Sunburned at Church

Sunburned at Church

You're just not supposed to get sunburned at church, or at least I thought you weren't. But if we were to make a list of weird things that happened at church Sunday, the sunburn would be one of the least significant.

Our team of five, Gayla, Whitney, Mitchell, Zach, and me, left around 9:00 from the rehabilitation center in Eldoret that was housing us. We crammed into Keith Gafner's car with his young daughters, Kirsten and Ruthie, and headed to the place of the church meeting, leaving plenty of time to get there by 10:00am (when church was supposed to start).

The churches here around Eldoret are small and plentiful, so once a month a cluster of about five churches will get together on Sunday morning for a combined worship service. This particular Sunday was a cluster meeting. It wasn't actually the originally scheduled date for the cluster meeting, though. The churches decided to hold their cluster meeting on a different Sunday so that everyone would have the chance to greet the visiting wazungu.

Wazungu is the Swahili word for "white people", and mzungu is the Swahili word for one white person. We hear "wazungu! wazungu!" everywhere we go here, particularly from the children we pass on the sides of the road. They point and yell and get all excited just because they see a matatu (van) full of white people pass by them. Everywhere we go people want to greet the wazungu. All the attention we get here has started to become tiresome. We would really just like to show up at church or at gatherings and just blend in with the crowd, experiencing events as the locals experience them, but our skin forbids it. The children, in particular, are just downright giddy about wazungu. One little Kenyan boy came to sit next to me at church, and he would slowly move his hand over close to mine and gently brush my hand with his. When I offered him my hand for closer inspection, I was suddenly surrounded by a dozen Kenyan boys and girls pawing at my skin. "Come quick everyone! It's a wazungu petting zoo!" I didn't mind; it was kind of fun. But we did make a bit of a scene in the middle of church. Nobody said anything about it, but if someone had told the kids to leave me alone I would have said as loudly and self-righteously as I could "Suffer the little children come unto me and hinder them not, For the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these!" Well, ok, maybe I wouldn't have really said that. It is possible to go a bit too far with WWJD.

Anyway, so everyone wanted to get to greet the wazungu. But greeting someone in Kenya in Kenya is very different than greeting someone in America. Waving or saying "Jambo" doesn't cut it. A greeting consists of at least a handshake, and usually a meal and chai (tea with milk). So as soon as we arrived at the church site, a small mud building with a tin roof, we were ushered down a grassy path to the home of Ezekiel, an elder in the church here. We toured his home and garden and sat in his small living room with a television powered by a solar panel on the roof. As we were talking together, I started to think, "We're going to be late for church. We should probably get over there." But about that time they brought out the hot cocoa. So, we sat around and drank hot cocoa for a while while the worshippers continue to gather and wait for us just down the path. Eventually, Ezekiel said that we needed to get to church, so we left his home, walked down the path, and found about 100 people waiting patiently under a big burlap tarp set up on the lawn near the church building.

Church got started when it got started (which was about an hour late), and it ended when it was over and not a minute sooner. In fact it was almost dark by the time we got back to Keith's place that evening. We spent the entire day at church. Something that took quite a bit of time is that at the end of the worship service we were supposed to shake all of their hands, all 100 of them. But not only did we shake all of their hands, they all shook each other's hands, too. 100 people each shaking hands with 99 other people. The mathematician in me wondered how many total handshakes there were that day, so I asked Ruthie Gafner to try to figure it out. She wasn't able to do it; after all she's only in third grade, but I stepped her through the derivation of the formula anyway. I won't tell you the answer. I'll just leave it as an exercise for the reader, but it's a lot.

Something else that took a while is that, after everything was over, all the elders of the church gave lengthy speeches about how grateful they were to have us visitors among them today. Then they gave each member of our team a gift. After they finished with the speeches and the gifts, I (as the oldest male in the group) was supposed to give a similar lengthy speech thanking them for their hospitality. Grace told me later that I botched it; apparently my speech wasn't nearly long enough and I was supposed to be more grave and not make any jokes. So, if we are never invited back to that church again, let the record show that it was all because of my own cultural ineptness.

I'm sure everyone on our team took away something different from the service. Each of us were stretched in our own ways, but most of my stretching came as a result of having to preach the sermon that morning. Keith Gafner had emailed me right before we left Abilene and asked me if I would be willing to preach at the church in Eldoret on 21 June. I had never preached a full sermon before, particularly before a congregation that was so culturally different than me, so it was very frightening to think about. But, once again, Reepicheep just wouldn't shut up about it, so I told Keith that I would do it. (See the post "A sermon for the deaf" if you are confused about who Reepicheep is.)

During most of the flight to Kenya, I journaled about my anxieties over the sermon. It was a very lengthy journal entry and maybe I'll post it someday. At the very least I wanted to pick Keith's brain about a sermon topic that would be relevant to the people of Eldoret, but Keith was explicitly unhelpful. Keith told me that the Spirit would let me know what I should preach about. So, I took Keith's advice and waited for inspiration. Unfortunately, the Spirit was taking His happy time, and at 6:00am Sunday morning I still didn't know what I was going to preach about. I guess that shouldn't surprise me too much, Jesus never had very good things to say about planning ahead and instead advocated trusting God to supply what we need for each day. But at about 7:00am it all started coming to me, so I jotted some sermon notes on a scrap of paper and didn't even worry about the sermon the rest of the morning. And by the time I was called up to preach at about 1:00pm, I wasn't even nervous. Having to wait for the Swahili translator to interpret every sentence is really a blessing. It helps to slow the pace of the sermon, giving time to collect your thoughts and say exactly what you want to say.

