Set A Stone In Nairobi

Becca receiving the traditional Kenyan farewell gift

 Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer, saying, “Thus far the LORD has helped us,” –I Samuel 7:12-

This is it. This is the last blog post to be written from this side of the pond. In a little over 72 hours, Rebecca and I will be on a plane that will take us away from Kenya for all of the foreseeable future.

Amidst all of the chaos of mixed-emotions and packing fever, I can’t help but wonder what the real missionaries feel like at this point, what someone who has spent 10, 15, 20, or even 30 years feels like when they realize that they’re about to leave behind friends they may not meet again, their second home, and a huge portion of their life’s work. I can hardly imagine that. But what I can say is that for us the strongest emotion now is one of deep, deep gratitude to Jesus.

In our blog, updates, meet and greets, prayer letters, and conversations, Rebecca and I have tried our best to be honest about the struggles we’ve faced living here. The work with the farmers has been taxing and overwhelming, and even now it’s often difficult to see whether or not we’ve had much of an impact. We’ve experienced severe road rage in the daily life-risking activity of driving in Nairobi, we’ve been overwhelmed by myriad cultural differences that can grate on you like nails on a chalk board (particularly in terms of being asked for money), and we’ve been irate and undone by the stories of deep injustice we hear daily about so many of the politicians, schools, churches, NGOs, and businesses. And yet, the last two weeks leave all of this covered by a deep sense of thanksgiving.

Govind teaching Michael how to do Koroga Bonga: Stir and Talk

Each of our farmers groups gathered specifically to send us off Kenyan style. Each group lavished us with gifts from hand woven bags, to banana leaf canvas paintings and hand-carved gourds. And then, each and every group told us how much they loved us, how we had become good friends, and how they would continue to pray for us. One of the goals we had from the beginning was to be people who connected with folks on the ground, who ate the food our friends served us and slept in the guest beds they offered us. At each meeting I was amazed by how clear it was that this had happened. God honored our efforts and the Kenyan people are among the most hospitable and gracious on earth. We truly feel like we have mamas, babas, ndugus, na dadas in the faith all over Central Kenya (mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters in Kiswahili). At our pilot project send-off, one of the leaders stood up and thanked us for helping them see the resources they had that they hadn’t recognized, and helping them to work together to use those resources. Creating that kind of experience was a full half of what we hoped for with that group, and by God’s grace it seems to have happened. We made so many mistakes! We can be nothing but be thankful that God used us all the same.

Our experience in Nairobi has been more of the same. Last Saturday I was in an accident which was not my fault. Under the weight of culture stress, car stress, leaving stress, and all-round sinfulness I succumbed to the temptation to be pretty completely unChrist-like to the lady who hit me (who claimed it was my fault). Followers of the blog: this should sound familiar (remember the police incident). I went to church the next day ashamed of myself, feeling like I had failed Jesus and wondering how I ever expected to represent him well in all my lousiness. I girded up my loins and led worship for the last time at NCF all the same, and received the body and blood of Christ through communion afterwards. And then the church gathered around Rebecca and I, gave us incredible gifts, and spoke of the great maturity, love, and passion with which we have served at NCF. Afterwards every demographic of our extremely diverse church came up and thanked us for serving, expressed their love for us, and told us how grateful they were for our friendship. Over and over again people said, “From the very beginning, you were reaching out and befriending people from every group in the church.” And finally a close friend came up to me and said, “I’ve seen lots of people come and go here at NCF, but I’ve never seen two people showered with love as much as you guys.”

Rebecca and Michael wearing our gifts with Pastor Joe and his wife Elfi

And in that moment I realized: the good I do is not my own, it is Christ who lives in me. But for Christ uniting Himself with me through the power of the Holy Spirit, I am nothing but that angry jerk on the side of the road. All of our righteousness before the Lord is like filthy road-rage rags; but Christ has shone through Rebecca and me in ways we did not even recognize with a light that is not our own. Let the Lord be praised! And we are so grateful.

Later that evening all of our friends from Nairobi came to a good-bye party thrown for us by the church. We have slept at the homes of 5 different families in the last 9 days. We have feasted, partied, remembered our time here, and grieved our departure with dozens and dozens of brothers and sisters in the Lord who showed hospitality to these two American aliens and strangers on our sojourn through this foreign land. We have seen Christ in the hands and feet of our brothers and sisters, and seen how Christ has worked through our grubby hands and feet to do the good works he prepared from the beginning of time for us to do. And we are grateful.

Two farmers and Beth, who will continue working on the pilot project

“Here I raise my Ebenezer, hither by Thy help I’ve come.” So says the great hymn. The story comes from the Old Testament when Samuel rallies the Israelites to return to the Lord. They gather together and fast and pray and repent of all their idol worship. While they’re there the Philistines come after them, but Samuel says that the LORD their God will fight for them. And so they cry out to God, and God answers with loud thunder and sends their enemies into confusion, and Israel wins the day. Afterwards Samuel raises a stone at Mizpah and tells the Israelites to remember “thus far has the Lord brought us” when they see it in later days. Samuel had been around faithless Israel long enough to know that they would be tempted to forget God’s goodness when things got rough in the future; so he gave them a stone to help them remember Yahweh’s everlasting faithfulness.

