Sermon: The Reason We Reach Out (Mar 9, 2014)

Title: The Reason We Reach Out
Text: Matthew 4:1-11

I felt so good when I got back home from the Shrove Tuesday Pancake Supper last week! I was fully refreshed and recharged - as you can see from the picture on the screen, I was fully satisfied with the delicious food and contented by the friendship and happy chats that I experienced that night. You can see all the pictures that so perfectly capture the happiness on the faces of people that night if you visit our church’s Facebook or mine. You see, Facebook can be a great resource – it is a great way to link us and connect us all if we use it wisely. Thanks to every volunteer who gave their talents and time that night and to those who came and supported the event with their gifts of money – each individual gift may be small, but when it is all gathered, it is not only a large sum of money, but a wonderful way to gift ‘grace’ to a family in Kenya. Thanks to the outreach team, again, for organizing this event in such a loving way.

As you know, our church has, for some years, sponsored a family in Kenya to help send the girls – Lucy and Sonia – to school. Recently, the girls’ father sent a few letters asking us to support not only the girls’ education, but to send some extra money to help the family’s struggle through recent hardships, including some problems with the family’s business. It made some of us feel uncomfortable. Just before the election in 2013, which the people in Kenya and the world were so fearful about, remembering the bloody eruption of violence after the election in 2007, our sponsored family moved to the border country next to Busia, Kenya, for their own safety. They were safe, and we were happy for them, but their recent requests for more money concern us because we are not sure what our best response should be.  

I understand that our sponsored family’s kinship, family, community-oriented culture may be essentially different from our Western culture where individualism and individual rights are of the foremost primary value. From some of my first-hand and personal experiences with people from Africa, including Kenya, I know their culture has some drastically different underpinnings, especially how they understand and value kinship and relationship and how they perceive and evaluate what makes a true friendship.  Here are a few of my first-hand experiences – when they call another a friend, they don’t spend years building up trust and mutual obligations - they immediately expect that the other person must provide care for them, and the extent and the intimacy of care they expect has no correspondence in Western culture. For example, if one person needs to go, let’s say, 1 km to find a washroom, the other person, if they call each other a friend, is expected to and must go with the person to find that far away washroom, when, in our culture,  there is no need of accompaniment for such a basic and personal task. Another interesting experience I had is that as soon as I was called a friend, my African friend immediately asked me to comb her hair that was braided in an African way, applying a special salve. My African friend’s understanding of friendship and care wasn’t comparable to any measure or expectation of friendship that I experienced either in Korea or in Canada. Very intimate. Very immediate. Too intense. Too close. It seems that they have no concept of the personal boundaries that we in the West keep between people. My point, as I say these things, is that it tells me that they still keep the kind of culture that used to sustain the culture of my home country a long time ago –this kind of deep kinship and care-based culture does not work in the now highly-individualized and Westernized culture of Korea.

Assuming that the Korea of my great-great-grandmother’s generation or earlier may be quite close to the African’s, I guess that, to the family in Kenya, the survival and sustenance of the family as a whole comes before the girls’ individual educations, no matter how deeply the family is committed to the girls’ education. I assume that if the girls are educated with the help of our financial aid, while the family struggles with other, more basic financial needs, it wouldn’t make sense to many Kenyans. The reason why I make and share these unexamined assumptions here is not to say that my guess is right, but to say that when we support somebody or a family, whoever it is, the principle must be that we open ourselves to curiosity, learning, understanding and engagement.

The first consideration, even before our financial capacity to support them, is to know that we are engaging into a ‘relationship’ with them. Aiding the family and the girls with our financial resources is the easiest part of reaching out to them. Our commitment is not composed only of our money, time, and fundraising, although those things are both appreciated and precious. What we must take seriously and engage with our hearts is friendship. To put it in a different way, what comes before our financial commitment is the why question – WHY do we reach out to them with financial resources? If we say that we do what we do because we want to help the family with gifts of money, it is not the response to the question ‘why’ at all - we just simply repeated what we do to answer to the question of why we do it. Last Sunday I introduced the concept of the Golden Circle. 

The point of the Golden Circle is that people know what they do, but seldom ask why they do what they do. Why do we support the family and Lucy and Sonia in Kenya? Because we believe that we are called to make friendships and extend friendships at the margins, at the boundaries of our lives, in difficult places. Forging a friendship in a difficult place calls us to step beyond our comfort zones, take a risk - because we care about trust and value faithfulness. The amazing thing about friendship is that we are invited to give our very self – and this is exactly what we do when we enter into a relationship with someone else in the name of Christ. Since we decided to support this family, we have been invited to the call that is for all Christians – to make friendship at the margins, at the boundaries, in difficult and odd places. Last Tuesday those who were part of the pancake supper enjoyed the great feeling of refreshment that good friendship brings – and I believe that the deep secret behind that great happiness we shared is that there was another friendship present – our friendship with the family in Kenya.

Friendship is a fundamental human interaction that’s based on sincere feelings and trust. True friendship is based on equal relationships even though one friend may be given aid by the other. Outreach is great not because it adds one more tangible item on the list of what we do as a church, but because it reminds us that we must extend our friendships beyond our comfort zone and beyond this community. When we make friends with one another we learn how to be faithful to another even in the hardest, the most difficult places and times - we learn that faithfulness is much more valuable under those circumstances.  When we are called to follow Jesus, we are called to the deep hospitality, the radical hospitality that Jesus exemplified. This hospitality is not the practice we extend to invited dinner guests or visiting family; we exercise and extend radical hospitality when we open ourselves and engage our hearts “To the strange and to the stranger.”

When we welcomed people with hospitality at the pancake supper, we also invited the family in Kenya to be present with us as friends, guests, and strangers. We need to learn how to be faithful to the “unusual” friendship.

As we begin our Lenten Season of this year, I hope that we may remember this year’s Lenten theme: “We live in a Web of Love.” I hope that today’s Children’s message may also remind us that we are called to live out our life as a church as a Sharing Community. Jesus says, in today’s Gospel, “We can’t live by bread alone.” Turning a stone into bread is like sending money to our Kenyan family for their sustenance. However, Jesus didn’t tell us to give bread in today’s story. What he said, exactly, is that we don’t live by bread alone. We give the gift of friendship that is a holy currency, holy money that moves and circles around and nourishes and replenishes ourselves as well as those we befriend. Making friendships at the oddest places and learning to be faithful with unlikely response, unlikely care and unlikely friendship is a distinctive call to all Christians, and must be a principle as we reach out to the family in Kenya, every person we meet and everything we do to advance humanity among us in the name of Christ.