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First Parish
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Loaves and |
Linda B. Hirst
John 6:1-14
Many of you know, and for those of you who
don’t know, I’ve been quite the traveler lately - after going on the mission
trip to Buffalo with our high school youth, I was in Honduras a couple of weeks
ago – with Dan Ramus to check on the AMIGOS program - Amigos stands for
American Mission in Grace Offering Sustenance – it’s a joint effort between
churches here in the York Association of the Maine Conference and churches in
Honduras to feed 559 children for two months - July and August - because it is
during these two months that food is scarce because the growing season is over
and prices are often double what they are the rest of the year...and that’s if
you can get to a supermarket - I have to say I certainly didn’t see any while I
was there.
Since there is so little food, many of the
kids in these rural communities get only one meal a day and others don’t even
get that. So to conserve their energy, they stay home from school.
The idea behind AMIGOS was to invite members
of congregations in York County to sponsor a child for these two months - to
fill two 5 gallon buckets full of food -which would be delivered via tractor
trailer to the different churches - so the congregations over there could offer
a healthy meal each day at lunch time, feed their children and hopefully keep
them in school. That was the idea.
The reason for Dan and I going to
To answer the first question, yes, the
buckets got there - and with nary a dent. The tractor trailer carrying all 1000
buckets somehow made from York Maine, across the ocean to Honduras, through the
city of San Pedro Sula, and then up the very narrow, twisting roads leading to
the little village of San Buena Ventura, to the Evangelical and Reformed
church, where at 2 in the morning, Maria Elena Paz and her husband Anthony, the
pastor of the church in San Buena Ventura and a bunch of other adults and kids
met the truck and after gathering for prayer, thanking God for the bounty they
had received, thanking God for helping to take care of and feed their children,
thanking God for their friends in America, they unloaded the buckets one by one
into the church.
And they got it all on video tape. Someone in
from their congregation has a video camera and they wanted to document
everything, to show us from beginning to end how things went. And after some
editing we will show it to you.
After the buckets were unloaded, the next
task was to get the right buckets to the right churches - the buckets were all
labeled; church name in Honduras, child’s name from each church, the sponsors
name - your name on this end and the church where the buckets came from in
Maine. All matched with great care. So Maria Elena and Anthony, loaded up their
very small, very old, Toyota pick-up and delivered all the buckets to the
churches, two of which were fairly close by, the rest of which could only be
reached by long, bumpy, dusty rides over long, bumpy, dirt roads and a few
creek beds deep in the Honduran mountains, including one church two and a half
hours away in the tiny town of Conception Del Norte, a beautiful, struggling,
little town, plunked down in the middle of nowhere between the hugest rugged
mountains I have ever seen.
And that is where this whole thing got
started: the whole idea of feeding hungry kids in
AMIGOS - which means friends in Spanish - it
all started last March, when 17 people from different churches in the York
Association – two from our church - Dan Ramus and Nancy Collins went to spend a
week in Conception Del Norte, to help build a pastor’s house. The pastor, his
wife and three year old daughter were living in what could be described as a
large shed and the crew from the York Association were going to help build a
new and very simple structure out of concrete, complete with doors and windows,
electricity and plumbing, which is a luxury for many in Honduras.
And feeding the crew while they were there
working on the pastor’s house was Maria Elena Paz, who in addition to being a
pastor’s wife, is also one of the few women students at the Evangelical &
Reformed seminary, a woman who traveled two and a half hours from her home in San
Buena Ventura with her stove in the back of her pick-up truck in order to feed
the crew from York County, a woman of great determination, a woman of great
vision, a woman of passion, passion for the church, a passion for Jesus, a
passion for God, and a passion for her people. Some of you had the pleasure of
meeting her when she was here in May - she is a force to be reckoned with.
She and Dan Ramus, also a man of great
determination, a man of vision and a man of passion got to talking one morning
- about Honduras, about the need in that country, about the poverty that is so
prevalent, so staggering throughout the villages and towns, about the kids who
go routinely go hungry - and the wheels started turning.
And before you knew it, these two determined and
visionary and passionate people came up with the idea of starting a partnership
between churches in Maine and churches in Honduras to feed all these kids - it
would be just like the story of the loaves and fishes,
So that’s what they did - they began to live
the story that we heard this morning in the gospel - they saw that people were
hungry, had faith, believed they could all be fed and went about doing it.
And when you wrote a check for $60 to feed a
child for two months or shopped for days on end to find the 20 different items
of just the right size to put in the Home Depot or Moe’s pickle bucket: items
like cookies, tuna fish, dinty moore stew and dried milk, things like crackers,
refried beans, tortillas and rice, you began to live the story, too, to make it
come alive
And when 30 people spent the better part of a
June morning heaving all those buckets one by one onto the trailer and then
waved the truck on its way with faith that it would get where it was going and
those who were hungry would be fed. Loaves and fishes, they got to be part of
the story - the miracle of the loaves and fishes - too.
