“Swimming at Rancho El Rio”
Micah 6:6-8; Matthew 17:14-20
Rev. Dr. Deborah L. Clark
September 14, 2014
According to Trip Advisor, it was just a vacation rental—a cottage in the cloud forest of Monteverde, Costa Rica that happened to be named Casa Inspiracion. Little did we know how apt the name would turn out to be.
When we arrived, the owner Veronica was waiting for us at Casa Inspiracion with homemade cheese and tortillas and fresh mango slices. We shared our snack at the kitchen table. She told us about her brother-in-law the birding guide, and about the neighbors who would cook dinner for us. “And one day,” she said, “you’ll have to come to our place for a swim in the river.”
We did. We took a taxi down the mountain to the small village of Guacimal, and then down a dirt road to Rancho El Rio, where Veronica, her husband Alex, and their 11-year-old son Stuart make their home.
After a glass of freshly made Star-fruit juice, we braved the rocky path down to the river. We swam, floated in the current, and finally found a shallow spot in the shade to soak and talk.
We asked Veronica why her family had moved from Monteverde to Guacimal. She explained that they had long dreamed of growing all their food, and Guacimal had the right climate. During the wet season they grew rice; the dry season was perfect for corn. All year long they tended mango, starfruit and cashew trees, and raised chicken, turkeys, and pigs. “Back when we used to buy most of our food,” she said, “I had so many health problems. I didn’t want that for my son.”
A move that started as a personal commitment to their family’s well-being soon led them beyond themselves, when they learned that a multi-national fruit company was planning to divert a large quantity of water from the Guacimal River. If that was allowed to happen, Veronica realized, this beautiful flowing river would become a mere trickle, and the lifeline of the village of Guacimal would shrivel up.
She and Alex, neither of whom are lawyers, organized a coalition and filed suit. The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court of Costa Rica. Along the way Veronica and Alex tried to get more groups involved. The University of Georgia, which has an environmental research facility in the area, declined to participate in what they considered to be a lost cause. Veronica and Alex refused to accept it as a lost cause. This past spring, the Costa Rican Supreme Court ruled in their favor. The river will continue to flow, nourishing the land and people of Guacimal.
“For a while,” Veronica admitted, “I spent all my time working on the court case. I was worried I wasn’t giving my son enough attention, and that he would grow up resenting environmental activism. But then one day Stuart declared he wanted to become President, so he could make laws to protect all the rivers.” He had been watching and learning all along.
Veronica looked at her watch. “We’d better get some lunch,” she said, “so we’ll have time to show you our other project.” We climbed up the muddy embankment, changed clothes, and tested out her original recipe for cashew burgers. We admired their mostly open-air house. “What about mosquitoes?” I asked. “As long as you don’t mind bats,” she answered, “the mosquitoes are no problem.”
Then we squeezed into her pickup truck, and headed into the village for our next opportunity for inspiration. We pulled up at a sprawling, seemingly abandoned old building. “Here it is,” Veronica exclaimed with pride. She described their vision—a community center for the people of Guacimal and a retreat center for international visitors.
“See this room?” She began our tour. “It used to be a dance hall—with a bar over there. Can’t you picture yoga classes? And fresh fruit smoothies at the bar…”
We climbed the rickety stairs. “The second floor”, she continued, “would be perfect for a hands-on children’s museum, with exhibits about the environment.”
She took us outside and showed us massive trees. “We’re thinking some benches around the trees would be nice. Maybe a labyrinth. And over here, a greenhouse, where we’d raise mango trees and give them to local folks to plant in their yards, so they won’t have to buy fruit at the supermarket.”
She elaborated on her idea of inviting international groups to come for retreats. “They could do homestays,” she said, “Then the people of Guacimal will get some income.” The international programs, she explained, would yield income, which would enable them to offer events and classes for the often struggling people of Guacimal.
“When this place was a bus station,” she said as she concluded our tour, “it was called Casa Grande—the big house. Maybe we’ll keep that name.” And with that, we hopped back into the pick-up truck and headed for the bus that would take us back to the much smaller Casa Inspiracion.
