386 Preparing for Advent

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Preparing for Advent”, originally shared on November 27, 2025. It was the 386^th  video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   How can we prepare for Advent when Advent prepares us for Christmas, and the world started celebrating Christmas months ago? Today, we’re going to find out.

   We will begin a new year this coming Sunday.

   What? Christmas starts in June, Halloween starts in August, Thanksgiving starts in September, and now New Year’s Day is on November 30^th?

   Actually, only one of those statements is correct, and it’s the last one.

   We begin a new Church Year this Sunday.

   How does that work? Why doesn’t the Church have the same year as everybody else? Do I need to buy another calendar?

   Well, yes, you can buy a Church Year Calendar, but most people will be buying calendars this week for the first season, the season of Advent. Some stores will give you a free one, with a purchase of course. But they rarely have Christian Christmas themes anymore. You have to look for those.

   We saw giant ones for sale in a local Target more than a month ago that didn’t have chocolates for each day, but cans of Red Bull. I guess that’s for people who are either really stressed or want to be really excited for Christmas. 😊

   Advent calendars cover the days from the first Sunday in Advent until Christmas Day. They begin at the beginning and count the days until the end: Christmas Day. “Advent” means “coming”, after all.

   But the season of Advent begins at the end. (?!) The Gospel reading from Matthew is about the second advent, when Jesus will come again to judge the living and the dead, and a new heaven and a new earth will be established forever.

   That works for me.

   Most people begin at the beginning. Today, we’re going to find out why sometimes it’s better to begin at the end.

   How do you like to read a story. Front to back and then be surprised at the end? Or reading the end first and then seeing how the author gets there? Do you just watch a movie from beginning to end, or do you find the Wikipedia article and read the plot first to see how the film maker presents the story?

   I prefer the later and this liturgical year, the Gospel reading for the new year is satisfying to people like me. It begins at the end.

   We’ll celebrate Thanksgiving Day tomorrow, so Happy Thanksgiving! It’s many people’s favorite holiday because there is so little that is expected of us except to provide a meal, focus on the people we share it with, to give God thanks, to have an attitude of gratitude, and to express our thanksgiving with thanks living. But we’re not going to talk about that today.

   We’re going to talk about the new liturgical year in the Christian church that starts this coming Sunday.

   We’re going to talk about a fresh start, but we’re going to begin at the end.

   The new church liturgical year begins at the end of time.

   The word “liturgical” refers to the way we do our worship. All churches are liturgical if they have an “order of worship”. Typically, these include formal acts of engagement with God including such things as repentance, confession and forgiveness, readings from the Bible, a sermon, remembrance, prayer, praise, and thanksgiving.

   Most churches include these elements within the same structure that Jesus used in the synagogue where he grew up at Nazareth: gathering, word, and sending. The Christian Church that followed Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven added Holy Communion or, “meal”. Otherwise, they are the same.

   In the pre-Christian Greek world “liturgy” meant a religious service offered by a rich patron. In the Christian world, it became the work of the people. Worship is directed toward God. So, Soren Kierkegaard, the 19 century Danish philosopher and theologian, once observed that the question to ask oneself after a liturgical worship service is not, “What did I get out of that?”, but “How did I do?”

   Liturgical worship is not about us. It’s about God and about life with God.

   The liturgical calendar is structured to help us live that life.

   I saw a picture of a liturgical colander a while ago. It was a colander built with the colors of the liturgical seasons. Do you know what a colander is? It strains out what you don’t want and leaves what you need.

   The liturgical calendar not only measures time, but it also concentrates it and infuses it with meaning.

   Worship in the Christian Church has themes and colors and cycles and seasons, and if you worship regularly, you’re used to seeing things change throughout the year, including the colors that, like leaves on trees, signal the changing of the seasons. The fabric paraments that decorate the altar, pulpit, reading desk and other places, and the stoles worn by pastors are made with the colors of each season.

   You may also have noticed that the Gospel readings follow a three-year cycle; a year of Matthew, a year of Mark, and a year of Luke with John mixed in here and there. 😊 In fact all the Bible readings follow a three-year cycle that is used by the vast majority of churches throughout the world. It is set-up so that, if you came to church every Sunday for three years, you would hear most of the Bible and all of the history of salvation read out loud.

