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Minute for Mission |
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- Healing a World
- Restoring Hope and Wholeness
- Our Voices Together
- Minute for Mission
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One
Great Hour of Sharing |
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(We recommend
you have a poster or some other large image with the new logo
with you as you present this minute for mission.)
OK folks, the insert this morning talks about this new image
of One Great Hour of Sharing, that strange new presence in the
middle of this poster. What is it? Is it a fruit? Is it a heart?
Sure, it could be. Do you see anything else? Here, maybe if
I cover up half the image, you may see them—the pair of
figures whose dance forms a joyful circle. This image is the
offering’s first attempt to focus graphically on the last
word in its name: Sharing.
Why is sharing represented as a dance? Many of us might have
other images of sharing, something along the lines of someone
splitting what he or she has with another person who doesn’t
have any. The problem with that kind of image is that it can
freeze both of us into an uncomfortable position. Let’s
look at the encounter the insert suggests: Usually when I begrudgingly
give that beggar my 35 cents, neither of us is very happy with
the transaction. We both know I could probably give a lot more,
and neither of us wants the subservient gratefulness the receiver
feels obligated to show. But we’re both kind of stuck
there as long as we believe that I’ve just transferred
something of mine to another person.
We only begin to get free of those postures when we realize
that what I’ve given was never mine to begin with. It
was only a temporary gift from God, whose primary nature seems
to be unending generosity and mercy, who allowed me to have
what I had precisely in order to share it with someone who needed
it more. Since I’m not truly the source of the gift, the
beggar is free from the need to grovel before me; as for me,
giving frees my hands to receive whatever God is offering now.
That recognition is one of the first steps to freedom from
bondage to the things we think we own, but which in fact own
us. I need to give even more than the beggar needs to receive
because I am at least as trapped in my dream of ownership and
self-sufficiency as he or she is in the nightmare of dependency.
So long as we believe that the path to our security lies in
owning things and looking out for ourselves, we will always
be stuck needing more and more—no amount is enough to
truly provide security. It is only in placing our reliance on
others, and ultimately on God, that we can free ourselves from
that trap. It is only then that we can come down from the pedestal
of the haves where we decide how much to share with the have-nots,
and join the dance of the sharers, the dance of those through
whose hands and lives flows an endless stream of grace.
I invite you, as this image of sharing invites you, to join
that dance today by giving joyously and generously to One Great
Hour of Sharing. |
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Healing
A World |
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Haiti was
once an incredibly rich and lush environment, but for centuries
it has been a clear example of what can happen to a country
when injustice, poverty, and desperation build on one another.
Since the earliest days of European colonization, its environment
and its people—the native Taino, then African slaves—were
mercilessly exploited. Fear and repression spawned slave revolts
but no good models to replace the corrupt systems. Thus, for
most of its history, a small class of wealthy people continued
to control the much more numerous poor through fear and violence.
Desperation seldom breeds creative long-term
vision. People with few means of survival sought to use the
few resources at hand. Firewood was the cheapest fuel, so forests
were stripped to allow people to cook their food. With no roots
to hold it in place, the rich topsoil washed into the sea, leaving
a landscape even less capable of supporting life.
Poverty, political powerlessness, desperation,
and ecological collapse have seemed to build on one another
into a spiral of hopelessness.
Yet hope too can build on itself. When people
recognize they are not alone, they take a more active and positive
role in shaping their world. When they learn of techniques that
can reverse the cycle of devastation, they begin reclaiming
small patches of land that give hope a foothold. When trees
and vines find a bit of good soil to grow, they slow the waters
that would strip it away and, little by little, more soil gathers
around them. Slowly, small corners of the abundance God wills
for all people begin to burst forth here and there on people’s
land and in their lives.
The healing of people’s land and lives
and communities is not something either we or they can control.
But as the Farmers’ Movement of Papaye and the Presbyterian
Hunger Program have learned, hope is a powerful force for healing.
As the name of the group Moccene helped found suggests, it helps
people Put their Heads Together. In the words of the project
that got him started, it helped them all get back on the Road
to Life. As the poster of this year’s offering proclaims,
when people share their resources, lives can be changed. Let
us celebrate the hope and possibility that God’s love
creates in all our lives by sharing our resources through giving
generously to One Great Hour of Sharing. |
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Restoring Hope and Wholeness |
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Any
disaster, be it earthquake, hurricane, flood, or fire, destroys
much more than the homes and highways, bridges and buildings
that burn into the retina of our mind’s eye as the images
of that disaster. In the everyday routine of our habits we take
for granted the thousand strands of relationship that connect
us to our surroundings and to one another. When disaster strikes,
many of those strands can be torn apart. The routine becomes
a struggle, and each day presents a long list of tasks that
before the disaster we would have done without thinking.
The spiritual needs of survivors of disaster
are no less important than their need for new homes and a rebuilt
community, and the time needed for that recovery will take at
least as long as the physical rebuilding. Members of the National
Response Team, who are specially trained in responding to human-caused
events like school shootings, can be deployed to provide pastoral
care to caregivers, assist the presbytery in assessing the need
for further opportunities for support, and consult with church
leaders about future needs of the community.
When a church burns, it can have the same
effect spiritually as house fires affecting hundreds of families.