A half hour later, Fran and I sat on the bus, climbing the steep winding roads to Monteverde, marveling at our day—swimming in a river, eating cashew burgers, wandering through an old deserted building. Most of all, we marveled at the inspiration—vivid reminders that we can make a difference.
We live in a world that conspires to make us feel small. Megamalls, megachurches, megabytes on an impersonal internet. We are overwhelmed by horrifying news stories, dwarfed by statistics, perplexed by a universe vast beyond our comprehension. It’s easy to feel we don’t matter. It’s easy to join the disciples in saying “but we can’t do that.”
Jesus’ response to the disciples’ despair—to our despair—is deliberately provocative: if you have even a mustard seed worth of faith, he says, you can move mountains. Jesus refuses to accept our conclusion that we are too small to make a difference.
Veronica likewise refuses to accept the conclusion that she is too small. She has thought long and hard about how to use those tiny mustard seeds—seeds of passion, commitment and resources—to make mountains move and to keep rivers flowing. In the three projects she showed us that afternoon, she makes the connection between multiple ways of working for change. Her three projects, strikingly, resonate with Micah’s description of what God requires of us—do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.
Veronica began with herself—and her family. They changed to live in accordance with their values. They did it for themselves—to improve their health. They did it to bear witness to their conviction that there is a better way to live—to model an alternative to the genetically modified over-processed food they found at the grocery store. They sought, in the words often attributed to Gandhi, to be the change they wished to see in the world. If they were religious folks, they might say they did it to live out their faith, to walk humbly with God who created the fruit trees and the rivers and who longs for our wholeness.
Lest we put Veronica too high up on a pedestal, I will point out that her family didn’t grow everything they ate. In fact, I saw her packing a lunch for her husband, complete with a box of store-bought chocolate cookies. Seeking to live with integrity isn’t about perfection—it’s a lifelong journey.
It’s a journey that ultimately leads us beyond ourselves. Veronica and Alexander realized that true change happens only as we build sustainable community. And so they dreamed of a community center that would bring people together. They envisioned opportunities for folks to share knowledge, resources, and even fruit trees; they imagined homestays that would build friendships across the globe. They dared to dream of a place where Micah’s loving kindness would prevail.
It’s a bold dream, one that will surely falter at times. Creating community, like living with integrity, is a journey—sometimes frustrating, sometimes joyous, never complete.
Without a river running through the village of Guacimal, though, no amount of community building would make much difference. Veronica and Alex knew they could not ignore the bigger picture, the way politics and big business impacted their village. To work for change at this larger level required believing that a mustard seed really could move a mountain. It required coalition-building, bugging experts until they agreed to help, strategizing, persisting when it seemed like a lost cause. It requires standing strong in the face of intimidation and ridicule. Doing justice in a complex, messy world is complex, messy work.
Trying to live with personal integrity. Building lasting community. Engaging in public policy advocacy. Veronica’s story reminds me that all three of these ways of making a difference are connected; they build on each other and need each other.
Veronica is unusual in her ability to work for change at all three levels simultaneously. Most of us gravitate toward one level. Some of us love the strategizing and organizing of transforming systems—doing justice. Some are inclined toward building communities that model an alternative to the harsh ways of the wider world—loving kindness. Others strive to be to live out our convictions in our everyday lives—walking humbly with God.
Veronica’s story challenges us to expand our repertoires. Can your personal commitment to recycling broaden into advocacy for public policies that protect the environment? Does your work on behalf of rights for people with disabilities translate into how you care for your elderly neighbor and how you honor your own body’s abilities and limitations? How do we take the welcome we have experienced in this church and work to make a more welcoming society? We may discover that the best way to expand our repertoires is to make connections between the diverse ways each of us works to make the world a better place.
Veronica saw mountains that needed to be moved–food to be grown, community to be built, a river to keep flowing. She used every mustard seed to she had to move them. What are the mountains we see? How can we use our mustard seeds–our faith, our passion, our skills, our resources–to move them?
Advocating for social change, building community, living with integrity. Doing justice, loving kindness, walking humbly with our God. As we seek to follow Micah’s challenge, as we work together at all levels, the mustard seed of faith we celebrate here in this church really can move mountains. Thanks be to God. Amen.