Receiving the Unlikely Gift of Grace
The Rev. Canon Frank Logue preached this sermon at St. Augustine of Canterbury
in Augusta, Georgia on September 30, 2018
Receiving the Unlikely Gift of Grace
Mark 9:38-50
“Whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ
will by no means lose the reward.”
I thought of this scripture as I looked at the tin cup of clear, cold water, held out by a boy beaming at me. I was in the most dangerous part of the big and growing Brazilian metropolis of Belo Horizonte, a city of two million people. The slum was so known for its violence that everyone called it Poca Olho, which means “the place where they gouge your eyes.”
The sun was beating down. I was covered in sweat. Yet, my first thought was of the signs posted all over the neighborhood warning of the danger in drinking the water without boiling it first. The water was known to contain a cocktail of bacteria and viruses. There stood the smiling boy soaked in sweat offering me a cold drink of untreated water.
This was 1994 and I was still a few years from starting seminary. I went to Brazil with Jean-Paul, a friend who had been an exchange student when we were together at Georgia Southern. He was making a documentary film on the martial art dance called Capoeira. Capoeira is a uniquely Brazilian blend of gymnastics, dance, music, and fighting. Everyone stands in a circle and two go in and perform a stylized fighting dance and then others tag in and the fighters change as the music goes on. Capoeira developed as slaves working in the Brazilian sugar cane fields found they could practicing their fighting techniques if they masked it in dance.
We were specifically documenting the work of a group of Capoeira teachers who gave free lessons in the deadly slum. In Brazil, you take Capoeira lessons the way one might learn Tae Kwon Do here. The cost of the lessons leaves learning Capoeira well out of reach of the poor.
The day before I flew back home after several weeks in the area, I went to Poca Olho one last time with Raimundo, the instructor who started this outreach program. We were going back to the roots of the story. He had told me how the whole project began eight years earlier. Raimundo’s uncle had fallen on hard times and ended up in Poca Olho. Raimundo’s Mom asked him to go down to see his uncle.
As Raimundo found the street, he saw two boys playing Capoeira near his uncle’s house. They were not good at all. They did not know the moves, but they were trying. Raimundo had no sympathy for his uncle, whose drinking problem that led to drug addiction was to blame for his descent into the slum. But, he could not help but feel for the boys he saw playing in the street.
Raimundo showed the boys some basic Capoeira moves, beginning their training right there in the street. Then he told them that if they would be there the next Saturday, he would come back and keep up the lessons. The next Saturday, the boys were there with a few friends. Raimundo taught them and then kept coming back and got his Capoeira school in on the project. They got permission to use the public school grounds for their lessons and dozens of kids came and took part.
To take part, you had to stay away from drugs (running drugs for dealers as well as taking them) and to stay in school. The teachers emphasized the communal aspect of Capoeira to build up a community of hope in a place with no hope to spare. The program brought together homeless kids who lived under tin and cardboard shacks on the edge of a garbage dump. They hooked the kids up with sources for food, clothes, and in time, jobs, and a place to stay. Most of all they gave self respect in a place that taught the kids they were worthless.
Raimundo and I rode into Poca Olho on his motorcycle. Rather than going to the school, we cut over to the street where his uncle had lived. There in the same street where it all began, we found boys from the program playing in the street. Once more Raimundo worked with them on their moves. Then it was my turn. The kids laughed at my awkward attempts at Capoeira. Soon we were playing with abandon in the sweltering heat.
After a while, the mid-day heat got to us. We stopped to catch our breath. A boy who I had just been fighting ran off and came back quickly with a tin cup of cold water.
I knew that he would be devastated if I turned down his offer. How could I get him to understand? I couldn’t turn down this precious gift. I drank down the whole cup in one long satisfying drink. The boy was elated.
I never did get sick, by the way. Now as I look back in my mind and see that boy grinning from ear to ear as he offered me a tin cup of cool water. This is the world as God sees it. The roles were all reversed. I was the American who had flown down to Brazil with all my expensive photography equipment. He was the kid in the slum with nothing to offer anyone. And yet, it was he who was reaching out to me. He was the host and I was the guest right there in the street. As our Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry, likes to say, something like that just smells like Jesus. It’s got Jesus all over it.
