Global Mission Sunday
February 3, 2013
February 3, 2013
PREACHER: Seminarian Sarah Rohde
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Before I say anything more about my experience in Mexico, though, first let me say thank you to all of you for being a church that’s involved in God’s mission here in Crystal Lake, in Illinois, and all around the world. I fully believe that we can do and be so much more as a church when we’re in this work together, so thanks for all you do!
If I were to have selected a bible passage on my own to help me talk about Mexico, I don’t know that I would have ever thought to go to Paul’s words to the Corinthians read this morning. Every time I hear that passage about patient and enduring love, it only takes a couple phrases before I think I’m at a wedding. These words are no doubt powerful words for a couple beginning life together. But it was helpful for me to be reminded this week that Paul didn’t write this letter to two people head over heels in love; Paul actually was writing to a new church community that was struggling mightily to get along. The church at Corinth included people from different backgrounds and social classes; they brought a variety of gifts and opinions. I imagine that, at first, this was exciting! People were coming from all over the place to be a part of this new church! But then they started to talk about things more serious than the weather. They started to share opinions, and they tried to make decisions. People talked over one another and refused to compromise; they boasted of their own expertise, while they scorned the knowledge of others.
It’d be nice if we could just say these were problems of the past, but you and I know that these sort of realities bubble up when we encounter people who are different than us. It’s not easy to figure out how to be authentic to who we are, and yet still be open to being changed by people we don’t understand or people with whom we disagree. My time in Mexico helps me empathize with this first-century church in Corinth; in many ways, I could sum up my year in Mexico with precisely this theme: learning how to practice love in the midst of difference. Paul’s words were poignant back then, and they’re poignant today, helping me put into words an experience that is still hard for me to summarize.
Paul writes, “If I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and knowledge, but do not have love, I am nothing.”
Moving to Mexico meant saying goodbye to a lot of what I hold dear. Independence. Confidence. Punctuality. Comfort food. I still remember that sinking feeling in my stomach the first day I arrived at my host family’s home. Soledad, my host mother, showed me immediately to my room and talked at what felt like a million words per minute. I couldn’t understand what she was saying to me, I was glad she seemed excited to have me, but I was using all my strength to fight back tears out of a sudden sense of loneliness and insecurity, and I couldn’t get the right words to come to me. This surprised me. I thought I was up for an adventure; I had majored in Spanish and had kind of assumed that the language wouldn’t be the most difficult part of this transition. It turns out that textbooks teach us a language that’s different than the way people talk in the street or in their homes. Something I thought I already knew how to do became one of many things I had to learn how to do differently.
That afternoon began an entire year of learning what it’s like to live as a stranger in a foreign place. I let go of so much of my identity. No one in Mexico had heard of Concordia College, my hometown of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, or of Lutherans! No one in Mexico knew I got good grades—or cared! They didn’t know that I played piano or liked to bake chocolate chip cookies. Instead, people knew my first name; they knew I came from the United States; and they knew I needed help with just about everything. I needed a host mother to cook for me. I needed people on the street to tell me which way to go. I needed bus drivers to be patient with me when I didn’t do what the locals do, which is to jump off the bus before it completely comes to a stop, so as not to waste too much time. I needed people who had the time to have conversation with someone who spoke their language imperfectly, sometimes even offensively.
We live under a definition of giving and serving that most likely would have seen me as the one who had more to teach and give. People of my skin color and education level have power in this world, but the truth is, I was powerless without the love and generosity of the Mexican people. Far away from everything I knew, suddenly the only things that mattered were that I had a safe place to be, food to eat, and people to call me by name. If I were to translate Paul’s text, I might say, “Even if I speak clearly in English, and if I have a U.S. passport and a college degree, but do not have love, I am nothing.”
It was the first time in my adult life when I realized the vulnerability that sits right beneath my sense of confidence and control. In our highly-individualized culture, we are so tempted to believe that we can and should do it all on our own, but Mexico took me to a place where my language, my money, and my knowledge fell short of my need for love. I realized in a pretty raw way that there are things far more important than being successful or self-sufficient. My sisters and brothers in Mexico taught me what it really means to be loved for who I am, not for what I do, own, or accomplish.
Paul writes, “Love is patient. Love is kind.”