   Each liturgical year has two halves: the time of Christ and the time of the Church.

   The first half has two cycles: No, not a bicycle and not a motorcycle. The kind that is a complete set of things.

   The two cycles are the Christmas Cycle and the Easter Cycle.

   Each cycle is divided into three seasons: a season to prepare for the main event, a season for the event, and a season to reflect on what the event means.

   A new church year begins with the Christmas Cycle. And the Christmas Cycle begins with Advent. It’s the season of preparation.

   Christmas Day is fixed at December 25^th and Advent starts four Sundays before Christmas Day. This year, that’s this coming Sunday November 30^th. It’s the beginning of a new liturgical year.

   Many churches place an Advent wreath on a stand in their worship space with four candles, each candle with a significance related to the coming Christmas season, such as Prophecy, Bethlehem, Shepherds, and Angels, and they light them to count the Sundays to Christmas. Some people do the same at their dinner tables and they light the candle/s appropriate for the week in Advent at their main meal.

   Many homes post an advent calendar counting the coming days to Christmas. Sometimes these have a small gift or a piece of chocolate behind each day’s window.

   The color for Advent is blue. It’s a royal color and a color for hope.

   People had hoped for the birth of a deliverer for about 1,000 years, and then Jesus was born. Christians believe that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead in his second advent, or “coming”.

   We prepare to celebrate both the first coming of Jesus in Bethlehem and the second coming of Jesus in Judgement at the end of time for which we prepare during Advent, the season of preparation.  It’s the second advent, the second coming of Jesus, that is the subject of our reading from the gospel of Matthew this coming Sunday, in Matthew 24:36-44,

³⁶“But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. ³⁷For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. ³⁸For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, ³⁹and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. ⁴⁰Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. ⁴¹Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. ⁴²Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. ⁴³But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. ⁴⁴Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

   We are pointing to the end of time at the beginning of a new Church year to give us a sense of destiny. It reminds us that our destiny is in God’s hands.

   For example, I read a short article about the possibility of life on other planets. It discussed the study, not peer reviewed, of one of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory physicists who built on earlier theories.

   Mathematicians estimate that there could be billions of planets capable of supporting life as we know it, and that many of them could support intelligent life.

   The theory is that we haven’t been visited by any of them because of the technology and energy needed to travel the vast distances between us and those planets. Not that those are the determining factors by themselves, but instead that as a civilization develops what it needs for long-term space travel, it will destroy itself before it gets there.

   Well, that explains a lot. And it kind of fits with our world view. We are sinners. We mess things up with our rebellion against God. Technology is sometimes the means for that rebellion as in the warning of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9.

   On the other hand, could there not be planets where creatures did not rebel against God and lived in perfect harmony with God and all of God’s Creation for them?

   That’s the theme of another theory I heard once, that God created life on many planets for a personal relationship with God. God created many perfect worlds where all creatures and all creation lived in harmony.

   The creatures on some planets rebelled against God and evil entered those worlds. God sought to bring them back to a perfect relationship with God and some returned. Where they didn’t return to God, God came in the form of those creatures and they returned to God.

   But, when God came in the form of the creatures on one planet, they killed him. God had given his life to reconcile them to God by God’s action and he took his life back again. But the reputation of that planet as a place of inexpressible violence was such that nobody wanted to go there.

   And that’s why no intelligent life from other planets has visited earth. We’re the bad neighborhood of the universe! In theory. 😊

   Beginning a new church year with the end of history provides us with a reference point for the future: the end will come, but it is in God’s hands. It will not be the end, but the beginning of a new heaven and a new earth, and we will be a part of it.

   The sum total of all baptized believers, those who have accepted God’s gifts of grace, have become a new creation, one that will be perfected in the life to come.

   It will come like the flood in the time of Noah described in Genesis 6-8. There will be warnings but for most people it will come unexpectedly.

   Right now most people’s frame of reference is that Christmas is coming. We’ll be celebrating the first advent.

   I used to be an Advent season purist.

   “No Christmas hymns until Christmas!” Until one day a member of the church I served asked me, “Why is it that the only place we hear Christmas carols is at the mall?” So, we started singing the more Advent oriented Christmas carols (“O, Come, O, Come, Emanuel”) as Christmas was coming.

