"Missions - The Touch of the Master"
Sermon Transcript for April 25, 2004
Scripture Reading: Matthew 8:1-3
By Rev. John Eisenberg
I’d like to bring you greetings in the name of our Bishop who is the one in charge of the Methodist Church in Paraguay. He is an interesting character. He is one of the well-rounded people. He is a musician; a very good musician. He has a voice that is a deep, resonant voice. It’s wonderful to hear. But first, and most of all, he loves the Lord. And he’s had a real impact on people here who don’t know Christ and also pastors in the church helping the church fulfill the role that it is suppose to. It’s a real joy to bring you greetings in their name; and the name of his first lady, Barbeta. Our church now in Paraguay is very young, about 15 years old going into its 16th year. We have about 34 different churches scattered around the nation. I want first of all to bring you greetings in the name of all the pastors and the lay people—the people who are involved in the church in Paraguay. I’m sure they would want me to extend their greetings to you.
Before we begin, let’s bow our heads for a moment of prayer. I would like to share with you out of Matthew, Chapter 8, versus 1-3. I would like to do this in Spanish for two or three different reasons--one of them being, that’s to remind you that our missionaries overseas, often we are not ministering in our own language. There are days, sometimes four or five days in a row, that I won’t speak a word of English. I’ll be speaking Spanish the whole time. And, needless to say, there are times that I fall into bed and I’m pretty tired, mentally, from having to be thinking another language all the time. And I even have the same experience here occasionally where my mind is very quick into Spanish and I can’t think of any English that quite sums things up. Sometimes I have the reverse problem.
Want I want to talk about this morning is “Missions—the Touch of the Master”. And in this story we see how Jesus was always very wonderful about being able to see the deepest need in a situation and touch that need first. He could always tell what was on a certain person’s heart and usually would fulfill that as well. And I just want to share that with you this morning. I am hoping you have your pew Bible so that you can follow along in English. Matthew, Chapter 8, Versus 1-3: “When Jesus came down from the fill, large crowds followed him. Then a man suffering from a dreaded skin disease came to him, knelt down before him, and said, ‘Sir, if you want to, you can make me clean.’ Jesus reached out and touched him. ‘I do want to,’ he answered. ‘Be clean!’ At once the man was healed of his disease.”
In this story, we see Jesus’ great love for people in His way of recognizing their needs and touching those needs. Remember in the days of Israel, when you had a leper, these people are people who are considered unclean. As a matter of fact, if you turn your minds back to Exodus when people are leaving from Egypt, one of the curses that fell upon the Israelites, or at least on Miriam for having gone against Moses. So you see, to have leprosy was one of the worst things that a person could have in those days. Imagine if you were a person walking down the road had to be crying out the whole time, “Unclean, unclean!” so people would move away from you and give you a wide berth. So here we had a man who had this terrible affliction. He came to Jesus and knelt before him and said, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.” It’s one of the most beautiful examples, to me, of our Lord and His great love for us—the love of the Father. And as He stretched out His hand to touch the untouchable, to be that very direct connection between God and those of us who suffer from whatever infirmity you might have. And one of us is to be touched by the Master.
So in missions, one of the great responsibilities and joys we have is to do that very thing—to be the touch of the master in the needs of the world. I would like to share with you some of the ways in which we are trying to do that in Paraguay. My wife, Colleen, and I were invited to come here to work originally with the Toba Indians to help them to find some way of bridging the gap between being hunters and gatherers which they had been for who knows how long into a more modern society. Imagine if you will people who are normally use to going out into an arid, kind of dessert area, and building lean-to structures with a piece of plastic over the top and hunting for about a month. When they manage to find something and kill it, usually they eat it. Or if they have some extra, then they will try and sell it on the roadside. They will also look for roots and berries and other things which they can eat while they are out there. They do not have much to be found these days. People who look at our display out there notice the armadillo. The armadillo for them is not just, you know, a nuisance. For them it is one of their best sources of food these days. They are not able to find the larger game that they have in the past. And the humble little armadillo provides them with something to eat.
