In early April, Chris Rice will end his work as MCC UN Office Director after five years of service. Before that, Chris and his wife Donna served five years as MCC Representatives for Northeast Asia, working in South Korea and guiding MCC’s humanitarian work in North Korea as well. They will be moving from New York City back to their previous home in Durham, North Carolina for the next chapter of life. Chris offers these parting words.
As I sit in MCC’s tenth floor office in New York, looking over at the United Nations building across the street and thinking about the end of my work here, I realize that this place that brings all the nations of the world face to face, friends and foes alike, is needed more than ever. But only if prophetic voices rise in their midst.
Led by leaders of the world’s superpowers, morality is being turned upside down. Might makes right. Seeking absolute power is an absolute good. It is a hard time in our world.
It reminds me of another time when I had trouble finding hope.
It was 2016, I was with an MCC team in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, or DPRK, and for a week we had been traveling across the country visiting staff and children at pediatric hospitals where MCC sent life-sustaining support. At the very same time, tensions between North Korea and South Korea and the US were rising. MCC’s mission was ultimately about what many Koreans yearn for, on both sides: the 70-year wall of hostility coming down. I grew up in South Korea, now there I was in North Korea, keenly aware of the long history of division and distrust. Never before had I felt such hopelessness. The wall of hostility between the two countries seemed to rise and thicken like a great steel tsunami.
It was a cold winter, and our team was staying at a guest house outside Pyongyang. There was a lake outside the guest house, and it was completely frozen, the ice so thick I had seen solitary figures walking across it.
Early one morning I woke up, restless and disturbed. In the darkness of my room, I opened my book for morning prayer. The first Scripture given for the day, a cry of lament from Jeremiah, leapt out like a dagger:
Let my eyes stream with tears night and day, without rest,
Over the great destruction which overwhelms … my people, over her incurable wound …
Why have you struck us a blow that cannot be healed? We wait for peace, to no avail; for a time of healing, but terror comes instead. (Jeremiah 14:17, 19)
For many Korean people over many decades, that cry of lament named the truth of the divide. I looked out the window of my room. My heart felt like the dark and bitter cold I saw outside.
But I kept working my way through the day’s readings and prayers.
And after a few minutes, these words came as an interruption, from the beginning of Luke’s gospel, speaking of the coming Messiah:
Because of the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to shine upon those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.” (Luke 1:78-79)
“The dawn from on high …” As I read those words, I looked out the window. And at that very moment, a ray of light entered my room from above the mountains far across the dark lake. Dawn was breaking.
I couldn’t resist the dawn. I quickly dressed, left the guest house, and walked toward the lake. The ice was still frozen. It was still bitter cold. But light had interrupted the darkness. I walked toward the dawn. I claimed the dawn.
Yes, the walls of hostility were high. No, MCC and no force for healing had the raw power to move the two Koreas toward peace. But, somehow, Luke’s words and the coming of dawn injected me with deep belief that what we had been about that week in North Korea was about a deeper power.
This different kind of power is described in a prayer which has helped guide my work with MCC. It was written in honor of Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, who was murdered in 1980 because of his prophetic voice against his government’s abusive power.
The prayer invites us into the source of Romero’s courage, to “step back and take the long view,” to remember “the kingdom always lies beyond us” and that “nothing we do is complete.” Seeing this wider vision of God’s kingdom at work, we are called to act boldly, to “plant seeds that one day will grow” and to “provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.” Here are the ending words:
We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something and to do it well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’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.
MCC and no agency, church, or force for good has the raw power to transform absolute power. But we do have access to a deeper power to be prophets like this. To act in ways which interrupt the darkness. To provide critical yeast that works beyond us. To plant good seed that one day will grow.
This is the prophetic power I see in our MCC partners who keep me going, whose witness makes it matter for us to have a presence at the UN. It is the power of the Program for Peace and Reconciliation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo who for years, at great personal risk, have gone deep into the forests to persuade armed militia groups to disarm and return to their communities. It is the power of MCC partners in Gaza and Ukraine who provide life-saving support despite being displaced themselves and losing loved ones in the violence. It is the power of the first two recipients of MCC’s Global Peacemaker Award – the Colombian woman who faces threats because of her relentless work to empower young people to choose peace in the midst of violence, and the pastor from Chad who is a national leader in resolving conflicts between Christians and Muslims. It is the power of the Korean leaders I know who courageously plant seed for a new future between North and South.
I have also seen that power across the street at the UN, in diplomats I know who bravely speak up to their ambassadors behind the scenes, who publicly take sides against obstruction of justice, who quietly meet with countries on all sides of conflicts.
Providing yeast and planting good seed is prophetic because it reveals the truth: Might makes right is might without morality. It is strength without sight. Absolute power does not change the standard for virtue – “Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God” (Micah 6:8). Might makes right has destructive power. But acts based in moral truth have ultimate power.
Being people of the dawn doesn’t mean retreating from the challenges. It means actively working toward justice, reconciliation, and social healing from a different logic than right makes right. That is how moral movements for change begin. And this I believe: In Jesus the Messiah, God became flesh, and the “light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5). Because the Word became flesh, so our flesh can reveal the light of that Word.
About a year ago, my wife Donna and I started thinking the time was right to move from New York City onto to the next chapter of life. And now, after ten life-giving years with MCC, my last day is coming too soon.
I always dreamed of living in New York City, and in college I thought I was going to go into politics. Forty years later, I finally got to do both, though hardly in the way I expected. How grateful I am to have planted good seed as a worker in the field of MCC’s ministry, with so many fellow laborers across the world. Their light, the light of moral power, shines in the darkness. It inspires me forward into the next leg of the journey.
Chris Rice is the author of four books including Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace, and Healing. See his website for more about his writing, speaking, and next steps. His Christianity Today article, “The United Nations is a Mission Field” speaks to what Chris learned representing MCC to diplomats from across the world.