392 Things You Can Do (In The New Year)

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Things You Can Do (In The New Year)”, originally shared on December 31, 2025. It was the 392^nd  video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   God became human flesh to die for us. What can we do in 2026 to live that gift? Today, we’re going to find out.

    We’ll be welcoming, or maybe tolerating with dread, the inevitable turning of time to 2026 tonight.

   Some new laws are coming tomorrow.

   Grocery stores will no longer provide plastic bags but will require people to bring their own reusable bags.

   Restaurants will be required to list major food allergens on their menus.

   Electric bicycle (Ebike) riders will have to use flashing rear red lights or reflectors with solid red lights at all times.

   Some changes may be made to our lives, not by the law but, solely at our own discretion, like the resolutions that will last no longer than Christmas wrapping paper. Some will resolve to eat healthier, commit to some cause, or work out more. In fact, gyms see a surge in membership at the beginning of every year and, I’m told, most of those new members drop off by April.

   What can we resolve to do that we actually will do? Well, we could start with Christmas.

   We’re still in the Christmas season, on the sixth day of the twelve days of Christmas so we, and the vast majority of churches in the world, will be looking at a familiar text about God’s gift of Himself next Sunday: John 1:1-18.

   It’s usually read on Christmas Day, after the most familiar and personal and detailed of the Gospel stories of Jesus’ birth, Luke 2:1-20, has been read on Christmas Eve. So, you may have missed it if your church didn’t have a Christmas Day service. Or if it did and you didn’t go. 😊

   Or, they did have one, and you did go, you may have had only the vaguest idea of what that reading was about, because John wasn’t likely written for you.

   The Gospel of John was written for a primarily non-Jewish audience among the newly converted Christians in the pagan districts of the Roman empire. They knew very little about Jesus and even less about anything that came before Jesus.

   Maybe they knew a little about Moses and the importance of the religious Law given to Moses, the Law that was so hard for the early Jewish Christians to see past.

   So, John used the Greek philosophical and cultural language that those new Christians would understand. (If you would like to see the Christmas story told in a totally different way, check out “Christmas According to Kids -Southland Christian Church”, on YouTube)

   In John, Jesus isn’t a cute little baby born in horrific circumstances. Jesus is the Word made flesh. That’s about it, as in John 1:1-5,

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was in the beginning with God. ³ All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being ⁴ in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

   The natural “chaos” of the world is overcome by the “logos”, the state of order that is the word, but with a capital “W”: “Word”. In fact, everything that exists came into being through the will of the Logos, through the Word, through a word. And now the Word was being made flesh in the same way, through a pure act of the will of God. Nothing, and no one else.

   In fact, the first words of both the book of Genesis at the start of the Old Testament and the fourth Gospel, at the start of the New Testament are the same, “In the beginning” and both describe the work of God’s Creation.

   John the Baptist is presented as a preparer for the Word and a witness to the Word, as in John 1:6-9,

⁶ There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷ He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. ⁸ He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. ⁹ The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

   Then the abstractions gradually become more personal. The Word came to make those who believed in Him, in his essential self, recreated as the children of God, as in John 1:10-13,

¹⁰ He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. ¹¹ He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. ¹² But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, ¹³ who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

   He is the Law given through Moses, and He is more than the Law. He has fulfilled the Law. He has come to bring grace and truth. The philosophy of God is that truth is not an idea to be debated. The Truth is a person. Jesus is the Truth. He is fully God and fully human being, and he has made God known, as our Gospel reading concludes in John 1:14-18,

¹⁴ And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. ¹⁵ (John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ ”) ¹⁶ From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. ¹⁷ The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸ No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

   God has been made visible in Jesus Christ.

   How can we make him known in 2026?

   Bob Porter was a diabetic whose disease had taken his sight and one leg. He was confined to a wheelchair. He was all alone and feeling sorry for himself one night in an apartment near Christmas in 1969 when he remembered that he had known people for whom buying a Christmas tree at Christmas was an impossible luxury.

