WHY ARE WE HERE?
Rosenort’s 150th Anniversary Celebration
Rosenort EMC
Why are we here?
That’s a deep and philosophical question; maybe it’s too heavy for a celebration.
Why are we here?
Because the delegate David Klassen found some land and established a village near here. It may amuse you to know as a child hearing the story of his coming to Canada and having been raised on stories of the Wild West, I believed that David and the other delegate, while exploring some land, were chased by hostile Indians. I imagined them spurring their horses to get away with arrows flying about them. That’s not what happened. But it makes for a good movie.
Why are we here?
To celebrate 150 years of settlement in this rich, fertile community and the blessings of God we have known here. When our people’s privileges in Russia to teach, preach, and speak in German were eroding, when our young men were being conscripted to join the Imperial Army, they found a new land, a Promised Land in Canada where they could worship and live in freedom. Is that a good answer?
Why are we here?
Psalm 145 clearly tells us why we have been placed here, even why we were created. We have been placed on the earth to be personally blown away by the glory of God. And when we have stopped to consider the faithfulness of God and have been blown away by the glory of God, we want to live for that glory and not our own.
Why are we here?
We are here, not to wipe the dust off our history, but to declare to God and to those who will listen, that our God is worthy of praise and honor and glory.
To Praise God! (1-2)
We don’t know the circumstances which prompted David to write this psalm, but it must have been a good day. Some of David’s psalms cry out for justice, for God’s answer to his melancholy. Not in this psalm; this is a psalm of praise.
David the king acknowledges that God is the true King, and he provides us with the biblical answer to the question “Why are we here?” He says, “I will extol you, my God and King, and bless your name forever and ever. Everyday I will bless you and praise your name forever and ever,” (1-2).
To “extol” is to praise enthusiastically. It is not a mental assent to the good things of God; it is not a murmur or whisper of thanksgiving; it is an obvious and exuberant “hallelujah” that everyone can see. David declares, “I will loudly exclaim the value and worth of the King of the Universe!”
The Westminster Shorter Catechism asks the question, “What is the chief end of man?” And the answer is, “To glorify God and enjoy him forever.” You and I were created to bring glory to God. There is no higher calling.
How we bring glory to God can be contrasted by the microscope – telescope analogy. Glorify and magnify are very similar terms, but the instruments in question are very different. A microscope magnifies little, teeny things and makes them bigger than they are, while a telescope makes gigantic things that to the naked eye look more like what they are. To glorify God like a microscope is like grasping and groping to find something, anything to praise God for, while to glorify God like a telescope is to search the immensity of God and find that you can barely begin to explore the ways in which God has revealed himself to you in your life.
Your life, your parenting, your job, how you behave, the way you worship, the way you handle life – everyone should read from your life, “God is great!”
The Reasons are Innumerable (3)
The reasons to praise God are innumerable. David testifies to this when he himself says, “Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable,” (3).
The NIV is closer in this text using “his greatness no one can fathom.” Fathom is a word that gives us a nautical picture to work with. A fathom is a sailor’s measurement of depth. If something is unfathomable, it means you can lower a depth-finder deeper and deeper and never reach the bottom. That’s the greatness of God. His glory is so great we will spend a billion years in eternity researching the glory of God and we will have just begun to begin.
This is something Paul begins to pray for the Ephesian believers when he prays that they “may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth…” (3:18). He was trying to have them understand the love of God in Christ but gets lost in his musings so that he doesn’t even finish his thought. He can’t. Paul considered God in Christ and seems to have left his readers hanging. But he goes on to pray that they know the love of Christ which is ironically beyond knowing.
To count God’s blessings is as Matt Maher sings beyond our ability to count. “One, two, three, up to infinity. I’d run out of numbers before I could thank you for everything. God I’m still counting my blessings.”
Where do we begin? David Klassen brought 30 families to a hot, muggy, mosquito-infested flood plain and said, “We’re home.” Follow that with the coldest winter on record in Manitoba and you can see why no one wanted to live here. Fast-forward 150 years and we have reaped the blessings of these pioneers and live quite comfortably with our A/C and our Thermacells. And it’s quite easy to dismiss the distant reality that if Klassen and the Mennonites hadn’t moved, we would be living in the middle of a warzone in Ukraine.
One, two, three, up to infinity…
Praising God Teaches the Next Generation (4, 11-12)
Praising God must have been a public event for David and his people. Or at least he envisioned that praise would involve rehearsing the stories of God’s faithfulness in the homes as grandparents related them to the younger generation. David wrote, “One generation shall commend your works to another, and shall declare your mighty acts,” (4). A little while later, David repeats this charge to share these stories of God’s activities, “They shall speak of the glory of your kingdom and tell of your power, to make known to the children of man your mighty deeds and the glorious splendour of your kingdom,” (11-12).
To praise God goes beyond singing songs and declaring “How great thou art…” The Mennonites of David Klassen’s day had a morbid fascination with the Martyr’s Mirror. Between the Bible and the Mirror, these pages were fodder for sermons. Why rehearse the stories of men and women who suffered and died for their faith? What encouragement could be gained from such profound defeats? I believe they saw in the martyr stories the power to face anything; they saw that a person could trust in God with the last drop of blood believing in a better world to come with Christ as King. So, they shared these stories boldly.
