August 1/5, 2007

Colossians 3:1-11; Luke 12:13-21 and Luke 7:21-22: "Who's rich and who's poor? What I/we learned on our mission trip to El Salvador."

A question floats up from the crowd following Jesus. Quarreling brothers are at an impass over money, and one of them is trying to get Jesus to take his side in the probate dispute. But Jesus doesn't take the bait. "I'll not be your referee," he says. Instead he shows the brothers -- and us - a new way. Like many of us who call North American suburbia home, the rich fellow in Jesus' parable has a problem peculiar to the affluent: He has too much stuff. As the story opens, he is about ready to scrape off his mid-century rambler to clear the way for a McMansion with more storage space. Once this is achieved, he figures he owes himself a snooze in the hammock: after a lifetime of hard work and careful planning for retirement, it's time to stretch out and enjoy his accumulated wealth. After all, as the old saying goes, you can't take it with you. He's not particularly religious. Who needs God when you have plenty of buying power? "Relax, eat, drink, be merry"...works for him! But, as Jesus tells the story, the very day that the rich man makes all these plans turns out to be the last day of his life on earth. The self-sufficient rich man dies, leaving behind barns filled with livestock and silos filled with grain...He was rich in material possessions, but poor toward God. So, Jesus says to us, don't be like the rich fool spending his way toward the elusive "good life." Instead, be rich toward God. What is it to be rich toward God? The fifteen of us from Family of Christ who spent last week in El Salvador caught a glimpse of what that looks like. We learned that there may be something even better than "the good life" we seek as persons of power and privilege here in Minnesota. In fact, we learned something about how our pursuit of "the good life" gets in our way. In El Salvador, we learned something about another way of living - call it the blessed life. Even though he lived and wrote in the third century AD, St. Augustine seems to speak to the sickness of greed -- "affluenza" some call it -- from which many of us in North America suffer today: "God is always trying to give good things to us, but our hands are too full to receive them." In El Salvador, we lived with the poor and it made us richer. We learned that if we empty our hands -- and hearts ! - of our possessions for a while, we receive spiritual gifts that are longer lasting than any material thing we own. We arrived in San Salvador one hot night, loaded down with stuff to share: 23 suitcases and duffle bags filled that you helped us pack with much-needed vitamins, analgesics, toothbrushes, soccer balls and uniforms, shoes and clothing, Bibles, Beanie Babies and other toys, markers, crayons, and chalk. And there were letters and packages to the students from their sponsors. We had so much stuff it was a challenge to keep track of it all as we schlepped the bags around airports and in and out of Jorge's truck. It was hard, sweaty work to divide the treasure between Maria Trinidad's ministry to the homeless men and street children of San Salvador and the people of Pastor Matias and Martina's five rural congregations. But it felt good to come with something to share with the people who welcomed us with open arms and warm abrazos (hugs)... who shared their humble home and guest house with us, who cooked and cleaned for us, who drover us around in the back of a flat-bed truck, who suspended their regular work for several days to show us what God was up to there. We had come prepared to share with the Salvadorans, to walk with them, to serve them. I don't know if we were prepared to receive so much in return. Under the enthusiastic leadership of Pastor Anna-Kari Johnson and college student Julie Roy, the fifteen of us learned a lot about the struggles of the Salvadoran people and the work of the Lutheran Church in advocating for the poor. There were sobering moments as we listened to the testimonies of people who had shown courage and faith in the midst of great suffering during the 12-year long civil war that ravaged their country and nearly every family. But there was plenty of laughter and fun as well! With joy we made many new friends, enjoying the pure, unencumbered, undivided love of the little children and sensing the sincerity and deep gratitude of the adults, from Bishop Gomez to the road-weary men waiting for their day's meal at Hope House. Sponsors met their sponsored students and received the shy thanks of the students' mothers. Our youth learned new games, shoveled dirt and carried rocks as they joked with the youth of Miracle of God Church, and played to win on the lumpy soccer field in