When I began working with the Toba’s it was very interesting. Our Education Officer said, “If you are going to work with the Toba’s, you will work and they will watch.” Now I wasn’t very encouraged about that. There was so much needing to be done in the church there that I thought, “Well, I’ll find something else to do then. I’ll just avoid that problem.” But by God’s grace, there was a work teams came down who had compassion for the Toba’s and helped to build some houses for them. And construction being my background, I worked along side them. And I found that amazingly enough there were some people who really wanted to work. Young men—they were there each day and working faithfully, working hard spending the whole day in the heat of the day. And so I thought, well maybe I just received some bad advice. And so I’ll check it out. And so I approached these men and I asked them if they’d be interested in being part of setting up a carpentry program. They were really excited. And we got together and we got some palm trees, a particular hard type of palm tree, and made a frame then put up some tin roofing. And that’s how I intended to leave it. I thought with the Toba’s being used to being out in the open all the time; I’ll just leave it open so the air can blow through. But then the young pastor friend that was working with me said, “We’ve got a problem. The Toba won’t know to stay in the carpentry shop. They’re going to wander off into the houses nearby. People might be a little upset.” And so, we had to wall it in and put in big windows. But we have the carpentry shop all in operation. One of the things that we produce is the little table that’s out on our display table there. Now the Toba’s really do have an interest in making a living. They have different problems that we’ve encountered on the way as well.
In the time that I was working on the carpentry shop, I kept having the women from time to time come to me and say, “Would you mind coming out a bit down the road and helping to bring our firewood back?” And so I thought well, I’ll drive out, you know, a few blocks and pick up their firewood, bring them back; it won’t take me long. And I got in my truck and I drove, and I drove, and I drove, and I drove out about eight or ten kilometers and they were waiting at the side of the road with their firewood. And normally they are carrying their firewood back that far. If you can imagine having a load of wood on your head, or actually they use a strap that they carry it on their back, and carrying it that far of a distance. I thought, well surely there is some way we can improve on this situation. They have quite a large tract of land but most of it is the drainage basin for the Green River. So we began trying to various things to plant, some trees that could grow and provide them with firewood and possibly wood for the carpentry shop a bit later on.
As often happens though the best-made plans of mice and men often aren’t the way. So after planting these 500 eucalyptus trees and we got a good hearty start on them, I went away to work with my rural pastors. When I returned, all the trees were dead. And we’re still getting to the bottom of it! But they say there is a little animal that comes along and tends to chew them off at the base. So I’ve been told our means of solving that is to take a 2-liter coke bottle and cut off the top and bottom and slide it down to protect the base so that they can mature. So live and learn; we’ll see what happens next!
One of the other ministries we have in Paraguay is the rural clinic. It’s a mobile clinic that we take around to each of our supporting churches. The nice thing about the clinic there is that we can take it wherever we need to. It gets a bit dicey sometimes when we’ve had rain. We’ve had it stuck and we’ve had it nearly jack-knife on us. When we get in to one of these areas, usually we’ll see about 200 patients a day, 200-300 patients a day. So usually in the course of a year, we are treating anywhere from 4,000 to 7,000 people with our mobile clinic. We try the best we can to lift up the Scriptures and see the way that Jesus touched the needs of the people. We know one of the ways that gave Him much joy was in bringing healing and bringing a healing touch. And this is one of the ways the mobile center is able to fulfill that need.
We are concerned about other factors that we have to deal with as well. One of them is our youth. I’ve shared with many of you what I shock I had one day when I was sitting in church and looking around I began to realize I was the oldest person in the church. And began to think of other churches. And I thought, “Well, I might not be the oldest but I’m in the top 5% in whatever church I’ve been in.” So that caused me to do a big kind of shift in my thinking. I thought, “If that’s the case, that I’m one of the older people in the church, than the people I am thinking are in the process of being prepared to take over leadership are actually the leaders of today.” So one of the things we are trying to do now is find key leaders among our youth and try to help them with their educational expenses and whatever else they need in order to continue to prepare themselves as leaders of the church.
