Angels in the Treetops

November 22, 1998, PM

(Some background: Exodus 16:2-15, Matthew 20:1-16)

Philippians 1:21-30

In January of 1956 I loaded up a U Haul and drove to the place where I was to begin my pastoral ministry. Cherry Valley is a tiny crossroad community, not even a village, in northeastern Ohio. I was twenty five years old. As I began to learn the wonders of the pastorate, I was blissfully unaware of many problems and pitfalls. Amazing grace kept me safe sometimes in dangers I remember, and no doubt many times when I didn't have sense enough to recognize real danger. I did things backwards, I'm sure. I remember times when I was dreadfully afraid, and many times when I probably did the wrong thing. But people in the community were saved. God blessed in many ways. God has been good to me, and given Helen and me four loving sons, and twelve wonderful grandchildren, and I have served churches where the congregations have treated me with love beyond what I deserve.

In that very same month, January 1956, a small group of young Christians just a little older than I were launching a new ministry as well. These were people with top notch college and seminary educations, the kind who go to the very top in any field they enter. The one thing that distinguished this group was that they had totally dedicated their ambition to God.

This particular group had come together because they believed God wanted them to take the gospel of Christ to a tribe in South America where the life expectancy was barely 30 years of age, and where revenge and murder was the accepted way of life. Five wonderful, bright young Christian families believed God was leading them to take His Good News to these primitive people. They prepared in the best imaginable ways. It was as sophisticated and yet as dedicated a missionary endeavor as you could imagine, using aircraft and radio contacts. And then in their very first contact with the dangerous tribe all five men were killed.

Why have I put these two beginnings side by side? Am I comparing myself to those great martyrs? No there is no comparison in my mind. I wouldn't change places with them, and I know they wouldn't change places with me. I have the CONTRAST in mind. Grace does not seem to treat us all alike, as the gospel lesson makes clear. But again today (as last week) we see several insights into the nature of God's grace:

Last week speaking particularly about FORGIVENESS, we said:

Today's "outline" is about OBEDIENCE, and it is similar:

GRACE IS GOD'S BUSINESS, ON HIS TERMS

Our gospel lesson tells of contrasts in work and working conditions: "The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who hired people in the morning who worked all day in the sun he hired them at nine, and noon, and three in the afternoon, and again he hired an hour before quitting time and they all got a day's wage. The all day workers cried foul. Humanly speaking, as the only way we can speak, it was unfair.

How God assigns, how God rewards, what God calls vital and important is finally His business. Our business is to follow the pillar of fire, the "Presence," where it leads. Our challenge is to believe, to trust that God will care for us.

GRACE IS GOOD, BUT IT DOESN'T MOVE TO OUR EXPECTATIONS

Exodus passage: underscores the very human traits of grumbling when things don't go was expected. What outside forces could NOT do– destroy the Exodus mission internal dissension and bad will almost did do. The biggest headache Moses had was ...grumbling, complaining, murmuring—

The people experienced some hunger ... and expressed their discontent. They made unfair comparisons. They remembered best times of slavery Still on the journey, the Exodus, no one starved... but some died from snakebite.

Grace may be present and unrecognized, even despised; grace can be blacked out, even apparently defeated

The miracle of manna is how God chose to feed his people. It required both faith and obedience. That lesson is echoed every time we pray the Lord's Prayer: "Give us THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD! Faith and obedience connect with God's grace! We have provision for today to be what God would have us be today.

GRACE IS NOT FAIR. IT IS UNDESERVED. IT IS GOOD.

When the five missionary martyrs, died Life magazine carried pictures of red eyed widows, and corpses beginning to bloat in jungle heat. The reporters did make mention of the amazing calm of the women and children, and their lack of hatred and revenge spirit. But it was a sad, sad story. To a pure materialist there is no question that these people were deluded in the matter of life investment and spiritual reality. What a waste for people to study language and sociology, and to take expensive equipment into the moldy hot jungles only to be killed on their first encounter with their target tribe, and have their airplane torn apart.

