The Never Ending Apocalypse

 

The Reverend Seth Ethan Carey

September 30th, 2007

 

First Congregational Church, Glen Ellyn, Illinois

www.firstconge.org

630-469-3096

 

It was a quiet afternoon at the far edge of the world.

 

I'd been in Eastern Africa for three days when I found myself sitting at an old wooden table in the rural mountain village of Kishanje, engaged in conversation with my traveling companion Pat Brady and our gracious host, Reverend Ben Tumuheirwe. I was nearly 8000 miles from home, breathing the thin air of high altitudes and waxing philosophical on the intersection of science and religion. I thought it was an ironic conversation, given the lack of running water in that deeply spiritual place.

Pat had just finished teaching a class on astrophysics to a group of high-school aged orphans, who were now playing a game of soccer in the late afternoon sun. He had taught them about the death of stars. “The sun is no exception, you know,” Pat explained to us afterwards as he casually peeled a banana. “When the sun enters its Red Giant Phase in about 450,000 years, its mass will envelop the planet, evaporating oceans and destroying all life on earth.”

 

Perhaps such an apocalyptic revelation should have troubled me, but in all honesty I was more concerned with my own personal safety in the here and now. Only an hour before, I had nearly fallen to my death from a second story balcony. I feared that my keen knack for tripping over things would be my undoing in Uganda, where guard-rails are made of twigs and pot-holes in the road are deep as graves. I even managed to fall out of the pulpit the previous Sunday morning, but I’d rather not go into details there. Tripping over your own robes in church is embarrassing enough—although one must admit that it isn’t as embarrassing as tripping over someone else’s robes—but falling out of the pulpit is a new low. Although it was, to its credit, the only part of my sermon that got any laughs.

The hospitality in Kishanje was exceptional and no words can do justice to the natural beauty of its surroundings. But getting there wasn’t easy. We reached the base of the mountain at dusk three days prior, as I watched the sun set over the bars and brothels of Kabali Town, gateway to the western mountains of Uganda and the wild jungles of the Congo beyond. Our driver—a man named Noah— took us up the nearly vertical mountain pass in pitch black darkness. As we wound our way up and around the mountain, I made the mistake of looking down. I couldn’t help but notice that the passenger-side tires were soaring off the ground, propelled by gargantuan rocks and bumps in the road, mere edges from a sheer drop of several hundred feet. I feared death. For three hours I cast furtive glances over my shoulder, half-expecting to see the grim reaper nestled in among the bunches of bananas we’d purchased along the way. But by the grace of God Noah saw us through, navigating his pick-up truck of an ark across the deadliest off-roading adventure that I ever hope to encounter.

 

After that drive, an exploding sun didn’t frighten me at all.

 

But our host, Ben, took a real interest in Pat’s dying stars. “That’s exactly what it says in 2 Peter,” Ben replied with enthusiasm. “That there will be a loud noise, and the heavens will be consumed by fire; that even the elements themselves will melt. Isn’t it amazing,” he added, “that the scriptures could be so precise? See, it all makes sense!” But when I turned and looked out the window at the poverty-stricken orphans peering in, I couldn’t make sense of anything at all.

 

***

 

Due in large part to the deadly epidemic of HIV that has swept across Uganda in the past twenty years, there are over two-million orphaned children living there. Most of them have few resources and little hope of ever overcoming the cruel hand that life has dealt them. A few years ago, Pat and Ben founded Juna Amagara Ministries to combat the threat of orphan poverty—to give as many orphans as they could an education, a home, and a chance to succeed. In the relatively short time since its creation, they have founded an orphanage in the city of Umbarare, put dozens of orphans through school, and have even begun expanding the operation to include learning centers in the villages of Kishanje and Kimoynge.

 

As chairman of the organization, Pat invited me to accompany him on a first-hand inspection of their operation, and to bear witness to God’s healing work in Uganda.

 

We spent our first week at their satellite facility in Kishanje, teaching an improvised Intro to Computers class to the high school students there. The organization had acquired three laptops from a recent donation, and we had to share them between nearly twenty students. When Pat wasn’t scrawling notes about processors and binary code on the well-worn blackboard, the students were tightly clustered around these computers, getting hands-on experience with Microsoft Office. Occasionally some dirt and debris would fall from the ceiling onto the keyboard, but they just dusted it off and went back to work on the machines. They were powered by a diesel generator out back.

 

One evening, after most of the children had gone home, I was sitting in bed reading when I heard the unmistakable sounds of someone playing video games in the common room. Could it be? I thought perhaps that I was feeling the psychotropic effects of my anti-malarial drugs. Or maybe it was just wishful thinking. But as you can imagine, I was going through a bit of electronics withdrawal so I got up to investigate. It turns out that Pat had showed a couple of the kids how to boot up the Pinball game that came loaded on one of the machines, and they stared at the screen, transfixed, their lips curled upward in child-like grins.

