“What you see depends on where you stand”
Mark 10: 17-31
World Food Sunday
Mark 10: 17-31
World Food Sunday
I am not sure whether you were at the Kingston Road Street Festival yesterday. You should have seen Kevin and Derek in their shorts selling hotdogs and hamburgers while standing under a shadow of the church building in cold windy day. The two macho men were there to raise money for our Sunday School. Our children are blessed to have people like Kevin and Derek, along with folks involved in Christian Education, at KRU. Derek and Kevin told me that everything was donated by local merchants so that the profit was 100%. I would like to also thank the local merchants for being so generous with us.
A pig and a chicken were in conversation about getting something about a birthday gift to a farmer who took care of them. The chicken came up with a brilliant idea for a birthday gift. “Let’s cook him a breakfast.” The pig thought that it was a good idea. So the pig asks, “What should we cook for the farmer?” “Ham and eggs” the chicken says. The pig thinks about it for a while and says to the chicken, “If we were to provide ham and eggs, it will be a contribution from your part but, for me, it would be a sacrifice.”
For the chicken, she has to sacrifice one or two eggs for the breakfast. But the pig would have to be slaughtered to provide ham.
What you see depends on where you stand.
A wealthy young man comes to Jesus and asks a serious but somewhat philosophical question, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
The conversation ends by Jesus giving a practical answer to the young man, “You lack one thing: go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” It is recorded in Mark that the young man was “shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.”
Jesus tells a young man who has done everything his religion has asked him to do that he lacks one fundamental thing. Jesus tells the young man that having too much material wealth is to lack something fundamental in his life.
It sounds so strange to hear that having too much material wealth is not about fulfilling one’s life but actually lacking something fundamental in one’s life.”
For those of us living in Canada, where the surge Capitalism has eroded a sense of Socialist values people strove to bring to country in the early 1900, it is so hard to hear Jesus being so harsh towards a young man who seemed to have done everything in his life to follow the guidelines of his religion.
What do you mean that he has to give up everything? That is way too much to ask, we say.
Is it a sin to have much? Why would I give up everything I have worked so hard for me and for my family? It sounds so unreasonable for Jesus to expect his followers to give up everything in order to follow him.
I confess that I would rather speak about something else then today’s passage; however, I felt that I need to reflect on the passages that I myself have problem hearing.
There are some of the things I hear from Jesus.
Get rid of everything that hinders you from following me.
It is not good enough to do the minimum requirement of what your religious authorities tell you.
What I require of you is a total commitment. There is no ‘in-between.”
For those of us who do not want to give up our possessions or controls of what we possess, what Jesus says sounds like a threat and a condemnation. For those who are willing and able to give up what they have, the message is likely to be an affirmation of their conviction.
What we hear depends on where we stand. Our perception of the world depends on where we stand.
The first time the poverty hit me in the face was when I was faced with a beggar at my home. It was a hot and humid summer in South Korea. Our family gathered around the dinner table set by the living room that was open to the garden. A bell rang and I was confronted with a stench when I opened the gate. He was a boy about my age, wearing a rag that could hardly be described as cloth. He looked filthy and hungry. He put his right foot into the gate so I could not shut the gate on him.
What shocked me the most was his voice filled with anger. He was not pleading for food. He uttered, “Give me some food. Give me some damned food!” He must have been turned down by many times by the time he got to our house that he was beyond being nice to plead for food.
My mother took some food from the kitchen and gave it to him. The little bit of food we shared with the beggar was not much sacrifice from our dinner. But that little bit of food was a dinner for him and perhaps his family who may have not had much to eat for a while.
The memory of being confronted by a boy my age, about 12 years old, begging for food still haunts me. It was a shock for me as a boy from a middle class family where everything was given when asked for to be confronted to the reality that there are people who are hungry and starving in the world. It is not that I have not seen beggars before. I never had to face them until a boy walked into my life. Poverty hit me hard on that evening in the form of a boy my own age.
But poverty continues in South Korea. Poverty seems to be an epidemic not many people are willing to cure.
“The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations celebrates World Food Day each year on 16 October, the day on which the Organization was founded in 1945. The World Food Day and TeleFood theme for 2005, "Agriculture and intercultural dialogue", recalls the contribution of different cultures to world agriculture and argues that sincere intercultural dialogue is a precondition for progress against hunger and environmental degradation.
At the international level, many societies feel threatened by one form of intercultural dialogue: world trade. Poor farmers cannot compete in an international market place if their goods are shut out of richer countries, while subsidized farm produce from industrialized countries is sold at or even below production cost in poor countries. Many developing countries want to produce for export purposes, but will not reach their full potential until further dialogue among nations leads to a fairer trading system.
More than 850 million people around the world remain hungry. [This is about 25 times of Canadian population.] At the World Food Summit held in Rome in 1996 and again at the World Food Summit: five years later in 2002, leaders vowed to reduce that number by half by 2015. Moreover, the United Nations Millennium Development Goals commit world leaders to reducing by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger, while ensuring environmental sustainability.
