God's Smuggler

by Brother Andrew

It occurred to me once that perhaps the chaplain might be able to help. They told me I could find him at the officers’ bar, and when I did, he was as tipsy and garrulous as anyone there. He stepped outside to see me, but when I told why I’d come, he laughed and told me I’d get over it. “But if you want, come to services before you fight next time,” the chaplain said. “That way you can kill men in a state of grace.” He thought the joke was very funny. He went back inside to repeat it to the others.

Perhaps this chaplain was struggling himself with PTSD or poor mental health in some other way, maybe he did not have true faith himself, regardless the consequences of his lapse here are terrible. Christians are never 'off duty' and should always be available to be a witness and proclaim the Gospel, especially when asked so directly.

Pier wrote me once, asking me to meet him for a good old-fashioned drinkfest, but I didn’t answer the letter. I intended to, but I found it weeks later stuck in the back of a biography of Hudson Taylor.

Most of the bag was filled with small thirty-one-page booklets entitled “The Way of Salvation.”

“Tell Brother Andrew why Josif is not here,” said Nikola. “Why is my Josif not with me?” she asked. Her voice was bitter. “Because I am a peasant woman with no education. The teacher tells my son there is no God. The government tells my son there is no God. They say to my Josif, ‘Maybe your Mama tells you differently, but we know better, don’t we? You must remember that Mama has no education. We will humor her.’ So? My Josif is not with me. I am being humored.”

“Don’t laugh,” said Professor B. “This is the way we preach to most people these days. Folks today are afraid to enter a church except for funerals and weddings. So we preach to them then! A government official said to me last week, ‘I’ll bet every night you pray for your friends to die so you can get your sermon in.’”

he shook his head. “We can’t even give you hints about how to get a new passport quickly. Such as, for instance, doing a lot of travel to nearby countries and always insisting that they stamp your papers, so that your passport will fill up sooner. We couldn’t even give you hints like that, don’t you see? I’m very sorry.” Within a few weeks I had a new passport.

“But what should I do now, Lord?” I asked aloud in Dutch. And suddenly I knew that I had to go ahead and drink that beer, that to turn it down would be to turn them down, that their kindness and hospitality ranked higher with God than one observance of a rule. Twenty minutes later, eyes watering from the powerful home-made brew, I once again shook twenty hands, laughed, wished them the speediest of all possible salvations, and went on my way. It took forty minutes of high-speed travel down the highway before the mud that had been trapped on the wheels of my little car stopped thumping the sides of the fenders.

I don't think that it was wrong for Brother Andrew to drink the beer, but I do take issue with his reasoning. The Bible teaches clearly that drunkenness is wrong, but I do not find the case for total abstinence from alcohol in the Bible. Brother Andrew here appears to think differently as he refers to not drinking the beer as being 'observance of a rule', the question is whose rule. If Andrew believes that he should not drink because he believes that is what the Bible teaches, then while I would disagree with that, I would take far more issue with his willingness to compromise for the sake of hospitality and not hurting someone's feelings. This way of thinking opens the door for all kinds of error in the Church. On the other hand, if the 'rule' referred to is simply a personal principle (such as being on a diet and not eating sugar), then I agree it would be right to put this 'rule' to one side for the sake of the people. In modern eyes, the 'rule' of drink driving comes to mind, and of course to drink 'eye watering... powerful home-made brew' with no idea of the alcohol content and then immediately partake in '40 minutes of high-speed travel down the highway' (with mud on the wheels no less!) seems indefensible.

But Petroff and I had learned one thing right at the beginning. It is never safe to call a church a puppet—no matter how dead, no matter how subservient and temporizing it may appear on the surface. It is called by God’s name, it has God’s eye upon it, at any moment He may sweep the surface away with the purifying wind of His Spirit.

“I have nothing to wear,” she said in a very small voice. I started to laugh: wasn’t this what women always said? And then I saw the tears in her eyes. Silently I began to look over her wardrobe myself. Warm dresses. Serviceable ones—at least with Corrie’s meticulous mending they’d been made serviceable. But somehow the clothes she had salvaged from the refugee room had not managed to include anything pretty. Nothing feminine and happy.… And suddenly I saw that this was part of a whole pattern of poverty into which we had fallen, a dark, brooding, pinched attitude that hardly went with the Christ of the open heart that we were preaching to others.