   But the second coming is coming, too.

   I once lived in a house that was broken into, I lost count, but I think that it was around 13 times. I didn’t have much to steal, but the house was bordered on one side by an empty lot covered by tall bushes in the front, and I was rarely at home except to sleep, so only one person was ever seen and caught. I didn’t know when a thief might come, so I had bars put on the windows when Sally and I were married. Then, we were prepared.

   Many of us have home security systems, monitoring services, and Ring doorbells. We want to be prepared.   

   We long for the second advent of Jesus, and to be prepared for it, even as we seek to be patient for it.

   It’s been said that the early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. Patience, particularly as we await God’s time, is a virtue.

   We seek to be prepared for both advents: the coming of God in Jesus Christ, born as an infant to redeem the world, and the coming of Jesus Christ to judge the world as we know it and usher in the world that is to come.

   We will consider both this coming Sunday, on the First Sunday of Advent, a new Church Year, by beginning at the end.

385 One King

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “One King”, originally shared on November 25, 2025. It was the 385^th  video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   There seem to be major political shifts happening in our society and in the world as a whole, and they all have to do with the Christian understanding of marriage. Today, we’re going to find out why.

   How many kings do you have? Is that a trick question? Maybe. Maybe not. Today, we’re going to find out.

   We have seen public demonstrations with the theme “No Kings” over the past several months to protest the perceived authoritarianism. of the current administration. It has been estimated that millions of Americans have participated.

   We fought a war against the rule of King George III to end his abusive rule and gain our national independence from 1775 to 1783.

   Kings are not popular here in the United States. We believe in personal independence. We value it, and we have fought for it.

   So how do we approach a Christian holiday like “Christ the King” Sunday. “Christ” and “King” sound like polar opposites to us. 

   But how can we know who God is?

   What do you picture when you think of God? An old buff guy? The Force? A kindly grandparent? An absentee parent? Today, we’re going to find out who God is, and I guarantee that it will shock you! Even if you already know God, who He is always comes as a surprise?

   What do you picture when you think about God? A a guy in a white robe sitting on a golden throne? Long, flowing beard and puffy hair?

   A kindly, elderly friend who just loves you exactly as you are, asks nothing of you, and who just wants to love you and give you gifts?

   An impersonal essence? A principle? A generic higher power?

   Maybe something else?

   Your personal vending machine who you can ask to give you whatever you desire but who you can walk away from anytime you want and is otherwise uninvolved in your life?  

   A wise harmless old guy, like George Burns in the movie?

   Do you ever picture God as being young?

   Here’s another question: What do you think God thinks of you? Does that very thought make you feel guilty? Is God always judging you, waiting for you to get out of line? Do you think of God as violent and vengeful? Kindly and indulgent? Unavailable? Indifferent? Loving?

   Christmas will be here in about a month. (!) Do you picture God as a spying Elf on A Shelf? Watching like Santa, who knows when you’ve been sleeping, who knows when you’re awake, who knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!? Ohh!

   If you picture God as any of those things, get rid of them. I’m about to blow your mind!

   Maybe you think of God as cosmic royalty on Christ the King Sunday.

   Last Sunday was “Christ the King” Sunday in most churches throughout the world.

   One of the titles given to Jesus at his birth was “Prince of Peace”. OK. How did he get promoted to “Christ the King?”

   Last Sunday was the last Sunday in the Church year, and in it we go t to see who God is.

   The Gospel reading for this Sunday begins like this, in Luke 23:33,

³³When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. 

   This is where we find out who God is. This is where we find out what God thinks about us. At the cross.

   Here’s the story:

   Everyone has a belief about what the world is and how the world works. It’s called our “worldview.”

   The Christian worldview takes many forms, but they are all founded on the belief that the world as we experience it is not the way it’s supposed to be. Human beings messed up that perfect relationship with God and the perfect world that God created by rebelling against God. We thought we knew better. We still do, and that’s how evil enters the world.

   God sought out people to return to the personal relationship with God for which they were created: destruction and renewal, slavery and liberation, a chosen people blessed to be a blessing, the religious Law, victory and defeat, nationhood, disunity and hope, prophets, priests, and kings, and more! Nothing worked, or it didn’t work for very long.

