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 Sunday, October 18, 2009 Sermon: "A Cup Of Humble Tea" Scripture: Mark 10: 35-45 Reverend Larry M. Gerber If Greg Mortenson is motivated to do good deeds by the example of Jesus, you wouldn't know it by reading his book. He not only makes no mention of such motivation, he makes no mention of Jesus, at least not as having anything to do with Mortenson himself. Although his parents were Lutheran missionaries in Tanzania, where Mortenson grew up, he makes no claim that he shares their faith. But, he lived their faith! If you want an example of someone who takes seriously Jesus' injunction to love your neighbor as yourself, you will look at Mortenson. Born in 1957, Mortenson joined the U.S. Army as a young man and was trained as a medical corpsman. That, coupled with a love of adventure, later led to Mortenson being included on mountain-climbing teams, which were always eager to have a medic along. In 1993, he was part of a team ascending the world's second-highest mountain, known only by its map coordinates as K2. It is part of the Karakoram segment of the Himalayas. It's located on the border between Pakistan and China. To many it is known as "The Savage Peak" due to the difficulty of climbing it. One in five persons die trying to reach the summit. All climbers want to get to the top of the mountains they tackle, but in Mortenson's case, he had an additional incentive. The previous year, his 23-year-old sister, Christa, had died from a massive seizure after a lifelong struggle with epilepsy. Mortenson intended to dedicate his conquest of K2 to her memory. As it worked out, however, he honored Christa with far-more-lasting results. After 78 days of struggle against the mountain, which included helping rescue another climber, Mortenson got to within 600 meters of the summit. But then failing strength and altitude sickness forced him to turn back. A local guide helped him off the mountain, but they got separated when Mortenson made a wrong turn. He ended up in the primitive mountain village of Korphe in Pakistan. Too sick to go on, he stayed there under the hospitable care of the villagers while he recuperated. The people of Korphe belong to an ethnic group called Balti. Many of them, like the more well-known Sherpas of Tibet, work as high-altitude porters for climbing expeditions. But one important difference between the two groups is that the Sherpas are Buddhists and the Baltis are Muslims. While in the village, Mortenson observed the harsh realities of the Balti way of life. They live in isolated, remote mountain valleys and subsist on marginal crops of grain and small herds of yaks. Because of the altitude, the climate is severe. Medical care is almost nonexistent, and people die from things that would be routinely treated and cured in other places. Among the Balti, children under 12 months of age have a 35 percent mortality rate, primarily due to diarrhea-induced dehydration. During the brutal winters, villagers retreat into tiny basement dugouts and spend six months huddled together, barely kept warm by smoky yak-dung fires. For the children who do survive, there are often no schools. In Korphe, Mortenson saw 82 kids kneeling on frosty ground in the open, trying to learn. The Pakistani government provided no teacher, and the villagers couldn't afford one on their own. They shared a teacher with a neighboring village, but he was in Korphe only three days a week. The rest of the time, the kids gathered in the open to work on the assigned lessons. Though Mortenson had no money and no idea how to raise any, he resolved to build a school for the village. When he returned to California, he took a job as an emergency room nurse and started sending letters to celebrities and anyone he could think of who might help with the school. That attempt failed, but eventually a man who'd made a good bit of money in the semiconductor industry (and was also a climber) read about Mortenson's quest in a climbers' newsletter. That man contacted Mortenson and donated the necessary money. Mortenson then went back to Pakistan, purchased building materials and rode in a truck to get them near Korphe. From there, Mortenson had to solve the considerable problem of getting the materials to the remote mountain village while fending off tribal chieftains and others who tried to shuttle the supplies toward their own uses. The people of Korphe themselves solved the final part of the logistical problem. A rock slide had blocked the road some 18 miles away. The men of the community, accustomed to hauling heavy loads on their backs for climbing expeditions, moved the materials that same way. One photo in Mortenson's book shows the men with massive loads of lumber on their backs, laboring toward their village...with great smiles on their faces. During this ordeal, the Balti and other Pakistanis became convinced that Mortenson had no ulterior motives and had come to do only good. After Mortenson's school was built and his promise was kept, he returned to the States but continued to be haunted by the needs he'd seen in the mountain villages. To make a long story short, Mortenson resumed raising money so he could help other villages build schools. He kept returning to Pakistan, and eventually to Afghanistan as well, to build more schools. As of last year, he and the organization he founded had established more than 78 schools in rural and often volatile regions of the two countries. He not only constructed the buildings but often paid for teachers and learning materials, too. Those schools provide education to more than 28,000 children (including 18,000 girls) in regions where few opportunities existed before. Mortenson hasn't profited financially from all this. Although he now draws a salary from his organization, it's small. He has faced considerable dangers, including an eight-day armed kidnapping by a Taliban group. It eventually let him go after becoming convinced of his good intentions. (Some Taliban fighters even gave him money for the schools.) In 2003, Mortenson escaped a firefight between feuding Afghan warlords by hiding for eight hours under a load of putrid animal hides. He has been the target of two fatwas from Islamic mullahs who didn't like his helping girls receive an education, has been investigated by the CIA and, after 9/11, received hate mail and even death threats from Americans for helping Muslim children receive an education. But by his persistent efforts, his selfless actions and his willingness to meet