Sermon: Advocates "Yopp"
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Sermon: Advocates "Yopp" Texts: John 6:1-21 Date: May 18, 2008 Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church I have some great news to share with you this morning. The world is making progress in the fight to end extreme poverty. When I say “extreme poverty,” I mean the numbers of people who are living on less than $1/day—for the first time since 1981 the number of people living on less than $1/day has gone down. Even as the world’s population has been increasing, the number of people living in extreme poverty is decreasing. Great news! We should rejoice—but not rest just yet. The number of people who still do not have enough to eat numbers 854 million. That’s still a lot of hungry people. There’s more good news: in the past two decades, immunization has prevented an estimated 20 million deaths. And evidence has shown that mothers who receive at least a primary school education are 50% more likely to immunize their children as mothers with no schooling. 20 million lives saved by immunization, in a change powered in part by education. Great news! We should rejoice—but not rest just yet. About one-fifth of the world’s adult population—771 million adults—do not yet have basic literacy skills, and at least two-thirds of them are women. More good news: the number of children under the age of five who die each year has dropped below 10 million for the first time since 1960. We should rejoice—but not rest yet. Because there are still 28,000 children under five who die every day from preventable causes, more than half of them hunger related. I’ll do the math for you—that’s around 14,000 children under age 5 who are dying daily because they don’t have adequate nutrition. So, as usual in the human situation, there is good news and bad news. We have been, as a nation, part of the very positive trends I have been talking about. Since 1999, U.S. poverty-focused assistance has more than tripled. Poverty-focused development assistance has grown from $7.8 billion in 2001 to $14 billion in 2007. This is a result of a commitment we made in the year 2000, along with 188 other nations, to reduce extreme poverty by half by the year 2015—one of the Millennium Development Goals. Great news! We should be proud of our part in this world-wide effort to reduce extreme poverty—an effort that is showing results. We should be proud and rejoice—but not rest just yet. In order to reach this achievable goal and do our share, do what we already committed to doing, we should be spending about three times what we are now contributing to poverty-focused development assistance. Would tripling our aid be a large percentage of our federal budget? I posted a 25-foot piece of adding machine tape on the wall as a visual aid. The mark at the 5-foot point is what a lot of Americans think we spend on foreign aid—about 20%. The line at the 1.25 foot mark is what many Americans think the U.S. should spend—about 5%. The colored-in segments at the end of the tape—2 and a quarter inches—is what we actually spend on all foreign aid, including military assistance, money for embassies, and political aid. If you look at only poverty-focused development—education, clean water, agriculture, health, road-building—that’s the last inch and an eighth—about one-half of one percent of the whole federal budget. If we were to get on track to meet the promises we have made for the Millennium Development goals, the increase would equal about one percent more of the total U.S. federal budget. Percentages aren’t as interesting as people, so let me tell you the story of a real person. The BFW material in support of this year’s Offering of Letters included a story of a 13-year old youngster named Catherine. Her life has already been improved by development assistance. Debt forgiveness in her home country of Zambia has allowed free primary education for all children for the last four years. Families must still pay for uniforms and books, and the schools are terribly crowded, but at least there is more access than there was. Further, foreign aid helped Catherine by drilling a well near her home so that she and her sister only have to walk 10 minutes to the water source instead of the 30 minutes they used to have to walk to carry the family’s water. That leaves them time to walk the hour it takes to walk to school, and leaves them a little more time to study. Catherine wants to become an accountant, if her hard work and talent in math allow her to get into secondary school. Her life is better because of the aid her family has already befitted from. We should rejoice, but not rest. Because her grandmother, who cares for Catherine and her siblings since Catherine’s parents died of AIDS, is a farmer, and food insecurity is a big issue. Having seed, farm implements and irrigation would stabilize her tiny farm and give the family a little more security, but she has no access to better farming implements. Assistance in agriculture, which would make a big impact in a country where 60% of the residents are farmers, accounts for only 4% of US aid to Zambia. We could do better, which would allow families like Catherine’s to do better—a hand up, not a hand out. If we had the $5 billion we would probably be happy to share it. But we don’t have it; those who govern us have access to the deep pockets to which we have all contributed through our tax dollars. We can and should give out of our resources charitably. We can also do something to influence those with the big bucks (that they got from us) to spend more of those funds assisting our neighbors. Toward this goal, the folks at Bread for the World are asking us to join their effort to convince the Congress to budget another half-inch of adding machine tape—a $5 billion increase in poverty-focused development assistance for fiscal year 2009. It’s a bit of a leap, but it’s the level of increase we would need to fulfill the promises we and the other 188 nations have made in recent years. Can we afford to help these 854 million people who are hungry? It seems like an awful lot of people who need help, and it looks like we’re headed into a recession. I don’t need to tell you that there is a lot of anxiety going around about family budgets and federal budgets and all things financial. Do we have money to spare to assist the hungry? After all, it’s not our fault they are hungry. This is a good time to turn to the gospel as we wrestle with questions of abundance and scarcity. The story of the feeding of the five thousand shows up in every gospel. In John’s version, we see some mathematical calculations going on among the disciples as they try to figure out whether they can afford to feed the crowd that has gathered to hear Jesus teach. Jesus asks Philip (to test him, according to the gospel writer), “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” Philip sounds a little panicky: “Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.” Obviously, some think there is not enough to meet this challenge. Then another disciple finds a kid who is willing to share what he has, five barley loaves (the bread of the poor) and two fish. And when he shares, and Jesus blesses it, when it’s passed around, there is enough for everyone to be satisfied with 12 baskets of leftovers. John’s gospel writer includes this as one of the “signs” of Jesus. It is a happening that reveals something important about Jesus’ mission and ministry. So when we read this story, we can still see it as a sign of what God is trying to do in the world—inspire people to trust God and share with each other so that they will discover there is more than enough to go around. Writing a letter of advocacy, should you choose to do so, is a sign that you trust there is enough to share, and a sign that you want to be part of the process. I’ve been thinking about one of Dr. Seuss’s great stories that was recently made into a movie, Horton Hears a Who. In it, Horton, with his great ears, hears a cry for help from a little speck of dust that turns out to be an entire planet of tiny people called Whos. He swears to protect the Who people, because “a person’s a person, no matter how small.” The grouchy members of the animal community don’t hear the Whos and want to do away with the speck because it makes Horton look crazy. So Horton urges the mayor of Who-ville to get everyone involved in making noise, hoping that if they all work together they can prove their existence. The Whos start making a racket, but it’s not quite enough to make themselves heard. Horton asks the mayor if everyone is doing their best. And the mayor finds little Jo-Jo who is just hanging around, silently playing with his yo-yo. [The mayor] climbed with the lad up the Eiffelberg Tower. We may often feel powerless to affect the serious, complicated problems we face as a human race. But advocacy, doing something like writing a letter to Congress to urge them to do the right thing, can be our shout-out, our “YOPP!” It’s our little noise for justice and mercy. It’s one way to exercise our power in what was, last time I checked, still a democracy. If every person of faith, loving our neighbors and trusting in God’s abundance, were to add their voice, we might finally be heard, and the whole world might be saved.
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