Sermons at St. John’s Presbyterian Church

Reflections from Guatemala

Transcribed from the sermon preached April 20, 2008

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

St. John’s Presbyterian Church

2727 College Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94705

Scripture Readings: Isaiah 6, Matthew 5:1-12

The air was cool as the colors of the day's fiesta faded across the mountains. Marimba and marange music danced lightly from distant homes. The village and group had dispersed, seeking semi-private space after eight hours of prayers, music, food, fireworks and piñata scrambles. Martha, Stewart and Glenda took a walk up the village hillside and were greeted by flower-bearing girls. Feliciana disappeared into the darkness of the adobe kitchen with her breath and a handful of grass; Sarah and the boys were still down at the field throwing fire crackers, and I laid down to steal a few words from the setting sun.

          "'What a dust we raise,' said the fly upon the chariot wheel," fabled Aesop. After all the promises, accolades and diplomas, declarations and blessings, despite the powerful sense of the presence of God, I felt all the more small. I was less certain about my own understanding of what I was about, of what we were about, of what Catholics and Protestants, Americans and Guatemalans are about than before the trip began. Today, I still feel much the same way. So resting in the gracious mercy of God, I hope to bring God's truth but not necessarily answers. My reflection is like four or five snapshots from Guatemalan culture; from a few rough figures on poverty in Guatemala to plastic bottles and cell phones. From there I move into the Catholic-Evangelical relations and finally into reflection from Octavio Paz on the "fiesta" as a metaphor in Latin American culture.

          Our scripture this morning is Isaiah's conversion story. It is both inspiring and disturbing. It is a moment when Isaiah sees the sin of his own class, the class that he serves. Yet he is cleansed by God and realizes someone needs to speak the truth. He answers God's call. Here I am Lord, send me. Unfortunately, he also sees a vision where the people do not see or comprehend the injustice they have created and benefit from.

          The priesthood are spokespersons for the ruling elite. In virtually all agrarian societies, ancient Palestine and Guatemala included, there is a very small upper land-owning class, 2-4%; 4-10% are a professional servant class made up of priests, scribes, engineers, artists and military and 85-92% are peasants or campesinos, those with marginal land or marginal land holds, little or no education, the poor. In ancient agrarian societies priests and scribes are the only real literates among the whole population, and they are paid by the elite.

          Isaiah is among the privileged priestly class. Thus, when he comes into the presence of God he says, "Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among the people of unclean lips." He is among the people who lie to hide the injustice of the powerful. And he is convicted by God. Writing before the sunset in Xecaquic I feel a bit like Isaiah, and I sit in the presence of the Holy God. I find myself saying, Woe is me, for I am a person of unclean lips and I live among the people of unclean lips.

          By American standards, virtually all of the Quiche people are poor. More often than not, they do not go to the doctor when they are sick. The death rate for children under five is astonishingly high. The primary causes of death are a deadly triangle of ailments: intestinal parasites, malnutrition and dehydration. Respiratory illness is also a big killer. Though we had stirred up a lot of dust, and eaten quite a bit, it remains to be seen how much service and help the clinic can provide.

          And everyone, those in our group, the people of Xecaquic, God's Church and the whole world look more human, limited, fallible, finite, of the earth: "From dust we come, to the dust we shall return." One of the draws of foreign mission is the exotic nature of it. Distance allows us to idealize the poor and imagine relationships less complicated than those with the poor of our own neighborhood. Upon closer inspection we discover they are not the sweet caricatures we would hope, but so different in culture, and their life more complex and beautiful than we could have dreamed.

          Of course, one of the draws of this mission is that it was initiated by the poor of our own neighborhood. For all the hours of travel over bumpy, dusty roads, wading across rivers, around mountain hairpin turns, the world looks smaller, more interrelated than ever.

          Another example of this interrelatedness is plastic: plastic, plastic was everywhere. Tropical culture throws things away, anywhere and everywhere. Mangos and bones are finished off by other organisms, but plastic just accumulates. What a sad testimony to the influx of modern capitalist culture; the privatization of liquid, and the tragedy of the commons. But then again, wouldn't it be nice to have plastic catheters, plastic heart valves?

