July 30, 2006 Sermon

Report from the Mission Trip to Bay St. Louis, Mississippi
Romans 5:1-5

August 29, 2005. The day hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. Evacuations were mandated three days before the eye wall slammed into Louisiana. Bay St. Louis, Mississippi sat ninety miles to the north on the line of attack. Almost everybody there fled. Roy and Richard did not.

Roy is maintenance director at the Duvall Village retirement center. Richard is a contractor who had just finished building an addition to the center. Though the residents had left, the two men decided to ride out the storm. A number of pets were left behind at the facility, and they thought they could minimize the damage if they were there during the storm.

Katrina brought sustained winds of over one hundred miles per hour and more than twenty inches of rain in less than four hours. Duvall Village shrugged off even these shocking assaults. But the building could not withstand the storm surge. When hurricanes hit land they push seawater up ahead of them. Katrina forced more then twenty feet of salt water onto land. It obliterated a Gulf Coast area the size of Connecticut.

At Duvall Village the storm surge broke windows and walls. Water poured inside. It rose a foot about every ten minutes. Roy and Richard had no idea what to do. They started circulating through the building with mattresses floating beside them, picking up the animals the residents had left behind. Those mattresses began floating at knee level, then waist, then chin. The water rose above the doorframes. In a panic, the men decided their only hope was to go outside, into the storm. They climbed an iron stair out onto the roof of a walk-in cooler, behind the shelter of a higher wall. There, on a six-by-six foot surface, they crowded with about a dozen dogs, five cats and a couple of birds.

Suddenly Roy realized that his wife’s dog, Jo-Jo, was not with them. He ran back down the stairs. He called to Jo-Jo as he swam through the halls, diving under to pass through doorways. The dog was nowhere to be found, so Roy fought his way back out onto the roof, using a five-gallon bucket that just “happened” to float to create a stepping stool. Then he looked over the far side. There, paddling frantically in raging waters now saturated with raw sewage, was Jo-Jo.

Roy strikes me as a reasonably intelligent man. But his thought when he saw Jojo was, “My wife is gonna kill me if I don’t get him.” So Roy dove into the water, grabbed Jo-Jo, handed him up to Richard up on the cooler, and used the bucket to get back up himself.

Hours later the storm surge finally started going down. Roy and Richard climbed down those stairs and entered the hell in which they have now lived for eleven months. Their houses were erased. They live in camping trailers. Their friends and families have for the most part left town. But Roy and Richard have gone back to Duvall Village every day to chip away at cleaning it out. The shell of the building remains. They have carted hundreds of wheelbarrow loads of debris out to the road, where the Feds pick it up. They have built temporary doors to keep out the looters.

Roy directed our work last week. Though his teenaged son and a friend also work on site this summer, they have not gotten far. The facility has over one hundred rooms. They had not finished cleaning out a single room before we arrived. By the time we left we had removed tens of cubic yards of drywall, vinyl siding, floor tiles, drop ceiling, wiring, and cinder block. Roy estimated we had done in four days what it would have taken his four-man work crew four months to accomplish.

All of us who went on this mission trip have never sweat so much in our lives. The heat and humidity were typical for a Deep South summer—totally beyond the experience of Michiganians. Some of us swung sledgehammers, others worked out in the direct sunlight, others labored with scrapers and pry bars. All of us worked hard all day long. Often we would drift off to sleep during our water breaks. But when the time came to get back to work the adults would simply stand and go. The youth, without a single complaint all week long, would follow.

We were working for Roy. We were working because of the haunting look in his eyes. We were working because of the expressions of thanksgiving and love he kept making to us. We were working because Roy told us that he and Richard had nearly lost the ability to keep going. The massiveness of the task had finally worn them down. Week after month had passed and the job had not gotten any smaller. Thousands of people have quit. They have moved to Atlanta, Arkansas or wherever, leaving behind lots three feet deep in storm rubble. Roy and Richard stayed. The residents of Duvall Village were calling, asking when they could come home. Roy had started dreading those calls.

By the grace of God we changed all that. Roy and Richard have started dreaming about how they will rebuild. Praise God that we could restore their hopes. Praise God that we could help them draw closer to bringing a hundred people back home. Praise God that we could help them restore a hundred jobs to an area that desperately needs them.

Roy is still a long way from welcoming his first returnee. I do not know how to communicate the size of the devastation wrought by Katrina. I do not know how to help you understand the infinity of human need left in her wake. We have started talking about going back to Bay St. Louis during Spring Break, 2007. We could take youth and adults, especially people with skills in the building trades who will be sorely needed by then.

Many of us may ask why we should support the massive effort to rebuild in hurricane alley. Not to be thoughtless and/or unfeeling, but we wonder: Wouldn’t it be better for people to restart their lives in a safer place? Doesn’t doing this waste an incredible amount of tax dollars? (The money spent by the federal government this year on hurricane relief dwarfs the money spent on all our military adventures of the last fifteen years added together.) Aren’t some people cheating, taking advantage of the handouts? The answer to all of these questions is yes—and no.

Actually, the only honest reply we can give is that these questions are far too complex for us to know the right answers. Meanwhile, people are hurting deeply. They have endured an affliction worthy of Job. In fact, one woman we met said she felt she had passed the “Job Test”. What sort of Christians would we be if we did not respond to the pain our brothers and sisters—Christians and non-Christians alike—are suffering?

It is easy to agree with the verses we read from Romans when the suffering and endurance referenced in them is temporary. It is even easier to agree when the pain belongs to somebody else. But those of us who went to Mississippi have now, in a partial way, accepted the pain of our friends there. We have made it our own. As I tell you only a tiny sliver of their story I hope you can make their suffering yours, as well. Then, I pray, we can all enter into the Way of Christ more deeply. After all, what did he do, but suffer the pain of others, and whose pain did he suffer but ours?

Did we do the right thing in Mississippi ? What would Jesus do? Jesus would do whatever he could to help shoulder the burden of the pain Roy, and all the people he represents, must bear. Thank God for the opportunity to help with this absolutely necessary ministry. Won’t you join in doing the same—here in Traverse City, in Mississippi, and everywhere?