Preached at Kingston Road United Church by the Rev. Richard C. Choe
Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God. So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, saying, "Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?" Then Peter began to explain it to them, step by step, saying, "I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners; and it came close to me. As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. I also heard a voice saying to me, 'Get up, Peter; kill and eat.' But I replied, 'By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.' But a second time the voice answered from heaven, 'What God has made clean, you must not call profane.' This happened three times; then everything was pulled up again to heaven.
Them and us.
I remember seeing the photos of starving children in North Korea a few years ago. I remember the feeling of profound pain. I remember the tears and the rage towards the regime that would starve children for the sake of “defending” its political ideology and the luxurious privileges of a handful of the ruling elite in North Korea.
For years I had seen plenty of photos and moving images of starving children in other lands. I had seen so many such images that my eyes no longer stopped at the pictures of children with bloated stomachs and my heart no longer skipped more than a few nano seconds to change the channel when images of under developed children looked at me on TV. I no longer raged as much as I once did. I had somehow accepted the images of starving children as part of the reality.
If I rationalized my apathy, I told myself that I was too small to change the system and that rampant corruption would prevent change for those who were suffering. But a few years ago, newspaper images of children crying, suffering, and dying of starvation really shook me. I could not believe that so many children could die of hunger and malnutrition in the 20th century.
I could no longer just sit and rationalize that the North Korean government was corrupt and that nothing would change the situation. The starving children looked just like me and my family members. They were me. They were my relations. They were my own blood. They were my people.
A few days after I saw the starving children in North Korea, I got involved in raising funds to purchase grain to alleviate famine in North Korea. I also began asking myself why the suffering of children in other countries had not affected me as much. Were the two-dimensional photos of those children too far removed from my realities? Did I believe that nothing much could change the realities of those children even when the rest of the global village poured in money and food into their country? Was I a racist toward people who did not look like me?
There were many questions for which I did not have clear answers for; however, it was clear that a sense of “them” and “us” prevented me from being moved to do something about making changes. Although I grew up with my mother telling me and my brothers that it is a sin to not to help others when we could, it was the notion of them and us that prevented me from doing something for them.
Them and us. This is a struggle Peter and the Jewish followers of Jesus were faced with in the early Church. The Way of Jesus of Nazareth began as a “renewal” movement within Judaism. As a result, each and every one of the faith community was Jewish in their ethnicity and in faith. However, as Gentiles – those who were not Jews – began to join this nascent movement, as it spread outside of Palestine, those who were of Jewish ancestry were faced with challenges they did not have to struggle inside the Palestine.
Kashrut – the body of Jewish law dealing with what foods Jews can and cannot eat and how those foods must be prepared and eaten – was one of the challenges. Kashrut comes from the Hebrew root Kaf-Shin-Reish, meaning fit, proper or correct. Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin writes in his book “To Be a Jew,” that “by following the dietary laws, a Jew cannot eat a meal without being reminded of the fact that he or she is a Jew.”[i] But as non-Jews began to join their faith community, Jewish followers of the Way were confronted with a major challenge – the dietary law that made them who they were was now a stumbling block in welcoming others to be part of their faith community.
Peter’s vision marked a transition of the Way from a nascent Jewish movement within Judaism to an autonomous faith community that was willing to venture outside of the Judaism. There are legitimate fears from the Jewish followers of the Way. What do these Gentiles know of our faith and practices? What if they overwhelm us with their ignorant ways? What if they take over the control of our vision of the Way? In the midst of this crisis, Peter heard a voice in his vision saying, “What God has made clean, one must not call profane.” Rather than using the dietary law as an excuse to exclude gentiles, Peter’s vision helped him to move beyond the law and welcome the Gentiles into the Way.
Becoming an inclusive community often requires giving up the values a community holds at its core as “essential”. Changes are mutual. Welcoming is mutual. Being in community is mutual. Being in solidarity – standing together with differences – is mutually engaging and mutually transforming; processes where the outcomes are always more than the combination of all the contributing factors. The process of becoming an inclusive community risks shaking the foundation of the community. Peter had a vision that the Way of Jesus is open to all who were willing to take the journey that led to life in Christ Jesus. Through his vision he realized that they were part of us. That was the most essential part in building an inclusive community – them and us could be one and the same part of a community.
Reading “Not on Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond” profoundly shook me. Don Cheadle, an actor who was nominated for Academy Award for portraying the hotel manager in “Hotel Rwanda” and John Prendergast, a senior advisor to the International Crisis Group and a former official in the Clinton White House wrote the book to let the world know and become responsible in stopping genocide in Darfur.
Sudan is the largest country in Africa. It is located directly south of Egypt. Due to its location, the country straddles the cultural divide between the Arab and Arab-influenced societies of northern Africa and the societies south of Sahara. Sudan’s geography and its 41 million citizens are correspondingly diverse. More than 50% of Sudanese are described as black or “African,” and nearly 40% are Arabs.
Darfur means “Home of the Fur people.” In Arabic Dar means home and Fur denotes the ethnicity of the people. Darfur is a North West region of Sudan. From the early 15th until the 20th century, the north-western region of Darfur was a prosperous independent kingdom of the Fur people. During the British colonial era, one of the largest exports from Sudan were human beings. The slave trade continues today within Sudan. Today, it is called “inter-tribal abductions.”
