| ||||
|
When Jesus heard that John the Baptist had been arrested, he went to Galilee. That's way "up north," near the border where there were many who were unclean, many who were sick and infirm, many foreigners and many possessed by demons. It was, Matthew says, in "the land of the shadow of death" where Jesus called Andrew and Peter and James and John to be his disciples. And they left their fishing and their fathers and followed Jesus. Jesus did this, Matthew says, to fulfill the words of the prophet Isaiah, who said that light has dawned on those "who live in the land of the shadow of death." Have you ever been to the land of the shadow of death? Some of you have, I know, because we've gone there together, to Haiti. But there are lots of places in the world where death casts its shadow, some places in Asia, some in Africa and South America, some in the inner cities of our own land, even in Colorado Springs, even in Broadmoor. But it was in Haiti that I have seen death most vividly. And Haiti is where I saw the bottle. A beer bottle, it was. It could have been any kind of bottle - a rum bottle, an old medicine bottle, even, as I have seen on occasion, a discarded STP gas treatment bottle. But this bottle was a beer bottle. When I first saw the bottle, it came from a small bandana satchel held by a young boy who was fast asleep on the dirt floor of the clinic. He was holding his mother's satchel for her, the little bag in which peasant women in Haiti carry their valuables. The bottle contained water, not beer, when I saw it, and it had a stopper made from an old corn cob. The water was for the woman and her son to drink as they walked the hot miles in the sun to the clinic and as they waited the long hours for the doctor. My job that day was to give the children worm medicine - an awful job because, like children everywhere, they don't like it, and they spit it out all over themselves, and all over you. So if a child puts up too much fuss, you ask the mother if she has a bottle, and then you put the worm medicine in the bottle, and she takes it home to give it to her child later. That's what happened that day. The little boy wouldn't take his medicine, so I asked his mother if she had a bottle, and she pulled the beer bottle out of her satchel. First, she gave her son a drink, then she took a drink herself. Then she shook the remaining drops of water out onto the ground, and I watched as two or three insects tumbled out as well. Then I poured in the medicine, and she corked the bottle with the corn cob and took the medicine home to give to her child. Medicine in rural Haiti is like that. Sterility as we know it here just doesn't exist, because it's not possible. There is no equipment, there are too few doctors, and often there is no medicine in any event. But the children have worms, and we had worm medicine, and the woman had her bottle, and one does what is possible. Then there was the rock. It was a big, heavy rock. It was sitting on the top of a big pile of rocks in the village of Jeannette in Haiti. There were fifteen or sixteen piles of rocks by the side of the church. I asked what the rocks were for, and I was told that the particular rock I was interested in began its story a mile or two from the church. Earlier that Sunday morning it was sitting on a hillside doing what rocks do when a young boy picked it up on his way to church. And the boy brought it to church that morning. Barefoot, up and down the hills over the hard dirt paths, he carried it to church as his offering to God that week. You see, the people of rural Haiti have no money, but they bring what they have, in thanksgiving and hope, and offer it to God. And week after week the rocks were offered for the foundation of the school the church hoped to build one day. These are two images of life and disease and death and hope in Haiti I have carried with me for years. Most Haitians live, literally, in "the land of the shadow of death," in what amounts to the inner city of God's world. The poverty is grinding. Infant mortality - I forget the exact figure - is unbelievable by American standards. Women, as a matter of course, have six or eight children, or more, in the hope that two or three will survive past age five. Malnutrition is simply expected as a way of life for adults and children alike, and it is what most die of. Disease is a faithful partner in life, and there is little or no medical care outside Port-au-Prince and two or three hospitals elsewhere. A few in Haiti live in luxury. But most live in hovels, in indescribable slums in Port-au-Prince, but in somewhat better conditions in the countryside. In the countryside, they mostly live in one-room wattle houses with banana-leaf roofs but where the dirt floor is at least usually dry and not soaked with sewage like dirt floors in the slums of Port-au-Prince, and where the cockroaches and tarantulas and rats, though large, are also largely harmless. Among those who have jobs, which is only about half the people in Haiti (maybe not that many), some make a few hundred dollars a year. None of it is dependable. Measured by Haitian standards, you see, there are no poor in El Paso County. For most in rural Haiti, there simply is no money. And if the people in areas like these are to have school - which, apart