Sermons

“Sharing Life, Learning Hope”

Matthew 5:38-48; Romans 5:1-5 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – February 19, 2017

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words, that your Spirit might soften our hearts and open us to deeper understanding of your hope. We pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.

I first became aware of the Haitian proverb mentioned in our video this morning when our Ecumenical Book Group in Alabama read a book about Dr. Paul Farmer. Dr. Farmer is the founder of Partners in Health, a global health organization that started in Haiti. He dealt with the AIDS crisis there, along with countless other medical challenges, in a context almost completely devoid of the tools and technology a US doctor takes for granted. The book we read, written by Tracy Kidder, was actually called “Mountains Beyond Mountains.” Apparently, this truth – that “beyond mountains, there are mountains” – is an ever-present reality in Haiti. And it’s a truth we recognize, isn’t it? In many different ways.

Are any of our hikers here this morning? I can’t speak from personal experience, but my understanding is that when you’re hiking in the mountains, it often seems like you’re about to make it to the top, but then when you get over the next heap of boulders, you see there are more peaks above you still. That sounds like it would be really frustrating to me, but people who choose to climb mountains in the first place may get a kick out of it.

The metaphorical sense of this proverb is harder to deal with. I know that there are some of you who feel like your lives have been going this way lately. Before you’re even done dealing with one thing that must be surmounted, another mountain is rising before you, demanding to be scaled. One thing after another, each a more difficult climb, making you more and more worn out. At some seasons of our lives, it seems as though the mountains will never end.

It seems like Paul Farmer experienced the same thing in Haiti, though, that the video we just watched showed us: with great challenges comes great resilience. I’m not sure that proverb would be so widely used if there weren’t some sense in which it is a proud part of Haitian identity. When your life is reflected in the very land from which you eke out your existence, the poetry is hard to avoid.

Haiti is, of course, only one place where Week of Compassion takes us. Just in the past month or so, Week of Compassion has had us doing development work in Tanzania and flood relief in Texas. If you’re interested in learning more about what we’re doing around the world, you can sign up for regular email updates from Week of Compassion at their website or follow them on Facebook. We may be tempted to think about the ministry of Week of Compassion as something we do out of the goodness of our hearts, a result of our generous caring, a way that we’re serving others in Jesus’ name. And all of that is the case, of course. But there’s another side of it that I’d like us to consider today. And Haiti is as good a place to start as any. I am increasingly convinced that we can’t follow Jesus as fully or as faithfully as we’re called to, without these relationships that Week of Compassion helps us develop with our brothers and sisters in Haiti, and Tanzania, and Texas, and Papua New Guinea and Mozambique and Ecuador.

As a denomination, we Disciples of Christ have taken on the cause of Christian unity as our special mission. We have long proclaimed that Christ’s church is one, and that our calling is to restore that unity through real reconciliation of all the many ways it is broken. Increasingly, we have been coming to understand that building up unity means carrying one another’s burdens and striving to ensure all God’s people have the opportunity to thrive and grow in peace. If we are to do that, we must be in relationship with God’s people all around the world.

There has been a lot of talk about “enemies” in our society lately. Most of it has been fairly ridiculous, but nonetheless, it’s out there and it starts to seep into our hearts even if we don’t want it to. So it’s timely that the lectionary has offered us a reminder today about what Jesus taught us about enemies. It is important to hear these words in a time such as ours. “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” Jesus said. And he knew he was stretching the conventional wisdom about how such things are supposed to work. He knew this isn’t easy. The passage ends, for heaven’s sake, with him telling us to be perfect like God is perfect. He had to know that we are going to fail, right? But there it is, nevertheless, “Love your enemies.” It’s worth noting, on this Presidents Day weekend, that we hear these words echoed many hundreds of years later, by Abraham Lincoln, when he asked “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?” There is much commentary about the various strategic underpinnings of Jesus’ teachings about turning the other cheek and walking the second mile. “Wise as serpents” he told us to be, yet there’s a basic truth here: If we love our enemies, they cease to be our enemies. Hard as it is, it may be the simplest solution to the problem. Does refugee assistance in Syria qualify? Community development in Iraq? Earthquake relief in Pakistan? To be blunt about it, Week of Compassion gives us the opportunity to follow Jesus in very real, life-changing ways – ways that turn potential enemies into friends, and more, into brothers and sisters.

But wait, there’s more! Remember those mountains? The real ones in Haiti and the metaphorical ones in our lives? Remember what else we saw emanating from those folks in Haiti continually having to climb mountains both real and metaphorical? When we develop deeper connections with our brothers and sisters in places like Haiti, we soon learn that we are not the only ones bringing gifts to the relationships. To connect with Haiti is to witness the living out of those verses I read from Romans 5. “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.” There is a common hashtag that people in this country sometimes use when they are complaining about something going wrong in their lives. #Firstworldproblems is a way of acknowledging that despite whatever mishap may have occurred, we’re not having to lug our water 7 miles to our homes or trying to survive a hurricane in a shack of tied-together sheets of tin. But the truth is that our problems are hard too, in the context of our lives, and when we develop deeper connections with people whose challenges aren’t #firstworldproblems, we can learn from them how to better weather our own difficulties, while simultaneously maintaining an appropriate sense of perspective. How amazing were all those smiles in that video? Didn’t they do your heart good? Can you imagine maybe holding onto this video, so that when your day gets rough, you could go back and watch it again? And maybe you could read Romans 5:1-5 again, to remind yourself about how our faith invites us to respond to the mountains in our lives. “Hope does not disappoint us,” Paul writes. What a bold claim! How can we dare to believe such a thing? But how can we not, if we are privileged to witness the lives of our brothers and sisters in Haiti? Beyond hope, there is more hope. If I hope for the hurricane to dissipate and it does not, I can hope for the storm not to be so strong. And if the storm is still strong, I can hope for help in picking up the pieces. And because of Week of Compassion, we can be there to make sure that is a hope that will not be disappointed.

This thing that we do – this amazing, miraculous thing that puts us in the places of deepest need all around the world – it is good for our souls. For in sharing in the suffering of those in need, we learn from their endurance, and our character is strengthened, and our hope grows as resilient as theirs. Let us give thanks for the opportunity to give! Alleluia and Amen!