Who is Jesus?

Here's another excerpt from a great sermon written by Eugenia Gamble. The text is Luke 9:18-27, which begins, "Once when Jesus was praying in private and his disciples were with him, he asked them, 'Who do the crowds say I am?'”  

A number of years ago I took my study leave for a month alone to write on a tiny island off of Nova Scotia ... When I was in Nova Scotia I thought a lot about that question. I was serving a congregation that was growing and growing more diverse in a city that seemed more and more unconcerned about the gospel. So whenever I had a natural opportunity, I asked the question of people that I met what they had to say about Jesus.

.... I met a couple from Ontario who lived on their sailboat and went all over the world. We chatted while our clothes washed and somehow, probably after they asked what I did for a living, I asked them.

The man said, “He was a wonderful man who founded a horrible religion. No,” he went on, “It’s not a bad religion. It is just practiced by horrible people, hypocrites. I’d like to be a Christian if it wasn’t for the hypocrites.”

The young girl who rented me a movie at the general store nearly every evening said in answer, “He was part of God wasn’t he, a long time ago?”

The defrocked Roman Catholic priest who was the owner of one of the little restaurants in town said, “He was my way to God before the church blocked my path.”

And, my personal favorite, the young man at the pizza parlor said, “Jesus, I don’t know the dude.  Does he live around here?”

In each of those conversations, I could hear Jesus’ pensive question to his friends, “Who do the crowds say that I am?”

That is a huge question for us today, sisters and brothers. Who do the crowds say that he is? Is he a political code word for a particular ideology? Has he become a justification for our points of view—right, left, right, wrong? Is he just the name of an ancient man with long blond hair who was fond of holding lambs and lifting gentle hands to gentle children?

Who do the people in your company say Jesus is? In your school? In your family? In your neighborhood?

What does it mean to be blessed?

We just had to share this excerpt from a Waiting for Water sermon we received written by Dr. Stuart Bond. He is writing about Jesus' famous Sermon on the Mount as recorded in Luke 6:17-26. We'll pick up where Dr. Bond describes the press and chaos that must have surrounded Jesus that day as he prepared to teach the crowds and his own disciples.

Finally, he sits everyone down. He looks over this crowd of scared people, some of them healed, most of them struggling, all of them wondering what their future would be. And he says, “These are the blessed people: those of you who are poor, hungry, weeping, and hated.” 

Joan Baez gave us modern images about these same folks in the early seventies:

Blessed are the one way ticket holders
on a one way street.
Blessed are the midnight riders
for in the shadow of God they sleep.
Blessed are the huddled hikers
staring out at falling rain,
wondering at the retribution
in their personal acquaintance with pain.
Blessed are the blood relations
of the young ones who have died,
who had not the time or patience
to carry on this earthly ride.   

Joan Baez, Blessed Are, 1970, 1971, Chandos Music

Meanwhile, Jesus continues, woe to you who live comfortably because you have all the comfort you are going to get. Enjoy that pizza now, because the time will come when you can’t find a bite. And yuk it up while you can because it is closing time at the comedy club, and tragedy is the next event on the marquee. And if everyone thinks you are the greatest, that is just the way they talked about the prophet-haters back in the day. 

The problem for us is that we feel the divide. We already know that Jesus is not talking about us when he says they are blessed. He is talking about “them.” He is talking about people who live in rough circumstances and have nothing to show for a lifetime of hard labor. And maybe we could go for that—we can see the beauty in the picture of an old woman sitting outside her hut chopping wood or the African woman balancing water on her head and a child on her hip. We like the poetry of considering them blessed.

But how about them woes! Are you kidding me, Jesus? Sure I have had some privilege and some opportunities, but I also worked hard to be where I am. Are you telling me that after all this, plus serving on several church committees—are you telling me that I am out of your kingdom just because I am not poor? 

Maybe. Or, maybe it is more like this: Unless you are part of the solution, unless you care about the plight of those with nothing, unless you align yourself with the kingdom’s goals, you have had your day. My getting poorer isn’t going to make any poor people rich. But my being satisfied with the world as it is, my being glad to keep things arranged with me on top—that isn’t going to help anything either. 

And isn’t it interesting how we hear this statement of hope for the poor and instantly want Jesus to talk more to us? Sometimes we who have so much need to step back and let this word simply be for those who have nothing. Maybe part of what we need to do is be silent and listen, and realize this: “Jesus is their voice. He is speaking for those who cannot speak, who are never heard. Jesus is their voice.” 

(Children from Cienfuegos, Dominican Republic. Photo courtesy of Healing Waters International.)

You might come back and tell me the futility of trying to help the poor. After all, you might say, Jesus himself said, “The poor shall be with you always.” It is never going to change. 

I would say to you that Jesus was quoting that saying from Deuteronomy 15: 11, which says, “There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land.”

