Messengers

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Advent 2, Year A
December 8, 2019
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
As the sunlight faded on the Friday after Thanksgiving, a few of us were here preparing for a David and Arline’s wedding.  As we discussed details, four young people came in the front door of the church.  I assumed that they were coming for the wedding, but they were not dressed for it.  As they entered, I greeted them and introduced myself. 
 
One of them said “We saw the lights on, and this beautiful church, and decided to stop.  Is it ok if we come in and look around?”
 
“Of course,” I said, and then asked them about themselves.  It turns out they had met up in Charlottesville to carpool back to college at American University in DC.  What struck me was how at ease they were together and in talking with me, a perfect stranger, in a collar.  Not only that, they looked like a poster for the United Nations.  One was white and blonde, another was black, another was Asian, and another was Hispanic.  I inquired further and they said they were all friends from school and of different faiths.  And finally, I asked, “What made you stop here?”
 
“Well,” one of them said, “we were are headed back to school to take exams, we have been with our families for several days, and we all agreed that we needed to seek a little peace.” 
 
At that, I told them to seek away and left them to wander.  They came up front and looked back at the organ.  They walked up to the altar and looked up, wide eyed, and out the window.  They stood silently for a time and then talked quietly among themselves, and after a few minutes they thanked me for the welcome.  I walked them outside and paused with them to ask a prayer for God’s peace and blessing on their journey and they headed back to college.
 
Now, I am not much of a magical thinker, but I am just mystic enough to believe God sends us messengers on our journey of faith.  After I had spent the week before reading somewhat dismal Pew Research statistics on young people and their relative disaffiliation with faith, in come these really diverse young people seeking peace – in church!  Reflecting back, I was reminded that Church really does have something crucial to offer our fragmented culture.  We make spaces for reflection, reconnection, and aspiration.  We offer a message of love, reconciliation, healing, and helping in a far too callous and sound bit pattern of public discourse.  For some good reason, the Spirit intervened in these young people’s lives and brought them here -- to receive a message of peace, but also to remind me of its sticking power and importance.
 
In making this journey through Advent, we hover in the already but not yet-ness of God’s interaction with the world.  The reason we slow it down is to listen.  And this week’s lessons are all about listening to some of God’s messengers.  Isaiah talks about a shoot or sprout coming out of the long left for dead legacy of the great King David.  St. Paul echoes the Isaiah text and gives the persecuted church in Rome a pep talk on believing in the future even if things seem dark and difficult.  And then we get to John the Baptist crying out in the wilderness.  He is not the kind of guy you want at your family dinner party as lays waste to anyone who believes their family, tribe, nation, or particularized theology guarantees them a spot on God’s good side, automatically.   John’s rant sets up a future where the world to come is turned inside out and upside down.  He is right about the radical thing God will do in sending Jesus.  But the Holy One he predicts we will come to know is not exactly what he portends.   John is a little harsh about that God’s judgment and notably short of God’s grace, but hey, he is on a roll, and he gets everyone’s attention.  He is a messenger, but he is not the message.
 
When I was an undergraduate college student at the University of the South, we had this crusty old athletic trainer that had been there for at least 60 years.  He was not of the modern sports medicine ilk of athletic trainer, he was of the rub your ankle, tape you up tight, and put you back in the fight kind of athletic trainer.  He was more like a combat medic than anything.  Nevertheless, he was legendary.  He had recalled when our little division three college was a football powerhouse in the South (In 1899, Sewanee went 12 and 0, beating Texas A&M, Texas, Tulane, LSU, and Ole Miss in the span of six days… and as the story goes, on the seventh day, they rested).  As much as our trainer took care of athletes, he was also a teller of stories and a keeper of history.
 
Inevitably, sportswriters and students would ask the trainer about the most important game the University ever played.  With an encyclopedic knowledge of the past, eyewitness experience, and generations of contests he had seen, without hesitation he would say;  “The most important game for the University is the one coming up.”  He may have been nostalgic, but he was also practical.  Every season, on just about every team, that message was delivered like a mantra.  The most important challenge we face is the one coming up.
 
It is not a long leap to apply this to the messengers of Advent.  While they are rooted in a rich and deep tradition of covenant worship of the living God, they tell us that God is about to do a new thing.  In the person and work of Jesus, God grabs hold of us, showing us different ways to think about power, different ways to live in faith, and challenging ways to be people of love.
 
We worship in a parish that began meeting in 1860.  The buildings were built over time, and renovated over more time.  There have been 19 rectors.  Some stayed only a few years because the money was not there.  Others stayed for many years and ministered through generations of people.  Even though they have long since moved on Marston and LaRue and are folks many of our people remember.  I feel a kinship with them already as I have read their stores and memoirs.  Together with Mulally and Garcia, they are part of our story and part of our history. And that is just the clergy.  George Ellinger is 106 years old and living in Waynesboro.  He was a local realtor and Senior Warden in 1942… and about 30 years after that!  This was before term limits.
 
The messengers of Advent: the young people who came here seeking peace last weekend, the prophets of old, the gospel of now – all of them urge us to a deeper and most important purpose.  Our mission is to seek, serve, and glorify God in Christ in the world that is now and the world that is to come.  With past as prologue, we are the people God has at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Greenwood, Virginia.  Our message is that of peace, healing, and help for a broken world so desperately in need of God’s grace.  It is good work.  It is God’s work.  It is our work too.  Amen.