(77) Christmas Apocalypse

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Christmas Apocalypse, originally shared on December 31, 2020. It was the seventy-seventh video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   It’s still Christmas (we’re on day 7 out of 12 today), we’ve left our Christmas lights on and our decorations up. Who cares if our neighbors think we’re lazy. It’s also New Year Eve. Please do not go out tonight. Our hospitals are approaching chaos of apocalyptic proportions. Ambulances are circling hospitals literally waiting for someone to die so that a bed becomes available. Please don’t make it make it worse. We are also between the two advents, the first coming of Christ and the second coming. Things are likely going to get worse, short term. But, our long term prospects are out of this world. Today, we’re going to talk about God’s promises, and how they can give you the perspective you need to face what’s coming with hope and confidence.

   Manny Castro was a member of the church I served in San Dimas, until he and his wife and daughter moved to Missouri for his wife’s work.

   He was in the Navy when a friend of his wanted to try-out for the Navy Seals. He talked a reluctant Manny into going with him. His friend didn’t make it, but Manny did.

   He was a funny guy and always ready to help. We had a huge crew of volunteers painting the exterior church walls with a sprayer and the trim with brushes one year.

   I was on a tall extension ladder painting the trim above the main entrance to the old worship building. I had one leg on the ladder and the other stretching out so that I could reach a missed spot without having to move the ladder. The ladder and I shook as I stretched further-out. Many laughed and said, “That’s MY pastor.” and stood where he could catch me if I fell.

   He was an active member of the Red Cross and, when there was a disaster anywhere in the country, he was there to serve.

   He loved his dog, Leather. One year, Leather was riding on our church’s 4^th of July Parade float someone from the crowd yelled, “Look, a Lutheran dog.” That stuck. One day, Manny was riding down the freeway with Leather in the car and he suddenly realized that he was in the car-pool lane, which realized that he had thought was OK because he and Leather were both in the car.

   He grew a goatee and had it when he and his family left for Missouri. On his family’s last Sunday with us before they left, at the “Farewell and Godspeed” luncheon we threw for them, we grabbed each other’s beard and smiled for the camera.

   Manny died of COVID-19 the day before yesterday, one death among the hundreds of thousands that went before him, but tragic in so many ways, not the least of which was that he contracted the virus at his church.

   The congregation celebrated its 50^th anniversary just before Thanksgiving. Manny wanted to go, to support the church. They took all the precautions. In retrospect, though, they are sorry that they went ahead with the service. No one intended this to happen.

   His wife and daughter, who were at the center of his life, contracted the same strain and recovered. Manny did not. There is not a shred of doubt in my mind that Manny would totally have rather had it this way, than the other way around.

   Manny’s no longer suffering, and even as we mourn, we rejoice in the victory of the cross, the promise that because Jesus Christ lives, we shall live also, that death has no more dominion over us who are bound to Christ and to one another by faith and baptism for eternity.

   It’s also a time to remember a story I’ve told before, that Manny liked, about the guy who was sitting in his home one day when a Red Cross worker pounded on his door, yelling “The dam has broken. Get out! Get out now! We’ll help you.”

   He replied, “Oh, thank you very much but I’m a Christian. I know that God will take care of me. I’ll be fine.” And the Red cross worker finally left and went on to the next house.

   The waters came and flooded the first floor of his house, so that he had to move up to the second floor. A guy in a rowboat came by and said, “Hop in, buddy. I’ll get you out of here.”

   “Oh, thank you,” the man said. “But I’m a Christian. I know that God won’t let anything harm me.” The man in the rowboat finally went on to other houses.

   The waters continued to rise, and the man had to crawl onto his roof. A helicopter flew over and the crew spotted the man on his roof. They dropped a rope ladder and shouted, “Climb up and we’ll get you out of here. The waters are rising. This is your last chance!”.

   “Thanks for coming, but I’ll be fine. My faith is strong. I know God will take care of me,” he shouted.

   The water kept rising and pretty soon the rose over the house and over the man, and he drowned.

   When he arrived at the gates of heaven, dripping wet, he immediately demanded to be taken to the throne of Grace. “That’s kind of an unusual request but, OK.” St. Peter said.

   He stomped through the throne room into God’s presence and whined, “You promised me! You said that you’d always be with me, no matter what. What happened?”

