1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:06,000 I want to tell you a little bit about this idea of using the path in order to find peace. 2 00:00:06,000 --> 00:00:13,000 When my sister and I were younger and we were, well, any time would have been when we were younger, technically, 3 00:00:13,000 --> 00:00:19,000 with that, though, is we were riding along with my mom in this neighborhood near our school. 4 00:00:19,000 --> 00:00:26,000 And as we're going along these speed bumps, my sister says, why are we going this way? This is a dead end. 5 00:00:26,000 --> 00:00:30,000 And my mom and I were looking at each other, we're looking down the road, we're looking the other way, 6 00:00:30,000 --> 00:00:34,000 we're looking around, and we're like, where is this dead end? 7 00:00:34,000 --> 00:00:38,000 We had absolutely no idea, but my sister's like, I saw it on the sign. 8 00:00:38,000 --> 00:00:42,000 It says, this is a dead end. So we were really, really confused. 9 00:00:42,000 --> 00:00:46,000 So we went ahead and we turned around and we went back to try to find the sign. 10 00:00:46,000 --> 00:00:53,000 And there was the sign, just as my sister said, which said in clear English, road humps. 11 00:00:53,000 --> 00:00:57,000 Which is when we discovered my sister needed glasses. 12 00:00:57,000 --> 00:01:07,000 You see, it's fascinating that oftentimes we can be going down a street and completely miss what it is that the signs are saying is up ahead. 13 00:01:07,000 --> 00:01:14,000 And we can oftentimes not even realize where we're even going, or even ask the question, is that actually where we want to go? 14 00:01:14,000 --> 00:01:19,000 You see, that's also what we end up seeing in regards to peace. 15 00:01:19,000 --> 00:01:27,000 This is our second Sunday of Advent. But the thing with peace is that oftentimes we try to find it in different ways. 16 00:01:27,000 --> 00:01:36,000 Oftentimes by political paths or economic paths or sometimes social or even social media paths. 17 00:01:36,000 --> 00:01:40,000 Somehow we think we're going to find it in our TikTok feed, whatever it might be. 18 00:01:40,000 --> 00:01:44,000 Is that there are lots of different ways that we try to find a sense of peace. 19 00:01:44,000 --> 00:01:48,000 And yet, they still leave us lacking. 20 00:01:48,000 --> 00:01:53,000 I want to tell you a little bit about a neighborhood in North Houston called Independence Heights. 21 00:01:53,000 --> 00:01:55,000 Have you heard of Independence Heights before? 22 00:01:55,000 --> 00:02:01,000 Okay, a few. Maybe not all of you though. I see one or two people like this. 23 00:02:01,000 --> 00:02:05,000 And truth be told, is that it's an easily overlooked neighborhood. 24 00:02:05,000 --> 00:02:14,000 When I was getting my urban planning degree, we studied about it because it was originally the first black town in Texas. 25 00:02:14,000 --> 00:02:20,000 It was the first one that was actually incorporated. And historically, this was the early part of the 20th century. 26 00:02:20,000 --> 00:02:23,000 It was at a time during segregation. 27 00:02:23,000 --> 00:02:29,000 And so being able to have their own town, their own city, was a very important thing at that time. 28 00:02:29,000 --> 00:02:33,000 And it was just north of, just outside of the Houston city limits. 29 00:02:33,000 --> 00:02:41,000 So if you think about I-45, north, and then 610 north, think about the northwest corner right there. 30 00:02:41,000 --> 00:02:48,000 That's Independence Heights. Right next to a place you may be more familiar with, Garden Oaks Oak Forest. 31 00:02:48,000 --> 00:02:57,000 Now, with that though, is that after about two decades, it was no longer its own city. 32 00:02:57,000 --> 00:03:02,000 Independence Heights got annexed by Houston. Many different reasons. 33 00:03:02,000 --> 00:03:07,000 But many of which was that they were unable to get their roads paved. 