Isaiah 25:1-9
Philippians 4:1-13
How many of you have ever seen or heard a TED Talk?
Good! Then I don’t have as much explaining to do.
TED Talks began (surprisingly) way back in 1984 as a conference focused on the convergence of Technology, Entertainment and Design (hence, T-E-D!). The first TED included: demos of the compact disc and e-book, cutting-edge 3D graphics from Lucasfilm, and mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot demonstrating how to map coastlines using his developing theory of fractal geometry. Geek city!
Unfortunately, geek wasn’t yet chic, and the whole concept of TED didn’t take off until the millennium. But since then, TED has, as they say, gone viral. It’s now online, on TV, on NPR and, closer to home, a really important part of our young adult group, Common Ground, which began listening to and discussing TED Talks as a way to connect with and inspire deeper conversations with one another over a year ago.
Actually, I think the first TED Talk ever viewed by a Cleveland Park Church group may have been Brenee Brown’s famous talk on vulnerability that I shared during my first Lenten series. If you haven’t seen it, I strongly encourage you to do so! Just Google: Brenee Brown, TED.
The point is, TED talks have a lot to do with what we value at CPC: thinking deeply about what matters and going into the world to do something about it. As the TED website claims: “[we’re] a global community, welcoming people from every discipline and culture who seek a deeper understanding of the world. We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and, ultimately the world…”
So, today, we’re very fortunate to hear two of our own, Trevor Bakker and Karly Kiefer, share their TED Talks, asking the question: What matters deeply to me and what am I doing about it? Or, in the words of our CPC mission statement: How do I “nurture love of God and neighbor in the world?” I look forward to hearing their ideas!
Karly Kiefer:
When I was in South Africa this summer, I had the opportunity to visit Robben Island and see the cell that Nelson Mandela was imprisoned in for over 20 years because of his attempts to end the unjust institution of apartheid. The tour guide who took my tour group around was a man who himself had been held as a political prisoner on Robben Island for four years. He told us his story as we walked through what had once been his cell, and our entire group marveled at what it must be like to return to the island now, as a free man, and show tourists what had once been his life.
Just before we went into the cellblock that contained Mandela’s cell, we stopped in the courtyard outside and our tour guide talked about the various activities that went on in the courtyard. I stepped back from the group a ways to take a picture of the courtyard while he talked. As I looked around, my eyes stopped on a familiar looking face with a grey beard and a baseball cap. I did a double take. Is that, I asked myself, Mandy Patinkin? For those of you who don’t know, Mandy Patinkin plays Saul Berenson on the political CIA-thriller television show Homeland.
Patinkin is also the man responsible for the words I have heard numerous times since I was a child. “Hello. My name is Anigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” Yes, Patinkin played Anigo Montoya in the Princess Bride, the fantasy-adventure classic that I have watched over and over again since I was a kid. Coming from Southern California, you may think that I regularly encounter people I recognize from on TV. But this was, in fact, my first celebrity encounter.
I bring this up, not just to gush over my first celebrity sighting. But to say that it is SO easy to lose sight of our passions, to get distracted from what is important. As our tour group moved from the courtyard into the hall where Mandela’s cell was, all I could think about was “I’m pretty sure that’s Mandy Patinkin! I’m almost positive that is Mandy Patinkin. If only he would turn his head this way one more time, I could be sure. If I can get close enough to hear him say something, I know I’d recognize him from his voice!”
No matter how many times I told myself, Focus, this is supposed to be a solemn, inspiring experience. You are looking at the place where one of the world’s greatest champions for justice and equality was punished for his belief in his cause for years and years and never gave up. This deserves your full attention! I could not turn my brain off. I could not stop glancing over at Patinkin and repeating Anigo Montoya’s line in my head.
When Ellen first approached me about talking about my summer in South Africa shortly after I returned, I said I would be happy to share my experiences. As the time got closer, however, I found myself struggling with what I should talk about. I had immensely enjoyed my time in South Africa, but what could I share about it that would be sermon-worthy?
