by Lita Johnson

One hot summer day, as I stood at the kitchen sink washing dishes, I watched my daughter pulling weeds in the garden. She suddenly stood up and started to jerk around, as if a wasp might be attacking her. But rather than running back to the house, she stayed in place, moving her limbs strangely. I feared she might be having a seizure.

Then I saw the rhythm in her movements — and finally noticed the cord dangling from her ears to the pocket of her shirt where she had clipped her tiny music player. No wasp. No seizure. She was exuberantly dancing to the beat of music that I couldn’t hear. Once I realized that, all her moves made sense.

My daughter’s dance brought to mind the words of William Fry: "Hope is hearing the melody of the future; faith is dancing to it in the present."

How strange the dance of faith must look to those who cannot hear the melody of God’s future! How naive hope must seem in a world where suffering is everywhere — where one out of six people lives in extreme poverty without adequate food, safe water, education, and health care. This is a world in which a child dies of hunger or preventable disease each time we breathe in and out.

In a time when e–mails flit across the globe and we travel in ways our great–grandparents could not have imagined, the suffering of our world is as near as the closest TV screen. On the nightly news, we can look into the eyes of vulnerable people in the killing fields of Darfur, in Indonesian sweatshops, in the squalid camps to which people flee to escape war or natural disasters.

It is all too easy to flip quickly to another channel, for sometimes the suffering of the world seems too big for us, too much to bear, too frightening, too...inevitable.

That might be true if we were alone. But in God’s choreography, those who dance the dance of faith do not dance alone. It is our joy to be in relationship with God in Christ — God–with–us, whose death and resurrection reveal both God’s love and the future God intends. It is also our joy to be in relationship with others in Christ’s body, sharing the mind of Christ, sharing in Christ’s suffering and death, sharing in the suffering of others, and sharing in a common hope that compels action.

So we joyfully dance the two step of witness to God’s love and service in the world. It is a true miracle of God’s grace that in the very shadow of death, our dance of hope has the power to bring to birth the future that God intends.

those most vulnerable
The Bible describes in various ways God’s intent for humankind. But there is one concrete illustration of God’s intent that threads through both the Old and the New Testaments: the treatment of widows and children. Widows and orphans were among the least powerful in society in biblical times. They were the most vulnerable to abuse, exploitation, and poverty.

James calls on the members of Christ’s church to "care for widows and orphans in their distress" ( James 1:27). But God’s intent goes beyond charity. Both Jesus and the prophets denounce those who use the system to exploit the vulnerable: "Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless" (Isaiah 10:1–2).

This aspect of God’s intent is, in fact, attainable in the here and now: a society in which justice is available to the most vulnerable — not by whim of the powerful or by largess of the wealthy, but as their right. Justice, in turn, is complemented by acts of compassion and simple kindness, as suffering is shared in community.

Responding with compassion and seeking justice for the most vulnerable in our society is one way we dance to the melody of God’s future in our time. Among the vulnerable ones today are those who literally are widows and orphans: those who live in the shadow of AIDS and extreme poverty in sub–Saharan Africa.

Africa has received a lot of welcome media attention in recent months. Celebrities like Bono, lead singer of the Irish rock group U2, are using their status as popular icons to press governments to take action on the HIV/AIDS crisis and to change policies on aid, trade, and debt that are deepening the impoverishment of African nations. Entrepreneurs like Microsoft’s Bill Gates and talk show host Oprah Winfrey are now using their money and skills to bring about change in Africa. Photos abound of celebrities’ adoptions of African orphans — Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, Madonna and Guy Ritchie.

There are times when the church lags behind movements for justice in the wider society. But this is not one of those times! Our African companion churches have long been dancing in hope in the midst of suffering: providing food and shelter where there is urgent human need, working with communities to break the cycle of poverty and hunger through sustainable economic development, calling on governments to change the systems and structures that perpetuate poverty, and addressing the HIV/AIDS crisis, which claimed over 2 million lives in Africa last year. For many years, we and other members of our worldwide Lutheran family have been privileged to walk with our African companions in this work through our gifts, through the sending of missionaries, through shared action, and through prayer.

campaign of hope
Building on a long history of relationship, the ELCA committed itself at the beginning of this decade to Stand With Africa through a special campaign of hope. Stand With Africa complements our World Hunger Program, through which we say "No!" to the scandal of chronic hunger in all parts of the abundant world God created.

