The following sermon was delivered by the Reverend John W. Howe, Rector of Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax, Virginia, on April 25, 1982. 

The title is, Let's Go Get the Land. Five months and one week ago last night, the vestry and the clergy met together for what was certainly the most extraordinary evening of my life, and I think I would speak for all the rest of us, a truly remarkable evening in which God dealt with us as a group and individually. Most of you were part of that evening by virtue of intensive prayer support. We had asked you to pray with us and for us.

Many of you joined us in fasting that day as we sought the mind of Christ regarding the possibility, the question, of whether or not He would have us expand this physical plant. We had begun to suspect that maybe that's what He was saying to us for quite a while before that meeting. There were indications that He wanted that, and yet we came into the meeting with a tremendous diversity of opinions as to whether we should expand, how we should expand, when we should expand, how we should finance it, or if we should do it at all.

And in the course of that evening, as you know, God began to speak to us. In fact, I would have to say that He spoke that evening more clearly than I've ever heard Him speak on any subject. He spoke explicitly He spoke clearly He spoke emphatically He said build And then He said build to the right And to the left And we left that meeting unanimous Unanimously convinced that we had heard the Lord And that that's what He was telling us to do It's been an interesting five months since then We've been hard at work with site engineers With architects, builders a sound engineering specialist with representatives from Lewis and Hitchcock, the people who have built and maintained our organ, and with various representatives and boards and agencies of the city of Fairfax.

And we received a number of rather interesting confirmations along the way that indeed that's what God is saying to us. Indeed, that's what He would have us do. Some of you may know and some of you may not know, that this tract of property immediately adjacent to our own, which has been owned by Mr. and Mrs. Eakin, was a property that vestries for many years wanted to acquire.

Many more years than I've been here, vestries have wanted to get that piece of property, if for no other reason than to protect this, our property, from, say, a Pizza Hut or a McDonald's or what have you, coming in right next door to us. And there were various attempts to put such places right on that property and they failed. And we praise God that they failed, but Mr. and Mrs. Eakin were not ready to sell that property until literally two days within the time of our decisive meeting on November 17th, that property became available.

And interestingly enough, had we not moved when we moved, we would have lost the chance forever. Because in the interim, somebody else has come along who really would like to acquire that property. But God provided it for us.

And that becomes doubly interesting because, you see, it's not just a matter of protecting the property now. It's a matter of having a requirement from the city to provide adequate parking space. And we don't now have adequate parking space.

Some of you know that very personally from this morning. We ran a little bit late, and I know you got caught in a bottleneck, and that's why we didn't start this service until about 20 after 11. But we don't now provide adequate parking, and if we expand on the scope that we're talking about, there's no way we could qualify with the city codes except that that came available to us two days from the day of our meeting, and God enabled us to purchase it.

so we began to meet with the architects we we learned what some of us suspected but some of us didn't we learned that that there really was no way to do this apart from moving the choir and the organ down to the front we've discussed that somewhat in the newsletter that from a sound point of view from a sight point of view from the dynamics of worship we had to move the choir and the organ and we looked back at the plans and you know what we discovered? That the area in the apse where the organ pipes have to go approximately where the shadow is on the back wall was originally designed to hold the organ. And it was an afterthought to put it up there.

That was not the original plan. It was designed to put the organ right back there. And so no major structural change is required.

It goes right into where it was designed to go. And we thank God for that. Some of you have heard the story of the bricks.

Some of you haven't. Let me tell you about it. Obviously, if you're going to add on to a building like this, you want to match as closely as possible the brickwork that already is in place. The problem is that these are not standard-sized bricks that you can buy from any supplier.

They're oversized bricks. They were handmade, and they're darker than the usual brick that you would want to purchase. And so in order to go out and have a special order for oversized bricks of a darker hue than typically comes out of the kiln, obviously that's going to be an enormous extra expense.

Bruce Scott began to look around and talk to various suppliers, and lo and behold, God led him to a particular company that about a year ago had had an order somewhat similar to what we were talking about, oversized bricks. And in fact, it was such a large order that they had to completely shut down their plant and retool all their molds in order to make this particular order. And they said, well, if we're going to all that trouble, we might as well do an overrun, just in case.

And so they ran an extra 40,000 bricks. Only one problem, they left them in the kiln a little bit too long, so they came out darker than usual. Interestingly enough, in the interim, they've sold about half that number.

They have about 20,000 such bricks on hand. And Bruce has estimated that what we need is somewhere between 19,000 and 20,000 bricks. Now if you go out to the courtyard for your coffee hour, I want you to look over against the back wall.

