Sermons
“THE MISSION OF MUSIC"
THe MISSION OF MUSIC
Text: 1 Samuel 16: 14-23
Pastor Noel Anderson, First Presbyterian Church of Upland
GOD SENDS THE BLUES
Saul was a typical politician—an impressive figure of a man with natural leadership abilities—but he goes sour. Power and ego get the best of him until he becomes a tragic figure. Our text says that God sent an evil spirit to Saul. Hold the phone: God sent an evil spirit? Maybe it’s a mistranslation. The Hebrew says, well, evil spirit. From God. Hmm.
First, remember that Saul had stopped listening to God once he realized he was not God’s number one pick for office. As God’s favor for Saul’s kingship is withdrawn, how else would Saul feel? The absence of God’s favor would be a kind of torment all by itself.
Second, God is not sending a demon. In this text, an “evil spirit” just means an angel of the heavenly court commissioned on a job. That spirit is to impress upon Saul the reality of his distance from God. The “evil” in “evil spirit” is not a description of the spirit’s character, but a job description, perhaps temporary. The spirit is to lean heavily on Saul. Perhaps Saul may yet come to repentance.
Thirdly, God is in charge and provident over all things. We see that God is drawing David and Saul together, and David will be endeared to Saul because of his excellent solo work on the harp.
All this to say that when David played the harp, Saul felt better. Music heals and music improves people.
Martin Luther said: “My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.”
"The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat"
My favorite book title ever. In it, Dr. Oliver Sacks describes the case of a very real “Absent-minded Professor.” Students and faculty thought him quaint, or rather a character, for turning to a bush and speaking to it, or ignoring certain people entirely in one moment while paying them the dearest attention at another. He was a brilliant man, so his indiosynchrasies and peccadillos were overlooked. But his wife was fed up.
She told the doctor (Oliver Sacks) how her husband could go completely catatonic in the middle of a sentence and remain frozen there for 2-3 minutes, and then snap out of it with no awareness of the lapse. She feared his absent-mindedness and Mr. Magoo-ish behavior were symptoms of a deeper issue.
When the professor came in to see Dr. Sacks, he was given a standard reflex test—swiping a key along the sole of the foot. Everything seemed normal enough. The professor answered all the doctor’s questions with no problems, but when Dr. Sacks told him he could put his shoe back on, he held up his shoe and asked, “Is this my foot?” Sacks continued with questions, but the professor grew irritated with the examination, insisting there was nothing wrong with him. As he got up to leave, he reached over to his wife’s head with his hand and grasped it exactly as though he was reaching for his hat. As he tugged, his wife looked at the doctor with that “please kill me” look.
It turns out the professor suffered something called visual agnosia, a neurological condition that makes him unable to recognize objects or people. Oddly enough, they discovered it was only a problem if a person or object was still, at rest. When in motion, there was no problem. This is why he could sometimes recognize students just fine, but otherwise mistake a shrub for student, or his wife for a hat.
His therapy was music. Music is movement and motion, so the professor’s prescription was to sing his life—to have a little song for everything he did that made up his day. A song for getting dressed in the morning, a song for eating breakfast, a song for talking to people—everything, as long as it was attached to music and movement—functioned just fine. No more catatonic episodes, no more Mr. Magoo, no more mistaking his wife for a hat.
His story inspired Michael Nyman to compose an opera of the same name, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, because he was intrigued by the idea of this man’s life having to be turned into music. His life was now, daily, to be tuned like a guitar, and his every behavior imbued with rhythm, melody, and blissful harmony.
In Oliver Sacks words:
Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears – it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more – it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.
Music can do more than soothe our nerves; it can undergird our entire day, helping us to rightly order our minds and emotions. We, too, can turn our lives into song and sing our way through our days. So music can be a critical factor in our spirituality.
LANGUAGE DEEPER THAN WORDS
Listen to Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Music will help dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibilities, and in time of care and sorrow, will keep a fountain of joy alive in you.” Could he not have been talking about the Holy Spirit? Or even of Joy?
