Both last week and this, we have heard that Jesus and his disciples are “on the way.” They have been travelling throughout Galilee and the surrounding areas, and Jesus has been proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing people, and casting out demons, and the disciples have been sent out to do this same work.
And now, Jesus and the disciples are “on the way” to Jerusalem. Jesus is intent on getting the disciples to understand what is ahead—suffering, death, and ultimately, resurrection.
For Mark, the writer of this gospel, being “on the way” is being on the path of discipleship, and as we follow the disciples along the way, we find that we have left the joyous time of proclamation and are now following Jesus along a more sobering piece of the way—the way of humility, of service to others, and today Jesus gives us the shocking news that welcoming and caring for the most vulnerable members of our society, as children were in Jesus’ day, means to welcome Jesus himself into our midst.
I get frequent calls from vulnerable members of our society—for instance, a mother who works at Wal-Mart, and has had her hours cut, and who can’t afford to buy her daughter winter clothes—or people who’ve lost their jobs and can’t pay the rent, and the list goes on. My discretionary fund can’t possibly solve the problems of those who call.
These calls are just a hint of the issues of poverty in our society. Luckily, most of us are sheltered from the serious financial issues that force us into hard financial choices, so it’s hard to imagine the desperation of the people who just can’t make ends meet. And I’ll admit that I agonize over whether I’m just perpetuating people’s problems by applying financial band aids to seemingly hopeless situations.
And there are other vulnerable people in our society. Over 50 million people with intellectual disabilities live in the United States. In Virginia, the programs that have been in place for decades to help these people live independent lives as adults are being shut down, leaving the intellectually disabled with even fewer choices about how to manage their lives.
The poor, the intellectually disabled, people who suffer from dementia, children who live in poverty, and many other vulnerable people in our society are the very ones that Jesus tells us are the ones we are to welcome in his name.
Really, what is the point of preaching a sermon about how we should be more compassionate, or how we should do more? Of course we should. Of course we want to welcome those Jesus tells us to welcome, especially when we feel discouraged and wonder whether or not the little we can do will even make a difference for these vulnerable people in the long run.
How we carry out this command of Jesus will differ for each one of us. Of course we can contact our senators and representatives about our support for programs that protect the most vulnerable among us, and we can continue to do the things we are already doing as a church—community dinners, bringing food for the food pantry, providing gifts for a family at Christmas, supporting Hunters for the Hungry, along with the many things that we do individually.
Mother Teresa’s words, which I I’ve referred to recently, are also helpful. Mother Teresa says “Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time and always start with the person nearest you, “ which is what Lauren Kohls did while she was deployed in Afghanistan, when she started with the people nearest her.
On Friday, the Free Lance-Star featured an article about this twenty-three year old Marine, who will receive a Marine Corps award for her work during her year-long deployment in Afghanistan. Even though she is only twenty-three, Lauren has already worked in an orphanage in Peru for five weeks during high school. Lauren has a gift for languages, and she learned Pashto, one of the Afghan languages, in order to be able to communicate directly with Afghans to help them understand what Americans are doing there.
While she was in Afghanistan, Lauren and another linguist, Sarah Abdella, started a nonprofit aid organization in Afghanistan’s Helmed province. They call their organization Hayla International. Hayla means hope in Pashto. The organization focuses on women and children, and while the women were deployed, they held donation drives to obtain blankets, clothing, and school supplies for the Afghans. Now that they’re back in this country, they’re working on a curriculum of audio books, so that Afghan women can teach their children how to read at home.
Most of us don’t have the opportunity to do welcome the most vulnerable on that scale. But even we, in our small corner of the world, can welcome Jesus by caring for the most vulnerable.
Philip Gulley writes fiction about the people who live in the small town of Harmony, Indiana, and in the book, Signs and Wonders , he has written a story about what happens to two people who live on a farm right outside Harmony who try to welcome a child into their home in the name of Jesus.
Ellis and Miriam Hodge are a good Quaker couple who adopted Amanda when she was twelve from “Ellis’s no-good brother, Ralph. They had to pay Ralph thirty thousand dollars, all they had in the world. At the time it seemed like the right thing to do, but ever since, Ellis has worried about going broke. He’s had to borrow money to run the farm and thinks he might have to sell it off, move into town, and get a job at the glove factory in Cartersburg.”
In this story, called “True Riches,” Amanda is now fourteen, and she’s as smart as a whip. She won the National Spelling Bee and shook the President’s hand. Just this past winter, she was invited to join the Future Problem Solvers of America, which involved a five day trip to Atlanta for the annual convention. Ellis is proud of Amanda, but he is sick of shelling out travel money.