I finished the sermon with a prayer and went to sit down, but Keith caught me on the way to my seat and told me that I had forgotten to offer an invitation. Oops. I guess that's really important here. Unfortunately, I had never given an invitation before. In fact I suddenly realized I had never even paid much attention to the thousands of invitations that I had seen preachers offer in my life. Somehow my mind just kind of filters the invitation down to "Time to pull out your song book." I thought about telling Keith that the Spirit didn't tell me to offer an invitation, but self-righteous smart alecs are the worst sort of Christian, so I went back up to the podium and did the best Baptist alter call that I could muster. And whadda-ya-know 21 people came forward plus a bunch of children.

Then I was totally lost. I felt like I was supposed to do something preacher-like with the people who came forward but I didn't have a clue what that was. Eventually I just did what came naturally which was to greet each of them with a handshake, look into their eyes, and say "God bless you". At this point Keith came forward to support my sermon, which I greatly appreciated.

Supporting a sermon is very important in this culture. When a visitor presents a sermon, the congregation is hesitant about trusting his message until someone else they know and trust backs that sermon up with a similar sermon of his own. Stephen Greek did the same thing for me when I presented my sermon for the deaf at Siriat. The people here know and trust Keith, so I was very happy for him to follow me up. After Keith was finished, I led a prayer for those who had come forward in a language they didn't understand. (For some reason, they don't interpret prayers.) And this time, when I walked back to my seat, no one called me back again. Keith told me later that they don't usually have that many people come forward; they just wanted the mzungu preacher to pray for them. But it was a stretching experience for me, all the same, not only to preach the sermon but be able to interact with those worshippers who had responded to it.

Something I haven't yet mentioned is that all of the praying for those who came forward and blessing them individually happened directly under the mid-day sun. We had been worshipping outside under the shade of a big burlap tarp, because the 5 church cluster was too large to fit in the small mud church building on the site. My big, ridiculously floppy hat had been protecting me from the sun the past two weeks, but you just can't pray with your hat on, and by the time I sat back down under the tarp again my bald head was fairly well toasted. I guess I could have worn sunblock to church, but who thinks of putting sunblock on the top of their head before going to church?

After the worship service was over we split up into our Bible classes, and Keith had told me that I was supposed to teach the men's class in addition to preaching. We men went into the mud church building while the ladies stayed outside under the tarp to be taught by Gayla Herrington. The inside of the church building was speckled with an eerie pattern of circles of sunlight piercing through the holes in the tin roof, and the men sat in a circle of plastic chairs on the mud floor of the structure. I knew which lesson I wanted to teach; Mr. Circle. Mr. Circle is my absolute favorite lesson to teach, but everyone I know has already heard it, so I don't get to teach it much. It involves drawing an analogy between these flat paper figures who live in a flat world and our own limitations in seeing and knowing God as he truly is. Keith strongly suggested that I not teach the lesson, because he thought it was too complicated to survive the translation into Swahili, but I was pretty sure I could simplify it enough to at least get the main points across. It turned out that the class seemed to follow the lesson very well, even answering some very difficult questions, and we had meaningful discussion of some pretty complex theological concepts even across the language barrier.

Then, just out of the blue, one of the men in class asked me a question that was only weakly related to the lesson, but that was obviously weighing heavily on his heart. He asked me why there is so much evil and suffering in the world if God is so infinitely powerful as I had been teaching.

I have no idea what lay in this man's past. I don't know what tragedies he has suffered or what evil he has seen, but my guess is that it has been great. The inter-tribal clashes that occurred following last year's election are still fresh in the minds of the Kenyan people. The clashes produced stories of both indescribable evil and awe-inspiring courage and selflessness. And I had even touched upon these stories in my sermon earlier in the day. Whatever this man had been through or whatever he had suffered, he was unsure how God fit into the picture. And who could blame him? The existence of evil begs for a perpetrator, and an omnipotent God is an obvious first suspect. Whatever suffering this man has endured in his life, he must have cried out to God for deliverance and met only silence. It is the most natural question in the world to ask.

What would you have said to him? I'm fairly happy with the answer I gave him, but I'll leave this as an exercise for the reader.

Some theologies are forged in ivory towers; others are forged on the dirt floors of mud church buildings. I think a good rule of thumb, though, as I continue to ponder the problem of pain is to make sure that any theological explanations for the existence of evil I propose from the comfort of my home in Abilene, Texas can be stated clearly and without wincing to the face of this particular Kenyan brother.

Lord, guard me from the temptation to meet you in worship as a critic, continually evaluating the motives and practices of my fellow worshippers. Guard me also from the temptation to meet you in worship as a tourist, seeking only a cross-cultural experience. But give me the wisdom to worship you sincerely at all times and in all places and to offer my life completely to you as a sacrifice of praise. Amen.


Yeah, I know. That was ridiculously long. Sorry about that. But writing succinctly hard, and I'm kind of running out of steam here at the end of our trip. In fact, as I write this we are waiting in the terminal at the Nairobi airport preparing to board our flight to London. All in all, it was a very fruitful trip, but I'm very ready to see my wife and daughters again.