   Then, in what the Bible calls the fullness of time, God became incarnate, God came in human flesh, fully God and fully human being in Jesus Christ. And God was rejected by the humanity he came to save and they crucified him. That’s the part we are seeing today.

   But they did not take Jesus’ life. He gave it. He who committed no sin, took the punishment for our sin on himself to restore the relationship with God for which we were created to all to receive that relationship as God’s gift.

   I have a t-shirt that says, “Body Piercing Saved My Soul”. That’s the most important message in history. Body piercing saved my soul. And yours.

   That is our worldview. Our message is our world view in our increasingly secular culture. Our challenge is that it means nothing to say that we need a Savior if the world doesn’t know that it needs to be saved. The cross means very little to people who don’t know of their need for it.

   But, the world does sometimes have a vague interest in God.

   And what do we learn about who God is at the cross? We are reminded that God’s disposition toward humanity is personal. We see God’s love in action in God’s suffering for us.

   Where do we see the kind of king that Jesus is? In John 19:1-5,

1Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged. 2 And the soldiers wove a crown of thorns and put it on his head, and they dressed him in a purple robe. 3 They kept coming up to him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” and striking him on the face. 4 Pilate went out again and said to them, “Look, I am bringing him out to you to let you know that I find no case against him.” 5 So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, “Here is the man!”

   We learn what kind of king God is in what Martin Luther, the 16^th century church reformer, called the Gospel (the good news) in miniature, in John 3:16,

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

   Luther describes that as the Gospel in miniature because everything in the Bible points to the cross and because the Bible’s purpose is to lead us to a living relationship with the one true living God in Jesus Christ.

   Here’s how it happens, as the Gospel reading for this Sunday continues in Luke 23:34-43,

³⁴Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” And they cast lots to divide his clothing.

 ³⁵And the people stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!” 

³⁶The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, ³⁷and saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!”

 ³⁸There was also an inscription over him, “This is the King of the Jews.” 

³⁹One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” 

⁴⁰But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 

⁴¹And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” ⁴²Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” ⁴³He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

   That is Christ the King. The King of Kings of all time and space.

   Christianity didn’t begin in the Western World. Christianity was in Africa before it was in Europe. The Ethiopian Bible was put together well before the King James Version.

   Augustine of Hippo, in North Africa, one of the great theologians of the early Church, is attributed with the saying, “If you were the only person on earth, Christ would have still suffered and died for you.”

   We have been set free from the consequences of our sin at the cross. We exist as a part of the human race that is now reconciled to God, by God in Jesus Christ through faith and in Baptism.

   Even death has no more dominion over us.

   A colleague, a predecessor at a congregation I served, told me about the night he had a Church Council meeting, and he knew it would be a late evening. He called his wife and told her not to make dinner for him. He would just stop by McDonald’s on the way home, which he did. But, as he got out of his car to order inside, someone jumped out at him, pointed a gun at him and told him to give him all his money or he’d kill him.

   He told me, “I wish I could say that I was brave, but the truth is that I was just tired, and I said, ‘You can’t kill me. I’ve already died in Jesus Christ.’” He spoke of his Baptism, but I’m guessing that the other person thought that he was facing the living dead. And, in a sense, he was.

   All the color drained from the other person’s face, and he turned and ran away!

   Jesus is God, and he died for us. That’s a lot to absorb. When he lived incarnate on the Earth, he was young. He became human flesh as an infant, was a little kid, a teenager, and did not begin his public ministry until he was 30 years old. He was 33 when he gave his life, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven. Imagine Jesus as someone you know who is about his age. Imagine Jesus in occupied territory as a first-century skilled worker at the far eastern end of the Roman Empire. Imagine Jesus on the cross.

   That is who God is. Humanity is reconciled to God by God.

   God is neither male nor female. Our references to God are how we express our cultural identity, not God’s identity. There is no race in God.

   And yet, God is personal because God has made us for and given to us a personal relationship with God. That’s why Jesus, who was a middle-eastern Jew, often looks black in African Christian art, Chinese in Chinese Christian art, Latino in Latino Christian art, Indian in Indian Christian art, and European in European Christian Art.

