Sharing the Story

What follows is a transcript of Guest Speaker Elena Huegel's message from our Sunday morning gathering. We share these messages on our blog for those who appreciate the opportunity to read the sermon again—whether for deeper reflection, personal study, or a quieter moment of prayer and introspection. As you read, we invite you to linger with the words, notice what resonates, and remain open to how God may be speaking to you through them.

by Elena Huegel

2 Corinthians 4:1-12.

Therefore, since it is by God's mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart. We have renounced the shameful things that one hides.

We refuse to practice cunning or to falsify God's Word, but to be the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscious of everyone in the sight of God. And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case, the God of the world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

For we do not proclaim ourselves, we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus's sake. For it is the God who said, let light shine out of the darkness, who has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.

We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed, perplexed, but not driven to despair, persecuted, but not forsaken, struck down, but not destroyed. Always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to the death for Jesus's sake, so that the life of Jesus may be visible in our mortal flesh.

So death is at work in us, but life in you. 

Thank you for having me here today.

It is such a pleasure and a joy to be able to share with you, to be able to remind you that together we are the face of the church around the world. I represent you. I represent you through global ministries of the Christian Church Disciples of Christ in Chiapas, Mexico.

Yeah, it's amazing to me when people say, oh I didn't know the Disciples of Christ had missionaries. Yes, we have had a long history of missionary service around the world. My grandparents left, my grandmother left Hannibal, Missouri, believe it or not, in 1920, and my grandparents served as missionaries in Mexico for 60 years, and my parents for 50 years, and now I've had the privilege of also being in God's service as a missionary in Latin America.

First in Paraguay, then in Chile, and now in Mexico. And I want for us to think a little bit about these treasures that we are, that we carry in clay vessels. So fragile.

In fact, so fragile that one of my little clay vessels got broken by the airline, and I had to, I was gluing it this morning when I arrived. My little Jaguar had a broken leg. So fragile, and yet we carry this incredible treasure of the knowledge of Jesus Christ.

So I want to share with you a little bit about global ministries, and also a little bit about my ministry as we think about how we share the light that Jesus has given to us with people around the world. And I want to share with you some of global ministries core values as it relates to this Bible text, and also to my ministry. So we work together with the United Church of Christ, because as the Christian Church Disciples of Christ, we believe, one of our core beliefs, is that we work with other people.

We don't go at it alone. We network, we find other people who may be very different from us, and other people who may be like-minded, and we find how we can share. And so only through global ministries, the rest of the ministries of the church are completely separate, the United Church of Christ and the Disciples of Christ.

But in our global missions, we're working together. And we've been working, we're going to celebrate our 30th anniversary this year as global ministries. I'm also celebrating my 30th year as a missionary.

I went out just as these two churches came together to work around the world. To think a little bit about our core values, I would like to take you to a village in southern Mexico, in the highlands of Chiapas, way up in the mountains, a little village called Amatenango del Valle. Now the people of Amatenango, the women of Amatenango, have been making clay pottery, clay vessels, for as long as they can remember.

Archaeologists say probably for about 2,000 years, the women of this village have been making first clay pots that were shipped all over Mesoamerica, and then later different artistic things, different figures, now jaguars and doves that they sell to the tourists. But this little jaguar and this little dove come from this valley, Amatenango del Valle. This little village, way up in the mountains, the government built a highway and the highway splits the village in half.

So half the people are living on one side of the highway and the other half are living on the other side of the highway. And this highway is a difficult place because it is the main highway whereby migrants and drugs are being shipped north to the United States, and weapons are being shipped from the United States, all of this illegal trade, into Mexico and the rest of Latin America. Now this village does not have, it's a very small town, it doesn't have a Protestant church.

It only has one very big structure that is a Catholic church on the main square. Mari from Amatenango del Valle, whose mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, as far back as they can remember, have been potters, but she studied anthropology and has a university degree. She continues to make pottery, but she's also an anthropologist, came to the Institute of Intercultural Studies and Research where I work, and she came to tell us we have a problem.

