I

n the Jewish festival of Succoth, held a few days after Yom Kippur in late September or early October, Jewish families build a small shelter called a sukkah made up of sticks and branches in their back yard or garden, or sometimes at the synagogue. They are intentionally flimsy structures, and the specifications call for you to be able to look up and see they sky between the branches of the roof. Families build the shelter together, and during the seven day festival, they eat meals there, and sometimes even spend the night.

       Succoth– also called the Festival of Booths or the Festival of Tabernacles– is one of the three “pilgrimage” festivals celebrated by the Jewish people, along with Passover and Shevuot. While there are elements of an ancient harvest festival, the Bible associates Succoth with the forty-year period of wilderness wandering after the Hebrew slaves were brought out of bondage in Egypt. So while the festival commemorates a time of hardship, the mood of the festival is one of celebration, remembering God’s protection and provision even in the most difficult of circumstances. To leave your comfortable home and sleep in the sukkah is to remember that ultimately we rely on God alone.

       The tent erected in our sanctuary this morning is not intentionally flimsy, and no one chooses to live in one. It is a replica of the tents sprouting up all over western Sudan and eastern Chad to house the more than two and half million people who have been displaced because of the atrocities in Darfur. There are over two hundred thousand Darfurian refugees living in eastern Chad, along with another one hundred thousand Chadians who have been displaced because of the violence that has spilled across the borders. In fact, refugees are actually considered lucky if they have something as stable as this tent. The numbers are rising so rapidly, and the violence has escalated so quickly, that international humanitarian groups have been unable to get even the most basic provisions, such as food and shelter, into the region.

       There is in most Jewish festivals an element of solidarity. So on Passover, when the Jews remember their own delivery from slavery, they identify with all those who are held in bondage. And when Jewish families gather in the sukkah, they not only remember that they once wandered in the wilderness, but also remember the world’s many peoples who live in vulnerability and rely on God’s protection.

S omehow I don’t imagine that refugees in eastern Chad are experiencing living in tents as a spiritually enriching experience. Of course, neither did the newly liberated Hebrew slaves at the time, who complained bitterly to Moses for bringing them out of Egypt only to die in the desert. So in the same way, Paul writes to the Corinthians exhorting them not to lose heart, which is precisely what they are tempted to do, faced with hostility and persecution from their neighbors and infighting within their own community. Paul writes, “For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” I think it is a misreading of Paul’s words to hear him as privileging life beyond the grave over life in this world. His point instead is that we are all living in tents. This life is but a momentary state. That does not make it meaningless, but rather all the more precious. Christians, however, are enabled to live this short life with confidence because we have hope in what we cannot see. Therefore, we do not lose heart.

       That’s not the same thing as saying that our hearts don’t break. In fact, it seems to me, as Christians our hearts ought to break more easily. Frankly, I don’t know how any human being’s heart could not break reading Travis Fox’s article in The Washington Post last week about refugee camps in Dogdore, Chad. He told the story of Ashta Adam and her little boy, Izzedine, whose village was burned to the ground and whose husband was killed by the Janjaweed Arab militias under cover of the Sudanese government. Because of the violence, there has been only one delivery of food in the past seven months. Her son is surviving only on emergency rations provided by Doctors Without Borders. The 18,000 refugees living nearby have scavenged for every last bush and branch to make shelters so that Ashta does not even have a roof over her makeshift home. “Deep inside,” she told the reporter, “I’m very sad about this situation we’re living in. This is not the kind of life we’re used to living.” Sad indeed.

C hurch member Jerry McPike, in his adult class these past three weeks on India, Africa, and China, has made the point that we should pay attention to such parts of the world because as Christians we are called to love our neighbors. Jesus emphatically emphasized the boundaries of neighborliness by insisting that we are to love our enemies. Jerry concludes that this means that we are to love those who will not or cannot love us back. So we love our enemies, who will not love us back; we love the earth, which is unable to love us back; and we love the destitute poor, who are in no position to love us back. Yes, of course, our neighbors also include those close by, those like us, those who might love us back, but the Christian imperative is to love the other– something no other religion or philosophy calls for in quite the same way.

       In her interview with the reporter, Ashta Adam worried about what would happen when the emergency rations from Doctors Without Borders ran out. They were just enough to stave off severe malnutrition, but she only has enough for two weeks. If more food does not arrive by then, she will be right back where they started. “If my neighbors had any food they would give it to me,” Ashta explained. “But they don’t, so I don’t ask.”

       As it turns out, Ashta’s Christian neighbors have plenty of food. We just haven’t determined that we are going to get it to her. The refugee crisis in Sudan and Chad is one of the gravest humanitarian crises in the world, and indeed, the international community is spending millions of dollars to get food and provisions to the area (though, I might add, nothing close to what we are spending for the war in Iraq). But so far the world’s power brokers, particularly the United States and China, have not mustered the will to intervene between the rebels, the government, and the people like Ashta and Izzedine Adam who so desperately need our aid. We may long for that eternal home not made with hands, Paul writes, but God will judge us for what we do in this life. “All of us must appear before the judgment seat of Christ,” Paul concludes, “so that each may receive recompense for what has been done in the body, whether good or evil.” If that’s not enough to make you lose heart, then I don’t know what is.

       Yet we do not lose heart. As Darrell Guder puts it, in our contemporary setting, “such hopeful living may be the most revolutionary witness imaginable.” At our WIN “action” on Monday night, the closing speaker, Lionel Edmonds, quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said, “Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.” So, Paul writes of his current suffering as a “slight momentary affliction,” not because his suffering was not real, but because he was able to view it from a higher point of view. So we can give all that we have, and risk all that we are, for the sake of the gospel, because we know that living or dying, our life belongs to God. This does not for a moment lead us to minimize in any way the suffering of the world’s peoples, but is what emboldens us to struggle even in the face of resistance. As Guder puts it, because we know that the outcome is certain and in God’s hands, we are enabled to look at our present reality in a different way. Our confidence in the future is not a distraction that turns us away from our present task, but a confidence that empowers us for our present task.

I don’t know if Paul was thinking of the 27^th Psalm when he wrote these words about this earthly tent. He certainly would have known them. The psalmist writes:

The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?

       The LORD is the stronghold of my life;

of whom shall I be afraid?
...For God will hide me in God’s shelter

in the day of trouble;
God will conceal me under

the cover of God’s tent...
Now my head is lifted up

above my enemies all around me,
and I will offer in God’s tent

sacrifices with shouts of joy...
I believe that I shall see

              the goodness of the LORD

in the land of the living.
Wait for the LORD;

              be strong, and let your

              heart take courage;

       wait for the LORD!                                    ✞

© 2007 Jeffrey K. Krehbiel