October 5, 2008:  EVEN WHEN YOU DON’T SUCCEED
Matthew 21:33-46, Philippians 3:4b-14, Psalm 19
Eileen Parfrey  --  Springwater Presbyterian Church

Reading Philippians:  exegesis while reading
      Paul’s description of the spiritual practice of radical letting go of ego (false self)
      Paul had every religious/social/economic privilege possible (born-to, accomplished)
            Knew them as not just pointless, but actively get in the way of knowing Jesus
            Spiritual life is not “knowing about” Jesus (facts) but directly knowing Jesus
Paul’s question is essential human search for meaning in life:  who do we think we are, who do we think God is?  This is our True Goal, baptismal promise
We don’t get to succeed at faith; resurrection only happens after we’ve failed (death)

Reading Matthew:  exegesis while reading
      Why Jesus told stories (parables and not allegories)
            Stick with people, come with ethical demands (how we live)
            People hear them in different times and learn ethical demands for their season
      Not about “authority of God” but response of those who hear and know about God
Jesus is the son, but this not atonement allegory (not salvific; he is killed for greed)
            Vineyard is NOT the people of God but Kingdom in its ideal form
      “Kingdom” doesn’t belong to any one set of people (owner only wants the fruit)
            Original hearers = religious elite actively interfering with kingdom (Jew/Gentile)
      Matthew’s fruit:  righteous living, human caring, courageous witnessing
      We’ve been given every privilege (white, educated, more wealth than anyone)
            We kill the messengers (global warming, economic crisis, ecological decline)
            We’re supposed to be either the messengers or “good tenants”
Peacemaking:  sustainable life, just/ethical economic system, racial equality
      Apparent lack of success means we have a choice
            Depress and discourage?
            Develop better strategic goals? (work harder)
            Fine-tuning our skill sets? (work smarter)
Know we will never “succeed,” receive this as a gift part of God’s design, knowing it’s not our vineyard and turn the “produce” over to God

            Naomi should have known this all along, but it took her five years to figure it out.  Raised in Venezuela but born of US citizens, she was a Latina by upbringing and a US citizen by birth.  Her parents were Baptist missionaries and, until she was 18, she had been to North America only three times.  You can imagine the shock to her cultural system as she stepped off the airplane to enter a church-sponsored college in Chicago.  She remained in the US after graduation, went into the “family business” as a missionary to college students, and acculturated herself into being an American.
            Maybe that’s why it took her five years to figure it out.  The process began when her life disintegrated and re-made itself at the tender age of 40 when she married a widower and became pregnant.  About that time, her little congregation disbanded in a storm of argument, she lost her job in a shake-up at the mission agency, and her mother died.  She found a new congregation, and when the baby entered kindergarten, she went on the church’s first-ever mission trip to Juarez, Mexico.  She was an ideal translator, but being bilingual did not make her bi-cultural.  She was enmeshed in our North American need to get things accomplished, to get them right, a human doing not a human being.
            The first year the group went to Juarez, they spent the week making concrete blocks for walls and digging a trench for a water supply pipe to a future dental clinic on the church campus of their Mexican partner church.  They mixed concrete by hand in a pile on the ground using gravel they scraped off the hillside.  It was arduous, hot work, and the gringos were disappointed in their inability to finish the job, but El Pastor assured them that groups coming in the next months would take over the work.
            When Naomi’s church arrived the next year, the clinic had walls, but it had no windows and wasn’t roofed.  Instead of working on the clinic building, though, El Pastor had them pour concrete walls around the church campus.  It set the gringos’ teeth on edge to create such an obvious barrier between the church and its mission field, the neighborhood, since their congregation back home struggled to establish effective outreach to their neighborhood and kept coming up against figurative brick walls.  Here they were building one.  El Pastor told them that, in their culture a wall indicated the owner was worthy of respect, and a wall would actually enhance their witness to the barrio.  It didn’t make sense, but it was the stated need of their hosts, so it was back to scraping gravel off the hill and mixing concrete on the ground, while they looked in frustration toward the would-be clinic.
            The third year, Naomi’s group arrived to see that more of the wall had been constructed by work groups from other US churches, but the clinic had not progressed at all.  Their group was divided into two work parties:  one to mix concrete on the ground for more of the wall, another to join members from the Mexican church in repairing the home of a local widow with six children.  The next year, Naomi’s husband found a used portable concrete mixer on Craig’s List and towed it down to Juarez before the church group arrived.  Boy, would they make progress on the wall around the church!   They could finish up the wall and to do something meaningful!
            When they arrived, El Pastor was so pleased with the gift of the concrete mixer that he had the church group haul it to a stalled community center construction site where they used it to mix concrete to pour a recreation patio.  Again, the church did what the host church asked, but they also set trusses and roofed the dental clinic in the afternoons.  The fifth year, Naomi and the church group arrived to hang drywall in the clinic building, which was now being used as a child care center, since no dentist was willing to work in the barrio.  Seeing a desperate need and no one to fill it, El Pastor’s wife had enrolled in dental school.  On Friday, as Naomi sat on the church steps to catch the cool evening breeze, she heard a child crying.  It was a neighbor child, crying out of loneliness as she waited for her mother to arrive on the bus.  The mother took the bus to work in El Paso across the river early each Monday morning to work, leaving her children with her mother, so she could earn American wages.  Most weeks she got home after midnight on Friday.
Naomi comforted the girl, but that night as lay on her foam pad on the floor of the sanctuary, she couldn’t sleep.  She was mulling over the years she had been coming to Juarez with her church.  She thought of the child, collateral damage in an economic system that lures peasants to border towns from all over Mexico, in the hope of finding a better way of life.  She thought of her own child waiting for her to come home, of the financial sacrifice she made each year to come on this mission trip, and how their group never finished any of the projects they worked on.  She got up and went to talk to El Pastor.
“Have we made any difference,” she asked “coming here year after year and never quite finishing anything?”  El Pastor was both gentle and wise.  He said that his wife would never have had the courage five years ago to go to dental school.  Women did not do such things in Mexico, but she dared now, because she had met professional women who came on work groups from US churches.  He said that his congregation was too poor to pay for the materials to build and fix their sanctuary building and his house.  The people appreciated that the Americans made that possible, but (and he was very intense when he said this) they appreciated more just that the church groups came.   “They say it’s like Jesus,” he said.  “God could have used any way to save the world.  But instead, God came. You could send a check, and we could buy materials and hire contractors, and the work would get done.  But instead, you came yourselves.” 
That was when Naomi figured it out.  It had taken her five years.  Finishing the projects wasn’t the point.  Eventually someone would finish what previous groups had started.  The point is not succeeding, or even finishing the work.  The point, Naomi now saw, is for us to bring ourselves, to be faithful, to offer what we can, and to allow ourselves to be changed.  And that’s enough.