A Sermon preached in Christ Church, Grosse Pointe, Michigan by The Reverend Dr. Walter Brownridge The Second Sunday of Advent 09 December, 2018 May I speak of the name of our ever living, ever loving, ever life-giving God. Amen. And all flesh shall see the salvation of our God. My wife and I have a longstanding friend of at least 20 years or so. Her name is The Reverend Yamily. That's Spanish Y-A-M-I-L-Y. Her surname is Bass-Choate. Bass being her birth name and Choate being the name of her husband. She was born in Bogota, Colombia. Grew up probably quite middle class. Ended up in America and married, who he would describe, I'm just a good old boy from Mississippi. That's her husband, Horace is a good old boy from Mississippi who likes to hunt and fish. Yamily is this more sophisticated kind of lady from a very different country where her first language was Spanish and they lived in Mississippi in quite middle class comfort. And then Horace sort of as a midlife kind of crisis, found God and decided to go to seminary. From the diocese of Mississippi as it was the time, surprisingly a lot of folks, if they didn't go to Sewanee or Virginia, they went up to New York City to General Theological Seminary, my alma mater. And that is where Tina and I met Yamily. She was at that time, she said I'm both a spouse and a seminarian. What she had done was came with Horace to be that spouse, and they had two children, two daughters at home. She was caring for them, but they were getting on at the school age, high school and elementary school. The youngest was in fact in the same grade I think as my eldest son. And Yamily was involved somewhat with Youth Ministry as a lay person and that was fine. Then Horace, her husband, was going to go on a summer trip to Cuba, and this would've been about 1997, '98, still in embargo, still tensions. And she goes there and she's brought along, because she's the one person in the community that can speak Spanish and so she asked to be the translator. And she described one day that she was walking in the streets of Havana, upbeat and filled with confidence. This is the story she told years later to a group of my seminarians who were students at Sewanee. And as she was walking along, she noticed a disheveled Cuban man, and he looked straight at her. In fact, he glared at her and it made her feel extremely uncomfortable. That night she told her Page 1
husband about it and they prayed about it. Then the next day they had meetings and activities. Have you ever been on one of those kinds of group trips? You're kind of exhausted and you get hungry, and Yamily was heading with her husband to lunch, and she was, could smell the beautiful food, wafting out of restaurants. And so she even more that exacerbated her hunger pains as she smelled this aroma. And as she was walking by, there were many impoverished men and women on the streets, but she said she did not notice them. And then while standing inside the restaurant waiting for her table, she noticed that very same man from the day before, and again, his penetrating glare, unnerved her. He had come in to get a glass of water, which he got. And then he walked over to her and threw the glass of water in her face. She was shocked and upset and probably thinking, this must be some kind of deranged individual. She was speechless. That night again at the hotel, she talked over this with her husband Horace and prayed, and she only then became to realize after much reflection on the next day and the next day and the next day, that when that man poured the glass of water in my face, Jesus baptized me. He opened my eyes. He broke down all the walls, all the lies, all the barriers I built up. She realized that she had failed to notice the impoverished people on the street outside the restaurant, and she didn't have the compassion to recognize that they were much hungrier than she. And although they too could smell the aroma of the food, unlike her, they couldn't go in and eat. She had finally realized that now, and she reflected, even though in her quote minority status in America, that she was still a privileged middle class woman. And she had failed to recognize. In fact things like her daughters in New York City, attending a private school and her husband, even if he was a seminarian, had a comfortable standard of living. But she hadn't recognized that the impoverished men, women and children in Cuba and in her hometown or her brothers and sisters, part of this beloved family of God. Now, when I met Yamily, she seemed to me to be quite an activist and aware of these issues. And when I learned about 10 years later this story, I realized that that story was part of how she got to be that way. And then when I'm reflecting on both the reading for Malachi and the story we heard in the Gospel, I think now that when she said that when the water hit her face, it was Jesus baptizing her, it may have been, but it was more through the actions of a Cuban John the Baptist, a prophet, a messenger from God who got her to wake up and see things in a new way. Page 2