   “What do you mean,” God said. “I sent you a Red Cross worker, a rowboat and a helicopter.”

   Manny’s death was just one, but it hit with the force of a catastrophe if you cared about him, as do the deaths of anyone we care about.

   That it happened during the Christmas season reminds us that God became human flesh, fully God and fully human being, to rescue us, because the world is not the way it’s supposed to be. It got messed up from the beginning, and still gets messed up every time human beings believe that there is a way to be like God, think that they know better than God, and that they could do a better job of being God than God. 

   God has given us researchers, medical professionals, and civil leadership, and we ignore the simple things that would give us the best chance of living. God has come in Jesus Christ, offers us the gift of faith, a living relationship with the living God, in order to live the abundant lives that we were created to live, and we ignore the good news and its implications for our lives.

   Just like from the beginning, in the Garden of Eden, we know what to do, but we seek our own interests over other’s interests, and that’s why things are the way they are.

   Yet, God has not given up on us. God continues to offer himself for you. God will one day come to bring all those whom he has saved to be with him forever. That’s the second advent, the one that is coming. In our creeds, we say of Jesus that, “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

   We long for that day, when everything will be changed. Restored. As St. John writes in the last book of the Bible, Revelation, the 21^st chapter:

*Revelation 21:1-4

   That is the apocalypse, written in a style of apocalyptic writing found many places in the Bible.

   Christmas reminds us that, in anticipation of a coming apocalypse, when there will be great suffering, followed by the final judgement, that Jesus was born to die for us, and is coming again. When will that happen?

   I went to worship on Christmas Day at Redeemer Lutheran Church in the old city section of Jerusalem when I was in college and did a term abroad. We had some excitement. A guy stood up in the middle of the pastor’s sermon and shouted, “Jesus has returned! He has been reincarnated and is now a 12-year-old boy living in India”.  In case you are not a Lutheran, just so you know, things like this do not normally happen in Lutheran churches. Someone else stood up and said, “He is not! Jesus taught that we should always be ready, because no one knows when the final judgement will come.” Finally, things settled down and the Christmas Day worship service went on. What is important is what has already happened and is now unfolding for us.

   The worship still goes on, but we are still called to be ready. I heard someone say that he lives every day as if it was his last. “That’s why I never do laundry. Because who wants to do laundry on the last day of their life?”

   How different will 2021 be from 2020? Who knows, but whatever comes, we are called to keep our focus on God and to be ready.

   Meanwhile, we live to serve others sacrificially, in response to what Jesus, God made flesh, did for us on the cross. We do what we can to keep one another healthy. We serve the poor, not to keep them poor, but to provide the circumstances, both individually and systemically, in which they can move out of poverty in a way that is an expression of the already here but not yet realized Reign of God.

   Our stage in this pandemic, is just like our stage in the history of salvation. We are now living between the two advents, the two comings, between the first coming in Bethlehem, and the second coming to judge the world. We live in the present, leaning toward the apocalypse, after which Jesus comes to bring his perfect reign to those who believe and are baptized. Just like in this pandemic, “There’s light at the end of the tunnel, but we’re still in the tunnel.”

   And, just as Christmas celebrates that God kept his promise after 1,000 years and came as the messiah, the Christ, to deliver the world from sin, death, and all the powers that defy God, and that he abides with us in the Holy Spirit, the streams of living water that never end, we can live with confidence that God will keep his promise to come again after 2,000 years in the Second coming, to save us.

   “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.”

(76) Christmas Con Carne

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Christmas Con Carne, originally shared on December 28, 2020. It was the seventy-sixth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   How do we best share the good Christmas news that God became flesh, that Jesus was born for all humanity, with the growing numbers of people who know nothing of Christmas except Santa Claus? Starting with what we believe in common, or starting with confrontation? The answer, as they say, might surprise you.

   We had some rain last night, and some thunderboomers where we are. We had a little break, and then the rain started again. (Open door). See, streams of living water! We need it. Some of us have been praying for it, so I guess the message is be careful for what you pray for. 😊

   This time of year reminds me of one of my favorite online videos. It shows an office with dozens of people working. A TV monitor is on the wall for breaking news when suddenly the screen turns red, “Storm Watch Southern California”.

