The Rev. Richard Kunz
St. Margaret's Episcopal Church & School
The first thing I want to do is to thank you, this congregation and out-reach committee and some of you as individuals have been generous supports of El Hogar and it makes such a difference, sometimes I am convinced, between life and death, in the lives of these boys, so thank you, that’s the one thing I want you to remember from my sermon. O.K? Don’t go home without remembering that.
So, I bring you greetings from the Episcopal Diocese of Honduras and especially from the boys and staff of El Hogar, demoris porantis, which means home of love and hope. When I go to church what I try to do is look at the Gospel through the experience of the people of Honduras and especially our boys and those who work with them and that’s what I’m going to try to do with you for a few minutes this morning. We’re still in the first chapter of Mark and though Mark’s not the one who invented the chapters, I’d have to say there’s a lot crammed into the very beginning of Mark’s Gospel. If you think back a couple of weeks, Jesus says he begun his ministry and he’s announced what his central messages is which is the Kingdom of Heaven is upon you, it’s here, in the presence of Jesus, that Kingdom is present, so repent, have a different mind, change and believe this good news. And, on the basis of that proclamation of the Kingdom being present, he begins to call disciples and he asked them an unusual thing. I was a rector of a parish for a long time and I know how to call people up on the phone and ask them to do things, but Jesus is not calling up and saying, now Peter I need someone to be president of my little band of disciples - and I need a treasurer and I need - that’s not what he does, he doesn’t give a job description, he simply says to them, follow me. Follow me, that’s it, he doesn’t even give them a destination, you would expect Jesus to say, I’m on my way to Jerusalem to establish the Kingdom, why don’t you come with me, he simply says, Follow Me. How open-ended can you get? And Jesus is so compelling that they drop everything and follow him. And in a sense what is played out in the rest of the Gospel is an explanation of where it is that Jesus is leading us. And if we read through the Gospel of Mark, you know ultimately he leads them to the cross. And through the cross - the resurrection. But on the way, where is it that Jesus leads them?
We’re beginning in this passage and the one last week to find out what it is that Jesus is calling these disciples to do. He says, come with me, follow me, see what I do and where does he lead, consistently Jesus leads them into an engagement with human needs. He leads them to deal with the sick, the hungry and those who are harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd, those who need good news preached to them , consistently Jesus leads his followers to engage in the power of the spirit of human needs and it’s when Jesus engages with that need that the disciples see it went to the Kingdom because when Jesus touches people in their need , that’s when we find out who he really is, that’s when the healing occurs, and Jesus reaches out and doesn’t just minister to them, but somehow he draws them through that and into the community that is growing around himself. It’s when Jesus touches human need that we get glimpses of power of God’s Kingdom. There’s blessing that takes place. Both for those who are healed and for the disciples who get to see it. And then there is transformation that takes place , so for instance in today’s Gospel here’s Peter’s mother-in-law, I’ve heard it speculated that perhaps the mother-in-law wasn’t so happy to have Jesus at her house. If you think about it, Simon Peter, had a nice business going and the daughter married a good sturdy business man and now he’s thrown everything away and is following this itinerant preacher , she may have had mixed feeling about Jesus. We don’t know that, but here she has a fever, Jesus touches her, she rises up and what is the first thing she does? As a result of being healed and transformed by Jesus? She begins to serve others and she begins to make her home a center of ministry for the whole village she is transformed by that touch of Jesus. And I am convinced that Jesus still calls us to follow him and still calls to engage with need. This not the American way, the American way is to build a nice comfortable bubble around ourselves and only deal with the need we absolutely have to deal with and then maybe once in a while look at something else, but basically want to shelter ourselves from it thinking that that’s how we will feel blessed. The way of Jesus is the opposite. Open ourselves up to the need he reveals around us. So that when we touch is and the people we touch and we ourselves are blessed. I see this functioning in El Hogar.