God's salvation history for Yamily broke into her real life on that day. And in the Gospel today, the way Luke describes it as saying, listen up people, real life, real history, real rulers. Emperors of Rome, governors of not only the southern half of Palestine, Judea but the northern half, Galilee, ruled by one of the sons of Herod and the other son of Herod getting another region, and a third person, a cousin, doing another region and two high priests, son and father in law, were the rulers over priests of the temple. Luke is telling the people who would have first heard those words, this is real stuff, real history, real life. And then it says out of this, somebody out of the wilderness, John the Baptist, who people might've thought was crazed and deranged, certainly as mental health professionals today who I have great respect for would say. But this John the Baptist was telling people they needed to get ready for a change, that their God was coming and all flesh would see it. That this guy was going to ask them to repent, so they needed to get ready and begin that process of conversion, of new life through baptizing, so they could be ready to meet Jesus, to prepare for the coming of the Lord. Now was this crazy? Hm. I couldn't name any names, but I know people who when we have guests coming over for dinner, I think go a little crazy getting ready. And don't let them as it be this year, when I have cousins coming in from Milwaukee and staying a week, the preparations are already coming, getting ready. Thanks be to God, actually, I have a wife like that who gets things ready, because I would never be prepared for them. John the Baptist was doing the same thing. Someone far more important than your cousins are coming and he will come, and so we need to get ready. You need to get ready. Malachi, likewise, writing to a community, first century Palestine being ruled by Rome, oppressively, being mistreated by the governors and even misled by their priesthood in the temple, corruption abound. Malachi was writing to a Jewish community that had been exiled, exiled out of Jerusalem in Judea. And he was writing a prediction. But again, people would have heard about it and said, this guy is crazy and it's unbelievable, and yet it did indeed happen. Now this afternoon, and this is the point this afternoon, if you come back at 3:00, you'll get to hear a Bach Christmas Oratorio. But of course at some places this time of year you would go to a concert and hear Handel's Messiah. And I think this is why we partly don't get it. I love Handel's Messiah. George Frederick Handel put the words of Malachi and the words of John the Baptist, the words of Page 3
Luke, puts it in such a beautiful, lovely setting that we have forgotten the profound and deep meaning of the words that he shall come and purify, a refiner or a fuller soap. Make straight the highways, clear a path, a highway for our God. To us it's just nice text to beautiful music sometimes perhaps. But this is the word of God telling us to get ready for the second coming of our Lord. Unbelievable you say, but if we think back to that time of the 1990s, so we just reflected on the wife of George H.W. Bush, things that were once held by experts to be unbelievable, impossible. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of apartheid. A few years later in the Clinton Administration, an end to violence in Northern Ireland. They were also said to be impossible. But what John the Baptist was doing, what Malachi was doing, with the actions of so many people like Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel and others were to witness and proclaim God's salvation against the nihilism and despair and hopelessness of the situation. And if those global events are too far off for you, let's go closer to home. In Detroit, some of you may know about the Church of the Messiah. In fact Father Ron Span who spent decades there. And today if you were to go to the website under the leadership of the Reverend Barry Randolph, it would say a non traditional Episcopal community. And it is non traditional for a couple of reasons. The first thing is that 60 percent of its congregants at its 12:00 service on Sunday are African American men under the age of 30. Having two of them in my house, so I can tell you if they there on Sundays, and they get there once in a while. That's still to me, pretty much of a miracle. But more important than that, and my youngest son who went down to Church of the Messiah for a program, a conference, a discussion about the arts, was impressed with what was happening there, about not only providing housing and job skills, but entrepreneurship, both private and social technology and art skills, told me that's where I need to be working in fact, he said. But this past Friday at the Christmas party, Barry Randolph was there because one of our outreach ministries and partnerships as we hope to continue to develop it with the Church of the Messiah, and Barry was there as the silent auction was going to go to help support Messiah. And when someone asked him, how do you do it, Barry, get these young men into church, he simply said, look, we're Christians. We believe as in the words of Isaiah, I'm just telling you it was in Isaiah, we believe that a virgin did conceive in her womb, a virgin, and gave birth to God. So why is it so hard to believe that we can get young black men in the church on Sunday? Page 4
Folks, we need to listen to those prophets, both locally and nationally and globally. We need to pay attention even to a homeless and perhaps deranged man who may throw water in our face to wake us up from our slumber. We need to take note of those messengers in our lives, who are called like John called those folks in first century Palestine to prepare for a new life worthy to receive Jesus. May by the grace of God he continue to send us such messengers. Amen. Page 5