A New World Is Possible!

This is a reflection I was supposed to offer at a Church on the 22nd of January. However, due to the weather the service was canceled. Nevertheless, I think that the reflection has some merit. I hope you enjoy the reading.
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January 22, 2012, 7:00 pm

Fairview Chapel UMC

Sermon: A New World is Possible!

Reading: 1 Corinthians 7:29-31

Eliezer Valentín-Castañón

One Sunday morning, a mother began to waken her son. “George, it’s time to wake up”, she said. George replied, “I don’t want to get up. I’m tired!” “But Georgie, you have to get up; it’s Sunday, and we don’t want to be late for Church.” He replied: “I don’t want to go to Church!” “Oh George, it’s Sunday, and you have to go to Church.” “I don’t want to go.” “But why not?” she asked. “Because,” he replied, “I hate it.” “You hate it? But why?” “Because it’s stupid: the sermons are boring, the music is terrible, the people are dumb, and the pastors hate me.” “Oh Georgie, it’s not that bad. Now please, get up, or we will late for Church.” “I’m not going”, he replied. “But Georgie, you must.” “Give me one good reason why I should go.” His mother replied, “Well, George, first of all, you’re the bishop.”

Think about what happened to you in the telling of my joke. Think about how long it took you to get the joke, because a good joke works almost instantaneously, involving our minds, our feelings, and our bodies. In an instant—in a flash—we put things together in our minds, especially the unexpected. We laugh before we understand it. And humour is infectious; once people start to laugh, it spreads. It is what makes laughing together with another person such an interesting example of shared experience.

It is regrettable that not all experiences are so shared in the world. In the world we live in today people, as you all know, are suffering due to lack of water, food, access to health care, education, and many other things. There are people in the world who have never seen anyone beyond the circumference of their villages, or their tribal communal arrangement. There are people who have not even seen a Tv or heard a radio; lets not even mention a computer.

If we could share our resources the way we are able to share our laughter the world would be a whole lot better, don’t you think? Regrettable it is not!

If we could, at this time, shrink the Earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look like this:
There would be 57 Asians, 21  Europeans, 14 from the Western
Hemisphere (North and South) and 8  Africans.
70 would be non-white; 30 white.
70 would be non-Christian; 30 Christian.
50% of the entire world's wealth would be in the hands of only 6 people.
(All 6 would be citizens of the United States.)
70 would be unable to read.
50 would suffer from malnutrition.
80 would live in sub-standard housing.
Only 1 would have a college education.

I know that some of us here are not happy about the movement to occupy Wall Street, I am sure that some of us feel that is a group of people with misguided expectations. And, some of you might be completely right! But no one can argue that there is something profoundly wrong, even anti-Gospel, when a small percentage of the population of the world control most of the resources of the world, while the vast majorities suffer of want. Now you can blame it on people’s lack of determination, or on people’s drive to succeed. Some of you might even think that people’s conditions are the result of their own actions. We in the western capitalist nations of Europe and the Americas have convinced ourselves that the things we have are the result of our industrious efforts; we have lifted ourselves from our own boots straps, we tell ourselves. And all this might be right, but Jesus does not call his disciples to make an account of our financial achievements, Jesus did not called us to show others that their misery is the result of their lack of effort , while ours is the result of our entrepreneurship.

The undeniable reality is that

• the average North American consumes the same amount as more than 400 Africans.
• We poses enough weapons in the U.S. alone to create more than 100,000 Hiroshimas.
• There are 25,000 people who die every day as a consequence poverty, and nearly 16,000 of those are children, which means every five seconds a child dies of a preventable disease.
• Much of the death and suffering of our world is fundamentally caused by greed and hunger for power.

It’s time to take the words of Romans 12 seriously, with the admonition: “Do not conform to the patterns of the world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The people of the WORD should be the people who question the world as it is in order to present the world as God wants it to be.

It is time for the us come to the realization that “the present form of this world is passing away,”  and the children of light, the children of the living God have been entrusted with a new way  of being human, a new way of caring for each other:

This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends. (Jn. 15:12-13, NKJV)

If we dare to love like this, if we dare to take the challenge that Jesus posed his disciples 2,000 years ago, and still today: a new world would be possible.

We must be bold, as people who have been filled with the power of the Spirit of God; not to feel good about ourselves but rather as people who have received the power of God in order to make the new world possible, because it is in God’s will!!

Think of those people that today around the world are making a difference in the lives of millions because they had decided that God’s Kingdom message is indeed bringing life and justice to many people who are suffering in the world.

Just this past year in Philadelphia, there was a congregation that was extending hospitality to people in their community by opening their church to the homeless people in their neighborhood. Unfortunately the city council had something else in mind. They forbid the church from opening a shelter. Most people would have given up but the Spirit of God was moving.

Shane Claiborne[1] described the church’s response in the following manner:

• The pastor was told they were not allowed to run a shelter as they did not have proper permits, nor would they be granted them because the city did not want a shelter there. So the congregation prayed, and the Spirit moved. They announced that they would not be running a shelter, but they would have a revival from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. every night. The city did not dare stop a revival. It was brilliant. I attended the revival one night. It began with great singing, worship and sharing, and transitioned around 10 p.m. to a 10-hour period of “silent prayer.”
• He also tell us of another experience where other disciples of Christ, understanding their calling, acted faithfully.
  In Atlanta, Claiborne says, a group of pastors and Christians were met with anti-homeless laws that made it illegal to urinate in public. (In fact, some homeless folks have been arrested and charged with public indecency and exposure, which makes them registered sex offenders.) So our friends launched a “Pee for Free with Dignity” campaign, which insisted people could not be arrested for public urination if there were no public restrooms. They marched to City Hall carrying toilets and laid them at the mayor’s door. Soon Atlanta had some public restrooms.

I am not here to preach about social justice, which is what many people would suggest I am doing. On the contrary, I am here proclaiming the full-Gospel. Through Jesus we have come to hear the Good News of the Kingdom of God. The Good News that God was bringing a new aeon into the world, a world of justice, peace, and mercy. A world were hunger, suffering and death due to poverty, greed, exploitation, and oppression cannot not be accepted as a matter of providence. Jesus’ Good News tell us that he has come to bring us life, and abundant life at that. You and I have been made ambassadors of this awesome mission of God’s reconciling love. Through faith, you and I have been charged with the task of making God’s rule a reality for the whole world. Thus, the words of Teresa of Avila express our task so eloquently:

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.[2]

Arundhati Roy, an Indian Christian and author makes the contemporary point: “Another world is possible. Another world is necessary. Another world is already here … on a quiet day I can hear her breathing.”

The world is waiting, groaning, aching for another world—for the children of the God to usher in the Kingdom of God here on earth.

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[1] Shane Claiborne is an author, speaker, activist and recovering sinner. He wrote the best-selling memoir The Irresistible Revolution and is one of the compilers of Common Prayer, a new resource to unite people in prayer and action for a better world.

[2] Teresa of Avila (1515–1582). Christ Has No Bod.