Because what you'll see, at first glance, it'll look like just a little wooden frame leaning up against the wall. But I want you to take a very close look at that, because it's not just a wooden frame leaning against the wall. It's a piece of masonry.

It's a little brick wall in front of the brick wall. It's the new bricks put up against the old bricks. And when you look at it, it dissolves right into the wall.

God has provided exactly the size, the color of the bricks we need, and exactly the quantity we need. I think the most significant thing to me is the ease with which we've gone through the various city hearings there were no less than four separate meetings that we needed to present our case to and get the approval of the Board of Architectural Review and the Board of Zoning Appeals and so on and I frankly anticipated that that was going to be the area where we really were going to run into trouble with red tape and with niggling over details and various directives that they would give to us that would just get us into hopeless kinds of muddle. We've breezed through every one of them.

I believe that it's because you prayed, in part. It's also because the homework was well done, and it's also because this is what God wants. We came up to the city council.

Al Kimmel tells me it took six and a half minutes for them to come to unanimous approval of the whole plan. Interestingly enough, if you go back into the Old Testament, you read the book of Ezra and the book of Nehemiah about the building of the city wall around Jerusalem. They also thought that it would be the government that would hassle them.

The government gave them no problem. It was some of the faithful. one of the questions that I've wrestled with over the last few months is is there an ideal size to a church how big is big enough you know folks would say well this is big enough why do we have to get any bigger how big is big enough I conclude that there is no such thing as an ideal size to a church that instead there are really two principles that go hand in hand for celebration the more the merrier so long as you're providing opportunities for folks to be deeply involved with each other in smaller group fellowships something like our shepherding program has to accompany a parish of the size that we already are, let alone what we're becoming.

See, there's no way that you can belong to 2,500 people. You can't belong to 2,500. You might belong to a dozen.

And so we hope that you're already into a shepherding group of about a dozen to know and to be known, to have that deep experience of supporting each other. But for celebration, the more the merrier. So long as you provide for such things as traffic flow and that kind of thing, I come out with a double principle.

Number one, maximize the usefulness of your physical plant. There's no ideal size except that God would have us make the plant as useful to Him as we can, to accommodate as many people as we can, to have as many diverse kinds of programs that would minister to as many people as is humanly possible. Maximize the usefulness, number one, and then maximize the use, number two.

I believe that's what He's saying to us. Scripture speaks somewhat to this in the parable of the wedding banquet. You remember Jesus' words?

The master said to his servant, Go out into the highways and hedges and compel the people to come in that my house may be filled. Compel the people to come in that my house may be filled. Filled to overflowing.

And then enlarge it. To fill it more. To overflowing.

I think the master would have his house ministering to as many as is possible. I'm going to tell you a story this morning. In approximately the year 1300 B.C., God led His people Israel out of Egyptian bondage, out of slavery under the leadership of Moses, and He gave them a command and a promise.

The command was to go and take the land of Canaan. Go occupy it, subdue it, populate it, and offer it back to the Lord Himself as a place for the glory of His name. That was the command.

Go, take the land for me. The promise was, I'll be with you as you do it. I'll enable you to do it.

You won't do it in your own strength. You'll do it in the anointing, in the power of the Lord. And so they wandered through the desert, the Sinai, and they came up to the very border of Canaan.

and Moses said, I think we ought to send somebody in to check it out. And he took one representative from each of the twelve tribes and he sent them in as a little advance spying party. You can read about this in Numbers 13 and 14.

It tells us that they spent forty days checking out the land. And when they came back, they found it far more extraordinary than anything they'd ever imagined. It was a land flowing with milk and honey, they said.

It was a land of fig trees and pomegranates. It was a land of such lush produce that it took two men to carry a single bunch of grapes. Maybe you've seen the pictures.

They had a pole between them resting on their shoulders and one monstrous bunch of grapes hanging from that pole. It's on every guide's badge Israel today as a symbol of that land. Incredibly more wonderful than anything they'd ever imagined.

Oh, one problem. There are giants in the land. They said they're incredibly frightening, fierce, mighty men.

They live in fortified cities. They scare us. Joshua and Caleb came back and said, no problem.

Let's go. We can take it. God has said, take that land.

He said He's going to be with us. Let's go occupy it right now. We're well able to overcome that land in the power of God.

But the other ten spies said, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. Giants in the land. now mind you at this particular point in their history they've only crossed the Red Sea dry shod they've only seen the mightiest army in the history of the world to date overthrown without firing a single shot they've seen God visit the Egyptians with ten plagues one after another count them ten each one worse than the one before they've only been led through the wilderness by a pillar of cloud and smoke showing them exactly where they're to go they've only heard the voice of God thundering down from Mount Sinai they've only seen His glory reflected in the face of Moses to the point where they couldn't dare to look at it reflected glory but there are giants in the land they can't possibly do it Joshua and Caleb begged the people to believe God God said it we can do it in God's strength but the ten doubters prevailed and it says that the people became so incensed at Joshua and Caleb that they actually took up stones to stone them to death.

