Small Wonder

October 5, 2003

World Communion, or Worldwide Communion, as it used to be known, is, I have always thought, one of our better ideas. The idea, which grew out of the brokenness of the human community before and during World War II, was that on the first Sunday of October Christians all over the world would come to the table of our Lord and celebrate, together, his love for the world—and therefore our unity in that love, which transcends the barriers of nation, race, and ideology.

And so it is fitting that a group of twenty-two members of the Fourth Presbyterian Church family, led by Joanna and Al Adams, are visiting the First Presbyterian Church of Havana, Cuba this morning. Joanna will preach the sermon and help baptize a few babies and receive new members. We have an important relationship with that Cuban congregation and its minister, Hector Mendez. They have managed to stay together and be faithful through the decades of political oppression, when it was an every-Sunday matter for a government agent to be in the congregation, seeing who was there and checking what the preacher said. The churches weren’t allowed to print materials of any kind during those years or evangelize.
It is a different time now, and they are allowed to receive visitors from the United States. So Joanna is there, and she will present a check to support the work of that congregation and a new church they are organizing in Cojimar and the Presbyterian Theological Seminary at Mantanzas—which, by the way, is bursting at the seams with new students.

So as we come to the table of Holy Communion this morning, in a very real way we do so with Joanna and Al and our brothers and sisters in downtown Havana, all of us one family in the love of God.

In a fine essay, “Small Wonder,” novelist Barbara Kingsolver tells a story from a remote province of western Iran. She says the story is from “some gentler universe than this one.”
The story begins with a wife and husband walking home from a morning’s work in the wheat fields. They talk and laugh as they walk, until they see approaching the slender teenage girl who was left in charge of the village babies. She is crying. She tells them that while she was tending to the infants, their toddler wandered off, and she can’t find him.

The mother and father return to their hut, look in all the familiar hiding places, calling his name, then the neighbor’s huts, then the entire village. He’s gone. A party of neighbors sets out into the rocky, arid outskirts; they comb the gullies and hills. Night falls. He can’t possibly survive. He is only sixteen months old. There are bears in the mountains.

In the morning, the men set out again at first light, up into the mountains, search caves where the bears are, fearing the worst. At the fourth or fifth cave, they hear a voice, a cry. Slowly, cautiously they enter, smelling the distinct aroma of a bear. Their eyes adjust to the dark and they see the bear—not crouched to attack. It’s a she-bear, lying against the wall, curled around the child, protecting him from these fierce intruders.

Kingsolver says it is a true story. She says you can look it up on the Internet under Bear—Iran. She says the bear was a lactating mammal who lost her baby. Kingsolver writes: “You could say ‘impossible.’ Or you could read this story and think of how warm lives are drawn to one another in cold places, think of the unconquerable force of a mother’s love” and that mysterious part of our DNA of each of us that sometimes can be awakened to reach out to one another in compassion and kindness instead of suspicion, anger, retaliation, and violence. I don’t know whether the story is true or not. I only know that when I read it, it set me to thinking about this Sunday, World Communion Sunday, and how basic the truth of the story is to my faith, my religious tradition, and how there is hope when humans act not out of an instinct for retaliation and revenge, but out of kindness and how, whenever and however it manifests itself, it is a “small wonder” every time.

In the meantime, we live in what Kingsolver calls fearsome times, a world “whose wells of kindness seem everywhere to be running dry,” a time when the only thing we can think to do to protect ourselves is build bigger and better weapons to hit back harder those who hate us and hit us. We live in fearsome times. I glanced at the headlines early this morning. There has been another terrible suicide bombing, in Haifa, twenty are dead. Israel has already retaliated. Two Apachi gunships have attacked inside Gaza. Palestinians, living in refugee camps under Israeli occupation for forty years, prevented from moving about, deprived of jobs, lash out with horrible violence, killing innocent Israeli civilians. Israel, under assault, surrounded by nations who only very reluctantly agree to their right to survive, powerful militarily, strikes back, targeting Palestinian leaders, killing innocent civilians—three times as many Palestinians have been killed by Israel as Israeli citizens killed in suicide bombings. Palestinian rage deepens. People dance in the streets in Gaza to celebrate the most recent suicide bombing. The young woman who blew herself up yesterday is called a martyr, and more passionate young people volunteer to die for the cause.

Fearsome times, indeed, in which racism emerges in surprising places. Vicious anti-Semitism, which we thought had disappeared finally, reappears in France, Germany, Poland, and is openly propagated in Egypt and Saudi-Arabia. Even Rush Limbaugh, on ESPN, invoked one of the oldest and stupidest canards of all—that I used to hear from railroaders in western Pennsylvania—namely that so many African American players on the roster of the Pittsburg Pirates was obviously evidence of a liberal plot to mix races. I knew how wrong that was. Clemente and Stargell could play. Before them Robinson, Doby, Newcomb, Campanella, could play and had to force their way in because of people who think like that. Rush Limbaugh has reminded us that racism doesn’t disappear easily, and that stupidity is resilient and widespread.
Is there no alternative vision? Yes, there is. It doesn’t have much by way of military power or economic power or market power. It has something far better and in the long run more powerful. It has the power of human love. The power of God’s love.

