Rest for your souls

Proper 9 A

I had the opportunity to spend January term with a family in Germany to satisfy my language requirement in college, but could not pony up the cash to do it. My brother offered to lend me the money, and even so, I could not get my head around how I would ever be able to pay him back, given that I had no job prospects looming after graduation and wanted to go to graduate school. Now whenever I look back at that lost opportunity to live with a family from another culture, I kick myself. It was a wonderful chance to learn, to live in another country and make international friends that would have been fun and enlightening and expanded my world greatly. In my farm background no one in my family had ever done anything like that, so I know my lack of vision was a little based in lack of experience. I know better now, and during the years when I was a professor, then campus minister, I used to encourage young adults to take risks that I knew would expand their horizons.

Making connections with other people takes time. Getting to know others of a different culture is sometimes scary. I know that for me, I have lived in three different states, apart from my native Illinois and each time, I encountered different ways of speaking, different ethnic groups, different foods. In Rochester NY, I was a farm girl in the big city, surrounded by people of Italian descent and I met and became friends with my first Jewish friends. I learned to love chopped liver and had my first real bagels. In Ann Arbor, I went to Greek town and had wonderful middle Eastern foods, one of my professors brought baklava to our doctoral seminars, and I heard music from around the world at the University of Michigan. Here in Kentucky, I encountered more southern culture--cheese grits and barbecue. And until I could get the hang of the local accent, I once went to the car wash, not understanding what the man with a thick Eastern Kentucky accent was asking of me, I finally just agreed and ended up with musk scent in the car.

When we lived in the Chicago area, we also had access to wonderful food and music, including Mississippi Delta blues, of course Chicago style pizza, and many cultures who have immigrated there, including Mexican people and the biggest population of Polish people outside of Poland. Riding on the El there, you could hear a myriad different languages being spoken.

We hear Jesus say that his generation is like children in the marketplace who complain to each other--we played the flute for you and you would not dance, we wailed and you would not mourn. Trying to be connected, to have vision and take opportunities where they are given to be in relationships with others, to hear their flute and mourn with their grief, is a challenge that we don’t always live up to. But there is some good news too—after the attacks of September 11, 2001, many people have taken the opportunity to dialogue with Arab and Muslim people in interfaith listening. Unfortunately it took something very drastic to wake us up to the fact that as Americans we can become very insular in our cultural ideas. Even so, we have taken this opportunity to listen to the flute of another religious group and try to learn its melodies. We also began to understand the wailing of Muslin extremists who do these suicide missions, and how people in extreme poverty may view the richness of our country.

Right now my family is in the middle of the Mississippi floods—they can only get to work by going out of their way several miles to another bridge to Iowa, some have been laid off until the waters recede. Some have lost whole farms and this year’s crops. There is much suffering when floods arrive. The Episcopal church is listening to their grief, and has mobilized assistance—the bishop of Iowa has a video on Episcopal News Service that you can watch to see the devastation and learn how you can make connections with the people’s grief, hear their flute and dance in sympathy with them.

I believe that these connections among peoples, whether they live right here, in a couple states over, or across the hemisphere, are part of Jesus’ words to us to ‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.’

When we take another person’s burden, we dance with them, we mourn with them, we become light as feathers, our souls have been joined in a way they could not be any other way. When I went with a youth group from Chicago to the Gulf Coast to help with rebuilding two years ago, we worked on the trailer of a young single mother not much older than some in our youth group. She would come after work and help us, with her little four year old girl. Our youth played with her little girl and we got to know her and her hopes and dreams. She cried and we cried with her. We made a real connection and our souls were joined together in this short week we were there. We helped carry her burden for that week, and we became lighter, our souls found rest in the work we were doing. I believe that had we merely worked on houses without meeting people we were helping, it would have been a much emptier week. We would not have known the people we were helping, there would have been no human connection, just some physical labor in hot Mississippi.

To get to know anyone, really know them and understand their life, their sorrows, their joys, is to know their blessedness in God’s eyes.
It is a way to take on the yoke of Christ,
to hear the flute and learn another person’s dance,
and to find rest for your soul.