The Christian world saw things somewhat differently from the start. It was not too long before the very same warriors who had killed the missionaries testified that the missionaries' God had conquered them, not with punishing power and vengeance, but with forgiveness and life changing love.

But just recently the whole story has emerged. In the latest Christianity Today is an article by Steve Saint, who was a baby when his father, Nate Saint, was killed by the people he was trying to reach with the love of Jesus. I read to you:

"Why didn't he flee into the jungle?" Mincaye emphatically asked me. "If he would have fled, surely he would have lived. Instead, he just waited for Kimo to wade out and spear him."

Dawa, one of the three women, told me she had hidden in the bush through the attack, hearing but not seeing the killing of the five men. She told me she had been hit by gun pellets in the wrist and just above the knee. (The obviously came from random warning shots fired to scare the attacker, because Dawa was hiding on the far side of the narrow river and the men could not have known of her presence.) She also told me that after the killing she saw COWODI (Auca word for foreigners) above the trees, singing.

She didn't know what this kind of music was until later she heard records of Aunt Rachel's and became familiar with the sound of a choir. Mincaye and Kimo confirmed that they heard the singing and saw what Dawa seems to describe as angels along the ridge above Palm Beach. Dyuwi verified hearing the strange music, though he describes what he saw more like lights, moving around and shining, a sky full of jungle beetles similar to fireflies with a light that is brighter and doesn't blink.

Apparently all the participants saw this bright multitude in the sky and felt they should be scared, because they knew it was something supernatural. Their only familiarity with the spiritual world was one of fear. Dawa has said that this supernatural experience was what drew her to God when she later heard of him from

Dayuma. CT 9/16/96 26,7

[Supplemental story appended to this text at the end of the sermon]

Maybe that is something of what Paul meant when he wrote:

Philippians 1:20, 27 29 "For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain. ... Only live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that, whether I come and see you or am absent and hear about you, I will know that you are standing firm in one spirit, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel, and are in no way intimidated by your opponents. For them this is the evidence of their destruction, but of your salvation. And this is God's doing. For he has graciously granted you the privilege not only of believing in Christ, but of suffering for him as well since you are having the same struggle that you saw I had and now hear I still have."

Did you get that one sentence?: For he has graciously granted you the privilege not only of believing in Christ, but of suffering for him as well–

We don't know where God's grace will lead us when we start out.

AND THAT IS GOD'S BUSINESS! DO WE DARE TO FOLLOW?

Steve Saint closed the article he wrote about his martyr father with this short paragraph:

God took five common young men of uncommon commitment and used them for his own glory. They never had the privilege they so enthusiastically pursued to tell the Huaroni of the God they loved and served. But for every Huaroni who today follows God's trail there are a thousand COWODI who follow God's trail more resolutely because of their example. This success, withheld from them in life, God multiplied and continues to multiply as a memorial to their obedience and his faithfulness. CT 9/16/96 27

GRACE IS LOVE, IT IS HERE FOR US NOW IF WE WILL RECEIVE IT

If you decide to take the way of depending on God you may have forty years of ministry, or you may have a disaster so far as a humanist observer could see. Grace is not fair. Thank God it is not fair. But I feel sorry for the people who have no invisible means of support.

Prayer

Hymn # 443 I Know Whom I Have Believed

NATE SAINT AND OTHER MARTYRS OF THE ECUADOR MISSION
(8 JAN 1956)

In the dense rain forests of Ecuador, on the Pacific side of the Andes Mountains, lives a tribe of Indians who call themselves the Huaorani ("people" in their language, Huao), but whose neighbors have called them the Aucas ("savages" in Quechua). For many generations they have been completely isolated from the outside world, disposed to kill any stranger on sight, and feared even by their head hunting neighbors, the Jivaro tribe.

In 1955, four missionaries from the United States who were working with the Quechas, Jivaros, and other Indians of the interior of Ecuador became persuaded that they were being called to preach the Gospel to the Huaorani as well.