“The money’s always been tight, but with Amanda it’s even worse. Twenty dollars here, fifty dollars there. The tractor’s been broke for a month, and they don’t have the money to get it fixed. Then to top it off, Pastor Sam stopped past one evening and asked if they needed help from the church. Ellis tried to laugh it off, but he was embarrassed. ‘No thank you, Sam. You give that money to someone who needs it. We’re doing just fine.’”
After Sam leaves, Ellis glares at Miriam and accuses her of saying something at the Friendly Women’s Circle. Miriam denies this and tells Ellis that she doesn’t appreciate his tone of voice.
As Ellis spends more and more time worrying about money, he and Miriam start picking on one another over matters they used to let slide.
And then Amanda joins the softball team, and needs a mitt, so Ellis gives her the one he’d used as a kid, but after forty years the leather has rotted and it’s falling apart. Miriam says that Amanda needs a mitt of her own, so even though Ellis objects, Amanda, Ellis and Miriam go down to Uly Grant’s hardware store.
Uly has two mitts for sale—one costs $18, a left-handed first baseman’s mitt which Uly’s father ordered by mistake in the late sixties, and a brand new genuine cowhide mitt that costs $75.
Ellis has to dip into the emergency $100 bill he keeps in his wallet. He complains all the way home, and by the time they get back, Amanda is practically in tears, and Miriam is furious with Ellis.
“Miriam had been taught by her parents that husbands and wives should never go to bed mad. But if she had abided by that, she’d have stayed awake the entire month of June. She was that mad at Ellis. She didn’t speak to him for several weeks, except for the essentials, and only then with a poisoned courtesy.”
So in late June, Ellis takes his recliner, a TV set and box fan and goes to live out in the barn with the cows. He ventures in the house just to eat, but after a while, he starts smelling like the cows, and Miriam tells him he can eat his meals out in the barn, too.
Since Miriam and Ellis have never fought before, they’re locked in a statemate, and Ellis figures it’s easier to stay in the barn than to try to resolve their differences. He even stops going to church.
So Miriam stands at the sink in the evenings washing the dishes and looking out the window toward the barn, and every now and then she catches Ellis standing there looking toward the house.
Meanwhile, Amanda blames herself and feels that everything is her fault, and how Miriam and Ellis would have been better off never to adopt her. She wants to take the mitt back to the store.
One night in July Miriam finds Amanda crying and tells her it’s not her fault, and that everything will work out.
And then Miriam goes and sits down in the living room and looks at the empty space where Ellis’s recliner had been and she starts crying. All these years, the couple has never had a hard word, and now this.
Miriam decides that all of this is foolish pride, and so she goes out to the barn and finds Ellis sitting in his recliner, totally dejected.
And she says to Ellis—“I miss you.”
And Ellis’s stubbly chin quivers, and he says, “I miss you too.”
And Miriam asks if he will come back home and he says yes, if she’ll have him.
And so the two make up, but the next morning, they find that Amanda has run away. She’s made up her bed and left her baseball mitt on the pillow along with a note saying how sorry she is to have caused all this trouble, and inside the mitt is $30 and an IOU to Ellis for forty-five dollars.
A little before noon, Ellis and Miriam find her bike behind the Rexall drug store, where she’d bought a ticket to the city. She’d left on the morning bus.
So Bernie, the local policeman in Harmony, drives them to the city in the police car, and the police in the city nab Amanda when she gets off the bus. The police make Amanda and Ellis and Miriam talk to a social worker, and then the social worker takes Amanda off separately and asks questions about Ellis, which makes Ellis feel like a criminal. And then they leave the three alone, and Ellis apologizes about the mitt.
“Amanda, honey, you don’t know this yet, but when you’re an adult, you worry about things about money. I’ve just been anxious, that’s all. I sure didn’t aim to take it out on you.”
So they go back to Harmony, and it’s Italian Night at the Coffee Cup, so Ellis suggests that they eat there. Miriam asks if they can afford it, and Ellis grins and rubs Amanda’s head and says, meaning it,
“Why sure we can. We’re rich. We’ve got Amanda, after all. She’s our treasure.”
In these months of turmoil, Ellis and Miriam have discovered the nitty gritty downside of living a life of service to someone else. They have experienced suffering. And these two have also discovered the importance of humility in their own relationship.
“Jesus sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes, me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” Amen.
Signs and Wonders: A Harmony Novel by Philip Gulley
HarperSanFrancisco, 2003
Free Lance-Star, Friday, September 21, 2012 in the Region Section,
“Marine earns award by helping Afghans” by Rusty Dennen