Study Trip Reflections: Incarnation

Ruth has been finalizing details of our itinerary with Ron, and our study group participants will take part in a conference call on Sunday evening to talk with each other for the first time.  From Santa Ana to Philadelphia... From Rochester NY to Greensboro NC... From Lubbock TX to Takoma Park MD... the anticipation is building!

Our second reflection posted below comes from Barrett Smith, missionary-pastor of the Carpenter's Church in Lubbock:  "We are a diverse group of people located mostly in the Overton area. We've been here since 1998 trying to be a place of belonging to all who find themselves here. Whether we've been pushed to the fringes of society or find ourselves wandering there, we come together to find something different, something authentic, something divine. And we believe we're finding it together, on our journey with God." 


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Mzungu Syndrome, I began to call it. A sort of coping mechanism perhaps. It became my term for the terrifying tendency that I encountered and perpetuated during a brief visit amongst the Giryama people on the east coast of Kenya. I was alarmed as we drove through the countryside - past a large group of children outside their cinder block school. “Ciao!” “Ciao!” They yelled with their hands raised as they ran after us longing for the candy that was supposed to come sailing through the windows. However, the reality of this syndrome penetrated most deeply as I talked with Christian Ministers in the area. They would often describe their difficult living conditions and then turn towards me. With a hint of a sparkle in their eye they would say, “If only I could be in America…” Flustered, I would scramble to defend their way of life and point out every American foible that I could think of while sharing all the good that I saw around me. Still, their pain was often too deep and the “good life” that I proclaimed by my presence was too tantalizing. This presence, despite my counter desires and efforts, tended to bring attention to their lack rather than their wholeness. It tended to point out their communal brokenness rather than their communal health. It tended to mark them as inadequate rather than God’s chosen people. Simply because I had the ability to be there for a short time.

Let’s make a VERY rough parallel and meditate for a few moments on the incarnation of Jesus. What does it mean for Jesus to “pitch his tent among us?” What does it say about who God is? What does it communicate to us, you, me, and the rest of creation?

God’s material, physical entrance as Jesus could not help but point out the difference between Himself and Creation. After all, God was the one who made the move. However, Jesus was determined to break through this false chasm between Creation and God. In Matthew 20 James and John come to Jesus asking to sit at his right and left in the kingdom. One could say that they wished to move to America as reward for the difficulty of life in Judea following Jesus. However, Jesus responds by calling on his disciples to become servants and slaves. After all, he didn’t take advantage of his equality with God. Rather, by his own humanity and his service to creation, he spoke to its goodness. He moved for its wholeness. We are reminded of this today each time that we take the mundane and earthy elements of the Eucharist – bread and wine. It is this world that God entered. It is this world that God served. It is this world that God works to redeem. And he calls all of us into participation in that activity. In so doing, he reminds us that we are all made in his image, and all of creation is good.

Now, I did say that this was a rough parallel! Our identity and action is far from that of God’s; unfortunately, in our world the movement can be interpreted similarly by some.

So, as we visit our sisters and brothers in El Salvador, may we seek relationships that affirm rather than critique. May we in our language, action, and attitude acknowledge wholeness rather than lack. In so doing, may we travel together as we all learn to more fully embrace God’s claim that we are His children, made in his image, loved, valued, and valuable.

Barrett Smith
Carpenter's Church
Lubbock, Texas

Study Trip Reflections: Rutilio Grande

The April 2nd departure date for the Cielo Azul Study Trip in El Salvador is drawing near!  Our participants will be considering brief reflections each week to begin to enter into this experience prayerfully together.  We'll be posting those here on our blog so that you can share this with us.

Our first reflection comes from Ron Morgan, whose enduring relationship with the people of El Salvador began in the late 1980s, during the civil war.  Ron is a member of the Cielo Azul advisory board and member of Central Baptist Church in Wayne, PA.