Many international initiatives and civil society networks, such as the International Alliance Against Hunger, are promoting intercultural dialogue to help achieve these goals. World Food Day provides an opportunity at the local, national and international levels to further dialogue and enhance solidarity. Human and cultural ingenuity, the right vision, partnerships and support – including that of FAO and the international community – can surely lead to progress in achieving food security for all.”
How do you fight against world hunger? It sounds too daunting. There are so many variables? How can one person do anything against such a huge and complicated question?
Well, there are many who are doing the impossibilities. Here is one person who has done something impossible.
This Friday, Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the 66-year-old founder of the Grameen Movement micro-banking system, and the Grameen bank emerged as surprise winners of the Nobel Peace Prize for their pioneering work in lending to the poor. The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised Dr. Yunus and Grameen Bank, which means ‘Bank of Villages’ in Bangali, for their “efforts to create economic and social development from below.”
Yunus pioneered the concept of microfinance, giving small loans to transform destitute women into entrepreneurs.
According to the New York Times, “Dr. Yunus’s simple but revolutionary idea was that the poor could be as creditworthy as the rich, if the rules of lending were tailored to their circumstances and were founded on principles of trust rather than financial capacity. He found that they could achieve lasting improvements to their living standards with a little bit of capital.
Since its creation in 1983, Grameen has made a total of $5.72 billion in such small loans, and has turned a profit in all but three years, including $15 million in 2005. “Across cultures and civilizations, Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that even the poorest of the poor can work to bring about their own development,” the Nobel citation said.
Muhammad Yunus is often referred to as "the world's banker to the poor". His revolutionary Grameen banking system is estimated to have extended credit to more than seven million of the world's poor, most of them in Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations in the world. Half of Bangladesh’s 150 million people earn less then $1 a day.
Mr Yunus came up with the idea in 1976 while professor of economics at Chittagong University in southern Bangladesh. It was the havoc wrought by a devastating famine in Bangladesh in 1974 that changed the thinking of a Bangladeshi economics professor named Muhammad Yunus.
When Yunus saw the disaster's crippling effect during a university field trip, he felt that classroom economic theories were simply not doing enough to address the needs of those living in desperate poverty.
Soon after, Yunus handed out loans as small as $27 to a group of women in a village of Jobra. His plan was simple: give the poorest of the poor money to begin income-generating projects that will help them support themselves. Yunus said he was convinced that people could take care of themselves, if they had just a little help.
The sweeping success of his experiment led him to start the Grameen Bank in 1976. It lends small sums of money to the poor, without collateral, and most of the loans go to women.
The women use the money for simple projects, such as starting a tiny roadside stall, raising poultry, cropping a small piece of land, or running phone booths in villages. Such businesses are far too small for most banks to bother with, so although the women needed only a tiny amount of money, they were not eligible for loans - until Muhammad Yunus came along.
The women had relied until then on local money-lenders who charged high interest rates. The conventional banking system had been reluctant to give credit to those who were too poor to provide any form of guarantee. And yet, a repayment rate is over 98% when it falls below 50% in other banks in Bangliadesh.
The success of Mr Yunus' scheme exceeded all expectations and has been copied in developing countries around the world. His "micro-finance" initiative reaches out to people shunned by conventional banking systems - people so poor they have no collateral to guarantee a loan, should they be unable to repay it.
Mr Yunus' has tried to tranform the vicious circle of "low-income, low saving and low investment" into a virtuous circle of "low income, injection of credit, investment, more income, more savings, more investment, more income". As a result, even beggars have been able to borrow money under his scheme.
Earlier this year, Yunus explained to students at Tufts University, in the American city of Boston, why he aims his loans at women. "We focused on women as a kind of reaction... The conventional banking is unjust. How can a financial system reject two-thirds of the world population?," he asked. "Something is wrong… We have to design a financial system that is inclusive, where nobody is rejected. Credit should be accepted as a human right."
What you see depends on where you are. For most bankers, only the haves get to borrow in order to have more. For the most, “common sense” based on the traditional market ideology means the poor lack the potential and possibilities. For Dr. Yunus, it is those banks that lacked imaginations and creativity.
What you see depends on where you are.
The young man, perhaps, was like the bankers who could not see the poor as trustworthy. Like the most bankers of our time, his wealth blinded him from seeing the poor as capable of or deserving of the quality of life he himself took for granted.
Jesus, I think, was pointing out to the young man and those around him that his wealth was limiting him from seeing the full potentials of the rest of the humanity in his world.
What do you value the most in your life? Why? What would it mean for you to give it up for you to inherit a life that is filled with meaning for you and others in your community? What limits us from seeing others as people with full of potentials and possibilities?
A famous Christian theologian went to Japan to study Buddhism. He requested a meeting with the abbot at the Zen temple indicating that he would like to learn more about Buddhism. The abbot met him and invited him for a tea. The abbot began to pour tea. The tea is being poured to a cup that is overflowing. The theologian waits. Then, finally he tells the abbot, “Abbot, why are you keep pouring when it is already full?”
The abbot smiles at the theologian and asks, “Why do you keep pouring ideas into yourself when you already have enough?” “Truth you seek is not about learning more, it is about enlightenment. It is about awakening, not about having more knowledge.”
May the words of Jesus enlighten us and challenge us to empty ourselves and see the full potentials with the poor of our community.
Amen
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