One of my volunteer placements for the year was in a rural indigenous community called Cuentepec. I accompanied a social worker named Maria Luisa, who, at that time, had been working with a group of women in this community for over a decade. Now, let me set the scene … Cuentepec is a small community about two hours away from the city. It is nestled in rolling hills of corn and peanut fields, and it is the only community in this part of Mexico that still retains most of its indigenous roots; they speak their indigenous language, wear traditional dress, and practice ancient rituals for healing and worship. For the most part, families in this community live off the land, cook over open flames in their small huts, and walk to a river about a mile away to bathe and wash their clothes. The women stay home to cook and care for the children, while the men work long days in the field, in construction, or across the border as migrant workers. There are animals of every size, shape, and smell running through peoples’ yards…it wasn’t a bit abnormal to be eating a meal in company with roosters, birds, pigs, dogs, horses, and goats.
The first months in this community were quite a challenge for me. I remember telling people that I felt as though I had gotten plopped down into the middle of a PBS documentary on indigenous life, and then was asked to build community. I knew I was there to form relationships and learn about a different way of life, but those ideals became a lot more complicated when I actually got there. I struggled to know how to connect with these women. I wondered how they felt about a random Norwegian woman just showing up to be present and learn from them? And what did it mean to be in solidarity with people whose cultural, economic, and religious identities were so different than my own?
The changes were slow. We certainly didn’t develop trust and understanding overnight. For the first several months I was there, we communicated mostly by doing things together. The women invited me to go to the river with them to get water or to take the kids to school; they also taught me how to make fresh tortillas. We didn’t do a whole lot of talking; mostly, we shared smiles and lots and lots of gestures.
One day, several months into my time there, I was helping my friend, Felipa, make corn tortillas over the open fire. We had been silent for awhile, slapping the tortillas back and forth in our hands, and then she turned to me and, with helpful gestures, asked, “Do you shave here?” We both broke out in a laughter that makes your belly ache for minutes, but it was more redemptive than I can describe. It was such an unexpected moment that opened a way for our relationship to deepen; talk about shaving our armpits turned into talk about our identities as women, turned into talk about our families, our cultures, and our faith.
Felipa eventually shared with me that she and the other women didn’t really know what to think of me at first. She told me how pieces of my identity raised questions for them. They knew I was from the same faith tradition as missionaries in the past who had come to try and replace their indigenous customs with Christian confessions. They knew I called home a country that didn’t allow her husband, who’s lived here for 14 years, to become a citizen.
These conversations made it hard to claim who I am. They made me want to cover up the pieces of myself that make people question my integrity. But spending a year with these indigenous women taught me that living in solidarity was not about us becoming the same people, but about us living authentically with each other, being open to ways of understanding each other that complicated some of our assumptions and stereotypes.
Toward the end of my time in Cuentepec, Felipa said, “Sarah, I’m sorry you’re leaving, because we were just getting to know each other.” Felipa spoke a truth I hadn’t yet put words to, namely that it takes time and courage to see people beyond the labels and categories we place on them. It’s so much easier to live as though we have people figured out. It’s also easy to write off relationships if they don’t gel the first time. I kept showing up; they kept showing up. Difference didn’t go away, but judgment and fear did.
Love is patient; love is kind.
Lastly, the apostle Paul writes, “Love does not insist on its own way, but rejoices in the truth…For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part.”
I could talk about the fact that Mexicans often show up an hour late.
I could talk about the mixture of lime, baking powder, and coke that my Mexican host mother offered as remedy for nausea.
I could talk about the way the Mexican people greet and say goodbye to each other—every single person in the room hugs and kisses every other single person in the room. I thought Midwesterners were bad for long goodbyes, but this was something else.
Suffice it to say that my year in Mexico was filled with my way meeting another way. At times, it was an exciting adventure to explore a way of life very different from my own; at other times, it made me so mad.
I think these clashes of ways should happen. They happen because something we feel strongly about is being called into question by another way. Who we are or what we think is being challenged by another way of being or thinking.
In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul wasn’t trying to get them all to agree on one right way of life. He didn’t think that one skill or idea was better than all the others. Rather, he was trying to help them see that the way of love is a way that acknowledges more than one way of being human. “We all see through a mirror dimly,” says Paul, and because of that, we need each other to help us better understand ourselves and the God who has created us all.
One of the most important things my time in Mexico taught me was that mission work doesn’t require crossing a national border. It’s not just work that gets done by really adventuresome people in faraway places. We call it global mission because every relationship, every conversation bears the potential to transform some corner of our broken and beautiful world. We are called missionaries, because we are all called to be a part of the boundary-breaking mission of God—wherever and whoever we are. I’ve heard it said before that “it’s not the church that has a mission; it’s the mission of God that has a church.” And so it is in the name of a God whose mission is global that we journey to places we might not otherwise go, trusting all along that God’s love will meet us there and transform the world through us.
Amen.
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