"I LOVE YOU WITH A LOVE THAT CANNOT CHANGE" - REFLECTIONS ON THE DEATH OF ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU BY THE REV. JOSEPH C. ALSAY, ST. AUGUSTINE OF CANTERBURY EPISCOPAL CHURCH, OKLAHOMA CITY, OKLAHOMA

​Reflections by the Rev. Joseph Alsay
​St. Augustine of Canterbury Episcopal Church, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
on the Death of
the Most Rev. Desmond M. Tutu
December 26th, 2021
 
 “I love you with a love that cannot change.” And God speaks those words, quietly, gently into your heart, into my heart, into the hearts of all of us. Stevie Wonder used to have a hit that said, “I just called to say I love you.” In Jesus, in this birth it is as if God were saying to you, and to you, and to you, and to me, “I just called to say I love you. You are special to me; you are precious.
”Through this Christmas event, God was saying too, “I am a biased God, a God who takes sides. I am biased in favor of the weak, of the vulnerable, of the voiceless. I am biased in favor of the sinner so that in my heaven, there is not just joy, but greater joy over one sinner who repents, than over 99 needing no repentance. I have a soft spot for the despised, the ostracized.”
Just look at the parents God chose for his Son. They did not have clout even to get a room in the inn. Somebody says Joseph went to the innkeeper and said, “Please, please help me, my wife is pregnant,” and the innkeeper replied, “It’s not my fault.” And Joseph retorted, “It’s not mine either.” It was such as these who were to become his friends, the prostitutes, the tax collectors, the scum of society. It was about these that he could say, so remarkably, “Inasmuch as you have done it to the least of these, my sisters and my brothers, you have done it to me.”
In his coming, in his turning an epoch to make it belong to the Lord, AD, he proclaimed that all were God’s children, all were members of one family–this new society ruled by kingdom values-love, compassion, gentleness, caring and sharing and ruled by the ethic of family. That was truly revolutionary, truly radical.