   An announcer comes onscreen and, trying to disguise the panic in his voice, says, “One-half an inch of rain is expected throughout Southern California today.” The whole place is thrown into chaos. People are running in circles, raiding the snack cupboard for survival food, hiding under their desks, cowering in the corners in the fetal position, when the announcer comes back on and says, “Just a minute. Just a…no…no, it looks like the storm is going to avoid us. It’s going to be another beautiful day in Southern California.”

   The office workers come out of their holes, laugh in relief, and return to their work. Just then, their whole building is shaken violently. Earthquake. The workers barely notice, or just shrug, laugh, and go back to work. That’s life in Southern California.

   That’s kind of our approach to the coronavirus, too. There are significant numbers of people who panic over the restrictions that are in place for their safety and ignore the real threat that is right in front of them.

   More and more groups of people are getting the coronavirus vaccine and, by the middle of next year or so, we should be approaching herd immunity. More and more people seem to be willing to ignore all the safety recommendations and our hospitals are now at a bursting point. When the consequences of that behavior over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays hit, its going to get ugly. I wonder if the anti-vaxers, the conspiracy theorists, and those who believe that the number of coronavirus cases is vastly exaggerated have every seen the state of our hospitals. The numbers of people being treated for nothing else but actual cases of COVID-19 is an objective fact. It is draining our health care system, particularly, our health care workers. It is not a pretty sight, but one would think that seeing it would lead people to change their behavior simply for the sake of others.

   We treat Christmas in the same way. We are uncomfortable with the reality of the Christmas story, so we make it into something that is more pastel

   Much of popular Christmas imagery depicts the silence of the birth of Christ. I guess that is to engender a sense of awe at the meaning of the event itself. Sanitizing the story also makes it more palatable for non-believers to absorb and for business interests to use to sell things.

   But, those things don’t have much to do with the event itself. I shared a description of the event itself last time. Today, I’d like us to consider why it’s hard to share the Christmas story with others in any meaningful way, and what we can do about it.

*John 1:1-14

   Jesus is the Word made flesh. The gospel of John was written for a world other than the Biblical world of which Jesus was the fulfillment. John was written for people who never heard of Adam and Eve, or Moses, or David or Elijah. It was written to a gentile audience, a Greek audience.

   In that world, the natural state of all things was chaos (a Greek word that came also into the English language). Onto this natural chaos, logos (that is, order or reason or The Word, or all bound up together) had been imposed. Order was everything to the Greeks. It was how they saw the essential character of civilization, how we got along with one another for everyone’s benefit. It was how they measured beauty, by pleasing proportions, a standard still dominant in the cultures of the Western world.

   John began his gospel at this point of commonality with the Greeks, but not to accommodate them. In fact, it may well have come across as confrontational. That is to say that the good news of Jesus Christ is that God had become human flesh. The Word was Jesus Christ, God.

   This idea was a difficult hurdle for the Greeks has they had many Gods, and they believed that the interaction between human beings was primarily to make mischief. It was offensive to them to think that a god would be born to serve, much less die on a cross. It was foolishness.

   John proclaimed that

   John proclaimed that the Word had become flesh, i.e. meat. This was another problem. The Greeks believed that the body was bad. It was just a body that housed what was truly important, a soul. Christians believe that God created the body, that what we do with our bodies is our spiritual worship, and in the resurrection of the body. Christians believe in the incarnation. See those letters in the middle? C-a-r-n? It’s the same root as carne, as in chili con carne, chili with meat. God became meat, human flesh, and dwelt among us.

   John found a point where Christians and non-Christians could agree. And then he kind of got into their faces.

   Nevertheless, most our art depicts a quiet, tranquil scene. Jesus, Mary and Joseph posed serenely with clean fluffy animals around them, all cooing at the baby Jesus.

   Our Christmas hymns contain lyrics like, “The cattle are lowing, The poor Baby wakes, But little Lord Jesus, No crying He makes”,  or  “Silent night, holy night! All is calm, all is bright.”

   The Christmas I read about in the Bible doesn’t sound like this at all. I sounds like a story of God born into rejection, laid in a trough filled with animal feed, filled with the smells of yesterday’s animal feed.

   Have you had a baby? Have you seen a birth? It may be beautiful to you. Now, anyway. But no one would say it was pretty. It’s filled with pain, and cries, and fluid and blood and body parts.

