Scripture: Philippians 1: 3-6

I want to tell you about a man. I want to tell you about a man whom I believe to be an angel. My angel, at least.

I grew up in a lovely little town called Bethlehem, PA, Christmas City, USA. I was raised in a very humble house in a very modest neighborhood, attended very normal public schools where I made very average grades and was assessed to be a very typical kid. That made me very happy.

My mother saw to it that I was in attendance every time the doors of Calvary Baptist Church were open. For the most part Calvary Baptist was made up of hard-working, clean-living, Bible-believing families of eastern European descent whose last names usually had only one vowel that was, more often than not, a "y" or an "i" at the end, whose fathers worked in the steel mills, whose mothers cooked, cleaned and sewed and whose children excelled in school, baseball and wrestling. Although smoking, drinking and sex were considered quite taboo the only unpardonable sin was dancing. Opportunities at Calvary Baptist were endless. Along with the regular dose of Wednesday night prayer meeting, Sunday morning Sunday School and Worship service and Sunday evening Youth Fellowship there were summer camps, winter retreats, mission conferences, revivals, trips to see Billy Graham, picnics, Boy's Brigade, gospel sings, prayer breakfasts, progressive suppers, Bible studies and many other activities offered for the socially deprived and spiritually engaged Christian. I did them all.

As in any collection of people our congregation was not without its sad cases, hard-liners and oddballs. It was not uncommon for a first generation German woman in old lady shoes to stand up in the middle of a service and just start wailing out to kingdom come in her native tongue. Most of us had no idea what she was saying but, it was quite evident she meant it. There was a Welshman I can't remember ever hearing speak who, every two months or so, would stand up and sing a solo of How Great Thou Art or The Old Rugged Cross and absolutely wipe the congregation out with his beautiful and soulful tenor. There was a beautiful, young woman named Helen, my mother's dearest friend who, at the age of 35 was crippled with arthritis and managed, for the rest of her years, to attend every service in that church and I can still feel the touch of her gentle, crooked hand on my forearm and hear her sweet, weak voice struggling through her twisted jaw to say to me, "Isn't God wonderful, Tommy." There was a handsome and robust, fiery evangelist who traveled the country preaching the gospel but lived in our town and worshipped with us who took to the liquor, found himself a sweet young thing and ran off and left his family and never returned. These are just a few. I know you all have your counterparts.

But, I want to tell you about a man. I want to tell you about a man whom I believe to be an angel. His name was Dave. Dave had an odd and humble occupation. Dave was a child evangelist.

I was a child when I first met Dave and his wife. Dave was an ordained minister and they settled in our little community and joined our church. He was called into a ministry called Child Evangelism. My mother became very close to them because she thought what they did was very special. My mother gave them donations every month. This being the 1950's and given the fact that my dad made maybe $6K a year I figure my mom probably gave them a buck or two a month. That meant a lot to the Schmolls. That was their name: Schmoll. S-C-H-M-O-L-L. That wasn't the only odd thing about them.

In the modern-day language of the street Dave was what you would call a geek. Dave was an odd-looking sort of fellow and the fact that he was legally blind and wore those coke-bottle glasses with big black frames did not help. He wore very modest clothing and always had his trousers hiked up way too far and had that belt strapped in real tight. I remember that he often wore flannel shirts with the top button closed (that may be hip now but, it certainly wasn't in 1960) and he usually had on a pair of those industrial-type black shoes and a pair of white socks. On Sundays, when Dave was in church, he had one sort of brown suit, a nice white shirt and a tie that was way too wide and way too short clamped onto his shirt with one of those tie clasps from like, 1939.