See, when we realized that this highway was carrying, the cartels were carrying drugs and people north and weapons south, and they were also going into the village and trying to recruit our young people, we as the Catholic Church decided we're going to do something to make our church into a safe space, a place where young people would be welcome, where we could, where they could have fun, they could have a good time, but they would be in a safe place. And we didn't, it didn't matter if they were Catholic or Protestant, we just wanted to them to come to church to be in a place where they could be okay. And we did such a good job that we now have 85 between the ages of 13 and 25 who want to join the church, and we don't know what to do with them all.

So we sat around the table and talked about the core value of global ministries, which is presence. How could we be present with these young people and present with this church? Now the Institute, we are Catholics and Protestants working together trying to find ways to build bridges. So we had three Catholics, three Protestants, and Maddie came and told us about her situation, and the three Catholic leaders looked at each other and said, well we're willing to work with anyone over 18, so we'll take the ones from your 85 that are over 18, and then they turned and looked at me and said, but you can have the teenagers.

But I'm Protestant, and this Catholic Church had never had a Protestant working in its church. The situation between Catholics and Protestants in this part of the world is very manipulated by the powers that be. See, if you can get the Catholics fighting the Protestants, then the community breaks apart and the mining companies can come in and take over the land.

Or the government at times has even found ways to get the Catholics fighting the Protestants so that it weakens the community so then they can sell out to foreign companies and deforestation comes in. So she looked at me and she said, well I'm gonna have to talk to the church about this, to our priest about this, but a couple weeks later she says, it's all set, we want you to come, and I gathered a team of young people who work with me in camps and vacation Bible school and all of those things that we know how to do, and we traveled to Amatenango del Valle. When we arrived, Mari said to us, I would like to share with you a visit to our holy ground.

We don't invite just anyone to go to this place, but we want to show you we trust you. We want to welcome you into our community, make you part of us, and to do that you need to understand our holiest of places. So she took me out into this little valley where there were all these potholes throughout the whole valley, and she says this is the place where the women of my community for years upon years upon years have come to take the clay out of the soil that we then use to make our pottery, and this place we know it is a place where God gifts us the gifts that we need to be able to make the gifts that we give on to others.

These are the gifts of Mother Earth, and we protect this land. We protect this land with such care, but we had to learn it the hard way. See, about five years ago, the men of the village decided that it would be a great idea to bring bulldozers and backhoes into our potter's field, into the clay field, and take more than was needed to take abundant, and then hoard it, and hoard the clay, and then use it and sell it to make more money, and then some people in the All of the clay pots we made broke in the kilns, and Mother Earth taught us a lesson, and we as women took back the potter's field.

We took back the clay, and we said no more machinery. Everything that is taken out of here is taken by hand. No more men in the field.

Only women can come and take from the soil, and no more hoarding. We only take the precise amount that we need for that year according to the need of each family, and she turned to me, and she said, this is justice. Justice is balancing things out.

It's healing the wrongs that have been done, and correcting them. Now as women, we have to fight all the time with the men, because they want to come back in, but we know that the gifts our Mother Earth, our Mother provides through us, to us, that Mother Earth provides to us, are gifts that are for the whole community to be shared equally as the needs arise. As Global Ministries, we work in mutual presence with others.

We work towards justice, to correcting the wrongs, but we also work in mutuality. So as I designed the program for Amatenango del Valle, I asked Mari to select 15 young adults that would be the ones I would train so that we would work together with the teenagers. So it wasn't going to be me.

I don't speak the language. I'm not from the culture. It would be the people that are from there doing the games, and teaching the lessons.

So the first night I was there, we gathered the young adults that were going to be working with the with the teenagers, and as we started to play games, and I taught them songs, and we talked about how they were going to give the Bible lessons, I noticed that there were five older women sitting on a bench watching carefully everything we did. The beginning, they were very serious. By the end, they were laughing and having a great time, and when everyone left, they were still there, and when they were getting ready to leave, I walked over to them, and I said, it's so wonderful to have you watching us tonight, and they said, oh yeah, the priest sent us to keep an eye on you, to make sure you weren't going to do something in our church that wasn't right, but you know what? You're okay.

You're one of us. Your heart is in the right place. This mutuality requires trust.

It requires building up that trust. It requires being humble enough to recognize what you don't know, and that you might not know what you don't know, and then opening your heart to doing things in a different way or to the adaptations, so the next morning, these five ladies came up to me. They said, oh we so wanted to watch you work with the teenagers today, but we were invited to a wedding, so we decided since everything is fine in your hands, we're going to the wedding.

