So we managed to bring our entire group home from Buffalo last Saturday, tired but blessed. A full update on the goings on of the mission trip is in order---until the schedule allows that, though, do know that it was an amazing, grace-filled journey, one that we would all gladly repeat. After all the craziness associated with a trip like this, the past week has been a chaotic attempt to catch up on sleep and work in the middle of VBS here at Hinton Avenue and about a million other projects.

This morning, we took our regular Youth Sunday festivities on the road, leading worship at my home church, Salem UMC in Prince George County. My church involvement in Charlottesville doesn't allow me to get home on Sundays very often, but the community there continues to support me in countless ways and worshiping with them is always a joyous homecoming. We piled into the church van a little after 8:00 this morning, stopped in Colonial Heights to enjoy a great breakfast provided by my parents, and then made our way to Salem. The service itself was wonderful and very well-received, and afterward we joined the congregation for a delicious covered dish lunch. As an added bonus on the ride home, we stopped by Johnston-Willis hospital to help Isaac's grandfather, who is there recovering from a mild stroke, celebrate his 91st birthday!

In all, it was a terrific day and yet another reminder that I still have the best job in the entire world. And now for the obligatory sermon post. The title this time is "Into the Thin Places"

He entered Jericho and was passing through it. A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax-collector and was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, 'Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.' So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. All who saw it began to grumble and said, 'He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.' Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, 'Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to tea poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.' Then Jesus said to him, 'Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.'
--Luke 19:1-10

In the spring of 2003, not too long after I had taken the job as Director of Youth Ministries at our church, I embarked on a two-week journey with a group of fellow students and ministers from our university community. This was a journey unlike any other that I had ever experienced. It wasn’t a mission trip exactly, but it certainly wasn’t a sight-seeing tour either. We weren’t traveling to visit with people we knew or to be present for a major event. We were on what we called a spiritual pilgrimage.

You see, we were all people who were far too busy doing work that was uplifting and life-giving, but also demanding and exhausting. We were folks whose time usually was consumed by our calendars and our email accounts, by the sermons we had to write, the research we had to do, and the meetings we had to attend. We were people whose jobs and families and responsibilities demanded careful attention and boundless energy. That is to say, we were ordinary folks, with ordinary concerns, who committed to carve out some time to travel together, first by car and then by plane and then by train and finally by boat, to a couple unlikely, holy places in western Europe.

We went first to the Taize monastery, a uniquely youthful and visionary religious community in southern France. Taize is a monastery that was founded in 1940 as an international, ecumenical brotherhood, modeling a spirit of simplicity and charity within an active ministry with the world’s poorest and most abandoned peoples. In the late 50s, young people, high school and college students, parents with young children, critical people with lots of questions and lots of potential, began coming to Taize, to pray and worship and learn from the community there. This tradition has continued and today the brothers of Taize are younger than monks you’ll encounter almost anywhere else, and while most monasteries host a select handful of people at any given time, the men of Taize have built whole dormitories where pilgrims are invited to stay for days or weeks at a time. The hospitality and faithfulness of the Taize community has blessed the souls of countless Christians over the years, and they were a source of great hope for my companions and myself.

After a few days at Taize, we went on to spend a week on Iona, a small island in the frigid waters of the north Atlantic, just off the west coast of Scotland. Iona is where Saint Columba, exiled from the Irish church, established his monastery in the sixth century. The island was later the site of an influential Benedictine abbey and hundreds of miraculous events and conversions during the Middle Ages. Kings and poets and pilgrims made their way to Iona over the years and found there a stirring of the Spirit and an abiding peace. In 1938, the Reverend George MacLeod, a parish minister in Glasgow, established on the island the Iona Community, an ecumenical group of Christians committed to seeking new of living the gospel in today’s world. Initially, community members expressed this purpose by rebuilding and occupying the original monastic quarters and by being fully engaged in mission and ministry throughout Scotland and beyond.

Today the community remains committed to rebuilding the common life, by working for social and political change, striving for the renewal of the church, and exploring new more inclusive approaches to worship, all based on an integrated, biblical understanding of spirituality. Some of the most innovative and exciting things happening in the church today find their energy in the Iona community. Many of the songs in our United Methodist Hymnal and the new Faith We Sing supplement come to us directly from the island. The responsive call to worship that we used this morning comes from the Iona Abbey’s prayer book. And clergy and laypersons from all around the world are breathing new life into their congregations after spending time with the people and places of Iona.