   He also knew that supermarkets had lots of unsold trees as Christmas approached. So he called around from his apartment to the supermarkets he knew in his Southern California neighborhood, and he asked them if they would be willing to donate the trees that, by a week before Christmas, they knew that  were not going to be able to sell. Some said yes.

   Then, he called places in low-income neighborhoods who agreed to pick up and distribute those trees.

   The first year, he distributed 1,500 trees. Sixteen years later, by 1985, when he died, he had developed the Bob Porter Christmas Tree Project into a nearly year ‘round effort, all of which he did by placing phone calls from his wheelchair, in his apartment, to retailers and pick-up truck operators, and then to wholesalers and trucking companies throughout California and beyond.

   By then, he had given away 150,000 trees to low-income families. The growers, the truckers, and the lot operators all got a write-off. Poor people got a Christmas tree. Win-win-win-win!

   I met Bob several times as the church I served in Compton was one of his distribution sites. I think that a community group kept the project going for a short while, but then it ended. There are no photos if him that I can find online today. He’s been pretty much forgotten. I’ve often wondered “why?”

   Every one of us has a particular spiritual gift given to us at our baptism to build up the Church, the body of Christ. They have nothing to do with our skills or talents, or our jobs. They are gifts given to us by the Holy Spirit to build up the Church. And we don’t use them so that we will be remembered.

   Each of us is equipped to do something to make Jesus Christ known in some way through the whole Body of Christ so that people are transformed into a new Creation in a living relationship with the one, true, living God.

   How can we do something that will last? How can we make the eternal God known among all people?

   Every congregation already has all the gifts that they need to do what God has called and equipped it to do. Some people have the gift of Evangelism, but all of us have been given the role of evangelist.

   I’ve accumulated ideas over the years of ministry that I used to present with the announcements in a church a served before Sally and I retired. Here are seven small things that the Holy Spirit can use as the means to move within people you know and care about to bring about life-transformation.

   They are ideas from others’ experience that I have seen online and revised or accumulated from reading books and articles and have revised, or things that I’ve heard about and revised, though with no source that I can find or remember, but for whose inspiration I am grateful. I came up with many of them from my own experience.

1.             Wear a Sign

   You don’t have to put on a sandwich board and walk down the street. A sign is something that points to something else. Wear your mother’s gold cross necklace, your father’s fish pin, or buy your own. Wear a t-shirt or a polo shirt with your church’s name on it or with a Christian message. They can create opportunities to share Jesus. 

    In my experience, it’s mainly existing Christians who will respond, but you never know who will see them, or who will comment.

2.             Text Somebody

   Text them from church: “Guess where I am.” It’s really good.” “Come with me next Sunday”.

3.             Forward Announcements from Your Church to Somebody

   Include an encouraging message to people who feel estranged from the church and, when the time is right, invite them to come to church with you. As Paul writes to the church at Corinth, in 2 Corinthians 5:18-20,

¹⁸ All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; ¹⁹ that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. ²⁰ So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

4.           Mail the Good News

   Did you get a Christmas Card from someone? Did it have a stamp with a Christian message on it? It created an impression, didn’t it? Did you send them?

   Stock up on greeting cards with a Christian message and send them for holidays, birthdays, to say “thank-you”, in times of sadness or celebration, etc. State your faith.

5.             Strengthen your Faith

   Work on yourself, not on your witness. Relax. The Holy Spirit will give you the appropriate message to share and speak through you. Make yourself a good instrument and listen to God.

   Isn’t the new year a time to “turn the page?” Read your Bible, pray, read Christian books, web sites and blogs, serve others in the name of Jesus. You can’t give away what you don’t have, but you can share what you do have. Develop that. Always be ready to be the means by which the Holy Spirit acts.

   As Peter counsels in 1 Peter 3:14-16,

¹⁴ But even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, ¹⁵ but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; ¹⁶ yet do it with gentleness and reverence. Keep your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame.