   I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that, if the Incarnation means what I think it means, it means that Jesus did what babies do: cry. And, it means that there were diapers involved. I remember a painting by 15^th century artist Hieronymus Bosch showing Joseph drying clean diapers next to a fire. That’s the incarnation.

   I don’t think that this reduces Jesus to a human level, unless that’s all we chose to see. The message of faith is that God was fully human and fully divine. Both. At the same time.

   That’s the central mystery of Christmas, not mystery in the sense of something to be solved, but a mystery in the sense that God cannot be apprehended by human beings, except to the extent that God reveals God’s self. The biggest challenge of Christmas is that Jesus is God.

   The Greeks, the non-believers, were deeply offended by this whole picture.

   We are now on the 4^th day of the 12 days of Christmas, the Christmas season.

   When someone asks you, “What did you do for Christmas”, you might answer by saying that you heard a Christmas story that was kind of disturbing, but that meant a lot to you.

   It’s still time to talk about Christmas. Not about Christmas traditions. Not about Christmas customs. But, about Christmas.

   Those may not always be comfortable conversations anymore than the Christmas story is a comfortable story to tell.

   How, for example, do you think Joseph’s friends responded when he told them that, no he wasn’t the father of Mary’s baby.  betrothed (a state in between engagement and marriage)’s.  It was a miracle! God was the father!   How about the story that Mary had been raped by a Roman soldier that has been told from time to time? Which seems more credible to most people, then and now?

   How do we tell that story without confronting the powers that deny God?

   I don’t think we do. I don’t think it’s possible.

   Today, it is not the cross that seems foolish to the wise of this world, but the idea of belief itself. It seems irrational to believe in something because your parents believed, or you grew up in a certain geographic area, it seems random and not unlike many other “religions” who also claim to be true.

   We empathize. Christianity is not a religion, it’s a relationship. It’s not myths but a historical reality. It’s not doctrine but the work of the Holy Spirit, active and present, pointing us to what is doctrine. But, still…..

   It’s like looking at a stained-glass window from the outside. It’s just a blob of brown glass. Look at it on the inside and you see its colors, its shapes, and its meaning. The difference is the light. Jesus is the light of the world. The darkness has not over come it. Jesus has overcome the darkness.

   Our faith is their indictment. It is a rebuke to the idea that the only things that exist are the things that can be measured. It is a rebuke to those who, when they don’t live according to their values change not their behavior but change their values.

   Christmas is not just good news to the world, it is a rebuke to it, to Sin, to everything that defies God, the one true living God who can’t be described or explained and doesn’t need to be. It’s been said that the best way to defend God is to get out of his way. Any proposed deity who can be explained by its Creation, isn’t a deity, but an invention.

   Instead, God did the difficult and the foolish. God became human flesh.   Christmas is not a story about how we came to God, but about how God came to us, in the flesh.

 I’d say 12 days is at least the number required to try unsuccessfully to absorb this. And to celebrate it.

   We, too, have a birth story. A new birth story. A born-again story. We may have been saved from addiction or a life of crime and given eternal life. We may have been born in the church, raised in a Christian home, and been baptized at an early age. We may have been released from a destructive job, friends who did not have our best interests in their hearts, and bad influences all around us.

   Being born again is messy. Being pulled away from that which is killing us, mocking us, damning us is not easy. Being pulled away from old friends and toward real friends is not easy. Giving up lucrative practices that diminish people is not easy. But, person after person, for thousands of years, have said that it’s the best thing that ever happened to them.

   Maybe that’s the best place to point people this Christmas. To Jesus.

   Christmas is still good news for all humankind. God became a child, incarnate to redeem us and our Sin by giving up that life for us, to make us his children.

(75) A Disrupted Christmas

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for A Disrupted Christmas, originally shared on December 24, 2020. It was the seventy-fifth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   Christmas is going to be celebrated a little differently this year, but it will still be Christmas. What can we learn this year that will help us make the focus of Christmas more meaningful?

   It’s a holly jolly pandemic Christmas this year. Santa got a vaccine injection direct from Dr. Fauci as an essential worker, so he’s good. Snowmen and icicles are decorating Southern California homes where neither has ever been seen. One of area hospitals is seeing patients in its gift shop. There’s a Christmas irony for you. The malls are packed, as are the ICU’s. I wonder if there’s a connection? They say that the last few miles of a marathon are the hardest. Is that why we see so many people ignoring the simple steps they can take to literally save lives? Because it is hard? I’ve run a couple of marathon and I know that the adrenaline kicks in with the end in sight. Let that be our reality, people trying even harder to do the right things as we near the finish line.

