WEEK 2–HONESTY

“For [God] did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; [God] did not hide [God’s] face from me, but heard when I cried.” (Psalm 22:24)

When Kamini Dhurvey was just a child, her mother died and her father remarried.  Her stepmother abused Kamini, and her father did not step in to protect her from his new wife.  Unprotected and unsafe, Kamini left home when she was older and eventually found a place to rent and a job in a small shop.

Even out on her own, she did not feel safe.  Kamini feared that the landlord who owned her residence would hurt her.  The security she tried to find in leaving home eluded her.  Through a door-to-door survey, Kamini learned about Naari Shakti, a project of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Madhya Pradesh in India supported in part by ELCA World Hunger.  Naari Shakti works for gender equality through advocacy for women’s rights, provides training in tailoring and computer skills, and offers emergency medical support to girls and women in vulnerable situations.  The project also provides housing assistance and psychosocial support to those who need it.

At the Naari Shakti project office, Kamini found a safe space to tell her story and people who would welcome her.  With counseling and support from the project, she was able to leave the place she was renting and move into a hostel for girls.  The project later arranged for Kamini to stay in a women’s rehabilitation center, where she is living and pursuing her studies.

Before Kamini moved to the rehabilitation center, project staff tried to contact her father.  But her father told the staff that he no longer wanted anything to do with her and that it was up to her to live her life as she wanted.  She was no longer welcome in her father’s home.  With nowhere else to go, Kamini has found a home at the center.  The naari Shakti program provides her a safe place to live, books and additional support for her education.

Around the world, 690 million people face hunger, and each of them has a story to tell.  Hunger is rarely just a matter of lacking food.  Rather, it is often a pernicious and persistent symptom of much deeper pain, of much deeper need.  Unfortunately, stories like Kamini’s are not uncommon.  For women and girls around the world, abuse, violence and inequality lie behind the higher rates of hunger they face.  Globally, women are 13% more likely than men to experience food insecurity and almost 27% more likly to be severely food insecure.  They are also more likely to be victimized by violence, more likely to do work with little or no pay, and less likely to have access to credit to start a home or business.

If we are going to end hunger, we have to start by being honest about the stories of pain, exploitation, injustice and violence that lie behind it.  We must start with honesty about what hunger is and what it is not.

Hunger is not accidental.  It is the result of inequality, marginalization and injustice that inhibit one’s ability to access the resources one needs to live.

Hunger is not merely the physical sensation of going without food.  It is an insidious reality that affects the whole person–physically, emotionally, psychologically and socially.

Hunger is not merely a calculation of calories.  It is a measure of the extent to which a person is constrained in the pursuit of their own well-being.

Ending hunger means being willing to enter into the sometimes painful stories of neighbors in need.  It requires that we accompany one another down difficult roads with honesty about what we may find.

Lent commemorates Jesus’ journey to the cross and thus demands of us honesty about the death-dealing pervasiveness of sin that would crucify truth in order to silence it.  This makes Lent an appropriate season to consider what it will take to arrive at the vision of a just world where all are fed.  Lent, after all, is about honesty.  In this season, we are called to be honest about the depths of our sin, including the many ways that we, as the church, have fallen short in meeting the needs of our neighbors.  Lent is about being honest with ourselves and with others about the depth of need in our world.

And Lent is also a season to be honest about the God who calls to us.  In the psalm for this second week in Lent, the psalmist rejoices that God “did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted… [nor] hide [God’s] face from me, but heard when I cried.” (Psalm 22:24).  In the Gospel story of Jesus’ transfiguration, we hear the voice of God echo over the mountain: “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” (Mark 9:7).

The honesty to which we are called compels us to confront the pain of the world with a vision to transform it.  Both the pain of the world and the vision to transform it are clear in the stories of Kamini’s life and the Naari Shakti project.  It is the difference between the father who rejects her and the God who welcomes her.  To know ourselves as claimed, named and welcomed by God is an act of truth-telling about who we really are–and how much that may differ from who the world thinks we can be.  Abuse and rejection are part of Kamini’s story, and accompanying her means being honest about that.  But they aren’t the whole of her story, and accompanying her means being honest about that too.

The honesty formed by faith compels us to tell the truth about hunger–and the truth about the God who promises its end.  God’s promise of a just world where all are fed pulls us into the world to confront sin in all its’ forms, refusing to hide from affliction and yet refusing to let affliction be the end of the story for ourselves, our neighbors or out world.  It is the honesty of an Easter people, who can deny neither the reality of the cross nor the reality of the empty tomb.  To end hunger, we will need to be honest with ourselves about both.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. How have you experienced or felt God sustaining your strength in challenging circumstances?
2. What are some things you hunger for other than food (such as companionship, love and acceptance, or justice, clean air and water)?  Does your community better provide things that feed people in mind, body and spirit?
3. In the Naari Shakti project, Kamini found the resources she needed to develop her strengths and make meaningful choices for herself and her future.  How does your church create opportunities for neighbors to develop their strengths and make meaningful choices for themselves and your community?
4. What kind of honesty will it take to end hunger in your community?  Where is there a need for truth-telling and truth-seeking when it comes to the challenges you and your neighbors face?

PRAYER

Gracious and loving God, through the power of the cross and the glory of the empty tomb, you bring us the truth of your love for us and for all people.  Help us to live into that truth and to share it with the world.  AMEN!

