Living on $1 a day

Well, if any of my regular readers thought I’ve been very quiet over the past few weeks, then the answer is “Yes.” And if you think that I’m very lazy, then the answer is “Yes!” I’m actually on leave at the moment, and although we’re at home, I’m trying to do as little as possible and appreciating every moment of it.
But as 2008 is coming to its end, I decided to publish one more post, for two reasons: One is that the topic is important to me and secondly: This is my 300th post since I started blogging and I wanted to post this before the year runs out.
Eric Bryant, author of Peppermint-filled piñatas which I wrote about here, recently published a post which immediately caught my eye: Eating for a $1 per day in the USA. It’s about two teachers, Christopher and Kerri, who decided that they want to determine whether it is possible to survive on $1 per day (the amount which is described by the World Bank as living in “extreme poverty.” You can read more about their adventures on their blog: http://onedollardietproject.wordpress.com/
I was touched by what they had done and immediately wondered if I would be able to convince a number of my friends to do the same. Perhaps we could make some kind of statement by doing this. And then I thought about this some more. The reality is that I’m working in Swaziland within a community where it is calculated that 60% live on less than 45 cents per day! Furthermore: from this money they not only have to buy food (which is difficult enough) but they also have to pay for transport, medication, clothes, school fees and much more – something which the people who took part in this project did not need to do. Christopher and Kerri also had access to discount stores where they could buy in bulk – once again a luxury for most people living in rural areas in Swaziland who have to make do with small stores within the rural communities and which are extremely expensive.
But then, the most important thing: After a month the two teachers could return to their “normal” way of living (although I’m sure that they would have made some changes after this revealing experience). In Swaziland, living in extreme poverty, trying to make ends meet with hardly any money, is the “normal” way of living, day in and day out, month in and month out, year in and year out.
Perhaps we all need an experience like this, if only to make us aware of the plight of the people in the poorest countries in the world. But we need to remember, (as we all recently had our Christmas dinners and in a few days time will sit down to a feast to celebrate the coming of 2009), that there are millions of people in the world who have no idea what it means to have three meals a day.
My wife teachers mathematics and computer science at a highschool and was engaged in a debate with one of the learners some time ago. She tried to convince the learner that it is wrong to make decisions based purely on the financial implications of the decision. Specifically the discussion was about an occupation and my wife said to the girl that it is better to have an occupation in which you are happy, even though the salary may not be the best, rather than working for a big salary but being unhappy in your work. And this girl made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that she disagreed with my wife. When my wife asked her why she felt so strongly about this, she replied: “I can’t imagine how it would be not to wake up each morning wondering whether you will have food to eat that day!”
What Christopher and Kerri did, is commendable. I salute them for doing this. But this is not reality. This is something of a “Survivor” game, after which it is possible to return to a normal way of living. I’ve seen reality, and it is truly heart breaking.

Cheap grace (or Easy Discipleship)

Many years ago, our professor in New Testament urged us to read Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s, The Cost of Discipleship. It was amazing to see how he explained the consequences of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) for today. That book had a profound influence on my own life, even though I know that I continually fail to live up to God’s standards. One concept which he introduced in the book was the term, Cheap Grace, by which he meant that Jesus had to pay the highest price in order for us to be saved, but that we sometimes seem to think that, even though we receive grace free of charge, it also cost God nothing.
I’m presently busy reading Alan Hirsch’s book, The Forgotten Ways, (and when I’m through I’ll definitely write more about it). On page 104 he makes an important remark: “…many of our church practices seem to be the wrong way around … we seem to make church complex and discipleship too easy.” The context of this remark is that he is discussing the reason for the growth in the early church, in which, he says, church was simple and discipleship was hard – so hard, in fact, that people who became active followers of Christ often paid with their life for this decision.
I’m convinced that there is a lot of truth in this remark. We have a certain way of doing things in church. We have a certain vocabulary (which I’ve named “Christianese”), things are done in a certain orderly way (and this is true regardless of whether we attend an Orthodox, mainline or charismatic church) and in general for the non church attendee, I have a feeling that it is not easy for such a person to feel comfortable in the church. And then there’s classes and training and Bible Study and catechism – all aimed at making this person a better church attenders. But in my experience little is being done to make church attenders better disciples. In fact, in most cases I know of, if a person’s name is on the register (and we have a rightful claim on their tithe), then we are happy.
I’m not against training and Bible Study and catechism, but let this not be an indication of the commitment of a believer towards God. When we are selling cheap grace, then we say to people that God expects nothing from you in return for being saved. When we proclaim the message of Jesus, then we are offering God’s grace free of charge but also telling people that God asks everything in return. This is what Jesus tried to tell us when he said in Luke 14:28, that we need to calculate the cost before building a tower. This has nothing to do with earning salvation. But it has everything to do with informing people beforehand about the cost of discipleship.
I don’t think I have the answer yet, but I do believe that what Hirsch is saying is true for most churches today. And then we don’t need to be surprised that Christianity in general doesn’t have a very good image in the world.