   Over 9,000 people have died of COVID-19 now in LA County, and it’s still rare to see anyone wearing a mask as they walk by our home. A group of people in Thousand Oaks held an event the other night to protest current restrictions by singing Christmas carols in a mall parking lot; no masks, no distancing.

   As a result of this indifference, we’ll be celebrating Christmas apart from our families this year. We won’t be traveling to exotic destinations. Our online shopping won’t all get done, or arrive on time, because of COVID related volume. We won’t be going to our go-to local businesses for gifts. Some of them aren’t there anymore. We won’t be going out to restaurants. Some of them aren’t there anymore. Our economy is starting to bounce back. Some jobs aren’t there anymore.

   Christmas has become a difficult time for many, missing loved ones who have died, particularly those who have died in the past year, trying to live up to everyone’s expectations, trying to keep up the pace and the peace.

   I saw that one of our local churches is having a service specifically for those for whom Christmas is a hard time. They’re calling it the “Blue Christmas” service.

   It’s been said that Christmas is weird. It is that time of year when we sit around a dead tree and eat candy out of our socks. If that’s all that Christmas means, that is pretty weird.

   Christmas is going to be celebrated a little differently this year. It’s been disrupted by both the pandemic and by an increasingly secular popular version of the holiday.

   By the 26th, it will be toast. By January 2nd it will be packed up and put away.

   But, what if we disrupted this year’s disrupted Christmas?

   What if we made it into something less commercial, less about spending, something with fewer unreasonable expectations, something more meaningful?

   I know. Whenever I say something like that, I think of Pastor Ingqvist, the pastor in Garrison Keillor’s mythical Minnesota town, Lake Wobegon, who began an Advent sermon with a proposal. “This Christmas, I propose that we resist the temptations of our world to make Christmas about the things we can buy. Let’s make it less about the gifts we give and more about the gift God has given us in Jesus Christ.” And just then his gaze fell to the row in front of the pulpit, where his five children were mouthing words at him. “No! Dad, no! No!”.

   We all get sucked into the Christmas machine and come out of it slightly more processed and the worse for wear, pledging to do better next time.

[***What do you think?   How do you try to resist the commercialization of Christmas?

   Share your thoughts in the comment section below and we’ll respond to every one.]

   Not that its been easy. Ever.

   Think about that first Christmas. It’s not a cute story, or even a pleasant one.

   Mary, who likely is barely a teenager, is pregnant and Joseph knows it’s not his at a time when Joseph could have had Mary put to death for the shame she had brought upon them and their families. But Joseph, who like Mary had been visited by an angel, a messenger from God, moved forward with Mary. Just then, everyone was ordered to go to their family’s city of origin in ordered to be registered by the occupying Roman Empire. The Romans wanted to make sure everyone was accounted for at tax time.

   Mary and Joseph travel the 90 miles to Joseph’s family town of Bethlehem, by donkey and on foot, in Mary’s ninth month of pregnancy. They arrived and found that people coming into town from all over have taken all the rooms. It’s almost inconceivable that Joseph’s family wouldn’t have found someplace for them. But the out-of-wedlock pregnancy had shamed the family.

   It was not likely that there was no room for them at the inn, but that thee was no room for THEM at the inn, or anywhere else with the family.

   They find some shelter in an enclosure for animals and, having no place to put her baby, Mary wrapped him in tight bands of cloth and laid him in the container from which the animals ate.

   I spent a semester studying in Israel when I was in college. I was there the first semester, so I was able to spend Christmas in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus.

   The students in our group were all excited about this, as were thousands of other people from all over the world, who were also wanting to spend Christmas in Bethlehem.

   We went on Christmas Eve. Bethlehem is in Palestine, not Israel, today. There had been violence between Palestinians and Israelis, so we had to purchase a special permit to visit Jerusalem and board special busses in order to get there. When we arrived at “Manger Square” outside the Church of the Nativity, a place we’d toured before but where we now wanted to worship, the scene was controlled chaos.