And then God Himself intervened. God Himself said, enough of that. And He said, because you have not believed Me, none of the men who have seen My glory and My signs shall see the land which I swore to give to their fathers except for two.

Guess who? Do you know that? Various estimates have been given out of how large that group of ancient Israelites was.

Some folks have estimated as many as three and a half million people. And out of that whole group, two adults got into the land of promise. They spent the next 40 years wandering around in the wilderness while all the others died off, including Moses himself.

Their children got in. Their grandchildren, their great-grandchildren got into the land and all the adults died off except for Joshua and Caleb. I wonder what it must have felt like for those two men 40 years later.

to cross over the River Jordan and to enter that land. On the one hand, knowing vindication. We were right.

It could have been ours 40 years ago. And on the other hand, what sorrow that we've wasted a whole generation. What they didn't believe, they didn't receive.

what they didn't take they had to forsake and 40 years wasted in the Sinai it seems to me that in a very real sense we're standing on the east bank of the Jordan this morning we're looking over we know what God has said he said it this wasn't my idea friends as a matter of fact I didn't even want to do it very much he said it and he promised us that he would enable us to do it and we've sent out our spies Al Kimmel Hank Long, Ed Pritchard went out checked out the land they came back with pictures they said it's going to be beautiful only one trouble there's one giant see I thought there were going to be a whole bunch of giants I thought the city was going to be a bunch of giants parking was going to be a bunch of giants only one giant his name is 1,095,800 that's a considerable giant A little shepherd boy named David went out to fight a giant. He took five little stones with him. You know, it only took one.

One stone. I know. I don't believe.

I know. that this building is going to be built because God said so. What I don't know is how quickly.

I don't know whether we're going to be like Joshua and Caleb and say, let's go do it. We can do it today. Let's believe God.

We can do it today. or whether we're going to waste the next 40 years sitting around in the wilderness. Sooner or later, it's going to be done.

The question is whether we'll believe God or be afraid of the giants. I got a letter this week. I'd like to read it to you.

Dear John, The church expansion brochure wasn't the only thing late to arrive at our household. The Holy Spirit met a much more formidable resistance than that of the U.S. male.

Thanks be to God for the extra week to get our spiritual affairs back in order. Last Sunday, my wife and I were prepared to present God through Truro, a skimpy contingency pledge. Really, it meant, if I make it, you'll get it.

This makes good sense, considering I presently have no income, and we are living off savings and borrowed funds. It would be fiscally irresponsible to strap my family, I said. A good husband and father should provide for the needs of his family, I said.

And to throw financial support toward a project that's too ambitious, too premature, too expensive, and most of all too demanding of the congregation, aided in my decision to hedge my bets. I figured that when things got rolling next year, I would be in a better position to help. But I think I now know the experience of the vestry that was witnessed a few months ago very personally.

For I've been moved to abandon all good earthly sense and generously support the church expansion. Something had been nagging at me for months to give in good measure. The closer we came to pledge Sunday, the more annoying the nagging and anxiety became.

After last Sunday's service, my wife described to me her feeling of sadness and irresponsibility at not having the faith to boldly give. Something clicked. Our course of action was crystal clear, and our earthly rationalizations were absolutely transparent.

we did have assets and we could divert them to Truro we would not be at peace unless we gave sacrificially we would not be at peace until we recognized God as our own provider thank God for this opportunity to step forth in faith I am now confident that much as the child's five barley loaves and two fish more than fed the multitude the congregation's offerings will more than meet the building budget requirements. What, John, are we going to do with the surplus? I need to add one footnote.

I told you last week about the lady who gave us a check for $25. with no money in the bank to cover it. She believed God that by May 1st the money would be there and that's when she dated the check.

She got home to find a check waiting at her doorstep. Somebody figured out who she was. I don't know how they did that because I've not told her name to anybody including Karen.

But somebody figured out who it was and a check was waiting for her on her doorstep that reimbursed the $25 and added to it ten times as much. Guess what she decided to do with the ten times as much? In order to slay this giant, it works out to an average of doubling our pledge.

Some of you cannot do that. Some of you can do that and a whole lot more. Karen's going to sell the mink coat that her grandmother gave her.

We're going to empty our savings account. I don't want to miss this blessing. Forty years from now is too late for me.

Let's go get it now.