As music works on us at deeper levels, it resembles the work of the Holy Spirit. Music speaks without words deeper than language, speaking directly to our hearts and filling them with light and energy.
Bad music—or rather shallow music—never penetrates the surface. It may be fun, but it stays on the skin and has no deeper or lasting impact.
It’s the same with reading Scripture. We hear the Word of God beneath literalism in deeper layers of apprehension. Literalism always fails. The Bible is not a collection of pat answers or rules; it is a conversation between God and humankind. Not everyone who merely reads Scripture reads it correctly. There is a work of the Spirit that must take place in order for the reader to be drawn to Christ. Two people read the same Scripture. One says, “I read about Jesus and gain information about him.” Another says, “This Jesus is the Lord—the Son of God!”
The Bible contains the Word of God. The Word of God, according to Scripture, is Jesus Christ himself. The Bible is God’s Word insofar as it makes witness to Jesus.
There is a rhetorical device called metonymy, where something is described by the thing it contains. If I’m pouring coffee and ask you, “Would you like a cup?” we know what is meant. If I hand you an empty cup you are right to roll your eyes at me. We both know you don’t really want the cup itself, but the coffee it contains. In the same way, the Bible is the means by which we meet and come to know Christ (through the work of the Holy Spirit). The Bible is the vehicle of the Word of God, but not strictly the Word of God in and of itself. The Bible contains and mediates God’s Word the same way a large picture window offers us the garden outside. What good is a window by itself? If you have no opening in the wall, then the window is just glass in a frame, revealing nothing.
It’s possible for people to read the Bible and get nothing. They look only at the frame and the glass. Those who get it are those who read and see the garden drenched in sunlight beyond. And that kind of reading is a gift of the Holy Spirit.
T.S. Eliot speaks of “The word within a word that never speaks a word.”
Music, at its best, runs beneath the surface. It opens chambers in the human spirit that surprise us. When music does its job, we experience magical, mystical charms. We taste beauty in all its mystery. Images of Heaven open up—dreamlike settings and landscapes that water dry souls--and we are swept into that kind of longing that C.S. Lewis calls Joy.
JOY TRANSFORMS US
Joy is that song in our heart that turns our even mundane lives into music. For the Christian, joy is the constant backdrop before which the events of our lives—good and bad—play out. Because of that joy, that music, whether we flourish or suffer, we know the goodness and providence of God make up the bigger, truer, more beautiful reality. In pain and suffering, our hope is intact.
The gift of the Holy Spirit—the one Jesus calls the Counselor, the Advocate, and the Comforter—meets us exactly like good music. It works beneath the surface—often beneath our conscious awareness—working on us, gently kneading our souls into shape. That is how we are sanctified and transformed, which is to say it probably won’t be the result of a lot of conscious self-help work. The deep changes we desire can only be wrought from the inside out, which means we depend upon the Holy Spirit for that work to be completed.
“Music will help dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibilities, and in time of care and sorrow, will keep a fountain of joy alive in you.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Is it any wonder that singing has always been a part of worship? When we sing hymns and praise songs, we are being inculcated by the gospel—steeped in messages written to reach the depths of our hearts.
UNITY IN DIVERGENCE
Finally, our unity in song parallels the mystery of our oneness in Christ. And though one, we remain individually distinct.
As patriots, when we sing the national anthem at a baseball game, we feel a oneness and brotherhood with our fellow citizens. It can warm the heart in the midst of other divisions. This is a shallower version of what happens when we gather for worship and sing hymns and songs of praise. It’s more than just the pleasure of belonging—social conformity—the warmth of the herd and all that; it is part of the remaking of who we are.
When we worship, we each become part of the praise. We may not particularly like all the songs, be we stand dutifully and learn the new tunes, doing our best to follow along and meditate on the words, ultimately making them our own.
What a wonder it is when we fuse our emotions with the message! We rise up in praise and worship, giving utterance to truth and beauty. More than that, we do so in a mystical fellowship with all of our brothers and sisters in faith.