Since achieving independence from Great Britain in 1956, Sudan has been a country at war with itself. In Darfur, the government of Sudan armed the Janjaweed, a mixed bag of bandits and racist ideologists whose ethnic cleansing of all non-Arab people was mostly motivated by the desire to take over land and steal livestock. The Sudanese government turned the ethnic diversity of the Sudanese into a political instrument of genocide.
Darfurians had been targeted for extermination by the regime in Sudan on the basis of their ethnicity. Their crime is that they are from specific non-Arab ethnic groups that are deemed to be sympathetic to rebel groups in Darfur. Since 2003 the Sudanese government has orchestrated and waged a deliberate campaign of murder, rape, and displacement against the people of Darfur region. More than 400,000 people have died, thousands of women have been systemically raped, and more than two million people have been displaced and forced to live in squalid refugee camps.[ii] The genocide continues in Sudan. The crime against humanity continues in Sudan.
The co-authors of Not on Our Watch quote Mukesh Kapila, former UN humanitarian coordinator for Sudan, as they offer strategies for effective change in Sudan.
“People can show solidarity by not forgetting. One of the most terrible and depressing things when you are a refugee or an internally displaced person from a war like this is you feel completely forgotten. You feel that you are stuck there somewhere in a camp in the middle of nowhere and the world has simply passed you by. And that, more than anything else, takes everything away from you. So help; don’t forget; and bring pressure on the authorities to do what must be done.”[iii]
The United Church has been urging its members to write to their MPs to:
· use all diplomatic means necessary to ensure that the Government of Sudan does not block the deployment of multinational peacekeeping forces as mandated in the UN Security Resolution 1706
· continue in its support of the peacekeeping efforts of African Union forces
· use Canada's influence with the African Union to urge the leaders to reconsider the appropriateness of Sudan's presidency of the organization in 2007
· appeal to the members of the United Nations Security Council to
o follow through with enforcing existing sanctions
o impose tougher penalties on the Sudanese government to fulfill its obligation to protect the people of Darfur
o comply with the requirements of the International Criminal Court.[iv]
Karl Jaspers, a German philosopher, called the period between 900 to 200 BCE as the Axial Age because he believed that it was pivotal to the spiritual development of humanity. Confucianism and Daoism in China; Hinduism and Buddhism in India; monotheism in Israel; and philosophical rationalism in Greece were developed during this Age.
Karen Armstrong, a scholar in comparative religion, asserts that each generation is challenged to adapt the original insights developed in the Axial Age to their own peculiar circumstances, and that must be our task today. She notes the following as the characteristics of the religions developed during the Axial Age.
“What mattered was not what you believed but how you behaved. Religion was about doing things that changed you at a profound level. The only way you could encounter what they call “God,” “Nirvana,” “Brahman,” or the “Way” was to live a compassionate life. Indeed, religion was compassion. … If people behaved with kindness and generosity to their fellows, they could save the world. … We need to rediscover this Axial ethos. In our global village, we can no longer afford a parochial or exclusive vision. We must learn to live and behave as though people in countries remote from our own are as important as ourselves.”[v]
The Dalai Lama echoes Karen Armstrong’s view when he talks of compassion. “The true expression of non-violence is compassion. Some people seem to think that compassion is just a passive emotional response instead of rational stimulus to action. To experience genuine compassion is to develop a feeling of closeness to others combined with a sense of responsibility for their welfare.”
We can no longer stay silent as if we are not responsible for people dying of genocide in Darfur. We cannot give up on people who are dying in Darfur by saying that one person cannot change the world. Archbishop Tutu said at the 9th Assembly of World Council of Churches that people marched and the Apartheid government of South Africa fell, people marched and the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, and that when people march, racism will fall as well. I firmly believe that if each one of us can commit to bringing down the perpetrators of Sudanese genocide, it will happen. “Nothing rips more at the common fabric of humanity than genocide – and the only way to assert our own humanity is to stand up to it.”[vi]
Peter’s vision of mutual inclusion and mutual transformation within God’s compassion shook the foundation of faith of the early followers of the Way of Jesus. Peter’s vision of mutuality in God’s love facilitated the Way of Jesus to dare to be open to the world they lived in. God invites us to broaden and deepen our understanding of community. Community ought to be far more inclusive of people who are living in our immediate neighbourhood or even within and beyond our national boundaries.
May each one of us be daring like Peter so that we welcome strangers and are welcomed by them as sisters and brothers in God’s love. May we be able to hear the plight of people of Darfur as the plight of our brothers and sisters in God’s family. May we experience God and be transformed by God’s compassion as we live out our commitment to realize God’s justice and compassion in our global community.
Amen.
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[i] Kashrut: Jewish Dietary Laws, Judaism 101 (http://www.jewfaq.org/kashrut.htm).
[ii] Not on Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond, Don Cheadle & John Prendergast, (Hyperion: New York, 2007).
[iii] Not on Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond, Don Cheadle & John Prendergast, Hyperion: New York, 2007, 200.
[iv] Take Action, The United Church of Canada web site (http://www.united-church.ca/action/sudan/060111.shtm).
[v] The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, Karen Armstrong, (Vintage Canada: Toronto, 2006), xv-xxiii.rtf
[vi] Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times
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