Iona is both a community that’s shaping the face of Christianity today and a holy site of pilgrimage for Christians wanting to reconnect with the One who calls us all together into the abundant life. While our group was there, we got a glimpse of that life. Worshiping in the beautiful and historic Iona abbey, hiking among the sheep and cattle that call the island’s hills home, and hearing the waves constantly break on the rocky shoreline, we sensed that God was singing us a new song and teaching us the words to join in.

I take you through this unfortunately long-winded introduction not simply to offer an enthusiastic travel log, but rather to suggest that this life-giving, transformative journey we took, this spiritual pilgrimage, was not merely a series of random travels. It was, instead, an intentional effort to surround ourselves with a community of grace in which we might find ourselves and our Lord. We selected these two destinations, Taize and Iona, for this pilgrimage because for generations people of faith had known them to be thin places, places where the line between heaven and earth is especially thin, places where God is mysteriously but perceptibly near to humankind. We went to these places, where so many people had encountered the Risen Christ in their lives, and we found them to be as powerful and as inspirational as we ever could’ve imagined. And most importantly, we returned home to find that those thin places had given us the language we needed to describe the movement of the Holy Spirit within our own faith communities in Charlottesville.

This morning I want to suggest to you that this theology of thin places is precisely what the curious story of the wee tax collector Zacchaeus is all about. Tucked away neatly in a corner of Luke’s gospel, surrounded by the more impressive miracles and parables of Jesus, Zacchaeus’s tale doesn’t get much serious play in churches today. Too many children’s sermons and picture bibles have reduced the story to little more than a reminder that Jesus loves everyone and a call to perseverance even in the face of physical obstacles to meeting him.

Those ideas are important, and they’re certainly present here. I think we need to continue teaching our young people and our old people that our God is in the business of coming to table with the least desirables of human society. And we ought to do everything we can to encourage one another to get out of the house, find the parade, climb a tree in order to witness what Jesus is doing in our midst. But I think there’s something more happening in this scripture.

When we meet Jesus here, he’s on a journey himself, from Galilee to Jerusalem, from the place where he called his first followers and began his public ministry to the city which God had marked as peculiarly God‘s own, the seat of Hebrew culture and religion. We might say that he’s passing from one thin place to another thin place. And along the way he attracts an eclectic crowd of disciples who want to follow him, sick and wayward people who need his healing, and Pharisees who ridicule his every move.

And then he comes to Jericho, something of a thin place in its own right. You’ll remember Joshua leading the Hebrew people to victory over the army of Jericho, marching around the city walls seven times and collapsing them with a trumpet blast inspired by the Lord of Hosts. You may also recall that it was in Jericho that Jesus came across the blind beggar Bartimaeus, whose faith made him well, despite the angry protests of the crowd. So Jericho itself was a town in which God’s presence had been directly felt for many years. Perhaps this history is why we see Zacchaeus rushing to get a glimpse of Jesus as he passes by. Perhaps he knew about the hallowed past of his village and was expecting God to do something new through this radical itinerant preacher and healer. Maybe Zacchaeus had realized his own brokenness and the power of this one who was coming to reconcile his relationship with God and his community. He may even have known in the depths of his being that this Jesus of Nazareth was the Word made flesh, the God of his people come to bring light and life into a darkened world.

The scripture isn’t clear as to why Zacchaeus rushes to be where Jesus is, and that may be all for the better because it allows us to place ourselves in the story, reading our own values and motivations and longings into this moment. What the writer of the story is clear on is that Zacchaeus is curious enough about Jesus that he refuses to let him pass by unnoticed. Zacchaeus was a short man and by the time he arrived a great crowd had already gathered so that he had no chance of pushing to the front or seeing over the people in front of him. It was like someone had taken Rose and Ashley, two of the girls in our youth group whom you met a little earlier, and stood them behind a group of professional basketball players or for that matter people of, say, normal height, and expected them to see above or around that crowd of people. Zacchaeus couldn’t get at Jesus that way so he ran ahead on the road, climbed up into a sycamore tree and waited for Jesus to come to him.