   Armed soldiers patrolled everywhere. Crowd flowed elbow-to-elbow falling on souvenir displays where prices had at least doubled for the occasion. Children went around selling hard boiled eggs for $1. All the food prices had been jacked-up.

   Tourists, far from home and their social constraints, were chugging alcohol and vomiting in the square.

   We were surrounded by a Tower of Babel rush of languages everywhere we went, most of which we hadn’t heard before and didn’t understand.  

   There was such a crush of people that we never even got close to the church, much less worshiped there.

   We left, disappointed that Christmas in Bethlehem was nothing like what we expected. Until the next morning, Christmas morning, when the pastor at the Lutheran church in Old Jerusalem, preached about how he, too, after spending his first Christmas in Bethlehem, had been disappointed until it dawned on him that his experience was closer to what had happened at the time of the first Christmas than the experience of Christmas for most people today.

   Somehow this has gotten conflated with cute kids in their bathrobes, unrestrained spending, weird social customs, unrealistic expectations, the trying to please everybody, winter decorations where there is no winter, nostalgia for idealized Christmases past, a tree slaughter, and so on.

   And the long period of commercial preparations ends on Christmas Day, and then it’s done. Really done.

     The Christian Church, however, starts the Christmas season on Christmas Eve, and celebrates it for 12 whole days, until January 6th, the Day of the Epiphany!

   So, now we get Christmas pretty much all to ourselves.

   There is no more holiday stress.  The long nightmares of excess and expectations are over. Now comes the Christmas blessing.

   How might we spend this time by actually celebrating Christmas? Here are seven simple suggestions:

1.     Open your heart and allow God to make or re-new you as a new person.

2.     Spend some time in grateful prayer.

3.     Take some time to read the Christmas story at the beginning of Matthew, Mark, Luke or John in your Bible this season.

4.     Talk with your family and/or friends about the old, old story and how it has changed you.

5.     Show others about how grateful you are for the birth of Jesus in your life through acts of giving and love.

6.     Leave your Christmas decorations up and lighted until January 6^th.

7.     Help someone else find their true self in the name of Jesus.

*Luke 2:1-20

      Welcome to the season of Christmas!

(74) Ad - Venting

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Ad - Venting, originally shared on December 21, 2020. It was the seventy-fourth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   It’s Advent. It’s not Christmas until the 25^th. It’s hard to wait even a few days. Why does Southern California’s response to the growing COVID-19 pandemic have everything to do with Advent? Today we’re going to you to see what we’re waiting for, and why it’s hard for us to wait.

   The worldwide coronavirus pandemic is setting daily records for hospitalizations and death.  The immunizations have started, but as Governor Newsom said, “There’s light at the end of the tunnel, but we’re still in the tunnel.”

   Here, in the LA metro area, we are at its epicenter, we are the most infected urban area in America. Why us? Why Southern California?

   The architect Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.”

   I was looking at the history of the little store, aka The Country Store in Laurel Canyon, and I  found this quote from singer Joni Mitchell: “Ask anyone in America where the craziest people live and they'll tell you California. Ask anyone in California where the craziest people live and they'll say Los Angeles. Ask anyone in Los Angeles where the craziest people live and they'll tell you Hollywood. Ask anyone in Hollywood where the craziest people live and they'll say Laurel Canyon. And ask anyone in Laurel Canyon where the craziest people live and they'll say Lookout Mountain. So I bought a house on Lookout Mountain.”

   One of my former bishops once said, “That white stuff on the Sierra Mountains isn’t snow. It’s the transfer letters of Lutherans moving from the Midwest to Southern California.”

   America has been a place people go to reinvent themselves since our founding.

   California reinvented reinvention. We are the last frontier, a place where people moving west couldn’t move any further, a place where people got away from the old world.

   We are not lovers of freedom. We are lovers of license. That is, of being able to be anything we want and to do anything we want.

   As a result, we are creative and inventive in every way. We don’t think outside the box. We remove the box. If our behavior doesn’t match our values, we change our values.

   We love our toys, our sports, our entertainment centers, our restaurants, our bars. We love to play outdoors. We can ski and surf in the same day. We love our status as rebels and iconoclasts! And, it’s coming back to bite us. All of us.

   We are now in decline. Where is our creativity? It’s all in the hands of corporations now with one motivation: money. Where is our imagination? In syndication.

