Signs

​Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Second Sunday after Epiphany (Year A)
January 19, 2020
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
Do not worry.  I do not have plans to install an electronic scrolling message board out on Rockfish Gap Turnpike, neither do I have plans for one of those old school signs with the slide on letters to change your message every so often, but I do love a good church sign.  And when you are me, you collect examples of the best ones.  Here are a few of my latest favorites: “Tweet others as you would like to be tweeted.”  “Seven days without prayer makes one weak.”  “Honk if you love Jesus. Text while driving if you want to meet him.”  And this week: “Had a clever sign planned for this space, but the Astros stole it.” (a reference to the latest baseball cheating scandal). 
 
These kinds of signs are a helpful antidote to some of then hellfire and brimstone messages I have also seen, like the one on I 65 in Alabama: “Go to Church or the devil will get you.”  You know, those sort of turn or burn threats made as if fear was going to bring us to the loving body of the faithful.  More contemporary church signs may be a bit like dad jokes, as in they are probably only funny to us.  Committed Christ followers do have encouraging words to offer.  If some may help us get the message out that we are welcoming and loving and that we are not a glum, guilt and fear wielding lot, so much the better.  A number of years ago, the Episcopal Church embarked on an advertising project and came up with some clever posters, one of which hangs in the Parish Hall kitchen right here at Emmanuel.  None of them tell the whole story.  At best, they are a reminder of who we hope to be.
 
If you are of a certain age, you may remember the old Campus Crusade for Christ marketing strategy.  For months, they put up billboards, printed t-shirts, and passed out buttons saying “I found it.”  There was no explanation, just a carpet bombing effort to get it out there and get people asking what in the world “it” was.  A few months later, they revealed that the “it” was salvation in Jesus Christ.  Later, they claimed to have brought more than 3 million people to Christ with a four-point plan conveniently fit into simple pamphlet.  I am not sure how one measures being brought to Christ completely, or its staying power.  For most of us, it is process requiring a constant reupping as we grow.
 
You cannot blame folks for trying, but I am always suspicious of secular sloganizing when it comes to engaging people fully and authentically in a life of Christian faith.  Living a life with and for God is not like buying a t-shirt, a soft drink, or a Tempur-pedic mattress.  The whole binary way of believing that one is either in our out, one of us or one of them, saved or depraved, presents a false dichotomy and seems to be part of what is driving the kind of divisiveness that plagues our culture and conversation of late.
 
When if comes to matters of faith, bumper stickers, pithy slogans, and, even, four-point pamphlets carry us only so far. Being Church goes beyond ascent to a single proposition as it offers the life-changing model of Jesus’ life and ministry, a community of love and care, and an insistent redemption narrative that upends division and despair. 
 
When we read the lessons each Sunday, we cover a number of bases in our narrative.  We harken back to the Hebrew traditions of poetics and prophecy.  We incorporate the Epistles, mostly letters from St. Paul to young churches, as a way of creating language to talk about matters of belief, and finally, we excerpt a piece of Gospel writing to go straight into the life and work of Jesus as then core source for meeting God in person.  Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell the story in order, but when we get to John, we get a much more symbolic telling, filled with nuance and loaded words and phrases.  If we are looking for slogans, John is our man.  He uses terms like “Lamb of God,” “Rabbi” and “Messiah” in reference to Jesus.  John assumes his hearers already know the story, so his words contain inference, layering, and foreshadowing.  The players on his stage are already well known characters.  Andrew was one of the first disciples.  Peter is known as the rock, as much because he is dense as he is solid.
 
To illuminate this one text alone would require hours of annotation and more sermon than you want to hear or I could ever preach, but suffice it to say John floods us with images and ideas of God that both fill our imaginations and stretch them to see deeper into eternity.  Toward the end of this passage, even John realizes that what drew people to Jesus, what caused them to drop everything and follow him, what led them to give their lives to the way of love is, ultimately, impossible to explain in clever prose or loaded slogans.  When he is out of language to express that experience, he has Jesus issue a simple invitation:  “Come and see.”  It is that simple and that complicated all at once.
 
Last week, we confirmed 12 and had one received one from another branch of the Christian faith.  For a number of weeks, on the door of the room where the confirmands met and prepared for that day was a simple sign that read “Confirmation is not a drive by event.”  I loved seeing that sign because, like any good sign, it pointed to a reality beyond itself.  Getting hands laid on your head, prayers from a bishop, and a lovely reception celebrating the occasion is not a one and done happening.  Confirmation and reception is a grown up redo of baptism.  It takes some courage and conviction to take the wheel and commit to driving one’s own part in following Jesus, and it is not over once the programs have all been recycled and the relatives have gone home.  This baptized life requires care and feeding.  That is what Church does. 
 
What we are, and what we do as Christian people is an abiding thing, an ongoing choice, and a lifelong wrestling match with self and ego and service and sacrifice.  It is about telling our story, living God’s story, and being in history.  Long after fads and fashions fade, clever slogans and marketing schemes come and go, the signs we follow open our lives to being made new again and again. 
 
I still see those bracelets and t-shirts from emblazoned with WWJD: “What Would Jesus Do?”  I like that because it is a question and not a declaration.  And honestly, a lively faith comes with lots more question marks than it does periods.  If we are to reach the world for God and welcome others into the faith, we do can go to school on WJD, What Jesus Did, and say “Come and see.”  When we do that, we are not about telling people what to believe or how to fit in, we are inviting others to join in helping God’s story live in this world.  Our world really needs this story: a story that turns on experience, a story that summons us to be the wild and wonderful people God has created us to be, a story that saves us from despair, and even, death.
 
Of course, we will not be installing an electronic scrolling message board out on Rockfish Gap Turnpike.  We would never have enough space or sufficient language to express what has to be experienced.  So it is on us to invite the world to see God’s abundant life in person here or wherever we are.  To help people to come to Jesus, how we live our lives is the best and most effective sign to point the way.  Amen.