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To God, the person who others look over is as precious as the wealthy and the famous. The person who others look over is the one with the gift, if we can stop and pay attention long enough to receive it. The person who seems to have it all together may be the one with the greatest need.
What I gained out of my trip to Brazil was a greater conviction that I wanted to spend my life serving God. I read Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book, The Cost of Discipleship, while documenting the work of Raimundo and his fellow Capoeira instructors.
Bonhoeffer, who would later be put to death by Hitler for his stand against the Nazi government, wrote in that book how Jesus’ “life on earth is not finished yet, for he continues to live in the lives of his followers.”
The self-giving service I saw in Capoeira teachers in their 20s and 30s going back week after week for years to lift up kids who would otherwise be lost and left out seemed discipleship writ large. It was not a Christian program and yet I saw the Agape love of God shot through it.
Discipleship is simply Christ living in us as we seek to walk as he walked (I John 2:6) to love as he loved (John 13:34, 15:12) and forgive as he forgave (Colossians 3:13).
In our Gospel reading as a whole, Jesus is redirecting the disciples who want to be jealous of someone else who was casting out demons in Jesus’ name. Through metaphor, he moves them from looking at others to considering themselves and how they might need to change to be more like Jesus. Is our faith in Jesus a priority? We show whether it is in the way we change to be more Christ like.
Jesus’ disciples often missed metaphors like thinking “Beware of the yeast of the Pharisees” was something he said because they forgot to bring bread. We similarly should not trip over the hyperbole in our passage for this Sunday. It is better to enter the Kingdom of God with one hand, one foot, and a single eye is not, of course, a literal injunction, but a call to costly discipleship, as we change to be more like Jesus, who we are following.
Are there parts of our lives that need to die? This will certainly makes sense to someone in recovery who needs to change who they hang out with and where they go in order to beat an addiction to alcohol or drugs. But any of us may need to change our lives, dying to some parts of ourselves in order to be more Christ like and in the process to become not a different person, but a better version of ourselves.
And now we can look at the cup of water anew. If we see the world as haves and have-nots in terms of wealth, status, and possessions, then we miss what it was that Jesus wanted us to have. Jesus wanted for you to have life and have it abundantly and that abundance is not having a bunch of things, but an overflowing experience of love and joy that flows from loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself.
What I learned in that trip to Brazil is that seeing the world as God sees it means discovering that everyone has needs and everyone has gifts and we are meant to both give and receive. When we get out beyond our comfort zones, we encounter new people and God comes to us through them in ways that bless us.
Beyond doing this as individuals, churches as a community also seek to be more fully the Body of Christ. This too means getting out of the building, to be Christ for others in the community, knowing that in doing so we are receiving a gift as well as giving one. In serving food on the second and fifth Saturdays out of Christ Church, St. Augustine’s is being the Body of Christ alongside others in the community. In reaching out through St. Stephen’s Ministry to those with HIV/AIDS you are likewise serving Christ through serving others. And in going into the school to read, you as a church are being Christ for those to whom you read, but they also are Christ for you.
Jesus summed up all his teaching telling us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength and to love our neighbors as ourselves. The more we draw close to God, the more it draws us close to other people. The more we draw close to other people, especially those we can serve as serving Christ, the more it draws us closer to God.
As I was praying through this sermon, what I saw so clearly is that this service is not things you as individuals or as a church are doing for those you serve. Serving others feeds you and me. So this is not another item on a full to do list in order to earn God’s good graces. Grace is free. God has already given it to you. Bonhoeffer would add, that it is not cheap grace because Jesus gave his life for you. It is costly grace and your serving others should cost you as well. But serving is not to be costly because you are paying back to God. Instead it is in costly service to others that God gives richly to you. And when you offer the love of God to someone else, you will see Jesus’ eyes shining back at you.
Amen.
