Hero Series #2: Jon

On the first Saturday in June, 2007, one of my heroes, Jon Karner, was laid to rest in a verdant cemetery outside tiny Milaca, Minnesota. I met Jon in 1980, on a street corner in the USSR. He was Jaanus Karner back then, a leader in the underground church in the Soviet republic of Estonia. We were there to deliver some sorely needed supplies from supporters in the West.

Jaanus was a semi-anonymous legend in the West, and I had seen his black and white photograph hundreds of times. Now, standing there in the flesh, tall and strong with a coal black beard Samson might have envied, I somehow saw him still in black and white. Mind you, contrast was good in the USSR, a lifeless land whose grayness of spirit seemed to drain even the natural world of every shade in the spectrum.

In a nation where many men preferred the blurry haze of drunkenness to the stark clarity of belief, Jaanus’ faith framed him in a sharp black and white. He not only engaged in the dangerous practice of youth ministry at Tallinn Methodist Church, but enthusiastically embraced the highly illegal vocation of evangelism. If, as was often said, Estonia was the Soviet Union’s “window on the West,” this man was a rope dangling from it. More goods got in and news got out because of him than virtually anyone else in the Christian underground. Want to meet with Christian leaders in Kiev? Jaanus knew them. Need contacts in Moscow, Leningrad, or way down in Armenia? He could put you in touch.

Living in black and white was challenging but good in the Kingdom of Gray. From Tallinn to Tashkent, Kiev to Kamchatka, the Evil Empire’s vast steppes wore a trench coat of gloom. Charcoal clouds dotted gray skies that loomed over gray buildings on gray streets. The pallor of the people was equally sunless, especially their eyes—fogged over windows into hopeless souls. Strobe Talbott had once described Leonid Brezhnev and his Kremlin cohorts as “old men with faces the color of sidewalks.” He was right. Even the elite, incapable of either passion nor embarrassment, could not muster a pink blush. Yes, black and white was good, even necessary, because it kept one from drowning in the murk.

But it was also dangerous. Jaanus had already been kicked out of university and consigned to a series of menial jobs. The KGB had ransacked his home more than once in the middle of the night, searching for Bibles and incriminating documents, yet never finding them because, he said, God warned him every time that they were coming.

“Those agents always drive Volgas,” he once told me. “And the click of that particular car door outside my house will awaken me from a dead sleep.”

No wonder his older son, thirty-six year old David, told me the day of his father’s interment that he had clear memories of those episodes from the age of three. Having the front door smashed in at 2 a.m. by thugs in dark suits would do that to a toddler.

I still remember Labor Day weekend of 1983. It was David’s 12th birthday, and Jaanus wanted me to attend his party in Tallinn, before I flew back to America on September 2nd.

“You can’t walk straight to the pick-up point,” he said. “When you leave the hotel, walk around Old Town for a few minutes like you’re sightseeing. Then wait by the bus stop near Maripooiste Church. Use your peripheral vision to watch for Tani’s red Lada. He’ll stop about 50 feet down the sidewalk from you. When the back door opens, get in and lie down.”

I followed Jaanus’ instructions and eventually arrived at Tani’s rickety front gate, whereupon I was whisked furtively into the house with my head down. David and his little brother, Stefan, were playing with Tani’s kids in the living room, oblivious to the ridiculous intrigues that somehow cast a little boy’s birthday party as a threat to the State.

We hadn’t been there for fifteen minutes when Jaanus pulled me into the hallway and cranked up a big, tube radio his friends kept handy to defeat electronic eavesdroppers. Then, cupping his hands over my ears, he said in his staccato accent, “This is probably the last time I’ll ever see you.”

I jerked away to look my friend in the eye and rebuke him, but he pulled me close again to explain.

“The KGB took me in a few weeks ago and told me that it’s already been decided in Moscow. I will be taken to trial, found guilty, and sentenced to ten years hard labor in Siberia. They said they would give me a little time to prepare my family to live without me.”

I was stunned. Nobody tried under Soviet law was ever found innocent, because that would reveal an imperfection in their prosecutorial system. The noble State only ever arrested the guilty. I also knew that ten years in the gulag was a virtual death sentence.

