SE ROSSEA VE LUBOV

Preface

"Lord God, help us at work and at play, to be ready in season and out of season, for any adventures you bring our way, and to be able to give everyone a good answer, especially to those that ask about the hope within us because of Jesus Christ, our Savior. Amen."

A Russian Lesson:

Da - Yes

Nyet - No

Dobra Otra - Good morning

Dobra Deen. Good day.

Se Rosshea ve Lubov. To Russia with Love.

Bog Este Lubov. God is Love.

History

One thousand years ago, two Greek missionaries from the Byzantine empire brought the Christian faith to Moscow. However, there was not a written alphabet to copy the Bible into the Russian language. These missionaries created the first Cyrillic alphabet for Slavic speakers.. When the prince of the city-state of Moscow was baptized, the entire region adopted the eastern orthodox faith. For the next 900 years, the country expanded and consolidated ... always with the orthodox church at hand. This is similar to the roman church in Europe during the middle ages.

This did not mean religious freedom. As is Europe, Jews were mistreated by the Czars. But the last czar had other problems. The orthodox church was so entwined with the repression of the serfs in the Russian feudal system that the Soviet replacement treated the church as the enemy of the people. However, the former serfs and peasants did not hold that same animosity and clung to their beliefs. In the drive to secularize Soviet society, 500 year old icon paintings were removed from churches, defaced, and used as target practice. Some were used as sidewalks.

Some icon paintings were rescued for the museums as trophy art of the triumph over the backward and repressive beliefs of the czars. Joseph Stalin not only purged the communist party of dissenters and crushed internal resistance by the Cossacks, but he established a systematic destruction of synagogues, churches, Bibles, and pastors. In many ways, Stalin copied the methodology of Adolph Hitler. They were two peas in the same pod.

With all this, the Soviets kept open a few churches for the babushkas, the grandmothers, in order to claim that there was freedom of religion in the Soviet constitution. In the guidebooks of 1980s, it was stated that every religion has facilities of worship in Russia ... and what was left unsaid was that only one building was allowed per religion for millions of people. All the rest were converted into warehouses, stables for horses, or museums.

The Moscow Baptist church dates back to the late 1800's and was a trophy church that Stalin left open. Even today, I saw mostly grandmothers, the babushkas, attending this church. For most of the population, Jewish and Christian faiths had both been effectively erased from the national memory. It was like the 70 years exile of the Jews in Babylon and Assyria. It was about as brutal and equally devastating.

This continued through the darkest hours of the Cold War when Nikita Kruschev proudly proclaimed that he would soon parade the very last Christian in Russia before Soviet TV and place the very last Bible under glass in the national historical museum.

The video is showing photographs and newspaper headlines about Russia with an eye to Christian faith in Russia. Some of the photos are courtesy of my friends Lynn Shaeffer of NAI, Sandra Taylor of the Russia Project, and Melanie Gillespie of Oak Ridge National Lab. Other copyrighted materials come from Wycliffe Bible Translators Museum of the Alphabet and the Chronicle of the 20th Century.

Books in 1972

In 1972, there was a widespread interest by Christians in America about the faithful in Russia. Riding on the coat tails of the Jesus Revolution in the US, a series of books were published about Russian Christians and missionary activity in the underground. These books portrayed for the American public the depth of suffering ordinary Christians faced day by day under the Soviet secret police, which was the dreaded KGB.

Christian pastors were jailed and families were separated. The Soviet education system was similar to Hitler's claim to children. Separate the children from their parents and build a new society without the remnants of religion. They were taught that only the State was supreme and that there was no God. Traditional Christianity and the Bible were scorned. Yet while Soviet leaders died and were replaced, the church continued under the surface of society. The average older citizen secretly respected the Orthodox traditions and rituals. The youth however were launched into the 70's and 80's without those bearings.