34 00:03:07,000 --> 00:03:17,000 They were unable to get infrastructure and good plumbing and lights and everything else that you could go just below what we see now as 610 and find it. 35 00:03:17,000 --> 00:03:31,000 But the buses that would take people back and forth across the city with those who are working throughout the city, as soon as they would get there, would stop just outside of it and not go in. 36 00:03:31,000 --> 00:03:41,000 And with so many things facing this community, it became practically impossible for them to continue as a city to the point where finally they said toward the end of the 30s, 37 00:03:41,000 --> 00:03:45,000 yes, we'll go ahead and be annexed by Houston. 38 00:03:45,000 --> 00:03:53,000 But you see, the reality was that Houston wasn't really looking to annex them because they wanted to make it a better neighborhood. 39 00:03:53,000 --> 00:03:58,000 At the time, Houston was doing everything it could to become the largest city in Texas. 40 00:03:58,000 --> 00:04:04,000 So they could stand out in the census, which we know eventually they were. 41 00:04:04,000 --> 00:04:14,000 But with that, though, is we have seen over time then freeways coming up all around it to the point where people don't even know of the neighborhood there as a whole. 42 00:04:14,000 --> 00:04:21,000 But other problems like flooding and a lack of development in the area has made a real struggle. 43 00:04:21,000 --> 00:04:32,000 With all these things that happen, what we would end up seeing is that while the scripture may say to make the mountains level of the hills level and the valleys filled in, 44 00:04:32,000 --> 00:04:36,000 we sometimes forget about, yeah, but did you pave the roads? 45 00:04:36,000 --> 00:04:40,000 See, making straight the way of the Lord. 46 00:04:40,000 --> 00:04:42,000 It's a tricky thing sometimes. 47 00:04:42,000 --> 00:04:52,000 You see, oftentimes we're looking at things for peace that are just more of a ignoring what may be there at hand. 48 00:04:52,000 --> 00:05:02,000 See, many of the issues that we faced economically for a long time, we saw that many things were just kind of brushed over for many, many decades. 49 00:05:02,000 --> 00:05:13,000 And so even to the point of instead of saying our whole system needs to change because our entire economy has now shifted a century and a half ago, 50 00:05:13,000 --> 00:05:20,000 instead, it's just saying, well, as long as you just work hard enough, I'm sure everything will work out just fine. 51 00:05:20,000 --> 00:05:23,000 But here's the difficulty with this. 52 00:05:23,000 --> 00:05:26,000 Peace doesn't just happen. 53 00:05:26,000 --> 00:05:30,000 Peace never just happens. 54 00:05:30,000 --> 00:05:32,000 It's never easy. 55 00:05:32,000 --> 00:05:49,000 See, even right now, if you were to actually look at a floodplain map, you actually see that a lot of northern Houston doesn't actually have a major issue with that except this one pocket right there where there's poor irrigation next to these freeways, 56 00:05:49,000 --> 00:05:55,000 a place that ended up being paved over because of freeways that didn't exist before. 57 00:05:55,000 --> 00:06:05,000 And one thing that's interesting is when you look at cities that have loops that go around them like 610, historically they were developed because they were meant to be an opportunity that during warfare, 58 00:06:05,000 --> 00:06:13,000 military vehicles could go around an entire city to get anywhere they needed to go and to take building resources anywhere they were needed. 59 00:06:13,000 --> 00:06:20,000 But what was the one neighborhood that wasn't included when that loop was developed? 60 00:06:20,000 --> 00:06:24,000 The neighborhood that was just north of it. 61 00:06:24,000 --> 00:06:30,000 The thing with it is that many of these things, they don't just naturally fix themselves. 62 00:06:30,000 --> 00:06:40,000 You have to make the effort to figure out how to include everyone when a city is thriving the same way that our city has been. 63 00:06:40,000 --> 00:06:45,000 But more than that is that we end up seeing the same thing in our spiritual lives. 64 00:06:45,000 --> 00:06:49,000 Our spiritual lives don't just flourish just because we hope that they do. 65 00:06:49,000 --> 00:06:54,000 We put in our time on Sunday or we made sure that the kids got confirmed. 66 00:06:54,000 --> 00:06:59,000 But rather is it an ongoing process. 67 00:06:59,000 --> 00:07:01,000 It doesn't stop. 68 00:07:01,000 --> 00:07:05,000 That was the thing that John the Baptist ended up discovering. 