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January 24, 2010
1 Corinthians 12: 12-31a, Luke 4: 14-21

Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen.

Imagine that we are at a big banquet in a fancy hotel ballroom. The status of everyone here is very clear.

There are folks seated at the head table in tuxes and evening gowns. The folks at the tables close to the front are clearly part of the upper echelon – they have more money, more power, than those at the tables near the door – although those folks do have the opportunity for a more discreet get-away as the evening drags on.

There is a maitre d buzzing around the room, making sure the waitstaff is all doing its job. The waitstaff is all in sharp looking uniforms – probably had to buy the clothes themselves out of a rather meager salary. You can’t see the folks in the kitchen, but you can be sure their work is generating plenty of sweat.

Up at the head table, one of the guests seems upset. He’s been trying to get some butter for his rolls. He has asked several waiters as they pass by, but no butter has appeared. He is not used to waiting for what he wants.

As another waiter nears the table, the man roars at him: “Do you know who I am?”  The waiter looks at him blankly.

“I am president of a major corporation. I am a graduate of Harvard University. I have homes on three continents. I am one of the guests of honor here tonight. And none of you waiters seem to be able to find the time to bring me some butter.”

The waiter looked at him for a moment, then asked softly: “Sir, do you know who I am?”

“Just a waiter,” the man replied.

The waiter paused again for a moment, never breaking his gaze with the man.  “Sir, I am the man with the butter.”

This was not the image that Paul was sketching out in his letter to those early Christians in the city of Corinth.  Paul was using the very familiar image of all the parts of the body working together, depending on one another. It’s an image that is very familiar to us.

It was not such a familiar image to the people of Paul’s time. Oh, they had heard about how society is like a body. But the description was much more like what we saw in the banquet all. At the top was the head. The head controlled all the other parts of the body. Everything moved from the top down. Hierarchy ruled.

Imagine, then, the shock when people read the radical message in Paul’s letter. Imagine their shock at those words early on in this passage – “For in one Spirit, we were all baptized into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free – and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”

It might have been the same kind of shock those residents of Nazareth felt as they gathered in the synagogue for what they thought would be a routine Sabbath, much like we might come here expecting a routine Sunday morning at Memorial.

What a treat to have Jesus doing the reading on this Sabbath. They knew him as he was growing up and they had heard good things about his preaching in other places. So he selected a passage from the Prophet Isaiah, stood as he read it, then sat down to offer a few thoughts.

So far so good, although close listeners might have noticed that he read that part of the verse in Isaiah that talks about proclaiming a year of the Lord’s favor but left out the rest of the verse about “the day of the vengeance of our God.” What was he doing?

When Jesus began to talk, they were even more puzzled. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing”? We thought he was just quoting Isaiah. And in the rest of this section of Luke’s Gospel that we did not hear read today, it gets worse.

Jesus reminds his friends in Nazareth of some other famous stories from their scriptures. He talks about the Prophet Elijah healing a widow’s son in Sidon – an outsider. He talks about Elisha providing the path to healing for Naaman, the commander of the Syrian army that was occupying the Israelites’ lands. These were stories of God’s care extending way beyond the Jewish people.

It was okay for Jesus to talk about a year of the Lord’s favor coming to Nazareth. But when the boundaries were extended so wide, the crowd turned on Jesus and chased him out of the synagogue in his hometown.

What the Gospel writer Luke does with this passage is to set out the mission statement for Jesus and his followers. The old barriers are being overcome. Good news is being brought to the poor, not the guy at the head table.
Those who are oppressed now will go free. The year of the Lord’s favor is here – the Jubilee year out of the Hebrew scripture -- when forgiveness of old debts reigns supreme. Jesus would call that the Kingdom of God.

The question before us this morning as followers of Jesus is how do we live into that sense of equality that Paul was writing about, where we understand that every part of the body of Christ that we call the church is important?

How do we live into that vision of the year of the Lord’s favor, where we become partners in overcoming poverty and oppression?

Let me tell you the story of just one person trying to do that. It’s a story familiar to some of you. And it’s a story as immediate as the news the last few weeks out of Haiti.

Margaret Trost grew up hearing the stories of how following Jesus meant putting your faith into action by reaching out to those in need and working for social justice. Her father was Fred Trost, a pastor in Chicago when she was growing up, the conference minister for the UCC in Wisconsin during the time Memorial was moving out here to Fitchburg, someone who has preached here on numerous occasions. He’s the one who rejoiced in our clear windows where, as we heard the Gospel, we could look out at the needs of the world.

Life was pretty good for Margaret in the late 1990s. She and her husband Rich lived in Cottage Grove. They had a five-year old son, Luke.  They both worked in the television production in a company they had started. 

And then on a September night in 1997, they were watching the sunset and talking about their life together when Rich had an asthma attack and died.

