Coffee, Solidarity and Eternal Life

Jesus was heading out on a journey and a man, a very very anxious man, ran up and knelt down in front of him with an urgent question: Good Teacher, Teach Me! What must I do to inherit eternal life? This anxious man runs up to Jesus and wants to know if after all his studying he has got the right answers. He holds his breath as Jesus tells him that he already knows the rules: be don’t kill, don’t betray the ones you love, tell the truth, keep your hands off other people’s stuff, honor your parents. Yes, he says. I’ve done all that. He thinks he’s done what is expected, done what is needful. He is pretty sure he has earned the promised inheritance.

Hermione Granger, Harry Potter’s classmate with the wild red curls, is just this kind of eager student. She stays up late in the library. She reads all her assignments and more. She works hard. In her third year at Hogwarts she gets a charm to help her take two classes at exactly the same time so she can cram in as much learning as possible. She always has her hand up, always one chapter ahead of her classmates.

When I hear this story from the Gospel today I cannot help but see the urgent student is a teenage girl with wild red curls. She is just like I was at that age, eager to be first, to be best.

Jesus smiles. His heart is warmed. He loves eager students, this one in particular. And he says, yes, it is important to live your life by doing no harm. But you must also live your life by doing good. Dear eager one, you who are overflowing with faithful energy, full of eagerness to live a holy life full of integrity, empty your pockets. Unpack your backpack. Put down what you have been carrying around so carefully so that I can give you what you really need, what you really want. And the eager student is startled. Give up the books? Give up the laptop? Give up everything she has?

It is so hard for us to imagine living only on the grace of God. It is so hard for us who have just about everything we need, and almost everything we want, to even imagine the grace of God.

Now I want you to think with me for a few minutes about coffee, that which I NEED first thing in the morning. I want you to think about coffee with me today because this is the beginning of the coffee harvest in Mexico and Central America and in Columbia. Right this moment Juan Valdez and his wife and children and cousins are picking red ripe coffee berries. Much of the coffee we drink is produced by farmers who grow their crops on less than 5 acres. The small trees that produce the coffee cherries are at least four years old before they bear the first crop. Every time a hurricane sweeps through and wipes out the trees the farmers have to start again, hoping to survive very lean years. The small farmers sell their crops to middlemen who remove the outer fruit, wash and ferment them and dry the two beans at the core of the cherry. The coffee beans are then shipped to other middlemen who roast the beans. The roasted beans are then shipped to other middlemen who put the beans on our store shelves, or deliver them to a church office. You can imagine how much the farmer gets to keep from the $1.60 we pay at Java Cup or Dunkin Donuts. Coffee is one of the world’s most volatile commodities. Coffee prices fluctuate wildly and sometimes farmers will have barely enough to live on through the winter after the October harvest is complete.

Over the last 20 years cooperative movement has been growing that helps coffee lovers join hands with coffee producers. One such effort is a New England company called Equal Exchange, www.equalexchange.coop an employee owned and controlled company. Equal Exchange develops long term relationships with democratically operated cooperatives of small farmers throughout the coffee growing areas of Central and South America. The small farmers that participate in this effort own their own farms and without the support of their cooperatives they are as vulnerable as the farmers of Jesus’ time. Small farmers are always on the edge financially. If the crop fails loans taken at the beginning of the season could default. If loans default the land gets bought up and the farmers end up dispossessed or as tenants on their family’s ancestral land. An absentee owner concerned about profits, does not particularly care if the farmer can pay school fees for his children or feed his ninos breakfast. Weather, global markets, corrupt governments are all security threats well beyond the control of hard working coffee farmers. Standing together cooperatively enhances the safety, and the wellbeing of each farmer, and his family and his village.

Equal Exchange gives a fair and dependable price to the farmers helping them to weather the ups and downs of the market cycle. By supporting farmers to gain the tools and equipment to do some of the intermediate processing the farmers keep a bigger share of the value of their crop. By supporting farmers to teach each other practices that qualify their crops for Organic certification they earn more for their labor. Organic coffees are good for the farmers, and good for us. The winter habitat of many of the favorite birds we see in our back yards is the tree canopy over shade grown coffee.

Fair Trade relationships help not only the farmers, they help us. We need to be in relationships of integrity with those who prepare our daily bread, and our daily drink, for our own sake, not just for their sake. God calls us not just to avoid doing harm, but to do good. Jesus invites us to put down the things that separate us – the fairly comfortable, fairly well off – from those who struggle in this world. Jesus invites us to put down those things that support illusion of protection we carry around that we have somehow earned God’s particular benevolence, God’s special protection. Tragedy befalls even the upright. Job’s wealth and his righteousness does not protect him.

Mark Sweet, one of my classmates from the Hogwarts School of Theology, also known as the Episcopal Divinity School, went to work for Equal Exchange right after he graduated from college. That first fall he joined a field visit to a coffee cooperative in a small mountain village in Oaxaca, near the Mexican border with Guatemala. They stayed in a village where there was obviously no reserves to feed visiting dignitaries. The villagers offered the very best that they had, holding nothing back. My observant, anxious friend offered to pay for the banquet that the villagers could clearly not afford.

The leader of the village responded to this well meaning stranger. He said, Senior Dolce, we left our fields two days before you arrived in the midst of the harvest. It is a full day and half walk back to the coffee fields. We put on our best cloths. We opened our homes to you. We fed you the only chickens we have. We did all of this not for you to pay for it – or to have pity on us.

Your presence here is a miracle. Before your arrival we had never seen a white person who did not want to rape our children, take our belongings, take our land or tell us how to live a better life. You and your friends have given us respect and dignity. You have lived in our homes, eaten our food and heard our stories. It is amazing to us that people of such wealth and status in America would go out of their way to be with us. No Senior Dolce, it is we who should thank you. We now have friends and people we can trust. We now have people who can tell our story.

The presence of God, the grace of God in our relationships, our interconnection is that which makes us strong, and alive. Jesus invites us to grow in our openness and vulnerability to God and each other. The Christ looks with love at the eager anxious faith filled student and smiles. He invites us to see the Christ in each other in the only way we humans can do this. The Christ invites us to share our meals, our stories, our joys and sorrows with each other. The Christ invites us to stand next to each other, shoulder to shoulder with those whose backs are against the wall.

In three weeks, on October 24th, we will have a Ham and Bean Supper, a feast, a banquet to raise funds for Episcopal Relief and Development for strategic projects that benefit families struggling to survive on less than $1 per day. The nations of the world and our Church have embraced the Millennium Development Goals as specific people to people efforts to prevent preventable diseases, to teach the children of the world to read, to help women survive child birth and gain skills and capital to feed their babies. We have some Equal Exchange coffee on the way to pour for our guests at this feast. Organic Mind Body and Soul, on its way from Oaxaca.

There is so much we can do in this world to do good. Jesus our Rabbi is smiling at us, his eager and anxious students, and he says come follow me. AMEN