Even under enlightened times, all of the churches within the Kremlin were used only by the czar and the head prelate of the church. They are now strictly museums. The one exception is the completely rebuilt Cathedral for all of Russia. It is called the "Church of our Savior Jesus Christ". Stalin had destroyed it with dynamite and put in a public swimming pool. The church has rebuilt the cathedral to match the original building and interior artwork.. As poetic justice, I was told that they used dynamite on the swimming pool as part of the groundbreaking.

I attended a Russian Orthodox service off Red Square until our interpreter had more than she could stand and anxiously tugged me out of the building. Walking into churches and chapels were scarves on for women and hats off for men.

There is this push and pull of public secular life and private longing for rituals that instill respect for the presence of God.

Moscow and Kremlin Orthodox Churches

The Orthodox churches dating at least back to the 14th century were built around tall cylinder silos capped with an onion dome. As a result, these huge buildings have very little floor space. The interior of each silo from bottom to top were painted with saints and angels. Near the top but still in view, would be a painting depicting God the Father, the Son Jesus, and the Dove as the Holy Spirit.

I saw news reports of people of faith protesting pornography sold to their young people by a government publishing agency. They held signs calling the government to a higher moral code.

I recognized some church words in Russian taken were directly from Biblical Greek. Indeed, since half the alphabet are Greek letters, it made reading street signs much easier.

City Sites and ordinary people

Many Moscovites are forced to supplement their food supplies with summer vegetable gardens and canning for the winter. The city of Moscow spends August almost entirely as a vacation month in order to harvest the gardens at their Dachas in the countryside forests of poplar and ash trees.

Around the dinner tables was always fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions. Along the highways, were dozens of hopeful farmers with long strings of onions for sale.

Signs of modern times are microwave ovens in serviceable frame and plywood cabins that sprout from their gardens. These small plots of land are the life support system for many families. In these photos, see if you can tell the Americans from the Russians.

Stores and Signs

The signs in Moscow stores have a French origin or English words printed in Cyrillic. Sounding out the names were fun. Lynn Shaeffer and I found stores named as Veedeo Center, SooperMarket, Mahgahzine, Sooveeneer, Meenee-Market, and McDonalds. They spoke in a foreign language to appear suave and contemporary ... with English of course.

You will notice the freedom to wear the cross. To most, this is not popular jewelry as it is in the West. To the Russian Orthodox, forbidden to wear Christian symbols for 70 years, such jewelry reflects their deep religious heritage. Many atheists sell religious articles to the tourists but to actually wear a cross is an totally different issue. It marks that person (however superficial it might be) as drawing from ancient faith..

My Trip in November 1997

In 1997, I was asked to consult in Moscow on oracle database designs to track nuclear materials. I went not knowing how I would also be of service to God but knowing somehow, someway this would become a grand adventure for Jesus ... and definitely something more than being a weekend tourist.

One evening after work, a coworker from Oak Ridge and I attended the Russian staging of Jesus Christ Super Star. The Andrew Lloyd Weber rock opera songs were entirely in Russian before an audience of families and teenagers. It had cutting edge revisions placing the KGB, the Russian Mafia, and Communist era leaders in the roles of the enemies of Jesus. Had it been 10 years ago, I would have expected everyone in the theater would have been jailed or worse. This was NOT presented for the tourists and the Russian audience clearly relished the revisions of this popular rock opera. Even the protocol officer for our team could sing all the songs ... in English.

Afterwards in the cloak room to retrieve our winter coats, I spotted a man with a curious lapel pin that I recognized as being United Methodist. I pointed to it and motioned if he could explain. He spoke some English and was a TV anchorman from another city who had left his job to become a seminary student in Moscow. There are no phone books in Russia. The people are very sensitive to strangers knowing their last name much less their phone number. If you don't know, you don't have permission to know.

He gave only his first name and a phone number. I called later and then he gave the first name of the director and phone number. That person, gave me yet a third first name of a student pastor and a phone number. That pastor then gave directions using the superb and safe metro system to the Seminary, described the nondescript three story building, told me to look for a gray door, and to ring a bell. The Cold War may be over, but it may take the next generation to work through the cautions learned during the Communist years.