Have a good time, and they weren't there. The trust had been built, and the games got changed, and the stories were told in a different way, and everything was adapted, and the teens had a wonderful time, and together we built up a little community, so towards the end of our activities, I gave the teenagers, we worked with them, we took them into groups of six, and we gave them all these recycled materials, you know, things that had been left over from different things for them to create something, and what they had to create was a table setting where everyone would be welcome at the table, so we gave them each a table. We gave them all these different materials, and they had to create a table where they felt everyone would be welcome at that table, and they started asking questions, and they said, you mean it has to be a table where the drug lords are going to be welcome, or the guy who's recruiting kids? I'm like, well would Jesus welcome him at the table? Yeah.

What about the person who's bringing guns into our community? Would that person be welcome at the table? I'm like, yeah, because who invites us to this table? It's Jesus who invites us, and if you're willing to come, Jesus is willing to receive you, and so they got to work, and you could tell they had done things from parties many times, because right away there was like flowers and decorations, and then we had ten tables all decorated, each in a different place, and one of the young people came up with me to me and said, but we're still all in our separate tables. I said, yeah, what are you going to do about it? And he said, hey everybody, let's pull the tables together, and pretty soon they're bringing the tables together, and they're joining the decorations together, and we gather around one big table, but we're still in a Celtal Mayan community, and all the boys were standing on one side, and all the girls on the other side, because that's what's appropriate among the Celtales in this community. All the girls wearing their clothing that they take a year and a half to make by hand, all the boys in jeans and t-shirts, because the boys don't make the clothes, and they've left their clothing behind, and those traditions are not kept anymore.

Still part of their culture, still their community, but everyone welcome around the table. When we finished our time together, Mari took us back up on the hill, and we were looking over her beautiful valley, Amatenango del Valle, and we could hear the children laughing in the distance, and a cowbell over there, and the breeze coming across the valley, and it looked so calm, so peaceful. She turned to me, and she said, this is the word, these are the words for peace in Celtal, and it literally means peace with the land, and in the land where we live, with this soil, peace with Mother Earth.

She turned to me, and she said, until we have peace with the, with Mother Earth, until we have peace between us, Catholics and Protestants, until we have peace inside our own hearts, in this land where we live, there will not be true peace. But today, we've taken a little step in that direction. So what are we looking for in global ministries? It's amazing to me that so many of the values that we have in global ministries are the same values that the Mayan people are trying to teach to us, and to their descendants, and the key word to understand their, the core of how they live, is which means abundant life for all.

All of us having what we need, our needs fulfilled, but not living, not hoarding, not going beyond what we need. Looking out for each other, seeing in the community what other people need, recognizing the terrible situation on that highway, and doing something about it, within their own means. Finding a way to bring abundant life to every single person in the community.

And this is what we are looking for in global ministries, too. How can we be a part of recognizing the dignity, the worthiness of every single person? You are worthy. You have dignity, no matter what your story is, no matter where you come from, no matter what you believe, you are worthy.

You are a child of the ruler of the universe, every single one of us. We are all fragile. And on that hillside, Mari gave me two things that she had made.

She gave me a dove, which is traditional to Amatenango del Valle, and jaguar, which is also part of the environment in Amatenango. And she said, take these with you, because I want you to remember that in this path of peace, in this search for abundant life, some of us are doves, and some of us are jaguars. Some of us are bringing tranquility, and hope, and joy, and some of us are fighting for justice.

Both of these things are needed. Sometimes you'll have to make the choices of a dove, and sometimes you'll have to make the choices of a jaguar. Sometimes you'll be broken because of the choices that you have had to make.

But just know that that light that you bear, that light of Christ that is in you, will shine into the shadows where it's most needed. So as you go out today, I want you to think about what areas in your own community doves are needed. The bridge builders, the peacemakers, the ones who reach out to those who are very different, and welcome them, and remind them of their dignity.

And which areas of your community do we need jaguars? Those who stand up and say, this is wrong, and it must change. We are all called to bring abundant life to all in the places where we live. May God bless you, and take your homework now, and think about where you're going to be a jaguar, and where you're going to be a dove.