The uniqueness of our own voice is not diminished or lost in being combined into a collective whole, but rather we sing together and are united in spirit and purpose, not absorbed into unity, but composed together, like a bunch of bright, unique blossoms gathered together into a fascinating bouquet.
Our unity in song and spirit is not one of diminishment, which is to say we are not like drops of water lost and dissolved in the ocean. No, we are preserved. Every individual who praises God shines as an individual. The more completely and authentically we praise God, the less we resemble the whole, even as our unity increases.
The song in our hearts, brothers and sisters, is the good news of God’s salvation through Jesus Christ. Our evangelism, simply put, is very much like the music leaders trying to get the rest of us to sing along and put some heart into it. That is the mission of music. †
“BREAKING GOOD"
“BREAKING GOOD”
Text: 1 Corinthians 2: 6-14
Pastor Noel Anderson, First Presbyterian Church of Upland
12 Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God.
BREAKING GOOD
About the title. . .yeah, I made a mistake. I was hoping to play off “Breaking Bad,” but it didn’t pan out as I developed the sermon. I’m sorry, but it happens. We can stretch it by suggesting that all legitimate mission is about “good that breaks through”—and in that sense, mission is “Breaking Good,” but I’m clearly trying to salvage an unsalvageable title. Sorry.
Today, we’re going to look at our text with a few comments. We’ll then consider three aspects of mission, and then finish with two illustrations.
BACKGROUND
As Paul writes to the church in Corinth, remember that the environment was thoroughly pagan. Paul uses the buzzwords of gnosticism and popular paganism to proclaim the all-superior revelation of God in Jesus Christ. The pagan world depended upon secrets and hidden wisdom. With each use of words like “knowledge” (gnosis), “wisdom” (sophia), and “secrets” (mysterion), Paul is ringing their bells—speaking directly to their religious longings. He proclaims that only in Christ, by the Holy Spirit, are the real secrets of life and the cosmos truly revealed:
7 But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.
The Christian no longer seeks those secrets, because the Christian has direct access to the truth in Jesus Christ.
10 these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.
The secrets of the cosmos are no longer mysteries to be sought out and explained because God gives his Holy Spirit which reveals the truth of Christ as the only means of true wisdom, which is the knowledge of salvation over sin and death.
The Church’s mission comes down to this in all its forms and expressions: mission is sharing the God-revealed secret of salvation and life in Christ.
Mission isn’t just repeating information about Jesus, it is essentially three things: presence, witness, and perspective.
MISSION IS PRESENCE
Very simply, mission means showing up.
It’s about being there. Whether in Papua New Guinea, Marera Kenya, Lima Peru, Mexican border towns, Bridges to Home, or our children’s or youth ministries—mission requires boots on the ground and face-to-face interaction. But it is critical to acknowledge that we don’t merely bring ourselves; we bring God, because 0ur presence equals God’s presence.
God can do it without us, of course, but he calls us to function as his hands and feet. We are vehicles of the Holy Spirit in this world. As we show up, we must offer more than just information; we must be bearers of the Holy Spirit offering the very peace and presence of God.
This is the correct understanding of our bodies as “temples of the Holy Spirit.” Our bodies are temples—not as some glorification of our bodies, but as vessels of the Holy Spirit. As Christ is in us, we become the means by which others come to know and experience God.
How exactly does this happen? That is the mystery—the mystery of Witness.
MISSION IS WITNESS
Plenty of churches and missionary organizations have tried to codify and bottle the process by which the Holy Spirit reaches the lost, but we can’t. We depend entirely upon God’s own mysterious working. The Holy Spirit will do whatever it is the Holy Spirit needs to do, despite our thoughts or ideas about anything. We should never “play God” even as God-bearers.
Many people feel inadequate to the task of mission. They should. You and I should rightly feel beneath the task of bearing Christ; otherwise, we clearly don’t appreciate the true scope of what we’re doing.
Beware the overly-confident soldier of Christ. Too much ego ruins the message and misrepresents Christ. The tragic examples of this are too numerous to list.
Rather, the Christian is to show up in humility with some degree of inherent and self-aware inadequacy.
