To the CBS channel’s credit, they try on occasions to bring good news to their viewers. This past week, between reports on the latest polls and a lot of advertisements, I was able to watch a re-run of their show “Kindness 101” with Steve Hartman. If you don’t know the show, well, each time, Hartman presents and discusses with children a story tied to a theme that has something to do with kindness. Beyond being nice and polite, they talk about courage, honesty, optimism and so on. This episode I saw featured the story of Jason Brown. I didn’t know Jason Brown, but he had this brilliant career in sports being an NFL center with the St Louis RAMS – a dream came true for so many young men – and it didn’t hurt that Brown had a five years contract for the paltry sum of 37 millions dollars. And yet, as the story went, we learned that one day, Brown decided to quit, to leave it all behind to, mind you, become a farmer in Louisburg, NC, not so far from here. It wasn’t an early mid-life crisis, like Brown would have been so fed up with playing sports. Rather he decided he wanted to feed hungry people. The funny thing is that he knew so little about farming, he had to watch videos about growing stuff on the internet. I guess that’s a way to do it, and with perseverance and hard work, Brown was able to harvest this huge field of sweet potatoes, and give them to the local food pantry. Today, with the help of thousands of volunteers, the work continues and expands, it says they have even started growing cucumbers! Brown’s interview was something to behold, he looked very, very happy about his new life, He actually shared with Hartman the last words his coach told him when he announced his intention to quit: You’re making the worst mistake of your life, to which Brown replied No I am not. And obviously he has lived to not regret a minute of it.
Well, I was wondering about this story. I was wondering what I would have said as the coach, or as the mom or the wife maybe, I wonder how I would have reacted to such a decision. Maybe I would have said something like: Well, if you care so much about hungry people, maybe you can give money to a charity, maybe you can even give a million. Because that would be huge, wouldn’t it? That would feed Lousiberg, NC for a while, wouldn’t it? That would probably be more that what you can do on your own, knowing nothing about farming? And maybe then you can keep doing what you do well, and we all have a great football season, and everybody is happy? Yes. The thing though is that theme of the episode was not about giving money to the poor, it was about sacrifice, which Steve Hartman called “Next level kindness” or “Kindness 201”. Neither Hartman nor Brown explained the difference between writing a big check to a charity when you’re a billionaire and leaving the spotlight when you’re a superstar to start working with your own hands to help others, but I guess we all get it. It is, indeed, about sacrifice, it’s about not just “contributing out of your abundance“, it’s about “putting in everything you have, all your life in it“, to use Jesus’s own words as heard in our Gospel. It’s the difference between giving something you don’t really need, and giving your own person. It’s the difference between the Dad who sends a gift and the Dad who actually shows up to the birthday party, to put it simply. It can also be the difference between condescension and solidarity, the difference between pity and compassion, the difference between patronage and brotherhood. This is the difference between how we often think about being good and the life Jesus invites us to live, showing us as an example this poor widow, and showing himself as the example too. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us that indeed Jesus made the sacrifice of himself, living with us, dying for us. When you really love someone you don’t just want them to have what they need to get by, you want them to thrive and you’re ready to give of who you are, of your time, of your energy, even if it means you have to renounce to something important for you in the process, and that’s called a sacrifice.
The Old Testament today tells us also about another woman, another widow, who decides to give much of her life, Ruth. You may want to read the whole story at home because it’s very short and very moving. Ruth, a moabite, had married a man from the land of Israel when he, his brother and parents came to live in her country during a famine. But one after the other, the men died for untold reasons. The father, and then the two brothers, Ruth’s own husband and her brother in law. Only the women are left. Orpah, the sister in law, returns to be with her parents, but Ruth decides to stick with her husband’s mother Naomi, and to go back with her to Israel, to be with her on the journey, to share her fate, and also her faith. There is this beautiful passage we sometimes read at church for wedding: “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.” (Ruth 1:16-17) And we read it at wedding because it sounds very romantic, doesn’t it? It sounds like true love. Well, it’s actually a woman talking to her mother in law. Ruth shows true love to this woman who actually does not sound like an easy person. Naomi calls herself “Mara”, because Mara means bitter and she says that the Lord has made her bitter with her loss. She is bitter because she’s too old to find another husband and too old to have other children. She is bitter, she says, because the Lord has let her down, and even, she says, the Lord has turned against her. She weeps aloud confessing that certainly her lot is even worse than her daughters in law’s who, at least, have a chance at a new life in their own country. So, it’s all quite dramatic. But the gentle and faithful Ruth says it’s okay and she will walk with Naomi, and as she does, they arrive in Israel and Ruth starts gleaning to find leftover grains in the fields, as the law authorized foreigners to do, and that’s where she meets handsome and prosperous Boaz the landowner, and the rest is history. The story finishes with this passage we have just heard, Ruth marries Boaz and Naomi sits on her lap their baby who will become the father of King David.
You may remember from last week we talked about the many ways God wants to bring his people consolation. Well, there you have it. Ruth’s story is a story of finding new life, new love, new hope in difficult times through faithfulness and solidarity and togetherness. I guess we can agree that we could use stories like those in our times when we tend to make our lives so much about ourselves. When most of the time we tend to think about what we need, what’s good for us, what’s going to fulfill us, again and again the Gospel asks us to make the giving of self the center of our own lives. Some say we are born to die, the Gospel would say we are born to give ourselves away and it is something anyone can do, because you certainly do not need to have a million dollars to make a subsequent gift, even those who have nothing have their own life, their own person, their own presence they can offer. Ruth does not have much more than the poor widow of the gospel, but she can offer her presence to her mother in law. We may not be able to make a sacrifice like Jesus’s sacrifice, but all of us, we can offer something of ourselves to the benefit of others.
It’s not easy though. When I read these stories I find them so beautiful and yet I also have this lump in my throat, and maybe it’s because I know we live in a world where some consider normal that women give up their own plans to take care of others, we live in a world where we consider normal that the poor pay for the vanity of the wealthy, and it’s abusive to ask anyone to sacrifice themselves. When I read these stories, I don’t think this is very nice coming from Naomi to tell her daughter in law who has just lost her husband that it’s much harder for her because she has lost a son. It’s not very compassionate, it even sounds a bit manipulative to me. It also sounds quite toxic that Naomi would ask Ruth to seduce Boaz so she can secure becoming her wife, and then give Naomi a place in the household. It sounds tricky as well that Jesus tells his disciples to beware of the scribes who devour widows’ estates, and right after that he praises the giving of the widow to the Temple that supports and encourages this very oppression. The text tells us that basically the woman let her life be taken away from her by people who according to Jesus are superficial and dishonest. I also wonder about this field Brown purchased in Louisburg, and how maybe the locals could have used it for themselves, to build their own houses, to harvest their own fields, instead of having to show up bending their heads at the food pantry. I wonder how it looks like to try to be loving, trusting, faithful person when there are so many ways in which we can be deceived, taken advantage of,and that’s when we aren’t the ones deceiving ourselves, doing something we think is helpful and then it’s not that helpful because we haven’t thought it through. It’s hard to be a good person in a complicated and corrupted world, especially when we are not such good people to start with. And the thing is, Jesus did not really have an answer to that. Jesus didn’t have an answer to that. How ironic, if you think about it, that he kept warning his disciples about the corruption of the religious system only to end up being their victim. How can we be good when everything is corrupted? Maybe that‘s Jesus response when he’s crucified: You can’t win, and maybe that’s what a sacrifice is all about. A sacrifice isn‘t a sacrifice if we still hold on to giving it meaning or finality. We try to give a sense to Jesus’s sacrifice, but maybe Jesus died for nothing and that’s the point, he died just because he decided not to resist out of love for us. I think of mother Teresa who gave her life to save people who were dying anyway. She said that, maybe, rather than being worried about being good or doing good, doing something useful or life changing for people, we could try to do something beautiful for God. Doing something beautiful for God was giving her life so lepers wouldn’t die alone on the streets of Calcutta, but being held knowing there was someone who cared. Well, when I hear that I think that maybe I don’t want to sacrifice myself at every turn of the way, for people and things that aren’t worth it, and I wouldn’t advise that to anyone, to let anyone take advantage of you, but the thought of giving ourselves to do something beautiful for God, something that we choose, something that we agree with, even if it does not make much sense in the end, to do it just as an act of pure love, like Brown, like Ruth, like the widow, this maybe we can hear, this maybe we can think of doing right here in the world we live in.
Mother Teresa had a prayer for that, it’s called Do it anyway and it goes like this:
People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered; forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies; succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight; build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, there may be jealousy ;be happy anyway.
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow; do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough; give the world the best you’ve got anyway.
You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God; it was never between you and them anyway. Amen.