   In James McBride’s book, The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother, he tells of the time when he was walking down the sidewalk, through the puddles after a rainstorm, with his mother. He asked his mother what color God is. His mother said, “God is the color of water.”

   There is no way to describe God. We can only know what God reveals to us in the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One God.

   God knows everything, God is everywhere, and God is all-powerful. God is always the same, including what God reveals in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible.

   God is wholly other. God created everything out of nothing. And when I say “nothing” I don’t mean empty space. I mean nothing, no height or width or depth. No time. Nothing. God does not exist in any way that we can conceive of existence.

   That’s why the people of God receive this command in Exodus 20:4-5a.

4 You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them;

   That’s why God does not have a proper noun for a name. The “name” of something was believed to contain the fundamental reality of the thing it named in Bible times. That’s why when people went through some life-changing experience their name had to change, i.e. Abram and Sari to Abraham and Sarah and Saul to Paul. When Moses asked the voice from the bush that was burning but not consumed for its name, God answered “I am”. He gave a verb not a noun because it is impossible for a human being to know anything of God’s fundamental reality, except that which God choses to reveal to him or her.

   When I was taking notes in seminary, I sometimes used abbreviations like J the B for John the Baptist, or C the K for Christ the King.

   What do you think the initials CK mean to most people? Maybe the currently disgraced comedian Charlie CK? Most likely the logo for Calvin Klein, a symbol of conspicuous consumption, a label to announce your money, if not your taste. Because the world does not know God.

   Who is God? We can only know if someone has named the name of God to us. We can only know what God has revealed to us. We see what God has revealed to us most clearly on the cross.

   I spent a summer when I was in seminary doing a quarter of Clinical Pastoral Education. CPE is a program training prospective pastors to do hospital visits and counseling. It’s very intense and exposes seminarians to a lot of different kinds of life experiences.

   The program I was a part of was held at Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, Illinois, right outside of Chicago.

   One night, there was a humongous thunderstorm, and a lightning bolt hit a transformer and knocked out power to the hospital. The emergency generators kicked in and all essential services like the operating carols, the Natal Intensive Care Units, the respirators, and so on, received power.

   Almost immediately, the switchboard was lit up with calls from very agitated air traffic controllers from the nearby O’Hare International Airport asking what had happened to the fluorescent cross on the top of the hospital.

   Pilots coming in for landings had used that cross as a visual reference point as they descended and, seeing no cross, had been thinking that they were coming in from the wrong side of the airport. They were pulling up and flying in stacks over O’Hare.

   From that night onward, the cross was included in the emergency power network.

   The cross is our reference point. We see the love of God on it, what God did to restore the living relationship with God for which we were created.

   Americans may not like kings. Some of us may march for “No Kings”.

   But Christians have one King, and it is Christ.

   We will end the old church year this coming Sunday. We will begin the new Church year the following Sunday with the first Sunday in Advent, during which we will remember the wise men who came looking for the infant Jesus. Why? They had seen a sign that a King had been born.

   What kind of king?

   It is at the cross that we see who God is. Christ is our One King. 

384 The Keys at The Corner

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “The Keys at The Corner”, originally shared on November 22, 2025. It was the 384^th  video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   The Boy Scout and Girl Scout motto is “Be Prepared.” That’s Jesus’ counsel for Christians, but for what, and how? Today, we’re going to find out.

   My wife, Rev. Sally Welch, and I go walking together almost every day.

   There is one place that we walk where the sidewalk turns at a corner. One day, several months ago, we found some keys there, lying on the concrete.

   We left them there, thinking that whoever lost them would miss them and retrace their steps to find them. But the next time we walked in that place, the keys were still there. And the next time, and the next.

   The time after that, someone had put most of the keys on top of the fence at the corner so that they would be less likely to be kicked into the leaves and more likely to be seen and found by their owner.

   The keys on the corner are still there, months later. Lost.

   Why? Who would not miss lost keys and go looking for them?

   Do they no longer have any purpose? Did someone forget what they were for?

   The answer might have everything to do with the reading from the Gospels that is being shared in the vast majority of churches today, Luke 21:5-19.

   We are now almost at the end of our current Church Year. In two weeks, we will start a new Church year with season of Advent, preparing us for Christmas.

