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The Rev. Frank
Logue
The Simple Life Decisions. Decisions. Every day, each of us is bombarded with choices to make. Life changing decisions to the big questions like, “Would you like fries with that?” Or which jar of spaghetti sauce will I like that everyone in the family will be willing to eat. These are the sorts of dilemmas that we face early on, beginning as a child with picking cereal based not on the nutritional value, but based on the prize inside, only to be continually disappointed with the prizes we get versus the ones we pictured while perusing boxes in the store and nagging our moms to buy them. Life today presents us with a dizzying array of decisions on a daily basis. Individually, they don’t seem to matter much, but taken as a whole, there is so much to decide. Life is so complicated. This is why Olivia Ndahana’s comment surprised me. No it stunned me and has left me mulling over her words for months. Olivia told me how simple life is here in America. Simple? How could it be simple? Surely she misunderstood. Life here is so very complicated. But, I had to take time to think this through. Her comment could not be dismissed. Olivia is a very smart woman, with training from a seminary and experience in the field under tough conditions. She is a thoughtful, Christian leader and I knew I needed to pay attention to what she was saying. Many of you know Olivia. She is Daudi’s wife. Daudi is my friend from Tanzania who was with us in Easter of 2008 and then his wife Olivia and their youngest son Frank, joined us at King of Peace last year during his Christmas break from studies at Nashotah House Seminary in Wisconsin. Daudi has completed his Masters in Theology and is back home in western Tanzania. Olivia is once more working with Mother’s Union, an Anglican group involved in improving the lives of families in the area she serves. Olivia is from a village in western Tanzania. I first learned of the area from the Rev. Michael Bashingwa, a fellow seminarian at Virginia Theological Seminary. Michael explained to me the area to which I was traveling to serve as an intern in the Anglican Church of Tanzania. He said that people in Tanzania referred to the far western border as “The Bush.” So the town of Kigoma, on Lake Tanganyika, where a classmate of mine would be serving is “The Bush.” But he said, you will travel north on bad roads through the diocesan headquarters in Kasulu. People in Kigoma, think of Kasulu as “The Bush.” Michael explained that Kasulu is where his wife, Victoria, was living while he was studying in America. But he went on to explain that I would travel further north along worse roads, roads which were impassible much of the year due to heavy rains turning the red clay to a muddy bog. There I would work in Kibondo, a town of 5,000. That’s the bush he told me. I asked where people in Kibondo referred to as “The Bush” and he explained they didn’t. They knew they were unreachable much of the year. Olivia grew up in a village out from Kibondo. She knows well the price paid in human lives when the rains don’t come or come too quickly or too hard. She knows well the havoc wreaked by injuries with no ready antibiotics and the toll disease takes with no medicine to fight its spread. Olivia knows the faith in Jesus Christ that comes from growing up in western Tanzania. And in the years since that 1998 visit, I too saw that toll taken as first Victoria Bashingwa and then Michael were quickly felled by sickness much more easily treated in any hospital here in America. Many of you will recall how this past Christmas and New Year’s we joined in prayer with Daudi and Olivia as they learned their children had malaria again. We prayed and waited for word as Felista and Jonathan suffered in their aunt’s home, far from their parents. Olivia also knows shopping at Wal-Mart and enjoyed buying groceries at our Publix hear in Kingsland. She worried over their son Frank, just a baby while here, that he would get too accustomed to American food. She worried, because Daudi and Olivia were going home, and at home he would need to enjoy a simpler diet, grown in nearby soil, rather than food imported from around the world so that everything is always in season. So when Olivia spoke to say that life in America is simple. I needed to listen. Here she needed Daudi to translate. I speak so very little Swahili and even with her impressive skills with English, this conversation was beyond her ability. Daudi translated how when a child gets sick here in Camden County, the parents just take him or her to the hospital and they get the medicines the child needs. Sometimes, they do not even have to do that. The parent can take a cell phone and dial a doctor’s office, get a call back and have ready advice on what to do in the middle of the night, to get the child’s fever down before bringing him or her to the office in the morning. Compare this to a child getting sick in Kumwambu, where Daudi and Olivia lived when I met them more than a decade ago. No one owned a car. A sickness so severe as to need a doctor would mean someone would have to walk to find a relative or some other person with a car and beg use of it, and then get a ride to town where the small infirmary-sized hospital may or may not have on hand what is needed to bring relief. The many things it would take to try to do something to simply relieve suffering were daunting. All it would take here would be a middle of the night drive to a 24-hour pharmacy where even over the counter medicines would provide more healing than available through a day of hard effort in western Tanzania. Our lives are so simple. Yes, there are many things we must decide each and every day. Yes, there are so many decisions our brothers and sisters in Christ in East Africa will never have to decide. So many