Day 1 in Amman--CVT, Bethany on Jordan, Sunday night service

Entry: September 27

Amman is hot,dry, and growing in numbers and sophistication, though Bedouin still set up camp in open city fields and herd sheep and goats through the city center.

Two-thirds of the citizens of Jordan live in Amman.  The city is built on mountains, the buildings are the same tan as the desert, and the traffic is as congested as anywhere.  With no lane lines, driving seems to be a combination of courage and courtesy, honking horns, manual shifting artistry, and good brakes.

Our first day in Jordan, we connected with the Center for Victims of Torture, lunching with staff involved in a mission of mercy and healing for the millions of refugees from Syria and Iran who flee to this rare haven of stability in the Middle East.

In the afternoon, Pastor Rolf Pearson and his wife, Kirsten, picked us up and took us to the Jordan River, to the baptismal site of Jesus, and to the new Lutheran church and parsonage nearby.  The country of Jordan has approved a pilgrimage site near the Jordan River where several denominations--Catholic, Orthodox, ...and Lutheran!--have been allowed to build churches.  (Not to be outdone, the Russians, while not invited to build a church, have built a retreat center--that includes a chapel.)  The Pearsons, longtime missionaries from the Swedish Lutheran church who have spent most of their lives in Zimbabwe and the Middle East, are charged with this new ministry in Jordan.  There is not yet electrical power at the church site, so for now the Pearsons live in Amman and lay groundwork for future ministry.  The lovely, small church houses dramatic chancel paintings by a Norwegian artist and a small, but versatile, pipe organ that survived (barely, apparently) raising to the choir loft via ropes and muscle power.  Will it survive the heat until the electrical power provides AC?

Our daughter, Christine, gave me a book before we left, one of many,many by Tom Wright (i.e. N.T. Wright or the Reverend, Dr. Nicholas Thomas Wright), and Anglican author and theologian I have turned to frequently in recent years.  It is a small book on pilgrimage:  THE WAY OF THE LORD.  In his chapter "The Way to the Jordan," he writes:

However the living God meets you--whether, like Paul on the road to Damascus, it happens in a blinding flash, or whether, like many others in New Testament times and since, it comes creeping over you, with a strange warmth and joy and challenge that the living God is addressing you, calling you, loving you, forgiving you and commissioning you--the many ways in to personal faith are all summed up and made public in baptism...here, washed in this water, are the covenant people of the one true God.

Here, then, at this site on the muddy Jordan River are the covenant people of God, people from many nations, approaching the river from the Israeli side and from the Jordan side, dipping in toes or plunging in full body, saying to themselves and to the world, "I am a child of the living God."  Here Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches rise from the desert to honor Christ and the event that took place at this site and to invite the pilgrims to rest and renew.

In the evening--worship at Good Shepherd Lutheran, the only Lutheran church in Jordan, thus far.  Hymns, accompanied by an uninspiring electronic organ, were nevertheless sung with fervor.  David was able to find the hymns in the hymnal and had us following the tunes, reading the melodic line backwards, of course, to match the Arabic text.