First Congregational Church – Hanson Rev. Dr. Peter J. Smith
Isaiah 61:1-9, James 2:12-14, Psalm 41 January 28, 2024
Sermon: “God is in the Rebuilding Business”
It is a privilege and a pleasure to be back with you this morning. None of us – when I accepted the invitation of Samaritan’s Purse to become a member of the Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) – foresaw that I would end up being deployed during the season of Christmas. I am proud to be part of a church that pitches in so as to be able to send one of its people out to help in an area of extreme need. Bob and Steve and others have gone out in different ways on different mission: I was very aware during the weeks that I was away that I needed to represent well the church that had sacrificed so that I could do this work.
What work, you say? On October 25 of this past year, the 1 million citizens of the Acapulco, Mexico – once famous as a resort city but now overrun by cartel violence – went to bed expecting to have to ride out a tropical storm. However, in the hours from 9pm till midnight, the storm intensified to a strong category 5 storm. If there was a category 6, this would have qualified. Gusts hit 200mph: sustained winds of 165 removed the roofs from most every house in the city and its surroundings.
The city Electrical system was knocked out for days: damage to the municipal water system was catastrophic: much of it needed to be replaced.
Widespread looting emptied the stores of every essential food and non-food item.
Believers and church partners in Mexico city organized an effort whereby thousands of food bags were packed with the essentials – to which the Mexican army added more items – and drove them 200 miles to Acapulco, before the airport had opened back up.
The DART Team started to arrive within a week of the storm. A base of operations was needed. One of the local partner churches had a connection with the owner of the Hotel Victoria – a small, secure, 15-room hotel near to the heart of the city. They were not expecting to be able to house guests:
The Team Organizers said, “It’s Perfect!”
From the outset, I was impressed with how the Incident Management Team – especially those who first came to assess the situation – were able to identify and specify challenging but achievable tasks that would make a significant positive impact to the people and churches of Acapulco.
One of the first of these goals pertained to restoring housing. We wanted to intervene directly to individuals, but also multiply the impact by providing resources for many more people so they could do repairs themselves.
Samaritan’s Purse has a Mexican partner organization of Christian men called Legendarios. These are “Brave Men” who worked side by side with DART members in rebuilding over 200 roofs.
The Mexican army and National Guard were remarkable helpful, in contrast to the local police who could often be seen wearing cartel colors. The military created a depot for the various Non-Government Organizations, like Samaritan’s Purse, to bring in the large quantities of goods that would be needed. This picture was a frequent scene for me, driving a box truck to the depot to bring tarping in bulk to the local Presbyterian church which was providing space to work and stage for deliveries for the team I was on.
Look through the windows and you can see the blue tarps fenced in by pallets, guarded by the men and women of the Mexican National Guard.
By the time I arrived 45 days later, the electricity had become mostly reliable. Vestiges of the old system dangled everywhere and had to be walked around. I was placed on the Distributions team, charged with delivering 5,000 shelter kits during those 3 weeks.
Within 90 minutes of my arrival on Saturday morning, December 23, I started working on transforming the bulk supplies that had been delivered into family-size portions of ropes, nails, solar lights, mosquito netting, buckets, and tarps.
Before I say more about the work I was involved in – and that largely prevented me from seeing first-hand much of the other work that was going on – Let me describe the other teams.
WASH – an Acronym for WAter, Sanitation, and Hygiene – created 11 different water stations, each capable of serving 10,000 people. About half of these are solar powered and were transferred to the car and operation of local partner churches. The others are powered by conventional electricity and are being entrusted to the stewardship of the Mexican Army.
Church Repair – Most of our deliveries of shelter kits were to local churches. Very few of these had a roof on their building.
In response to this need, there was a specific Church Repair team as part of our DART. These men and women assessed many structures and identified 30 which Samaritan’s Purse pledged to repair. Much of this work will be done by local professionals but supervised by SP members. Again, I was not able to see this work being done, but I saw the joy in my teammates’ eyes as they returned from worshiping at the newly restored church which had invited them to come for their re-opening: (Read Note)
Operation Christmas Child – The extensive network of contacts that Samaritan’s Purse has in Mexico, as in other countries, begins with something as innocuous-looking as an Operation Christmas Child shoebox, such as many of you prepare each year. I had the extraordinary privilege of witnessing an OCC distribution on the afternoon of Christmas Eve.
