Sunday 5 November 2017

The Blessing of the Least: Or, Who Is Saving Whom? (Matthew 5:1-12)


(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on November 5, 2017, All Saints' Sunday)



“Help Yourself First”

D. L. Mayfield grew up wanting to be a missionary.  She wanted to travel overseas to strange and wonderful lands, to save all the innocent souls who had never heard the name of Jesus.

She tells the story of a mission trip she took to India when she was seventeen.  Her group visited a tiny village to perform a play.  It was a drama, she says, “about the temptations of money and women and alcohol, and how Jesus has the power to overcome them.”  Never mind that this village was dirt poor.

She remembers eating dinner in the village before the play.  Sitting on a swept dirt floor, she and her traveling companions ate the rice and curry that had been carefully prepared by a scrawny old woman with only a few teeth left intact. The curry was “hot-as-hell,” she recalls, and seemed to be composed of little more than okra.  Having heard that spice is often used to disguise rotting vegetables, she was thankful for the fire in her mouth.  She cooled it as best she could with the tall metal cup of water, which must have been drawn from a well outside the village.

Later in the evening, after she and the team had performed their play and no one had come forward at the altar call, they climbed into their SUV and rolled out of the dusty village back to their flat in the city.  On the way home, their guide and interpreter remarked in his singsong voice: “That was their one meal of the day, and they shared it with you.”  Mayfield recalls how bitter those words tasted: “This was normal for [our guide],” she says, “this display of generosity. But for me, it was my first meal given to me by someone who would then do without; it was the first time I ate rice that was destined for another stomach….I remembered the children milling around while we ate, the way their eyes watched our faces. It was their dinner we ate, pretending to be missionaries. The shame I felt tasted like bile.”[1]

Mayfield doesn’t explain why she felt shame, but she doesn’t need to.  We all can identify with her feeling.  If she had known what this family was doing, she would have protested.  She would have refused their one meal of the day.  And if she and her team had been in the little village longer, perhaps they would have gone a step further and taught the families how to save what they had, perhaps even how to invest it and multiply it, so that instead of living from day to day they could secure their future. 

After all, that is the way of our world.  All of us who are privileged enough to have flown on an airplane have heard it put this way: “In the case of emergency, secure your own oxygen mask first before helping others.”  If you don’t help yourself first, you may not be there to help someone else.

Who Really Needs Saving?

But something strange happened to Mayfield.  At first, she had thought she was the one doing the saving.  So she felt shame.  What kind of missionary would steal a meal from a dirt-poor family?  But the more she reflected on her time in India, the more she realized that she wasn’t the one saving.  She was the one being saved.  “Everyone,” she reflects, “[was] poor as far as my eyes could see. And yet, the generosity in which seemingly everyone moved changed me: how they adored bright colors and dramatic movies and soaring operatic songs and spicy food. Although it was deemed little by the world I had grown up in, it seemed to me that all of India was willing to share what they had.”[2]

In other words, her dirt-poor hosts already seemed to be living in the kingdom.  Faith, hope, love—these were not just things they read about or practiced in their free time, or on Sundays, after they had secured their own lives.  These were the very things their lives depended on.  How else do you give away your only meal for the day, if not in faith that your own needs will be met, if not in hopeful joy for the life your gift will bring, if not in love for the other.

A Conversion Story:
From Saviors to Saved

“The least of these” can sound patronizing and condescending.  The least don’t have as much we do.  They don’t know as much.  They don’t achieve as much. 

When Jesus promised last week that he dwelled among “the least of these,” and that whatever we did unto them, we did unto him—we may have left thinking: “Easy enough.  Jesus is calling us to charity.  Jesus is calling us to help the least of these.”  In other words, we may have left feeling big-hearted and better off, thinking it was our duty to pull up those below us.

But is this way of thinking anything special?  Is it even Christian?  Many people advocate for charity and helping others.  And many of them are the same people “obsessed with staying safe and securing a good life for themselves, protecting their borders and procuring a retirement account.”[3]  I count myself among this crowd, and I’m not proud of it.  Because I’m not so sure it’s Christian simply to take care of ourselves first and then help others.  I’m not so sure it’s Christian simply to help the least of these—when helping them means making them more like us.  Making sure that they don’t give away their only meal for the day, that they know how to save or invest.

What Jesus says today points in the opposite direction.  The least don’t need our saving so much as we need theirs.  Blessed are they, Jesus says.  They might not have as much, “know” as much, or accomplish as much.  But in their life is a faith and hope and love that the secure and self-satisfied will never know.  Who can appreciate the promise of a feast more than the hungry?  Who knows what it is to trust, to have faith, better than someone unable to provide for himself?  Who can truly love another person for who they are, other than the meek who surrender their own interests to others?

To be clear, I don’t think Jesus is saying that the least don’t need help—food when they’re hungry or care when they’re sick.  I think what he’s saying today is that the least are calling for more than our help: they’re calling for our hearts, for us to be converted to their life of blessing, for us to walk alongside them and discover their salvation. 

Saved by the Saints, Saved by the Least

On All Saints’ Sunday, we remember and celebrate the Christ-followers who have gone before us.  Their lives shine like candles, like stars in the night guiding us on the way (cf. Phil 2:15).  The powers and principalities of our world—the media, business executives, government leaders—proclaim a rational way of living: fill yourself first, then others.  Save and save and save, until you’ve got some extra to give.

But the saints we celebrate—parents and grandparents, teachers and mentors, friends and strangers—remind us of a different way.  What we remember today is their Christ-likeness: how they lived selflessly, perhaps giving us their only meal one day, or perhaps simply putting down the paper to look full in our eyes.  What we remember, oddly enough, are not their great accomplishments but their “leastness.”  Maybe we remember the poverty of spirit with which they laid their own interests aside.[4]  Maybe we remember their mercy and meekness, by which they loved others lavishly and for no good reason.  Or maybe we remember how they hungered and thirsted to see others living well, how they would not rest until others did.

Whatever exactly we remember, we give thanks for having shared in their blessing.  And we give thanks for our salvation, which comes not from on high but from on low, from the least of these, who lead us in the way of faith.

Prayer

Little Christ,
Who lives in the least
Not so much to be saved
As to save:
May the memory
Of our saints
And their poverty
Convert us
From selfishness
To the way of faith.  Amen.



[1] D. L. Mayfield, Assimilate or Go Home: Notes from a Failed Missionary on Rediscovering Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2016), 173.
[2] Mayfield, Assimilate, 174
[3] Mayfield, Assimilate, 185-186.
[4] Oscar Romero, a saint of El Salvador whom I remember today, once remarked that “dialogue is characterized by poverty”; it is “becoming poor to seek with another the truth.”  Perhaps what we remember of our saints is simply their words, which did not dethrone us but treated us as equals, as companions.

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