“Engaged in Caring”
Isaiah 25:6-9; Matthew 25:31-40
Rev. Dr. Deborah L. Clark
October 4, 2015
Confirmation at Edwards Church always begins with questions. And so, at our first Confirmation pizza lunch last Sunday, each pair of a youth confirmand and an adult mentor was asked to come up with at least six questions: two about confirmation, two about our church, two about our faith. The questions that emerged ran the gamut: What does confirmation mean? Did someone named Edward found our church? Will we always have pizza and chocolate chip cookies for our meetings? What do we make of Bible Stories that seem outrageous?
One pair asked, “What’s our connection with the Pope?” A well-timed question, given that we were meeting on the last day of Pope Francis’s historic visit to the United States, only a few hours before he would celebrate Mass for two million people in Philadelphia.
We talked about our understanding of spiritual authority in the United Church of Christ—how we don’t have priests or bishops or a pope, how we trust that God speaks to and through each one of us, how we believe God speaks in an especially powerful way when we gather prayerfully as a community. We noted that the Pope doesn’t have the authority to tell us how to live as Christians. One of our youth pointed that, while we may not agree with everything he says or does, this Pope seems to be a wise person who can inspire us.
That insight from our Confirmation Class seems especially relevant today, as we reflect on the third of the verbs that describe our church’s mission: engaging in caring for God’s world. It seems especially relevant as we talk about the refugee crisis overwhelming our world, for the Pope’s words and actions in relation to this crisis have been powerful. His responses point us toward some guiding principles for our own words and actions, for our own efforts to engage in caring for God’s world.
Just before Pope Francis boarded an airplane for Cuba, the first leg of his trip, he met with a Syrian refugee family being hosted by the Vatican parish of St. Anne. The family—mother, father and two children—recently fled from Damascus and are seeking asylum in Italy. The pope was deeply moved: “You could see the pain in their faces,” he said.
The refugee crisis is complicated. The Pope challenges us to keep it simple. This is about beloved children of God. “We must not be taken aback by their numbers,” he says, “but rather view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening to their stories, trying to respond as best we can to their situation.” His words echo the challenge of Matthew’s gospel: when you feed or clothe or befriend a refugee, you befriend Christ.
The pope lifts up a starting point for engaging in caring for the refugees of our world: look into the faces of our sister and brothers who are suffering. Listen to their stories. Honor their sacredness and our shared humanity.
Each of the parishes in the Vatican City is hosting a refugee family. Pope Francis has challenged every Catholic institution in Europe—every parish, school, convent, sanctuary—to do the same. If they did, 40,000 refugee families would have a place to call home. In his request, the Pope points us to a second principle for engaging: when we work together, our small actions combine to make a difference. Next week our youth will put together hygiene kits—maybe 50, maybe 80, maybe even a hundred. It’s a drop in the bucket, unless churches all over our country are doing the same thing. By the grace of God, they are.
Some parishes in Europe are responding to Francis’s challenge with enthusiasm. Others have been more cautious. The archbishop of Budapest pointed out that in Hungary, hosting undocumented migrants is a criminal offense that would put their parishes at risk. Another bishop said Francis “doesn’t know the situation.” “They want to take over,” he said, referring to refugees that are Muslim. Their fear is palpable—how, the bishops ask, do we distinguish between refugees that desperately need our help and someone who comes to do harm? Pope Francis acknowledges those fears in his request that parishes focus on hosting families rather than single individuals, trusting that the parishes will feel safer with families. He honors their fear, and he challenges the parishes to act with courage even when they are afraid.
The reactions of the bishops point us to still another principle for engaging. Engaging in caring for God’s people and God’s world is risky. It calls us to reach out to people we do not know, people whose lives are very different from ours, people we may fear. Sometimes the danger is in our own imaginations; sometimes it is real. It is hard to know the difference. As people of faith, we cannot allow our uncertainty to keep us from reaching out.