6.             Listen for an Opening

   “I don’t know what to do…” “I feel so stretched…” “Everything has changed, etc. all could be openings for empathetic listening. Listen. Share your experiences and your wisdom. Listen some more. Share what your faith has meant to you.

7.             Witness When Eating at a Restaurant

   Pray before your meal just like at home, not to show your righteousness but to be visible and unashamed. Let your light shine. And leave a big tip. Show your server that Christians can be grateful and generous. 😊

   It’s not easy to be a Christian. It never has been. Be faithful and grow in your faith.  That is, be open and receptive to God’s working in you. As Jesus said, in the context of the first Christians, in Matthew 10:16-20,

¹⁶ “See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. ¹⁷ Beware of them, for they will hand you over to councils and flog you in their synagogues; ¹⁸ and you will be dragged before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them and the Gentiles. ¹⁹ When they hand you over, do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you at that time; ²⁰ for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.

   It is very rare to see instant results when sharing your faith. Be patient. Let things happen in God’s time. You are not in control. God is. You never know when people might respond to God’s activity through one of these means.

   Maybe these 7 ideas will stimulate your own thinking about how you can share the faith that God has given you.

   We received some Christmas cards this year that were made by the Hallmark company. Their slogan, since 1944, has been, “When You Care Enough to Send the Very Best!”

   It’s a very good message for this Christmas season, as we start a new year.

   God sent us his very best. He sent himself. And now He sends us as his friends, His Body, and as His witnesses, and as His ambassadors.

   You may ask, “Who? Me?” But remember, you’re ready. God has given you everything you need to share the good news in your witness and in your actions.

   You’ve probably already participated in, or at least heard of, community toy drives, food banks, backpacks at the beginning of the school year, and lots of things that we do for others in the name of Jesus Christ?

   I heard of a new one the other day: wood banks.

   They mostly happen in rural areas where people depend upon wood burning stoves and heaters to cook and stay warm in the winter.

   Some people can’t afford to buy wood, or are not able to chop it into a size that a stove will burn. So people are cutting and chopping the wood, then stacking it for people to pick up, and even delivering it to people who need it, free of charge.

   That’s both a statement against our current economy and a testimony for the work of people who do what needs to be done for people who are in need.

   It’s a metaphor for what we do.

   God has provided the fuel and built a fire of the Holy Spirit under us and within us. God has equipped us and sent us to reflect the light and the heat that is God at work in the world through us.

   We have something good to share, the best news in the history of the world, given to us at Christmas. God has called, equipped and sent you to share it with people you know.

   Be a Christmas blessing. Share the Good News! 

391 The More Things Change

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “The More Things Change”, originally shared on December 26, 2025. It was the 391^st  video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   The world is a mess. Christmas changes that. Today, we’re going to find out how.

   We’ve been getting some weather this week.

   We’ve been experiencing what meteorologists called the Pineapple Express, an atmospheric river, a potentially disastrous rainstorm producing floods, blocked roads, and mudflows. LA got ½ of its normal annual total rainfall in 72 hours!

   Sally and I got an alert here on our phones and we were told to be ready to get out in a moment’s notice.

   But we had just been standing outside looking at the rain from our garage, and it didn’t seem too bad. It was raining, but I wasn’t thinking about packing up the car.

   It was coming down hard enough, though, that I had already been outside in the rain to do some storm damage repair. Did you have to go outside in the rain to fix something?

   It happens. You think you are ready, that nothing bad will happen, and then it does.

   And this weather has been more than a nuisance for some. It has been a calamity. But they too had been warned.

    This coming Sunday is the day in the Christian Church year that we remember the Slaughter of the Innocents.

   Christmas is celebrated in the context of an atrocity for which there was a prophecy, but no warning. And we don’t hear about the atrocity until after Christmas.

   Sally and I hope that you had a wonderful Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. 

