Advent and MCC humanitarian Assistance
Here’s a riddle: What is something you can touch; and is given freely; and it smells good; and you can eat it, and wear it; and it turns up sometimes in unexpected places?
If you said, “MCC material assistance,” you’re right!
But there’s another answer. You could have said, “Jesus Christ.” All those things can be said about Jesus as well as about material resources, and I’m going to read you all the Scripture references right now to prove it. Think about this with me for a few minutes.
- You can touch it.
A school kit measures 10” x 26”. You can handle and heft each item inside it. You can see for yourself that the covers of the notebooks are smooth and shiny; you can feel the sharp corners of the ruler; you can throw the eraser and watch how gaily it bounces.
The Bible says that Jesus was as substantial as a school kit. People reached out their hands and touched Him all the time. After the resurrection, Jesus said to His disciples, “Look at my hands and my feet. It is I, myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see I have” (Luke 24:39). And the Apostle John proclaims the same thing, writing about Jesus: “… which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched…” (1 John 1:1).
- It is given freely.
I remember this every time Elizabeta[1] sends me a commercial invoice and a gift certificate letter and I translate the following phrase into Russian: “These items are to be used for humanitarian assistance, a free gift, and are not for resale. No foreign currency has been used for the purchase or shipment of these supplies.”
In other words, while these items have value, they cannot be bought or sold; they can only be received in the spirit with which they were given. The people who make or collect or pay for the items we send, together with the board and the churches they represent, have declared by their own free will that these are gifts—not inventory for sale and not extorted by force: gifts.
Jesus speaks of His own ministry in the same way: “The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life—only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again…” (John 10:17-18a).
- It smells good.
Did you ever notice that, even after it’s empty, a health kit retains a pleasant, soapy smell, rather like sheets or tablecloths that have been stored with a sachet? The dreariest basement takes on a fresh, bathhouse bouquet when cartons of soap have been stored there for even a little while. And what can compare with the smell of soup supplemented with a spoonful of MCC beef?
Interestingly one of the ways the Apostle Paul describes the influence of Christ’s messengers is in terms of smell: “But thanks be to God, who . . . through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of Him. For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved . . . we are . . . the fragrance of life” (2 Cor. 2:14-16). It’s also the way Paul describes Jesus’ sacrifice: “. . . and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Eph. 5:2).
- You can eat it.
Some years ago, there was a Somali refugee in Moscow named Marcus,[2] who became a good friend of MCC staff there. Once he made the following comment about some canned beef that came his way: “When I eat this meat,” he said, “I can walk for a long time.”
That is even more true of Jesus. “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink” (John 6:54-55).
- You can wear it.
Sturdy shoes mean that a child staying at Good Shepherd Shelter in Makeyevka can attend school and play soccer afterward. Warm winter clothing is essential for war refugees in the Caucasus or for people flooded out of their homes by typhoons in the Russian Far East.
You’ve got to wrap up in something, and Paul invites us to try on the very fashions that Jesus modeled: “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience” (Col. 3:12).
- It turns up in unexpected places.
I find traces of MCC material assistance everywhere.
- Last New Year’s Eve I was invited to a party given by the Christian Medical Association here in Zaporizhzhia. We played a few games and I even won a prize: a handsome spiral notebook with a blue cover and a label on it printed in both English and French. Hm, I thought, I wonder where this came from?
- A few weeks ago, I was at a church service in Makeyevka when I observed that the deacons were taking up the offering in simple cloth bags. There’s nothing unusual about that, except that generally such receptacles are made out of some heavy fabric like velvet, and in some solid colour. These bags were made out of two-toned checked material and were of a certain familiar size. What were they? Empty health kits, of course.
- Recently, I was at Good Shepherd Children’s Shelter in Makeyevka and overheard one side of a telephone conversation carried on by Zhanna Zhuk, who is the administrator who handles the official documentation of children who stay at the shelter. When children are admitted to Good Shepherd, they undergo a medical examination at a local hospital, and apparently one little girl who had just arrived needed some special care for her eyes that required medication the hospital couldn’t pay for. They had called Zhanna to see if the shelter could help, which, of course, it couldn’t—there isn’t money for such things. But Zhanna quietly continued to negotiate with the hospital. Finally, she asked, “Do you need paper?... What about notebooks? . . . I could give you American notebooks, lined paper, at least 100 sheets in each. . . .What about five of them? . . . All right . . . That will be fine . . .Good-bye!” And, hanging up the phone, she turned to the secretary: “Olya, run downstairs and ask for five notebooks, and ask Grisha to take them over to the hospital and say it’s for Tanechka.” And thus, a little girl’s eye-care was paid for—not with money, because there isn’t any money—but with some of the contents of several school kits.
And you might run into Jesus anywhere at all: in a marketplace, or in a rowboat; in a garden or on a city street; at home with your family or lying in a manger. You might not even recognize Him until He’s already gone, as it happened to two of His disciples. Do you remember? “When He was at the table with them, He took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized Him, and He disappeared from their sight” (Luke 24:30-31).