Jesus envisions a day when the poor are lifted up and—let’s be honest—the rich come down a few pegs. And if his prayer is that his will be done “on earth as it is in heaven,” then we want to become a blessing to the poor. We want the water they drink to hydrate their bodies rather than infect them. We want the work they do to be micro-enterprises that create sustainable businesses. We want the horizons for them to be brighter than a one in three chance of death by AIDS. What can we do? 

The longest ten

Last Thursday morning I was brushing my teeth and reviewing my list of to-dos for getting the children to school on time. Then there was a crash and a scream; I ran to my daughter's room and found her lying on the floor next to a wooden stool. Suddenly, her eyes rolled back and she went limp. I scooped her up and began talking loudly, trying to get her to wake up. I carried her outside to the drizzly autumn air, begging her to respond, until finally she squirmed and began crying again. She was able to point to the top of her head and tell me she had hit it on her stool. Her body was strangely floppy though, and she complained "I'm sleepy" and begged to go back to bed. I grabbed my phone and dialed 911.

For ten minutes, I held my daughter and waited for the paramedics to arrive. I strained to hear the sound of an engine turning onto our street, imagined every sound was the wail of a siren, and willed myself not to throw up or start sobbing. Finally--finally--they arrived. By then she'd begun to recover enough to build a block tower and tell them she was going to be Hello Kitty for Halloween. The medics checked her eyes, examined her all over, and jotted notes on a pad of paper. "Kids this age are made of rubber," they assured me. Like so many things in life, none of us knew why she fainted or how exactly she'd hit her head in the first place. We decided, however, that she didn't need to go to the hospital, and they left.

Watching one's child suffer and not knowing how to fix it is terrifying. As I reflect on those minutes between trauma and the arrival of help, I also remember my sisters in other countries. Women who, when their child falls ill, have to wait much longer than ten minutes for help. Their choices are stark: Should they wait it out or risk a long journey on foot to the nearest clinic? Once they arrive, will they have money to pay for treatment?

Even worse, many mothers know what is causing their children's illnesses, because it is something they give them every day. The water that is necessary for survival is the same water that is sickening and killing more than 4,000 children every day. These deaths are preventable. Let's do something about it.

Waiting: Our least favorite thing

A couple years back my husband and I were sitting in a boarding area at the Newark airport on our way home to Ohio from a visit to Cameroon, West Africa. We had just gone through two weeks of pretty rough travel (by our standards) involving hours bouncing in buses and taxis, random military checkpoints, and routine and unexplained three-hour delays. I reached a particularly low point after about ten hours on a bus, my legs crammed sideways against the floorboards behind the driver's seat. Then a lady got on, squeezing her ample body into the front row of seats beside me, and put a sack of cooked cassava in front of me. I crimped myself up a little more to make room, feeling my muscles ache and twitch, and then the smell from her sack wafted up to my nose. I don't want to disparage this woman's cooking, but to me it smelled like warm feet. At that point, all I wanted to do was arrive at our destination, and failing that, curl up into the fetal position and cry. Luckily for me, I was already pretty much in the fetal position. I stared out the bus window at the blur of palm trees and mud brick houses, and I asked myself: How much longer can I wait?

Now, our journey was almost done. Our two children were waiting for us at home, and we only had one more flight to board before hugging and kissing them. But first we had to wait some more. It turned out that our flight was delayed--for eight hours. As the time wore on, my fellow travelers began to mutter. One particular woman, who earlier had been talking about her faith in Jesus, now began cursing and complaining to anyone who would listen. She berated the airline and the airport for their incompetence and began punching buttons into her Blackberry, calling her colleagues and friends to invite them to share in her misery.

It's pretty clear we Americans don't like waiting. But most of the time, waiting is just an inconvenience. Waiting for what we want--to reach a destination, to see a loved one, to pay for the pack of toilet paper--will not prove life-threatening. But for 884 million people on this planet, right now, waiting is a life-threatening activity. These are the people who are still waiting for access to a safe supply of water. In a world where some of us fly on airplanes and have $200/month cell phone plans, there are others for whom a cup of disease-free water is out of reach.

Next time I find myself being forced to wait for something inconsequential, I want to stop and pray for those who are waiting too--for life, health, and dignity itself. Maybe you can join me.

Wait. Receive. Respond

Waiting for Water supports organizations which are providing safe water in Christ’s name and equips his followers to show God’s love to the world through acts of compassion in their communities and across the globe.

Join this growing movement as we bring back the real meaning of Easter—to go out into the world and be Christ’s witnesses through the message of the gospel and acts of compassion.

             Easter Sunday!   A final destination or a launching pad?

