Ants Marching
June 27, 2010
Luke 9:51-62 and 1 Kings 19:15-21
A few days after the first big rain of spring this year I decided that I had better mow the lawn before it became a forest. So I woke up the mower from its hibernation and began to cut the grass. After finishing the back yard, I headed to the front, already dripping with sweat. While making my way around the second bend of our law, suddenly the mower’s front wheels dropped down a couple of inches and the mower began shooting up thick clouds of dust.
I pulled back the mower a few feet, cut it off, and then tried to find what I had run over. For those of you with lawn mowing experience, you’ve surely figured out by now that I had completely demolished an ant bed. When I have been in this situation in the past, my normal response has simply been to bypass the ant bed and continue mowing. But for some reason the thousands of scrambling, frantic ants caught my attention. So I crouched down near the ground and, for a few minutes, just watched them.
The first reaction of the ants was to get away from danger. This meant finding the nearest tunnel and scurrying underground.
One would think that after such a demolition by lawnmower the ants would be content to wait for hours in their protected lair to be sure that danger had passed. But, remarkably, after a just a few minutes of hiding underground, the ants soon returned to the surface and quickly began rebuilding what had been lost. There was no pause. No fear of another tragic event. Just the realization that what was broken needed to be fixed.
The next morning I decided to check on the progress and found the ant bed almost completely rebuilt.
What the ants surely missed in their diligent work but what I was able appreciate was how grand the kingdom they created was. Alone the ants could probably only build a tiny tower of sand. Together, though, they pay tribute to the fact that small, seemingly unimportant tasks, when multiplied over and over again, can help create vast kingdoms, beautiful empires of intricacy and splendor.
Perhaps keeping the diligence of ants in mind can help us better understand our passages from Luke and 1 Kings.
The theme of these passages is simple: when God, or a person from God, calls you to a specific task, you drop what you are doing and follow the will of God. In 1 Kings, God tells Elijah that he needs to train a prophet to follow in his footsteps. He needs someone to live like he has lived, to show justice and righteousness in a land of apostasy and injustice. He needs someone who will commit themselves, like he has—to lifting up the plight of the poor, to caring for the widows and those who are alone, to making sure people have enough to eat, and are cared for with affection and concern. The man God chooses is Elisha.
So when Elijah sees Elisha plowing his field, the prophet places his cloak on Elisha’s shoulder. It is a symbol of power being transferred from one to the other. Elisha asks only to hug and kiss his family. After doing so, he rids himself completely of all his wealth and property by slaughtering his twenty-four oxen and cooking them on a fire of his burning possessions. He has gone from rich to poor, from a man of property and riches to a man of God.
In Luke, the story is similar, though the requirements are even stricter. Unlike Elijah, Jesus rejects a potential follower because the would-be disciple simply wants to say goodbye to his family. The point is simply this: to follow the will of God and the path of Jesus means placing the good of others and the good of the world, over all other concerns. We must not forget that at this point, Jesus knows that he will soon be tortured and executed. In our passage he is calling others to follow his example: to be willing to die, to be willing to give up all that you have, so that others may find life. This is the commitment called for. This is the goal to be sought.
This commitment to the path of Jesus is often labeled “discipleship.” But this term is ambiguous and often poorly defined. Often times “discipleship” for many people means just going to church, or praying before a meal. But the discipleship called for in our passages sees Elisha burning all of his property thus becoming poor and people leaving homes and loved ones without even saying goodbye. Is this how we are called to live as well?
Perhaps a modern story can help us understand our passages a bit better.
It was exactly fifteen years ago yesterday when waves of surprise and wonder rippled through the hot, heavy air of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Something remarkable had happened. Something unbelievable had occurred.
The story truly began more than seventy-five ago when a poor girl named Oseola McCarty walked into the First Mississippi National Bank in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The young Oseola had been making a few cents each week by washing and ironing clothes after school and had finally saved enough to open a bank account. I was a happy day for Oseola. She was planning on saving enough money to help her get a good start in life, despite her poor background. This moment was supposed to be the beginning of good things; and it was, for a while.
But disappointment would come a couple of years later when a childless aunt of Oseola’s fell ill and was no longer able to care for herself. There was no one else to help so Oseola dropped out of the 6th grade and went to work full time so she could care of her aunt. She was never able to return to school.
But Oseola was diligent; and she was frugal. Like an ant marching she went about her tasks. For days on end, for years, for decades she worked, washing and scrubbing, cleaning and ironing, earning meager pennies and small, wages in an unfair and unjust society that rarely paid people of color their proper due.
World War II came and went. And Oseola ironed and washed. The fifties, sixties and seventies soon passed as well. And Oseola ironed and washed. Those who knew Oseola remember seeing her push a grocery cart over a mile each way to the grocery store—in the summer heat and the winter chill. She never believed buying a car was an appropriate expense and walked everywhere she went, if she couldn’t find a ride from others. She didn’t even buy an air conditioner until a couple of years before her death.
Over the years her young supple hands became increasingly gnarled and arthritic. But she kept on washing and ironing until 1994, when her arthritis became so bad she could no longer work.
Her life had been hard. Perhaps to the wealthy and socially advantaged people she washed clothes for she was simply poor and had always been poor. So it was probably no small surprise when they picked up their newspapers one hot, humid morning in July of 1994 and saw that Oseola McCarty, the woman who had scrubbed and washed and pressed and starched their families’ shirts for seventy-five years had donated $150,000 to the University of Southern Mississippi to be used for scholarships for black students who, like Oseola, had grown up poor.
It was the single largest gift ever given by an African-American to the University of Southern Mississippi.
Said Oseola, “I can't do everything, but I can do something to help somebody. And what I can do I will do. I wish I could do more."
At times our lives can seem repetitive and mundane. We go to work, we come home, we lounge around. We repeat. But what a difference we can make in the mundane days of our lives. In the mundane is really where the battle is won. The kingdom we are trying to build—a kingdom of God that cares for the poor, that brings in outsiders, that uplifts the downtrodden—will never be built quickly. It takes time and patience. But if each of one of us can do our small part each day, if each one of us, like ants marching, can grab and lift and put into place our own little grain of dirt, the kingdom will eventually take shape.
I would like to leave you with some words from Oscar Romero, the late archbishop of San Salvador. Romero was murdered by a government and military death squad in 1980 while performing mass because of his stances in favor the poor and powerless in El Salvador. These words speak elegantly to the important differences our small daily actions can make in the broader world:
It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
It is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the church’s mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.
This is what we are about:
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted,
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for God’s grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
Amen.
Shannon Wertz, “Oseola McCarty Donates $150,000 to Southern Miss,” http://www.usm.edu/pr/oola1.htm, accessed on June 23, 2010.