You can touch it; it’s freely given; you can smell it, eat it, wear it, and you might find it anywhere at all. What is it? Is it material assistance, or is it Jesus?
You can touch it; it’s freely given; you can smell it, eat it, wear it, and you might find it anywhere at all. What is it? Is it material assistance, or is it Jesus?
Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that Jesus Christ and humanitarian assistance are identical—if you’re trusting in a bale of old clothes for your salvation, you’re in terrible trouble. But I am saying that material assistance is a significant way—not the only way, mind you, and not always the best way—but a significant way of testifying to the love of God in Jesus, our Lord.
The theological term for what I’m talking about, of course, the formal term, is incarnation. Something that is “in the flesh,” that you can see, and smell and hold. Incarnation is absolutely essential for us humans because we are “in the flesh” ourselves, earth-bound, made of the very earth to which we will eventually return. You can talk to us and talk to us about how great God is, and how much He loves us, but we don’t really get it unless we can hold a real, live baby in our arms, or unless we watch a man writhe on a cross or unless someone we know to be dead suddenly, tenderly speaks our name.
We are people and we cannot survive without material things: we need food; we have to keep warm. But the great mystery of the Incarnation is this: God’s eternal love for us comes in the human flesh of the True Man Jesus, who Himself knew hunger and cold. Through Him, all of our own fragile life is blessed so that the things that we give and make and buy and weigh and sort and bale and can and ship and clear through customs in Jesus’ name, become an incarnation themselves, powerful evidence that God is, indeed, love. In the colours of a quilt or the contours of a used hospital bed, you can sometimes discern the image of Christ.
But the great mystery of the Incarnation is this: God’s eternal love for us comes in the human flesh of the True Man Jesus, who Himself knew hunger and cold (. . .) In the colours of a quilt or the contours of a used hospital bed, you can sometimes discern the image of Christ.
Most of all, however, Christ is seen in the lives of the people who follow Him. It isn’t likely that God would be recognized in a sewing kit or a volleyball without a person to accompany the gift. And here the context for the gifts that we send (their incarnation, if you will) is provided by our partners, people serving in about a dozen different churches and missions scattered all across the former Soviet Union, some of them as far away from Ukraine as seven or eight time zones. Someone or another of us on the MCC staff in Zaporizhzhia has some personal acquaintance with each one of these groups, and each group has its own long list of people and organizations that it helps and ministries that it carries out. I can’t even begin to name them all. Because of them, MCC material assistance has a recognizable human face, and through their hands, it goes to thousands of disabled children and adults; to the elderly; to kids in summer camp; to theological students; to refugees; homeless people; prisoners; the mentally ill—all kinds of people. We trust our partners to look at their own situation and assess what kind of help would be useful to them; we encourage them to think creatively about how to use material assistance to enhance their ministries, and we try to help them to work out accountability and decision-making structures.
To tell you the truth, I don’t see much in the way of direct distribution of assistance. I don’t know much more about the containers that you so carefully prepare and send than what a few bytes of data on an e-mail attachment can tell me. Occasionally, I’ve been there when a container is being unloaded, but that just means it’s taken from the container into sealed storage where it might stay for months. There might be a time lag of nearly a year between the day a container is requested and the day it finally clears customs.
But I do hear words of appreciation. Sometimes I hear something about how accurately MCC prepares documents; sometimes I hear something about the fine quality of MCC meat; sometimes there is a word of thanks for the careful way various kinds of kits are put together.
But interestingly, those kinds of comments are not what I hear most often. More frequently, I hear something else. Last winter, for example, I was given a photograph, showing an elderly woman standing in the snow at the gate outside her house receiving a small bag of humanitarian assistance from a member of New Bethany church in the town of Novosysoyevka, which is a few hundred kilometres to the north of Vladivostok—‘way out on Russia’s Pacific coast. The photograph was labelled, “Can it be that someone has remembered about me?”
The words that I hear most often about material assistance are, “Thank you for not forgetting us.” Notice—not “Thanks for the blankets,” or “Thanks for the soap,” or “Thanks for all the neat stuff” (although that is said, too), but, “Thank you for not forgetting us. Thank you for thinking of us. Thank you for remembering.”
Thank you for not forgetting us. Thank you for thinking of us. Thank you for remembering.”
Now, why do you suppose that is? I would suggest that it has something to do with the riddle of incarnation—eternal love in solid, recognizable form that lets you know you haven’t been forgotten. You can touch it; it is freely given; it smells good; you can eat it and wear it; and you’ll be very surprised sometimes at where you find it. Is it material assistance, or is it Jesus?
They aren’t identical, but wherever gifts are given in Jesus’ name, suddenly we are no longer alone; giver and recipient alike—we know that we are remembered; we are not forgotten. And in the gift, we recognize a human face—Immanuel—God With Us.