St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church, Owings Mills MD
December 17, 2023
Year B: The Third Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11
Canticle 15: The Song of Mary
1 Thessalonians 5:16-24
John 1:6-8, 19-28
Making An Old Way New Again
Last Monday evening, after getting over Covid, I attended a very impressive event at Greater Harvest Baptist Church on Saratoga Street, in West Baltimore.
It was an action hosted by BUILD (“Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development”), which has been doing the hard and good work of community organizing in Baltimore for decades.
As you may have seen in the paper or on the news, BUILD has partnered with the City and with the Greater Baltimore Committee on a bold plan to address the thousands of vacant properties in Baltimore City – buildings that are dangerous and drag down entire neighborhoods.
I’m really not knowledgeable enough to evaluate the merits of the plan, but it was inspiring to be with well over 500 people – Christians, Muslims, Jews, other people of goodwill – who remain committed to a city that has suffered so much for so long.
Now, it just so happens that BUILD is a sister organization of Jersey City Together, which I was involved with back home.
And so on Monday, I was once again reminded of the similarities between Baltimore and my hometown.
Just like there are two Baltimores – some prosperous and beautiful neighborhoods and also areas of near-total devastation and despair – there are two Jersey Citys – there’s the impossibly expensive real estate along the Hudson River – the Gold Coast, it’s sometimes called - and an inner city that continues to struggle with familiar and persistent and heartbreaking problems.
Both Baltimore and Jersey City were once industrial powerhouses, providing reliable, if often dangerous and tedious, blue collar employment to many thousands of people.
And both cities were once great railroad towns.
Just a few decades ago, what is now the Gold Coast was occupied by half-abandoned rail yards and warehouses. And a few decades before that, every day many thousands of people poured into Jersey City on the Jersey Central, the B & O, the Pennsylvania, and other once mighty railroads – and then hopped on a ferry over to New York.
Maybe some of you remember doing just that.
In the neighborhood where I grew up there was a little spur line, just a couple of blocks from our house.
As a kid, it was always exciting when the railroad crossing bells would ring and a freight train would rumble by.
Today that’s all gone – all that’s left is an irregularly-sized strip of land, a kind of no man’s land where I’m sure kids hang out, just like some kids hung out “on the tracks” when I was little.
So, this is a longwinded way of saying, maybe it was inevitable that I would be interested in trains.
Back in the 90’s I spent a lot of time traveling around different parts of New Jersey, photographing remnants of the Jersey Central Railroad.
And now thanks to the Internet, it’s possible to belong to different online groups of people with similar interests, abandoned rail lines, old train stations.
I recently find one group that’s a little different, though.
Rather than documenting railroad ruins, instead of discovering relics of long lost routes, this group is documenting the surprising rebirth of a line in New Jersey that has been out of service for decades – it’s called the Freehold Secondary.
And so for several months, from afar, I’ve been watching this amazing progress, as brush was cleared and old tracks and ties removed, as gravel ballast and new ties and tracks have been firmly planted, getting ready for the trains that will be rolling again soon.
The workers have been making a way – not a new way – but making an old way new again.
Making an old way new again.
Today, on the Third Sunday of Advent, we switch our liturgical color from blue to rose.
It’s a symbolic lightening up, signaling that the Advent days of preparation are drawing to a close.
Rejoice, because soon – very soon, actually – it will be Christmas!
This week we get to spend a little more time with John the Baptist, the powerful prophet who declared it was time to repent – time to turn around - because the Kingdom of God was drawing near.
John the Baptist fascinates me because then, as now, people really didn’t like being told they were on the wrong track. But John doesn’t sugarcoat his message – not at all – and yet the people still come in huge numbers.
Deep down, they know they’re heading the wrong direction – they know that they need a new start.
Well, no surprise, John’s big crowds drew the notice of the religious authorities in Jerusalem. And, as we heard in today’s gospel lesson, they send a fact-finding mission to learn just what John is up to.
And what they learn is that John is not Elijah and he’s also not the Messiah.
John declares his mission by quoting the Prophet Isaiah. John is the one crying out in the wilderness, “Make straight the way of the Lord.”
John prepares the way of Jesus by cutting down the weeds of sin and delusion.
John prepares the way of Jesus by calling people to repent – to change their ways – to be dunked in the River Jordan and begin anew.
John prepares the way of Jesus.
And the other main Advent character, the Virgin Mary, whose song we said today in place of a psalm, she prepares the way of Jesus by quite literally carrying him into the world - into a cold and inhospitable world, carrying the Son of God into a world where the powers that be are out to get him, right from the start.
And later, after the first Easter morning, the way of Jesus – the way of love and sacrifice - will be well traveled by the apostles and by Christians down through the ages, including the hearty and faithful band of “forest inhabitants” who built this beautiful church on the highest ground they could find.
But, you know, the way of Jesus – the way of love and sacrifice – is kind of like a railroad right-of-way.
If the trains stop running, if maintenance is deferred, the weeds quickly take over, burying and hiding the tracks.
And it’s the same with the way of Jesus.
If we neglect the way, it too can be buried, lost, and forgotten.
Over the past couple of years, one of the key themes here at St. Thomas’ has been renewal.
We haven’t invented a new way.
Kind of like those workers laying track on the Freehold Secondary, we have made an old way new again.
With God’s help, of course.
We made an old way new again at the Christmas Extravaganza on Tuesday night, following a tradition that’s now more than two decades old, but which this year noticeably included quite a few new people, new to outreach, new to the parish, who brought their own gifts and ideas.
We made an old way new again by reimagining our Youth Confirmation program, making it less like school and more of an experience – giving our wonderful young people the opportunity to not just learn about the church but to be the church, to be who they really are.
And, I’d suggest the BUILD action on Monday night was making an old way new again – Christians and people of other faiths or maybe no faith but goodwill, gathering together to endorse a kind of complicated plan which may or may not work, we’ll see, but really we gathered to choose hope – choosing Advent hope even in the midst of so much fear and despair.
This is the way of Jesus.
This is the way of love and service.
It’s the way prepared by the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist.
It’s an old way that we are called to make new again.
Amen.
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