December 16, 2007

by The Rev. Constance Jones

James 5:7-10

It had to happen, with all the driving I do. I had a car accident last Monday.
Nobody was hurt and all will be repaired. It was my fault.
The man ahead of me had a ladder with a flag on it in the bed of his pickup,
and at about two miles an hour, I ran into it.
It punched through the grill and radiator of my old Volvo wagon.
I think the ladder had eyes and wanted a bite of car radiator.

I hope you all have been accident-free and stay that way,
but the rest of us know that sinking feeling.
Oh no. Here we go. Your anxiety shoots up,
you wonder if you can blame the other guy.
All those adversarial defenses come up.
You have to contend with the other driver. The police.
The insurance company. The body shop.
It’s easy to transition into blaming God. Why me???
Then honesty sets in. How could I have been so stupid?
Ninety seconds into the adventure, you have a headache. .

But something amazing happened to me on Monday, and I am not making this up.
As I took a deep breath and opened my car door,
it was as if I head the click of a switch. It was about that definite.
I sort of stepped into a different operating system.
I can’t tell whether I made a decision, or whether it happened to me,
but in retrospect, I believe I felt the mark of my Baptism on my forehead.

What happened is that the other driver and I greeted each other.
We found that neither of us was hurt.
I apologized to ..... he said his name was Ralph Carr.
That’s OK, he said.
We called 911, and started talking
Found we are both churchfolk.
Waiting (and waiting) for a trooper to come give me a ticket,
we had a conversation we’d never otherwise have had.
Our churches are a stone’s throw from each other,
Shiloh Baptist and Grace Episcopal,
but how often do we bridge the gap --
of race and liturgical difference and sides of route 17?
Ralph asked if our congregation had people who opposed having
what he called “a lady pastor.” They have one too.
We ladies should meet each other, he said.
We talked about new construction of church buildings,
the merit of driving old cars, and much more. We had lots of time..

Then I saw the ladder.
It didn’t look like a yardstick, as ladders should. It looked like a slalom course.

“I’m going to buy you a new ladder,” I said.

“No thank you,” he said.

“I insist.”

“No, I won’t accept it,” he said, and told me a story of a favor rendered him, a merciful act, really. He was honor-bound and glad to pass it on to me.

So, on this third Sunday of Advent when we have prayed to God,

“Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us;
and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins,
let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; .......”

I feel pretty stirred up. Because at a minor crossroads of my life,
which happened to be Monday afternoon at Cook and Old York-Hampton Highway,
one an Advent day sometime between when Jesus Christ rose from the dead
and when he will come again,
God came, right there,
while some chrome and plastic front-end material lay underfoot.

Ralph and I did not rise to conflict.
We did not follow the way of the world,
which was to retreat to our own cars and imagine lawsuits.
We made a state trooper relax.
We bridged a gap.
We lived into the holy gift
that the epistle of James calls “patience” in anticipation of Christ’s coming.

The word “patient” in James sounded so modern that I looked up the Greek.
It’s the opposite of “quick to anger” or “anxious.”
I caught my breath with recognition.
It was the gift I received on Monday afternoon.

In our world there is much to be anxious about, even to despair over.
Getting old. The war in Iraq. A constipated housing market. Being alone.
You can add to the list.
And......there are so many people out there worthy of blaming!

If you are tracking events in the Episcopal world beyond these doors,
you know one whole diocese, San Joaquin in central California,
voted to leave The Episcopal Church.
Heaven only knows how this will play out in terms of who owns what property,
what will become of Episcopalians in San Joaquin who want to remain Episcopalians,
or how the current bishop of San Joaquin and his California flock
will become part of a province in South America.

But what I wish for all concerned is that a switch will trip,
as it did for me on Monday.
That the car wreck of disagreement over women and sexuality
that’s fueled a decades-long dispute between San Joaquin and The Episcopal Church,
will be as transformed.
If state troopers or courts have to be involved, as often they must be,
may they be astonished and warmed by the civility and love
between those who run headlong into each other.
May Christians on a collision course act without hatred or anxiety.
Without demonizing one another.
And without thinking that the existence of the church depends on Me, the Right Person.
Because of course, the church belongs to God.

This is, I am sure, all about our Baptism.
About the moment when we are signed with holy oil on our foreheads,
anointed with the words
“You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism, and marked as Christ’s own for ever.”
It’s like a switch installed in us
as we are sent off into the real world.
We’ll be knocked around a bit.
Might even (like John and Jesus) get killed.
But we cannot lose that mark of our Baptism,
and it changes everything.

Because of that mark, we might reject some ways of the world.
Reject the addiction to conflict that’s an infectious disease,
that makes so many people get out of bed in the morning only to be against something.
We might reject negativity, either/or thinking,
and the lust to judge and punish others.

“Be patient,” James says, “strengthen your hearts,
for the coming of the Lord is near.
Beloved, do not grumble against one another,
so that you may not be judged.”

Patience is not cowardice, I might add. It does not run away.
Patience does not ask for silence when truth needs to be told.
It is self-sacrificing, like Jesus. It leaves judgment to God.
Christians whose hearts are strengthened by God
treat others with respect even when they are reviled for it.
They turn the other cheek and pray for their enemies.
They work for love and justice – with their time, their money, and their reputations.
You know, all that Jesus stuff.

I have one more true story from a couple of years ago.

The last church I served was in downtown Norfolk.
Our sexton, an African-American man named David Roberts,
was loved by the children, trusted by the staff,
and respected by the street-folk who came to our weekly soup kitchen.
David made us all feel cared-for and safe.
One day when my husband Bill was very ill --
in Norfolk General Hospital for a long stay,
David Roberts came to visit him.
David and Bill always talked baseball.
I wasn’t in the hospital at the time, and David got lost.
You can do that in Norfolk General.
So he stopped at the nurses’ station.

“Can you tell me where Bill Jones is?” he asked a nurse.

“We have a William Jones,” she said,
looking up into his black face,
“but he wouldn’t be the one you are looking for.”

At this point David, a man of faith,
filled every day with St. James-like patience and slowness to anger,
turned and saw Bill in his hospital bed, just across the hall.
He went and visited with Bill for a while
then got ready to leave.

Now I figure at this point, he had three choices.
He could have gone back to the nurse and vented his anger.
He could have just walked away from a the racism he’d known every day of his life.

But he rose above both those options.
What I think he did was to preach the Gospel with simple eloquence.

Returning to the nurses’ station, he got the woman’s attention.
“Excuse me, ma’m,” he said gently.
“Why wouldn’t you think I’d want to visit my brother Bill Jones?”

There are moments even in our own time, I think,
that the presence of God is so manifest,
the mark of Baptism so incarnated,
that the universe’s pulse must skip a beat.

Shhhhhhhhh. It’s Advent. Watch and wait.
But don’t sit on your hands being passive.
Don’t run around looking for opportunities to be cranky, either.
Open your eyes and ears to opportunities
to welcome Christ into the present moment.
Tune down the rhetoric and listen to an opponent.
Assume you are forgiven and get on with a life of service.
Rejoice despite all you have lost.
Breed peace and laugh at fear.
Look for the coming of the Lord, at every minute.
Because, you know, he is drawing very, very near to you. Amen.

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