The scripture’s also clear that Jesus is curious enough about Zacchaeus that he simply cannot pass by without noticing and engaging him. In fact, I have a close friend who points to this story as unmistakable evidence of the high value Jesus places on leisure and recreation. In case you missed the parts where he turned water into wine and grilled breakfast on the beach for his friends, here we clearly see Jesus step out of the routine of work in order to allow something holy to happen. He’s been traveling for weeks, preaching and teaching and healing, engaged in a ministry that has often left him doubtful and exhausted. And right in the middle of this journey, while he’s in a sense at work, he spots this funny man hanging from a tree, and he stops everything he’s doing. He drops all his priorities and plans and says, “Hey you, funny little man in a tree, Zacchaeus, come down quickly ‘cause I’m comin’ to your house for dinner.”

It’s a strange call to hospitality. It’s an even stranger call to discipleship. Jesus saw in Zacchaeus’s pure, priceless, unexplainable act of obedience something that the rest of the world had missed. He saw that on the journey of life even the home of an unpopular tax collector can be a thin place. During the meal they shared together, Zacchaeus had a conversion experience that’s probably pretty familiar to many of us. He didn’t subscribe to a whole new set of beliefs that day. He wasn’t overwhelmed by the divine presence of Jesus. Instead, he committed to line his actions up with his beliefs. He promised to give half his possessions to the poor and to repay fourfold anyone he had defrauded through his creative bookkeeping.

After dinner Jesus offers the most wonderful blessing on Zacchaeus and all those gathered in his home. He says, “Today salvation has come to this house, because Zacchaeus too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.” In the home of the tax collector Zacchaeus, Jesus allows space for repentance and new birth to spring forth, invoking in that splendid moment the grace of God and the whole history of human salvation. A thin place, indeed.

Last Sunday morning about this time, folks from our youth group were valiantly struggling with another sort of thin place, the one between wakefulness and sleeping. You see, only a few hours earlier we had returned from our annual week-long summer mission trip, which this year took us to the Niagara Frontier District of the United Methodist Church’s Western New York Conference. There, we led Vacation Bible School for a mission church in Buffalo’s impoverished Seneca Babcock neighborhood. We were able to say to the children of that community, who too often grow up with little hope, that some people from Virginia love them and love God enough to come all that way to share some of their summer. The VBS was a smashing success----in fact, it was so popular that we almost had to stay in New York because the children and their parents didn’t want us to leave at the end of the week.

While we were in the area, we also helped paint a mural at a nearby Asbury Shalom Zone, prepared and served a free community meal to about 100 people, and struck up friendships with fellow pilgrims that will last a lifetime. We connected with a local youth group for a cookout and pool party, spent an evening exploring the beauty and mystery of Niagara Falls, led the children of our Vacation Bible School on a wild field trip to an area amusement park, and took a day to travel, play, and shop in Toronto.

Unfortunately our time this morning doesn’t allow me to share all the stories and experiences I’d like to from this journey, but the truth is that the youth who were there can do a much better job of describing the trip than I can anyway. So I encourage you, as we share a meal together after our hour of worship, to ask them about all that they saw and felt and tasted of God’s goodness during their week as missionaries.

It’s enough for now to say that we found in western New York the people called Methodists being the church for the most forgotten parts of their community. We met there congregations and individuals who are striving earnestly to establish and uphold a thin place, where reconciliation and even salvation is possible. It was certainly a thin place for us, as we returned home sleep-deprived but energized for the task before us. Having seen God at work in new and exciting ways in and around Buffalo, we’ve been encouraged to continue actively discerning our own call to mission and ministry in our local community and throughout the world.

Sisters and brothers, if all this is true---if it’s true that the home of Zacchaeus can be a thin place for the only Son of God, if I’m right that Taize and Iona, Buffalo and Niagara Falls are thin places, then might it not be that this church, where God’s Word has been proclaimed and lived out by so many faithful people through the years, is also a thin place? Might it not also be that your homes and schools and workplaces and communities are thin places, places where the distance between heaven and earth, between God and humankind, is not so great? Could it be that all we do is tread from one plot of holy ground to another? That the only thing separating us from the thin places are the eyes to see and the ears to hear what God is doing around and within us?

This week and every week, may we venture out into those thin places, as uncomfortable and scary as they may be, trusting that there God will meet us and transform us and bless us beyond measure. Thanks be to God!

