I’m always grateful when people come here for the first time, I often tell them that I think it takes some courage to enter a church for the first time; you don’t know what you’re going to find. Are people going to be welcoming and kind, or indifferent and inattentive? If you take a further risk and venture into coffee hour, will you be standing there all alone? Is anyone going to come up and talk to you? It’s like that saying, that some of the bravest words you can say are, “May I have this dance?”

These days I keep asking myself, “What is needed? What is required? What does it mean to be faithful?”

Is it to filter the news, and find ways to be informed and engaged without losing your mind? Is it to be out in the streets, protesting the injustices against immigrants and others who are at risk? Is it to be spending nights accompanying guests at our warming center downstairs? Or making a meal for the hungry, like our Board members did yesterday? Is it to be coming to church, and praying for equal justice under the law and freedom for everyone? And staying afterwards for our conversation about social justice?

I wrote my sermon a week ago and it was ‘pretty good.’ I had my wife read it over. I can always tell when I’ve hit it out of the park, she gets this cute look in her eyes like she knows she picked the right one to spend her life with. 

She didn’t have that look after she read my sermon. 

She told me it was good. That she got teary eyed. That I made some good points. And she told me I didn’t share enough of my own story. That I’d kept what was most compelling - the personal-  to a minimum. 

This hymn, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” makes me think about Martin Luther King, Jr., and a story he told from back in the winter of 1956. He was 27 years old, less than two years into his pastorate at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, and in the thick of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Every day King and his family were getting threats, and they were wearing him down. One night, just as he was going to bed, the phone rang. An angry voice threatened him, invoking the N word and saying, “Before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.”

Eighteen years ago, this church was searching for a new minister. I was the assistant minister in a nearby congregation, and that winter the senior minister was away on leave, so I got to lead the Christmas Eve service. Which I loved so much that I realized it was time to find a church where I could do that every year! 

Just a few months later you called me to be your minister. And now we’ve just had our last Christmas together, and I find myself thinking about this journey we’ve shared; how blessed I have been to be your minister, how grateful for the good we’ve done together. And I’m aware that there are things left undone.

We just sang “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” and I wonder, do you count yourself as among that number, as one of the faithful? In this tradition, we’re open about our theological diversity, we celebrate that we don’t all believe the same thing So I can imagine that some of you might be thinking, “I don’t know how faithful I am,”  or might say, “Don’t callI me faithful!”

Over my years here, what I’ve learned about faith, often from you, is that it’s not so much about what you think or believe as how you live. Faith is about showing up, trying to keep an open and courageous heart for whatever comes. There’s a line from a poem that says it plain:

“I learned that whatever we say means nothing,
what anyone will remember is that we came.” (Julia Kasdorf)

The other day I went out and bought some Christmas lights, already on sale, almost two weeks before Christmas! As dusk faded to night I was up on a ladder stringing them around an evergreen tree in our yard. They were the same kind of big, old-fashioned bulbs that my father in-law used to put up on a tree next to their garage in Baltimore, and it made me glad to think of him. 

I love this kind of seasonal getting ready, mostly. There’s joy in these tangible hospitable tasks, and the memories they evoke, and the anticipation of celebrations to come. In this darkest time of the year, decorating, lighting candles and, as Joni Mitchell put it, “singing songs of joy and peace.” Even shopping can be fun, in small doses, can’t it?

You may have noticed that lately I’ve been leaning into the Hebrew psalms and prophets. These ancient writings can use some interpreting and improvising to be accessible in the context of our days, but can be prophetic and poetic and helpful , can’t they? Like in the words we just sang—did you notice that they come from Isaiah, chapter 55? I love that the ways these psalms and prophets addressed the challenges they faced back way then— 2500 to 3000 years ago—can still speak to our human condition today, even though the context of our lives is so different.

This Sunday feels like a threshold to me. Thanksgiving just behind us, and December, with all that entails, just beginning. Do you know what I mean? We are here, in these darkening days, three weeks from the longest night of the year. We are here, companioned by these panels of the AIDS Quilt, and the lives that these panels, lovingly created, represent. We are here, in this sanctuary where people have gathered for 130 years now, companioned by the spirits of those who have gone before us. And we are here, on this first Sunday in Advent, these four weeks that lead up to Christmas. 

Last week the choir sang a song I was really sorry to miss. Even though I wasn’t here, that song has been in my heart all week. It’s a song about listening for your calling in life and responding positively to it.

For a long time I thought a calling was something you had to seek and find, like it was something outside yourself, that you had to search for it. And if you missed it, you missed your chance, and it was gone. Like it was a one shot deal.