Us with the Khans, who run a ministry for people with handicaps

As many of you know, Rebecca and I are coming home with a vision for our next several years. Rebecca is applying to programs that would qualify her to teach in one of Memphis’s struggling inner-city schools. I will be returning to work at Advance Memphis, where I will be trying to “do justice and love mercy” by helping low-income African-American adults in the 38126 zip code develop economically through the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We’re hoping to find a place to live in or near that neighborhood. Having seen racial, tribal, and socio-economic reconciliation among Africans and Asians, we feel called to enter into that work in a place where our own tribe is involved in the problem. We’re excited and very, very nervous. The work will not be easy, and because of our time here we’re more aware than ever of the complexities of poverty and injustice, and the depths of our own inadequacy and sin.

So here we raise our Ebenezer. With thanksgiving and hope we’ll remember the long drives through the thousand tiny farms filled to overflowing with electric green life. We’ll remember the friendship of hundreds of farmers, some of the world’s poorest of the poor from the slums in Nairobi, and Christian brothers and sisters from some of the world’s least reached places (like Pakistan and India). We’ll remember that despite our great personal failure and sin, Christ nevertheless baptized our half-hearted efforts and turned them into stones built into the kingdom of God. We’ll remember the power of His presence to us day in and day out through His word, prayer, the Eucharist, and the faces of brothers and sisters from every corner of the globe. Come what may, we call ourselves to remember and each of you to remind us, “Thus far has God brought us. And we have confidence that He who has brought us here shall bring us home.”

Having climbed Mt Kenya, about to head down. Cue the symbolism.

Thanks be to the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit! The LORD has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy!

Thanks for following us in this journey. Keep checking the blog for a few State-side reflections and eventually a link to our new blog (location TBD). Pray for us, write us (michaelandrebeccarhodes@gmail.com), visit us (Memphis), and call us (901-849-6345 from December 27 onward). Your encouragement, financial support, prayer, friendship and love have helped make all of this possible. When we look back at all we’ve learned and what God has done in us and through us, we believe it has been worth it. But more importantly than anything else, let each of us now, when we celebrate the time of Christ’s visiting us on Earth during Advent, remember the great things the Lord has done for us with great gratitude and full joy:

No more let sin and sorrows grow

Nor thorns infest the ground!

He comes to make His blessings known

Far as the curse is found!

Peace,

Michael

Lesson #7- The Body and the Bride

Finally, Rebecca and I have been overwhelmed by the power of the church. In our individualized, ultra-mobile American culture, the church can seem on the surface to be little more than a voluntary-society. In Kenya, we have seen glimpses of how the church as the community of God can change the world.

Kenya is one of those countries that has had a long history of all sorts of organizations of every stripe trying to create positive change within the society. Billions of dollars and probably millions of people have tried to make Kenya a better place. But only one oft-overlooked community in Kenya has the specific promise of the Creator God that they will be the hands and feet of the King in His world, and that community is the church. If we look at the metaphors the New Testament uses for the church, metaphors like “people,” “family,” “bride,” and “body,” all of them are incredibly intimate and personal. The church is less like an association you join than it is like a community you inherit as a birth-right, a community which demands your highest allegiance. Our first births bring us into the world heavily committed to our biological families, to the nation we live in, and to our ethnic group. But our new birth in Christ brings us into a community that Christ says claims a greater allegiance even than these. And that is the church.

We have seen the best and the worst of the church here. We have seen pastors abuse their spiritual authority in despicable ways, and we have also seen pastors and parishioners alike literally lay down their lives for the gospel. Whether with our friend Julias, who has taken a massive pay cut to pastor a small church in the village and yet finds a way to take care of 30 orphans in an orphanage that the church (whose total tithe is probably around 300 dollars a month) somehow manages to support, or the entire fellowship at New City Nairobi, which has stood together as a witness to the love of Jesus that reconciles enemies together before God and takes care of the needs of its congregants at the deepest levels, we have seen Christ changing the world through the hands and feet of his church.

There are some things that now, in the middle of packing and saying goodbye and all the emotions of leaving, I simply cannot find words to express or explain. The experience of church here in all of its body-of-Christ fullness is one of them. I can only say that after two years of seeing the poor and vulnerable be abused by churches that failed them on the one hand, and seeing new life and hope springing forth among the poor and spiritually broken in churches that embody the kingdom on the other, that we are more committed to the church than ever before. The church in our minds and hearts can no longer simply be the place where our family chooses to go and worship on Sunday mornings; it is the community that demands our highest allegiance at every level of life. We have been given the task of embodying the kingdom: to demonstrate in word, deed, and sign what it looks like for a people pulled from every corner of the globe and from every economic status to recognize the reign of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. We are the hands and feet of the Creator. As Tim Keller said, we are the aliens and strangers in the world who nevertheless are radically for the world in our love for our enemies, our generosity to the poor and broken, our moral purity, our love for each other, our fervency for the Lord, and our proclamation of good news that is found in no other place but in Christ and in his church.