If a sanctuary disappears overnight, the spiritual center of
a worshiping community is gone, and it can be difficult for
that community to find its center anew. This was true in Moscow,
Idaho; although still standing, the sanctuary was cordoned off
as a crime scene. The presence of Laurie Kraus and Rick Turner,
two members of the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance national
response team, meant much to the pastor. “It was confirmation
that our efforts were heading in the right direction, support
for those efforts, and reminders of some of the resources available
to help. But first and foremost, it was the witness and presence
of the larger church.”
Through support to middle governing bodies
for leader events and training, PDA helps pastors and other
church leaders understand and cope with the effects of disasters
on spiritual functioning. Once the immediacy of an event has
passed, PDA— in consultation with the presbytery and synod—
provides opportunities for caregivers to have training in compassion
fatigue and in dealing with the symptoms of stress brought on
by the disaster and its aftermath.
In cooperation with other denominations, PDA
helped develop Light Our Way, a Guide to Spiritual Care
in Disasters. This brief, excellent guide makes the concepts
of spiritual care in disaster accessible to church leaders,
elders, and pastors.
As important as any specific resource or
service, however, is the sense of compassionate presence. When
our sisters and brothers have been stricken by incomprehensible
violence, whether of human or natural origin, the sense of being
surrounded and held by the larger church is a powerful source
of comfort. That presence, perhaps more than any one thing we
say or do, is the balm our gifts to One Great Hour of Sharing
enable us to bring to those wounds in the side of the body of
Christ. Let us rejoice in this opportunity to witness to God’s
love. |
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Our
Voices Together |
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Under the new One Great Hour of Sharing logo are the words,
“Sharing Resources, Changing Lives.” It’s
easy to think of those words as instructing us to share our
resources to help change other people’s lives. And that’s
a crucial part of the ministries of One Great Hour of Sharing.
But think for a moment about how your life could be changed
by letting those whom we label disabled share what they have
learned.
Most disabled individuals have to come to
grips with the fact that they depend on others in some way.
It is all too easy for those of us who are helping others to
take for granted how negative this experience can be for them.
If someone makes you wait when you need a drink or a trip to
the bathroom, you become acutely aware of their power to make
you uncomfortable, even if they are not consciously abusing
that power.
This vulnerability that comes from depending
on others is an important part of what we must learn from individuals
with disabilities; without learning it, we can easily and unnecessarily
make their lives harder. But they have something else important
to teach us: none of us is as self-sufficient as we might like
to believe and, more important, that dependence is a God-given
part of who we are. Most of us carefully protect our illusions
of self-sufficiency because we want to believe we are in control
of our lives. Recognizing the limits of that control and letting
go of the rest are part of the invitation our disabled brothers
and sisters extend to us.
For more than thirty-five years, Self-Development
of People has been working to birth a new vision of how to join
people where they are in their own struggles—not to hand
them charity or even to help them get where we think they need
to go, but to partner with them, to walk alongside them as they
get where they want to go. One crucial part of this vision is
that our own hope is deeply interrelated with theirs—if
their dreams have not come to fruition, then neither have ours.
Similarly, that vision means we need to be open both to sharing
what we have to offer and to accepting what they offer us.
For that reason, it shouldn’t be surprising
that a group of disabled individuals seeking to find some measure
of control over their own lives can tell us at the same time
that we could really profit from learning to live with a little
less control over our own. Since in our culture, resources—money
in particular—are one of the means of exerting that control,
it seems to me they are calling us to shed some of our resources
and share them through One Great Hour of Sharing with people
for whom they will be a blessing. I believe that this act of
sharing resources will change and bless both our lives and theirs,
and I invite you to do so joyfully and generously. |
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Minute
for Mission |
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So what is One
Great Hour of Sharing? If you’re like many of us, it’s
one of those traditions you think everyone else understands,
so you don’t ask. And a tradition it is—there are
a fair number of congregations that will receive the offering
for the sixtieth time this year. But even in those congregations
I’ll bet there are people who don’t really know
what it is.
It started in 1949, when a lot of Christian leaders, seeing
the devastation that World War II had left in much of the world,
recognized both a responsibility to our sisters and brothers
and an opportunity to witness to a loving God. They organized
an hour-long nationwide radio broadcast on the last Saturday
evening in March in which some of the best-known stars of the
day highlighted the needs and invited people to give through
their church the next morning. The response was overwhelming,
so the offering was held again the next year, as it has been
every year since.
Over the years, the offering’s mission has grown from
simply emergency relief and rebuilding after disasters such
as wars, earthquakes, and floods to addressing many kinds of
human suffering, from the sudden to the chronic. Increasingly
it has included focusing on the root causes of this suffering,
so that the solutions can be sustained after our attention moves
on to other communities. At first most of this work was done
through Church World Service, which was then the relief and
development arm of the National Council of Churches.
Within the PC(USA), this evolution was accompanied by the
addition of new programs to the offering. In the 1970s, both
Self-Development of People and the Presbyterian Hunger Program
were added as One Great Hour of Sharing ministries. Since that
time the Presbyterian Disaster focus was reorganized as Presbyterian
Disaster Assistance. As each of these programs has evolved,
more of the ministry Presbyterians support with their gifts
has been done by these three programs while we continue to work
with other denominations through Church World Service. The ministries
of these three programs address a wide spectrum of human suffering
from the acute to the chronic, from offering short-term relief
to addressing root causes.
Even today, however, the offering continues the tradition it
has maintained throughout its history—standing with our
partners in the face of suffering, walking with them toward
a more hopeful future, and witnessing to the love of God in
Jesus Christ in tangible ways that proclaim in word and deed
that they are not alone. I invite you to join this great tradition
of sharing resources that truly changes lives.
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