There are now 12 million children in Africa who have lost one or both parents to AIDS; that number could double in a decade. Many live in absolute poverty with frail grandparents or are trying to raise little brothers and sisters on their own. These are not "those poor children" that we can click away by touching a button on our TV’s remote control. They are the children of our brothers and sisters in our companion churches of Africa. In the community that is Christ’s church, these are our children. Their suffering is our suffering.

Our worldwide Lutheran family offers compassionate care and seeks justice for AIDS orphans, both those who are part of the church and those in the wider community. One example is the Lutheran World Federation’s (LWF) work in Rakai, a very poor rural district in southwestern Uganda.

For 15 years the LWF has been working with 150,000 people in the Rakai area to build awareness about HIV/AIDS, help orphans and those living with HIV/AIDS, and work with people in very poor communities to improve their quality of life. The LWF operates at the request of the Ugandan government, which has actively (and successfully) worked with communities, churches, businesses, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to reduce the numbers of HIV/AIDS cases. The good news is that the HIV/AIDS incidence rate for adults in Uganda has fallen from more than 15 percent in the early 1990s to less than 7 percent today. But even this lower level is a human tragedy that still requires urgent action.

In the past year, more than 120 volunteer counselors trained by LWF provided psychosocial support to more than 2,000 child–headed households and families living with AIDS. Houses were built and food was given to the most vulnerable. LWF has provided vocational training to AIDS orphans. At the end of the training LWF has helped the children obtain the tools they need to start earning their living as seamstresses or mechanics.

Women in villages who care for AIDS orphans from their extended family and from their community are at the heart of the LWF work in the region. The LWF has helped them organize and learn about the rights of children, widows, and those living with HIV/AIDS. They received seeds and farm tools that they use to produce additional income even as they help raise awareness about HIV/AIDS in their villages. These women have become effective advocates for the basic rights of both orphans and their wider community to better living conditions and opportunities.

Annet Twongirwe, an LWF advisor, sees the strength of these women and how much they can accomplish. But she is also a realist, counseling them: "Some problems you simply can’t solve. All you can do is listen and share the suffering. But that is also important, in order to keep people from feeling lost."

the music of God’s future
Sharing the suffering means many things: being present, providing help, and helping change the conditions that cause suffering. Our global companions have much to teach us about sharing suffering — and about the joy that is rooted in relationship with God. For in the warp and woof of suffering and joy in their lives, we can see God weaving a pattern of hope in the world.

I learned a lesson about suffering, joy, and hope from Renathe Muswahili, a young woman who serves in the Northwestern Diocese of our companion church in Tanzania. When Sister Renathe smiles, her face lights up like the sun. She works in the church’s AIDS outreach ministry, seeking out families living with HIV/AIDS and the orphans left behind, who live in isolated villages where hunger is a way of life. Sometimes Sister Renathe provides emergency food. Sometimes she brings very sick people to a simple clinic. One time Renathe brought a bicycle to 14–year–old Denisia, an orphan raising two little brothers. By riding rather than walking two hours to school, Denisia saved enough daylight hours to both grow food and stay in school. But Sister Renathe’s most precious gift is being present in Jesus’ name.

At the end of a day "shadowing" this energetic woman, thinking about burnout, I asked her: "Sister Renathe, in the midst of all this death and suffering, how do you hold onto your hope?"

She was silent for a long moment and finally said, "Well, we are people of faith, aren’t we?" And then she smiled, her face lighting up with a joy that took my breath away — joy in her (our!) relationship with God, joy that energizes us to dance to the music of God’s future in the midst of present suffering.

In the end, Sister Renathe has it right. There is infinite complexity in sharing in Christ’s suffering, being present with those who suffer, and using all we have to bring about the healing, reconciliation, and justice that God wills. But at the same time, it is as wondrously simple as her brief reflection on joy and hope in the midst of suffering suggests: "Well, we are people of faith, aren’t we?"

Lita. Johnson is associate executive director and director for international programs in ELCA Global Mission.