2001 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

©2002 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

3/17/02

Tony

Matt. 11:28-30

3/17/01 Tony

We are not returning to Romans today

because I have something else altogether

that I want to share with you.

I want to begin by reading some words from the book of Matthew

spoken to us by our Lord.

Before I read them, though,

it will help us better appreciate

what He was saying

and why He was saying it

if I explain where He was at in His earthly ministry when He spoke these words.

Christ’s presentation of Himself

from the first day of His public appearance to Israel

right up until the day of His departure

following His resurrection

was all carefully designed by Him

to accomplish all that He wanted to accomplish

in the brief time He was with us.

When He first presented Himself to Israel

He was completely unknown to the nation.

But, as His teachings and the reports of His miraculous powers spread,

so did His popularity.

That popularity continued to grow over the next three years

until the Lord reached the point

at which He set the stage for His final great presentation of Himself to Israel,

a presentation that culminated in what we traditionally call the Triumphal Entry on Palm Sunday,

that remarkable entrance into Jerusalem

that so terrified the religious leaders of the nation

that it motivated them to crucify the Lord

at the exact time and place He Himself had already predetermined.

That final great presentation of Himself

in the days leading up to His death and resurrection

began first with His sending out 35 teams of two throughout the nation

proclaiming the coming of the King,

promising His personal appearance,

and presenting the people of Israel with a taste of what He would bring when He came.

When the teams returned

He then followed where they had gone in person,

presenting His credentials as the promised Messiah one last time,

and calling the nation to Himself.

Now, with that as background,

I want to read for us the words

spoken by Christ

at the point where He began that final great campaign throughout the nation.

This is from Matthew 11:28-30.

"Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light."

I’m going to come back to those words in a few minutes,

but now I want to share with you some of my own ancient history.

In the fall of 1969 I moved to the Carribean Island of Trinidad

to help a missionary family

lay the groundwork for a church

in the Cascade Valley just outside of the capital, Port-of-Spain.

I knew nothing about what I was suppose to do when I arrived on the Island,

and for the first few days

I just sort of hung around the mission house, reading my Bible and waiting for revelations concerning what “MISSIONARIES” did.

No revelations came,

and I got tired of sitting around the house,

so one evening I finally just started walking down the road

to see what I could see.

What I saw at the street corner about a block away

was a large group of young men,

all very loud and, to me, very frightening,

just siting on the curb

and standing around.

It will help you to know

that the Island inhabitants are nearly all black,

imported from both India and Africa as slave labor in the nation’s distant past.

Just prior to leaving for Trinidad

I’d read the book “The Cross and The Switchblade”

describing evangelistic work among some of the gangs in New York,

and I remembered feeling very white,

and very out of place,

and very vulnerable as I walked down to the group.

I introduced myself,

plopped down on the curb,

and spent the rest of the evening “liming” with the group.

It is a Trinidadian term - liming.

A person’s lime

is the group he hangs out with in the evenings on the street corner.

Each lime has it’s own corner,

and the limes often become more of a family unit for those involved

than a person’s own biological family.

And for the next year that lime became my family as well.

They welcomed me into their lives without reservation,

as I did them.

I share this with you this morning

because there was one young man in our lime that I want to tell you about.

His name was Tony.

He was one of the youngest in the group,

probably about 12 years old.

All the others in the lime called him “Scatters”

because most of his front teeth were already rotted out.

He hadn’t attended school

for at least a couple of years.

Tony and I hit it off right from the start.

He lived in one of the shacks in the valley,

along with a number of other brothers and sisters, mostly older than him.

I never met his dad, and don’t even know whether Tony knew who he was.

I was only about ten years older than Tony myself at the time,

but I became as much of a dad to him as he ever had.

About half way through that year

I was able to lead Tony to the Lord.

I am certain his salvation was real to him,

but I also know Tony brought an awful lot of baggage with him into his very young Christian life.

There was a great deal of drinking that went on in those street corner groups.

Trinidadian Rum is world famous,

and, for those on the island,

always available cheap.

Being the youngest in the group,

Tony always wanted to prove himself,

to prove he belonged.

The group started to pour rum into him long before my arrival on the island,

and even by the time he and I met

I believe he was well on his way to becoming an alcoholic.

I remember one evening when I wandered down to the corner to join the group

I noticed Tony wasn’t there.

I asked where he was

and was told he was in the house.

He didn’t want to come out.

I called for him,

and waited,

and then called again,

and eventually they brought him out, so drunk he could hardly stand up.

He staggered over to the little concrete wall I was sitting on,

sat down next to me,

and then leaned his head over and dropped it onto my shoulder.

Then he looked up at me and said,

“Are you vexed, Larry? Are you vexed?”

I put my arm around him and told him I wasn’t angry,

I just hurt for him.

I remember one afternoon

I asked Tony if he wanted to go to the beach with me.

He jumped at the chance.

I was using a motorcycle as my main source of transportation at the time,

and he and I climbed on and rode the nearly half hour it took for us to get there.

The Carribean was exceptionally rough that day,

with massive rolling waves crashing onto the white sand.

I charged out into the waves

until I was nearly over my head,

then turned toward shore and rode the waves in.

Little Tony attempted to do the same thing,

but whereas I was able to hold my own against the power of the waves,

he was not.