We just sent our first group of youth missionaries off on their journey to Buffalo, and I'll be joining the second group in just a couple hours. Our trips to Johnstown and West Palm Beach were both frightening, fun, holy experiences, and already I'm experiencing a little of each of those this year. God is with us, though, and God is good.

If you're interested, here is our best guess at an itinerary for the week. Your prayers and blessings are greatly appreciated. Shalom!

Friday      4pm Leave HAUMC for Baltimore; Dinner on the Road
                9pm Arrive at Everetts' Home in Glenwood, MD; Relax & SLEEP!!!
 
Saturday  3:30am Leave Glenwood for Baltimore-Washington International Airport
                6am Depart BWI
                9:30am Arrive at Buffalo-Niagara Int'l Airport (after connection in Philadelphia)
                11am  Settle in at Kenmore UMC
                2-4pm VBS Set-up at Seneca Street UMC
                4pm Worship at Seneca Street
                6pm  Italian Festival in Downtown Buffalo; Dinner at Frank's Happy Italy (authentic Buffalo
wings optional!); Walking Tour of Downtown Buffalo
1am Lights Out
 
Sunday    8am  Breakfast; Morning Prayers
                9am  Exploring the City
                1pm  Additional Setup at Seneca Street UMC
                2-4pm Seneca-Babcock Community Block Party
                4-6pm Dinner at Seneca Street; Final VBS Prep.
                6-8:30pm VBS Day 1: Egypt
                10pm Evening Prayers
                1am Lights Out
 
Monday     8am  Morning Prayers
                9am-12pm VBS Day 2: Mexico
                12pm Lunch at Seneca Street
                2-5pm Asbury Shalom Zone Mural
                5:30-9:30pm Pool Party Cookout with Hamburg United Methodist Youth
                1am Lights Out
 
Tuesday    8am    Breakfast; Morning Prayers
                9am-12pm VBS Day 3: Zimbabwe
                12pm Lunch at Seneca Street
                2-9pm Niagara Falls Day Trip (Maid of the Mist Tour; IMAX Experience; Souvenir Shopping & Dinner)
                10pm Evening Prayers
                1am Lights Out
 


Wednesday   8am Breakfast; Morning Prayers
                     9am-12pm VBS Day 4: Australia
                     12pm Lunch at Seneca Street
                     1-3pm Free Afternoon
                     3:30-8:30pm Seneca Street Children's Ministry; Soup Kitchen; Storytelling Festival
                     10pm Evening Prayers
                     1am Lights Out
 
Thursday       8am Breakfast; Morning Prayers
                     9am-12pm VBS Day 5: Talent Show & Olympics
                     12pm Lunch at Seneca Street
                     12:30-7:00pm VBS Fantasy Island Day Trip
                     8pm Dinner at Kenmore UMC
                     10pm Evening Prayers at Niagara Falls (Falls Light Show)
                     1am Lights Out
 
Friday           7am Clean Up: Pack Up; Breakfast; Morning Prayers
                     8am Leave for Toronto Day Trip
                     11am Lunch Near CN Tower
                     12-6pm Royal Ontario Museum
                     6-9pm Dinner & Shopping at Eaton Centre
                     9pm Leave for Buffalo
                     12am Evening Prayers
                     1am Lights Out
 
Saturday       5:30am    Leave Kenmore UMC for Airport
                     7:25am    Depart Buffalo
                     12:02pm  Arrive at BWI (after connection in Philadelphia)
                     1pm         Lunch on the Road
                     6pm         Arrive at HAUMC

And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God. --John 3:19-21

Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her. --John 8:7b

It's appropriate that we execute our unwanted under the invisible cloak of darkness. But this week the Supreme Court granted Robin Lovitt a stay of execution. I'll be praying for him. And for us.

There is an alternative.

This has been one of those extremely rare days that has actually turned out to be as productive as I had hoped. I've managed to finalize a complete itinerary for the youth mission trip, nail down transportation plans in New York as well as to and from the airport in Baltimore, and return the last remaining borrowed things from the yard sale, in the midst of countless other errands and projects.

Do not be deceived though, dear reader, much work remains to be done. Actually, I'm looking ahead to a long night of data entry and research for Lauren, but for the moment I'm celebrating the productivity with some web-surfing and now, as a result, some slightly off-topic blogging.

