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Click here to view the order of service, which includes the readings: As I prepared today’s service, I was taken back to the four months that Pam and I spent in Uganda last year. While we were there, I was continually struck by how different the Church of Uganda was from the Episcopal Church, even though both are part of the Anglican communion. Granted, we do many of the same things; the kinds of things that all Christians do: like listen to sermons, and have people over for dinner, and say a blessing before meals – stuff like that. But folks over there take some of those customs much further than we do here. Take preaching, for instance. Because the Church of Uganda doesn’t celebrate the Eucharist every Sunday, the sermon is the focal point of the service. And when folks over there preach, they really preach. The first 20 or 30 minutes of the sermon is basically an introduction, an overview, a warm-up – call it what you will. Then you get to the heart of the sermon, when every few sentences the preacher proclaims “Praise the Lord!” and all the people in the church say “Amen!” To give a concrete example, once when the bishop was asked to lead devotions at the weekly diocesan staff meeting, he preached for an hour and a half. By the time he was done, there was no time left to discuss anything, so they transferred the agenda to the next week’s meeting. Needless to say, I found preaching there a challenge. I started off by giving my usual kind of sermon, but when I got done and sat down, the congregation seemed to think I was just taking a break. Surely I couldn’t be finished. I’d only been talking for a few minutes! So eventually I loosened up a little bit, stopped worrying about crafting every sentence just so, and let the spirit lead. And the parishioners were invariably encouraging and welcoming for any word spoken in faith and love. (Just to put your minds at ease, I realize that if Africans weren’t too happy with an American sermon, most Americans wouldn’t even stick around for the end of an African sermon, so we’ll just keep to our usual time frame.) The Ugandans also take hospitality and saying grace to a new level. Because we were visitors from abroad, when Pam and I were invited to people’s homes for meals, it was a major event. The family devoted the entire day to preparing the food, and not just any food. To honor their guests, Ugandans will slaughter their prize goat or chicken, and often spend several weeks’ salary on one meal. The meal typically involved 5 or 6 courses spread over many hours, and it was customary to say a blessing over every course, including the tea. Between blessing all those courses and saying prayers upon our arrival and departure, it seemed we spent more time praying than chatting. Perhaps more than anything else, that’s what I took away from our time in Africa: God is everywhere. Nothing that we do is separated from God. The food we eat asks for God’s blessing. The friends we meet on the street are a gift that we should thank God for. It’s not so much that we go about our daily lives and remember God along the way. God is in everything, and so it makes sense to spend an entire meeting preaching a sermon, or spend more time praying than talking. If God is the most important thing of all, shouldn’t we spend all the time we can praying and preaching and listening and learning? Perhaps that explains why Christianity is thriving in Africa. The church makes no apologies for making demands on people. After all, Jesus said that if you wanted to be His disciple, you had to take up your cross and follow Him. Instead of making Christianity easy and convenient, the Church there makes it demanding and inconvenient. Instead of saying that it’s understandable if you miss church once in a while because something really fun is going on, or if you forget to pray because things at work got so busy, the Church in Africa says none of that is OK. We’re here to worship and honor God. That’s our sole purpose, and if we let anything else take precedence and push God out of the center of our minds and hearts, we have sinned. Given how the Anglican church in Africa is thriving, it’s a little curious that most people think of Anglicanism as an upper class, rather polite, white North American religion. When in fact less than 3% of Anglicans live in the United States. Nigeria, for instance, has eight times as many Anglicans as the United States, even though its population is less than half of ours. If you want to shock people, just mention that the average Anglican, in a global sense, is a black woman under 30 years old. Those are the statistics. There are other statistics, though. The life expectancy in the United States is 76 years; in Nigeria, it’s 51. Each year the United States spends over $4000 per person on health care. In Nigeria, they spend about $20 per person. 4 out of every 10 Nigerians are illiterate. 