I could talk about the awesome work of the organization I interned with for two months, Slum Dwellers International, or SDI. SDI functions as a network made up of people that live in informal settlements in over 33 countries. Each country has a community-based organization, known as a “federation of the urban poor”, that works to address their communities’ challenges and to improve their living situations. These communities begin savings groups and decide together what are the most pressing issues facing their settlement and how they want to address them.
They engage in what SDI calls “enumerations”, which is a process where slum dwellers begin to collect data about their communities—data that is often lacking, which local governments often use as an excuse for not providing city services such as water and sanitation to the slums.
SDI helps facilitate these community-groups engaging directly with their city governments to work together to improve their communities, and helps to organize international exchanges between community groups, so, for instance, a groups of slum dwellers from a slum in Cape Town can travel to a slum in India and learn from how that community has organized or the success they have had with building a public toilet block. I could tell you all about how I believe in SDI’s work and their approach and think they are doing amazing things.
What I couldn’t come up with to talk about was a more personal, reflective summation of my experience in Cape Town. I couldn’t tell you personal stories about the people I met, or how they inspired me. Working at SDI’s headquarters, I stayed mostly in the office. While I learned a great deal about SDI’s work and methodology, I didn’t make many personal connections with slum dwellers or experience many inspiring moments personally.
As I thought about what to say for today, I couldn’t help but compare my summer in South Africa with the time I spent in Kenya a few years ago. During my senior year in college, I spent 5 months on what my university calls a “Global Learning Term”, where I lived with a host family in their home on the outskirts of Nairobi’s largest slum, Kibera, and got directly involved in the life of the community I was in.
I could tell you story after story about my time in Kenya. I could tell you about my host father, Sammy Okwengu, a stern-faced, elderly Kenyan man who told everyone who visited the house that I was his “lastborn,” and vehemently believed that a cup of Kenyan tea could cure any ailment. My host mom, Redemptor, who raised 5 children and worked as the sole family provider after my host dad suffered a stroke that he never fully recovered from.
I could tell you about Milka, the poor, illiterate young girl from a rural area upcountry, who worked 24 hours a day as a live-in maid for my host parents, sending the little money she earned back home to her drunken mother. I could tell you about my friend Norman, who missed a week of his senior year of high school because he could not afford new school shoes to match his school uniform. I attended his school’s prayer-ceremony the day before he took his high school exit exam. We talked about where he wanted to go to college and what he wanted to do, ignoring the reality that we both knew—that life would not grant him the opportunity to go to college while living in his mother’s one room shack in Kibera.
I could tell you about about my young Kenyan friend Lillian, a hopelessly romantic 13-year old living a hopelessly unromantic life in the slum of Kawangware. We shared a love of reading, and she lost herself in the Harry Potter books I gave her. I knew that she’d probably never have a way of obtaining the final 3 books after I left Kenya, which is a tragedy in itself.
My time in Kenya, living among the urban poor and participating in the life of the community I was in, is what inspired me to want to pursue a career in which I could be part of making a more equitable and just world. In South Africa, I had the chance to work with an organization that is doing big things to better the life of slum dwellers all over the world. And yet, I did not feel as connected or inspired here as I did during my time in Kenya.
Most of us here in DC believe that looking at the bigger picture—working to change institutions and policies to create a more just and equitable world, is important. It’s not just about caring for the poor in our own lives, its about working to create a world with equal opportunity and justice so that there will be no more poor and hungry and oppressed people.
As Christians, we look to Jesus and see that not only did he feed the hungry, and heal the sick that he came across in his own life; he worked to dismantle an unjust, oppressive empire and instate a new kind of kingdom—one where the poor would be blessed and that last would be first. His ideas and his movement posed such as threat to the powers of the day that he was killed.
But the question that I’m faced with, and I will ask today, is how do we remain passionate and driven when we are working at the institutional level, when we are working to not just improve one person or one community’s life, but to improve the entire system?
It’s easy to feel passionate about things when you right in the middle of them—when the people you want to serve are right around you. When you are working at a community-driven, grassroots level. It’s not so easy when you are in the day-to-day dredges of work and life.
