The Unequal Inheritance: August 1, 2010

Hosea 11:1-11 and Psalm 107:1-9, 43 , Colossians 3:1-11 Luke 12:13-21
Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad/ Good Shepherd, Berkeley

As most of you know, I have been in Guatemala for the past month, and it has been a breath-taking and eye-opening and uncomfortable experience. On the one hand, I saw a high level of Bay Area style luxury, apparent in the swank hotel near the house I stayed in, where I paid to experience an actual shower, some of the restaurants that cater to tourists, and some of the shops and markets. These places looked and felt somewhat familiar to me.

But then there is the sharply different Guatemala. The Guatemala of the indigenous people and the many workers and laborers, sellers of trinkets, hawkers of beautiful indigenous fabric and bags on the street, drivers of the tourist-seeking horse-drawn carriages, street beggars, and the servants in so many houses including the one I stayed in. The Mayan servant in our house, Ruty, named after the biblical Ruth, works hard for 9 hours a day, six days a week and makes $250 dollars a month. And our landlady frequently pointed out how well she paid her. In fact, I found out that Ruty was a trained nurse, but that her job cleaning our house and making meals paid better than hospital work, and had much more humane working hours. One morning, one of our number at breakfast didn`t want the single egg we were offered, and suggested that it be given to a fellow student of Spanish with a big appetite. Ruty paused, confused, although her Spanish was very good. We later realized that she just could not conceive of anyone having the opportunity, or even the ability to consume more than one egg at a sitting.

Mayan woman in their exquisite native clothing were everywhere, including the great and beautiful Iglesia de San Francisco, the largest and most beautiful of the four huge and ancient Catholic churches in Antigua. At one service I saw 12 indigenous babies baptized. To the right of the great altar there was a section that read Sólo para las oraciónes- For prayer only. After the service I went through the railing to pray and I beheld a vast and beautiful mural, featuring multitudes of indigenousness women with their gloriously colorful wipiles and skirts, laborers and farmers and children and babies surrounding an image of Jesus emerging from the water after his baptism. To my amazement, the mural, which depicted so many beautiful brown Mayan faces, rendered a Jesus who resembled no one so much as Peter O’Toole. A blond blue-eyed Jesus in a sea of black haired, brown-eyed indigenous people. This was bad enough, but then when I told my Spanish teacher about it, she told me that in her little pueblo of Pastores, just outside of Antigua, there is a statue of a Mayan God, Maximon, with distinctly European features. I later read that the God Maximon was originally embraced by the Catholic church, but then they decided he was too threatening, so they began to depict him as Judas Iscariot. What have we left them, I thought. Co-opting Jesus was bad enough, but stealing the identity of their own Gods as well?

I was constantly torn between dismay at these absurd inequities, at seeing the tremendous need of so many in the streets, and struggling with my own middle class discomforts- the lack of all the things I take for granted- drinkable water, electricity that stays on, showers with warm, clean water, dry clothes and shoes, beds with no uninvited living creatures, and disturbingly of all, inconsistent cell phone and internet access!

Our gospel warns us about greed, but desafortunadamente, by the time I decided to check out the readings, I had been treating my discomforts with retail therapy, and my natural greed was in full flower. I was assailed on all sides by expert saleswomen in the streets offering some of the most beautiful fabric items I had ever seen at, of course, ridiculously low prices. By the time I saw the readings about greed I was praying every morning for God to grant me the strength not to purchase every piece of beautiful fabric in Guatemala. But like the man who planned to build two new barns to house his many possessions, I found I had to purchase two more bags to bring home all my bounty.

After my brain was bursting trying to memorize the myriad verb forms in the past tense, my Spanish teacher suggested I get a Latin American Bible and that we just read through that.

I went right away for the most familiar and beloved passages, and I opened the beginning of the Gospel of John. But to my great surprise, the passage was not as I expected En el principio era la Palabra or “In the beginning was the word.” It read instead, En el pricipio era el verbo. “In the beginning was the verb.” After that bible reading, God started giving me all kinds of unsubtle hints about how I might also be a verbo.