While catching up on the archives of some online journals that I rarely have time to peruse, I noticed that a friend had a map (similar to the one that follows here) of all the flights he could remember taking posted to his homepage, but with no link to any online generator. This set me on an unfortunately long and often tedious hunt to create one for myself. You see, although I don't do it nearly as often as the more prolific travelers among my readers, I very much enjoy flying and am amazed (in the genuine, holy sense of that word---not the trite, overdone way it's generally used today) by the machines and people who make it possible. And since I haven't flown quite as much as many of you (AND since I'm one of those dorks who remembers things like specific travel itineraries from five years ago!), I was able to log the data for my flights easy enough.

The result you see here comes from Karl Swarz's Great Circle Mapper, which I think is the best open source program available for accessing and mapping common flight paths. The display problems you see here have far more to do with my technological ineptness than the program itself.

In any case, as I prepare for another series of airborn journeys early Saturday morning, I thought it appropriate to share with you where I've been. Is it bad form to include our upcoming flights on this map, you ask? Rubbish, I say---it's faith.



FYI, highlighted airports here are in Richmond, Charlotte, Dallas, Baltimore, Houston, Leon (Mexico), Washington, Salt Lake City, Billings, Frankfurt, Moscow, Pyatigorsk (Russia), Atlanta, Pensacola, Long Beach, West Palm Beach, Philadelphia, and Buffalo.

Wow! It's taken me seven weeks post-graduation to return to the old blog, and even now it's only to share a sermon. Perhaps this is a good thing, though, indicating that life as a college grad has been peaceful and busy and good (can those qualities go together for non-English majors?). Since my last substantial post I've completed my 45-page thesis on John Wesley's vision of evangelism, spent a week at the beach in Duck, North Carolina with folks from the Wesley Foundation, moved into the Hinton House next door to our church, done a tremendous amount of substitute teaching, mostly at Charlottesville High School, during the last month of the school year, gotten accepted as a graduate student at the University of Virginia, conducted more research and mailed more books for Lauren, attended the 8th grade graduation of 2 members of our youth group, attended the 223rd session of the Virginia Annual Conference in Hampton, attended Katie and Grant's wedding in Columbia, South Carolina, enjoyed several wonderful days in Charleston with April, visited my family in northeast Tennessee, hosted my cousin Johnathan for a week and a half, watched the Nationals beat up on the Pirates at RFK, traveled to Virginia Beach with the youth, watched Independence Day fireworks in the Heights, taken the children of Project Transformation to Sherando Lake, read some books, watched lots of scary movies, and been very, very alive.

This weekend has been the busiest of all, as we had a youth lock-in on Friday night where we sorted, priced, and set up the mounds of donations we received for Saturday's youth group yard sale. After getting virtually no sleep on Friday and then working the yard sale until 3:00 or so, I managed an afternoon nap yesterday before heading to the office to finish planning this morning's Youth Sunday worship service, print and copy the bulletins for that service, and write a sermon. Despite the weekend's craziness, the service went smoothly and was very well-received by the congregation. Once again, I'm reminded that I may have the best, most life-giving job in the world! Hopefully I'll continue to believe that over the next couple as I scramble to pull together all the last-minute details for next week's mission trip.

In the meantime, below is this morning's sermon, which aims both to celebrate and bless the work of our youth mission team and to continue our church's weekly study of the doctrines of the United Methodist Church. Your feedback is greatly appreciated!

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, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God."'
John said to teh crowds that came out to be baptized by him, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from teh wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire."
And the crowds asked him, "What then should we do?" In reply he said to them, "Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise." Even tax-collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, "Teacher, what should we do?" He said to them, "Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you." Soldiers also asked him, "And we, what should we do?" He said to them, "Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages."
As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be teh Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, "I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to u ntie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with teh Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing-floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."
So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.
--Luke 3:1-18

I want you all to know that we did not select the destination for this summer's youth mission trip based only on its name---but if we had, we couldn't have done any better. The Niagara Frontier District of the United Methodist Church sounds about as exotic and enticing as any I can imagine. It gives one the feeling of traveling to the extreme edges of civilization, overcoming fear and hardship and loneliness to claim a rugged, wilderness space as holy ground. In fact, that's the dictionary definition of frontier---a rugged wilderness space, a region just beyond or at the cusp of a settled area, an undeveloped area awaiting exploration and discovery.