Many folks fear making a hospital visitation to someone sick or dying and not because they fear for their own health. They fear they won’t know what to say, or that they may say the wrong thing, or that they will fail in their witness and misrepresent God. Good! It is right to feel this way. You and I are not sufficient to the tasks! But we bear the Holy Spirit with us, in Whom is our entire trust and power.
I never preach a sermon without sweating bullets—without knowing myself beneath the task of bearing the Word of God. Seriously, it never relaxes, and my thoughts about it never depart from fear and trembling before God.
All mission absolutely depends upon the mystery of the Holy Spirit. We come forth in humility or we do better to stay home.
We do come equipped. We bring the proclamation of the gospel: the good news that Jesus has conquered sin and death for us. We bring faith—our own faith, such as it is. Sometimes, a weak or infant faith is more effective at reaching outsiders than a mature faith.
We also bring endurance, which the Bible calls long -suffering. That’s patience, but long-suffering says it better. The gift of patience and long-suffering is that it dissolves pride and ego. It is critical to mission.
Endurance may be the most underrated virtue in the world; it is perhaps the most important virtue in mission. Keep at it, keep at it, follow through no matter what.
MISSION IS PERSPECTIVE
Perspective is that weird worldview that makes Christians an oddity to the rest of the world. We have been an oddity to the world since the year one—our peculiarity is part of our salt and light. We do not live by the spirit of the world, as Paul says in our text, but we live by the Holy Spirit. We see things differently.
We live by faith, not sight. We not only believe in Jesus, but we trust in Him. We commit and invest who we are and what we have to him. We trust in his providence and his final victory in this world and the next. That is the substance of the Christian perspective, and it makes us peculiar, weird.
LIVING OUT THE TRUST 1 FRANCIS OF ASSISI SICK AS A DOG
One of my favorite pictures of the unique perspective that comes from trusting in God and trusting in God’s providence is the example of St. Francis of Assisi. He started out like most: self-absorbed, self-gratifying, and self-pitying. Christ worked a transformation in his life and he became a model of selfless devotion and prayer. The legends say wild animals would come to him and birds perch on his shoulders without being fed. It was as if something in his character—something so excellent and warm—effected a kind of transformation on everything and everyone around him. But the truth is that Francis was the one who had been transformed and he would be the first to say it.
As the story goes, Francis was very very ill. We don’t know what it was, so I’m just going to ask you to imagine the worst flu or food poisoning you’ve ever had. Your head hurts, your eyeballs ache, and you feel like you might die, or worse, that you won’t. Francis was ill, and he was so concerned that he not infect his brothers in the abbey that he forced himself away—off to the ruins of an old chapel.
Now must of us, when really sick, depend upon others—even if we don’t like to—but Francis wouldn’t burden others. I imagine him creeping his way into a miserable little corner of this ruined chapel with its caved in ceiling. Imagine yourself there, curled up with the chills with one blanket on a stony floor. You start a pathetic little bonfire for light and heat. You look through the roof right at the stars as your head throbs. I think most of us would fall into deep self-pity by this point, but it gets worse.
Next, Francis hears noises—scurrying from the walls and soon around him on the floor—the place is infested with vermin: rats and or mice in fair numbers. Great, right? I would have been praying, “Come on, God—gimme a break—after all, I’m doing for the safety of others!” And then comes the storm: strong winds, torrential rain, and the very earthly picture of misery—alone, sick, and beset by rats and storm-showers in this miserable, broken-down ruin of a building.
But Francis was one whose life had been transformed by Christ. He didn’t whine or complain, he sees the world from the eternal perspective.
Looking at the mice or rats around him in that bleak little chapel, he felt grateful. He had a little congregation and a church to host them in. It is said that he preached the good news to his furry little congregation, and apparently, all external events notwithstanding, he remained full of joy and affirmation.
The words he wrote in remembering that occasion reveal a perspective that can only be called things like weird or bizarre:
To the mice he says:
All creatures of our God and King
Lift up your voice and with us sing
Through the collapsed roof and ceiling he says:
Thou, burning sun with golden beam
Thou, silver moon with softer gleam
O praise Him! O praise Him!
