Second Street Angels

by Bob Setzer, Jr.
Atop three buildings on Second Street in downtown Macon, six angels keep silent vigil. They are First Baptist angels. I call them our “Second Street Angels.”

Those angels have kept watch from their present posts since 1884, or thereabouts. Before that, they were fixtures in the First Baptist sanctuary that once stood where the Crest Finance and EZ Finance buildings stand today. That sanctuary burned down after smoldering embers from a defective flue took hold in the organ, then blazed throughout the building. A lovely gothic sanctuary, said to be “second to none in the state,” was reduced to a smoking ruin.

Which begs the question, Where were our our Second Street Angels when our sanctuary burned down? Were they asleep on the job? Did they let us down?

According to the frequent emails I receive featuring angels, angels are the private security force of the faithful. So long as the angels are on your side, you have nothing to fear. No harm can come your way.

That wasn’t so for Jesus. In fact, the Devil tempted him with just such a half-truth about angels: “Throw yourself from the pinnacle of the temple and the angels will protect you!” Not so, said Jesus. You shall not test the Lord your God.

When the time came for Jesus to lay down his life for the sins of the world, the Bible says he could have called 72,000 angels. He didn’t. Because sometimes, the path of suffering and loss is the one that bests serve the mysterious purpose of God.

So where were our Second Street angels the night our Second Street sanctuary burned down? Weeping in attentive anguish I would imagine. And plotting the revolution that would plant our witness atop Poplar--in an even more magnificent sanctuary--where we worship today.

Our Second Street Angels each has a sickle in hand. Jesus said he would send his angels at the end of the age to reap a great harvest. That’s when it will become clear, if it is not clear already: the beautiful sanctuary on Second Street--and the lovely Sanctuary atop Poplar’s Hill--never were the wheat. The buildings were the chaff; the wheat was and is the people that by God’s grace, yet bear witness to the “love that wilt not let us go.”