I have an interesting couple that came as missionaries to Paraguay. He had been an engineer and she had been in health care. And they came there; they came to help with our mobile clinic. They thought they would come for six months. They had always had sort of a call to missions and they thought that they had answered that call when they put in their time requirement and have the satisfaction of serving for a short term over there. When Mark and Johanna came to Paraguay they stayed for six moths, one year, two years, three years…eight years! They’ve been there for eight years now. And here’s an older couple that you would think should be able to just rest and enjoy life; and I can not keep up with them. The two of those, either one of them, they are usually up at the crack of dawn. Often people will come and knock on their door, someone’s sick, and they will come and get medicine. Or even at 11:00 or 12:00 p.m. at night they’ll have the same thing happen. The two of them are always out touching the needs of the community even when they are home, when they are not out in the mobile clinic. And in the process of being there nearby they are beginning to understand some of the needs of the people. They found that a lot of the young people, the kids who are kindergarten, first graders, are not going to school. One of the common things that they do is they go out on the street, and when cars stop at a stoplight, they come up to your car and ask if they can wash your windshield in order to something. There is no set price. You give them what you want to. And then in that way they can generate enough income to help their family to buy the food that they need. They have a very tough economic time right now. I don’t know if you know, the Argentine economy, the economy of Argentina, collapsed and they are one of the main trading partners with Paraguay. And the Peruvian economy almost followed suit. They came very close. And although Chile, the other side, stayed somewhat stable, because of the Andes Mountains they don’t have very much contact with us. So Paraguay is really suffering.
The Waltz’ felt a need for the young people to have an education. And they began approaching churches like this to ask people to help sponsor kids. And they had more than one reason to do it. It wasn’t just to get them off the street and to get them in the classroom, but they said, “We need people who are really trained up in the Word of the Lord and know how to live life living the Gospel. We want to see people who are in a leadership position not just in the church but in the government because the biggest problem in Paraguay is corruption.” It’s very interesting; when we were in Costa Rica we saw a list of the ten most corrupt countries in the world. And right up there on the list of the ten most corrupt countries in the world, Paraguay wasn’t even on it because it was off the bottom of the list. So we do have a problem. It’s not like Columbia where there is violence and corruption is very overt. It’s just very straightforward. When you go to get something out of customs they’ll say, “Well, the value on this is $200 so the duty you have to pay is so much and then there are other expenses. So and so needs this much, so and so needs this much” and they just itemize what everyone is going to get which is nothing to do with what should be taxed. But those people have to put a stamp on it to get it cleared and without that stamp it’s not going to clear. And so they get their own little tip.
But in general the country is very open to missions. We have working, some frequently, one of the ways our mobile clinic functions at all, is that when workers come they bring Tupperware containers full of medicine and used eye glasses. Those of you who might be interested in that, there is a church in Tennessee that they send eyeglasses to and then they have a machine that reads the prescription and prints it out. And so they have those ready to dispense in the mobile clinic. This couple has been a very wonderful part of our own experience here.
The actual first missionaries who came to Paraguay were a retired couple. They came to teach at the Christian Academy that my kids go to, Asuncion Christian Academy. If there are any of you who are retired teachers and you think it would be a wonderful experience, which it is, come down and spend some time in Paraguay and teach at the school. They have their own self-contained apartments and things. And it is just a wonderful experience.
One of the other ways in which we touch the needs of the world is to try to help prepare our pastors who are fulfilling their roles in the church. Imagine a church that is only fifteen years old. Where are you going to get the pastors from? Obviously their faith in many cases is not any older or not as old as the church. We have pastors who have been believers for sometimes just five or six years taking on the role of pastors. And you can imagine we have a lot of slipups here and there. A lot of difficulty from a lack of having good theological base—but we are working on that. We have a Bible Institute being built. We have been using our main church, but now we are building a separate seminary or Bible Institute. And one week out of each month, the pastors come and pray together and go through their process of education to get them fully qualified at the level that we can as pastors.
We have all sorts of opportunity for work in Paraguay. And what a joy it is. I get up each morning; I never really know exactly what I am going to do. I have had people ask me why I am a missionary. And I say, “Because I really don’t know from one day to the next what I’ll be doing. I can never complain about my life being boring!” I may just roll out of bed and get a call and I’m being asked to work with a work team that are doing construction somewhere or go to the Bible Institute. I just never know what is going to happen. So that keeps life exciting.