Being an ordained minister and a member of our congregation Dave would be called on, from time to time, to fill the pulpit when our regular minister was, for whatever reason, unable to preach. I was astonished when I first witnessed Dave step into the pulpit. I mentioned his eyesight. Dave said a prayer and then asked everyone to open their Bibles to a particular passage and then he lifted up his own big, black and well-worn Bible holding it an inch away from his eyes so that it covered the entirety of his face and began reading, with a great matter-of-factness, the scripture from which he had based his lesson. You could barely see the top of his head moving left to right, right to left and back again, straining rigorously to see the words he loved so dearly. You could feel the effort he was putting forth getting those eyes to focus, stringing the words and phrases together page to eyes, eyes to brain, brain to lips. Occasionally he would stumble and you could sense the entire congregation raising up a little from their pews as if to run and help him, help him read. And Dave's voice was not that of an oracle. It was nasal and biting and he seemed to maintain a constant pitch with little inflection. At this point in my life I was entering the evil and awkward age of adolescence and this was all an odd, almost pathetic spectacle. And, although I was a pretty sweet and decent kid I must admit that Dave was an easy target for the slings and arrows of the stinging humor that seems to come so naturally to 13 year old boys. Put simply, in the vernacular of 1964, we mocked him: His dress, his voice, his vision, his glasses, his sermons. Everything about him. We made fun of him.

As I mentioned earlier, Dave and his wife were called into a ministry known as Child Evangelism. Let me explain to you what they did from 1957 until last year (1997) when they retired. In and around the neighboring communities of my home town they set up simple church school classes on street corners, playgrounds, parks, elementary schools, churches, backyards and civic buildings, wherever they could beg, borrow or steal the space and then went door-to-door with little hand-written invitations inviting any and all children who wanted to attend to come to the free Bible Club. With meager supplies like crayons and scissors and glue and paper Dave and his wife would spend all day with these precious kids teaching them about Jesus and how He loved the little children, all the children of the world. The most sophisticated of their supplies was something called a flannel board. It was basically a piece of plywood about 3 feet long and 2 feet high covered with a piece of black flannel and placed on an easel. Accompanying this flannel board was a box full of flannel Bible character figures like Moses and David and Goliath and Daniel and the lions and Jonah and the whale and Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus. And Dave would tell the Bible stories and his wife would place the figures on the flannel board and then they would say a prayer and then they would sing some songs and then they would have some Kool-Aid and a cookie and then they would color a picture of Noah's ark and then they would go home and come back again the next day until the week was over and then Dave and his wife would set up their little church school in another neighborhood in another part of town the next Monday. And this was funded by the donations from people like my mom who would dig deeply into the little bit they had and give them dollar bills and fives and maybe even a twenty once in a while. And sometimes it would rain and often it was very hot and the neighborhood bullies would come by and taunt them or the wind would blow the construction paper down the street or a child would fall and hurt their knee or there was barely enough money for a bag of cookies. But, Dave and his wife had a heart for these kids. Only God could give a man and a woman a heart for a ministry like that. And these children, often otherwise unchurched, heard the pure and simple Gospel; they heard the Truth. They did this for 40 years.

Writing these thoughts down on these sheets of paper has been wonderfully torturous for me and I would ask you to trust that I am not using this opportunity to be with all of you to purge myself of any leftover teenage guilt because I thought Dave was a geek or because Jimmy Lewis and I used to hold our Bibles up close to our eyes and hike our pants up to our breasts and pinch our noses shut in order to imitate Dave's nasally voice. That's just part of being a jerky, wise-ass adolescent. It's simply that one of those little kids who sat on one of those little chairs and sang that little song about that wee little man and colored orange and purple all over the faces of Abraham and Isaac has grown up and walked out into a world that is angry, into a society that is void of the sacred, into a country that has abandoned its foundations, into an industry that is morally bankrupt, into a generation that has no soul and into a life that is equal parts numb, fearful and restless. And when he sees Jimmy Swaggart weeping in front of the country on national TV because he got caught, for the second time, soliciting a prostitute, he recalls the purity of this man; and when he sees a televangelist on a globally-televised broadcast in a $1500 suit preaching the gospel of prosperity he recalls the humility of this man; and when he hears the talking heads and spin doctors railing on and on about the insignificance of a semen stain on a blue dress he recalls the meekness of this man; and when he reads, daily, the horrifying stories of child abuse and homelessness and abandoned families and crack babies he recalls the commitment of this man.

So, I think about Dave. I think about him often. I see him in that brownish suit and I realize that it was a Cloak of Righteousness. I hear him speak with that high-pitched, nasally sound and I realize it was the Voice of Reason. I see him and his wife setting up one of those make-shift, street corner Bible Clubs and I realize that was the House of the Lord. And I think about those poor, tortured eyes and realize that, save for Christ Himself, few have seen more clearly the Truth. And I thank God for Dave Schmoll.