Sermon Transcript for September 15, 2002
By Rev. Dan Sinkhorn
Will you pray with me? "Oh, God, continue to make this a holy time now through your spoken word. May everything that is said be according to your will. Seal in the hearts of your people your will only so that you will be glorified. Amen." I don’t often question Mike’s wisdom; he’s pretty sharp. But I certainly questioned the wisdom of asking me to bring the message this morning after I traveled 25,000 miles and my body thinks that is twelve hours from now and I should be in bed. But he’s pretty sharp and I have a feeling that this is the right thing to do because I want to share some thoughts with you about my trip to Kazakhstan while there are some important things that are very fresh.
From car windows, airplane windows, airport windows, from my eyes as I walked, I have seen Indianapolis, Atlanta, Richmond, Washington, New York, Halifax, Dublin, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Frankfort, Warsaw, Minsk, Moscow, tens of thousands of miles of empty plains, called steps, Halmaiki, Karaganda, Mikaduke, Molydioisny and back again so I’m a little tired! In all of those places there is the spirit of God. A week ago today, about twelve hours sooner than now, I shared in worship with believers in the little town of Mikaduke. And I told them that in about twelve hours the same Holy Spirit that felt present to me there would be present in your worship here. And now that I’m back, and knowing that twelve hours ago they were worshiping in their little place in the Spirit of God, I am certain that I am right because the Spirit of God is here in this place. Amen!
It’s remarkable to think that I have traveled all of those miles and only seen a small portion of God’s creation on earth. Only a small segment of what God sees and what God cares about. I guess I’ll begin by showing you a couple of pictures. I have many but I haven’t really had a chance to get my act together on that. I want to show you one right now from that worship service that I was in just a week ago. This is a picture of their church in Mikaduke. And if you look carefully in the background you can see that it is literally a hole in the wall kind of facility. Property is easy to come by there, but most of it is in pretty poor condition.
A colleague of mine that traveled with me there was given the privilege of bringing the sermon and I was given the last minute and somewhat unenviable privilege of asking for the offering. And this is me speaking through the translator, Vitali, giving my personal testimony and then asking for the offering. I swear I didn’t plan this. But God knows what He is doing because you’ve already been talked to a little bit about giving. How would you like to ask a room full of people whose average income is about $100 a month to give to the work of the church especially when you know how rich you are by comparison? I did some quick praying and basically said to them these things that I know to be true about our giving—God gave it first. God gave us everything He had to give just because He wanted to. And whatever we give back to God we give in response to His love. We don’t give it because we feel that it will help us earn His favor. He’s already shown us His favor. He gave His Son who died on the cross to pay the debt for our sins. He brought His Son to life from the grave, gave Him back to us, and He will send His Son again to us. He did all of that before we ever asked. So when we give, we give because we just can’t help it. Because we love God so much we just can’t help it. Now this is what I said and this is what Vitali translated into Russian. And I watched as those people gave literally thousands of tengay, which is a currency there. One tengay is about equivalent to a quarter of a penny. But they gave on the average about one-quarter of their income for the work of the church because they understood what God had done for them.
Show the next picture. It’s the only other one I have for you today. It’s kind of a favorite of mine. I want to introduce you to a few of my newest friends. These little children are meeting in what is called a coffee house in Mikaduke.
They call it a coffee house because religious organizations have found it’s better not to put religious names on their meeting places because then the government gets a little agitated. So they call it a coffee house, but the children know what it really is. In fact they don’t drink a lot of coffee over there; they drink lots of tea. These are street children. These little guys go to school and then come to the coffee house for the only hot meal they’ll probably get all day. And they come for a lot more. For you see, they are street children by choice. In Kazakhstan if ones parents are found to be depraved, that is a legal status, then the children are taken away from the parents and placed in state orphanages. And that depravity is brought on by alcohol abuse, drug abuse and crime--things that are all way too common there, leftovers from the Soviet era. And the children don’t want to be separated from their parents, no matter how bad they are. And so some of them have figured out that the best thing to do is to go to school and pretend like everything is okay and then go to the coffee house and hang out. Before the coffee house they would hang out in any place they could. The winters there are long and cold and wet. Temperatures will stay around 25 to 30 below zero with constant winds for months during the winter. And these children walk the streets. And so what they did before the coffee house, they tried to find some nice, dry hole in the ground somewhere. All of the heating is provided by steam pipes from a central location to all of the homes and buildings; the children a lot of times would find garbage scraps and pile them over the steam pipes and then lay underneath for warmth.