 

One of the teachers at the school—a man named Moses—sat at the keyboard for an hour, a regular pinball wizard. 

 

The next day in class, Pat and I noticed that the students were packed in more tightly than usual around one of the laptops. And then we heard the telltale beeping sounds and digital music that accompanied the pinball software.

 

“All right guys, all right, you can play video games after class,” Pat began telling them, working his way towards the crowd. It was then that we realized it wasn’t the kids who had interrupted our class to play video games, but one of the teachers. It was Moses. He just shrugged, and smiled, as if to say, “Can you blame me?”

 

And I couldn’t. When the nearest medical facility is adorned with a cardboard sign that reads surgery, when the streets of your town are littered with garbage and discarded banana peels, when the only world you know is populated by a never-ending line of children in rags, no— I can’t blame you for clinging to this machine, this icon, this graven image of the modern world, and all of the possibilities that it represents.

 

***

 

Uganda is a hard country. In 1971 it was seized in a military coup by Idi Amin, an ultraviolent and maniacal dictator who remained in power for eight long years, before his own people drove him into exile. Things have been slowly improving there since the 1980’s, but the unstable political climate, so susceptible to corruption and collapse, makes it an unlikely interest for the big corporate investors that could really improve the economy.

 

Now, I know I tend to come down pretty hard on mega-corporations. But in a land without hamburgers, it would have been nice to have a McDonald’s nearby. And while the corporate presence in America can be overwhelming, I for one would welcome some new corporate overlords in Uganda.

 

Most of the country is living in terrible poverty. The government has put a lot of resources into expanding the capital city of Kampala, but much of Uganda is a vast wilderness of shantytowns and unpaved roads—dirt highways trod by a million people who will never know another world.

 

When I was teaching those kids alongside Pat in Kishanje, I saw so much potential in them. They were kind, intelligent, enthusiastic, hard working kids. And Juna Amagara Ministries has given them a chance to shine.

 

But for every one of them that will get an education and rise above their own dire circumstances, there are a hundred more whose gifts and talents will be unrecognized, disregarded, forgotten. There are a hundred more who will never learn to read, never learn to use a computer, never learn that one day, the sun will explode.

 

That’s one kind of apocalypse, a supernova, the kind that happens so fast you won’t even know what hit you. But the orphans of Uganda suffer from something else, slow to kill but equally devastating on a personal level—a perpetual fire that consumes possibility and melts hope, dissolving every chance they ever had—a bad hand of cards, a constant tragedy, a never ending apocalypse.

 

But for a lucky few, organizations like Juna Amagara can arrest the slide into oblivion and turn things around. It can give them a shot at a better life, a chance to transform the consuming fire of poverty into an exploding star of never ending possibility.

 

***

 

With nine hours to go until I arrived home, God gave me a blessing in disguise. I had settled into my seat on the plane, looking forward to a long afternoon of British Airways in-flight entertainment, when I realized that the headphone jack on my armrest was busted. I couldn’t plug in my headphones. If I couldn’t plug in my headphones, I couldn’t watch Pirates of the Caribbean. A bead of sweat trickled down my brow as a cold panic seized me.

 

I inquired into the availability of other seats, and to my good fortune they moved me to first class. The trouble was, they had put me next to a man who wasn’t interested in watching in-flight entertainment. Just as I plugged in my headphones with a satisfying click, he began a conversation with me that lasted for nearly an hour.

 

At first, I was annoyed at the irony of the situation. It had been a long two weeks, and I was in bad need of the kind of mindless entertainment that only a movie about pirates can offer. The man seated next to me was a Saudi Arabian oil tycoon, a dignified man of refined tastes who complained to me about the quality of British airline food all throughout lunch.

 

“The British were once a proud people,” he announced loudly, “regarded around the globe for their hospitality. But this,” he pointed to his dish with a plastic fork, “this is a poor man’s meal.” After leaving a third world country, I was a bit annoyed with this sort of talk. 

 

But when the subject of my profession came up, along with my trip to Uganda, he said something that took me off guard and stayed with me.

 

“It’s a shame,” he said sincerely. “No one goes on pilgrimage anymore.”

 

I hadn’t considered my own trip to be a pilgrimage, per se. In all of the planning and traveling, the word pilgrimage hadn’t been uttered once. The word is generally used to refer to a journey made to a holy place. But then I realized that that’s exactly what we’d done. We had traversed the globe to bear witness to something holy, a light shining in the darkness, manifested in the hopes and dreams of these bright-eyed orphans.

 

And it’s something we’re called to do all the time—not necessarily to walk the earth, hunting for sacred shrines, but rather to journey inward, to walk the path of Christ, to go looking for God in unlikely places. Because somewhere along the way, we’re transformed into the kind of people God always meant us to be, the kind who can create a new heaven and a new earth—

 

Not just for the privileged, but for everyone.

 

Amen.