When we think about the Devil and
the nature of evil—if we ever do think about these things—we tend to think
about terrible temptations, murder and violence, utter depravity and the like. It’s
easy for us to see evil at work in big forces outside of our control—things
like terrorism and addiction. The nightly news is draped with images of sin and
the power of the Devil, but we should certainly remember that these are not the
only images of evil in our lives.
On
the bus ride home from our youth’s mission trip in Idaho a couple nights ago I asked a couple
of our young people what I should preach on—because, honestly, I didn’t have
much clue. What ensued was twenty minutes of deciding how to re-create a
heavenly battle scene for all of you complete with fiery swords and flying
angels and evil dragons. They had picked out characters and everything. It was
a lot of fun, but I decided—perhaps wisely, perhaps foolheartedly—to not act
out a heavenly battle on the altar. The youth were understandably disappointed.
But that is what this is about, isn’t it? This is the only scene in the
traditions of Christianity or Judaism where there is actually a battle in
heaven. It is the ultimate, epic, Spielberg-esque prequel to our lives on this
planet. Satan, that great deceiver, is defeated dramatically and cast to this
earth where he meets first Jesus, against whom his power is useless, and so he
is forced to focus on Adam and Eve, forever changing the history of humankind.
This
dragon story is virtually identical to a myth in the Greek tradition about the
god, Apollo. Ancient readers would have picked up that John was adapting the
Apollo story and using it to point to Jesus. In so doing, the real effect of
the dragon and the angels is that it gives an explanation to one of the most
troubling effects of life on this earth: it tells us to origins of evil.
I
suppose that upon descending to earth the Devil could have begun to wage a
violent war on human beings, but it’s telling that he doesn’t. Instead, the
Devil does something far more effective: he whispers in the ears the most
tempting of ideas and, slowly, things begin to unravel. The Devil is more
interested in silence than a bang. See, there was no headway to be had with
Jesus. Satan seemed like an unstoppable force when he landed upon the earth but
in Jesus he met something fundamentally good
that he could not touch. So he had to settle for the rest of us, causing the
earth to quake, famine and war, visible signs of brokenness, and far more.
This
past week, forty-six of us from across the county set out with varying intents
and desires to cross the country and do some work in putting evil in its place.
We did this not with shows of force. We did this,
as it is always done, with small acts of love. Every time we denied ourselves
and put the needs of somebody else above our own we were living love and in that way
smoothing away a little of this rotten world.
This
week our young people witnessed evil that was mostly not the kind of thing that
makes the 6 o’clock news. It was the evil of dementia, the evil of hunger, the
evil of a person unable to move from injury or arthritis, the evil of cancer,
the evil of losing a spouse; I could go on and on and on. There were so many
evils that were outside of peoples’ control that it is easy to get overwhelmed.
If we didn’t see it before hopefully the forty-six of us see it now: our world
is broken and all we can do is little acts of defiance to heal it.
I’ve
been reflecting basically all week—nearly forty hours on a bus does this to you—on
why we do mission trips at all. While there is a lot of need in the Silver Valley
of northern Idaho
there is also a lot of need here at home. I don’t want to pretend like we need
to travel halfway across the country in order to find people who could use some help. But I realized
something as the week wore on that I never had before: We need mission trips
because our young people need to get outside of their normal, safe worlds in
order to realize that their world here is not nearly as safe as they supposed.
Taking mission out into the world shows us how badly that mission is needed
back home.
If
our young peoples’ world was entirely safe in Kittson
County I would hear the same openness
and love for one another that I heard in Idaho
on a daily basis. If their world was entirely safe in Kittson County
there would have been no need for tears and sometimes mournful, sometimes
joyful admissions on this trip that some had never shared before. If our world
was entirely safe in Kittson
County you would know our
youth fully for the amazing, thoughtful, loving and passionate people that they
I have seen them to be.
But
it isn’t. It isn’t safe. And it isn’t the big stuff so much—that exists, but
even more devastating is that stuff that lives in the silence. Looking around
this place—this community and this county—I honestly have no idea what the
Devil could possibly be doing here and, frankly, that scares me. You see,
everything positive that I said about our young people lies in the balance now
that we’re back home. They saw it in themselves and they saw it in one another.
We are a people with a tremendous capacity for love and a willingness to put
others before ourselves. We have it in us—our young people do and the rest of
you do, too. But if the love we bring with us lives and dies when we go on a
mission trip once or twice a year for four years of our kids’ lives
then this community will never get a chance to see how deep our kids’ capacity
for love is. Trust me, you want to see that. It will change you. It certainly
has changed me.
The
task before us is a challenging one. We have to figure out a way to live love
in our daily lives. It’s an astoundingly difficult thing to do. Even traveling
1200 miles across mountain ranges and far out of cell service does not do it on
its own. It takes a community committed to a single goal and willing to put
aside their own wants and needs for the sake of others. Our young people need
that here.
Heck, you all need that here.
Mission trips are only a success if they
bring mission home.
This
is a harder place for us to live love than mission fields far away. This place
is scary in a different way because our home life is filled with commitments to
school and work and so many sports, and commitments to family and friends and
church and other organizations like it. We see each of these commitments as
distinct from a mission trip, just as we feel that we aren’t
really doing mission work until we crisscross several mountain ranges and get
off the bus under the watchful gaze of tree-stacked mountains. But this is
complete nonsense. Our mission starts new everyday. All of those commitments—faith
and family, school and work, sports and community involvement—are
our mission in the world.
Mission trips end when we step off the bus
and get a nice warm shower and find a comfortable bed to sleep, but mission
does not. The distinction between mission
time and normal time is completely
made up, and, frankly, it’s devastating for our youth. It needs to end right
now. I’ve seen too many cool things happen with our young people to pretend
like that side of them should be confined to one week a year. For all the work
that the Devil does here on earth the most damaging may well be telling us that
what our youth experienced on a mission trip is exceptional and this is normal; that expressing love is
exceptional and keeping it to yourself is normal;
that serving others is exceptional but serving ourselves is normal.
You
know what? Our kids don’t buy that anymore. They don’t and they can’t, because
they’ve seen what it looks like to be a community living love for those in
need. But they need something now. They need a not-so-gentle reminder—and this
is on every one of you to do this: They need to know that what they saw and did
and shared and loved was not the exception but the rule; they need to know that
what they considered normal eight days ago was a lie, so that when the
commitments start lining up—and oh, they already are—they need to know that the
love that carried them through Idaho is something that infiltrates every cranny
of their lives here. Sports and school and relationships are places where love
is lived just as it is on a mission trip. Kittson County
is a place where service must be done just as it would be done on a mission trip.
And we do this not because what we did last week was exceptional or abnormal
but because it was the most normal thing of all. We came, we saw, we loved, and
now the only question is whether we are taught to bring it home.
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