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NEWSLETTER Your e-mail address:

Greetings!

by Alexa Smith, JH Associate for Presbyteries

We can turn to Matthew 13: 1-16 in the harvest season, when the world is preparing stocks for barer times and saving seeds for next year’s crop.

In the discourse that Jesus is launching into here in Matthew, he starts out talking about seeds. About a sower tossing seeds into his field. About where to plant and what kind of crop to expect, given that the ground is rocky or scorched or thorny. But it’s all a metaphor, really, for souls. It is about souls who are trying to find the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but, they cannot see what is right in front of them. They can’t hear what is being said. And they don’t feel in their hearts that something has gone terribly awry. They just bumble along, paying no attention to what is happening in the world around them, stuck in a stupor, only half-awake and barely aware.

But to the disciples, Jesus says: Blessed are your eyes, for they see. Your ears, for they hear.

So it is the disciples he’s counting on to latch onto the Word and to spread it around so it sprouts up thick and fast and feeds those who’ve been starving for it until now. He says that we can’t pretend that life is alright when it isn’t. And we shouldn’t even try, rather we need to ask ourselves how we’ve stayed so long asleep?

Which is why in Joining Hands we’re trying hard to look and to listen to the world about us. We’re awakening ourselves – and anyone else that will listen to us -- in Latin America, in the Middle East, in the United States, in Africa and in South Asia to wrestle with what went wrong with our food systems and why it is causing havoc in the world. Too much food in one place. Too little in another.

This is how Joining Hands has helped grow a movement with a big legislative push and the creation of a new Joining Hands community:

• The Energy Security Through Transparency Act S.1700 was introduced into the Senate by a five-member bi-partisan coalition and it is expected to be introduced imminently into the House of Representatives. There, it will be called the Extractive Industries Transparency Act. Both aim to curb corruption, stop human rights abuses and introduce transparency into the machinations of the extractive industries here and abroad. Joining Hands is working now in nearly thirty presbyteries to speak to the bill, which holds potential for enabling people to redirect millions into education, health care and infrastructure to reduce poverty rather than be siphoned off into corrupt purposes.

  The Joining Hands’ push originated with our Cameroonian partners of Relufa, and was catalyzed by the PCUSA joining the international Publish What You Pay coalition. The campaign was embraced as one of the global JH campaigns at the International Event in Orange.

• Two presbyteries – Giddings-Lovejoy and Cascades – are organizing Joining Hands networks and other key presbyteries around advocacy for the Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment Act of 2009 H.R. 3012.
  The bill aims to expand Congressional oversight of trade acts, replaces a fast track and pushes for greater environmental and human rights concerns abroad and to ensure the creation of quality jobs in the U.S. The impetus for the work came to Giddings-Lovejoy through its Peruvian partners who are researching the impact of the present U.S. trade agreement with Peru.

• A new network is emerging in the United States, partnered with peasant farmers in Haiti who want to better control their own food supply and have organized their own network.

  Founding members of the Haiti JH network

  They are pushing the government for a moratorium on jatropha production, a plant used in the manufacture of diesel fuel which many are touting as a cash crop with short-term income potential. But farmers say they’d rather see Haiti’s arable land used for food production to feed themselves and their families rather than cultivate a product for corporate export. The U.S. network of churches is non-geographic, a new approach for us.

  Dalits on rubber plantation in Chengara, Kerala making a statement about the right to land.

• Joining Hands-Sacramento is celebrating that Nestle is abandoning its plans to build the largest water bottling plant in the country in McCloud, drawing upon Lake Shasta. Folks in Sacramento stood alongside residents to help restore the community’s control over its water, a concern that Joining Hands-India shares.

  Further, landless Dalits in Kerala, a state in southern India, won a two-year struggle to obtain promised land for their families by pitching makeshift tents in a symbolic takeover. The government has announced that package houses will be built for 1432 families. Chethana stood in solidarity with the campaign and visited the site to offer support.

Land to grow food. Control over one’s food. Transparency to raise living standards. Access to water. All are daunting tasks, but who better than us to be about the work of securing food for people’s lives? Call it whatever you want, a parable or a fact, the Scripture says that we all came from a garden, lush, delicious and nutritious. Our planet is even at home celestially in a galaxy called the Milky Way. This is where God first breathed life into two tiny beings, and then there we were. And it was very good. There were seeds of every variety put there and God says we should have them for food – for us, for every bird and creeping thing.

You might say care for the food system, then, is in our DNA. And it is certainly a calling in faith. Gardens and table spreads are what we do best as Christ calls the world to commune. For we have eyes to see and ears to hear and hearts to take it all in. So that we may all act together in God’s good name to turn over the soil of this world and plant the seeds that are a gift to us from the beginning of time for the healing of the world.