I find the idea of going to be in ministry with and for God's people in such a frontier area exciting and life-giving. And over the past several months, as I've shared our hopes and dreams for this mission trip with countless people here at our church and far beyond these walls, I think most of those folks have shared my general enthusiasm about the frontier. But they've also pointed out rather quickly that the place we're going doesn't actually fit any of these definitions of a frontier. With a population of about 300,000, Buffalo itself is New York's second largest city, and the Buffalo-Niagara metropolitan area, where we'll spend much of our time commuting between our home for the week at the suburban Kenmore United Methodist Church and our work sites downtown at the impoverished Seneca Street Church and several area soup kitchens, as well as in the fields outside and around the city, is home to another 800,000 people.

Niagara Falls proper, which gives its name to this district of our connection, is still considered the “Honeymoon Capital of the World,” a city of 81,000 which plays host to an estimated 14 million people annually. With many golf courses, amusement parks, science and art museums, campgrounds, and casinos in the area, we might call the Niagara District a lot of things, but a frontier is hardly one of them. We might argue that any place which will sell you t-shirts, coffee mugs, posters, or underwear emblazoned with its officially licensed logo and available at its site on the World Wide Web can no longer in good faith be called a frontier.

The region was once a frontier, however, for the native and immigrant people of North America. History books tell us that the first humans arrived in the Niagara region around 12,000 years ago, just in time to witness the birth of the great Falls. The Niagara River emerged from the last Ice Age as the only spillway from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario, leading to the rapid erosion of the Falls, which came quickly to mystify and define the lives of the region's people. The Falls themselves are so majestic that the first European settlers in the area---hard, educated men---estimated their size at three times what it really is and heralded them as a sure sign of God's sovereignty.

In a lot of ways todaythis region is a tamer, safer, almost less real place than it once was, but for our team of short-term missionaries it as much a fronter as it was for the first dumbfounded European missionaries. It's a frontier for us not because we'll have to hunt and gather for our meals or because we'll have to leave the luxuries of community in order to explore it, but because this place is sure to call us outside of ourselves. Effective ministry with the people there will demand new things of us individually and communally. In simply going to be in this unknown community, we're taking a chance that somehow the God whom we've encountered here in Virginia is also active in New York, calling us to a fresh experience of mission and ministry. The Niagara District is for us a frontier not because it will take us to a physical wilderness in which we must fight to survive, but because it will be for us a spiritual wilderness from which we will learn unsearchable things about ourselves and about the One who has formed us together in this faith community.

John the Baptist was something of a wild man. According to Mark's Gospel, he “was clothed with camel's haird, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.” He was a zealous and passionate proclaimer of the coming, and present, day of the Lord. He called the Hebrew people----his brothers and sisters, his teachers and followers, his fellow pilgrims---to repent of their sins and to bear fruit in their lives which might be worthy of that repentance. And he baptized them in water, as an outward and physical sign of the inward and spiritual grace which they had received through their repentance. John's baptism embodied dying to one's old self and being reborn into another image, an image about which his followers were not entirely certain, about which we're not always certain.

John was clear, though, that the baptism he wrought was not final. Rather it was a bit of dramatic foreshadowing, of religious prophecy, which pointed directly at the promised reign of God. “I baptize you with water, but one who is more powerful than I is coming,” he insisted. “I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.”

John was a guidepost through whose teaching and example thirsting people found the way that leads to living water. Next week in New York, we too will be guideposts. We're not likely to refer too often to the children of our inner-city Vacation Bible School as a brood of vipers, and if you've had a chance to look at the insert in your bulletin this morning you'll see that the United Methodist Church strictly, and rightly, prohibits lay persons from baptizing other Christians.

So even though we'll be proudly donning our camel's hair robes and gladly feasting on locusts and wild honey during the week, our ministry itself will look, on the surface, quite different from John the Baptist's. In point of fact, though, we will, like John, be a voice crying out in the wilderness to the world and to ourselves to prepare the way of the Lord, to make straight the paths that lead to righteousness. You see, even though the city of Buffalo doesn't look a whole lot like the Judea of John's day, it can be a frightening, deadly wilderness for poor children growing up with little hope. It's a wilderness for many of the families in the Seneca-Babcock neighborhood where we'll be working, who literally do not have access to the money or resources to put food on their table at night. By uniting our hands and hearts and energy with the work that the United Methodist Church is already doing in this place, we will be a prophetic voice in the wilderness at the same time that the wilderness helps us discover who we are and where our voice comes from.