Nate Saint was 32 years old (born 1923), and devoted to flying. He had taken flying lessons in high school and served in the Air Force in WWII. After the war, he enrolled in Wheaton College to prepare for foreign mission work but dropped out to join the Missionary Aviation Fellowship. With his wife, Marjorie Farris, he established a base at Shell Mera (an abandoned oil exploration camp in Ecuador) in September 1948, and flew short hops to keep missionaries supplied with medicines, mail, etc. Once his plane crashed, but a few weeks later he returned to work in a cast from his neck to his thighs.

The other three, Ed McCully, Jim Elliot, and Peter Fleming, all Plymouth Brethren, came to Ecuador in 1952 to work for CMML (Christian Missions in Many Lands). Ed McCully was 28 years old (born 1927). He had been a football and track star at Wheaton College and president of his senior class. After Wheaton, he enrolled at Marquette to study law, but dropped out to go to Ecuador. He and his wife, Marilou Hobolth, worked with the Quechuas at Arajuno, a base near the Huaorani. Half a dozen Quechuas had been killed at the base by Huaorani in the previous year. Jim Elliot was 28 years old (born 1927) and an honors graduate of Wheaton College, where he had been a debater, public speaker, and champion wrestler. In Ecuador, he married Elisabeth Howard . They did paramedic work, tending broken arms, malaria, snakebite. They taught sanitation, wrote books in Quechua, and taught literacy. Peter Fleming was 27 years old (born 1928), from the University of Washington, an honor student, and a linguist. With his wife, Olive Ainslie, he ran a literacy program among the Quechuas.

Nate and Ed found a Huaorani settlement from the air in late September 1955. Nate made four more flights on Thursday, 29 September, and found a settlement only fifteen minutes from their station. They told Jim and Pete, and the four planned their strategy. They would keep the project secret from everyone but their wives, to avoid being joined by adventurers and the press, with the chance that someone not dedicated to the mission would start shooting at the first sign of real or imagined danger, and destroy the project. They had one language resource, a Huaorani girl, Dayuma, who had fled from her tribe years earlier after her family was killed in a dispute. Dayuma, who spoke both Huao and Quechua, was now living with Nate's sister Rachel. From her the missionaries learned enough of the language to get started. They would fly over the village every Thursday and drop gifts as a means of making contact and establishing a friendly relationship. Eventually they would try for closer contact. Nate had discovered that, if he lowered a bucket on a line from the plane, and flew in tight circles, the bucket remained almost stationary, and could be used to lower objects to the ground. He had devised a mechanism to release the bucket when it touched down.

On Thursday, 6 October, one week after locating the village, they dropped an aluminum kettle into an apparently deserted village. On the next flight, several Huaorani were waiting, and the missionaries dropped a machete. On the third flight, they dropped another machete to a considerably larger crowd. Beginning with the fourth flight, they used a loudspeaker system to call out friendly messages in Huao. Soon the Huaorani were responding with gifts of their own tied to the line: a woven headband, carved wooden combs, two live parrots, cooked fish, parcels of peanuts, a piece of smoked monkey tail.... They cleared a space near their village and built platforms to make the exchanges easier. After three months of air to ground contact, during which they made far more progress than they had hoped, the missionaries decided that it was time for ground contact. They feared that they could not keep their activities secret much longer, and that delay risked a hostile encounter between the Huaorani and some third party. They decided that the expedition needed a fifth man, so they brought in Roger Youderian, a 31 year old (born 1924) former paratrooper who had fought in the Battle of the Bulge (a major German offensive in Belgium in the last stages of WWII) and had been in General Eisenhower's honor guard. Roger and his wife, Barbara Orton, were working with the Jivaros, and Roger was thoroughly at home in the jungle, accustomed to living like the Jivaros and blessed with acute survival instincts.

They located a beach that would serve as a landing strip, about four miles from the village, and decided to go in on Tuesday, 3 January 1956. After some discussion, they decided to carry guns, having heard that the Huaorani never attacked anyone who was carrying a gun, and having resolved that they would, as a last resort, fire the guns into the air to ward off an attack, but would shoot no one, even to save their own lives.