Once he reached the United States, the pope’s schedule was full and varied. He visited an inner-city school where recent immigrants are learning and growing. He worshipped with inmates in a prison. He blessed children with special needs. In between, he visited the halls of power—Congress and the United Nations.
His schedule reflected the multiple layers involved in caring for our world. We must start by making the personal, human, holy connections. Those personal connections compel us then to look beyond the individual circumstances to the bigger picture—to economic forces at work, to the ways power is used and abused, to policies and laws and customs. They draw us into the murky waters of power and politics. The pope addressed our law makers boldly, challenging people on both sides of the aisle to look at how our policies impact the most vulnerable among us.
The refugee crisis forces us to ask difficult questions. How do our nation’s immigration policies affect the lives of Syrian refugees? What role have we played in creating or worsening the terrifying situation in Syria? Is there a positive role might we be playing? How does the Syrian refugee crisis, mostly centered in the Middle East and Europe, push us to examine our own history with immigration? These are hard questions, most of them without easy answers, many of them flash-points in our increasingly divided political landscape. We must ask them, and we must search for answers, even in the murky messiness of our political process.
From the simplicity of human connection to the complexity of confronting immigration laws and foreign policy dilemmas, Pope Francis’s words and actions this last week offer us these guiding principles:
First, we begin by looking at the faces of our sisters and brothers in need. We are called to see Christ in them and to respond with compassion.
Second, we are called to work with people of good faith and good will, for our small acts are multiplied when we come together.
Third, we must be willing to take risks, to reach out to people we don’t know or understand. Following Jesus is risky.
Fourth, we must dare to look at the big picture, the deeper issues, and use our voices and our power to fight for change.
Finally, we are called to come back to the starting point—to see the faces, hear the stories, honor the holiness and the humanity of those who are suffering.
It is overwhelming. It is overwhelmingly painful to look into those faces, overwhelmingly daunting to grasp the magnitude of the problem. It is overwhelmingly frightening to open our hearts to people we do not know, overwhelmingly messy to delve into the realm of public policy.
How do we do it? Where do we find strength and courage to keep engaging in this overwhelming charge to care for God’s world? Pope Francis’ final act before he headed back to Rome gives us insight. He celebrated Mass with two million people. We have a different understanding of the meaning of communion; still we share a conviction that this sacred meal can give us strength to fulfill our Christian calling. We don’t have two million people gathered on the streets of Framingham, but today, on World Communion Sunday, we celebrate that we share this meal with hundreds of millions of Christians all over the world. We are not alone in our fumbling efforts to care for our world. God is at work when we come together. This meal assures us that Christ is with us and will give us the strength we need to keep seeing the faces, to keep collecting wash cloths, to keep taking risks, to keep speaking up.
We share this meal with Christians all over the world, and we share this meal in honor of people of all faiths all over the world who are reaching out in different ways to offer food and hope to refugees.
We share our meal today in honor of Hungarians who stood by railroad tracks handing out granola bars to frightened, hungry refugees. In the face of their own government erecting barbed wire fences, these good people wanted to let the refugees know they cared.
We taste our bread today inspired by the Turkish couple Fethullah Üzümcüoğlu and Esra Polat. Instead of their planned wedding reception, they spent the day after their wedding feeding 4000 refugees through a Turkish relief organization.
We drink from this cup rejoicing in the dedication of the Ethiopian community in Stratford, Ontario, which held a fundraiser for Syrian refugees on the Ethiopian new year, serving $10 plates of their traditional food to everyone who came. They remembered when their own community was in need, and so they wanted to help.
Hungarians, Turks, Ethiopians, engaged in caring for God’s world. Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, engaged in caring for God’s world. Granola bars, wedding cake, Ethiopian treats—a feast for all God’s people. Kabalagala, Lithuanian sweet bread, babcia, tortillas, cornbread, Scottish oat cakes—a feast for God’s world. Let us come together, tasting the sweetness of our global community, engaging in caring for God’s world. Amen.