I know I, like so many other people, came to DC because I believe in working towards change at the institutional level. I moved to DC with Lillian, and Norman, and my host family, and so many others from Kenya in the forefront of my mind. So many people start out with such passion and such great intentions, only to have them pushed aside by our long to-do lists and deadlines and frustrations with bureaucracy. It is SO easy to lose sight of your passions, to forget the reasons that motivated you to do something in the first place.
I’ve always been a little skeptical of sermons or talks that wrap things up nicely with 3 bullet points of alliterations that will fix everything. So I don’t have an answer to this question. I for sure, don’t think that I am the one to tell anyone how to remain passionate and focused on the things that matter. As my experience on Robben Island shows, I can get very easily distracted. But I do hope that, going forward, we can at least try to be more mindful of keeping things in perspective; of remembering what drives us to work towards whatever it is we are working towards.
While its been said to not lose sight of the forest for the trees, we should also not lose sight of the trees for the forest. Each of us works in our own way to nurture love of God and neighbor in the world. And we must try, when looking at that bigger picture, to not lose sight of what or who is that inspires us and keeps our passion going.
Trevor Bakker:
About a month after graduating from college, I packed a suitcase, a duffel bag, and a backpack, and I moved my life to India. The first place I lived was a city called Berhampur in the state of Orissa. Now when I tell people in America this, they almost never know where Orissa is. Imagine a place just a little larger than the state of New York but with twice the number of people. It’s also on the east coast, which for India is the Bay of Bengal instead of the Atlantic.
When I finally encountered someone in America who knew of Orissa, it was a well-to-do doctor born in another part of India. He laughed incredulously and asked me what I had been doing in “that backwater.” I smiled politely and explained that I was part of a team of development economists. Our goal was to test an inexpensive but improved cookstove that piped smoke out of the houses of people who used it, hopefully reducing their exposure to indoor air pollution and improving their respiratory health. Our method of choice was a randomized controlled trial in which some households received the stove immediately while others received it later, the outcome determined by lottery. Comparing the two groups gave statistical evidence about the effectiveness of the stoves, which, if effective, could be distributed in more parts of the world.
In short, a man who had left his country for mine asked me what I had been doing in a part of his country he viewed as hopelessly backward; I told him what, and he nodded as I explained, but I doubt he was satisfied. Though he never asked, I’m sure he was wondering why. Why would a young man with a good degree and a promising future seek out such a place? Conventional wisdom tells us to seek out the job that offers the best pay, to impress the people of highest status, and to leave the rest behind.
This is where my faith has made all the difference. When we truly believe that all people are made in God’s image and meditate on that idea, we gain the perspective that an affront to human rights or human dignity in one place is an affront everywhere. Our senses of community and responsibility begin to flow outward, rushing beyond borders to care for neighbors we never knew we had.
My passion is understanding and promoting the conditions of life that enable people to realize their full potential. It’s a marriage of academic research and advocacy, and it’s something I’m still learning how to do. On the one hand, I believe ideas can have transformative power, and I like to dream them up and debate them. On the other hand, I’m compelled to work for the greater good, to see how ideas can be put into action.
Research is central to my passion because I’m not content to treat symptoms when there’s hope of discovering root causes. One of the things I confirmed for myself in India was that effective advocacy cannot happen in the absence of understanding. Although the cookstove project showed measurable health improvements in the first year, over time it failed to sustain these gains because people didn’t value the stoves enough to make the small investments needed to keep them working. People who had cooked over open fires all their lives often did not see the link between smoke inhalation and respiratory illness, so the problem was behavioral as much as technological.
However, grounding my engagement with ideas in lived experience has been crucially important for me. One of Jesus’ central teachings was about the kingdom of God, and I believe our purpose is to realize that kingdom here and now, seeking justice and making peace. Today we heard the words of Paul in Philippians 4: “I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”
When my work on the cookstove project wrapped up, I moved to Delhi and transitioned to a project that allowed me to experience circumstances more challenging that any I had known. I managed an audit of public services like garbage collection and toilet facilities in several hundred slums throughout Delhi. The diversity of poverties I found surprised me. Some of the communities I visited were wedged into leftover spaces beneath highway flyovers or on the periphery of new developments. Others were ragpicker colonies where residents rummaged through garbage for salvageable material to sell. Still others had an almost rural feel to them with livestock roaming around and no commercial development in sight. Sometimes the houses were made of durable materials (pakka), sometimes they were more temporary (kaccha), and sometimes they were the most makeshift of tent encampments. The bare vulnerability I witnessed helps motivate the conception of God we saw in Isaiah 25 this morning: “For you have been a refuge to the poor, a refuge to the needy in their distress, a shelter from the rainstorm and a shade from the heat.”