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Rutilio Grande memorial on the road to El Paisnal

This morning I attended a session of the Alternative Seminary here in Philadelphia. The subject was “THE CROSS OF CHRIST: A Justification for Redemptive Violence Or a Call to Gospel Nonviolence?” One of the themes of our discussion was the “scandal” as theologian Jon Sobrino put it, that by being nameless and faceless, poor people suffer--are ground to bits by structural injustices--without attention being paid to their lives and deaths. But, Sobrino continues, it was the contribution of murdered Archbishop Oscar Romero and Jesuit Ignacio Ellecuria that began to “give a name” to these hundreds of thousands when they referred to them as “Christ crucified in history,” or as “the crucified people.”

We also talked about the historical fact that Jesus was executed by Rome as a subversive threat both to the power of Rome and to the power of the Jewish Temple hierarchy, both of whose authority he undermined with his call to “announce good news to the poor, to proclaim release for prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind; to let the broken victims go free.” (Luke 4: 18-19)

As I have been anticipating our trip to El Salvador next month, I couldn’t help remembering that March 12th is the anniversary of the murder of the Salvadoran Jesuit priest Rutillio Grande. A friend of Romero’s from their student days, he was murdered for his advocacy of peasant workers and his attempts to “give names” to those who were being oppressed by landowners. Many people think that Rutillio’s death had a profound impact on the more cautious, bookish Romero, pushing him to begin to listen to the stories of the poor.

Here are some of the things people remember Rutillio Grande saying:

• “Some people cross themselves in the name of the father (money), and the son (coffee), and the spirit (especially if it's cane liquor!). That's not the God who is the Father of our Brother and Lord, Jesus, who gives us the good Spirit so that we can all be sisters and brothers in equiality, and so that we, the faithful followers of Jesus, can work to make His Reign present here among us.”

• “Don't be like fireworks—all noise and hullabaloo towards the heavens way up there! We have to fix this mess here on earth. Here on earth! God isn't in the clouds lying in a hammock. He cares about thte way things are going so badly for the poor down here."

• “I've said many times that we have not come with the sword—or the machete. Our work is not that. Our violence is in the Word of God, the Word that forces us to change ourselves so that we can make this world a better place, the Word that charges us with the enormous task of changing the world.”

• “Brother and sisters, I fear that if Jesus were to return today, walking from Galilea to Judea, which for us is from Chalatenango to San Salvador.... I dare say that with his words and actions, he'd never get as far as Apopa. They'd detain him around Guazapa, and they'd beat him up, even silence him or have him disappeared!”

• “The orioles have the conacaste tree where they can hang their nests so they can ive there and sing. But the poor campesion is not allowed his conacaste, or even a little patch of land on which he can live or be burried. Those who have money and power organize themselves, and they have plenty of resources to do so. But campesinos don't have land, or money, or the right to organize so that their voice can be heard, so that they can defend their rights and their dignity as children of God and of this nation.”

• “We are children of this Church and of this country which is named after El Salvador – the Divine Savior of the World. We can't just say: “It's every man for himself, as long as things go well for me!” We have to save ourselves together as a whole ear of corn, a whole cluster, a whole bagful. We have to save ourselves in community.”

(quotes from Memories in Mosaic by Maria Lopez Vigil)

Ron Morgan and Ruth Orantes
during a meeting at The Simple Way

I can honestly say that it has been one of my greatest joys to help folks to visit “the children of this Church and of this country....” I am anticipating our time together next month!

Ron Morgan
Cielo Azul Advisory Board

Updates for our Cielo Azul study trip! Join us April 2 - 9, 2011

Click here to access pdf brochure with complete information about the Cielo Azul study trip.

Join us for our first study trip this April.  Alex and Ruth will be planning our itinerary, and members of the Shekina community will be our hosts while we are in Santa Ana.  We will stay in guest houses for the rest of the visit.  The size of the group is limited to 10-12, so it is important to reserve your space. (Download the full study trip prospectus from our blog.)

Reservation deadline: $200 by February 15

Full land fees payment : $550 by March 15.

You will be responsible for making your own airline reservations.  Please schedule your airline arrival time for 11:00am to 2:00 pm on April 2.

If you cannot join this trip, you can download a selection of texts that will help inform this group here.

Please remember all of the participants in your prayers.

For more information, or to discuss your participation, call Ron Morgan 610 220 1317, or  send us an email through our contact form in the sidebar of this blog.

Thank you to our contributors!

Thanks to all our 2010 contributors for your support for the Orantes family and their ministries. Thanks to your response to our end of the year note, we achieved our goal. Soon you will be receiving a statement of your 2010 contributions from our fiscal sponsor, The Simple Way. Remember that you can now continue your support through an online contribution. Just use the secure donations form in the sidebar.

Your ongoing, regular support is greatly appreciated. In 2011, the Cielo Azul fund will able to provide scholarship funds to help cover a part of the costs for Victor Hugo as he begins study in a high school that focuses on architectural training. Also, in this coming year we will we help to channel two larger grants totaling nearly $10,000 towards ongoing programs and new facilities for ministry at Iglesia Bautista Shekina. But the heart of our mission is to give Alex and Ruth a secure, regular stipend for ongoing family expenses that they cannot meet in any other way. Our goal is a minimum of $500 per month.

Fiesta de Maiz -- Everyone Comes with a Special Gift

The people of Iglesia Bautista Shekina have been working for several years towards their vision for building a community center on land adjacent to the church to enable them to expand their ministries to serve children, youth, and senior adults in their neighborhood. They are making steady progress in deliberate stages – clearing the land, building a wall around the property, installing a drainage system to prevent flood damage during the rainy season, and constructing a large kitchen space. The next phase includes plans for adding bathrooms, which will be funded in part by the 2011 Bridges of Hope grant from the Alliance of Baptists.

Shekina's community center space is already being put to good use for fellowship gatherings, youth meetings, outdoor worship experiences, and the church's highly successful annual community outreach program “Puertas Abiertas” in which teenagers and adults from Shekina offers a month of workshops and provides safe space and healthy relationships for neighborhood children.

This fall, thanks to the vision of a recent church member, Shekina celebrated a totally new experience in the community space. Never had anyone dreamed of using the community space for planting corn – but all of that suddenly changed after Pablo Rodriguez married a member of the church last December and joined Shekina. When Pablo, who was from the countryside, saw the space at the side of the church where the community center is being constructed, he announced that he would like to plant corn. And so began the big new adventure.

People recognized that planting corn was a way for Pablo to feel like a part of the church community, and his idea was quickly embraced even though most of the members of the urban church had no experience with gardening. The youth were especially enthusiastic about getting started, so Pastor Ruth Orantes canceled regular Bible school classes one Sunday morning and sent them outside with Pablo to begin tilling the soil and planting the seeds.

 And finally, in September 2010, the people of Iglesia Bautista Shekina celebrated their first harvest of corn from their property by throwing a day-long party and inviting friends and neighbors to join in both the work and the fun. Everyone, from youngest to oldest, men and women, teenagers, boys and girls, divided responsibilities to spend a full day helping with the harvest, with cooking, and with clean up. All the guests at the “fiesta de maiz” feasted on freshly prepared tamales, elotes locos (grilled corn on the cob), riguas (sweet corn dough mixed with fresh cheese and beans and cooked on a hot skillet in banana leaves), and atol de elote (a traditional ground corn, cinnamon, and milk beverage).

Enjoy this slide show of photos from the day of the fiesta!  Thank you to Bernhard Voegeli for the pictures.

Reflecting on the experience, Pastor Ruth feels great joy to know that Shekina is a church where everyone can feel comfortable and where new people are welcomed into the church community:

“I think about the first Christian community described in Acts, and how people began to notice and say 'Look how they love!' At Shekina, everybody wants to be involved in church life, and that picture is good for the community around us to see. Neighbors and visitors see how we share life together, and they say, 'We want to be with these people!' It is good that Shekina is a church where everyone feels comfortable and welcome. We are a place where everyone can increase our friendship and we can improve our our life together. And everyone comes with a gift to share with the community.”

--- Ruth Rodrigues de Orantes