The Bear and the Dragon - Tom Clancy [252]
The congregation was already singing. They had a fine organ here, a real hundred-horsepower one, not the electronic kind he had at his church, but the singing … they couldn't help it. They sang white, and there was no getting around it. The singing had all the proper devotion, but not the exuberant passion that he was accustomed to … but he'd love to have that organ, Hosiah decided. The pulpit was finely appointed, with a bottle of ice water, and a microphone provided by the CNN crew, who were discreetly in both back corners of the church and not making any trouble, which was unusual for news crews, Reverend Jackson thought. His last thought before beginning was that the only other black man to stand in this pulpit before this moment was the man who'd painted the woodwork.
"Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. I am Hosiah Jackson. You all probably know where my church is. I am here today at the invitation of my good friend and colleague, your pastor, Gerry Patterson.
"Gerry has the advantage over me today, because, unlike me, and I gather unlike any person in the church, he actually knew the man whom we are here to remember.
"To me, Yu Fa An was just a pen pal. Some years ago, Gerry and I had occasion to talk about the ministry. We met in the chapel at the local hospital. It'd been a bad day for both of us. We'd both lost good people that day, at about the same time, and to the same disease, cancer, and both of us needed to sit in the hospital chapel. I guess we both needed to ask God the same question. It's the question all of us have asked—why is there such cruelty in the world, why does a loving and merciful God permit it?
"Well, the answer to that question is found in Scripture, and in many places. Jesus Himself lamented the loss of innocent life, and one of his miracles was the raising of Lazarus from the dead, both to show that He was indeed the Son of God, and also to show His humanity, to show how much He cared about the loss of a good man.
"But Lazarus, like our two parishioners that day in the hospital, had died from disease, and when God made the world, He made it in such a way that there were, and there still are, things that need fixing. The Lord God told us to take dominion over the world, and part of that was God's desire for us to cure disease, to fix all the broken parts and so to bring perfection to the world, even as, by following God's Holy Word, we can bring perfection to ourselves.
"Gerry and I had a good talk that day, and that was the beginning of our friendship, as all ministers of the Gospel ought to be friends, because we preach the same Gospel from the same God.
"The next week we were talking again, and Gerry told me about his friend Skip. A man from the other side of the world, a man from a place where the religious traditions do not know Jesus. Well, Skip learned about all that at Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma, the same as many others, and he learned it so well that he thought long and hard and decided to join the ministry and preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ … "
"Skip's skin was a different color than mine," Gerry Patterson was saying in another pulpit less than two miles away. "But in God's eyes, we are all the same, because the Lord Jesus looks through our skin into our hearts and our souls, and He always knows what's in there."
"That's right," a man's voice agreed in the congregation.
"And so, Skip became a minister of the Gospel. Instead of returning to his native land, where freedom of religion is something their government protects, Skip decided to keep flying west, into communist China. Why there?" Patterson asked. "Why there indeed! The other China does not have freedom of religion. The other China refuses to admit