And this, this is what we discovered as we
drove around the mountains of Honduras to all the different churches, bumping
along in the back of a very small, old Toyota pick-up truck; it’s the only way
to see Honduras.
We discovered that within a day or two of
each church receiving their buckets, all the food had been taken out, sorted
and stacked then stored wherever they could find space - most were in the
churches themselves or small rooms off a building or even the pastor’s house in
a bedroom – one pastor even build a storage facility with lock and key in the
church itself to store the food - it was that precious to them, and they were
that organized - they were going to make this work.
We discovered that Maria Elena had
coordinated cooks at each church; women who traveled, many by foot, women who
came for training on how to prepare the different meals for 50 or 100 kids;
they were that serious about this program called AMIGOS.
We discovered that word travels very fast in
small communities and the first week the churches made meals available, the
kids were there, walking from their school in their blue and white uniforms, to
receive a healthy, filling meal. And we discovered that the kids favorite part
of the whole meal was the cookies and milk - each day they get two cookies or
crackers - treats they wouldn’t normally have and each day these two cookies
are the highlight of their meal. And we found that while they loved the dinty
moore stew and ramen noodles - they weren’t so hot on the tuna fish and
definitely didn’t like the peas - we told them that’s o.k., kids in America
don’t like peas either - we can change that.
We discovered that every single child in
Honduras is beautiful, I’m not kidding, and Dan has pictures to prove it, and
they are as friendly a people as you will ever find; they were fascinated by
us; by the color of our skin, by my blond hair, by Dan’s 6’6 height, we would
sit in worship and they would all turn and stare then smile, then giggle. They
laughed with us, tried to understand us, tried to teach us Spanish while we
tried to team them English; it wasn’t easy or pretty but by the end of the week
we were playing games together and when it came time to leave, it was very hard
and very sad.
We discovered that the children in the part
of Honduras we visited love to play soccer, like school and even like doing
their homework, they are curious and sweet, caring and hopeful, and they have
so much potential.
On our last night there, Dan and I went for a
walk down the road and on either side of us were houses - tiny, cement block
houses, no paint, very stark looking, many of them were dark. And as we passed
one home - similar to all the rest - we happened to look inside and there in
was a boy sitting on a chair, in an empty room, leaning over a tray table,
under a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling, doing his homework. There
is potential there.
And they live in the one of the poorest
country in the world where potential doesn’t always matter. Where life is hard,
and jobs are few, and the pay is ridiculously low - and prices for food and
things of life are not much different there than they are here. The poverty is
staggering, the need is overwhelming and the problems are complex.
And yet, without fail, many of the people in
these small communities gather four nights a week and every Sunday morning -
two hours at a time - to worship God. And for one whole hour they sing songs of
praise thanking God for God’s goodness and care, thanking God for Jesus, their
Savior, then they hear a 45 minute sermon (you all have it so easy) then they
pray for 20 minutes or more during which time they offer up their entire
selves, body, mind and spirit to God. It is amazing.
While worshipping with the people there, we
discovered that it is their faith that sustains them, that keeps them going,
that gives them hope. And so they gather as God’s church, as God’s people, to
give thanks and praise.
And the most important thing we discovered is
that with a little bit of faith and a bit of work - miracles do happen - we
need to be reminded of that on occasion - you can feed a multitude of people -
sometimes it’s with a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish, sometimes it’s
with ramen noodles and dinty moore stew - still it happens.
Churches that had signed up to feed 50
children found 94 children that first morning at their door and they fed them
and continued to feed them and found, with a little creativity they could feed
them not only five days but seven. At Maria Elena’s church, where we sponsored
159 kids - they’re feeding 220 - they will not turn a child away - they are
finding a way to feed them all, and, Maria Elena said she thinks they will be
able to feed them not just for two months, but maybe even three. With God,
Maria Elena said, nothing is impossible.
And that’s what we learned, too. That’s the
great lesson of the gospel story of the loaves and fishes - that’s the great
lesson of AMIGOS and that’s a great truth about God. Truly, with God, nothing
is impossible. If we offer up what we have in faith, amazing things will
happen.
So what’s next...already the York Association
has planned two mission trips for the next two years - one next July - a heck
of a time to be in Honduras - and one for our high school youth in February of
2006 through Pilgrim Lodge, our conference church camp.
And Dan, of course, plans on feeding even
more kids next summer and hopes to take a crew from First Parish Church to Honduras
next August to see how the story of the loaves and fishes, Honduras style, is
going. And anyone is welcome to go, just give Dan or me a call.
Until then, we will get pictures and slides
together, we will show you all the good work that God is doing, children eating
their lunches in churches, smiling with cookies in their hand. We will work
with the Maine Conference to help build churches and pastors’ homes and we will
pray for our brothers and sisters in Honduras just as they are praying for us,
that one day all of God’s people will have all the things they need - food, a
home, jobs, economic equality, justice and righteous - that one day we will all
have the things we need and deserve to live as God’s precious children. Amen.