The night-time cold pours in on him. He sings:
Thou rushing wind that art so strong,
ye clouds that sail in heav’n along,
hallelujah, hallelujah!
And as it rains through the ceiling, He sings;
Thou flowing water, pure and clear,
make music for thy God to hear,
hallelujah, hallelujah!
He struggles to re-light his pathetic little fire against the chill, but says,
Thou fire so masterful and bright,
that givest all both warmth and light,
hallelujah, hallelujah
And for the whole scene—the rain, the wind, the sky, the little fire, and the congregation of mice, he proclaims:
Let all things their Creator bless
And worship Him in humbleness
Praise, praise the Father, praise the Son
And praise the Spirit, Three-in-One
O praise Him! O praise Him!
That fire—so “masterful and bright”—is not his little bonfire, nor it is the sun or moon; it is power and presence of God in whom Francis trusts. That masterful and bright fire is one lit from the Christian heart and soul. It ignites when we know Who God is and to Whom we belong in Christ.
That fire is in each one of us, enabling us to share the presence, witness, and transformed perspective of the Holy Spirit
LIVING OUT THE TRUST 2: PASTOR CHANG IN A CHINESE PRISON
A pastor friend of mine, on a missionary trip to Red China, gathered in Shanghai with a large group of Chinese pastors. Particular respect and interest was paid to one pastor in particular—an elderly pastor with otherwise unremarkable features—who, because of his faith, had spent nine years in a concentration camp during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
Between 1965 and 1975, China was undergoing its so-called Cultural Revolution. Its stated goal was to preserve Chinese communism by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society, and to re-impose Maoism as the dominant ideology. During that revolution, churches were shut down or otherwise destroyed, and many pastors were jailed simply for being pastors.
Life in prison is never easy, but when someone like a pastor is labelled as a backwards thinker with misguided loyalties, the treatment was worse than usual. Being abused, struck in the face or on the body with clubs, denied food and most every other natural human right was the norm.
Pastor Chang, in his nine years, was certainly singled out from the crowd. He was a leader, and by his profession one who sought to lead people away from centralized loyalty to Chairman Mao and give their hearts to Jesus instead.
As an act of routine humiliation, the guards consigned Pastor Chang each day to a specialized duty. In the prison courtyard was an open latrine into which all the human waste was dumped—a room-sized pit 10 feet deep—I would say “just imagine the smell” but we shouldn’t dare. Each day, Pastor Chang was thrown into the pit and commanded to dig. He was to dig and deepen this pit into which all of the raw human waste was dumped.
For nearly a decade, this kind Christian man spent most of every day standing waist high or, sometimes, chest high in raw human sewage. Often, he would be digging away in the bottom of the trench while buckets of sewage were poured over him. The good news, said Pastor Chang, is that the smell was so overpowering that few guards ever came near. It was the time when he knew he would not be struck or punched. Nine. years.
My pastor friend, aghast at the details, met Pastor Chang after hearing his story. He hardly knew what to say through the interpreter. What could be said? He simply said, “How awful for you!” But Pastor Chang smiled a big smile.
“Oh, no! Those were my most glorious times with the Lord,” he said. “Whenever I was in the pit, Jesus was with me.” We should not doubt this.
He added, “Furthermore, in that pit I was able to pray and sing hymns out loud.”
“What hymns did you sing?” asked my friend.
“Many, but I had a favorite for my time there. It is called, ‘In the Garden.’”
I have this image locked in my head of sainthood. It is of Pastor Chang in that pit, digging away with a song on his lips and love of the Lord in his heart. Guards are silhouetted in black on the ground above the pit walls with menacing grimaces. Pastor Chang, though he appears to be alone, is working side by side with his Lord and friend. His song is truth:
And He walks with me
And He talks with me
And He tells me I am his own
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known.
Like Francis, Pastor Chang lives a transformed existence. His life was and is a witness. It is worth adding the report that the entire prison population became followers of Jesus, certainly drawn in part by the shining witness of that singing pastor/gardener down in the pit. †
SOME QUESTIONS
- Why isn’t the feeling of inadequacy a bad thing when it comes to mission?