from God, is their greatest hope - then the schools have to be built and maintained with the help of people like us who have money to spare. And if they are to have medical services, they have to be provided through the help of those who have medicine to share. I tell you about my experience of the land of the shadow of death in Haiti, because that is where I have personally seen it most vividly. But death and infirmity cast their shadow in lots of other places where people hunger for good news and hope. The shadow of death, and the hunger for good news and hope, can also be found in the City of Brotherly Love. "I was converted my senior year in high school," said the young man who had been called to be a disciple of Jesus and sent to proclaim the Gospel in Philadelphia. "I was a fresh, eager Christian, so when Tony Compolo came to our town to speak, I went to hear him. He was great! After he spoke, he asked us to sign up for his program of inner-city ministry in Philadelphia that summer. So I did. "Well, in mid-June, I met about a hundred other kids in a Baptist church in Philadelphia. We had about an hour of singing before Dr. Compolo arrived. When he got to the church, we were really worked up, all enthusiastic and ready to go. Dr. Compolo then preached for about an hour, and when he finished people were shouting and standing on the pews and clapping. It was great! "'OK, gang, are you ready to go out there and tell 'em about Jesus?' Dr. Compolo asked. 'Yeah, let's go!' we shouted back. 'Get on the bus!' Tony shouted. So we spilled out of the church and onto the bus. We were singing and clapping. But then we began to drive deeper into the depths of the city. We weren't in a great neighborhood when we started, but it got worse. Gradually, we stopped singing, and all of us college kids were just staring out the windows. We were scared. "Then the bus pulled up before one of the worst looking housing projects in Philadelphia. Tony jumped on the bus and said, 'Alright, gang, get out there and tell 'em about Jesus. I'll be back at five o'clock.' "We made our way off the bus hesitantly. We stood there on the corner and had a prayer, then we spread out. I walked down the sidewalk and stopped before a huge tenement house. I gulped, said a prayer, and ventured inside. There was a terrible odor. Windows were broken out, no lights in the hall. I walked up one flight of stairs and toward a door where I heard a baby crying. I knocked on the door. 'Who is it?' said a loud voice inside. Then the door cracked open, and a woman holding a naked baby peered out at me. 'What do you want?' she asked in a rather mean voice. I told her that I wanted to tell her about Jesus. With that, she swung the door open and began cursing me. She cursed me all the way down the hall, down the steps, and out to the sidewalk. "I felt terrible. 'Look at me,' I said to myself. 'Some Mr. Christian I am. How in the world could somebody like me think that I could tell people about Jesus?' I sat down on the curb and cried. Then I looked up and noticed a store on the corner, windows all boarded up, bars over the door. I went to the store, walked in, and looked around. Then I remembered: the baby had no diapers, the mother was smoking. I bought a box of paper diapers and a pack of cigarettes. "I walked back to the tenement house, said another prayer, walked in and up the flight of stairs, gulped, stood before the door, and knocked. 'Who is it?' growled the voice inside. When she opened the door, I slid the box of diapers and the cigarettes in. She looked at them, then looked at me, and said, 'Come in.' "I stepped into the dingy apartment. 'Sit down,' she commanded. I sat down on the old sofa and began to play with the baby. I put a diaper on the baby, even though I had never put a diaper on a baby before in my life. When the woman offered me a cigarette, even though I don't smoke, I smoked. I stayed there all afternoon talking, playing with the baby, listening to the woman. "About four o'clock, the woman looked at me and said, 'Let me ask you something. What's a nice college boy like you doing in a place like this?' So I told her everything I knew about Jesus. It took me about five minutes. Then she said, 'Pray for me and my baby, that we can make it out of here alive.' And I prayed. "That afternoon, after we were all back on the bus, Tony asked, 'Well, gang, did any of you get to tell 'em about Jesus?' And I said, 'I not only got to tell 'em about Jesus. I met Jesus. I went out to save somebody, and I ended up getting saved.'" The college student went to the land of the shadow of death to tell the people the good news about Jesus, and he ended up meeting Jesus, who was already there ahead of him. We go to the land of the shadow of death and hear the stories of the rock and the bottle, and we end up meeting Jesus, who is already there ahead of us. And we end up having hope and faith proclaimed to us. When I used to visit Haiti, one of the things Haitians always shared with me is faith. Haitians, you see, really believe in God. I mean really! Despite the shadow of death they live in, a light has dawned. They believe that despite their great poverty and need, le bon Dieu, the good God, loves them, cares for them enough to cast his lot with them, to diaper their babies