Guaycume. All of us found we could communicate effectively in Spanish -- and it was fun! Some of us who had been searching to find meaning in the Church even got our faith back. Feeling adventurous (and wanting to be available to others doing the same thing) I accepted the invitation of a family in Guaycume to stay overnight in their home on Saturday. The señora has two daughters with names of flowers - Liliana and Flor - and Liliana has a two-year-old son who is the apple of everyone's eye. Theirs is a sad house, since their stepfather had been hit by a bus and killed just 8 days before. Now they feel afraid at night and worry about their future. Will Liliana be able to stay at the Lutheran University to finish her social work degree and levantar her family and her community? They depend on God because they have no one and nothing else to depend on. "I place myself in God's hands," the señora said. "What else can I do? I know He will take care of us." Pastor Anna-Kari had asked if, in view of their recent tragedy, the family still wanted to take a guest. They insisted that they did, and I received a warm welcome there. We talked together and watched a little TV, as chickens, ducks and puppies meandered in and out of the house. It was so very simple and quiet there, my string bed so comfortable, I slept remarkably well. At breakfast, I remarked on how peaceful it was there. "At my home," I told them, "it isn't so quiet. I can hear the cars on the highway day and night." Which surprised them all and prompted fifteen-year-old Flor to ask, "What year is it where you live?" Poor in terms of possessions, they know Who holds the future and they depend on Him. Liliana and Flor and their mother are rich toward God. There's a story by Florence Ferrier about a social worker in poverty-stricken Appalachia. It's called "We Ain't Poor!" The Sheldons were a large family in severe financial distress after a series of misfortunes. The help they received was not adequate, yet they managed their meager income with ingenuity -- and without complaint. One fall day I visited the Sheldons in the ramshackle rented house they lived in at the edge of the woods. Despite a painful physical handicap, Mr. Sheldon had shot and butchered a bear which strayed into their yard once too often. The meat had been processed into all the big canning jars they could find or swap for. There would be meat in their diet even during the worst of the winter when their fuel costs were high. Mr. Sheldon offered me a jar of bear meat. I hesitated to accept it, but the giver met my unspoken resistance firmly. "Now you just have to take this. We want you to have it. We don't have much, that's a fact; but we ain't poor!" I couldn't resist asking, "What's the difference?" His answer proved unforgettable. "When you can give something away, even when you don't have much, then you ain't poor. When you don't feel easy giving something away even if you got more'n you need, then you're poor, whether you know it or not." Our time in El Salvador stirred up some new questions in us, like "Who is rich?" and "Who is poor?" Our trip was billed as a mission/study trip. We prayed that God would go along with us and found that God had gotten there ahead of us! The Lutheran Church in El Salvador had invited us to join with our Salvadoran brothers and sisters in solidarity, to walk beside them, not ahead of them. We did not show up as tourists of their poverty. Neither did we come to assuage our North American guilt by dropping great amounts of cash and empty promises to fix them to make them be more like us.. Their gift of hospitality filled us full of God's love. We caught a glimpse of the Great Feast as a banquet that includes the brown faces of our new friends - from the older ones lined with deep, dusty creases, to the young ones shining with vibrant smiles. We have been changed forever by their richness toward God. This trip helped me hear a-fresh God's invitation to re-examine my orientation to my time and my possessions. I now hear these words of Jesus (which immediately follow our gospel text for tonight) not as a scolding for my worrying, but as a call to focus on the security we all have living lives hidden in Christ...to find buried treasure in a life lived rich toward God. A kind of spiritual geo-caching expedition, if you will...For the last several days, our senses have been assaulted by images of the 35W bridge collapse, and our psyches have struggled to absorb the impact of the disaster. Close your eyes now and let Jesus' words and a set of different images fill your crowded minds and anxious hearts. [Read Luke 12:22-34.] Thanks be to God! Amen! Kristie Hennig Chanhassen, Minnesota 1 Christian Century 2 Brian Stoffrgren, www.crossmarks.com/brian/luke12x13.htm