In preparation for this Buffalo mission trip, we've done a tremendous amount of praying and planning and sharing and fundraising to make folks in this church and throughout the community aware of what God is up to in the midst of our youth ministry. It's been encouraging for me to meet with this mission team each week, for an extra hour before youth group begins, and watch as they find their voice in planning the activities and curriculum for an entire week of Bible School. It's affirming to hear the passion with which they talk about this trip---the places they'll see, the work they'll do, the people they'll meet, and perhaps most importantly the ways they expect to grow along the way. I've already learned a lot from this experience, and I know that it's only just beginning. My sisters and brothers, we are blessed to have young people in our church whose faith and faithfulness challenge all of us to encounter the gospel in new and exciting ways. As a great example, this weekend we hosted a yard sale outside on the church lawn, with all the proceeds going directly into our youth missions account to be available to us both during next week's trip and as we look ahead to our future involvement in the missional activity of the church. First of all, this great program would not have been possible without the generous support we received from so many of you, who graciously donated clothes, toys, books, and other household items to the cause. So we do thank you from the bottoms of our hearts.

What we did with all those things you donated was pile them in one room downstairs and take some hilarious pictures of our group crawling around in there trying to fit in amongst the mayhem. Then, about 9:30 on Friday night we actually started to sort and price everything we had received. Obviously, sleep during the night was minimal, so many of us were fairly exhasuted by the time our first customers arrived around 7am yesterday (and completely wiped out when we finished with everything about 3:00 in the afternoon!), but it was an incredible 18-hour experience for me because I got to see people shine in new ways. The skills necessary to pull off a great yard sale aren't necessarily the ones that I have, but an awful lot of our youth stepped up the plate big time, forged ahead (if a bit groggily), and modeled grace and hospitality while continuing to raise money for our trip.

The final counting is still happening, but it looks like we netted a little more than $500 profit yesterday morning, which is far better than I ever would have imagined we'd do. But even if we'd only made a tenth of that, it would've been worth the while simply for the leadership and the ownership of this trip that our youth took this weekend.

And in a very real way, I'm convinced that this yard sale also has something to teach us about the grace of baptism. In baptism, we are initiated into a community of diverse gifts, in which we are called upon to share our strengths and weaknesses with one another. In this Christian community, the areas in which I struggle are prone to be the ones in which you thrive, and vice versa, so that we make up a body whose very breath depends on our working together to glorify God.

As such, the sacrament of baptism is about the newly-baptized Christian, but not exclusively. Instead, baptism is a means of grace that signals our new birth and weaves us together as the household of God. You may be aware that in the United Methodist Church we have a Book of Discipline which governs not only the administrative, but also the theological life of our congregations. It is in the sacrament of baptism, the Discipline instructs us, that we are incorporated into the church of Jesus Christ, which is open to people of all ages, nations, and races. Baptism is God's good gift of unmerited grace through the Holy Spirit, the grace which carries us through our journey.

United Methodists believe that God has so graced us that one baptism is sufficient for full communion and that infant and adult baptism are equally valid. Through what Mr. Wesley called preventing, or prevenient, grace, God does the work of baptism before we ever sense it. Baptism is then the response of the individual and the family and the community to that unending grace. When baptism is followed by proper nurture in the Christian faith, awareness and acknowledgement of the baptismal promises, and confirmation and entrance to full membership in the church, the body is both strengthened by the addition and made more vulnerable by the new promises it must keep and worrying it will surely do.

In baptism, both the young Christian (or her parents or sponsors on her behalf) and the gathered community commit to support the life of the church through their prayers, their presence, their gifts, and their service. That's a radical promise. If people rally knew that they were getting themselves into, they'd take some pretty serious notes every time a child or adult came forward to be baptized in their church. As Annie Dillard suggests, they might even start wearing crash helmets when they show up for worship, expecting God to do something powerful and even dangerous to signify the solemnity of the baptismal covenant.

On Friday when our youth leave for their week-long missions immersion in western New York crash helmets won't be on their packing list, but the expectation of transformatino will be on their lips and in their hearts. We go as baptized Christians, connected to this faith community, ambassadors to a new place, bringing with us the prayers, the presence, the gifts, and the service which we have gleaned from our time together.

Thanks be to God!