   As the old year ends, however, our readings from the Gospels will carry themes about the end of history, to help prepare us for the coming of the perfection of the reign of God in a new heaven and a new earth when Jesus comes again to judge the living and the dead.

   These last Gospel readings at the end of the old year give us the keys to being prepared when the Judgement comes. Will we use them, or will we lose them?

   Some people, though, are more afraid of the breakdown of society as we know it. “Preppers” are concerned about the possibility of another world war? What if our economy collapses, and the world’s economies collapse with it? What if our political, social, racial, and even religious differences result in chaotic, unlivable cities and multiple civil wars throughout the world.

   These things may happen.

   But we know of one actual apocalypse that absolutely will happen We repeat our belief in it every Sunday in our creeds when we say, “he (Jesus) will come to judge the living and the dead.”

   Preppers are getting ready for the end of the world as they know it.

   Christians are prepping for another beginning as God knows it.

   How do we get ready for that?

   I remember when our son came home with a flier alerting parents to the “active shooter drill” that the school would be holding in the near future.

   We thought about how awful the world was where such things like that were necessary for children. Then we remembered that when we were about his age, our schools held nuclear war drills. We were taught not to look at the windows so that the blasts wouldn’t blind us. We were taught to go to the hallways so that we wouldn’t be shredded by flying glass. We were gathered in the basements where the survival food was kept so that, though I don’t remember that it was ever spelled out, we would have food to eat and water to drink when our parents weren’t able to come and get us.

   Some people built “fall-out” shelters in their back yards to protect themselves and their families. The Civil Defense agency of the government provided easy to follow plans.

   Science fiction was full of reflections on these shelters. What if your neighbors, or friends, or other relatives came pounding on your shelter door? Would you let them in? What if they were desperate? Would you kill to protect your can of corn? And what would await you when you had to come out?

   We were preparing for the end of the world in the hope that some of us might survive. But survive for what?

   The Bible has a lot to say about the end of the world, and it is our focus now at the end of the Church Year.

   It tells us that the end of the world is followed by a new beginning.

   The new Church year begins with the season of Advent in two weeks.

   Advent means “coming”, We live between two advents: the coming of Jesus as a baby in Bethlehem, and the coming of Jesus as Lord and Savior in the Final Judgement, with salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.

   When will this happen? Do human beings have the keys to knowing the mind of God?

   Nobody knows. People have been saying that they have the key to understanding the signs of the end for two thousand years and, so far, every one of them has been wrong. Christian movements have arisen, built around the claim to have discovered the keys to the signs of the end, and so far, every one of them has been wrong.

   All we can know is that the end of history will be preceded by signs.

   But those signs are not there for us to have a time-code to crack. Those signs are the keys to show us the meaning of the end, and the role that Christians play in the revelation of it to the world.

   They are there to show us that life has meaning and purpose even in the worst of times, and that God is ultimately in control of how everything ends and what happens after.

   This happens in Luke 21:5-11,

⁵When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, ⁶“As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” ⁷They asked him, “Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?” ⁸And he said, “Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is near!’ Do not go after them. ⁹“When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.” ¹⁰Then he said to them, “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; ¹¹there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.

   Does any of that sound familiar? Doesn’t it sound like our world right now?

   Do we care? Are we looking for those signs, the keys to knowing that the end of the redemption of the world is coming?

   And if we are, are we looking in the right places?

   I think that the truth lies in a story I told a few weeks ago, and it comes from bubblegum.

   Bazooka Bubblegum was sold by the piece when I was growing up. Inside the outer wrap, each piece was enclosed in waxy white paper with a colorful graphic comic printed on it.

   One of the first jokes I ever read was wrapped around that pink gum.

   The comic showed a police car pulling up to a cartoonishly drunk man. He was standing near the curb, hanging onto a streetlight.

   “What’s the trouble, buddy?” asked the policeman.

   “I’m looking for my house keys,” said the drunken man.

   “Where did you lose them?” asked the policeman, getting out of his car to help him look.

   “Down the street,” answered the man, waving his arm.

   “Well,” said the policeman, “if you lost them down the street, why are you looking for them here?”

   The man answered, “Because the light’s so much better here.”.

   That joke could be read as a parable, and its lesson would be pretty close to the meaning of today’s Gospel reading from Luke.