   We celebrated Christmas with a bi-lingual Christmas Eve worship service in Monterey Park. Trinity-Faith Lutheran Church, the Mandarin-speaking church using the facilities of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, an English-speaking congregation, worshiped together with them in Mandarin and in English. I was given the opportunity to preach in English. I don’t think that happened in very many places in the world on Christmas Eve!

   Sally and I celebrated Christmas Day with worship at our nearby Catholic Church because they had a service on Christmas Day and we have a good relationship with them. We shared gifts among ourselves in the afternoon and went for a walk around our neighborhood. Later we had a festive meal with friends at their home and shared gifts there, as well.

   But there were many places in the world that were struggling with the weather, in wars, in persecution, and in poverty. The Christmas story is a story of struggle that continues in this coming second Sunday of the Christmas season.

   For an increasing number of people in our world. though, it’s over. Their presents are opened and put away. Some are already broken. Their tree seems a little out of place, and Christmas will be gone by the end of New Year’s Day, if it’s not gone already.

   For many, Christmas ended on Christmas Day.

   Christmas is over for others when the season of commercial preparations ends, and when it’s done, it’s done.

   In fact, some businesses and TV programs marked the 12 days of Christmas as a countdown to Christmas. So, when they’re over, they’re really over.

  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 of Our Lord, as in the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas”!

   So now, on the upside, we have Christmas pretty much all to ourselves and those with whom we share it.

   There’s no more holiday stress. The long nightmare of excess and expectations is over. Now comes the Christmas blessing and we open our hearts to receive it for 12 whole days.

   BTW, the cost of the 12 gifts listed in the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas” went up 4.4% this year to $51,000! Or, if you bought the items over and over each day as the song suggests (that's 364 total gifts) they would cost you $218,542! 

   You know, those exotic pets like turtle doves, geese, and French hens are expensive, increasing the most largely because of increased labor and food costs, and the price of gold for the gold rings has skyrocketed. 😊

   So, continue to have a Merry Christmas and don’t be embarrassed for celebrating Christmas as a Christian. Be counter-cultural. Don’t take down your Christmas tree, your lights, or your decorations. Leave them up until January 6^th, the day of the Epiphany (or inbreaking) of Our Lord, and be a witness when you are asked why you haven’t taken your decorations down or even when you just get funny looks. 😊  As Jesus said, in Matthew 5:14-15,

   ¹⁴ “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. ¹⁵ No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house.

   Be bearers of that light, because there is plenty of darkness in this world. There always has been.

   It’s the subject of the reading from the Gospels that will be shared in the vast majority of churches in the world this Sunday, Matthew 2:13-23. It begins with a warning that came after the Wise Men had left, starting in verse 13,

¹³ Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” ¹⁴ Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, ¹⁵ and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.”

   Herod was the King of Judea who had been put and kept in power by the Roman Empire. The Wise Men had come to Herod first after they saw a star in the east that signaled the birth of a new king.

   Herod asked the Wise Men to come back and tell him when they had found this king, but the Wise men sensed that something was off and they left by another road, avoiding Herod.

   Herod, as brutal as ever, knew where but he didn’t know exactly when this birth had taken place so, just to be sure that he had eliminated any potential competition, he had all the male children 2-years-old and under killed, which we see beginning in Matthew 2:16,

¹⁶ When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. ¹⁷ Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:

¹⁸       “A voice was heard in Ramah,

wailing and loud lamentation,

Rachel weeping for her children;

she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”

   Rachel was the symbolic mother of the nation of Israel through her husband Jacob, who had wrestled with God and survived, so whose name was changed to Israel, which means someone who strives with God and whose faith endures.

   It could be said that Herod was just the opposite.

   Herod was hated almost universally. But Herod was mortal and he died, as we see, starting with Matthew 2:19,

¹⁹ When Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, ²⁰ “Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child’s life are dead.” ²¹ Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel.

   Joseph went home, at least to his home country.

   As Herod was dying, he ordered that prominent Jewish leaders should be imprisoned and then be killed when he died so that some people in Israel, anyway, would mourn on that day. His sister seems to have disobeyed that paranoid and ruthless, though typical, command.