I don’t mean to break your heart but you should have been there. You can’t help but have your heart broken. Do you see the little boy behind my head there on the right in the mostly white shirt but with a little bit of a red stripe on the bottom? His name is Seragay. Seragay’s parents were depraved and so he spent some of his time anyway at his grandmother’s house and she wasn’t much better because one day in a drunken fit of rage she threw scalding water on Seragay. And hidden under his clothing are horrific scars.
There is a young surgeon there that I have become incredibly impressed with. Dr. Mark they call him. This is one young man with a tremendously promising career here in the United States. A brilliant surgeon so brilliant that he passed the Russian language exam that provides for certification to do surgery the first time he tried it and scored so highly they not only awarded him certification to do surgery as the only licensed Western surgeon in Central Asia, but he scored so highly they also awarded him teacher status. He can teach surgery in any of their schools. And yet Mark lives there with his wife and three children on next to nothing. And Mark examined little Seragay that day and when he came out of the back room where he looked him over he told me that Seragay’s scaring was so bad that it’s good that he wasn’t born a little girl because as his body developed in to maturity he would be so horribly deformed that he wouldn’t be able to stand himself. And he said there’s not much I can do about most of them but Seragay’s got a place on his arm that has healed so that his arm won’t bend, it won’t extend out straight any more, and he says I can fix that. The only problem is Seragay’s a street child and as soon as I fix that and put a cast on it, it will never heal. And then he looked at me and he said, "I guess Seragay will just have to come and live with me and my family for a few weeks until he’s healed." Dr. Mark could easily be making tens of thousands of dollars here with his skills but instead he’s going to perform his surgery on little Seragay.
The medicine is very backward there. Soviet era medical training is extremely limited because they just didn’t want to hear anything the outside world had to say. And so the doctors there are pretty ignorant but they are not too willing to admit it. And poor Dr. Mark has more to do than he knows what to do with. And he needs equipment and he needs help.
I held little Seragay on my lap for a while. The fact is when I sat down and said I want to get my picture taken with you guys, these kids literally piled on top of me. And I don’t think I’ve ever loved being clobbered so much. But after the rest of them went their separate ways, Seragay hung around because he was going to have his little examination. And I sat down on the couch next to him; and he crawled over on my lap, and I held him for a while and I talked to him. He didn’t understand anything I was saying but I just told him how much I loved him and how concerned I was for him. And one of the Russian ladies that provides the meals came over and through the interpreter said to me that I was giving Seragay something he’s probably never had in his life--the gentle voice and the gentle touch of a man. Seragay’s never had a man hold him and tell him that he’s loved and touch him gently. That’s all I had to give really.
It’s painful when you have your heartstrings tugged like this, isn’t it? Believe it or not right here in Franklin, Indiana the same needs exist. There are people everywhere that just need a soft voice, a soft touch. And men there’s a lot of them that need to know that men can be gentle. How can we speak of God our Father when the only father’s they’ve known have been wicked, pain inflicting men? I digress. In Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 1, Verse 8… You’ve heard the Great Commission and most of you refer to Matthew 28. And you hear many people recite from memory, "Go in to all the world and baptize in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit." But the same commission as it is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, not as often repeated, says, "But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." That says a little bit more. And I just want to review that for a second if I could. I want to go from back to front. This is, after all, one of the finest examples of a mission giving church that I’ve ever encountered and I praise God for your generosity especially as you give beyond the way that you serve the local church and the local community. But let’s review for a minute.
Do we serve as witnesses to the ends of the earth? Well, we do a pretty good job I would say because we send lots of money to missionaries and to missions around the world. How about Samaria? Do you know what Samaria is in this context? When Jesus spoke these words to the Jewish believers in that time he was saying to them, "Go to the place that you would prefer not to go. To a place that is hostile and in your mind dirty and unpleasant to people that you think very little of. People whose lifestyles and choices you don’t approve of. Go there." How are we doing? There are Samaria’s around the world. I’ve certainly seen a few of them in the last two weeks. But there are Samaria’s in Franklin as well—places we would rather not go, people we would rather not have anything to do with. But Jesus says we are to be his witnesses there too.
