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A Minute for Mission: |
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Our One Great Hour of Sharing poster shows an Indian woman taking a break from her work in the hot sun, turning her face to the sky to drain the last drops of water from a cup. Her posture—face upturned, throat wide open to the blessed relief of something cool and wet—speaks of a powerful physical thirst. That’s a kind of thirst most of us have known, though probably not as regularly as the women in this poster do. But probably, to God’s eyes, our spiritual thirst is almost as obvious—the kind of thirst that Jesus told the woman at the well his living water would quench forever. Is there a connection between the physical thirst of the world’s poor and the spiritual thirst of the world’s affluent? Simply asking the question probably starts us off on a guilt trip: “Are you saying that I’m somehow responsible for her thirst? All these facts I read about how a family in the developing world uses in one day what I use in one flush of the toilet suggest you think I should feel guilty.” Well, yes and no. Guilt may not be exactly inappropriate—it’s certainly true that we Americans do use a lot more water (and food and energy) than our share, whatever that is. But guilt is not a particularly helpful place to end up. No, let’s try to look at both kinds of thirst with the same kind of compassion. Addressing the woman’s physical thirst is simple, though not always easy—you give her, in Jesus’ words, a cup of cold water. If you want to prevent the constant recurrence of unnecessary thirst, you help her find a source of clean water. But when we try to quench spiritual thirst by consuming more water, we only aggravate it. Because our spiritual thirst and hunger derive from our separation from God and our reliance on our own resources, we deepen them every time we try to quench them by consuming more. Seen with God’s eyes of compassion, we must be a terrible sight to behold—a people desperately pouring the equivalent of salt water on our own parched throats, succeeding only in making ourselves bloated and thirstier still. One of our faith community’s traditional prescriptions for this fever of consumption is the fast, based on the common-sense principle that today we call the first rule of holes: you don’t get out of them by digging. We’re not here today to talk about fasting, even though the practice has long been associated with this time of year. But it’s worth thinking about some of the goals of fasting, which include freeing ourselves from compulsion, accepting hunger and thirst as natural states that we can choose to attend to or live with, and restoring the twin recognitions that we are dependent on grace for everything and that everything we have is an expression of God’s grace. Maybe remembering those goals can help us seek more fruitful paths to quenching the thirst of our souls. The good news here is that, regardless of the causes of our different thirsts, the solution to both is again relatively simple though, again, not easy. If giving up some of our compulsion to consume frees us to give more of our resources to the poor people of the world, we will end up freed of a burden and this woman may find the resources to ensure there’s always a cup of cold water when she needs it. And we find anew, as we always seem to find, that in sharing God’s love with others, it comes alive to us in a new way. Shared, it becomes the living water we have been seeking that truly refreshes our deepest thirst. Today, as we contemplate our gifts to One Great Hour of Sharing, gifts that will help offer a cup of cold water to thirsty people around the world, let us joyously offer of ourselves that neither our brothers and sisters around the world nor we may be tormented by our different thirsts. |
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