   We used to set the standards, now we seek them.

   This is not true of everybody? It’s not. But it’s the environment in which we live.

   And it’s coming back to bit us. All of us.

   Ok, I’ve vented. I’ve opened a space to let out some steam.

   Now I’d like to move on from venting to ad-venting.

   First, what season of the Church year are we in? Hint: it’s not Christmas! Christmas doesn’t even start until December 25^th, though Mary didn’t keep a baby book and Jesus never celebrated a birthday, that we know of. Theologically, it makes sense that Christmas should come around the time that the day’s darkness is giving way to the longer days of light, and there’s some evidence that Jesus was actually born around the time that we celebrate. Of course, its been in our stores since last Labor Day. It’s been on the radio since mid-November. People have started wishing me a Merry Christmas since last week!

   On the church calendar, it’s Advent. Advent literally means “coming”, and its been a battle to keep it that way for years.

   Why celebrate Advent if we can’t wait until Christmas? And, that’s not just in a pandemic year phenomena when everyone longs for something good. It’s been happening every year. We have the deferred gratification ability of three-year-olds. We want what we want, when we want it.

   Even I, I have to confess, gave up on part of this battle.

   The Christmas tree at church came in the early part of December, because it was easier on everybody’s schedule and thought to be a lot of work for something that only lasted 12 days, days during which most other people’s Christmases were over. It was in, but I didn’t turn the lights on until Christmas, until I did.

   I was a Christmas purist. We didn’t sing Christmas carols at the churches I served until Christmas-eve. Until one of the members of the church I served asked me why it was that the only place they heard Christmas Carols was at the mall. I was torpedoed by consumer culture.

   The Christmas Season, though, starts on Christmas Day on December 25^th and lasts until The Day of The Epiphany on January 6^th, when it ends. January 6^th. The Twelve Days of Christmas.

   It seems like this year everybody’s appropriating the twelve days of something to sell a product, and they lead up to Christmas Day, because it’s the biggest celebration of consumer culture goods and warm fuzzy feelings that have nothing to do with the actual story of the Birth of Christ, my feelings of nostalgia and manufactured hope, always bound to disappoint, of the year.

    It’s the human condition. We are curved in on ourselves. That’s one way Martin Luther defined sin. We want what we want when we want it, whether it’s endless fascination with ourselves or rushing Christmas to enjoy the goodies, or ignoring the simple things we can do to literally save lives and bring back our economy. It separates us from God.

   How do we get that creative  and redeeming spark back? Christians proclaim that it’s here and it’s coming.

   It’s here now in our Baptism and faith, and it’s coming in the second advent.

   Advent is an orphan season. It is a season that points to something else. It’s a season of preparation, as John the Baptist, a major player in Advent, in the very first words of the gospel of St. Mark said:

*Mark 1:1-4

  OK, I’ve Ad – vented. I’ve opened up a window to let the heat escape.

   Now, I’d like to admit some fresh air.

   How much better, and more realistic, would it be if we flipped Christmas upside down and made it a holiday that lasted 12 days, starting on December 25^th, instead of packing it up on January 1^st. How much better would Advent be as a season of four weeks that points to God’s promise of the deliverer that people longed-for for 1,000 years, who was coming for 1,000 years, including the last 300 years of prophetic. And then the Christ, the messiah, was born!

   That same Jesus, after describing the signs of the end before the Last Judgement, said,

*Matthew 24:29-31

   How much better to be reminded, as we await the Second Coming, the Second Advent that has been coming for 2,000 years, that God keeps God’s promises, even when it takes a very long time? Even when it’s hard to wait?

   We live between the first coming of Jesus, and the second. Between the first advent and the second.

   There’s light at the end of the tunnel, and it casts it light on where we are, but we’re still in the tunnel.

   We wait for a new heaven and a new earth. We seek to do what God has called and equipped and sent us to do, to make this world an expression of Jesus, the one that is to come.  

   To find meaning and purpose in serving others in God’s name.

   To live in the reign of God that has already begun in our baptisms and our acceptance of the gift of faith, in the peace that passes human understanding, until all is brought to the perfection again that God created and that we messed up with our own selfishness.

   The earliest prayer of the Christian church comes at the very end of the Bible, in the book of Revelation:

*Revelation 22:20-21

   Let that be our prayer, and may that be our celebration in this Advent season.

