The Archbishop told the story of God’s invitation to Moses, inviting him to partner with God to set free the Hebrew slaves. He recounted God’s invitation to Mary, the mother of Jesus. Together, they would partner to give birth to the Gift who has given us redemption. He retold the story of Jesus, who underscored this point by partnering with the boy who donated his lunch to feed five thousand. In each case, God wanted and needed and acted with a human partner bring about God’s will. He asks the same of us.

It struck me the what Desmond Tutu accomplished in South Africa was the very same work that Moses was called to in Egypt. The end of apartheid and the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a miraculous historical event, on the same scale, with the same risks, and with the same fruit as the Exodus. Tutu isn’t just a miniature version of Moses. In Tacoma, I witnessed a full-scale living Moses. Just like Moses became Israel’s lawgiver, Tutu became the world’s truth-and-reconciliation-commission giver, both in dynamic partnership with God.

It struck me too that Tutu was right. God does not act on earth without a human partner. Jesus of Nazareth was God’s greatest human partner (and much more, His Son). But God has always sought out partners through whom to work his love into the world. I don’t always like this system. We sometimes suffer under it. According to Matthew 25, Tutu says that even God suffers under such a system, in solidarity with those who still await God’s partners to feed them, clothe them, visit them, and free them. Until then, there are no hamburgers or Levi jeans falling from the sky onto the hungry and naked.

Further, God suffers as some of his children conspire to kill others of God’s children. Tutu also waxed prophetic, expressing the anguish of God through both the 9-11 massacre and the euphoria around Bin Laden’s death. “Why do my children do this to each other? Why do we spend billions and trillions of dollars on instruments of death when a tiny fraction of that would provide clean water for every child on earth?”

And in this lament, God sometimes finds a partner, and his heart ignites, and his smile broadens, and he goes to work.

So, to summarize, God chose to create an order where he will not move without a partner, and we are invited into the partnership.

If true, this explains for me all the evil in the world AND all the good in the world. It demonstrates both God’s weakness in the world AND God’s power in the world. Nor has he has delegated the work to us, merely standing by to watch and cheer us on as we do it. No, God is a real partner. Trying to change the world without the partnership of God seems futile to me. I’ve met enough ex-activists who were either burnt out by the overwhelming need or became bored because what they did wasn’t sexy anymore. But for those activists who will partner with God, Tutu says they can expect to see spectacular miracles. They won’t have to do spectacular miracles, but God will. They may, he said, need do nothing more than sit on a bus… and refuse to move (remember Rosa Parks?). But in our little lunch-bag offering to God we become a spark on which God breathes to ignite unquenchable fires.

Craig Keilburger is a living testimony of this. He spoke just before Tutu. When he was 12 years old, Craig was a regular Canadian boy, except that he had a speech impediment (like Moses). One morning, as he was perusing the newspaper for the comics, he saw the headlines of an article about a 12-year-old Pakistani activist who had been assassinated. As a 4-year-old, the boy in the story had been sold into slavery where he was put to work every day in a carpet factory, tying knots all day in the beautiful rugs that we pay so much to import into the West. When the boy was 10 years old, he escaped from slavery and began to campaign against child slavery, eventually traveling to Europe with his message. When he spoke publicly, the boy would hold a rug hook in one hand and a pencil in the other, demanding the rights of every child on earth to hold a pencil and be educated. Two years later, while back home in Pakistan, that boy was shot dead while outside his house on a bicycle — assassinated by those who profit from the slavery of little children.

That makes me angry. But then what? Turn the channel? Look away? Try to forget?

Not Craig.

Craig was shaken into action. He went to school, read the article to his class and said, ‘This can’t happen. We must doing something. Who will help me?’ Eleven 12-year-old students raised their hands. They formed a club which would eventually become Free the Children (and later also, ME TO WE)and they started campaigning. It became a youth movement that since that day in 1995, has gone global. The organization has built over 650 schools in 45+ nations around the world; they have provided clean water for over 1 million people; established 30,000 alternative income projects for assisting women and their children with sustainable incomes. They have also been putting on five conferences per year similar to ‘Be the Spark’ that fill stadiums. To attend, students cannot buy a ticket–they have to earn it through community service.

A boy with a lunch to offer. A partner with God. Spectacular.

He challenged us as Tutu had previously challenged him: Don’t view the tragic stories in the news as pure negativity to be avoided. Rather, understand that all those horrid headlines are is simply God’s to-do list, delivered directly to our doors or computer screens as invitations to partnership.

After all of that, I had that typically churched-person feeling that someone should perform the ritual of closing in prayer. Sure enough … the evening closed with Gospel singer, Crystal Aiken, singing over the crowd, “Holy Spirit, breathe on us.”

And from heaven I heard, “Oh, good! More partners!”