Recently, IMA World Health President & CEO Rick Santos delivered a sermon at the Westminster Christian Unity Service entitled "Victory through Unity in Christ".

Below is a transcript of his sermon. Click here to see local news coverage of the event.

Victory through Unity in Christ
January 29, 2012
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Good afternoon everyone. I am honored to be here with all of you today, as we encourage one another as we strive for unity in the body of Christ.  

Thirty years ago, as a undergraduate at the George Washington University, in Washington, DC, I was invited by a Presbyterian Minister, Rev. Bill Crawford, to attend a Tuesday evening dinner and participate in the Ecumenical Christian Ministry he led.  At that time I was searching to understand God’s will in my life and how to express it. That dinner, that vision of Christian unity, provided the trajectory of my life’s work ever since.   I stand here today, as committed to that vision as I was thirty years ago—and making that vision more than theoretical, but one actually lived out in the actions of my life.

The most recent expression of this vision of Christian unity for me is in my current position as the President and CEO of IMA World Health, a faith-based, ecumenical, nonprofit organization that operates out of the Brethren Service Center in New Windsor. Our mission at IMA is to advance health and healing to vulnerable and marginalized people all over the world, and our primary projects are in Haiti, Tanzania, DR Congo, South Sudan, Liberia, Kenya and India.  Our birth as an organization, and what continues to sustain us, is the commitment of different Christian churches and organizations to provide health supplies and services.   We work with local communities, facilities, and health ministries—to achieve our mission.

A little over a year ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Pastor Clementson, Pastor McCrickard and a few other members of the Westminster Ministerium, at a Day of Prayer we hosted in observance of the first anniversary of the Haiti earthquake.   

As some of you may know, I had a deeply personal experience with the Haiti earthquake in January 2010.  I was there, representing IMA with several colleagues, at a meeting on Neglected Tropical Diseases which had just finished 10 minutes earlier when the massive earthquake struck. As Pastor Fuss just read in 1 Corinthians, things can change in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye.  And they did for me and my five companions.  

One moment I was walking across a hotel lobby, with IMA and United Methodist colleagues who had joined us, heading to the restaurant to discuss how we could help revitalize the Methodist clinics in Haiti.  The next moment the earth lurched and the building collapsed on top of us, as did the entire six story hotel. We remained trapped beneath the rubble for more than two days before we were miraculously found and then rescued, by young French firefighters.

Of the six of us, only the four of us who were relatively uninjured eventually survived—two of my colleagues from the United Methodist Church survived the initial building collapse, but were severely injured and eventually died of their wounds and the shock.  Around us, in the rest of Port au Prince and earthquake effected areas of Haiti, it is estimated that more than 200-300 thousand people died, many more were injured and nearly 1.5 million were made homeless.

Why did I live?  Why did the foreign rescue teams come to where I was and not other places?  Why was I able to return home to my family while others still remain homeless to this day?  Why did the poorest country in the western hemisphere have to experience even more terrible suffering?

I still think about these questions—and the only answer that seems to make sense to me, which comes in those silent spaces, between the end of a prayer or scripture passage, and when the mind moves to other things—is that I am no more special than the person who died. And that in a tragedy, such as the Haiti earthquake, we all share in the loss; we all share in the suffering of those who died, were injured and made homeless.  That God is with all of us equally, and perhaps more so with those who suffered and died.   

I have been involved in relief and development work for the last twenty years, and I have seen great suffering over the world, particularly in places like Haiti, DR Congo and South Sudan where years of oppression and war have destroyed homes, families and critical infrastructure. There are no winners in these conflicts where millions of innocent people who are left without a means to obtain food, health care, clean water, education and other essential needs barely survive.  For me, how we respond to these tragedies, is what defines us—much like how the Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopals, Disciples, UCC, Mennonite, Brethren, and Adventists responded to the tremendous need for health and healing by unifying and creating my organization—IMA World Health—when it was founded 50 years ago.

Paul says in 1 Corinthians, we are called to devote our lives to serving God.   

What does that look like? Well for one, it means helping those who have been dealt a difficult hand – the poor, the sick, the oppressed. The people who could really use a victory. Isaiah 1:17 says, “Learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.”

And it also means loving one another, both throughout the world and here in the body of believers, just as God loved us.

Because of our victory in Christ, we know that despite earthquakes, despite suffering, despite the obstacles we meet along the path, our labor for God is not in vain. In fact, our work on this earth can transform lives and lead others to victory as well. That’s what we strive for in our work every day at IMA World Health, and that’s why we continue working in some of the world’s most difficult places.  

The theme of today’s service is the transformative power of faith in Christ, particularly in relation to our prayers for the unity of the Church. This doesn’t mean that we’re praying for everyone else to change to meet our own ideals. It means that we pray that we would each be transformed to be more and more like Christ every day—taking action and serving and loving one another.

That’s when true unity, true victory, true transformation and a true ecumenical vision in action can be made possible.