Many slum residents had migrated to Delhi in search of work, leaving behind the only communities they had known. Although they found economic opportunities in the city, they were continually met with the cruel ironies of living alongside communities of greater means. There was food for sale in abundance, but they could not always afford to properly feed their families. There were first-rate hospitals within a few miles, but they couldn’t afford to be treated. There were pipes of running water that passed their neighborhoods, but their homes were not connected. I was most surprised by the diversity of poverties in Delhi, but I was most affronted by this juxtaposition of need and plenty.
In one of my favorite books, Development as Freedom, economist Amartya Sen articulates a “capability approach” to justice that emphasizes the importance to “human development” of the “substantive freedom” to make real choices, both in terms of processes (like the right to vote) and opportunities (like the pursuit of happiness). How can a person realize her potential if she dies of preventable illness as a child? How can a person participate politically if he’s never received an education? How can a person even concentrate on school when faced with constant hunger? I find this notion of capabilities very persuasive, and I see working to expand capabilities as consistent with our mission as Christians to love God and love neighbor.
Now in the U.S., we tend to think of development as happening “somewhere else” since we, of course, are already “developed.” Yet in the wake of the Great Recession, our society has had to reckon with questions about our capabilities. How can a person support her family if she can’t expect equal pay for equal work? How can a person become a homeowner if he can’t get a mortgage? I think about the structure of our economy and its impact on Americans quite a bit these days in my current work on consumer financial protection. How does the design of financial products and financial markets expand or constrict our substantive freedoms? How do the blind spots and biases of human psychology play a role? These are the sort of impactful questions that compel me to do the work I do.
In closing, I want to share a message I heard at the start of this year here at Cleveland Park that gave me a feeling of great confidence and validation. Our own Bob Abernethy shared selections from his interviews on PBS’s Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, and I was moved by the words of writer and theologian Frederick Buechner, who gave this sage advice: “The vocation for you is the one in which your deep gladness and the world’s deep need meet.”
Deep need, deep gladness. It seems like every day we’re reminded afresh just how deep are the needs of this world, but deep gladness… that is not something we expect every day. If we have the confidence to begin looking and trust God to guide us along the way, we can find this gladness in discovering and living out our potential. So where does your deep gladness meet the world’s deep need? I pray you will seek and find the answer.
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Thank you so much, Karly and Trevor. I think we should contact TED and get your talks included in their online offerings!
In a minute, we’re going to take a moment of meditation. But, first, let me explain what will happen after that. Our sermon hymn is, This Little Light of Mine, and we’ll sing it along with Wesley Meacombs on guitar. As we do, I invite you to come forward and write a word or a phrase on the easel paper that shows, as Trevor quoted Frederick Buechner, “where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”
So, let’s begin our moment of meditation, asking exactly that: “where does our deep gladness meet the worlds’ deep need?”
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And here is what people wrote!
Public health & Reading novels
Learning
To fix things & help them work better
Child Development
Curing cancer
Facilitating change
Discover anything NEW!
Riding my bike & Making people smile
Teaching people how to fish
Economic Justice & Food Security
Fight climate change
Women’s rights
Community health
Service to male youth in the DMV
Where humans fit in the history of life
Journalism/Bringing truth to the world
Understanding the needs & passions of strangers
Human Development
Story telling with images, film, comedy
Present substance abuse!
Women’s empowerment / Justice
Education, visual beauty, art
Basketball
Understanding
Education / families
Music
Pleasure from art
Laughter
History!
Teaching art
Conservation through local economic empowerment
Kids at Shaw!
Equal educational opportunities for all!
Writing
Human rights
Sleeping
Making connections
Bora Bora!
Movement
Building new cities
Spread HAPPY!