The first huge wave that caught him

grabbed him and then rolled him over and over again, grinding him into the sand on the way in.

He came up sputtering,

with one eyelid full of sand.

We walked up to the shore together,

and as I helped him get the sand out of his eye

a huge Trinidadian lifeguard came over to me and said,

“Hey man! What do you think you’re doing!

Don’t you see the boy loves you?

He idolizes you.

He’d follow you anywhere.

You got no business leading him out there like that!”

And he was right.

He was right about everything.

Tony just stood next to me,

grinning.

My friendship with Tony continued to grow throughout that year,

and by the time I left the Island

it was really hard to say goodby.

We tried a letter or two,

but Tony didn’t have a whole lot of education,

and writing letters just didn’t work.

I heard nothing more from him,

nor he from me for the next 20 years.

Then, in the summer of 1990

our church made it possible

for Sandee and Joni and I to go to Trinidad.

That Island was so much a part of my past

and I was thrilled with the opportunity

to show Sandee and Joni what it was like.

At the top of my “things I really want to do when I get there” list

was to try to track down Tony and see how he was doing.

Soon after we arrived

I left Sandee and Joni in town

and went back up to the valley I’d lived in so long ago.

I found the little track that lead down to where Tony use to live.

As I approached the house

I called out his name,

and to my shock he came flying out of the house.

He grabbed me

and rapped his arms around me

and jumped up and down with me trapped in his bear hug.

He looked just the same to me,

except for being several feet taller, of course,

and I noticed how extremely thin he was.

We spent the afternoon together,

talking about the old days,

talking about the old gang,

with Tony filling me in on everyone’s history.

Then I asked him how he was doing.

He said he was doing fine,

except that...well...he was still having trouble with the rum sometimes.

I didn’t have another chance to see him before we left the island,

but we both parted knowing that nothing had changed between us.

Then, just a few months ago,

I came home to find a message on our answering machine from Charles Pierre.

Charlie had been a part of our lime in Trinidad that year I lived in the Cascade Valley.

He was now married, living on the East Coast of the United States.

Somehow he’d tracked down my phone number and called.

I called him back

and for more than an hour we caught up on old times.

Of course I wanted to know what the old group was doing.

And at the top of my list was Tony.

“Do you ever see Tony or hear from him anymore?”

There was a silence on Charlie’s end for a few seconds,

and then he said,

“Oh, you never heard, did you. Tony is dead.”

I asked him how he died,

and again there was a silence before Charlie answered.

Then he said, “Tony died of AIDS.”

Charlie wasn’t certain he had contracted it from the homosexual community in Trinidad,

but he thought it was very possible.

That news has affected me more deeply during the past few months

than I ever expected it to.

I found myself grieving over the loss of my friend, of course,

but it was far more than just that.

As I thought back on my last meeting with him

I understood why he was so terribly thin.

But the thing that has affected me the most

is that Tony couldn’t bring himself to tell me he was dying of AIDS.

I wish so very much he could have known

it wouldn’t have made any difference to me at all.

I wish I could have told him that.

But he was too afraid - afraid of losing the love

of the only dad he’d ever known.

If he only could have told me,

if he could have allowed me to go through that with him,

I could have helped.

But his fear,

and his sense of shame

kept him from taking the risk.

I knew from the day Tony and I met

that he was a desperately needy young man

with no one to guide him,

or to help him find ways

of working through the pain.

The fact that his life ended up being

mostly a painful, desperate pursuit of answers he never found

doesn’t really surprise me.

But, as I was thinking about Tony once again this morning,

it suddenly hit me that we so often do in our relationship with God

the same thing Tony did in his relationship with me.

We don’t dare risk inviting him into our pain,

and especially into our failures

because we fear His response to us.

And what we do not realize

is the same thing Tony could not bring himself to believe,

that, if we would let Him in,

His first response to us would be,

“My child, it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t change My love for you.

It can never cause Me to turn away from you.

I can and I will go through this with you if only you’ll let me.”

I began our time together

by reading the words of our God to us

spoken when He was here in human form.

He said,

But what we do not allow ourselves to believe

is that He spoke those words to us

with full, and complete, and absolute knowledge

of everything that’s going on inside us.

You may find yourself reacting to my account of Tony

because you react to his homosexuality,

or to his AIDS.

But the truth is,

there is no difference between him and us.

The fact that we have selected other hiding places,

other coping tools for our pain,

other forms of immorality that may be more socially acceptable

does not change a thing.

We are all just like Tony at certain places deep inside -

caught in our own unrighteous traps,

unable to meet our needs through them,

and yet unable to break free from their grip.

And the offer our God gives to us

at that point in our lives is clear:

I will see Tony again.

I’m certain of it.

He was my brother

as well as my adopted son.

We are united forever by our Lord Jesus Christ.

My one great regret

is that I could not have stood beside him

and, with full knowledge of what was going on in his life,

have said to him, “Tony, it doesn’t matter. This is no barrier between you and me.

I have loved you from the first day we met,

and nothing ever can or ever will alter that.”

It would not have erased the consequences of so many wrong choices.

It would not have delivered him from AIDS.

But he would not have had to go through the pain all alone.

and I know I could have helped

with so many of the things he was wrestling with inside.

And I am certain,

if we could know honestly our Lord’s response to each of us,

we would see Him responding to us

in exactly the same way.