          I was blown away by the ubiquitousness of cell phones. Antenna towers have replaced the steeple as the tallest thing in town. When I was in Guatemala twenty years ago, the most common form of communication between rural locations was the telegraph, and most of those who received them had to have the message translated by a literate person. Maybe two or three percent of the population had a land line telephone. In one short step Guatemalans are skipping literary culture (the culture of letter writing and books) and the industry of modernity, and jumping headlong into digital, postmodern culture. Now, very conservative indigenous teenage girls, complete with traditional Mayan hand-woven clothing, are standing on a mountain in the middle of cornfields talking on their cell phones. Who will they talk to? What information will they gather? Are they talking about my tall, quiet son? Will they gain access to digital libraries? I know this. We were able to talk with Fred Goff here in Berkeley, and we have the number of the nun in Chicamán who runs a health clinic and may be able to help us set up our clinic in Xecaquic.

          One of the possible drawbacks of this mission trip was that besides the work of travel, and Feliciana's deeply rooted inclination to keep up with her mother and care for the whole group, we did little labor. It feels good to sweat for a good cause. On the other hand, one of the strengths of this mission project is that the people we hope to help are enthusiastically doing the work themselves. This is a sure sign that they actually want it and have the hope that it can be accomplished.

          Hope expressed in five hours of worship. Two and a half hours for the Catholics, two and a half for the Evangelicals. What odd confused feelings I had toward this. For one, it makes our hour and fifteen minutes look pretty short. It is fairly unprecedented to have Catholics and Evangelicals cooperating and worshipping together in Latin America. People working together for the betterment of the whole community is a good thing. But the equanimity shows loss for the Catholics, a religion that for all its hierarchy, patriarchy and prostitution to colonialism, its absurd and dangerous requirement of celibacy for the priesthood, has also had greater cultural flexibility, and has been served by thousands of Isaiahs, well-educated heroes and martyrs for peace and justice. So while we are considered Evangelicos to Guatemalans, especially Guatemalan Catholics, I found more in common with the Catholic Priest than the Evangelico pastor.

          Evangelical Protestantism got its start in Guatemala during the reign of Rios Mont, the violent evangelical president of Guatemala in the early 1980's. Catholic priests, nuns and lay leaders, working through small groups to educate and empower the poor, were systematically exterminated. It was during that time that the military came into the Tum's village, burning it into non-existence. Fed and encouraged by the CIA, protestant missionaries from the United States began pouring into the highlands.

          Protestant missionary values reflect that of capitalist United States, with the protestant work ethic and an individualistic morality and salvation. But the women love the emphasis on individual responsibility and the prohibition of drinking. And the evangelicals are congregational in their government, and Spirit driven in leadership, giving the people direct access to God. Catholic worship is expressed more through ritual, where Evangelical faith is expressed more through passion and feeling. It is a great irony that evangelicals here in the United States are critical of postmodern culture and its emphasis on personal feelings.

          There are two priests in the area near Xecaquic, serving 70 villages. Meanwhile, every cornfield has a pastor. And evangelical members take personal relationship with God and the church seriously. You might say the Catholic Church operates like the land line telephone while the Evangelicals function more like cell phones.

          I find that an uncomfortable metaphor, but not because it doesn't work. In the Catholic framework you need to go to the priest, the land line, to communicate with God. And there are only two in the whole region. But in the Evangelico Church, you can just stand in your cornfield and talk to God in your own language and receive God's Spirit.

          But there is still the matter of the broker, the corporations and government that control the power, the lines, and the satellites. In the church as well, the medium and the transmitters of the medium greatly influence the content. In that sense there is not all that much difference between the landline and the cell phone, between Catholics and Protestants, between those right wing North American missionaries and we left wing North American missionaries. We are still both individualists and materialistic consumers, still incredibly naïve about the power and struggles faced by the Quiche.