   Apples don’t fall too far from the tree, people say, and Jesus’ earthly father Joseph seemed to know this, as we see in the conclusion to this week’s Gospel reading, starting in Matthew 2:22,

²² But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. And after being warned in a dream, he went away to the district of Galilee. ²³ There he made his home in a town called Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, “He will be called a Nazorean.”

   Jesus was born in danger, he and his family had to flee the country, pursued by powerful people, and he died in danger, crucified by…who?

   Well, here’s where it gets personal.

   The world is not the way it’s supposed to be. It’s not the way God created it to be.

   God created us for a living relationship with God, and God created a perfect world for human beings, and He put us in charge. 

   And when we thought we could do a better job than God, and we disobeyed God, evil entered the world, as it still does, through our rebellion against God.

   And we continue to bring evil into the world by disobeying God. We cut ourselves off from a living relationship with God.  That’s why we need a Savior. That’s why we need the cross.

   Who killed Jesus? We did, by our continuing rebellion against God’s will.

   The slaughter of the innocents is nothing new.

   Our world is very different from the world of Adam and Eve, or of Moses, or Paul but the more things change, the more they remain the same.

   Innocents are still slaughtered by people who think that they could do a better job than God.

   One of the few things that I remember from a particular Philosophy class in college was the professor’s opinion that most of the world’s evil, and probably all of its really worst evil, is done by people who sincerely believe that they are doing good.

   The Bible says the same thing in Proverbs 21:2,

²        All deeds are right in the sight of the doer,

but the Lord weighs the heart.

   It is our hearts that must be transformed by God for us to do the good that comes from God. That’s a good lesson to take to heart as we approach a new year.

   It’s why we need a sense of morality that comes from God. And it’s why we need a Savior.

   New Year’s Day is coming next week. It’s a way we measure time, and with time comes change. Things change, but they don’t just change.

   Change requires an idea, and people who are willing to put that idea into action, or people who will just go along with it and won’t object. And then people who will just take it for granted. We get used to it and then accept it.

   That’s why, when people say they prefer traditional hymns and traditional worship, they are often saying that they prefer the hymns and worship that they grew up with, which people once said sounded strange and were hard to adjust to and they didn’t like them.

   That’s why most people’s favorite music is the music that they listened to when they were becoming adults.

   That’s why almost nobody knows that the square they click on to save a document on a computer is a picture of a 3.5” floppy disk, the storage media of the early days of computers.

   That’s why when people talk about a “standard” automobile transmission, they’re talking about a transmission that hasn’t come “standard” in cars for a very long time.

   That’s why “dropping a dime” on someone, or snitching, came from the cost of a phone call on a public telephone in a phone booth, neither of which are around now, but the expression still means the same thing.

   Things change, but they don’t just change.

   Evil, like the Slaughter of the Innocents and all sin, comes from the change human beings made to the way God intended them to be. And the more things change, the more they stay the same: we are naturally disconnected from God.

   We need a Savior, not only to be saved from the consequences of our Sin, but to live the new lives that the Savior brings!

   That’s how we change the world.

   The world isn’t the way it’s supposed to be, and the more things change the more they stay the same. Those things are true. But they don’t mean that we can’t make the world better.

   Within 18 months, my father’s life was turned upside down. His wife, my mother, died of breast cancer when she was 53. His father died. The family business had been overtaken by large corporations and was sold. His business partner, my uncle-in-law, committed suicide. My dad locked in on himself. He didn’t go out. Even his church and community volunteer work suffered. His family and his friends were worried.

   Then one day one of my father’s longest friends, a man whose work as a special agent for the FBI working against organized crime, whose work had taken him out of state, called my dad. He asked my dad to do him a favor, to make a hospital visit for him, something that my had done dozens, maybe hundreds, of times as a deacon in our church. He asked my dad to visit a woman who had bone cancer,

   My dad did. And that visit pulled him out of himself and into the needs of someone else. My dad left the darkness, and he reflected the light of Jesus Christ. Service to others in the name of Jesus Christ, in response to his gift of Himself at Christmas an on the cross, is what expressed his relationship with God, and that is what turned his life back around.