The Seminary has an evening two-year certificate program for training laity both about the Bible and about Christian ministry. The students meet twice weekly for 3 hours each night to attend classes. After visiting, the student pastor invited me to speak the following week on "The Grace Gift of Teaching". Members of the class included an older woman with a Ph.D. in languages, a few middle-aged men, many women, and a respectable showing of college students. One of their books in this Methodist Seminary was a book by the Presbyterian R.C.Sproul ... in Russian of course.

Even in Russian, I could understand the intent of the class I visited and followed along sufficiently because I knew the basic material. One ice-breaker was asking the students to recite the books of the Bible. Those that tried were applauded. The ordering of the books differs from our English versions.

The Sunday after the class, I was invited to attend the small United Methodist church on the outskirts of Moscow. Vladimir, the man I met at the Theater offered to join us with his young son. We were escorted through the streets to an unmarked building. It was the fourth anniversary as a congregation and they rented a flat from the Communist Youth League for the blind. It was ironic to see Communist posters in a building where the blind are unable to see. Perhaps it was for the benefit of the church. The songs were familiar tunes and I was happy to try to sing the hymns in English from memory.

Afterwards, there was tea, chai. My co-worker and I were peppered with questions about how to be more effective in telling others about Jesus and how our US churches dealt with various issues. One woman said: "Tell all the churches in the United States a big hello."

Hebrew/Russian Bible

After the service, I presented a Hebrew/Russian Bi-lingual New Testament that a friend had given me, to Vladimir as a way to thank him for introducing me to the Seminary. Unexpectantly, he valiantly tried to hold back tears. He said his class next quarter was going to be the Hebrew language and he had been dreaming only the night before about how he might find and buy such a rare book.

[Looking at various pages of book:] Matthew, ...Mark,.... Luke, ....John.... John 3:16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life."

My Trip in October 1998

In September, a man in Livermore asked me to contact Nadia, the bookkeeper of Russian Christian Radio and her 15 year old daughter Nina. On first phone contact, I asked to attend their church. They said, 'Oh no, you must want to attend an English speaking church." "No, I would like to attend your church." After several puzzlements, they agreed to meet me at the hotel. In route, they changed their mind again and took me to the Moscow Baptist Church that I mentioned earlier. They apologized that the only seating was upstairs by the choir loft. It was standing room only. I had the best worst seat in the house. The choir was of concert quality and I was perhaps the only one who could see the elegant carved pipe organ tucked out of view .

After a day of touring, Nadia and Nina took me on the Metro across the city to the offices and studios of Russian Christian Radio. It was an unmarked one story white building sharing space with a few other Christian ministries. It became clear how Nina has enhanced her English skills. She translates the e-mail and faxes that come in from Americans for her mother. Together they help stuff booklets and bibles into envelopes to be mailed to people who asked for literature offered on the radio broadcasts. Last year, their book room sent out 15,000 packets or Bibles and bible materials through the Russian mails.

Instead of asking for books to be shipped to them, she pointed along the wall of stacks of brown parcels fresh from the printers and asked how many I could use. I have brought two books describing the faith stories of famous people that the Russians respect from history.

I never did get to their own church which I later learned had a Korean pastor leading a Russian language congregation who was encouraging them to learn about the Jewish roots of Christian faith ... in Moscow of all places.

I was impressed that they followed up on this Korean's advice, had located some Jewish friends, had attended several Shabbat candle-lighting in their homes, and had learned to even dance the hora, a high spirited Jewish circle dance. Since I am learning Hebrew, I taught them a line from the common Shabbat prayers using phonetic Russian letters to help them out. So in the middle of the Polytechnic Museum, an American and two Russians were reading a blessing in Hebrew out loud for all the world to hear, saying: Baruch atah, adonai elohenu, melach ha olam - Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe.

Surprised at my vocabulary, they told me this Russian joke: