November 29, 2007

Bringing Christ to Nicaragua

Many of you have heard me tell the story. I was in the airport, waiting for a delegation to arrive, when I saw another group—12 or 15 people coming out through customs together, all wearing an identical bright-yellow tee shirts with a small symbol of their congregation and the large lettering, “BRINGING CHRIST TO NICARAGUA.” They were met by two other U.S. people and a Nicaraguan driver and whisked off in an air-conditioned bus. The delegation for which I had responsibility was arriving, so I didn’t get the opportunity to ask them if they knew that Christ is already here and has been here for a long time.

In this Advent-Christmas season, we use a lot of words about the coming of Christ and about preparing ourselves to welcome him into our lives. The lectionary texts for this season focus on the prophecy of Christ and talk of Christ’s return. All of these texts are very clear that these events happened in God’s time, not in our own. The Old Testament prophets proclaimed the need to prepare our own hearts and lives for it to happen, but they never suggested that there is anything that human beings can do to make it happen.

I have often thought about those tee shirts and the attitude that they represent to me. I read in that slogan a sense of superiority, a sense of the assumption that because Nicaragua is a poor country they don’t know about Christ or have Christian faith. I’ve seen that attitude before, for example, in those who insisted that a local food pantry sponsored by a group of churches needed to hand out “salvation tracts” along with the food. The assumption was that if these people were “saved” they wouldn’t be hungry. What utter nonsense!

My fear is that those who come here with the attitude that they’re “bringing Christ to Nicaragua” may never widen their vision to learn the wondrous ways in which Christ is already here. They may never open their eyes to see the face of Christ in the dirty face of a shoe-shine boy or in the wrinkled years of a campesina woman. I fear that they may stay in their air-conditioned bus and hotel and never find the joy of being served a hot cup of coffee from the weathered hand of the person who picked the coffee beans. I fear that their image of Christ for Nicaragua may be the commercialized Christ of the Christmas in the shopping malls of home.

That image is also here in Nicaragua. The Christmas season is well under way in the stores. The MetroCentro Mall has one of the biggest artificial Christmas trees I’ve ever seen, and decorations are all over the place. Those who have the money to buy can find plenty of commercial Christmas. I’m afraid that this is the way the outside world is “Bringing Christ to Nicaragua.”

The Advent-Christmas season highlights the inequalities of life in Nicaragua in its most glaring light. The fact is that most Nicaraguans have never gone into that mall and will never see that huge tree. Or maybe the Advent-Christmas season highlights the most glaring inequalities and disjointedness in all of our lives. We claim to worship the Christ who was born poor, lived poor, and died poor, but we do it by spending more money than at any time of the year. We claim to worship the Prince of Peace, but we do it by adding money to the budget for war. We claim to worship the One who calls all people as brothers and sisters, but we do it in a world in which color, language, national origin, sexuality, and many other things divide us into smaller and smaller sub-groups.

The Advent-Christmas season calls us to something different, something better, something new. This season calls us to live with the openness and joy of those who believe that a better world is possible and that we are on the verge of unlocking its doors. This season calls us to love with an openness of heart and spirit that our small-minded divisions cannot even image. In this season may we all learn to live as those who know that Christ is already here and that all we need to do is to prepare the way of justice and peace in our hearts and in our world so that Christ may enter us and fill us with the love which fulfills that path.

Personally, I come to this season with a renewed sense of joy. Having come through a successful surgery and a rapid recovery, I am back at work in Nicaragua. Having returned to new challenges and new co-workers, I am finding the same joys of open friendship that I’ve always found in Nicaragua. No, I’m not “bringing Christ to Nicaragua.” Rather, Nicaragua, its people, and the work of CEPAD are always bringing Christ to me.

I hope that you all are finding someone to bring Christ to you this holiday season.

Doug

The 2007 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 58