# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1911 06 13_S188
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

188

Look, there by the door sit the grandmothers, six in number. Because they are frail, they are to be comfortable, and so we have given them a place right by the entrance. They are all widows. In their youth the light of God's Word scarcely shone upon them. Their eyesight and hearing have greatly declined; they can hardly learn anything anymore. With much effort they have still grasped that there is only one God, and that idolatry is sin — but also that God's Son, the Lord Jesus, has redeemed them from the devil, sin, death, and hell. Although these grandmothers can no longer do any work in the Lord's vineyard, they still have their significance. For it is often through the grandmothers that the children and grandchildren also come to Christianity. But the main thing is that they themselves, rescued in their old age like a brand plucked from the fire, enter into heaven.

In front of them sits the younger part of the congregation, the men and women in their prime. By occupation they are field workers, gardeners, tanners, workers in tobacco, and the like. The women do menial labor, carry water, or gather grass; one of them runs a small business. Our congregation consists mainly of twenty families; some are married couples without children, others are men, women, and children. The childless couples bear the great cross of childlessness, which weighs even more heavily on the Oriental than on the European. And the families with children have mostly also been through a great deal; one of these families, for example, lost six children while they were still heathen. For the sake of their Christianity they have all already been slandered, some even beaten and literally trampled underfoot. I can testify of them that it is a matter close to their hearts to be good Christians. May the Lord keep them faithful unto death!

In front of the adults you see the schoolchildren sitting. They make up the congregational school. They are the young saplings in Christ's garden; they are now being watered and tended. On them rests our hope of a future good Christianity, one to which heathen thinking will one day be foreign.

And last you see all the little ones from six years of age down to the tenderest infancy. Of them it is especially written: "And he took them up in his arms, and put his hands upon them, and blessed them," Mark 10:16. The Holy Spirit intercedes for me with unspeakable groanings when at baptism I lay my hand on such a little brown child and pray the Lord's Prayer over him and so place him in Jesus' hands.

Now look once more at the heathen. They worship stones; they have a heart of stone, and therefore also a stony expression on their faces. So — now look once more at our Christian congregation. God has taken away their heart of stone and given them a heart of flesh. Therefore their stony expression, too, has vanished, and a soft, gentle, friendly, evangelical expression has taken its place.

But how does it stand with the old Adam of our Christians? He is, alas, still there — and he is a Tamil. The chief sins of the Tamils are lying and unreliability. Therefore these sins keep breaking out again and again among our Christians too. One must constantly admonish them with Paul's words: "Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members one of another," Eph. 4:25. But their old Adam is no worse than others'. One sees this at once when one holds up one's own old Adam beside it. Neither one is beautiful. When one considers how much grace God has granted to people like us from our youth up, how we have always been allowed to sit at the fountain of life and drink, while our native Christians, by contrast, were heathen only a few years ago and sat in darkness and in the shadow of death, then one becomes humble and patient regarding their old Adam, and one learns to bear with their weaknesses. This does not mean that we put a good face on a bad matter; rather, we call sin sin, we rebuke and admonish — and then comfort them again with heartfelt mercy.

How much pasture, then, does this flock get? Every Sunday, as said, at ten in the morning there is worship, with preaching on one Sunday and catechism instruction on the next, alternating. During Lent we hold a Passion service every Friday evening. On every second Sunday of the month the congregational meeting takes place following the service. The remaining Sunday afternoons I devote to visiting my congregation members in their homes. In or in front of the Christian home I have set out to visit, I find myself together with the teachers and the boarding-school boys, and we take our seats. Christians from other households join in as well — and many heathen. A house service then takes place. God's Word is considered, and in prayer the members of the family being visited are especially commended to the Lord's blessing. So far these have been happy and blessed house visits. Four times a year we celebrate the Holy Supper. Most who are entitled to commune generally take part. In any case, in shepherding my flock I keep before me the word of the apostle in Col. 3:16: "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom!"

But how does it come about that people become Christians? You have already heard so much about preaching to the heathen. We missionaries go into the towns and villages of the heathen and preach God's Word to those who will listen to us: law and gospel, repentance and faith. The question now is whether the heathen are converted by this, so that they come and have themselves baptized. How many heathen are converted to Christ through this preaching largely escapes the missionaries' observation and belongs among those things that will one day be revealed above. If we are to judge by what we see, we must say that we notice next to nothing of conversions through preaching to the heathen. And yet it is preaching to the heathen, and that alone, that has to do with the heathen's coming to Christianity.

But how, then, do the two relate to one another? Well, preaching to the heathen is the glow of fire, the gleam of light, that the heathen notice and by which they are drawn. They do not yet know him who appears to them in this fire; they do not yet know what kind of light this is. Preaching to the heathen is the burning bush in which the Lord appears to them. Just as Moses did not at once recognize the face in the burning bush but wanted to go and see it, so too the heathen do not recognize, at first sight, from the preaching to the heathen,