When evangelical fervor was awakened in the Kleine Gemeinde (EMC) and the missionary spirit renewed, the Rosenort Church led the way with missionaries. I recall the story of Ben Eidse wanting to be a teacher and his father replying, “A teacher? I would rather you be a farmer.” And then Eidse decided to be a missionary, his father replied, “A missionary? I would rather you be a teacher.” But Eidse had been touched by the true evangelical spirit and convicted that people needed to know Jesus Christ. And the only way they would know Christ is if he stepped up and went to Congo.
The same could be said of Frank and Marge Kroeker when they went to Paraguay. They and many others forged ahead and were determined to “speak of the glory of God’s kingdom and tell of his power to save” through Jesus’ work on the cross. We need to tell these stories and how God has been faithful to the community of believers in Rosenort.
His Works Speak for Themselves (5-7, 10)
David knew that these stories of God’s goodness needed to be told and retold. As Jesus entered triumphantly into Jerusalem, the crowds praised the Lord for sending Messiah. But the Jews told Jesus to rebuke them. Jesus replied, “If they keep quiet, the stones will cry out,” (Lk. 19:40).
David said, “On the glorious splendour of your majesty, and on your wondrous works, I will meditate. They shall speak of the might of your awesome deeds, and I will declare your greatness,” (5-6). And then later, he writes of God’s deeds, “All your works shall give thanks to you, O LORD, and all your saints shall bless you!” (10). In a manner of speaking, David echoes Jesus saying that God’s work speaks for itself. How many times have we viewed the wonders of creation and thought, “How great is our God!” Stand at the lip of the Grand Canyon, stare down from the Alps, or gaze upon the great big sky of Manitoba, and tell me you are not in awe of our Creator.
But Paul reflects on God’s greatest work and declares, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them,” (Eph. 2:10). WE are his workmanship. God has done an amazing thing through Jesus in taking sinners and transforming us into his children!
As a professor of Anabaptist History, I have the opportunity to share the stories of our ancestors who took a bold step to baptize adults at a time when the church was stagnating. 500 years of faithfulness. We have a heritage of faith that has been passed down to us and we must not forget it. I hear often from my students that they dread a history course; they fear it will be boring facts and dates. When the course is done and the stories of God’s work in faithful people has been shared, their eyes are alight with the drama of our Anabaptist/Mennonite journey. It’s not history; it’s God at work. And you and I are the beneficiaries of this heritage of faith.
The Character of God Calls Us to Praise (8-9)
Why do we praise God? His character, his person speaks to us in a profoundly loving way. David repeats a phrase we have heard before: “The LORD is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The LORD is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made,” (8-9).
I wondered, “Where have we heard that before?” So, I searched and found it in an ancient text, in Exodus. Moses wanted to see God. But God said that he couldn’t see God and live. God placed Moses in the cleft of a rock, covered him with the shadow of his hand, and passed by that place speaking these words that David quoted.
For centuries that hand covered the people so that they could not fully see God. Then Jesus came. And Paul interpreted his coming like this: “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ,” (2 Co. 4:6). God has taken his hand away and we see Jesus who is God in the flesh, gracious and merciful, abounding in love.
We have seen him because we see his works. Look around.
Why are we here?
In the world? We are here to praise the living God and to tell of his works to people who need to know him. We are the evidence of Christ’s transforming work that changed us from sinners to saints.
Why are we here?
In Rosenort? After 150 years, we can look back and see a little bit of what God has been doing. The story is grander than our little blip in history, but our part is significant. I believe we have been brought to this place as a faint reflection of the Promised Land. We have been brought here to grow in faith, to prosper from the land, and to take that prosperity and send workers into the field to join Christ in the true harvest.
I know that it is tempting to think that you earned the prosperity of these times. But don’t be fooled, God gave you the riches of this place and said, “Now, be faithful.”
Now the world is coming to us, to tiny Rosenort. We have seen in the past years how people of different ethnicities have joined us in our village. This community was established in faith, and we must continue to be a beacon of faith to our new neighbors. They have come to share in our prosperity, but the true riches of our faith – that’s what they really need. They need the Jesus who has done a good work in us. How will we respond to these challenges?
At age 22, Jim Elliot had a promising ministry in front of him in the United States. He probably could have been a very successful pastor or evangelist or teacher. His parents were not very excited about his call to go to the Quichuas in South America. They wrote and told him so. He answered bluntly.
"I do not wonder that you were saddened at the word of my going to South America," he replied on August 8. "This is nothing else than what the Lord Jesus warned us of when He told the disciples that they must become so infatuated with the kingdom and following Him that all other allegiances must become as though they were not. And He never excluded the family tie. In fact, those loves that we regard as closest, He told us must become as hate in comparison with our desires to uphold His cause. Grieve not, then, if your sons seem to desert you, but rejoice, rather, seeing the will of God done gladly. Remember how the Psalmist described children? He said that they were as an heritage from the Lord, and that every man should be happy who had his quiver full of them. And what is a quiver full of but arrows? And what are arrows for but to shoot? So, with the strong arms of prayer, draw the bowstring back and let the arrows fly - all of them, straight at the Enemy's hosts.
"Give of thy sons to bear the message glorious, give of thy wealth to speed them on their way, pour out thy soul for them in prayer victorious, and all thou spendest Jesus will repay."
(Elisabeth Elliot, Shadow of the Almighty: The Life and Testament of Jim Elliot, [New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers: 1958] p. 132; hymn quote from "Oh, Zion Haste")
We have a quiver full of arrows: faith, wealth, prayer, opportunity, and sons and daughters. Let us pray and let the arrows fly.
This is why we are here!
AMEN
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