          But we err if we think oppressed peoples and cultures are mere passive recipients of technology and culture, especially the Gospel. For the Gospel will break out of the cultural package that threatens to entomb it and come alive in the people. The image on the alter in the Catholic Church in Xecaquic is the black Christ of Esquipulas. If European Catholicism couldn't keep Christ white, neither will evangelicalism keep Jesus North American. The Gospel message of peace and justice has been put down before, over and over, and repackaged as an opiate to keep the peasants and slaves in their place.

          But the next thing you know you have another in a long line of prophets, from Isaiah to Jesus, Las Casas to Romero, from Martin Luther King to Jeremiah Wright: "Why do you cry out 'peace, peace' when there is no peace?"

          If we are on the spoke of the wheel that goes down, we may have hope that it will eventually go back up. That I believe was what we accomplished in our celebration, in the inauguration of the health clinic in Xecaquic. We celebrated and lifted up the hope that despite where we have come from, and despite the distance we still have to cover, the distance between our world view and theirs, between Jews and Gentiles, Quiche and North Americans, between the rich and poor, Catholics and Protestants, despite our small place on a turning wheel much greater than ourselves; in our fiesta, we all declare, hope is alive!

          As I mentioned last week, for me, the great moment of the celebration day, the great moment of our trip, was the scene of Stewart and Izabel cutting the ribbon on the door to the clinic. A little more than a decade ago the military came and burned all the villagers' homes, their fields and their storehouses. They shot Izabel's husband fifty times. And then, as if that wasn't enough excess, they took a large stone and crushed his skull. Izabel ran with the children she had with her into the mountains. The family was scattered with only the clothes they had on their back and no food. Some made it to the refugee camp in Chiapas, others finally to the Bay Area where they were helped by EBSC. Eventually she made it back and the community started again in Xecaquic, just down the mountain from the destroyed village of Los Platanos. Her children have helped her build a new home, and now they have initiated this project to build a health clinic.

          Then we show up to participate in the wonderful, chaotic, colorful celebration, the inaugural fiesta of the clinic. Why such fiesta in the midst of such a tough situation. Why spend so much money on a party when all around are poor people without the most basic necessities of life? Why spend the money on anointing Jesus with oil, when we are nowhere close to spending enough to end poverty?

          Mexican Octavio Paz in his Nobel winning Labyrinth of Solitude speaks of the fiesta as a central metaphor for life in Mexico, and I think it fits well in Guatemala too:

          Their souls explode like the colors and voices and emotions. Do they forget themselves and show their true faces? Who knows? The important thing is to go out, open a way, get drunk on noise, people, colors... This fiesta (is) shot through with lightning and delirium, is the brilliant reverse to our silence and apathy, our reticence and gloom.

The fiesta is a return to a primordial state, prenatal and presocial. It is a return that is also a beginning, in accordance with the dialectic that is inherent in social process.

The group emerges purified and strengthened from its plunge into chaos. It has immersed itself in its own origins, in the womb from which it came... It is a true "re-creation," the opposite of the "recreation" characterizing modern vacations, which do not entail any rights or ceremonies whatever and are as individualistic and sterile as the world that invented them.

But the Mexican fiesta is not merely a return to an original state of formlessness and normless liberty: the Mexican is not seeking to return, but to escape from himself, to exceed himself. Our fiestas are explosions. Life and death, joy and sorrow, music and mere noise are united, not to recreate or recognize themselves, but to swallow each other up. There is nothing so joyous as a Mexican fiesta, but there is also nothing so sorrowful. Fiesta night is also a night of mourning.

Now I will be the first to say that we have not accomplished much, and we need not pretend that anything we have or will do can erase the pain of such a difficult past, but two Sundays ago in Xecaquic, Stewart and Izabel opened a new door of hope, and we all joined together in the fiesta, and it was colorful and fun, joyous and real. Christ was a life. Soliciting a response, "Whom shall I send?" And we at St. Johns respond, here we are Lord, send me.