My World AIDS Day Church Service

Today is (or was, depending on where you live on the time zone) World AIDS Day. Churches are encouraged to devote the Sunday before or after 1 December for this cause. I was preaching yesterday in a church in South Africa and made full use of the opportunity to devote the entire service to the AIDS issue.
I took my Scripture reading from James 1:19-27 with my main focus on the first part of verse 27: “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress”
I then proceeded to show an AIDS Photo montage which can be downloaded, free of charge from http://www.willowcreek.com/grouplife/aids_day.asp
As introduction to my sermon I used a parable which was once told by the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard. There are a number of versions of the parable, but the one I used goes like this:
Imagine that geese could talk, Kierkegaard once said, and that they arranged things so that they too could have their Church services and their worship:
Every Sunday they would assemble together and a gander would preach. The essential content of the sermon was the exalted destiny of the geese, the exalted goal for which the creator had destined geese (and every time his name was named all the geese curtsied and the ganders bowed their heads). With the help of their wings they could fly away to far countries, blessed countries, where they really were at home; for here they were just like exiles. And so every Sunday. Then the gathering broke up, and every goose waddles home.
Then the next Sunday off they went to the service again, then home again. That was all. They throve and grew fat, they became plump and tender… that was all. For while the sermon sounded so exalted on Sundays, on Mondays they would tell one another of the fate of the goose who wanted to take his destiny seriously, with the help of the wings the creator had given it. And they spoke of the horrors it had to endure. But they prudently kept this knowledge among themselves. For, of course, to speak of it on Sundays was most unsuitable, for as they said, in that case it would be obvious that our service would be a mockery both of God and of ourselves.
There were also among the geese some that looked ill and thin. Of them the others said, “You see, that’s what comes from being serious about wanting to fly. It is because they are always thinking of flying that they get thin and do not thrive, and do not have God’s grace as we do. That is why we get plump and fat and tender, for it is by God’s grace that one gets plump and fat and tender. (This also motivated the theme for my sermon: Do you want to waddle or do you want to fly?)
I then asked someone with whom I had arranged beforehand to give a short testimony of what she had seen and experienced in homes where people are living with AIDS.
In the second part of my sermon I spoke about the widows and the orphans, in Biblical times and then also in modern times. I ended this part of the sermon with something that I realised as I had been reading Jeremiah recently in my personal devotions, that God was angry with the prophets and the priests, some of whom were actively involved in exploiting the widows and orphans, but He was also angry with the “good” prophets and priests, because although they themselves did not exploit the widows and orphans, they refrained from speaking out against it!
I then showed a short clip from the excellent South African movie “Yesterday”. If you haven’t seen it, beg, steal, buy or borrow a copy! It is available on Amazon.com as well as Kalahari.net. I showed the part where Yesterday goes to a clinic to be tested for HIV. Then I asked a Swazi woman to tell the congregation how it feels to live with HIV.
In the next part of my sermon I spoke about the fact that the church in general still seems to live in denial of the enormity of the problem of AIDS and that the situation calls us to act. I also included the words of Helder Camara, a priest in Brazil who once said: “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.” We need to address the reasons why AIDS is such a huge problem. Is it just by chance that the countries most affected by AIDS are the poorest countries, the countries in which the greatest discrimination takes place against women, the countries with the lowest education level?
My last video clip was The hidden face of AIDS, which can also be downloaded, free of charge, from Willowcreek’s website. There is a shorter and a longer version. I used the shorter version.
I then ended by asking those who had come to church whether they were going to waddle back home or whether they were going to fly home, because they had decided not only to listen to the Word of God, but to DO what He wants them to do.