I flew home the next day with Jaanus’ words a death knell in my ears. I hated the Soviet system. It was 100 percent evil and 100 percent stupid. And the KGB—how utterly cruel they were. “We’ll give you a few weeks before we come for you,” the arrogant Colonel Timusk had said, toying with this good man’s life like a cat bats around a wounded mouse.

But somewhere over the Atlantic everything changed. I had been at a worship conference in California the week prior to making this trip to Estonia, and on the last night of that event some fifty senior pastors had surrounded me onstage to pray for my ministry and safe return.

It was during that prayer, in the auditorium at Pasadena City College, that I had seen a—a vision, on the white facade that fronted that venue’s massive balcony. I wasn’t feeling particularly spiritual, mind you, and although I believed in visions, I had never considered myself a worthy candidate for one.

I saw Red Square. Right there, in living color, on the wall was Moscow’s Red Square, the gigantic brick plaza where soldiers goose-stepped and ballistic missiles rolled by in May Day parades, while the old men of the Kremlin stood atop Lenin’s tomb and waved to the throngs below who so despised them.

But now I saw dancers instead of soldiers, and banners instead of rockets, and tens of thousands of people worshiping the God that Marx had hated. “That’s ridiculous,” I thought at once. “If that ever happened there would be no Soviet Union. It’s just my stupid imagination.”

Suddenly, ten days later at 37,000 feet above the ocean, it wasn’t so crazy anymore. “Read Numbers 13,” a voice inside me said. I grabbed my Bible and quickly turned to a section of the Scriptures I usually avoided, because of all those boring “so-and-so begat so-and-so” passages. I usually turned to Numbers only when sleeping pills failed to work.

It was the story of Moses, sending 12 spies into the Promised Land. Ten of the men had returned, utterly horrified by the giants they had seen. But two, Joshua and Caleb, had come home full of faith. “We can take the land!” they reported, waxing eloquent about the bounty they had seen. It was as though God’s promise to them had turned Canaan’s giants into grasshoppers. And, of course, later on these two faithful men did indeed lead their nation to possess the Promised Land.

“What are you going to believe?” the Voice asked me. “Are you going to believe the big Soviet giant, or the picture I showed you on the wall in California?”

Then and there I knew that the mighty Soviet Union was going to fall as surely and resoundingly as the walls of Jericho. For the next eight years I blabbed that good news in churches all over America, and whispered it in living rooms and hallways in the USSR. And for eight years Christians on both sides of the Iron Curtain looked as me as though I were crazy. Then it happened.

“I suppose this makes you a prophet,” they said after 1991. “Nope,” I always replied. “I’m just an informed tourist.”

As for Jaanus, he never went to prison. Instead, just three a half months after we had parted so sadly in Tallinn, he and his family took up residence in Redondo Beach, California. A serendipitous contact with U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz had secured their release, which included a complete bypass of the KGB, who normally had to sign all exit visas. When agents broke in the door yet again in mid-December, the house on Looga Street was as empty as their legal case. As for the KGB Colonel who had taunted my friend so mercilessly, he was “retired” in 1991 when that spy agency was dismantled, and spent the rest of his life as a low-wage bouncer at a local bar.

Meanwhile, Annie, Jaanus’ sweet wife, passed away in 1992. David grew up to become a race car driver, and Steven went to work for the City of Los Angeles. Jaanus became an American citizen named Jon, and helped establish a broad presence for Christian television in the former Soviet Union.

In 1994 he married the lovely Elizabeth and “immigrated” once more, this time to central Minnesota, where he spent the last thirteen years of his life on a quiet honeymoon, he and his bride frequently returning to his beloved Tallinn.

The cemetery just west of Milaca was bright green on that day in June nearly ten years ago. And it was made greener still by a peaceful rain that cleansed the earth in preparation for Jon Karner’s saintly body. We read the Scriptures, prayed a prayer, sang Amazing Grace, and said some words. Then we all just stood in the shade of a stately oak and silently listened to the birds singing.

They sang in color.