This alternative vision comes out of the tradition shared by Islam, Judaism, and Christianity: namely that the one creator God has created one human race in God’s own image and so all are children of one God and therefore kin to one another. It is so simple, yet so stunning. “How good and pleasant it is when kinfolk dwell in unity,” the psalmist wrote.

Sociologist Rodney Stark, who studies the social effects of religion, urges us to try to hear the radical words of Jesus for the first time.

“Master—when did we see you hungry and feed you, naked and clothed you, in prison and visit you?”

And then Jesus’ words:

“Whenever you did it to the least of these, my family, you did it to me.”

It was that, the radical morality of Jesus and the power of love, that the ancient world found startling. Christians believed in a God who loves human beings, all of them—not just believers, but all. That is a new and revolutionary idea. And so is its corollary, namely that it is of the highest and holiest moral imperative for human beings to reflect that divine love by the way they treat one another.

In the ancient world, it was stunning whenever and whenever it happened. In Rome, whenever an unwanted child was born, or when a male was wanted and a baby girl appeared instead, it was common practice simply to abandon the child to die from exposure or worse. The first Christians stunned their neighbors by gathering up the unwanted babies. When plague appeared, the only thing anybody could think of to do was run away. The first Christians stunned their neighbors by doing what Jesus told them to do: they stayed with and ministered to the sick and dying, risking their own health. Slave laborers, often prisoners of war, were kept in miserable prison camps, jeered at, tormented, often persecuted by the populace. The first Christians stunned their neighbors by doing what Jesus told them to do: visiting the prisons, taking them water and food.

That’s what convinced the ancient world that Christianity was true. One of our earliest theologians, Tertullian, in the second century wrote, “What marks us in the eyes of our enemies is our practice of loving-kindness. ‘Only look,’ they say, ‘how they love one another.’” And then this ancient thinker, 1,800 years ago, broke out of the tradition of tribes and clan and nation to a new vision of humankind. To the pagan Romans he wrote “We are your brothers and sisters, too.” (See Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief, pp. 9-10.)

Churches, communities of faith like this one, are in charge of keeping God’s alternate vision alive, and it happens every day in thousands of communities in ways that can only be called “small wonders,” whenever, in the name of Jesus Christ, his followers reach out to the “least of these.”

I am part of a research and study group called the Executive Session, sponsored jointly by the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and Harvard Divinity School.

The project is called “Faith-Based and Community Approaches to Urban Revitalization.” Members include professors from the Kennedy School, Divinity School; John Dilulio, University of Pennsylvania, First Director of the White House Office on Faith-Based Initiatives; the mayors of Miami, Minneapolis, Baltimore, Indianapolis, and Washington, D.C.; and a few of us religious professionals. I do a lot of listening.

John Dilulio says it is his observation that city churches are the “paramedics of urban civil society.”

Martin O’Malley, Mayor of Baltimore, which had the highest addiction and murder ratios in the nation, said the young people of Baltimore are being mentored by a very efficient cadre of drug dealers and about the only institution with an alternate vision and a credible presence in the worst neighborhoods is the church.

O’Malley says, with statistical evidence to back him up, that faith makes a difference. churches save and change lives in thousands of small, quiet ways that reflect an alternate vision of what the human community could be.

This church has been doing that for thirty-nine years, reaching out in kindness and practical love to children in our Tutoring program—starting with 25 youngsters until today there are 500 children from thirty-three Chicago zip codes who come here weekly for a hot meal and tutoring.
Let me tell you about a small wonder I just learned about. A new program for teenagers was launched by our Partners in Education program this past summer, a program called Job Training and Readiness. Cabrini-Green teenagers are among the most vulnerable, most at-risk to threats posed by drugs, gangs, and guns. And so with the help of the Fry Foundation, Fourth Presbyterian Church offered Job Training and Readiness to twenty-five high school students. The young people were paid a modest stipend for a summer internship in workplaces arranged for and organized by this church and the Board of Deacons. They learned, on the job, skills that most of us were given almost as a birth right, basic practices like getting up, showing up, being on time, doing a good job. At the end of her internship this summer, one of those youngsters saw a whole new possibility, a whole new vision of what she could be. She has decided she wants to be a pediatrician. Small wonder!

“We are alive in a fearsome time, and we have been given new things to fear. We’ve been delivered huge blows but also huge opportunities,” Barbara Kingsolver wrote.

There is, in fact, a better idea, an alternate vision of what can be. And precisely in fearsome times it becomes more precious than ever.

I keep a symbol of that precious alternate vision: it’s the worship bulletin from that tiny, newly formed church in Cojimar, Cuba. Two years ago a group of us were privileged to worship with them in one of the member’s homes, a wonderful woman about my age who had just become a grandmother. Anibel Quesada, a wonderful baby girl had arrived the day before. I told her about our custom of celebrating new births with a rose in the chancel of the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago. I told her there would be a rose for Anibel the next Sunday, and there was.

I keep that bulletin in my Bible at Psalm 133.

“How good and pleasant it is when kindred live in unity.”

There is a better way. It is a vision of the world as God intends it to be. It is a vision of humankind bound together by the love of the one who said, “Whenever you do it to the least of these, my family members, you do it to me.”

The same one who invites us to table—all of us—to break one bread and share one cup.

Small wonder. Indeed.

Amen.