(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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