Connections&  
December 9, 2001--Second Sunday of Advent

• John the Baptizer appeared, preaching in the desert of Judea and saying, "Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand!"
  

Metal detectors
Last January, Jim Gain and Rob Stiff were on a business trip to Vietnam.  Shopping for gifts for their families in Ho Chi Minh City, they stumbled upon a vendor selling war souvenirs:  hats, boots, helmets, badges, flags and letters.  But what caught their eye was hundreds of military dog tags hanging on a wire.  "It was pretty ghoulish," Jim Gain remembers.  "I remember from my father being in the military that the dog tag was pretty sacred."
     The two immediately left, troubled by what they had seen.  Once they got back home to Orlando, Florida, they told family and friends about the tags.  They all overwhelmingly supported their plan to retrieve the dog tags.
     Four months later Gain and Stiff made a second trip to Vietnam to buy up as many of the dog tags as they could find.  Over the next three days they bought 620 dog tags, paying about 14 cents a piece for them.  Returning home, they sorted through the tags to separate the real tags from the fakes made up by unscrupulous vendors in Vietnam, and then set up a database of names and serial numbers.    They launched an internet search to match up the tags' names and serial numbers with those missing or killed in action.  They also set up their own website--founddogtags.com-- hope veterans who lost their tags would check it.  With the help of their congressman and the Veterans' Administration, they began to contact families to return the tags.
     So far Gain and Stiff have spent $9000 of their own money to return 52 tags to former servicemen and to the families of those killed in the war.  It is a price they are more than willing to pay.  The peace, comfort and closure their efforts to return the tags have brought to many hurting families are priceless.
CONNECTION: While they might shy away from the title, Jim Gain and Rob Stiff are "prophets" in the true sense of the word.  A prophet is "one who proclaims."  In their hard work to return these metal tags, Gain and Stiff proclaim the peace and compassion of God to these families.  We have many opportunities in our own everyday lives to be prophets of God's peace, to play the role of John the Baptist and Isaiah in our homes and businesses and schools.  In baptism we take on that same role of prophet and disciple:  to make God's will our will, to proclaim in our own time and place that the peace and justice of God have dawned.