July 26, 2009 Sermon

Report from the Mission Trip
Acts 2

While driving through Pickford, Michigan last week I saw her. She appeared seventy or eighty years old. She wore surprisingly nice clothing, a blouse with some sort of fancy collar and slacks. Her hair was done up. A complicated, serious brace encircled her neck. Her tiny bungalow home had like-new siding and extensive flower beds. As we passed she paused on her way to the mailbox. A piece of trash littered her otherwise perfect lawn. She painfully bent down, stretched to grab it, and straightened up in stages. This, to me, symbolized Pickford.

A straight-laced small town is dying. Slowly. The Pickford economy has come to a halt. Just this year a restaurant, an Amish gift shop and the butcher have closed. In a town that had no more than thirty businesses this represents a tremendous blow. Few people between the ages of twenty-one and fifty-five stay. They cannot afford to. Not even Sault Ste. Marie, twenty miles to the north, can employ them. For Sale signs decorate yards on every street. I asked one of our adult leaders, whose husband runs a real estate office here in Traverse City, who would buy a home in Pickford these days. She replied, “Only a retiree looking to come back home for his or her last years.” The old lady has nearly reached the end of her life.

Yet money lurks beneath the Pickford surface in a few spots. Most of the horses used on Mackinac Island come from the farms surrounding Pickford. The man who coordinated our work projects breeds and trains the Percherons who pull the surreys on which tourists slump while staring at the lilacs and the Victorian homes and slurping their ice cream sandwiches. Other farmers grow the hay that feeds those working horses and elite thoroughbreds. Something about the sulfur and iron in the soil and the perfect mix of timothy grasses in the region makes that hay a highly sought-after commodity. The town has its pride. It is holding on, for now. But its neck is getting stiffer with each passing day. It still can pick up the yard, but for how much longer?

We landed in Pickford by chance. Or did we? We had made arrangements to take our mission trip elsewhere. But those plans fell through. Now it seems clear that God had it in mind all along for us to go to Pickford. The Presbyterian pastor, Ron Bown, reacted to our appeal to come there with grace and energy. He recruited Jim Rye, the horse breeder I mentioned before. Jim knows virtually everybody in the community. Jim is related to many of them. He used his connections to find us work that mattered. He understood that we wanted not only to do meaningful work, but also to connect with the people for whom we worked. I do not know how many mission trips I have taken, but the number exceeds fifteen. Never can I remember doing more work for more people who had more gratitude. Truly God worked to put us in the right place at the right time to do the right work. Praise God!

We used Acts 2 for our nightly chapel services. This chapter documents the trials and triumphs of the earliest Christians in Jerusalem. Following his resurrection Jesus had just returned to God the Father, leaving the church to figure out how to do its work. We picked up the story with the Apostle Peter preaching Jesus boldly. The Holy Spirit of God has given him the courage to tell the story of Jesus in public in a time and place where that could get you killed. Our young people witnessed to their faith in that same Jesus Christ every day.

For the first two days part of our group roofed and painted a house just down an alley from the church where we stayed. I had a crew of three up on the roof. To my delight, Shannon Mahoney was painting—and singing—below us. It took me back four years, to the last time I shared a workplace on a mission trip with my daughter Laura and Kaitlyn Scott. Like them Shannon constantly breaks out in song. The homeowner noticed it, too. A reserved woman, Mrs. Dickinson seemed faintly embarrassed to receive our help. Her husband, an elderly but dapper gentleman, wandered about the neighborhood with his bow tie and cane. He always returned our greetings with a courtly “Good morning” or “afternoon” as the clock dictated. Not until we had left the property did I learn that he is a retired college professor far gone into dementia. By a circular route it came to my ears that Mrs. Dickinson was moved by our group. They worked harder than any young people she could remember. Plus, they treated each other with such respect. She knew this because she had been sitting at her window, secretly listening to them. And that young woman with the paint roller had such a beautiful voice—and she sang hymns and Christian songs along with all the modern trash, dontcha know.