69 00:07:05,000 --> 00:07:12,000 He couldn't just end up proclaiming the way of the Lord by just living a regular everyday life like anyone in the Jewish community. 70 00:07:12,000 --> 00:07:17,000 He couldn't just go be a Pharisee or a Sadducee or a scribe or any of those others. 71 00:07:17,000 --> 00:07:26,000 He had to leave everything he knew and get away to discover the path that would be cleared for God. 72 00:07:26,000 --> 00:07:36,000 Imagine that you're out there in the middle of nowhere and all you have is maybe some dead camel that you can skin and make as your own clothing. 73 00:07:36,000 --> 00:07:42,000 And let's be honest, honey back then did not come in little bottles that are shaped like a bear. 74 00:07:42,000 --> 00:07:51,000 There are no honey pots. There's no winnie, but you probably had to reach in and you probably got stung quite a bit by those bees. 75 00:07:51,000 --> 00:08:04,000 The thing with this is that trying to find the path oftentimes takes true reflection inside because we are so often the problem. 76 00:08:04,000 --> 00:08:17,000 We're the ones who end up causing so much struggle and God is not wanting us to start the path by figuring out everybody else that needs to get it right, but he's starting with us. 77 00:08:17,000 --> 00:08:24,000 See, that's the thing about this is that we can easily overlook these things because of everything else that distracts us in life. 78 00:08:24,000 --> 00:08:30,000 If you look, there's actually a Whole Foods that's right there on 610. 79 00:08:30,000 --> 00:08:39,000 And if you were to look over there today, you can see it's beautiful, like bright and colorful and everything, and that there are these murals that they're on the side. 80 00:08:39,000 --> 00:08:43,000 It is the Whole Foods, independent sites. 81 00:08:43,000 --> 00:08:47,000 It was not originally going to be Whole Foods, independent sites. 82 00:08:47,000 --> 00:08:49,000 It was going to be Whole Foods, garden oaks. 83 00:08:49,000 --> 00:08:54,000 It's not in garden oaks. It's in independent sites. 84 00:08:54,000 --> 00:09:04,000 But the natural automatic way of labeling it was to make sure that it was geared toward the closest wealthy neighborhood you could find. 85 00:09:04,000 --> 00:09:10,000 And people had to stand up and say, no, it's independent sites. 86 00:09:10,000 --> 00:09:18,000 And now you can even go in there and buy the fixings that would go towards Soul Food, which is very popular in the neighborhood there. 87 00:09:18,000 --> 00:09:20,000 But it didn't just happen automatically. 88 00:09:20,000 --> 00:09:26,000 It wasn't the original business plan. It had to take effort. 89 00:09:26,000 --> 00:09:30,000 See, oftentimes that's the thing whenever we're looking for a sense of peace. 90 00:09:30,000 --> 00:09:35,000 See, we have a lot of things like hatred and hurt that may come up in our lives. 91 00:09:35,000 --> 00:09:39,000 There are things where people have genuinely harmed us in different ways. 92 00:09:39,000 --> 00:09:43,000 Ways in which we have genuinely been put at a disadvantage. 93 00:09:43,000 --> 00:09:49,000 There are people around us who genuinely deserve worse than what they get. 94 00:09:49,000 --> 00:09:55,000 And yet that ends up destroying us on the inside because it consumes us. 95 00:09:55,000 --> 00:10:04,000 And we become less focused on making the world better and more focused on making sure that someone gets what they need, what they deserve. 96 00:10:04,000 --> 00:10:09,000 How does that bring peace? It doesn't. 97 00:10:09,000 --> 00:10:16,000 See, that's the thing with this is that when we looked at John the Baptist and he is proclaiming comfort, 98 00:10:16,000 --> 00:10:20,000 comfort wasn't a nice bed. Comfort wasn't an easy job. 99 00:10:20,000 --> 00:10:22,000 Comfort wasn't just fitting in with his friends. 100 00:10:22,000 --> 00:10:27,000 Comfort was not just somehow hoping that everything would work out. 101 00:10:27,000 --> 00:10:36,000 Comfort took years of even wondering what was going to happen before the Messiah walks up 102 00:10:36,000 --> 00:10:41,000 and he's able to say, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. 