Week 1

A Bigger “We”

“Your Father who sees in secret will reward you”

Matthew 6:4

 

Almost eight years had passed since Marina set foot inside a church building.  A car accident when she was in her late 40’s had left her homebound with chronic pain and without use of her legs.  One of her favorite visits in her home was on Sunday afternoon, when her pastor would come by to give Marina Holy Communion and pray with her.  With a half flight of stairs leading up to the church door and more stairs between the foyer and the sanctuary, worshiping with her congregation was not an option.

That’s why Marina was so surprised to get a call from her pastor in July 2020 asking her to be part of a conversation about reopening the building for worship during the COVID-19 pandemic.  She was quiet in that first Zoom meeting, listening to the other 10 people share their ideas and concerns.  Some were scared, some weren’t, but most were exasperated and at a loss.  One man seemed to put it best when he said, “This is all new to us.  We’ve just never had to think about what it would mean to not be in church together ever.”

Before anyone could murmur agreement, Marina made her sole contribution to the discussion: “Whaddya mean ‘we’?”

This “we” — or, more specifically, this call to reexamine “we” — is at the core of the gospel message for Ashe Wednesday this year and, indeed of the church’s vision of a just world where all are fed.

Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 6:1-6 and 16-21 is the starting point on the journey through Lent.  In this excerpt from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus admonishes the audience about public, showy displays of spirituality.  Rather than take pleasure or pride in giving alms, we are to hide the deed even from ourselves.  Rather than pray in public, we are to retire to private rooms.  Rather than display the effects of our fasting, Jesus tells us, “put oil on your head and wash your face” (6:17).

In fact, each of Jesus’ directives seems to contradict the very notion of what we have come to call “being a public church.”  The sermon of Jesus appears to favor private spirituality over public displays of faith.  He seems to suggest that faith is best lived out in the quiet and private spaces of our hearts rather than in public.

However, reading the sermon in this way misses the fact that the Gospel of Matthew is a call to be this very public church, which will “make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19).  We might believe that the message of Lent is to practice private piety, yet Jesus focuses here not on the mere practices of faith but on the community of faith.  In other words, Jesus is talking not about the what but about the who — who we are and who God is.

Michael Joseph Brown hints at this in his commentary on Matthew in True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary (Fortress, 2007), noting the subtle assumptions about privilege in Matthew 6.  Jesus’ command to the disciples to pray in their “room” (6:6) assumes they have a private room to retreat to, even though Jesus himself “has nowhere to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20).  “Almsgiving,” as Brown writes, “assumes that you have something to give.”  Even fasting assumes that one has the means to make choices about when to start and stop their own hunger.

Jesus’ message is a challenge to a privileged church to think more carefully about who they are.  The problem isn’t that they are doing the wrong things.  Giving alms to support neighbors is a good thing.  Praying in the synagogue is, well, what is supposed to happen when the community is gathered.  They are going through the right motions.  But they have forgotten why they are doing them, and they have forgotten who they are.  Their practices are no longer about the good of the community or the good of the neighbor but are mere performances, focused entirely on themselves.

Almsgiving, praying, fasting — these are practices meant to remind us of each other.  But has being faithful become a matter of making sure we are seen rather than of training our hearts and minds to see each other:  Marina’s fellow congregant in the Zoom call was more than willing to help the church with what it needed to do.  But as her question revealed, he had forgotten who the church is called to be.  His “we” was no more than an “I”.

Yet even when the church forgets, God remembers.  In each of the dictates to his followers, Jesus reminds them of the “Father who sees in secret.”  He reminds us that God’s concern for us is not measured by our conspicuousness, nor is it limited by our narrow imagination.

Accompanying our neighbors in God’s work of building a just world where all are fed means re-imagining who we are and who we are called to be.  There are so many stories shared across this church about friends and neighbors addressing hunger and poverty together.  But perhaps the significance of faith in God, who “sees in secret,” is best exemplified not by the stories we can tell but by the stories we can’t — stories of God at work “in secret” and in hidden ways.  These are the stories we don’t hear, of neighbors whose names can’t be shared.

They include the story of the clinic that cannot be named because unjust laws would put its noncitizen clients at risk.  They include the story of women in a shelter whose names must be hidden to keep the women safe from their abusers.  They include the story of ministries in conflict zones whose details cannot be shared without exposing workers and guests to violence.

These are the stories that cannot be trumpeted but are nevertheless triumphant examples of the work of God, “who sees in secret.”

Ending hunger means seeing what unjust power tries to keep hidden.  It means defining “we” in a way that threatens the principalities and powers — including our own privilege — that make everything about “I.”  And it means remembering, when we are isolated or marginalized, that “I” am never excluded from God’s “we.”

Jesus’ call in the Gospel reading reminds us that being the church requires a definition of community that is more expansive, more diverse and, thus, more beautiful than the exclusive vision put forth by those in power.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS:

1.  Think, journal or share about a time when you felt left out or unable to speak because of fear.  How does that memory impact your reflection on this reading and devotion?
2. The members of Marina’s church were unable to see that their ability to climb stairs gave them the privilege to gather together in one space.  The members of the ancient church to which Jesus was speaking were unable to see that their ability to give alms, fast, and pray in private rooms was a privilege.  What are some ways that privilege might affect who feels included in your community?
3. What does your church community look like?  In what ways are all neighbors in your community invited to share their experience and ideas openly and freely with your congregation?

PRAYER:

Gracious and loving God, through your Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord, you bring light and life for all the world.  Help us to listen, learn and love until your light and life fill every community.  AMEN!

Devotional for the week of February 7th, 2021

Devotional message and art based on the readings for February 7th, reprinted from sundaysandseasons.com.
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