We live in a time in which more and more people are looking around at their lives and seeing the fragmentation and isolation that comes from our Western culture’s rampant pursuit of individual choice and total rejection of outside authority. People feel alone. Maybe one of the reasons why the old methods of evangelism seem to become less and less effective is that they address one’s connection with God but ignore one’s connection to the world. But the blood of Jesus not only reconciles humans with God but humans with humans. The blood of Jesus brings us together, and the feast of communion anticipates that great feast in the new heavens and the new earth in which every tear will be wiped away and people from every tongue and tribe and nation will worship the Lamb. It is in the church that we come to the Table, and take the bread and the cup, and proclaim the Christ’s saving blood “until he comes.” And it is in the church that Jesus gives the world glimpses of what his rule and reign will look like. We in the church have an immense challenge, and an incredible opportunity. And it will cost us all of who we are. But one thing we’ve learned in Kenya is that it’s worth it.

May Jesus Christ make us His hands and feet through the power of the Holy Spirit for the glory of the Father.

Michael

Lesson #6- Citizens In The Kingdom Under The King

So if Christ is the King who is coming to reclaim His world, what about us? What do we do? What's our role?

We all know the simple (but not easy) answer: Jesus calls us to follow after him. To take up our crosses. To wash each others' feet. To go and make disciples. After the resurrection, Jesus breathes on the disciples and says "as the Father sent me so send I you." That, coupled with Paul's insistence that the church is the body of Jesus makes it pretty clear that we're to go about living like Jesus is Lord, telling others about Jesus, and embodying the Kingdom of God in our local contexts.

And of course a huge part of this is serving the poor. Moreover, an even more difficult part of living in the shadow of the kingdom is to treat the poor as contributors, even especially valued members of the kingdom community ("for theirs is the kingdom of heaven") rather than as passive needy recipients.

I think the thing that has struck Rebecca and I over the past two years, though, is how often we confess with our mouths that we are servants of the King of kings who has come to make His blessings known throughout the cosmos, and then we deny it with our lives by going about our work half-heartedly or without careful thought. It is so easy, especially when we're working with the poor, to think that just because we showed up, we've done enough. After all, our intentions are so good, and a whole bunch of other folks just stayed home . . . right?

 The nugget of truth here is what John Calvin meant when he talked about how Jesus' work not only cleanses us from sin but even makes our shoddy works great in his kingdom. Jesus takes our filthy-rags righteousness and makes it into something beautiful. But this mentality can become an excuse to neglect careful thinking or hard work.

We almost titled this post "The Importance of Professionalism." While at the end of the day I don't think that language captures the fullness of what we're talking about, I think it's crucial for each of us to realize that Christ doesn't want our leftover moments and half-baked thoughts; He wants our biggest dreams and greatest efforts. If we start a business we probably do all sorts of feasibility studies and serious research; if we want to do medicine we go to nine years of school. But somehow when it comes to working with the poor, we can fall into the lie that all we need are good intentions.

In her memoir about her conversion from orthodox Judaism to Christianity, Lauren Winner writes about how a Jewish mentor of hers would always use sparkling water to make the bread for Passover. Initially Winner wonders why, considering how it costs more and makes no difference in the taste. But eventually her mentor tells her that the bread is an offering, that it is consecrated to the Lord, and that no expense is to be spared. I think that that's a good metaphor for what God wants for us when we serve Him; He wants us to quit bringing those sickly lame lambs and go find the biggest snow-white sheep we can find.

Again and again we have been challenged to read more, ask more questions, talk to wiser counselors, and to work harder. There is so much that we can learn about how to serve in whatever capacity we find ourselves in simply by taking the time to do some research and by hanging out with the more experienced folks around us. Listening is one of my weakest skills in general, but a number of counselors have surrounded me in our work, and we have witnessed real improvement as a result.

The question for all of us as we look at our lives of service is, "Are we offering the first fruits, or the mealy rotting left-overs?" How can we grow in our ability to serve the poor and the marginalized, to work for justice, to do mercy, to care for the widows, orphans, and aliens in our own communities? Who is doing these things well around us that we can learn from?

I've never lived under an earthly king. As an American, I tend to hold fast and loose to authority, and to consider charity and service volunteer activities that I enter into out of my own beneficence. The problem is that my real citizenship isn't in a democratic republic founded on individual freedom. My real citizenship is in a kingdom under the King of kings, who demands my allegiance and service, and who is calling me to get on board with some projects He's working on. I think if I really pondered this and took it to heart, it would radically increase the level of seriousness and energy I'd put towards the work. Maybe that's true for many of us; regardless, it's something Jesus has really hammered home to Rebecca and me these last two years.

May we all grow in our zeal for the Lord's work, and in our willingness to shape our lives around service to Him.

Michael