Another day a small crew tore down an old step deck and built a new one for Marv McDowell. He is 86 or 87—he can't recall which—and fought in World War II, though he will not talk about that. When the crew arrived he met us in the driveway. A thin man with bottle-bottom glasses, work shirt and pants and steel-toed boots, he wanted to work beside us. For the first hour he and one of our young men pulled nails and screws from the old wood. He had the tools we needed. He watched our every move but must have approved of our work, because he never offered a word of criticism. As the day ended and we installed the hand railing to finish the deck, his wife brought out home-made sugar cookies and watermelon slices. We talked about their garden. Marv started a complicated story about a friend of his who taught the shop trades at Soo high. The story featured “long-hair” kids and tough love. At its end Marv added, “I would be proud to call any of your kids my own.”

Our young people witnessed to their love for Jesus Christ all last week. They did it in word and in song. They did it with their work ethic. They did it with their behavior in the town park. They did it with their grateful response to the church members who fed them. Pickford is such small town that by 10:00 Monday morning two of our women were approached in the grocery store. “Are you with that group that's been running out on the roads?” they were asked. The only time anybody from our group had gone running around Pickford had been three hours earlier. If the town talked about a few kids and adults running, you can be sure it also talked about the mission of the group to which they belonged. They talked about our work, and they talked about our Christianity. Praise God!
In Acts we also read of the struggles the early followers of Jesus went through to create a community of faith. Jews and Syrians and Palestinians and Turks and Greeks believed in Jesus Christ as their risen Savior. They needed to learn how to follow him as the church in the city of Jerusalem, where they all lived. They had to learn how to compromise on rules for living while holding firmly to the truth of the Gospel. On Wednesday of mission trip week we took our traditional day off for fun. “Fun for teens” and “Upper Peninsula” are not words that often appear in the same sentence. We did our best; driving to Whitefish Point on Lake Superior and Tahquamenon Falls. At the Lake quite a few of our youth stripped down to their swimsuits and dove into the sixty degree water. Others looked for interesting rocks or skipped them across the waves. At Tahquamenon Falls we had a picnic lunch and hiked first to the Lower and then to the Upper Falls. It rained on us most of the time, but the group kept its spirits high. As we walked back to the parking lot one of our adult leaders overheard a child on the path say to a parent, “That's one big family!”

Our youth group witnessed to their faith with their public behavior and they acted like a big family. People in Pickford constantly remarked how upbeat, how wholesome, how nice our kids were. A not-for-profit organization had sent teens to work in town last summer. From a non-faith-based sponsoring organization, they had sent some two hundred youth from around the nation to Chippewa County. Though the youth performed, on balance, a positive service to the community, they had also put the town on its guard before we arrived. Boys and girls had made out in the park. Somebody had drawn graffiti on the township hall wall. A few had mocked the accordion band at the Thursday evening Farmers' Market. Then came our bunch. The difference was their faith in Jesus Christ.

Not everything went perfectly. One member of our group accidentally spilled a gallon of paint on the brick pavers under the carport church entrance. Dawn Bondy, youth leader extraordinaire, described the leaders' reaction as like an upset hive of bees looking for the entrance to the hive. Spats between various youth occurred. Adult leaders ran out of patience. I lost a couple of screwdrivers, perhaps the greatest downer of all. But our group believed in Jesus Christ and practiced their faith. This fact made this year's event a Hall of Fame mission trip in my book. (And they got all the paint cleaned off the pavement.)

Tuesday night a group of kids stayed up past curfew in an off-limits place and had a heartfelt discussion. Though their leaders asked them—twice—to go to bed they stayed and talked out a few things. The upshot of it was the rededication of two of them to their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. As one of them reported at the candle ceremony that closes the week, “I got my Christianity back!” Another repeatedly said, “I found God again.” That is why we do mission trips. The mixture of service to those in need with Christian fellowship and spiritually-charged worship with awesome singing can bring people young and old to, or back to, Christ. As Dawn Bondy said, it took her a while to learn this, but the mission trip is not about the work. Precisely. The mission trip is about young people and Jesus. They met again this week. Praise God!