I think this is a good point and one not made often enough for fear of sounding like we are proclaiming some sort of prosperity gospel. So called 'first-world problems' are trivial, especially when compared to the needs of the world (which Brother Andrew saw first-hand). Yet we exist in a socio-cultural-economic moment and must live accordingly, we do not need to adopt a first century lifestyle in food, dress and housing for the sake of the Gospel when this is not necessary.

So we determined to change. We still live frugally, and always shall, partly because both of us were raised that way and wouldn’t know how else to act. But at the same time we are learning to take joy in the physical things that God provides. Corrie bought some dresses. We went ahead with the tearing down of a wall so that she could walk directly from the house to her kitchen. And when our third baby, Paul Denis, arrived—again just one year after the second—we actually went out and bought him some clothes. And I can’t say that he turned out any the worse for having passed his first days in clothes that still had the store labels in them.

'...we are learning to take joy in the physical things that God provides." this is key. We are to be grateful and rejoice in good gifts from God, even when these gifts are material (and even luxuries). We tend to think we should be grateful for 'spiritual' things but shun 'material' things, this is not the case, we need the material things and should give thanks for God's wondrous provision. Otherwise we risk becoming scroungers who are generous abroad in charity, but refuse to put our hands in our pockets at home for our own friends and families - what a terrible witness. A generous spirit loves to give not just what is basic and essential, but abundantly to bless, encourage and show love.

I laughed. That was my Corrie. The one thing I had not yet done was to ask God for direct guidance to the right person. So we did pray, then and there. And immediately a name came to my mind. Hans Gruber.

....the bad guy from Die Hard???? I joke, but seriously, why do I remember the name of a character from a film I must have seen decades ago?

And there in the dusty bypass we thanked the Lord for having allowed us to make one mistake in order to get us out of another.

Persecution is an enemy the Church has met and mastered many times. Indifference could prove to be a far more dangerous foe.

But what chance did the Gospel have when it was believed only by the old? What chance did it have when it was associated at every turn with yesterday’s empires? I was glad my guide had stayed outside. I had been trying to convince him that Christianity was a great adventure. But this? As I joined him outdoors after the service, I found myself thinking that if this were a fair example of Chinese Christianity, then the government would have an easy job of snuffing it out. All it needed was one little poof.

This seems at odds with some of Andrew's previous comments (such as "But Petroff and I had learned one thing right at the beginning. It is never safe to call a church a puppet—no matter how dead, no matter how subservient and temporizing it may appear on the surface. It is called by God’s name, it has God’s eye upon it, at any moment He may sweep the surface away with the purifying wind of His Spirit.") But I think the difference is that Churches can bow to a sort of cultural-conservationism where we evade the fresh, the exciting and the new in favour if the beige, the safe and the monotone. This links to Andrew's comments about his attitude towards finance: "I saw that this was part of a whole pattern of poverty into which we had fallen, a dark, brooding, pinched attitude that hardly went with the Christ of the open heart that we were preaching to others." This attitude, essentially, is lack of excitement, joy and instead indifference and passivity, which is terrible for the Church, especially when read in the context of Andrew's comments about persecution: "Persecution is an enemy the Church has met and mastered many times. Indifference could prove to be a far more dangerous foe." If we are not prepared to spend our time, money and energy in modernising the material and cultural fabric of our Churches to welcome in different generations or cultures then we cannot expect those who are alienated by these things to take the Gospel seriously.

“Remember,” I said, “that these people getting caught are depending on their own cleverness. Their motives are probably another disadvantage. Hatred and greed are heavy loads. Your motive, on the other hand, is love. And instead of priding yourselves on your cunning, you recognize how weak you are … so weak that you must depend totally upon the Spirit of God.…”

The difficulty, Andrew stressed to us, lies in the extremist brand of Islam with the demand of its leaders for all-encompassing obedience. In this, Islam has a lot in common with Communism. Neither is monolithic. There are places in the world where both are more liberal; places where they are dogmatic and totalitarian. In the Central Asian republics that used to be part of the old U.S.S.R.—Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan—fundamentalist forms of Islam are battling for control. In Afghanistan they already have it. The effect on people’s lives of these theological dictatorships that lay claim to body, soul and spirit is the same as under Communism.

“There is not one Muslim country at this moment with absolutely closed borders. You can get in anywhere if you go to serve. In schools, in water management, in banks, in hospitals, in technology. We’re to meet the challenge of Islam by ‘being-there’ evangelism—hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of Christians serving Muslims in the everyday world. Being there quietly, fulfilling the command to go into all the world to represent Jesus among the hurting people of the earth.”