How about Judea? That for us would be like Indiana, the Midwest, maybe even the United States. Have we witnessed among our national community? And then, finally, Jerusalem—Franklin-- Johnson County. How are we doing here? I submit while I did not intend to make this a stewardship sermon, I swear I didn’t, but it is your giving to the local church, it is our drive to fulfill our budget as we prayerfully prepared it, that you can begin to make your witness known here in our Jerusalem--Franklin. Are you witnessing in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria and throughout the world? I have watched saints in the last two weeks who appear to have sacrificed everything. But if you ask them, and I’m speaking of American missionaries, Australian missionaries, British missionaries, German missionaries but I’m also taking about Russian and Kazak missionaries—people who didn’t even know Christ a couple of years ago and didn’t even know anything remotely close, they make tremendous sacrifices it seems. But if you ask them about that they’ll tell you they’ve never had a better time in their life and they’ve never felt richer. I can certainly identify with that because it seemed in the beginning that Laura and I and the kids had made tremendous sacrifices to enter in to the ministry of pastoral leadership and yet it doesn’t feel to bad. Ten years ago when I had what seemed like a lot of stuff and money I never dreamed, I … further than that. How do you say that something never entered your mind and didn’t even have the possibility of entering your mind? That’s how I felt as I was flying back for the thirty hours or so that it took to get home just the other day. What day is this? You’re laughing but my wife is over there going, "Sunday" because she knows I really don’t know what day it is. But I thought on the way back, "Wow, Dan, look what you just did! What an adventure." And believe me, it wasn’t a fun trip; it was work. In fact it’s the most fulfilling work I’ve done in a long time and believe me when I say it’s been pretty fulfilling up until now. So how is it that I ended up here doing this when ten years ago it was the furthest thing from my mind? It happened because I gave everything I had to give to God and promised to just keep doing that.
While I was in Kazakhstan I had my most fundamental core beliefs affirmed because I saw how it is relationships and love that comes first and you can only give that authentically if you have given and received from God all that there is. I noticed that, when I think of Seragay, that if you just love people wholeheartedly with all you have to give in the imitation of the love of God, sometimes you don’t have to say a word about the Gospel. You don’t have to worry about whether your exegesis is good or whether you have memorized the Gospel presentation in three different languages. You don’t have to worry about any of that because through the touch of a hand, through the evidence of your complete commitment and self-sacrifice, there’s the witness.
In Paul’s letter to the Colossians, in his greeting he says something that I want to share with you. And I want to share it from Eugene Peterson’s, The Message, because I like this language. Paul says, "The lines of purpose in your lives never grow slack tightly tied as they are to your future in heaven, kept taut by hope." I met people over there in Kazakhstan who had, what it seemed like to me, nothing. And for that reason they held on for dear life to their line to heaven because for them it was like dangling over an abyss.
I want you to know that every believer, wherever they are in the world, has a story to tell to the nation. I want to close with this little story. On September 11 at 7:45 p.m. we were in the middle of a farewell dinner for the four of us who traveled over there and we paused to pray because it was 8:45 in the morning in New York City. And when we finished with our prayerful pause we sang spontaneously "America the Beautiful" and something really remarkable happened. We were in a little community center kind of a private meeting place and the caterer supplying our food was an old, Russian gentleman. And while we were singing "America the Beautiful" for no reason that we could expect, we heard piano accompaniment coming from another room and it was perfectly tuned with our singing. And then when the music finished we prayed and gave thanks and as we got ready to sit down we noticed that there were other people in the room. All of the other guests in the establishment, the owner, and his staff were all standing in the room praying with us. The owner had tears flowing down his face and he said to us in Russian in a broken voice, "I played the piano with you. I prayed with you because my heart aches for you, for your suffering, and I just wanted to share in this moment with you." He had a story to tell the nation and we thought we were the missionaries! And that’s how it really is.
So we’ll just stand with our brothers and sisters all over the world who have been united with us through God’s grace and mercy and sing that "We’ve A Story to Tell to the Nations".
E-mail Comments to: Reverend Dan Sinkhorn