Churches throughout the world spend months thinking about and preparing for Easter. Some follow the traditional church calendar which includes Lent, the forty days leading up to Easter, while others do not. Regardless, Easter is considered the most important event of the year, a final destination of worship where we proclaim, Christ has Risen; Christ has Risen indeed!

God sent his son, the living water, to satisfy our thirst for forgiveness and grace. We leave church to celebrate God’s love with our family and friends over food and fellowship, waiting anxiously for our next major celebration—Christmas!

But is that how the first disciples experienced Easter? Did Jesus ever command them, “Now that you’ve received me, go home, eat a great meal, and give thanks for my love?”

Actually, he commanded them to “go out and be my witnesses first locally and then globally.”

Easter was never intended to be a final destination where we pause to celebrate and then move on; rather, it’s the beginning of our journey with Christ as we are sent into the world to share the living water we’ve received.

Waiting for Water can help your church or small group become an agent of change in a world longing, like the woman at the well, for both safe and living water. You’ll do that in three simple steps.

             Wait.
                    Receive.
                                    Respond.

Wait.
Beginning on Ash Wednesday, February 22, 2012, you’ll spend time waiting for Easter through a time of preparation. Through small group Bible study and a six week sermon series, you’ll be invited to explore scripture that will cause you to reflect on your life as it currently is and how God might want to shape your life as a person of compassion.

During this time, you are also invited to give up something for forty days, taking the money you would have spent on that item or activity and donating it to an organization working to bring clean, safe water to areas of the world which are in need.

Receive.
On Easter Sunday, April 8, 2012, attend your local Christian worship service and receive the living water of Christ. If you’ve been a follower of Jesus for years, then receive his powerful love and grace again. If you’ve just begun to consider Jesus, let this be the day that you receive all that God has given you in his death and resurrection.

You’ll also receive a call to change the world through the love of Christ. This is a call to live out God’s greatest purpose in your life: to show His love to others in very practical ways, both at home and in faraway places.

Respond.

In response to the Easter message, you’ll take the following three weeks to consider how your church or small group can initiate a ministry of compassion in your local community. Once you’ve discerned how the Lord is leading you to minister to those in need, launch this new ministry and begin to experience the huge blessing of showing Christ’s love to the world.

You’ll be united with Christians all over the world by practicing compassion on behalf of those in need.

You’ll also be asked to respond by sharing the stories of God working through these new ministries on the Waiting for Water Website throughout the year through videos, blog posts, and pictures. Sharing your ideas and accomplishments can help inspire others and spark off new ministries in other parts of the country and throughout the world.

Waiting for Water

Who are we:
Waiting for Water brings together faith communities in united acts of compassion locally for the 40 days in preparing for the celebration of Easter.  In response to God's love , Christians will meet the needs of communities all over the world who are desperately Waiting for Water.

Led by a team of experienced professionals with backgrounds in church leadership, Christian water development, curriculum design, marketing and design, and social media, Waiting for Water is an interactive, low-cost, turnkey operation for NGOs and churches alike which features the following:

     - Interactive website filled with downloadable resources and information
     - Sermon aids, small group reflections, and implementation guides
     - Opportunities for churches to upload video, photos, and blog posts to share progress and ideas
     - Information and links to several carefully selected faith-based NGOs doing holistic water work

What are we about:
Easter is the celebration of Christ’s victory over sin, death, and evil. It is the high point of the Christian faith, a moment to pause and reflect on the significance of divine love in human form. Yet Easter in North America is often overshadowed by the spectacle of Christmas and fractured by competing claims for our attention.

Lent, the forty days leading up to Easter, has traditionally been a time of waiting—clearing away these distractions and preparing for Christ’s illuminating presence. Waiting for Water (W4W) is a movement aimed at refocusing our attention on Christ during the Easter season. Together, churches across North America prepare for Easter by learning about water poverty, reflecting on Christ’s suffering and sacrifice, and giving up an activity or indulgence. This process culminates with a joyous Easter celebration and an opportunity for participants to give out of their abundance in order to provide a cup of safe water in Christ’s name.

Our Mission:
Waiting for Water's mission is to bring together North American churches to participate in a unified act of compassion on behalf of the world’s poor and thirsty during the Easter Season. By equipping churches to prepare for Easter, remember the poor, and honor Christ’s sacrifice, Waiting for Water can deepen their celebration of Christ’s victory over sin and death.

      the facts:


     - 884 million people are still waiting for access to safe water.
     - 2.6 billion people lack the dignity and privacy of basic sanitation, such as a simiple latrine.
     - More people in the world own cell phones than have access to a toilet.
     - Waterborne diseases kill 1.4 million children each year.
     - The ancient Romans had better water quality than half the people alive today.
     - It costs on average just $20 to provide 1 person with access to a sustainable supply of safe water.


“And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones who is known to be my disciple, truly I tell you, that person will certainly be rewarded.” –Matthew 10:42