December 1, 2018 Tim Hughes Williams Sermon: Missed Connections The Old Testament Lesson: Jeremiah 33:14-16 14 The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 15 In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. 16 In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called: "The LORD is our righteousness." The New Testament Lesson: Luke 3:1-6 1 In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, 2 during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. 3 He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, 4 as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. 5 Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; 6 and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.'" Sermon: Missed Connections In November of last year, Steven Mion was putting flyers up all over his Washington, D.C., neighborhood. Why? Was he selling a couch? Trying to find a 1
lost cat? Nope. It was deeper than that. He was trying to locate this man he had shared only a few minutes of conversation with a few nights earlier. Here is what the flyer said, according to a story they ran about it on NPR s Weekend Edition: 1 Missed Connection - if you went as a low-effort lumberjack on a Saturday on Halloween weekend, hi. I'm the Pennywise Clown who you shared that Uber home with at 3 a.m. And we realized that we both live roughly on the corner of First and Adams. Honestly, I thought you were really cute, and I sort of regret not asking for your number. Though, to be fair, I was dressed as a demon clown so not my most attractive moment. Do you want to grab coffee? Steven then explained to the reporter that he put tabs on the bottom of the flyer with different options. Some tabs said, Sure, why not? I d love to. Those had a phone number on the back. Others said, No Thanks. These did not include a phone number. The NPR reporter asked the sort of obvious question for Steven: why take such an old-fashioned approach? Had he not heard of the many dating applications that were at his disposal? Did he not know that there is literally a Missed Connections page on Craigslist for precisely this purpose? After all, thousands of people write these kinds of notes to strangers they want to meet again that almost soulmate that missed connection. So they post notes like Steven s on Craigslist, hoping that this special person will miraculously see the post and reach out. Why, in 2017, the homemade paper flyer taped to the telephone pole? To be honest, he said, the new-fashioned ways of dating are just a little bit exhausting. There are so many apps with so many options. And you are just put into a giant pool of people who are judging all your flaws. And if your profile is not perfect, it s just an immediate swipe in the wrong direction at the end of the day, I just to try want something different. 1 A Missed Connection Success Story. https://www.npr.org/2017/11/19/565153423/a-missed-connectionsuccess-story 2
Never more options to connect. Never more difficult to connect. On Twitter the other day, someone wrote that Jesus greatest miracle was having twelve close friends in his thirties. And I feel that. If there s anything that people my age like to pine for, it s the earlier time when we could more easily make friends. And maybe it s not just people my age. Last week there was an Op-Ed by Albert Brooks in the New York Times called How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart. 2 The Op-Ed references a recent study by Cigna Health that says that nearly half of Americans report feeling alone or left out. Thirteen percent of Americans say that zero people know them well. Loneliness is also the topic of a new book by Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska. He says that it s killing us language that might seem like hyperbole until you link it to rising rates of suicide and substance abuse in the United States. Or if you go a step further and assess the isolation and loneliness of people who attempt mass shootings in America. When we were dreaming up topics for these Eventide services, we wanted to try and explicitly name subjects that are real in people s lives right now and not named enough. I think underneath our full schedules and status updates there is another story to tell about feeling alone or unknown. Liturgically speaking, this is the first week of Advent. The first of four weeks of waiting and watching and hoping that God will show up in a new way. The music is full of longing. O Come O Come Emmanuel. Come Thou Long Expected Jesus. It s one of the more counter-cultural moves in the church playbook as the world tilts into full-on Christmas crazy, we slow it down and focus on what is not here, what has not arrived, what we hope at long last will come. It s not a bad time to reflect on what means to be lonely. 2 How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart, by Albert Brooks, The New York Times, November 23, 2018. 3
Our Gospel text today starts very big and then zooms in to something very small. If it were a movie, I would imagine it like a long tracking shot, some kind of Google Earth rendering, beginning in the outer reaches of space, slowing moving inward with greater and more granular detail until it finally slips into someone s kitchen window. 1 In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, 2 during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. That is a very long sentence. Why all the names, all the details that aren t really relevant to the story? Well, Tiberius is the Roman Emperor. His empire transcended religion, race, and national borders. Obviously, the Emperor can t rule such a large and complicated region by himself so it was divided amongst sub-rulers. King Herod the ruler of Galilee, was technically a tetrarch, meaning he was responsible for one quadrant of a larger territory. He shared his power with Philip and Lysanias and Trachonitus. Within Herod s quadrant, he negotiated power with the local Jewish authorities Annas and Caiaphas were the high priests of the day. Underneath the watchful eye of Annas and Caiaphas was another priest in good standing a man named Zechariah. If the Word of God was coming shot like a dart from heaven to earth who do you think would get the phone call? Would it be the Emperor? Would it be his lieutenants? Would it be more appropriate to direct it towards the chief priests? They are the professional religious people, after all. Not in our movie. In our movie, the camera zooms by all those power players and, at the last minute, takes an unexpected lefthand turn out of the city all together and into the wilderness surrounding the River Jordan. There s a man out there. He s got a wild beard. He s wearing the skin of a dead camel. He eats bugs. He s yelling about something. 4