But one of the main joys for my wife and myself is working with our rural pastors. These people are people with a real heart for Christ—people who want to hear the Good News with all their neighbors. Most of them are farmers. Our churches are so small and the amount of income they get is pretty small and they can’t support their pastors in that way. So all of them have to be caretakers; they have to do their own work to make a living. And one way in which we started trying to help them, last year we had lots of grain and other food stuffs which they grow, we’ve been providing them with a milling machine they can grind up their corn and make it in to corn flour. My wife likes to tell about that because here we gave it to them expecting it to be just a blessing to them, and last Easter they have a particular cornbread they like to eat during that time, and they’ll move heaven and earth in order to have enough corn to have that cornbread for that meal. So when we found out that, in face, they had one of these machines, they approached them and asked if they would grind their corn for them. And so while they are grinding their corn, the pastors set down next to them and said, “Do you know why we have Passover? Do you know what Easter is really about?” They may not have Easter bunnies like we do but they have some other ideals that are really far off the mark. And so in sharing this with people, each time they ask to come to grind their corn, we have an opportunity of sharing the gospel with them. In the whole process, more people began coming to the church and people are saved in the Holy Spirit. And so that which meant to be just a blessing for the pastors was turned over into the community. And that’s been a real blessing to us.
When you become a missionary, you think you have this particular training, you are going to do this particular thing, and your life is going to be nice and comfortable in that regard. You know what you are going to be doing. When we got to Paraguay they looked us up after a while and said, “You’ve got children who are teenagers, why don’t you head up our youth program for the whole nation?” And so not having any training at all as youth ministers, my wife and I doing our best ended up plunging in to the situation and trying to help counsel them as to how to get all the different churches together And I really enjoy it. We have a campground and we are producing different buildings that we can use for camp meetings. And we’ve got a temporary kind of chapel structure. We don’t have windows in it yet. But we invited all of our youth from our different churches, at least certain ones, to come and be with us for our first national meeting. This is in July; it’s the coldest time of year there. We have winds that come up from Antarctica and they are really chilly. We ended up putting plastic on the open window frame to keep from freezing to death inside while we shared with them. We had a wonderful time of praying together and singing together.
Paraguay has an interesting history. When the first Spaniards came in they began trying to teach them, these were Jesuit priests, some skills they could use to make a living. And they found that they were very good craftsmen. They began making violins and guitars that were sold in Europe and very soon were being acclaimed as some of the best that were produced anywhere. So if any of you are harpist, you can come to Paraguay and buy a harp for about $300. You can buy a nice guitar for about $150. They love to sit down whenever they are together in groups and sing. There’s a wonderful time of sharing together.
Why do we need to be about trying to win others to Christ? As Methodist, unfortunately, we’ve lost our way in our desire to be connectional. We’ve gotten a little too wide, a little too connected with areas that were never included to be. And so we’ve lost our focus. When my parents went to the mission field in 1960, there were 2 billion people who had not heard about Christ. I’ve not really thought about it too much, in all these intervening years we’ve had missionaries going out. You would think surely we are catching up. But the last fact that I heard, we are just about in the same place. We’ve got 1.87 billion people in the world who has never heard about Christ. The need is still there! So this morning as we are thinking about missions, I’ve shared with you a bit about what God is doing in Paraguay and about how God wants your touch to meet the world. Is He calling one of you? Maybe this is the time that God is really speaking to your heart and saying, “Come, leave all that you have and follow me.” Now I’d like you all to pray about that. Some of you, of course, can’t come. There’s some that God may be moving in that direction. We need your prayers. And I’d like to give you thanks for our support for the church. When I found out I was coming here and I started to look at all the ways that the church is involved in missions, I was excited. Normally when I go to a church I speak about being God’s witness, I talk about meeting needs here as well as out there. It looks like you have all the bases covered, Reverend Mike. I don’t have anything further to say. I thank God for that.
The church my kids are going to right now has a school as part of it—it’s a Christian school. They get $400,000 a year from missions. Whenever I’m in different countries, often I have to send my students to the Assembly of God church because they’ve got such good programs and really interested in bringing the lost to Christ. Again, I ask you to be in prayer for us. I invite you to pick up a prayer card we have back on our table. Place that on your mirror in a bathroom or somewhere else where you can remember to pray for us day. Again, we pray that God will bless you and continue to call you into service.
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