Gloria Dei Lutheran Church takes seriously the mission of the Church "...to care for all without reserve."
Our international missionaries are Clifford and Mitesaida Lewis. They serve the Church in Egypt.
Click here to see pictures from Egypt.
Click here to see the Prayer Page for Missionary Support.
Cliff wrote this Lenten Devotion in 2008:
“Out of the depths I cry…” (Psalm 130:1)
Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 130; Romans 8:6-11; John 11:1-45
Meditation based on Psalm 130
The Lenten season is almost over. Things will shift now from
looking at ourselves to looking at Christ and the sufferings that will come with
Holy Week. All the lessons for this 5th Sunday help us to face some
mighty things and with them we can in sense anticipate what is to come. All our
lessons speak about suffering of one kind or another. Isaiah’s valley of dried
bones is a terrifying image for all of us. The scale of death and destruction is
enormous. We do not know how this all came about. That death came about is
very, very clear.
In our day and age perhaps this image of vast destruction and
devastation is not beyond our power to imagine. From the Tsunami in East Asia,
refugees from Sudan to Genocide in Rwanda and Iraq to Katrina, we are all aware
of the tragedies and disasters that engulf our world today. More than any other
time in the history of humanity it seems that our paths are leading to despair
and utter hopelessness. Pick up the news paper or spend 15 minutes in front of
the TV news and you will read and hear of the destruction and oppression that is
around us. In our world today many have come to believe in the inevitability of
their total destruction. In their deep depths of despair and hopelessness they
echo the words of the Psalmists. “Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord.”
These words from the Psalmist place us at the deepest darkest
part of the valley of the shadow of death. Though spoken thousands of years ago
by the Psalmist, address still the fundamental problem of our world today. How
does one maintain one’s hope in the midst of despair and defeat? We all perhaps
know something about being in the depths of despair and depression. We perhaps
know of those among us who find themselves in the deep dark valley of the shadow
of death. Our lives are not always upbeat, happy, productive lives.
Sometimes, however, when diversity comes it seems that some are
able to deal with heroically and graciously. They never cry out. They never
doubt God or themselves. These are the ones perhaps of whom Paul speaks when he
says that, sometimes we are so deep in despair that we do not even know how to
pray for relief. Perhaps you have or you are in such valleys in your life. What
do you do? Do you cry out like the Psalmist, “out of the depths O Lord I cry to
you, Lord, My soul waits for you more than those who watch for the morning.”
Waiting is never easy, especially when your depths have the appearance of
wholesale death and destruction.
This is a cry I hear more often than I would like in my daily
work and service at St. Andrew’s United Church of Cairo in Egypt. It is the cry
of a people who themselves stand in the valley of despair, whose “bones are
dried up, and whose hope is cut off.” It is the cry of a people who feel that
there is no chance of being restored to a place of peace and tranquility. They
fled from persecution in the Southern Sudan to Northern Sudan to find peace. But
what they found was terror, there homes would be burnt or torn down. They found
that they could not send their children to school. They fled to Egypt. But there
is trouble for them here also.
They get stoned on the streets; cars try to hit them when they
cross the road. They are called, ‘monkeys’, or asked if their blood is black
too, like their skin. They dream of one day leaving this place and going to a
place where they can walk the streets and not have stones thrown at them. They
can walk in the country side and no land mines blow up and kill or main them.
They hope and long for a day when they can walk through the streets like kings
and queens.
For these refugees the depths are real. They are not easily
dismissed. They cannot be minimalized. These are people who have lost faith in
governments, in themselves and have come to believe that there is no hope for
them. They are discouraged, downhearted and depressed. They ask the questions,
“Who are we in the face of such calamity. We are no better than those who have
already died.” Martin Luther’s paraphrase of Psalm 130 helps us to understand
where the Psalmist is in his life of despair and hopelessness and how he hopes
to overcome the despair.
From depths of woe I cry to Thee,
Lord, hear me, I implore Thee.
Bend down Thy gracious ear to me,
My prayer let come before Thee.
If Thou rememberest each misdeed,
If each should have its rightful meed,
Who may abide Thy presence?
Who among us does not want to avoid suffering? Who among us does
not implore God to hear our gracious prayer. Some pray through words. Some pray
through actions, like the refugees in Cairo during the months of
October-December 2006. In desperation to leave to find a better place, hundreds
of Sudanese refugees gathered at Mamoud Park in Mohandeseen, Cairo to wait as
they were told for airplanes that would come and take them to America. First the
parents arrived. Then they brought their children. They waited for months but
things only got worse. Soon it was coming near the end of the year, and the end
of Ramadan was approaching; rumors began to spread that soon the Egyptians
authorities would move in and move the crowd. Soon the security moved in and
asked the crowd to leave, but they did not.
In the end, the water cannons were opened on the crowd, many were
injured and number of people including women and children died, a large number
were taken into prison. In the aftermath, husbands and wives were separated,
parents and children were separate. For weeks after it was all over, the
Director of the Refugee program for St. Andrew’s United Church of Cairo worked
to have a number of the Refugees involved in the Church’s program released from
prison.
“Out of the depths, I cry to you, Lord.” This was the cry of the
Psalmist; a cry for justice and for mercy. This too is the cry of the refugees
in Egypt who find themselves with no place to call home. With them we cry to God
who in the last stanza of Luther’s hymn is the one who can restore us to hope
and peace.
Though great our sins and sore our woes,
His grace much more aboundeth;
His helping love no limit knows,
Our utmost need it soundeth.
Our shepherd good and true is He,
Who will at last His Israel free
From all their sin and sorrow.
This is the God we see in Christ Jesus who also knew the pain of rejection by his own, knew the loss of a friend, Lazarus; knew so called "failure" of his life's work; knew fear; knew betrayal; knew the anguish of Gethsemane and the torture of Calvary; and the feeling of abandonment by his God in the midst of it all, we have one who understands when we cry, “Out of the depths.”
The depths are as real for the Sudanese refugees of Cairo as they are for you and me. So we call to God whose property it is to restore us all to a hope that we might come to believe that we all can overcome our sense of defeat and loss, our despair and hopelessness and become a people of resurrection hope. Amen
Cliff Lewis, ELCA Mission Personnel serving in Egypt