not the law of moral relativity. If they fail, is it not the time to choose political parties which will?    

By your pastoral witness here in Elsies River, good Samaritans you are, you are materialising the promise in the Gospel of John that Jesus has come to bring abundant life to the world – right into the reality of Elsies River with its rampant unemployment, gang warfare, alcoholism, drug abuse and desperate poverty.   

The crisp point about the Parable of the Good Samaritan, someone who was also an outsider, is that he did not just have good intentions, he also provided practical assistance. He did not just pass by.  This is a principle I have always tried to deepen and promote throughout my long public life.  

Because of your historical struggle for freedom, you understand in a powerful way Christ’s call to feed the hungry and cloth the naked and to challenge powers and principalities – including from time to time, local councillors and the provincial and national governments.   

Your faith is more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; it is a living and vital force for change. As I look across this auditorium I see pervasive hope shining through the multiple dangers of a transitional society; of the importance of the choices we make in life and how personal and collective triumph can emerge when we choose love, God’s love, over rage. 

You, my dear brothers and sisters, are the change-makers! You are ‘God’s salt and light’, a ‘chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God’ (1 Peter v 9).  

May the Lord bless you and keep you, The Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious unto you, The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace. 

God bless South Africa.