Now many of you know what El Hogar is and for those who do not I am going to give the briefest possible explanation. And I think I’m going to do a class, so if anybody wants to know more detail I’ll let you know about the class, but, El Hogar is a ministry of the Episcopal Church of Honduras to poor boys. Why boys? Because almost all the street children in Tempe Sagatus are boys, they’re more likely to be run out of their homes and also in that society they still hold the key to breaking the cycle of poverty, so if we can train them and get jobs, they can take care of their families, so we have about 200 boys, they come to us when they are about 5 or 6 , they live with us, we give them an education, we have a chaplain, we have a counselor , we give them clothing, and when they get older, we also teach them a skill along with academic education. By the time they graduate then, they can be either a carpenter, electrician, metal worker, or they learn to work with crops and animals so that when they do graduate, they have their education, they have their skill and they can function in society. Most of our boys would be street children if we were not around and they would have other kids who were street children who would continue that cycle, we’re trying to break that cycle of poverty in the lives of these kids.
The need we reach out to is extreme and real, Honduras is the second poorest country in our hemisphere, Haiti is the poorest and we have no desire to over-take Haiti. But, we are the 2nd poorest and 50% of the people there, live in what is called extreme poverty which means they live on between 1 and 2 dollars a day - less than 800 dollars a year. Before I went down there a year and half ago, I thought well, that’s probably possible because things are cheaper there, right? No, a lot things are not cheaper there - and more expensive there, to live on that little means doing without things that we consider absolutely necessary . I’m sure a lot of you have traveled in the 3rd world and you know poverty there is different than poverty here. I’ve been to a lot of the homes our children come from, I’ve never been to one that had in-door plumbing, and that includes a bathroom, of course, I’ve never been to one that’s had a kitchen counter or kitchen cabinet, never been to one that a room as a separate kitchen , I’ve never been to one that had an appliance , anywhere in the home, I’ve never been to one that had a couch - and I’ve been to some really grim places - remember one place, 3 families had to shuffle out a ledge about eleven feet wide on a highway embankment and they lived there without electricity, without water, and when we were at that house, by the way, this woman , this was just before Christmas, she had a little tomato plant growing on this steep ledge, she had 3 tomatoes growing and this was all the food she had in her house just before Christmas. One of the outside walls was nothing but vinyl table cloths hung up, this is the level of poverty and I think we forget that in this country sometimes.
I did another home visit recently; we only try to take the poorest boys, the ones in greatest need so we always do visits before we take a child. And I talked to one of the older siblings of these two boys and said, did you have anything to eat today and this older girl smiled very sweetly and said no, but yesterday I had a cup of coffee. This is the level of need with which we deal - it’s extreme in Honduras, so one thing we try to engage that need by giving these boys substance to give them food - a lot of the boys when they come to us have never used a toothbrush, if you can’t afford food, you can’t afford toothpaste and most of them don’t have clean water to brush their teeth anyway, a lot of them have never slept on a mattress, a lot of them have been sent out to go through the garbage or used as distractions while the parent tries to steal, we have a lot turbulent background with which these kids come to us. We are trying to alleviate that kind of poverty - once they come to us we’re trying to train them so they can get a job and not perpetuate that poverty but more than that, we are a Christian Ministry, so we are trying to create a transforming community of God’s love in the lives of these boys. They need that, most desperately, some of them come from very, very loving families whose parents simply do not have the means to feed them. Others, come from very turbulent backgrounds , extreme poverty breeds disintegration of family, disintegration of family breeds poverty and you get into this horrible downward cycle so some of our boys come with horror stories.
We have two boys who came to us and their parents are both in jail for gang related activities, gang activity is a very, very troubling aspect of Honduran society, right now, their grandmother was raising them and she had terminal cancer - if she had not brought them to us, these kids would have been snatched up by the gangs and put to work doing crimes and eventually tattooed with a gang insignia and basically branded for life, a very short life probably. There are with us now, but they carry scars, they know their parents are locked up in jail. We have a lot of stories like that, - we have twins with matching scar tissue, their mother is mentally ill in that society, could not get the treatment needed and in despair one night she burned down the little shelter in which they were sleeping and they had to be pulled from the rubble, scar tissue all over their body - I guarantee the scar tissue is not skin deep - so we are trying to let these boys know that they are loved by God and that they are secure and that they have gifts to give the world.