As Margaret struggled to recover from that shock, she eventually connected with musician and minister Bryan Sirchio, who invited her to come along on a trip to Haiti. That trip in early 2000 changed her life. She helped start a meal program for children in Port-au-Prince and over the past decade, it grew so that it was feeding 1,500 children a day, five days a week.

The program was run by the people in Haiti around St. Clare’s church in the Tiplas Kazo neighborhood, which is part of the Delmas district in the city. Margaret raised the money. A priest at the church provided essential links with the people there. This was truly a case where many different parts of the body worked to feed the children.

And then there was the earthquake.

In the days right after Jan. 12, Margaret did not know whether her friends in Haiti had survived the catastrophe. She had no idea whether the food program could go on. But her supporters sent her money anyway in the hope that she could help the people of the St. Clare’s neighborhood recover.

Those of you who have seen Margaret’s updates on our web site know that amazing things have happened through her contacts there. In the midst of so much sorrow and so many obstacles, there are glimmers of hope in this neighborhood.

None of her close friends who run the meal program were killed. The church and rectory survived the quake relatively intact, although people are still afraid to be inside buildings. Her program liaison in Haiti, Lavarice, has managed to make multiple trips by truck to and from the Dominican Republic to bring in food and water and he has organized ongoing supplies.  The people at St. Clare’s began serving food last Wednesday.

Here’s how it goes, according to an account from Margaret relayed through her dad:

“A truck arrives.  The gate to the churchyard is opened. The truck proceeds to an open space on the rectory grounds.  The gate is closed. The food is unloaded. The gates are then opened and the children enter the grounds. Everything has gone smoothly so far. The food and water are distributed until there is no more.

“Lavarice indicates that thousands of people are coming to our food program when the food and water are distributed.  They walk for miles.”  And renting the truck, getting a driver and loading food and water costs between $5,000 and $8,000 per truck right now.

Within a few days, a field hospital will also be set up at the rectory, staffed by doctors from Turkey.

A key partner for Margaret in all of this has been the Zakat Foundation from Chicago, an Islamic charity that itself has been doing amazing work in Haiti. And just to emphasize that creating the kind of world God envisions need not be limited by the barriers that so often separate us, some of the earliest medical assistance in Haiti came from the Israelis, perhaps with the words of Isaiah etched in their hearts.

All sorts of people are doing what Margaret has been doing but there are some important connections between  Margaret’s work and what we heard in our scriptures today.

She understood that proclaiming good news to the poor involves more than words.

She knows well the oppression that has devastated Haiti over the years and the importance of helping the oppressed find a way to go free.

She helped people in the U.S. who had been blind to the harsh realities in Haiti recover their sight long before this played out in the national media over the last few weeks.

And Margaret knows full well the frustration and despair that can set in, whether over the long haul or especially right now when it is so hard to get food and water and tents and medical care to the people in such desperate need. She knows that for all her moments of success right now in Haiti, there are many other tragic stories.

So for all of us who know those feelings, whether in our own lives or as we feel so helpless seeing the scale of need in Haiti right now, let me end with two passages from Margaret’s book, On That Day, Everybody Ate.

The first passage came after Margaret described a Sunday at the meal program several years ago when the food was running out and a group of mostly adults – hungry, desperate – had pushed their way into the kitchen seeking food. She had seen so many disturbing things over a few days – orphaned children at the market begging Margaret for food, a dead man lying in the street, a shortage of food at the church.

“Our little food program had been swallowed up by the big need,” she wrote. She asked why she was even in Haiti. She could not find an answer. And then the words, “You’re here to love,” came to her. Fr. Gerry, the priest who inspired her, said a public thank you to her in church and the people in church were smiling at her and patting her arms.

She wrote this: “It wasn’t the quantity or the effectiveness or our different lives. It was simpler than that. It was about solidarity. It was about love. On that afternoon, in the front left pew, the words ‘You’re here to love’ became my guide.”

The other passage sets up the other phrase that has sustained Margaret when she feels overwhelmed. She was with Fr. Gerry and wondering about other things she could do beyond the food program. And then she considered the vastness of the problems – and this was well before the earthquake.

“Fr. Gerry turned to me and said, ‘We have a Creole saying I want to teach you. Piti, piti, na rive. That means “Little by little, we will arrive.” One step at a time, Margaret. In Haiti, sometimes they are very, very small steps.’ He laughed another of his full belly laughs. ‘Sometimes we go backward. But it’s important to keep taking steps, even though they are small. Never lose hope. Never give up. One day, maybe not during my lifetime, but one day, we will get there.’ “

It takes many parts of the body working together to function. It takes people with many different gifts.

But with the Spirit of God upon us, we, too, can proclaim a year of the Lord’s favor by what we do, and piti piti, na rive, little by little we will arrive.