There are children in this region who can’t sleep everytime the wind blows. They have nightmares, reliving that night when the roof blew off their homes, and they hugged their family through the wind and rain all night until the morning came, and then they began to try to piece their lives together.
I should mention here the pictures I took do not show the faces of any recipients – the ministry is very careful not to exploit the children or other recipients. When you see faces, these photos are professionally taken and approved by Samaritan’s Purse Communications staff.
We may rush to say, “This shouldn’t happen to any child!” With all the comforts we assume we will always have, it is too easy for us to forget that the realities of life are often much harder for many children and adults of the world. The Good News is that the God of the Bible proved Himself in just such a difficult world. The Prophet Isaiah in turn:
- Warned the people about the consequences of their faithless behavior,
- Assured them that God was going to walk with them through days darker than they ever could imagine (The Assyrian Invasion),
- Foretold the glory of the days ahead, because God is in the re-building business.
They will rebuild the ancient ruins
and restore the places long devastated;
they will renew the ruined cities
that have been devastated for generations.
Integrally involved in all the redemptive work of God that Isaiah foretold was the Messiah, the Suffering Servant, The Son to be born a Wonderful Counselor, the One on whom the Spirit of the Lord rests, sent to bind up the brokenhearted. Two weeks l later I returned to the same site, this time to help distribute boxes. Here my teammate Daniela (from Columbia) hands a box to a young boy.
The young man standing behind is the real hero. He is a Youth and Family Ministries pastor in a Mexican church, partnering with Samaritan’s purse. He told the children the story of Jesus, and will walk with them in the years head so that these broken hearts and threatened souls experience for themselves that God is in the Rebuilding Business.
7 Instead of your shame
you will receive a double portion,
and instead of disgrace
you will rejoice in your inheritance.
And so you will inherit a double portion in your land,
and everlasting joy will be yours.
We were able to be part of the distribution of 38000 shoeboxes in Acapulco, what one leader called “a great and tremendous tool for the pastors here in Acapulco.” These gifts, reinforcing the message of the Gospel, give them hope:
Hope, because Jesus loves them.
Hope, because God is in control. He is in the rebuilding process.
One of the greatest truths proclaimed by this response of the Body of Christ in the face of human catastrophe is that no matter the difficulty that any of us may be going through, God has not forgotten us. I’ll tell you about how God made that abundantly clear on our trip. The location was passable:
To be honest, when I first turned the lead car I was driving on to this road and saw that terrain was somewhere between the side of an Egyptian pyramid and the outside of the Eiffel Tower, I thought of one of our daughter’s favorite sayings: “That’s a whole bucketful of NOPE!” But I put the pedal to the floor and though the wheels slipped a couple of times, made it with local staff members on board. I had made it up the hill to where the church is located, the distribution sites for the shelter kits we were bringing. However, now the kits – buckets with solar lights and other supplies, plus tarps – were stuck at the bottom in a truck that couldn’t make the climb. You can see the tail end of the truck that couldn’t make it w-a-y down below. We’d have to bring up the supplies ourselves. Needing to deliver 75 kits, we were carrying 4 tarps or 5 buckets at a time, puffing our way up the hill. Then the local grandmothers and grade-school children started coming up to us and taking them out of our hands. They carried them up as if they did this every day – because they do.
Finally, when all the buckets and tarps were assembled, the pastor of that church prayed (while our interpreter whispered his meaning in English). The pastor thanked God for being faithful to the people even in the hard times, for never leaving us even when difficult times came, for sending help and helpers from many countries.
While we all worked very hard in very difficult and often dangerous conditions, there was also a great joy in being part of an international team of extraordinary followers of Christ. One of my immediate teammates, a young woman named Beth Ann, has a remarkable ability to befriend strangers in record time, while using even less Spanish than I have. Even in this carefully cropped photo, her sincere love for the people there comes through:
The day she flew home, we had to check Beth Ann’s luggage to make sure this little fellow was not hidden in there somewhere. Yes, she’s a Marilou Hall in training!
BethAnnes’ compassion showed itself on that mountaintop church that morning during the pastor’s prayer. As he prayed, I could hear a woman sobbing out a prayer in Spanish. With my attention divided, I opened one eyelid and saw her sobbing in BethAnn’s arms. Afterward, BethAnn told us this was the pastor’s wife. Much of her prayer was of course in Spanish, but from time to time she would repeat in English, “You have not forgotten us.”
