E-pistle is early this week and not written from Langhorne. I am sitting in the Miami Airport during a scheduled nearly seven hour layover between my flight from Philadelphia and tonight’s overnight to Belo Horizonte, Brazil. I should be on the ground in Belo Horizonte around 8:30 local time, just an hour earlier than Eastern time. I will be arriving in late winter Brazil with daytime temperatures in the mid-seventies, cool nights and low humidity.
As some of you know, the great occasion of this trip – I think it is my eighteenth to Brazil – is “o casamento do Leonardo e Jennifer,” the wedding of Leonardo and Jennifer. You might remember Leo’s story. I met him on my first trip to Brazil eleven years ago. He was a favela street kid who spoke no English and I was visiting American pastor who spoke no Portuguese. We met outside the soup kitchen that was then run by Igreja Presbiteriana no Jardim América. My Brazilian pastor friend had encouraged the four of us from Park Presbyterian Church in Beaver, PA, to mix with the locals, and Leo and his buddies were curious about these North Americans deep in the favela. By God’s grace an amazing friendship began.
Back in 2000, Leo did not worship at IPJA nor did he know the God who is worshiped there. He knew a life of petty crime, dabbling in drugs and no hope. It would be another three years before he came to faith in Christ – and it is a wonderful story of grace in which Becky and I play a small part. I was honored to baptize Leo in March of 2004.
God has given Leo some amazing gifts of leadership, music, insight and faith. He is 26 years old and loves God. He also loves his family – older brother Leandro, younger brother Luiz and his mother Jendira. All the boys love Jendira. She has been their rock and their inspiration. She cared for their father after he was crippled by a gunshot wound in some drug deal gone bad and for him during the long years before he died of complications from that same wound. Her small favela house was a refuge from the streets not just for her sons, but for their friends as well. I will be staying at nova casa de Jendira this week – her new house (pictured above). The government razed her old house, but the boys have been able to help her buy a new house, still in the favela, but larger and more pleasant.
Leo met Jennifer just a couple of years ago; I don’t know her as well as I know Leo, but she, too, loves God and is eager for the life that God has planned for them. Among the texts I will use in the wedding sermon is Jeremiah 29:11, “Porque sou eu que conheço os planos que tenho para vocês’, diz o Senhor, ‘planos de fazê-los prosperar e não de lhes causar dano, planos de dar-lhes esperança e um futuro.”
“Plans to give you hope and a future…” It’s what God does.
The wedding is Saturday night. The people of Igreja Presbiteriana will meet again Sunday night to worship the God of hope and plans for a future. I’ll be preaching again and they will be kind and not laugh too much at my mangled Portuguese.
I don’t know exactly who I will see in Brazil. For sure Arilson and Janete, Ronilton and Ednalva, Emerson and Nilcéia, Juninho and Juliane, Eli and Cristina, Nilda and Odias, João and Silvia, Ludmilla and Mateus, Adriano and Davyane, Flavia and Enio, Sergio and Aline, Rubinho and Josilaine, Filip, Junio, Kelly, Jessica, Adriana and many more.
The point is not how many names I remember but that God knows every name. That God loves us one by one, redeems us one by one, calls us one by one, sends us one by one and uses us one by one. And as he does so we become one; one in him and one with one another. We become the church, that much maligned, but loved-by-God unity that is a foretaste of the hope God gives and the plans God has.
I think I have a great week ahead. It’s going to be a church week, a week when the barriers of geography, language and culture are breached and broken and that hoped-for and God-planned future of “one o’er all the earth” is experienced for just a bit.