- Name some examples of how ego or pride can ruin an otherwise worthy mission project?
- Above all else, what is it that each Christian brings to the mission field—whatever that field?
- What is it that enabled Francis and Pastor Chang to find such joy in their afflictions?
- Why is patience—long-suffering—a critical and all-valuable virtue in mission?
- What is something you need to keep at for the sake of others?
“PROJECT SUMBA"
“PROJECT SUMBA”
Text:Ephesians 2: 1-10
Pastor Noel Anderson, First Presbyterian Church of Upland
v.10 For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.
PROVIDENCE: Why We Are Here
In the Fall of 1996, I was the brand-new pastor at Michillinda Presbyterian Church in Pasadena. My second Sunday there, after worship, a rather distinguished, professional, Indonesian man pulled me aside on the patio. He said, “When me and my family moved here, we joined this Presbyterian church because that’s what the evangelical churches in Indonesia are. After we joined, we found out there were almost twenty, Indonesian-language churches in the area. I don’t really know why we are here? ” I could tell he was letting me know that with the arrival of a new pastor, this seemed a good time to cut loose and gather with other Indonesians for worship.
I’m a big believer in providence. Providence is God’s foresight and care; God’s plan and provision for his people and world. I was moved to say to him, “Jack, I don’t know why you’re here, either. I don’t really know why I’m here. But God knows, and trust me, there is a reason why you and I are here.” At one level, I just wanted him and his family to stay; I didn’t want to psychologically give him permission to go. But at a deeper level, I really believed it. God had him and I together at little Michillinda for a purpose. Our role was to discover that purpose and walk into it.
Ephesians 2:10 says it beautifully:
For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.
This is God’s providence: that he has created good works out ahead of us and it is our calling to walk into them and fulfill them. That proved itself true sooner than either of us could have expected.
MISSION: Pray for an Unreached People
It was the next mission committee meeting that I challenged the team to find one of the world's "unreached peoples”—that is, a tribe or ethnic group that had never heard the Gospel in their own language. There are several parachurch organizations that can help local congregations connect to the names of such groups, and we started looking for one to call our own. We felt it would be a healthy thing for Michillinda—a church of 120 members—to connect with front line evangelism, if only as a prayer concern. The plan was to locate an "unreached language group" to adopt as a prayer concern.
Jack suggested we considerIndonesia, in part because he is Indonesian, but also due the richness of unreached micro-cultures and people groups there.
Indonesia holds claim to the title of "most Islamic country in the world". 200 million people in Indonesia claim Islam as their faith (I'm led to understand that that's more Moslems that the Arab states combined).) Jack was born on the island of Sumba, so we decided to check there first.
SUMBA STATISTICS
The Island of Sumba:
• Population: 500,000
• Size: 200miles X 100 miles
• 130,000 inhabitants still Marapu worshipers
Jack and I met with Michael Boyland, the Director of the Presbyterian Center for World Missions, who opened up his official "unreached peoples" guide, which revealed eight unreached language groups on Sumba alone! But Jack smiled broadly and gently corrected that figure: "No, there are sixteen." He then proceeded to name these uncharted, unreached language-groups off the top of his head. The director's jaw fell open; he began scribbling these names into the margin beside the little map of Sumba.
We started simply, by writing letters to the Indonesian government explaining our desire to create a sister-church relationship with a congregation in Sumba. In undertaking these advances, we had low expectations. My attitude was: “Let’s try—if they say no, then no big deal—we just keep praying for them.” As it turned out, every door we knocked upon opened to us. Not only that, but like the introduction to Get Smart, several sets of doors opened and a red carpet came rolling toward us. This is one of the ways we knew God was at work.
As it turned out, the “Minister of Religion” for the province of Indonesia including Sumba just happened to be an old classmate of Jack’s. We were amazed. Not only did he approve of a sister-church relationship (a unique one, by the way), but he said he would agree to the arrangement with one condition: that we adopt two churches instead of just one. This turned out to be another miracle of timing. According to Boyland, it was as though we had fired a bullet at a camera aperature only to have it open for the bullet and shut immediately after. it was just six weeks later that Jack’s old schoolmate was removed from his post and replaced by a Muslim Minister of Religion.
We began raising money for Bibles, hymnals, and gospel-tracts—all in Sumbanese. We sent hundreds of each directly to our two sister churches who used them in their outreach. We weren’t sure about what we needed to do next, but God’s timing took care of that.
In 1997, the Asian markets crashed. Food prices went through the r0of. We raised $2500 for a food bank to be based in our two congregations where Sumbans could buy rice at pre-inflated prices. Moneys went back to buying rice and back out to the people. It turns out our $2,500 kept nearly 4000 people fed through a period of months. Boyland later explained to us that this was also miraculous—a modern “multiplication of the loaves”—in terms of some dollars-to-people ratio understood by mission agencies.
Our two little sister congregations became the center of activity, and as people travelled there to buy rice, they also received the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
By February of 1998. they wrote us reporting some 2000 converts to Christ. Our two little congregations had each sprouted 12 new church developments! I received a letter addressed to “Bapa Noel” which apparently means “Father of the Island.” I asked Jack whether this was a good thing. He smiled, ‘Oh, yes!” In truth, he, Jack, was the Father of the Island; I was just along for the ride.
DEATH ON THE PLANE
We planned a trip—five of us (Jack Makonda, Bing Siswanto, Suzanne Reid, Terry Prentice, and me) would represent the church and visit Sumba. We paid to have a copy of the “Jesus Film” translated into Sumbanese and packed a projector with us. I brought a couple decent guitars and extra strings for each congregation. We looked pretty ridiculous in LAX with all our baggage, but we were on a mission from God, and we knew it.
The flight to Taipei takes 11 hours crossing the Pacific. About an hour into the flight, a somewhat nervous-sounding flight attendant came on the PA saying that there was a passenger on board in need of immediate medical assistance. I looked back, but there were three full sections of passengers behind(as well as one upstairs and the first class cabin ahead), but could see nothing. I kept reading my Indonesian phrase book.
After a few minutes, Bing came to my seat with a flight attendant. Bing felt the Holy Spirit calling him (and me) to help. We made our way back to the very back of the plane where a flurry of flight attendants buzzed around the rear passageway between aisles.
As it turns out, a 27-year-old man had committed suicide by strangulation in one of the lavatories. An open body bag lay across the rear center seats, and people all around were looking at me with sad, helpless faces. The flight attendants were no less shaken, and it occurred to me that people on a plane expect stewardesses to magically transform into nurses at the moment of a medical emergency. Oddly enough, they looked at me as though I were the doctor and they were awaiting my orders. Thank God, there was a real doctor caring for the dead man, who was presently out of view.
There were nearly 40 Chinese members of the same family traveling together—they all had blue windbreakers on—the young man was one of them. I looked around for anyone who might be crying, or who might just offer me that kind of eye-contact that says please help me. Bing located the family patriarch and we asked him if we could pray for him or anyone in his family. "No," he said, "we're Buddhists." I told him we would pray nonetheless. Bing and I returned to where Terry and Suzanne were seated and the four of us took hands and prayed there.
We prayed for the family members, for the young man, and for all the passengers who seemed anxious and bewildered. My last prayer was "Lord, we are your servants here, use us however you will." JUST THEN, a stewardess told me she needed help in the back. Bing and I were needed to help bag the dead man and carry him through two, large compartments of passengers and sit him in a lavatory in one of the passageways near the front of the plane. Bing, myself, and another man (I think he was the doctor) carried him through the plane in a pathetic procession through the narrow aisle amid gasps and horrified looks.
For the moment, the plane felt like the sanctuary of a church. We walked the body down the aisle as all the people looked on. How many times have I done this before? I was totally at peace with what we were doing, which surprised me. It occurred to me that a pastor was exactly what the plane needed at that time. This was the poor man's funeral service, and the congregation haplessly captive—seatbelts remained fastened—for the ceremony. God had answered our prayer to be used, and this service, though morbid, was my form of worship for the moment.
As we recovered from the moment, several flight attendants came to express their appreciation. Bing and I were bumped up to First Class(not normal first class, mind you, but James Bond First Class, with huge seats, four feet apart, that fully recline. I still didn't sleep.
FLIGHT TO SUMBA: That was close!
We arrived in Denpassar, Bali and planned to leave the next morning for the one-flight-per-week to Sumba. We spent the morning in money changing. It was like a parole hearing. I signed my name and passport number 90 times only to have them tell me that my signature had to match the signature on my passport (which had my full middle name signed, something I never do), so I had to re-sign all the checks to include my full name. We are pressed for time. The only bank in Denpasar that would exchange our American Express traveler's checks wouldn't do so until 11:00am. Our Flight was 12:30. We were in the bank until 12:10.
One of the most striking sensations was that of sitting in the front seat of a taxi on the "driver's" side. When we arrived by taxi at the airport, everyone was waiting for us. They waved us along as we ran through the airport. We jumped onto a shuttle that drove us down the tarmac to the plane. The props were spinning. We quickly climbed up the steps and the doors closed. We were taking off before any of us had caught our breath.
Suzanne said, “Wow! That was close? What if we would have missed this flight?” “Oh ye of little faith,” I said, “Why do you doubt? We are on a Mission from God!” This was funny because I was more stressed out than anyone else.
SUMBA: The Mission of God
We toured more than a dozen of the new church developments. Our host churches—in Kawangu and Prai Paha—had built new worship buildings (we had also raised $6000 for these). They wrote to us asking permission to name the buildings: 1.) Michillinda, and 2.) Pasadena. They liked the sound of the names and meant to honor us by them.
Each of the new churches (total of 24) were housed in makeshift bamboo huts the size of one of our transepts. Everywhere we went, we asked the same questions:
- How many people are attending services? The answer was never less than 200. I asked, “Where do you put everyone—this hut only holds about 50?” They said, “People stand around the building and worship from outside.”
- How many are you preparing for baptism? The answer was always between 60 and 200.
- How many in your community remain unreached? “Unreached” could include Catholics, Muslims, or Marapu worshipers.
Everywhere we went, the church leaders had precise numbers ready for us.
One particularly remote village, out on the edge of the island, was especially impressive. The church leader could have walked into Harvard Divinity School and not looked a bit out of place. When I got to question 3, he answered, “With those now preparing for baptism, that makes everyone.” Imagine: every single member of that community a follower of Christ with none left over!
AFTERMATH: Not without emptiness
A couple years later, I moved to a new call in Bakersfield. Where are those Sumba churches now? How have they grown? I’m sad to say I don’t know. We have lost touch and I can only pray that others have been called to pick up the mantle there.
But as I have been called here to Upland, I have an itching in my heart for a similar project. Our Serve Team does excellent work with our international projects in Peru, India, and Kenya. Even so, we are praying for a new project—one that would awaken the imaginations of new folks and younger generations. I, like them, long for all Christians to get a taste of that miraculous flow when you are drawn into a work of God.
God is truly at work in our world, and as we long to become part of God’s life, our ears and hearts are open to be called and deployed.
O Lord, where would you have us serve next? Where and how may we step forward in faithfulness? What doors are you readying to open? We know You have prepared good works before us for us to walk into and fulfill. Lead us, call us, send us; we are Yours. †
SOME QUESTIONS
- How and when have you experienced the calling of God?
- What natural resistances did you—or do you—feel at such a call?
- What is the difference between God’s call and one’s personal, well-intentioned ambitions?
- Why is it a little scary to pray that God may lead us to do something huge?
- Considering Ephesians 2:10, can you see how God sets good works before you in order that you may walk into them?
- If not, why not? What is the alternate perspective regarding one’s life events?
- How can we prepare ourselves to see these works ahead of us?
- How is praying for a mission different from praying for our own needs? ss