Before Christmas last year, I went into the office of this wonderful warm generous woman, Claudia Castro, who runs our school for the younger boys and there was a little boy in her office weeping his eyes out and there are a lot of us, and when you get to Christmas, you think of family, right? For some of us that’s a happier thought than others but for this boy it was dreadful because his mother was murdered by his father while he was in the house. So when he thinks of home, there’s a sadness there he was weeping so we prayed together and then she took him into her arms, and said you know you are God’s beloved child , there’s no one in the world exactly like you and God can see into your heart and know how much pain is there, but God also sees how much love is there how much you have to give to the world - and your parents could not have loved you they way they needed to, but God does and will always be there for you. And he’s put you here where you can learn to love others and you can receive their love and he has given you all these brothers - God is very special and you are special to him. And you could see his breathing sort of slow down as he got in control of himself and see those words penetrate into his soul - a couple days later, we took the boys on this crazy thing, it’s called the Gobs Christmas Train, - and for those of you who have driven in Central America , it’s kind of a blood sport to drive down there , O.K., , the streets are crazy, but this one ice-cream place has, it has a truck disguised as a locomotive and then it has a coal-car with a Santa sitting in it, then it has another car and you buy your ice cream from them and you get to drive in this chaotic streets - and it’s all decorated with lights and of all things what it was playing the Chipmunk Christmas album, maybe some of you remember that, I can’t make this stuff up, I don’t know why, well, we took the boys on that and I happen to look and here is this child, sitting in the middle gazing up at Santa and he’s got one arm around one of his El Hogar brothers, and the other arm around another El Hogar brother and they had their arms around him, and I thought , yes, transformation is taking place in his life.
When people visit, we try to tell them, please don’t treat our boys as if they are poor - we don’t want them to think of themselves as poor, we want them to know that they are blessed by God, they are blessed, we want them to know they have something to give to the world. And that transformation takes place because when we follow Jesus into loving engagements with human need and the power of the spirit, transformation happens, we get glimpses of the kingdom, people are changed and we are blessed too. Claudia tells the story of a couple of Christmas’ ago, a lot of our children have never had a gift when they come to us. When you can’t afford food, you can’t afford gifts, on special occasions, but that year a church had sent a bunch of gifts down and each boy got 3 gifts and this was very, very special to them, but we had a remainder and those of you know, where there are 3 gifts and then there are 4 gifts, you will have conflict so we had a remainder, so Claudia on Christmas afternoon said to the boys, you all know that in many of these neighborhoods there are children who have not received a Christmas gift, I am going to take the remainder and give them out, and they are all boys and want to come - they want to go for a ride , ye, ye I’ll come, so she got in the van, and before they left, one of the boys said Donia Claudia, is it o.k. if we share some of our gifts with these children and Claudia said it took her breath away, and said well I guess it’s o.k., and she got a big bag and passed it around and the boys that went donated all 3 of their gifts. They spent Christmas afternoon giving away all of their gifts that they had just been given. To me, that’s a glimpse of God’s Kingdom - that shows that transformation is taking place.
When we follow Jesus when we engage with human needs, something special happens - in our lives and in the lives of people that we touch. I’ve been a priest now for over 25 years , this is the most spiritual enriching thing I have had privilege of doing and I tell people that I get to live in the middle of the beatitudes because these children are once who have been hungry and they’ve been thirsty and they’ve longed for a better world and they mourned with a real loss in their lives and they’ve been abused and persecuted sometimes by the people that should have loved them most, but if you come to El Hogar and I hope that some of you will, you’re not going to see people walking around being bitter and self-pitying, ;you’ll find joy there, you will be greeted with hugs and enthusiasm and with music and creativity and be invited to try to communicate - and it’s a wonderful place because they are blessed. They are blessed by God. This is what happens when we engage in human needs , when we reach out and respond , we are blessed and the people we touch are blessed, God has graciously revealed to each one of you a circle of need - for some of you it’s El Hogar for some it’s people in your families people that you know, people that you work with, your neighbors they can be emotional need, financial need, educational need, all sorts of different need, I would encourage you to follow Jesus into engagement and follow that need. Don’t hold yourself apart from it. Give yourself to it when we respond to Jesus, people are transformed, people are blessed, we are blessed and I pray that you would obediently follow Jesus and that you would see his blessing and catch a glimpse of his Kingdom, Amen.