   Many of us have lived through violent and chaotic times, or we have heard about them from our older relatives. Everybody wants to be prepared for whatever is coming but, like the cartoonish drunk in the comic, we are often looking in the wrong places for the key to doing so.

   The key to the future is in God’s hand. It’s in the pierced hands of the risen Jesus Christ who invites us to find our way home by following Him.

   And where is Jesus taking us? I think that he is taking us to the place where we lost the key.

   Jesus says, in John 14:6,

⁶ Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

   Jesus is the key to being prepared, to living as Christians in our own time. We live in Him, and we tell other people the good news of peace and reconciliation with God through Him.

   We go on about out daily work as we are called, equipped, and sent by God to do. That daily work is living the Christian life, bearing witness to the hope that is within us, serving those in need, and testifying to the world that God has come in human flesh in Jesus Christ to suffer and to die on the cross in order to reconcile humanity to himself. God calls all people to repent, to turn away from the rebellion that is killing them, and toward a loving and gracious God and receive life. That makes us prepared to come before him in His Judgment.

   The best way for us to prepare for the end is by opening our hearts to the Holy Spirit, God’s ongoing personal presence for good in the world, to make us God’s people, to be born again, to be made God’s new Creation, to make our Christian faith everything about who we are, so that we may endure to the end, and the beginning.

   We are prepared when our lives have been shaped by God. Their quality is all that matters.

   Have you ever wondered why fine dinner ware is called “china” in English? It’s because fine dinnerware came to the West from the country of “China”. I thought of this recently when I saw some for sale at a 99 Ranch Market store near me. Porcelain was invented in China and for centuries finely made and artfully decorated plates and cups were traded with the West. It became known by its quality, and its quality was know by it’s country of origin. China.

   Likewise, Christians are known by the quality of their lives, and that quality is made known by its place of origin, in the work of God for us on the cross! In Jesus.

   Jesus says this, in his first century context, in his description of the end of the world in Luke 21:12-19

 ¹²“But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. ¹³This will give you an opportunity to testify. ¹⁴So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; ¹⁵for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. ¹⁶You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. ¹⁷You will be hated by all because of my name. ¹⁸But not a hair of your head will perish. ¹⁹By your endurance you will gain your souls.

   We the people of God are a people set apart. How do we get ready for the end of life as we know it and the coming perfection of the Reign of God? There’s a clue for us in the weather.

   We got some much-needed rain this week. It was streaming down the street, off the roof, and through the downspouts. It brought us some relief from our long dry season, but it also brought mud and debris flows that changed the landscape in the burn areas. In some places events were cancelled and schools were closed.

   Some people were prepared and others were not.

   We Southern Californians are pretty relaxed when it comes to earthquakes. But if ½” of rain is predicted, we are all on “Storm Watch!”

   Water that was moving was once called “living water”. “Streams of living water” is used as a metaphor for the Holy Spirit in both the Old Testament and New Testament sections of the Bible.

   Are we preparing for the end of time when Jesus will return and raise the dead and all will be judged? Are we preparing ourselves and others for the end by receiving the transformational power of the Holy Spirit?

   Or have we lost they keys to unlocking the signs of the end? And if we have, why aren’t we looking for them where we lost them?

   Do we think that they no longer have any purpose for us? Did we forget what they were for? Have we forgotten what Jesus so plainly tells us in today’s reading from Luke 21?

   It is we who were (or are) lost today, and we lost ourselves. Christ came to find us. He picked us up and saved us on the cross.

   Today, we are standing on the corner at a crossroads. The keys we need are right in front of us in today’s reading.

   Some people who fear civilization’s collapse are stockpiling food, tools, and weapons, and learning to live without the power and water grid. Their concerns are temporary.

   We are preparing for the end of everything and the beginning of a new heaven and of a new earth.

   Jesus says that the meaning of the end lies in the quality of our faith, and in our coming opportunities to testify to it. How do we get ready? By allowing the Holy Spirit to shape us from within, restoring the quality of our faith, like fine china, so that we are made ready.

   Jesus says, “make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.”

   Let the Holy Spirit flow within you to make you who God has made you to be.

   Christ will come to Judge the living and the dead.

   Today, He is showing us how to be prepared.