Can you imagine what it had been like? Their congregation had looked to them for encouragement, support, and help in finding meaning after this catastrophe struck. We had nearly not made it up that hill. How many other groups had simply passed them by? And how close we had come to saying, “Nope: that’s too hard”!
Today, somebody within the sound of my voice, is either saying or knows someone who is saying “God, have you forgotten us?”
No He hasn’t, but it takes a team of people to bring that message.
That morning the 9 of us who went up that mountain received the thanks and saw the appreciation of the people who had felt forgotten, but there was a team back at the hotel – base management, medical officer, administrative staff, procurement, security, and more – without whom we could not have done what we did. Behind them was an Incident Management Team in North Carolina, along with a Global Security Operations Center monitoring the situation so that we were safe. But behind them are countless churches and individual believers whose names will never be spoken in Mexico, who nonetheless are perfectly happy to be among those who provided the support necessary so that, that day and in that location, 300 people were reminded that God is in the rebuilding business and He had not forgotten them.
But is God done? A resounding “No!” was shouted together by 65 pastors who gathered in the same Presbyterian church that had been the site of much of shelter kit preparation. Those pastors had gathered, had heard the word of God, had knelt to pray together, and had risen resolved to join God in the mission of taking back Acapulco
From that same location, dozens of volunteers from across Mexico, as well as Americans, had headed out in a Single-minded dedication their part in that Mission.
They knew Hurricane Otis had created a problem with Housing – 85% of homes were destroyed or so seriously damaged as to be unlivable without serious repair. The usual damage was the roof blown off. Many times walls were destroyed as well.
The North American Volunteers were part of the same mission as all of us, a Mission that would not be accomplished while we were there, but toward which we could play an important part in achieving that mission seems impossible in the world’s eyes which says that you will never get rid of the cartels or the government corruption. Believers knelt together, prayed together, and then picked up their hammers and their Bibles because we were and are all committed to one purpose: Take back Acapulco.
Some people – usually from somewhere else – say, “Don’t bother with Acapulco: it’s too far gone. You’ll never make lasting change.” People will say that about other places, too: some near to where you and I live. But walking to church one Sunday Morning, we saw a silent statement of resistance to all the apathy, defeatism, and the corruption that would not go away quietly. This is what we saw:
They Love Acapulco: it is their home: It is the cry of their heart to “Take Back Acapulco” and you know what? It’s the cry of God’s heart, too.
So, in obedience to God who is in the rebuilding business, hundreds of roofs have been tarped by North American Ministries volunteers.
One tarp might not look like much, but there begins to be a statement made.
In obedience to God, thousands of Shelter kits were distributed by this team of extraordinary people – and one old man.
We made 50 deliveries – some drop-offs, many distributions. With each shelter kit helping an average of more than 4 people, before the mission is done, fifty thousand people will have benefited.
But I want to tell you about one more delivery. It was like many others, except that it wasn’t. We traveled to a church to leave off 50 shelter kits. Although this was a small delivery, and we weren’t supposed to be handing these to individuals, each delivery was an opportunity to care for a pastor or church leader – with perhaps his or her spouse – and communicate with more than our materials that God had not forgotten them, either. As is the way of the Mexican people, this pastoral couple wanted to offer us a cold drink: would we sit with them? It always seemed like we were sitting on a patio or terrace when we did this but in reality, we were in the church building it just didn’t have a roof right now. A mercy is that it almost never rains there in December and January. While we sat, a mother and daughter from the church came to pick up their kit. I looked at the young women on the team with a glint in my eye! This was the opportunity!
I had included in my baggage a single, authentic Jane Clemons Care Bear. The problem had been: How could I give a single gift to a child, when we always saw dozens of children at a time?! We believe God chose this girl – Jimena – to receive that simple, beautiful reminder of both God’s presence and also the love of fellow believers.
Francesco, our own Teddy Bear of a translator, repeated in Spanish the poem that Jane puts with each of her bears as I read it aloud. Please pray for Jimena and all the children of Acapulco, that God will give them peace each night as they sleep, and that they will grow knowing not only that God is in the rebuilding business, but also that He will be their strength as they stand against evil. May we do the same.