   How will we respond to Christmas?

   Margaret Meade, the anthropologist, said, “Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.”

   So, who’s change will you be? The world’s or the Savior’s?

   The more things change, the more they stay the same. People are still people. People still do dark things.

   But we aren’t called to be the light in a world of darkness. We are called to reflect the light that is within us, the light of Jesus Christ, who said, in John 8:12,

¹² Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”

   Are you sometimes discouraged by the darkness of the world today, near and far?

   Have you had to go out into the world to find someone damaged by life’s storms?

   Have you been warned that damage could happen, and then you went out in the midst of the storm to find somebody damaged by life anyway?

   That is where we are in this week’s Gospel reading. We are the repairers of the breach (Isaiah 52:12), the reflectors of the light that is within us, the Savior, Jesus Christ.

   John describes it in terms of the birth of Jesus that we celebrate and reflect, in John 1:3-5,

³All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being ⁴in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

⁵The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. 

390 Cut Flowers or New Life

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Cut Flowers or New Life”, originally shared on December 23, 2025. It was the 390^th  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 a time of death and life. Which one will it be for you this week?

   We hear bad news at Christmas, which is good because you can’t know good news unless you see how it’s overcoming something bad.

   The darkest day of the year has just passed, and we’re now celebrating the birth of Jesus, the light of the world. Can we value the light without knowing the darkness, the absence of light?

   We haven’t had much rain so far this season, but rain is predicted for Christmas this year. It’s a blessing. It will help everything that is alive in Southern California to live. Can we appreciate the rain without first knowing the death that comes without it?

   Christmas will be celebrated at worship this year, at Christ Mass. It will focus on the good news to every person who is dead, or has been dead, inside. Can we appreciate the birth of Christ without knowing what life would be without Him?

   The story from Luke 2:1-20 will be read in churches and in homes. It will be read in parks, and on the streets, and in places that have no names. It will answer those questions.

   Churches will be decorated in white, for the purity of the baby Jesus and for the swaddling cloths with which he was wrapped by his mother, Mary. Newborn babies were typically rubbed with salt and wrapped tightly with cloth and strips of cloth so that the itchiness of the salt would make them struggle against the cloth. It was believed that that would make the baby strong.

   Christmas reminds us that Christians are not exempt from struggle either, but that God has won the ultimate battle for us, and that that victory began with Jesus’ birth.

   Churches will be filled with flowers to celebrate the occasion and to honor the Christ child. They will look pretty, but they will be dead. They will still have the appearance of the life they had when they were rooted in the source of their life, when they were planted in good soil and watered. But, as decorations, they will be cut off from their source of that life. Some flowers will even be artificial and will never have been alive at all.

   Poinsettia plants will last a little longer. Decorating with potted poinsettia plants at Christmas comes from the Mexican legend of a poor girl named Pepita. She didn’t have enough money to buy a gift for the baby Jesus at her church’s Christmas celebration, but her cousin told her that Jesus would be happy with any gift she brought, so she picked a handful of weeds on her way to church for Christmas and laid them at the base of the Nativity scene and, suddenly, they were changed into beautiful red flowers.

   The first U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Joel Poinsett, brought them to the U.S. in the early 1800’s and the poinsettia plant was named after him. Their festive red and green colors matched what had been a pagan holiday color combination.

   One hundred years later an entrepreneur started sending them to TV stations free of charge to use in their Christmas specials and they became wildly popular.

   Sales and marketing made poinsettias the flowers of Christmas, so they would be the perfect symbol of our secular Christmas celebrations. And, in fact, their sap and flowers are mildly toxic.

   Except that their star shaped flowers suggest the Star of Bethlehem, their red color suggests the blood of Christ on the cross, and they come into bloom in December, which is when we celebrate the birth of Jesus.