and share their food. So they bring their bottles to receive our medicines in the name of God, and they bring their rocks to build their churches and schools, and they sing God's praise with great fervor, even, in some places, at the 6:00 a.m. mass. And not with a magnificent organ, or even a piano, but with drums. And yes! These are Episcopalians! Most important of all, they sing it with voices and heart and soul, and not just for an hour or two, but for as long as it takes, because, you see, they have never heard of the Super Bowl. It means nothing to them. But they do know God. The light has dawned in that land of the shadow of death. God means a lot to them. They have heard of the Cross of Christ, and that means much to them. And that's why they sing, as they did the last time I was there, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, sweetest name I know, fills my every longing, keeps me singing as I go," even in the midst of grinding poverty and disease and pain. Jesus calls us and sends us. Jesus calls us and sends us with Peter and Andrew and James and John to proclaim good news and hope, and to heal. But how are we to do it? In the same way Peter and Andrew and James and John did it - by going to the land of the shadow of death to share hope and healing. And by remembering. By remembering that it is by God's light that we see, not by our own. And by remembering that it is God's power we are to proclaim, not our own. God warned us long ago not to become smug about the freedom and wealth and power we enjoy. When he led us out of slavery in Egypt into the land of Promise, Moses passed on this word to us: "Be careful as you enter the land of milk and honey, lest you forget the Lord your God. Be careful, for in the land of milk and honey you can become fat, and then when you have your fine houses and your great wealth, all your gold and silver and cattle, then if you are not careful, you can forget the Lord your God whose light by night and cloud by day brought you out of slavery and gave you all these things, and you will say, 'My hand, and the power of my arm, provided all these things for me.' But if you forget, then things will not go well for you, and you will surely die." "Blessed are the poor" is the way Jesus will warn us of this same truth next Sunday. Blessed are those who know the poverty of their own power and wealth, for they will know the kingdom of God, which is the power of the Cross. This is a word from God to us in the United States, the Broadmoor of the world. When the young man went to Philadelphia, he found that Jesus was already there in that land of the shadow of death. When we go to Haiti to meet with those whose only hope is God, we find that the light has already dawned in that land. Jesus has gotten there ahead of us. We dare not take our own light and expect it to heal. "Pray for me and my baby, that we can make it out of here alive." This was the hunger the lady hoped to have satisfied. We dare not take our own power and expect it to save, either in Galilee, or in Philadelphia, or in Haiti, or in Iraq, or anywhere else in the world. Nora Gallagher wrote her book Things Seen and Unseen partly to answer a question prompted by a truth expressed by her husband, who is not a Christian. In the land of the shadow of death we know as Rwanda, he noted, "fifty percent of the people were Catholics." And Nora says that his words stopped the question that was forming on her own lips: "If religious faith cannot stop genocide, of what use is it at all?" Gallagher's book is her attempt to find an answer to that question. She walks us through a year in the land of the shadow of death known as Trinity Church, Santa Barbara, California. It is a walk through a year of prayer, as Nora comes to experience and love the liturgy of the Church. It is also a year of feeding the poor in the soup kitchen, and of chasing the drunks off the steps of the church and back into the streets when they become obnoxious and the neighbors want them moved. It is a year of coping with the loss of friends who die of cancer and AIDS and of wondering if the vestry of the struggling parish will find a way to call as rector a priest who has told them that he is gay. And at the end of the book, Gallagher receives her answer from God. The answer comes through a friend. Nora asks her friend how it is possible to love in a land such as this. And her friend replies, "You must enlarge your capacity to suffer." That's the way Jesus did it in this land of the shadow of death of human beings. He stretched out his arms on the hard wood of the Cross, to embrace the people of the land of the shadow of death. This is the Gospel we are called to preach, St. Paul reminds us. Not to preach the wisdom of this world, the wisdom of wealth and power, but to preach the folly of the Cross, "lest the Cross of Christ be emptied of its power." This foolishness is the Light of the world, Paul reminds us, the health of the dying in the land of the shadow of death. It is a foolishness to be shared, "not only with our lips, but in our lives." Salvation and light and life are of God, not of the wisdom and power of men, whether in Galilee, or in Philadelphia, or in Haiti, or in Colorado Springs or Broadmoor. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |