Stand with me for a moment at the edge of Matopeni.
Timbered shacks stretching miles into the distance. The stench of filth and decay mingling with the smell of open fires and food being prepared.
Children running barefoot through the reek, ragged but smiling. The old sleeping away their last weeks and months indoors, away from the sunlight; the middle aged – and middle age in these places is your mid-twenties – going about what work they can find to stave off hunger and desperation. Their eyes tell a story.
How would you feel, walking over the open sewers of Matopeni; stepping gingerly on the springy planks that can’t hold back the river of filth when the rains come?
How would you feel, entering one of these shacks where one room houses ten people? How would you feel, being offered whatever food and drink hospitality could muster? How would you feel, listening to the conversation and the stories of what makes for these peoples’ lives? How would you feel when you got back home and tried to pick up the threads of your own life?
Some of us have had that experience. Maybe not in Matopeni, but in India or Bangladesh, or other parts of Africa or Asia. We’ve known the jarring horror of the realisation that huge swathes of the world, vast stretches of urban sprawl, lack the most basic essentials that we take utterly for granted in this country. Clean water, a steady supply of power, sanitation, food, a safe, clean home to live in.
For those of us brought up in the West, standing at the edge of Matopeni, or places like it, can awaken a sense of despair that takes a long time to recover from, because the problems seem so vast; so utterly insoluble.
But when Catherine Kithuku and Catherine Nyaata look out on Matopeni, they see something different. They see a vision of change.
A person with vision can look at the worst set of circumstances and see the potential that lies within them.
I’ve been finding that out again recently as I’ve read a book called ‘The Jesus Way’ by Eugene Peterson. In one chapter he writes about the idea of holiness – God’s coming close to us – and talks about a well known passage in the book of Isaiah where the prophet has an overwhelming vision of God which re-sets the whole course of his life.
Angels thunder, the temple shakes and Isaiah is undone: “Woe to me” he cries “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty”.
But an angel touches his lips with a live coal, purifiying him, and sends him out on his life’s vocation as a prophet.
Now that vision, which is celebrated by both Jews and Christians alike, takes place in the Jerusalem temple – which is, of course, exactly the kind of place you’d expect visions to occur
But Peterson’s point is that that encounter with God is not normative. And he cites two others envisionings which take place in much less conducive surroundings.
The first is that of Moses – standing in the barren wastelands of Midian with sheep dung on his shoes. A murderer on the run, tending someone else’s flocks somewhere in the back of beyond. And it’s there, in the midst of seeming hopelessness that the life-changing encounter with God comes by way of a burning bush.
And the second vision is the one we read this morning from the book of Revelation. A book that in coded language conspired against the utter dominance of Rome in those days and promised that in the struggle between good and evil there could only ever be one winner – the God of our Lord Jesus Christ.
But who pens these words? The Apostle John in exile; stuck alone on the island of Patmos waiting for death.
And to whom does he write them? Fledgling Christian congregations facing not just scorn and ridicule, but active persecution from Rome and the Jewish communities from whom they’ve emerged.
Do you see the point Peterson’s trying to make?
Visions don’t just come in the heady spiritual atmosphere of the temple. They come in the baked, stony planes of Midian. They come in an arid prison cell in Patmos, They come amid the flies and stench of Matopeni.
They come when people, in the face of all the evidence that screams ‘hopelessness’ at them, open themselves up to what God wants to do, and will do, if his people can find their courage and keep faith.
Christian Aid’s Theme this year is POVERTY – LET’S END IT, which sounds hopelessly naïve until you remember that just a fraction of the money that’s disappeared down the black hole of the global recession would have been enough to sort out the problems of the 2/3 world. The money has always been there to do it – what’s been missing is the popular will to make it happen.
We might wonder if things will ever change. But in a way, that’s not the question. The question is, is it part of God’s vision and plan that poverty and injustice be ended, and the answer to that is an unequivocal ‘yes’.
In Revelation, John writes of a day when heaven and earth will be one, when God will dwell with his people, and there will be “no more death or grief or crying or pain”. But he’s by no means the first to cast that vision.
Listen to these words from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 65, which were written 8 centuries earlier
“The Lord says “I am making a new earth and new heavens. The new Jerusalem I make will be full of joy, and her people will be happy. There will be no weeping there, no calling for help. Babies will no longer die in infancy, and all people will live out their life span. The work they do will be successful and their children will not meet with disaster”.
What I love about that passage is that those words aren’t just about a spiritualised future when all the wrongs will be righted. They’re about a spiritualised now. They’re earthy. Isaiah’s talking about real people here – not disembodied spirits. He’s talking about real people who are working, having children, living their lives and even dying. But in a world where poverty and injustice are things of the past.
That’s’ what God wants to see, not just in the future, but now. And if that is part of God’s vision for the world, the question is ‘what can we do to help make that vision a reality?’. How can we help make his Kingdom come?”
The scale of the task is huge, but it reminds me of the old joke – “How do you eat an elephant?” – “One bite at a time”.
Catherine Nyaata’s project hasn’t changed Kiambiu from a slum to a leafy suburb. But they have got drains now, and they have got toilets and showers. It’s a small beginning, but it’s a start. It’s inspired her community to think bigger, and it’s given Catherine Kithuku hope that the same can happen in Matopeni.
For those women, and the communities they represent, the vision of a changed world that John and Isaiah hold out to us this morning isn’t something vague or ephemeral. It’s as solid as the ground we walk on because they are sure it’s part of God’s plan for the world. It’s coming is as sure as the dawn.
But in order for it to become a lived reality, it takes people like them, and like us, to commit to the vision. Not to stand, despairing on the margins, feeling nothing can be done, but taking up the cause, taking up our cans, maybe, and making the difference we can make for the sake of the coming Kingdom.
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