I went to a lecture about an organization that is deeply involved in building schools and insuring better education for the children of Guatemala: Common Hope/ Familias de Esperanza. The opportunity for sponsoring a child’s education for a pittance appealed to me, but I also wondered about a more direct involvement. The man who spoke said that Guatemala had the highest gap between rich and poor of any nation on earth. He said that only one quarter of the students even pass first grade. This was due to conditions in the home which, to say the least, are not conducive to successful learning. Food and shelter and clothing, the bare necessities of life, were often not available to them. The men are very often out of work, all too often alcoholic, and the women are often left to figure out a way to survive.

We saw the sad extreme solution to that problem when we drove past the red light district on way out of town, and saw the women leaning out of windows, with their children playing in the dirt outside.

Then a woman I met at the Spanish school recommended a book, Three Cups of Tea. This is a really incredible story about a Midwestern mountain climbing drifter, Greg Mortenson, who became an unstoppable force for promoting education to impoverished children in Pakistan, and then Afghanistan, by actually building schools in these difficult mountainous areas. He was especially interested in educating girls, and this was in Muslim country just before during and after 911. The story was astonishing and inspiring.

Finally, we heard about an after-school program for needy kids called Angel Guardian, started by a woman who had been an orphan herself. The kids had nowhere to go after school, and normally they would just be out on the streets. But at Guardian Angel, they got help with their home work, opportunities to make art, healthy snacks and loving care. During one visit, I played for about an hour with a four year old Mayan girl who seemed to have big anger issues. We played with blocks, tranquilly for a while, and then, apparently trusting me a little more, she started letting the blocks fall down the cement step we were playing on, then eventually she started violently smashing the blocks together, then letting them fall to the ground like dead people. After doing this for about an hour, she calmed down and quietly ate her snack while sitting on my lap. I was later told that her father, to whom she had been very close, had been murdered in the marketplace, traumatizing her and rendering the family destitute. Many of the mothers of the kids who go to Guardian Angel are employed there, or in a neighboring farm that benefits the program. My little friend’s mother had found a job at Guardian Angel, and the girl had apparently come a long way since she had come to the center.

When I planned to go to Antigua, no one told me that July was the rainy season, and that I would experience torrential rainfall every afternoon, if not all day every day. That my shoes would never dry out, because I would have to wade through deep water in the narrow streets which quickly became rivers. The last day I visited Guardian Angel, I noticed that all the kids seemed to have colds. Outside, a particularly impressive thunderstorm was in progress, and at 5:00 all the kids pulled small scraps of plastic over their heads and proceeded into the downpour on their long walk home. I too waded home in the downpour, trying not to think of exactly what was in the water we were deeply wading through. But as I walked that soggy way home, I suddenly thought of a way to be a verbo. I had noticed at the grand mercado in Antigua, that children’s raincoats were very colorful and cheap. I told my friend about my plan to buy 20 raincoats, and she donated enough money to buy five more. The next day, my last day in Guatemala, I asked my Spanish teacher if she would come and help me bargain. Whenever she spotted a stall with raincoats I made myself scarce. Three stalls and twenty-five beautiful colorful impermeables later she proudly gave me change back for the amount that I thought it would cost. I spent a ridiculously small amount of money to keep twenty-five kids happily dry through the rest of the rainy season. It felt good to be a verbo for a change.

As our gospel of today tells us, you can`t take it with you. It is implied that rather than building barns for our possessions, it is possible to build the Kingdom of Heaven right here on earth. In fact I think one of the surest ways we can experience heaven is when we pass it on to someone living in of hell.

Of course these organizations would love your support, but you don’t have to go to Guatemala or Afghanistan to be a verbo for children’s education. The children of Wilson Elementary School in Richmond need help and support, and Liberty Hill Baptist Church one block from Good Shepherd in Berkeley does free tutoring for high school kids every Saturday morning at 10:00. They could use our help too.

When the man who gave the lecture on unequal wealth in Guatemala finished with his statistics and his numbers, he said the following to the very white and affluent group who had gathered to hear him:

"The gap between rich and poor in Guatemala is just an example of the gap between rich and poor world-wide. Given that we are on the grossly rich end of that unequal divide, I have two questions for you: 1. How do you feel about that? and 2. What are you going to do about it?"

Amen