103 00:10:41,000 --> 00:10:48,000 The truth is that as we're in this season, this wintery season, this time of cold, this time of dark, 104 00:10:48,000 --> 00:10:56,000 you probably have many opportunities to reflect back on what's been happening this year, five years, ten years. 105 00:10:56,000 --> 00:11:02,000 And to wonder what is all this even leading to? 106 00:11:02,000 --> 00:11:09,000 But you see, the peace that we're looking for isn't just hoping that maybe the garland and the ornaments and everything else 107 00:11:09,000 --> 00:11:18,000 would somehow brighten our hearts, but rather knowing who it is that they proclaim to come into this world for us. 108 00:11:18,000 --> 00:11:23,000 Which is good because my Christmas tree still isn't up yet, by the way. No idea. I know. 109 00:11:23,000 --> 00:11:27,000 I'll get it up before the party, I promise. 110 00:11:27,000 --> 00:11:32,000 But you see, the thing is that oftentimes we don't know what that next step may be. 111 00:11:32,000 --> 00:11:36,000 Independence Heights? No idea the future of Independence Heights. 112 00:11:36,000 --> 00:11:45,000 The 45 expansion, there's a good possibility that it may be threatening to take over land from one of the oldest churches in all of Houston. 113 00:11:45,000 --> 00:11:52,000 And bit by bit, instead of raising up families' homes or creating better irrigation, 114 00:11:52,000 --> 00:11:58,000 more likely they're going to be bought out and forced to leave the neighborhood as a whole. 115 00:11:58,000 --> 00:12:02,000 The future of the first black town in Texas. 116 00:12:02,000 --> 00:12:07,000 We oftentimes don't know for sure how to handle the issues that are facing us. 117 00:12:07,000 --> 00:12:15,000 And we know that they are not just here, but the issues that are facing in Europe and Middle East, Asia, 118 00:12:15,000 --> 00:12:21,000 much of the economic downturn, the one child system that had been set up for so long 119 00:12:21,000 --> 00:12:26,000 and that now the workforce in second biggest economy in the world, maybe the first, 120 00:12:26,000 --> 00:12:30,000 doesn't even have enough people to work in it. 121 00:12:30,000 --> 00:12:36,000 Africa and many of the issues facing Kenya, we don't have easy answers. 122 00:12:36,000 --> 00:12:42,000 But the piece that we're looking for doesn't just come from finishing the article and turning off the news, 123 00:12:42,000 --> 00:12:47,000 and it doesn't come by just hoping and wishing that something would change it. 124 00:12:47,000 --> 00:12:53,000 But we have to start and look to see what systems, what actions have we had in place here 125 00:12:53,000 --> 00:12:57,000 that need to change for the world that we have around us. 126 00:12:57,000 --> 00:13:00,000 And the piece is never easy. 127 00:13:00,000 --> 00:13:07,000 When we see Christ Jesus coming into this world, it doesn't stop at the manger. 128 00:13:07,000 --> 00:13:13,000 That's already hard enough as it is, being born in a barn. 129 00:13:13,000 --> 00:13:18,000 But more than that is to be able to look and to say, you've got the next three decades to go through so much 130 00:13:18,000 --> 00:13:23,000 that's going to finish with a sacrifice for us. 131 00:13:23,000 --> 00:13:31,000 See, we here, I'm not here to offer you something that's easy or cushy or gentle. 132 00:13:31,000 --> 00:13:35,000 That's not why I'm asking you to be here with the church. That's not why I'm asking you to know Jesus. 133 00:13:35,000 --> 00:13:39,000 I'm sorry. That's not the final part of this. 134 00:13:39,000 --> 00:13:44,000 The final part is not the easy answer or the quiet reflection. 135 00:13:44,000 --> 00:13:51,000 The answer is you've already been given everything in Christ. Now what are we meant to do with it? 136 00:13:51,000 --> 00:13:56,000 See, peace is never easy, but it always starts with us. 137 00:13:56,000 --> 00:14:06,000 Because Christ came for us to die for us, to change us, and to send us into that world. 138 00:14:06,000 --> 00:14:19,000 So this morning, as we think of the peace of God, may we baptize in Christ and looking to Him for hope, 139 00:14:19,000 --> 00:14:30,000 bring His peace into a world that needs someone who can see beyond themselves to God who actually has loved us first. 140 00:14:30,000 --> 00:14:53,000 Thanks be to God.