people there do not face decisions on what to eat, where to live, what to wear, or which car to take to the store. These are things that simply are. You eat what is available. You live where you have a home. You wear the clothes you own. Simple. But in this simplicity, so many decisions to face in simply making it through a year. By comparison, you and I possess so much. Even the poorest among us in this church has easy access to much more than much of the world’s population. And even the poorest among us will make choices on which of the clothes I own do I want to wear, and what of the many types of food in the store do I want to buy. None of us faces pressure this year on whether the crops will thrive or fail and what that means for us in terms of feeding ourselves or our children this winter. Our lives are so simple that when we need something, we get it without ever giving it a thought. Not the things we want or desire. I mean food, and water, and shelter, and basic medical care. These things are so simply obtained that we give thoughts to better food, nicer houses and where to get the best medical care. Mark tells us of a wealthy man who came to Jesus wanting to know what he must do to inherit eternal life. After running through the parts of the Ten Commandments which deal with how we treat one another, the man assured Jesus that he had kept all these commandments since his youth. Then Jesus looked at him and loved him. He asked the man something which he had asked before at least twelve times. Jesus had asked this of Peter and his brother Andrew and then of their friends John and James. He asked them to drop their nets and walk away from their fishing boats. Jesus had already asked Matthew to walk away from his tax collectors booth, leaving the mounds of coins on the table for someone else to deal with. Jesus asked each of his disciples to drop everything and join him on the road. This rich man is being given the thirteenth spot on the traveling team that is Jesus’ inner circle. All he has to do to get the spot on the team is what everyone else on the team was asked to do. Just drop everything and follow. A decisive moment. Let go of all that you are carrying. Set it all down and join Jesus on The Way. A critical decision. A turning point no matter what happens next. The man famously turns away. He was shocked and went away grieving for had many possessions. Jesus offered the man a prime spot in history of God’s bringing salvation to the whole world. And the stuff mattered too much to him. He couldn’t leave it behind. He couldn’t follow Jesus. The hold his possessions had on him was too strong. It would seem that every one of us got off easy. None of us has had to face the day where Jesus gives us that big moment of decision, leave everything behind and follow me. Give everything away, and let’s go for a walk down some dusty paths, Jesus told that rich man, but you and I get to keep all our stuff and work on acquiring more without a thought in the world toward Jesus’ call. You know better than that, right? You know that we don’t face such an easy time of it. Jesus still comes into each of our lives and asks us to follow him on The Way. The Way is what the first followers of Jesus called their movement. The name Christianity would come later. First they were the ones on The Way. The Way of Jesus. Judaism had always talked about the life of faith in terms of following hallakah, which means literally the way to walk. Jesus and the rich man were having a discussion about hallakah. The man wants to know what is the way to walk that will have him inheriting eternal life. Jesus, the great physician, analyzes the man’s sickness and determines that he is going have to set down many things in order to truly follow Jesus’ path. The Way is demanding. There is nothing on Jesus’ Path that adds to the way to walk taught by the Jews. In fact, Jesus is teaching a simpler path where loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself are the signs that you are on the right path. Jesus will make it clear in our reading today that even those who give up houses and fields for him will gain houses and fields and so on in this life and in the age to come. Peter’s house was a center for Jesus and his followers. The disciples were not all homeless beggars. There would be other followers, like Nicodemus who bought the burial clothes for Jesus and Joseph of Arimathea who provided him with a tomb. These men were on The Way too. The question is not possessions or not possessions. Jesus teaches that your heavenly father knows you need these things. Jesus instead calls each and every one of us to radically reorder our lives and in this you and I stand alongside Daudi and Olivia Ndahana. None of us, no matter how much or how little we possess are permitted to let those possessions own us. Each of us is called to use what we have, the many talents, the money, the possessions; we have to live out our love of God and neighbor. To those of us in America, to whom much has been given, much is expected. We are to enjoy the blessings we have from God and use them to build up others in the here and now so as to make The Way of Jesus a present reality. Our lives are so simple. We don’t have to get bogged down in issues of basic survival. Whether the crops do well this year or not, we will all be able to eat well. And with all our basic needs met, we have no excuses. We have the time and energy and resources to devote to following The Way of Jesus. We have the time to read the Bible. We have time to pray for ourselves and other. We have the energy to serve Christ by serving others. We have the resources to give freely so that others will enjoy some of the blessings showered on us. It’s really that simple. Thank Olivia for showing me that so clearly. Amen.
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