(73) How to Hear a Sermon

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for How to Hear a Sermon, originally shared on December 17, 2020. It was the seventy-third video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   How many sermons have you heard in a lifetime? Did anyone ever teach you how? Today, you are going to learn how.

   The worldwide coronavirus pandemic has made the US a poster child for what not to do. We are close to, and maybe have surpassed, 300 deaths in a single day in California. Half of all California infections are in LA County, the most infected urban area in the country. One in 80 people here are believed to now have the virus. There are now 100 ICU beds in the whole of LA County. Some hospitals are out of ICU space; that means that if you have a heart attack or break a leg there will be a place for you, but it will not likely be in a place best designed to care for you. The governor just ordered another 5,000 body bags. Body bags. Medical personnel are near or at the limits of their endurance, and yet they go to work every day to minister to the sick, comfort the suffering and hold the hands of the dying. And many of us, at least to the extent necessary to make the difference, could care less.

   We are sinners, separated from God and from one another. Only God can bridge the gap, and bring us out of ourselves and our selfish interests.

   My question is, “how many deaths are acceptable to us in order to keep open or reopen our economy, our churches, and our schools. Apparently, we haven’t reached that number yet.

   Why do people come to church week after week and not get it? How can people be raised listening to sermon after sermon and learn nothing from them?

   I think that the answer, at least in part, is that there is a difference between listening and hearing.

   Maybe it’s a stretch to even hope that people will listen to a sermon without their minds wandering, much less hear what God is saying to them through it.

   One of the best books I never finished was How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren. I guess I was too busy reading other books.

   I don’t know of any mainstream books on How to Listen to a Sermon. I don’t know of any instruction in it either. I don’t know that listening is valued any more. We prefer to be told what to think. We seek out what we want to hear. There’s even a name for this. It’s called “confirmation bias”. It’s easier.

   Sermons, however, are preached for life transformation. How do we listen to a sermon with the expectation that God will work through it to bring or encourage the new life, the born again nature of the Christian life?

*Isaiah 29:13-14

   A lot of it depends on what of ourselves we bring to a sermon, and what we expect will happen.

   I think I mentioned last time is that one of the reason most people say that they like their pastor’s sermons is that people have such low expectations for them and what sermons can accomplish.

   Many of the same ways to prepare and conduct ourselves in worship that I mentioned a couple of sessions ago in the “How Did I Do?” video (i.e. prepare, be open to the Holy Spirit, focus, etc.) apply to how to prepare to hear a sermon.

   In fact, when Martin Luther wrote the meaning of the Third Commandment in his Small Catechism (a pamphlet he wrote to help parents teach their children the basics of the Christian faith, and which he himself read every day), he said:

“What does this mean? We should fear and love God so that we do not despise preaching and His Word, but hold it sacred and gladly hear and learn it.”

   Be a good place for the seeds of the Holy Spirit to take root. Be good soil for God’s Word.

   Hearing a sermon in this way is central to worship.

   To listen to a sermon is to hear the words. You could pass a test on what the sermon said if you were a good listener, and you would completely miss the point.

   To hear a sermon means to come to know what God is saying to you through the words, the things that lead to life transformation.

*Romans 10:14-17

   God communicates with us more like a movie does, than like a cell phone. God gives us pictures that have meaning, not just words we consume.

   Say you had to chose which of your five senses you would have to lose? Which one would you choose? Most of us, I would say, would say “Sight”. We depend upon our sight for everything. We are a visual culture.

   I think that Biblical-era people would say, without reservation, their hearing. There was no multi-media, no TV, no computers. Most people couldn’t read. They depended up their hearing.

   But even hearing a message is not enough. Taking it to heart is not enough. To result in life transformation, what we hear from God’s word in preaching and the faith that comes through that hearing, must be put into practice in response naturally.

   Share your faith. Start with the people you see after a worship service has ended. Share it with people among your friends and family. It can be a great opening for sharing the Gospel, i.e. “I heard something the other day that was really meaningful to me.”

   Faith grows by giving it away.

   Jesus said,

*Matthew 13:10-18

   That’s how to hear a sermon. Be open to the same Holy Spirit who inspires those who preach, let it inspire you to hear the very words of God in a sermon. And then, act in response to the presence of God.