February 11, 2007
The Sixth Sunday after Epiphany (Year C)
Jeremiah 17:5-10; Psalm 1; 1 Corinthians 15:12-20; Luke 6:17-26
Greetings on this last Sunday in the Season of Epiphany, the season in which we celebrate the Light of Christ that has come into the world; the Light that shines in the darkness that cannot be overcome. It is this Light of Christ that also shines into the dark places of our hearts that show our need for the Savior.
The texts this morning, particularly those from the prophet Jeremiah and Jesus' Sermon on the Plain, as it's called in Luke, are a kind of road map that show the path to the life of blessing or the life of woe. The journey of life brings us to these cross roads regularly.
As some of you know, I have just returned from a two week study tour to Tanzania which is in East Africa. I traveled with seventeen other women from across the US whose ages ranged from twenty-one to eighty-two. The trip was organized by LWR, the relief and development organization of the ELCA [Evangelical Lutheran Church of America] based in Baltimore. The purpose of our visit was to meet the Tanzania Project partners working with LWR and to see first hand how our gifts of prayer, funds, and materials resources are used in various places.
In the months leading up to our departure, many people asked us, "So what are you going to DO in Tanzania?" Expecting an answer like, "We're going to dig a well, or build a church, or work with children", people were surprised when we responded that we weren't going to DO anything, instead we're going there to just BE present with the people – to listen and to learn about their lives and their experiences of God's love and amazing grace. And in fact, the women and men whom we met didn't really want our help. They wanted to welcome us as their guests and to show all that they were accomplishing on their own. In fact, their request to us was, please, don't forget us and tell our stories to your congregations back home in America. The people of Tanzania whom we met are a proud and productive people. Their warm and welcoming spirit was shown at every place we entered, as they sang and danced, and in some cases adorned us with clothing. It was truly a joyous and heartfelt time.
If I could pinpoint one major difference between our life in the States and their lives in Tanzania, I would have to say, that they truly live with a sense of community and the need for God in their lives to provide for them every day. One of the places where we saw the gift of community was the "Kahawa Shamba" or coffee farm in Northern Tanzania on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro. There they are building an Ecotourism project in which guests come and stay in a traditional chagga hut (Chaggas are a tribe in Tanzania) and experience the whole process of making coffee from picking to pulping to grinding and roasting. And the coffee farmers themselves are being trained to lead these tourist groups as a way of providing extra income for their coffee cooperative and which ultimately benefits the whole village.
After spending a few days in the northern Kilimanjaro region, our group traveled south to the central Dodoma region. Dodoma is the political capital of Tanzania. Here I recall the image of the road map of this morning's texts that lead to a life of blessing or woe. Sometimes the shorter more direct route isn't always the best one. In our travels to Dodoma, this was certainly the case. We had the option of going on the more direct inner road or taking the longer route toward the coast and back to Dodoma. The direct road was very bumpy and not well built, while the other road, though longer, was paved and made for easier travel. In the end, our drivers took us the longer route.
Sometimes it may seem like the short cut is the easiest and direct route to a life of blessing. However, that's not necessarily the case. Usually there are life lessons to be learned along the way and we avoid them to our woe with our shortcuts.
In our own travels that day to Dodoma, we were riding in three vans with six riders each and all the luggage piled in the rear. The trip would take about ten hours. When we were two hours or so from our destination, one of the vans developed a problem: the fan belt wore out. And so we piled everyone into the two remaining vans and had what is called in Tanzania, a "Dala-dala" experience. The buses in Tanzania are so crowded and there's no such thing as personal space. Everyone is crammed in and holding on, which in 80-90 degree heat is really uncomfortable. But the thing of it is, if the trip had gone so smoothly, there wouldn't have been the opportunities for bonding that we experienced. There's nothing like a little adversity to bring people closer together. And even now, we can look back and have a good laugh at the whole event.
In Dodoma, we met LWR partners involved with advocacy; providing funds for groups to organize and bring about new practices, such as life skills training, computer training and other educational options.
Throughout Tanzania, the idea is catching on that education is the way out of poverty and this was the teaching of the first president of Tanzania, a very revered and respected man, Julius Nyerere. More and more, people are seeing the blessing of educating their children and especially women and girls who for the longest time were seen as not needing formal education. This was because their lives were centered on having children and taking care of the home. Thankfully this idea is changing and we met many women who were involved with computer training, hotel management classes, and other career choices.
Lastly, our travels took us to the coastal city of Dar es Salaam. And there was the place that had the greatest impact for me. We visited the Christian Council of Tanzania, an organization like our Massachusetts Council of Churches, to see the warehouse and distribution center for the dispersing of material resources sent by ELCA congregations in the States.
LWR is known first and foremost for its gifts of quilts that are sewn by women's groups across the country and sent worldwide. This project has expanded to include various kits, school, medical, layette for infants, that are assembled by Sunday School classes or youth groups and shipped to people in need. The exciting part of this visit was when we went to see some of the recipients of these items. They were kids from the VOSA Children's Home.
Why do I share these stories with you?
Because these texts this morning show us that we stand at a crossroads every day where we must choose between the life of blessing or woe. Both paths have their challenges, but in the path of blessing, we don't go it alone. We go with GOD.
These texts are also an indictment of our American way of life, a life of excess, instant gratification, consumerism, materialism, and most damaging of all, individualism. This has killed our sense of family and community because it allows us to move on when things don't go "my" way.
We have so much to learn from other cultures, and Jesus' words of warning are telling us to beware of our possessions that they don't possess us because they have the potential to interfere and distract us from the things that really matter – the life of blessing that we walk every day with Christ our Savior, who lived and died and was resurrected to free us from the chains of our woes.
Amen.
The Rev. Melissa Buono
Church of the Good Shepherd