people where they are without trying to impose on them some other agenda, Mortenson has gained the trust of Islamic leaders, government officials, military commanders and tribal chiefs in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. They see him as a humble hero. What's more, many observers on both sides of the Atlantic believe that in the long run, it's efforts such as his to build bridges instead of fight battles that will help reduce terrorism throughout the world. Mortenson's book is called Three Cups of Tea, which refers to an old Balti proverb: "The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family." (present three cups) We might even call it humble tea, and it's too bad that James and John didn't drink some that day, as they neared Jerusalem with Jesus and the other disciples. It's difficult to imagine what was going on in their minds that led them to come to Jesus with such a ridiculous request: "Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory." Where were their heads? Weren't they listening? Didn't they get it? It's as if James and John skipped right over the stuff about suffering and went straight for the resurrection, which clearly they clearly didn't understand. But more than that, their request for special seating in the kingdom of God reveals that they had misunderstood much of what Jesus had said. Go back to Mark 8:29-30, where Peter declares that Jesus is the Messiah and Jesus doesn't disagree. Start reading from there, straight through to today's passage. It appears that once James and John understood that Jesus was indeed the Messiah, they stopped listening to anything else. As commentator André Resner Jr. points out, in the intervening verses Jesus tells his disciples that following him means thinking of themselves as people who: -deny self for Jesus' sake and for the sake of the gospel, risking and accepting worldly shame (8:34-38); -are focused on Jesus and his words above all others (9:7); -remain humbly dependent on God's power to do God's work (9:14-29); -do not play the games of competitiveness, one-upmanship or glory grasping but choose the role of least of all and slave to all (9:33-37); -relinquish control for who does what and how they do it in the kingdom; in other words, giving up the need to be God's quality-control experts (read: control freaks) for anything that's done for God (10:38-41); -keep children at the center of their work, even when it appears distracting (9:36-37, 42-48; 10:13-16); and -do not become overburdened by possessions but receive the gift of the hundredfold promise (10:17-31). And after all that, James and John ask for places of special recognition! What they failed to do was drink from the "cup" that Jesus was offering them (v. 38). And their glib answer that they were able to drink of the cup from which Jesus drank suggests that they thought it was going to be filled with royal wine. Mortenson, however, discovered that the cup of service is often filled with humble tea. He needed to drink of the life experience of these people he was with and not sip from private stock. Only in that way could they be the hosts and he be the servant. Indeed, in their primitive circumstances, the yak milk they used to flavor their tea wasn't always fresh. But that was how they had to drink it, and Mortenson drank it with them. That became a metaphor for his work among the Balti and others. He lived among them in the same conditions they did, and because of that, they embraced and supported his work, they worked alongside him and they loved him. Today, Mortenson is one of the few Americans who is warmly received throughout Pakistan and Afghanistan, because he's seen as one who has come to serve without power and without seeking position and prestige. He shows that greatness isn't about how many people are serving us but about how many people are being served by us. James and John eventually learned that lesson, too, and they went on to faithfully carry the gospel as servants to others. We who want to be Jesus' disciples also are called to drink the cup the Lord puts in front of us, humbly, seeking not to be served but to serve. The mission of the church, our church, is to reach out to others through Jesus Christ by studying the Word, witnessing our faith, becoming humble servants before the Lord, reaching out to others through missions, praying for others less fortunate than our selves, and acting upon His word. Have you had a cup of humble tea recently? Have you had three cups? I have given you one tea bag to share a cup of tea with a stranger. The next time you share a cup of tea with that person, he or she will be an honored guest, and the third time that person will be part of the family. We can't all go to Pakistan or Afghanistan or so many other parts of the world that need God's love, but through our missions program we can go to the ends of the earth. That, my friends, is the work of the church, to offer a cup of humble tea through our programs that take food and clothing to the hungry and the naked, not to worry about where we will be seated in the Kingdom of God. Mortenson did what few of us can do, but through our outreach ministry we can be there. A portion of what we give to the church rightfully goes to others beyond our reach. Your continued financial support of this church must go to the general maintenance of the church and its programs, but we can't stop there. Your restored faith in our ministry has allowed us to be the church in action, beyond being the James and the Johns. Thanks to you we are helping to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit those in prison, and offer a cup of humble tea to the stranger who strive for survival in war torn countries as well as the needy in our back yard. They did not choose to live in those conditions. The wars and famine came to them. Thank you for dipping your tea bag in the cup of the stranger. Let us pray... Sources: Central Asia Institute, ikat.org. Mortenson, Greg. "The Balti porters: soul of the Karakoram." Mountain Hardware, Fall 1999. gregmortenson.com/Articles/1995-99Articles/Fall-99MtnHardwear.html. "Greg Mortenson." Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Mortenson. Mortenson, Greg, and David Oliver Relin. Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. Resner, André Jr. "Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost, Year B." The Lectionary Commentary: The Third Readings: The Gospels, ed. Roger E. Van Harn. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2001. |
