Education for Such a Time As This

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E.A. Sutherland Education Association

Plenary Sessions

John Bradshaw

The Great Object

Jim Ingersoll

War!

Ken Caviness

Faith and Science

Lisa Beardsley-Hardy

Learning From Work

Chester Clark

Education and Redemption Are One

Doug Baker

Harriett Clark

Steve Dickman

Panel: Education and Character Development

A Faithful Priest

While We Wait

About 120 miles from the coastal city of Mombasa, Kenya, is a little town, a little settlement called Tsavo.

Now the name Tsavo is known less for the little settlement and more for the national parks.

Sarvo West and the equally creatively named Sarvo East.

Combine them, they are the largest national park in Kenya.

And being in Kenya, you would expect, rightly, that in the Tsavo National Parks you will find elephants and hartebeests and rhinoceroses, rhinoceri, I don't know, leopards, cape buffalo, giraffes, all sorts of wonderful creatures, including Panthera leo, the lion.

In 50 years before these parks were established, those Tsavo lines, a couple of them, became a very real problem.

Not far from where the Tsavo River joins the Athe River and they create together the Galana River, there is a railway line.

It was constructed by the British who then ruled, of course, great parts of Africa, including Kenya.

And in 1898, they came to an especially important and probably a little bit challenging part of the building project.

If you look at a map right now, if you Google that area, you'll find Tsavo in Kenya.

It's about 200 kilometers or so from Mombasa.

And You'll notice right by there, it just pops up on the map, there's not a lot of detail, but you'll see something called Man Eater's Camp.

Between you and me, If I was going to Kenya, I would be leery of staying in a place that is named Man Eater's Camp.

I would probably stay across the road at the much more sensibly named very safe place to stay camp.

But there is a place called Maneater's Camp.

And my expectation is, if you are a thinking person, 1 of your first questions would be, Why would anybody name a resort Maneater's Camp?

When work was being carried out on the railway line in 1898, a couple of lions, for reasons nobody could really explain, began picking off construction workers.

Lions began attacking and killing and eating workers.

It got so bad that the project stopped because the workers flat out refused to be there.

Now, they tried to get rid of the lions and counter the attack of the lions.

They built fences and barriers out of acacia.

They were prickly and thorny sorts of things, you know.

But the lions jumped over the barriers or wriggled their way through those prickly barriers and attacked the men anyway.

Didn't I hear that lions are allergic to lead?

Well, yes, you did hear that, and they are.

The British man in charge of the building project had a gun and started using it.

As a matter of fact, when he shot 1 of them, it skulked away and then came back, attacked more men, and stalked The hunter.

20 days later, the second lion was killed.

And it took, I think, 11 bullets to finish off the second lion.

If you visit the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois, you'll see both the lions have been reconstructed.

Their skins were used by the man who shot them for 25 years as floor rugs.

So when they were purchased for $5, 000 years ago, the equivalent of $70, 000 plus today, the skins weren't in very good shape.

They had the skulls of the lions, so they reconstructed the lions, and Relentless were these lions, determined, unusually so, and hard to kill.

Most of us are somewhere between wary and terrified of pit bulls.

But there'll be somebody in here today, I'm guaranteeing it, and they'll tell you that there's no such thing as a bad pit bull, just a bad owner.

And maybe you're right, I'm sure there's some truth to that.

But no 1 ever says lions are poor misunderstood creatures.

And 1 Peter 5 and verse 8 says, be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary, the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he may, what, tell me?

Now of course Jesus is referred to as a lion as well.

You say, well why would Jesus be a lion and the devil be a lion?

Jesus is what a lion ought to be Jesus is like the lions Adam and Eve used to hang out with in the Garden of Eden Satan is power and majesty and beauty gone spectacularly wrong And you know what lions do they typically pick off the weak and the young Now they can take down an elephant particularly a small 1 But it takes a whole swarm of lions to take down an elephant.

They can bring down a giraffe, but they're gotta be kinda desperate to go after a giraffe, because a giraffe can kick a lion from this world into the world to come, over for the lion.

But they like to go after the weak and the sick and the young.

They size up their prey, a victim, and they assess.

They are the masters of doing a cost-benefit analysis.

And when they believe This is the right 1 and they've minimized as far as possible risk to themselves.

They go after it They don't always succeed but lions are on a mission they live to kill and they kill to live An apt metaphor for the enemy of souls.

We live in a world that is teetering on the brink of eternity.

We're not setting dates, but there's not 1 of us here who really believes in her or his heart that this planet has a long time left.

And even if we are wrong, we are right to think the way we think because it was Jesus who said, Be ye also ready.

1 day soon the eastern sky will split wide open and Jesus will come back.

It will be like the games of hide and seek you played as a child.

Jesus will say, ready or not, here I come.

What I mean by that is, our readiness for heaven is simply a matter of our telling God that we want To be ready that we cannot make ourselves ready that we need Him to make us ready and that He must do so.

Yes, I understand the battle against self is the hardest battle a person will ever have to fight, but Jesus never lost a battle He chose to enter into.

And Jesus tells us again and again and again in the Bible that he will fight for us And that means he will fight for our children and he will fight for our institutions And he will fight for our students and with Jesus on your side.

And so let's look at our passage for this morning.

As we do we will see that the lion has been picking off the weak and the sick with devastating effectiveness.

Now remember, we who are parents, we have young.

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Plenary Sessions

A Faithful Priest

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