Dan's Thoughts

Vision #28 - November 6th, 2006

Last night, I watched Saving Private Ryan for the first time. My friends had asked me to see it when it came on the big screen but I was just not at a place in my life at the time in which I was ready to see a lot of violence and bloodshed. Both Trish and I had uncles who fought in World War II and in fact, Trish’s uncle was killed during the invasion of France on D-day. I felt that it was important to us to face what those soldiers had experiences as they fought to liberate Europe from fascism and to preserve Western Civilization.

Saving Private Ryan is not the product of a horror movie screenwriter’s twisted imagination. It is rather an imaginative summery of the sacrifices actually made by hundreds of thousands of soldiers, most of them only a few years older than puberty. The one’s who died made a sacrifice that is immediately obvious. What is less obvious are the sacrifices that those who lived through the terror and who returned to their families and communities. My Uncle Benjamin returned and lived until 1962 but in the end, it was still the war that killed him. Alton Young, a member of our church who served in the Pacific theatre told me a few months ago; “none of us should have seen what we saw; it made it awfully difficult to live normal lives with those whom we loved.”

So the living, those who returned to their families, friends and society, paid a terrible price on our behalf, perhaps as great as those who ended their existence on battlefields far from home. In our superficiality, we tended to noticed only their gruffness and their detachment or their lack of desire for any sort of conflict or their inability to control anger or whatever other kind of scars that those early encounters with death, destruction, cruelty and despair had left upon their being. We were not always able top remember that these men had saved our lives at an awful price and that they were living testimonies to courage and dedication.

We owe so much to those who deal with the raw unpleasant realities of a fallen world. Policemen and emergency room doctors, firemen and psychiatrists, undertakers and nursing home attendants – all these people serve us in ways that too often gradually erodes their sense of self and dignity. It is well known that psychiatrists face an increased danger of falling into the very madness they treat and that if policemen are not careful, they can slowly absorb the criminal’s vocabulary and cynicism that they fight every day. Those who have never experienced life on the edge of polite society, out where evil gets raw and where the social lubrication of courtesies and polite banter give way to crude survival often have difficulty understanding how those encounters change a person’s mannerisms and patterns of thought.

Soldiers in the midst of conflict often do wrong things. They can make bad judgments and kill innocent people. Unlike the theatrical depictions of war made in a more innocent time, soldiers often go into battle shaking, crying and even soiling themselves. We grew up watching John Wayne, who in actuality never experienced real war, walking tall and proud into gunfights without a speck of fear or anxiety. The truth is, things like right and wrong and courage and fear get confused when a man must make dozens of decisions about life and death within seconds as bombs are destroying his hearing and as the blood and body parts fly through the air that he is trying to breathe.

You will forgive me, I hope, for using this analogy of bloody conflict to describe the effects of living life as soldiers of the cross. Missionaries, like some of the other professions I have mentioned tonight, live on the front lines. Despite the romantic myths to the contrary, missionaries are usually not more spiritually mature than others and they are not inherently better people. Neither are they good in every way or at every minuet. Actually, missionaries can be petty. They can squabble with their colleagues about the most trivial of matters. They can get lazy. They can even resent and detest the cultures to which they are called. None of these are good things but those of us who have served in missionary work have witnessed that they happen from time to time.

Like all battlefields, the mission field is full of fraud, power hungry and arrogant men, gossip and intrigue. It is, in other words, full of all the stuff of human life in a fallen world. And yet, for all of that, we also know that some of the greatest men and women who have ever drawn breath in this world have been missionaries. I have known men and women who lived most of their lives in what others judge as obscurity and deprivation who could easily have been add to that list of people that Hebrews chapter eleven describes as “those for whom the world was unworthy.”

Ron Manus was a Wycliffe missionary who spent his adult life learning a language spoken only by 500 people in the Amazon jungle. I was with him the day he was riding the boat down the Amazon into Iquitos to celebrate. He had just concluded his translation of the Gospel of John and told me as we approached the city that he had experienced the greatest joy of his life as he read in his adopted language these words, “I suppose that if all Jesus had said or done were to be written, the worlds of worlds could not contain them but these are written that you might have life that more abundantly.”

This unknown Wycliffe missionary was a hero to me. But I knew he was already unfit for life outside the jungle. For he was not really a part of the tribe where he lived but the world outside had already passed him by. So he had no home except for the one not made with hands.

I won’t bore you with stories about my father, who gave away his life’s savings building church buildings in the Andes. You wouldn’t recognize the names of people like Lewis Morley, who drug his crippled legs across the mountains and jungles of Colombia to found churches of enormous size even in those days. You would relate less to names like those of Felipe Ramache, a Quechua-speaking Ecuadorian highlander who was like a servant to our family and who preached through the mountains of Ecuador when there were no church buildings, no salaries and very little food. He is now trapped in a body bent over with arthritis and severely beaten by the raves of stroke but his eyes still dance. These were all real people. I often hear their voices in my sleep; their teachings guide my steps as I attempt to be a pastor to the people I serve. I have no doubt that they will be some of the ones who meet me when I cross the chilly waters of the Jordan.

I could name dozens more of the missionary heroes I have known. To me they are stars and celebrities; to you they would be mere names. I can tell you though that they were not angels. Not one of them were any thing more than common people trying to be obedient to their Lord. Molly Thompson knew more grief than any one person should ever experience but she was incapable of being serious. In a very tense board meeting between the national officials of the Colombian Church and the officials of our denomination in North America, as every one in the room stood to honor the General Superintendent of our church, Molly slipped a whoopee cushion into the seat in which he was about to sit. It became quite impossible for him to maintain any kind of ecclesiastical dignity after making the noise he made at that auspicious moment!

After services in which we baptized hundreds, the old English missionaries would make tea and tell funny stories like that. None of the stories were pious or holy; they were all about silly or even obscene things that had happened in their life’s work. Then they would prepare to go back to their work of danger, isolation and hardship. They knew that they couldn’t really go home to North America or England because their experiences had made them too eccentric and left them too far out of step to fit back in. So they loved one another, even when they fought. And the ones who survived were always funny. The real serious ones didn’t make it. They laughed about dysentery. They laughed about almost getting killed.

My Dad and I were once stopped on a little mountain road in the Andes by frightened fanatical and drunk villagers. A man stuck his head into the jeep and demanded, “Are you the people who don’t believe in the Mother of God?” Suddenly in my terror, I shouted out ‘are you serious? The mother of our Lord? She is blessed among women! Blessed is the fruit of her womb, Jesus!”

“Ahh, go ahead,” he said, “You must not be those Protestants we are looking for after all.”

As we drove off, my father said, “Well, son, I’m not sure you have the makings of a martyr.” We laughed about it for days.

So Pastor Hardwick and me thank you for being with us for these days of conference. We hope you will feel free to be yourselves. We know that you are God’s special friends and we want our children to know you. We know that you don’t quite fit in sometimes and we are glad you don’t. You remind us that we are all passing through cultures to which none of us fully belong. You remind us that there is a war going on. You remind us that we owe our very faith to the likes of you. Most of all, you remind us that ordinary people can become heroes and that indeed, those are the only kinds of people who can.

Dan