December 10, 2006

The Second Sunday of Advent

Two Investment Options

Philippians 1:3-11; Luke 3:1-6

The Reverend Richard E. Allen, Jr.

  

Okay, if you’re looking for a hot investment for your Christmas gifts or this year’s bonus, I have a suggestion:  how about stock in a company whose business is surging?  How about Western Union? Yes, I mean the company made famous by stringing lines across the country to carry its telegraphs.

 

The company has changed its focus, because the rise of the internet meant that earlier this year Western Union ceased its telegraph operation altogether.  Still, the company’s business is booming.  Its primary service today is sending money – from anyone, anywhere in the world, to anyone else, somewhere else.  It is fast, efficient, and profitable. Western Union currently does three or four times as much business as its closest competitor.

 

And the truth is that large numbers of people are sending their money from one part of the world to another, and they willingly pay Western Union about thirty dollars, on average, for the service.  And the average funds transfer is for about three hundred dollars.  Millions of people are willing to give about ten percent to Western Union for getting their money to someone else (in church we might call that a “tithe”, of sorts).

 

You heard me correctly:  millions of people.  Most of them are hard working people, many immigrants from some poor, developing nation, sending money home to their families.  I’ve met people like them, who have come here to find work, then send part of every salary check to those they left behind.  They know that without their support, their families might not survive.  So they go to the Western Union office, faithfully every payday, to send something to distant families.

 

See, maybe Western Union’s business plan is a good investment, after all.  But I need to add a disclaimer here:  countless of others have already heard the news.  This story was broadcast on a news program last Tuesday morning, as a business story.

 

But as I listened to the report of these people sending part of their income home to keep family members fed and clothed, I started thinking it wasn’t a business story at all.  It is a love story.  Immigrant workers surmounting the difficulties of travel, of learning a new language, of finding a job that’s likely to be dirty, difficult or dangerous, regularly

-– religiously -- arriving at the Western Union office to send money back to their families.  It’s like they are sending something of themselves, from a distant, alien shore, to those they cherish.  It is a story of sacrifice, but then, be honest: most sacrifice is bred of love.  So, yes, it is a love story, not just a business story.

 

Think of it, something special, something treasured, something life-giving, sent to a distant realm to give life to those in dire need.  It’s not just a love story, friends, it is the gospel, and it is the story of God’s love.  It is today’s story to people of faith.

 

Did you hear the lesson of love in the gospel passage John read this morning?  Listen again:  “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…the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.”  And the word, sent from God to John, is a message from Isaiah the prophet, first given to a people in terrible circumstances in a far, distant land.  It is a word of hope, of comfort, of joy. Yes.  But, most of all, it is a word of love:  “…the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” 

 

It was an ancient promise, but here, Luke says, it was coming to fulfillment in this weird character out in the wild country.  John, the son of Zechariah, announces the news with the same joy with which he might have held a Western Union money transfer.  “God’s doing a new thing,” says this wild man on the fringe of the world.  “Now,” says John.  “God’s love is here.  It’s time to repent, to be forgiven, to receive the One coming into our midst.”  An old promise, nearly forgotten, echoes in the outback of this alien land of Israel.

 

It’s not just a Bible story, it is the story of a God’s love that will eventually transform all history.  It is a word of life and hope and possibilities unimagined because they were unimaginable.  God is doing a new thing in the world.  God is sending love into the world, and all will be changed.  Forever.

 

From our vantage, this word of intervention seems trivial, expected, even inevitable.  But to the family living at the edge of starvation in the poorest village in Haiti, the funds wired from the son in London make the difference between living and dying.  The family is loved, they know, because someone has sent them a gift, and that gift is life.

 

Just so, villagers in war-torn Palestine two thousand years ago saw in John’s word the possibility of God’s salvation.  They believed that God loved them, of course, they knew their scriptures, and they trusted in the Lord’s steadfast love, the love that would not let them go.

 

But God has a way of staying on the fringes of life, partly because we tend to want to keep God there ourselves, for safety’s sake.  We can do it ourselves, we say, as if we were perpetually toddlers in God’s world.  But God loves us too much to stay remote, distant, safely removed from our lives.  So God immigrates to join us.  Or, as we put it theologically, God becomes incarnate – takes on our flesh.  God, in Jesus, lives with us, eats and sleeps with us, walks beside us from work to home, talks with us as with a neighbor.  And, to top it all off, God shares death with us, defeating our deepest fears.  It is a story too wonderful to be true, and it is the story of our faith.  God is with us.  We are loved.

 

That’s the truth, isn’t it?  We are loved whenever and wherever we are WITH another.  As churches, synagogues, mosques, fraternities, sororities, clubs, villages, or towns, we know we are loved and accepted whenever we gather.  We know our love for each other just by getting together.

 

This human connection is so common that we take it for granted.  So advent’s word is always “watch,” or “pay attention.”  Happening to pay attention last week, I was blessed to notice something of God’s love being born in our midst.  On Wednesday afternoon twenty or so young people from our church went to visit their neighbors to share God’s love.  They didn’t talk about it that way.  If you had asked them, they would have said that they were going to the Blythedale Childen’s Hospital to sing some songs.  Nothing special.  Just kids being kids.  Kids for other kids.  Kids with other kids.

 

So they took their keyboard and their guitars and their drums and their microphones and their speakers.  They sang their songs, they clapped and they danced.  And, for a few minutes on an otherwise uneventful day, a place of hope, joy, and peace was born.  And love was born there, too.  Scars and medications, though still very real in that place, took a back seat to love.  People were with other people.  Jesus might have called it “the kingdom of God.”  I called it a miracle; an encouraging, hopeful miracle.  For any who were awake to see it, God was present.  For just a moment, Isaiah’s dream for the world broke in:  the crooked path was made straight, the rough ways became smooth, and everyone in the room was aware, in their own way, of the healing balm of God. 

 

 On Wednesday afternoon, as the President of the United States received a report about a war in a far-away land, while George Pataki worried about ending his term as governor, and Eliot Spitzer pondered how he might begin, while the mighty and the terrible went about the business of power, the kingdom of God broke into a room at the

Blythedale Children’s Hospital.  The room was filled with sunlight and sound and there were smiles all around.  But the room was filled with something else, too.  For those who could see it, the room was filled with love, a human love and a heavenly love, too.

 

At the beginning I suggested a good investment, might be Western Union.  That’s still true, I suppose.  But here’s a better investment opportunity.  You can give your life, as Jesus did, to share with others, that the kingdom of God.  Like the guest workers in a land of plenty, you can send something of your abundance to give hope and joy to those who have little.  You can invest yourself, and a significant share of your God-given resources, with this little church.  Here’s our hope for how we’ll use that investment: occasionally, the crooked paths of the world become straight, and the rough edges of life will become a pleasure.  When that happens, if we just pay attention, together we will see the working of God in our midst, and we will know that we are truly blessed, and truly meant to bless others.

 

Amen.