Gifts of healing on Pentecost

On Pentecost Sunday, June 9, 2019, we delivered the bulk of the latest shipment of medicines from the Confessional Lutheran Church of Chile and Global Lutheran Outreach to 15 families in need of them.

Requests for medicine are coordinated through the Lutheran Church of Venezuela. Recipients can choose from a list of 25 common medications (up to three medications per patient). Each of those 25 medicines are available in Chile without a prescription. With money raised by Global Lutheran Outreach, medicines are purchased in Chile with the cooperation of a local pharmacy. Members of the Confessional Lutheran Church of Chile collate the orders and prepare each congregation’s shipment. Medicine is shipped using a globally known shipping company, and then is unpacked and sorted for distribution to the beneficiaries. After arriving in Venezuela, the medicines are sorted and packed for distribution to each beneficiary. In the first three months of 2018, Global Lutheran Outreach shipped a month’s supply of medicine to over 440 patients. The average cost per patient for a month’s supply is about $15 (including shipping).

Global Lutheran Outreach began its Venezuela Relief Project by sending funds to help people purchase food. Although food shortages are an acute problem for many Venezuelans, the lack of medicines is even more grave in a number of ways. Without adequate medicines, medical equipment or sanitary supplies, diseases that had virtually disappeared from Venezuela, such as malaria, diptheria and tuberculosis are spreading once again. Medical conditions that once were considered minor problems have become life-threatening. People who need medication to deal with such conditions as epilepsy and schizophrenia are in dire straits. And this is the situation everywhere.

To put things in perspective: During the last half of the 20th Century, there was rapid population growth in Venezuela’s urban centers without corresponding investment in infrastructure (roads, railways, water systems, electrical generating capacity, etc.). With the collapse of Venezuela’s economy, it’s the people who live in once prosperous cities like Caracas or Maracaibo who suffer most from shortages of food and drinking water. It has been noted that, ironically, the remote, rural areas that never fully benefitted from the post-WWII prosperity are now coping better with food shortages. The people in these areas either can grow their own food or barter goods and services with agricultural producers. However, even being able to grow medicinal plants in your backyard is not a substitute for vaccines and other modern forms of treatment.

School supplies from LeadaChild

Also in this past month, we have received school supplies – notebooks, pencil sharpeners, construction paper, glue and the like – from LeadaChild, a mission society based in Olathe, Kansas. A Recognized Service Organization of The Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod and a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity, incorporated in the state of Kansas, and a charter member of the Association of Lutheran Mission Agencies (ALMA), LeadaChild has supported educational projects in Venezuela since the 1990s and Epiphany Lutheran Mission since 2006.

We presented some of the school supplies and Bible storybooks from the Lutheran Heritage Foundation to Luz Maria’s afterschool students who next month will graduate from sixth grade to begin high school in September.

Completing coursework

On June 11, we received a visit from Pastor Eliezer Mendoza, director of the Juan de Frias Theological Institute, and Pastor Miguelangel Perez, president of the Lutheran Church of Venezuela. Much of our discussion centered on the fact that I am close to completing my coursework with the Formación Pastoral Hispanoamerica program.

Perhaps I should explain a few terms. There has never been a residential Lutheran seminary in Venezuela. The Juan de Frias Theological Institute was organized in the 1970s around the Theological Education by Extension (TEE) model pioneered by Ralph D. Winter, a former Presbyterian missionary to Guatemala, in the 1960s. TEE was the precursor for modern day theological distance education programs. The idea behind TEE was to make it easier for local church leaders to learn and be ordained as ministers without relocating them and their families for years to the capital city to attend seminary. These students could continue their ministry while studying at extension campuses near their town or village. Then, once a month, they would go to the seminary in the capital city to study.

When I came to Venezuela in 2003, I started taking extension courses from the Juan de Frias Institute (it is named for a Augustinian friar from Caracas who was burned at stake for teaching Lutheran doctrine in the 17th Century). Eventually I was invited by the national church to enroll in an intensive program to train pastors that required weekly attendance of classes in Caracas throughout 2007. In 2008, I continued to attend Juan de Frias seminars periodically until my ordination in December 2008.

Unfortunately, this program depended heavily on visiting professors from Concordia Seminary, St. Louis; Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Indiana; and Seminario Concordia, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Given current circumstances, it no longer is possible for professors from these seminaries to safely travel to Venezuela, nor is it as safe to travel every week to Caracas. There also are not enough qualified Juan de Frias instructors living in Venezuela to travel to all parts of the country as in previous decades.

But there is distance learning via the Internet, and for the past four years I have been taking on-line courses as a student in the Formación Pastoral Hispanoamerica (FHP) program, which is part of the LCMS Specific Ministry Program (SMP). The SMP is a means to provide ordained men to serve in ministry situations for which a residentially trained pastor cannot be supported. SMP–Español/English (SMP–EsE), headquartered at Concordia Fort Wayne, addresses the growing need for pastors in the LCMS who speak Spanish and are equipped to serve in bilingual congregations. FHP is an extension to the SMP-EsE distance education program to Latin America, with its base at the newly established Seminario Concordia El Reformador in the Dominican Republic. Dr. Arthur A. Just, Jr., who now serves on the faculties of the seminaries in both Fort Wayne and the Dominican Republic is director of the FPH program.

God willing, I will finish the program this year and next year receive a diploma from Seminario Concordia El Reformador. The value of this is that I then will be qualified to serve with the Juan de Frias Institute in training future pastors, deacons and deaconesses in Venezuela. This is consistent with our long-term goal of making Epiphany Lutheran Mission a center for such training in southwestern Venezuela.

Our days are numbered

We have completed the so-called “festival half” of the church year with the celebration of Trinity Sunday. The major festivals, which include Christmas, Easter, Ascension and Pentecost, all occur during the first half of the ecclesiastical calendar, which begins in November with the first Sunday in Advent. The latter half sometimes is called, in a very boring manner, “the non-festival half”, but I prefer the term, “Ordinary Time”, which does not mean ordinary in the sense of common, but ordered or enumerated. Thus the Sundays are in order, first, second, third, etc., Sunday after Trinity/Pentecost (depending on which lectionary that you use) until the last Sunday of the church year, Christ the King Sunday. This represents the idea that the days are numbered until the Second Coming of the Lord in glory.

“Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of Man. They were eating and drinking and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all. Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot—they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, but on the day when Lot went out from Sodom, fire and sulfur rained from heaven and destroyed them all—so will it be on the day when the Son of Man is revealed.” (Lucas 17:26-30)

The mission of the church during these ordered days is to proclaim the whole Word of God, Law and Gospel. The good news of salvation in Jesus is to be understood in the context of the imminent outpouring of God’s wrath, when there will be no more grace and mercy, but only judgment upon the wicked.

“For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.” 1 Corinthians 11:26

As for those who have received the Lord’s grace in baptism, we will not be taken unaware by the day of judgment, whenever we celebrate the Eucharist we proclaim not only His atoning death, but also His return in glory. Amen.