The Word of God came to John, of all people, the son of Zechariah, in the wilderness. And what is this Word of God that lit such a fire under John? It was actually not a new word at all, but rather a very old one from the prophet Isaiah, resurrected for this present moment. "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. 5 Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; 6 and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.'" I must have heard that text for twenty Christmases before anyone bothered to explain that the prophecy every valley filled, every mountain laid low this prophecy describes the creation of a road. Not just a road but a royal road. If you lived in ancient Palestine in this era of Roman occupation, you would have seen such roads. If the Emperor ever came to visit, it would be with great pomp and circumstance, shock and awe. The bigliest military parade you ve ever seen. And of course, such parades required roads that most little Israelite villages didn t have. So there was a whole preparation process leveling, straightening, and paving. To prepare the way for the Emperor. What s so subversive about John s appropriation of this language is that he s using the imagery of leveling in a very different way. After all, this is the Word of God that by-passed the power structures of both palace and temple, only to rest in the hands of a poor itinerant preacher. And the preacher is attracting crowds of people in the desert. He s inviting them into a very different way of living together. He s telling them to pay particular attention to the poor and to make sure that every hungry mouth gets fed. He s telling them that it s never too late to start over with the mistakes they ve made. To make amends with each other. He s telling them, above all, that One is coming. 5
One is coming who will bring down the mighty and elevate the downtrodden a leveling like they had never seen before. The Emperor s leveling prepares the way for his own chariot. John s leveling prepares everyone to approach the Table of God. And then, he says. When that happens, all flesh shall see salvation. In his book about loneliness, Senator Sasse talks about the loss of something that sociologists call thick community. Thick communities are groups of people who know and are committed to each other. The kind of communities where people get into fights and then work their stuff out, however painfully, because nobody is going anywhere. The kind of community where children feel like they have ten parents, for better or worse. Thick community is disappearing for various reasons all across America. Sasse in particular bemoans the loss of what he calls the hometown gym on a Friday night his memories, however nostalgic, of being surrounded by friends and family at high school basketball game in small-town Nebraska. But of course, another place where thick community exists is church. Just take a quick look around this room right now. Where else in Baltimore City would this group of people be gathered? Where else would you know each other s names and something of each other s stories. It s not just a coincidence this gathering. It s a glimpse a preview, if we are doing it right of a kin-dom of God where low is brought high and high is laid low and everyone all flesh behold the salvation of God. It is my humble opinion that this Word from God is no less powerful today than it was two thousand years ago, when it jolted John the Baptist in the wilderness. It s my opinion that it s no less likely to turn the world upside down now than it was then. And if you think it improbable that it would show up here, this humble place, this scary time, this dark night, consider the precedent. The wilderness is where God s hope lives. 6
In the second year of the Presidential Administration of Donald Trump, when Larry Hogan was governor of Maryland, when Catherine Pugh was the Mayor of Baltimore and Jack Young was Chair of the City Council, under the leadership of Jackie Taylor of the Presbytery of Baltimore, the Word of God came to you, of all people. Here at Light Street Church. Imagine what happens next? That NPR story about Steven Mior and his homemade flyers took a turn I was not expecting. The night before his scheduled interview on the radio, he got a phone call. It was the guy from the Uber. And the guy from the Uber, whose name was Robby, agreed to go on the air and participate in the interview. I was hooked. Well, one of my housemates who lives in the area sent me a Snapchat of the flyer and goes, You are the lumberjack, Robby said. And it was an incredible realization, because there was no other Uber in the world that had a lumberjack and the Pennywise clown. There s absolutely no doubt about it. So here s the thing. Robby is straight. Robby was not trying to date Steven. But he called him anyway. So once again the radio host found herself asking: why did you do that? Robby said, The thing that I find so funny is I've been telling this story almost every day because it was just so silly and innocent but also really wholesome. And when it happened to me, I went, you know what? I got to reach out because they put in the effort. They put in the time to this. And you don't see that very often anymore, especially in this digital, somewhat degrading dating world that we're living in. Then Steven said, I'm glad to hear that you appreciated that, too, because I like the idea of a genuine connection that you kind of get in person. I think that we live in a city where a lot of people really make connections for self-serving reasons. And I like the idea of kind of breaking out of that box and putting 7
yourself out there in different ways. You might be able to make a connection that is just genuinely to meet someone else. Friends, if you find yourselves lonely today and statistically, that s at least half of us here are at least two pieces of good news. First, the Word of God, the word of light and life and hope it is always gravitating towards the wilderness. The lonesome road. The empty apartment. The holiday season that frankly seems unbearable without him or her at your side. Into such places, the Word of God comes. And second, may we be the very kind of place that the Word describes. A sanctuary that is leveled so that every single one of us can draw near to the table of love. And yes, I recognize the irony of saying that in this inaccessible sanctuary. We have some work to do. May we hear the Word of God. May we work to make this a place of thick communion and holy communion. May we practice incarnation. May we tend to our hope like a fire of flickering coals, trusting it s flickering warmth, however fragile. The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when everyone all flesh will see it s light. 8