70% of the population earns less than $1 per day. And so the poor come to Christianity. That’s nothing new. We see it all the time in the Gospels, where the outcasts and the needy follow Jesus because they don’t have any place else to go, and He has the words of eternal life. But after Jesus ascended to heaven, for a long time the church focused almost exclusively on the next life and ignored the one we’re all living now. The church said to the poor, “God understands your plight, and your pain. Rest assured that no matter what trials you face in this world, in the next world you will be blessed and welcomed.” The church did little to change the structure of society that relegated so many of God’s children to lives of poverty and illiteracy, and early deaths. Karl Marx said as much when he called Christianity “the opiate of the masses,” meaning that Christianity was the drug that kept the working classes happy and quiet, so they wouldn’t get in the way of the rich and powerful. But gradually the church changed its focus. In the 1960’s with the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America, a movement known as “liberation theology” was born. Instead of telling the poor to accept their fate and trust that things would be better in heaven, the church told the people not to accept their fate. Instead of saying that God didn’t play favorites (even though it seemed He did, and the rich were the apple of his eye), the church said that God did indeed play favorites, and His favorites were the poor. The poor were first in line to the kingdom of God, even as the wealthy struggled like camels through the eyes of needles. The church wasn’t only concerned about the life to come; it was concerned about the life that people were forced to lead as a result of greed, injustice, and oppression. The true descendants of the Israelites, the chosen people who wandered for decades in the wilderness and then were persecuted and enslaved by one foreign power after another; the true descendants aren’t the rich folks that most people associate with Anglicanism, but rather the people who live day-to-day because they don’t have any choice in the matter; the people who come to God because there’s no place else to go; the very people whom Jesus welcomed when no one else would, and who the Old Testament prophets defended and proclaimed at every turn, even as the kings and rulers turned deaf ears to their pleas for justice. These are the people Jesus came to save; the people Jesus chose as His friends and confidantes. And they speak for Jesus in ways that the wealthy cannot. One theologian put it this way:
If you want to do theology, you have to start where people are, particularly the people that the Bible is primarily concerned with, who are the dispossessed, the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the prostitute, the pimp and the tax-collector. Find out what they are saying, thinking and feeling, and that is the stuff out of which the glimpses of God will emerge. [1] But it’s not enough to just listen to the poor. It’s not even enough to merely help the poor through charity, noble as that is. We must become poor. Jesus said exactly this to the rich young ruler who wanted to follow Him. Jesus didn’t tell the man to give more of his possessions to the poor. He didn’t tell him to tithe or to get rid of his vacation home or to live a more environmentally conscious lifestyle. Jesus told him to sell everything that he had and give it to the poor; only then could he follow Jesus. In short, Jesus said it wasn’t enough to care about the poor; you have to become one of them. Let’s be clear about this, though: Jesus wasn’t saying that your bank book disqualified you from following Him, or from getting into heaven, or anything like that. It’s not like St. Peter at the pearly gates is going to have an upper income limit on his checklist, and if you’re above it you’re out of luck. No: wealth doesn’t make people bad; wealth just makes it impossible to understand the Gospel. Because the Gospel was given to the poor, the outcast, the despised. And when we try to listen to the Gospel through wealthy ears, we’re like the Pharisees in this morning’s gospel. “There are rules,” we might say, as we’re more concerned with protocol than with hungry people having food to eat. “That just isn’t the way things are done.” But Jesus has no tolerance for that kind of self-centered false piety. And so He quotes Isaiah: “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines” (29:13). If Jesus had read on from the scroll of Isaiah, just a few verses later he would have come to these words, which look forward to the Day of the Lord when justice will roll down like waters upon the earth (Amos 5:23). Isaiah writes: On that day the deaf shall hear the words of a scroll, On this morning as we’re blessed by words and music from Africa, let us accept our holy responsibility to stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters, to accept the sacred poverty to which we all are called. Let us search the Scriptures for the gospel of liberation, and join our voices with Christians both near and far away who strive for health, and liberty, and salvation. And let us cast aside our notions of blessedness and entitlement, as we see, perhaps for the first time, that our wealth and security are not signs of God’s blessings; rather they are impediments to following God, which we are called to jettison in pursuit of liberation for all God’s children. Nearly twenty-five years ago, the Catholic bishops of Latin America released a statement that said: A cry is rising to heaven, growing louder and more alarming all the time. It is the cry of a suffering people who demand justice, freedom, and respect for the basic rights of human beings and peoples … The cry … is loud and clear, increasing in volume and intensity. [2] The question before us today is whether we have the ears to hear that cry, and what we are prepared to give up, if we do.
[1] Charles Elliott, “Is There a Liberation Theology For the UK?”, Heslington Lecture, University of York, 1985, p. 11. [2] Puebla Final Document (1979). |
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