On Tuesday they flew in and made camp, then flew over the village to invite the Huaorani to visit them. The first visitors showed up on Friday: a man, a woman, and a teen aged girl. They stayed for several hours in apparent friendliness, then left abruptly. On Saturday, no one showed, and when the plane flew over the village, the Huaorani seemed frightened at first, but lost their fright when presents were dropped. On Sunday afternoon, 8 January 1956, at about 3 PM, all five missionaries were speared to death at their camp. A search party the next day found no signs of a struggle, and the lookout who was to be stationed in a tree house overlooking the camp at ground level had come down, so it appeared that the meeting had originally seemed friendly, and that the attack had been a surprise. Ed McCully's body was seen and identified, but was swept away by the river and not recovered. The other four, at the request of their wives, were buried at the site of the camp where they had died. Besides their wives, they left behind a total of nine children.

The effort to reach the Huaorani was not abandoned but rather intensified. Within three weeks, Johnny Keenan, another pilot of the Ecuador Mission, was continuing the flights over the Huaorani village. More than twenty fliers from the United States promptly applied to take Nate's place. More than 1000 college students volunteered for foreign missions in direct response to the story of the Five Martyrs. In Ecuador, Indian attendance at mission schools and church services reached record levels, and the number of conversions skyrocketed. A Jivaro undertook to go at once to another Jivaro tribe that had been at war with his own tribe for years, bearing the Christian message, and his visit brought peace between the two tribes. Truly, as Tertullian said 1800 years ago, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.

In less than three years, Rachel Saint (sister of Nate Saint) and Elisabeth Elliot (widow of Jim Elliot) had not only renewed contact but had established permanent residence in a Huaorani settlement, where they practiced basic medicine and began the process of developing a written form of the language. Nine years after the murder of the five missionaries, two of those who had killed Nate Saint and his companions baptized two of Nate's children, Kathy and Stephen Saint. In June 1995, at the request of the Huaorani, Nate's son Stephen moved to the settlement with his wife, Ginny, and their four children, to assist the Huaorani in developing greater internal leadership for a church committed to meeting the medical, economic, and social needs of their own people as a means of showing them God's love and his desire to provide for their eternal needs as well.

Why did the Huaorani suddenly turn hostile? Much later, one of the Huaorani who had helped to kill the five martyrs explained that the tribe, who had had almost no contact with outsiders that did not involve killing or attempted killing on one side or another, wondered why the whites wanted to make contact with them; and while they wanted to believe that their visitors were friendly, they feared a trap. After the killings, they realized their mistake. When they were attacked, one of the missionaries fired two shots as warnings, and one shot grazed a Huaorani who was hiding in the brush, unknown to the missionaries. It was therefore clear that the visitors had weapons, were capable of killing, and had chosen not to do so. Thus, the Huaorani realized that the visitors were indeed their friends, willing to die for them if necessary. When in subsequent months they heard the message that the Son of God had come down from heaven to reconcile men with God, and to die in order to bring about that reconciliation, they recognized that the message of the missionaries was the basis of what they had seen enacted in the lives of the missionaries. They believed the Gospel preached because they had seen the Gospel lived.

PRAYERS

Almighty God, who called your faithful servants Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Jim Elliot, Peter Fleming, and Roger Youderian to be witnesses and martyrs to the Huaorani peoples in the rain forests of Ecuador, and by their labors and suffering raised up a people for your own possession: Pour forth your Holy Spirit upon your Church in every land, that by the service and sacrifice of many, your holy Name may be glorified and your kingdom enlarged; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Precious in your sight, O Lord, is the death of your saints, whose faithful witness, by your providence, has its great reward: We give you thanks for your martyrs Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Jim Elliot, Peter Fleming, and Roger Youderian, who purchased with their blood a hearing for the Gospel among the forest dwellers of Ecuador, especially the Huaorani people, and for their wives and children, who shared with them in their work and witness; and we pray that with them we also may obtain the crown of righteousness which is laid up for all who love the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.