“The Shared World”
Rev. Dr. Steven R. Jungkeit
Texts: Mark 6: 30-44
The place to start is with a story, written as a prose poem, from a Palestinian poet named Naomi Shihab Nye. It’s a poem I’ve shared with you before, but it’s high time to revisit it, in this new era of isolation. The poem is entitled “Gate A-4,” and it gives expression to the spirit that I sense coursing through the ministry of Jesus. It has to do with the kind of people we’re ever and always called to be. Here’s “Gate A-4.”
Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning
my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement:
“If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please
come to the gate immediately.”
Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just
like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. “Help,”
said the flight agent. “Talk to her. What is her problem? We
told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.”
I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly.
The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly
used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled
entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the
next day. I said, “No, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just later, who is
picking you up? Let’s call him.”
We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would
stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to
her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just
for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while
in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I
thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know
and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours.
She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee,
answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool
cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and
nuts—from her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the
lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered
sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.
And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two
little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they
were covered with powdered sugar, too.
And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This
is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that
gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about
any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.
This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.
This can still happen anywhere. And it’s true – not everything is lost. There is a longing out there for the shared world, and I believe churches everywhere have an ongoing role to play in creating the shared world. In particular, we, here at FCCOL, have an enormous role to play, given the tradition that we are a part of, given the resources that we have been blessed with, and given the legacy of this congregation. We are called to be laborers on behalf of the shared world.
Naomi Nye’s poem is about creating the conditions from which something like generosity and commonality can freely spring. Spontaneously. Joyfully. It locates this power in the action of a single woman who exercises patience, care, and a spirit of shared humanity. She reaches for a common language with the collapsed and anxious woman. First, the woman’s fears subside, and then this spirit of goodwill begins to spread, like a viral infection of hope. It is as if something long repressed, an expression of spontaneous sharing, was just waiting to be released.
We’re often told, especially of late, that human nature is selfish, violent, and cruel. Coupled with that, we see that sharing itself is treated as a crude transaction – I do something for you, and in “gratitude” you do something for me. An example: “Have you once said thank you since you’ve been here?” the Vice President asked Zelensky back in April. This is the kind of transactional exchange practiced by Tony Soprano and Don Corleone, unworthy of those who claim to speak and act in the name of the Christian faith. It’s the opposite of what Naomi Nye demonstrates in her poem. And it’s the opposite of what Jesus shows us in the Gospels.
Many of us know the story of the feeding of the five thousand from birth: how, when the hour grew late and the people grew restless, the disciples approached Jesus to tell him that everyone was hungry, and that he ought to dismiss the crowd. We can sense their fear, their near panic at the thought of what a crowd might do. Perhaps the disciples too imagine the people as inherently selfish and cruel. But not Jesus. He sees and feels otherwise – he has compassion upon them, the text says. He knows that, if selfishness and greed exist, and if those qualities can spread – and God only knows that they can and do spread, like a virus – then it must also be possible to release the opposite in human beings. And so he instructs the disciples to gather what little food they could find, which amounts to a few loaves of bread, and a couple of fish.
We’re told next that a miracle occurred, and that after Jesus blessed the loaves and fish, they simply multiplied, as if from thin air. Perhaps it worked exactly like that. But I tend to think the miracle worked in much the same way that the scene at Gate A-4 unfolded: something is released within the people themselves, such that they begin to create the shared world they actually wish for, the shared world that Jesus was, all along, helping them to experience. The resources, the food – it had always been there, but the will to hoard it, to keep it for themselves alone – that simply fell away. The miracle is that Jesus opened something in the crowd, something good and freeing and generous – something that allowed people to be their most authentic, grateful selves. “Here’s a little something I put away for later, I’ll throw it in the basket,” one of them says. “I actually forgot that I had this with me, but here, take it,” says another. And little by little, what had been a scene of deprivation turned into a scene of abundance. When the disciples formed the earliest version of the church in Acts 2 at the scene of Pentecost, where everyone shared resources in common, I have to believe they were responding to the vision Jesus had given them, back in that deserted place where the barriers fell away, and where everyone came to know what the shared world was like.
One of my favorite books of all time is a study of how people behave in the aftermath of catastrophes or hardships. It’s called A Paradise Built in Hell, by Rebecca Solnit, and I’ve talked about it often with you. It’s time to talk about it again. She shows how people are dying to release a generous, gracious, and altruistic part of themselves. Much of the time, our lives are constructed in such a way that we can’t or don’t release those qualities. We’re locked up within our individuality, within our houses, our families, our jobs, our routines. But then something happens: the Twin Towers fall; a hurricane blows through New Orleans; an earthquake obliterates San Francisco. In such circumstances, many people tend to imagine anarchy and chaos descending. What’s remarkable is that the opposite almost always occurs. Time and time again, ordinary people gather together to perform extraordinary acts of kindness and self-sacrifice for one another. It takes one person, or sometimes a small group, to initiate it. But then a portal toward goodness is opened, and most people (maybe not all, but most) choose to walk through it.
We have witnessed the shared world coming to life. We have seen it among Palestinians in the West Bank who care for one another in the most dire conditions. We have seen it in Haiti, as those with very little say “here, I have a little extra.” And we have seen it on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota, where many of us will travel in another week or so. There, time and again, a people abused and maltreated throughout the history of this country give thanks for what they have, and then they share it around. And I have also seen it in this community over and over and over again. One of the reasons I’m so grateful to live in and to serve a church like this one is that you know what it is to create the shared world: in our immigration outreach; in the way you care for one another when one among you is sick; in the work you do in stocking the food pantry and serving meals in New London; in the international outreach that we all take to heart in this place.
Next week, we’ll have an opportunity to practice the shared world once again in a way that has grown in importance over the years. To honor Juneteenth, and to honor the captive Africans and African Americans who were enslaved in this town – we have now documented some 300 enslaved people in the Lyme region alone – I have invited our Afro-Cuban friends to join us here in Old Lyme once again. There will be drumming, and dancing, and storytelling, all of which is a means of remembering the sacred traditions of Africa. We don’t know exactly, but it’s likely that some variant or analogue of these practices existed here in New England, and in the Northeast, for the first two hundred years after the arrival of the Pilgrims and Puritans. Today, communities practice these traditions in most of our major cities. Not only that, a number of us had the experience of visiting Cuba just a few months ago, where we had the privilege of witnessing these traditions in action. We’ll gather here next Sunday to celebrate those traditions once again, and to bring about the shared world together. It’s a world that I think most of us yearn to belong to.
What God has joined together, let no one pull asunder. Those are words often spoken at weddings, about the union of two individuals. But it might equally be said of humanity itself. God has joined us into one human family, a shared world. There are those who are busy rendering it asunder. Our task is to keep finding ways to build the shared world together, restoring that original union that God intended for us.
This is the world I want to live in. This is the world I want to help bring into being. We know, resting upon our faith, that even now – especially now – all is not lost. This can still happen. The shared world. Amen.