   So which Christmas are you celebrating this week? The celebration of the secular commercial Christmas and the inevitability of death, or the Christian celebration of the free gift of eternal life for all people who believe in God made flesh in Jesus Christ and are baptized?

   Will you be a part of a church culture, a social service advocacy group, a friendly family, a place where members are only valued as people who can boost the numbers, help pay the bills, maintain the building, and contribute to established member’s dreams of the past, to maintain their legacy, a place that looks like a church but is cut off at its roots and is dead already?

    Or will you be a part of a church that is filled with new life, a Christian community that is planted in the good soil of the Word of God, fed in Holy Communion, and watered by Baptism for the eternal life of all who have received God’s gift of faith in Jesus Christ and are saved to serve others?

   The Christmas story comes to all people as Good News.

   We are all naturally like cut flowers. We are cut off from God.

   We are all naturally like poinsettias. We can live for a while if we are cared for, and longer if we are planted in the ground, while still being mildly toxic.

   Our own efforts to save our lives will not help us.

   We don’t need to be made better. We need a savior, or we will die.

   And so we celebrate Christmas the birth of Jesus so that all may be born again.

   Christmas is about birth, not death, new life not poison; it’s about the beginning and about our restoration, about a new life with the one true living God. It’s about the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

   Mary, the mother of Jesus, was a young woman, unmarried in a Patriarchal culture, in Israel, an almost unknown country to the world. It was occupied by the Roman Empire, which was just the most recent of many empires that had occupied Israel for almost 1,000 years. Life expectancy was short, so girls would get married as soon as they were able to bear children. Mary could have been as young as 12 years old.

   Mary was pregnant, and Joseph, who had a legal relationship with Mary that was not yet marriage, knew that he was not the baby’s father. In those days, 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) believed that Mary, a virgin, had been made pregnant by the will of God.

   Just then, everyone in the country was ordered to go to their family’s ancestral city of origin in order to be registered by the occupying Roman Empire. The Romans wanted to make sure that everybody was paying their taxes!

   Mary and Joseph traveled the 90 miles to Joseph’s family town of Bethlehem, the city of his ancestor King David, by donkey and on foot, in Mary’s ninth month of pregnancy. They arrived and found that people coming into town from all over the country had taken all the rooms.

   It’s almost inconceivable, though, that Joseph’s relatives couldn’t have found someplace for them. But the out-of-wedlock pregnancy had shamed the family.

   So, it was not likely that there was no room for them in the inn, but that there was no room for THEM in the inn, or anywhere else with the family.

   They found 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 their food.

   This is how God, who created everything that exists from nothing as an act of God’s will, was born as Jesus, who was fully God and fully a human being.

   We celebrate Christmas because the common relationship we have with God, given to all people who will receive it, began in a barn with the birth of Jesus Christ.

   The Christmas story ends with Jesus being given a name, in Luke 2:21,

²¹After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.

   But why does his name matter? And why the name “Jesus”? Wouldn’t a rose by any other name smell just as sweet?

   Well, there are thousands of people who get paid big bucks because the answer is no, it would not.

   There are hosts of marketers whose job it is to sell things by giving them names that would be attractive to consumers, like those who made the poinsettia the flower of Christmas.

   Names are important, but they were even more important in Bible times, in both the Old and the New Testament times.

   When we think of how to describe a human being’s true self, we may use the words like their “heart” or their “soul” or their “spirit”. But in Bible times people would say it was in a person’s name.

   “Jesus” is a masculine given name derived from the name “Joshua”. In Hebrew the name Jesus is “Y’shua”, and it means “The Lord is salvation” i.e. “Savior”. The word “Christ” is a Greek, then Latinized, version of the word “Messiah”, the deliverer promised by God’s prophets for 1,000 years. So, “Jesus Christ” means “Jesus the Savior, the Messiah”. His name is who He is for you and for the world.

   Christmas reminds us that we have all been named with the same name.

   We are a new creation in Jesus Christ. We are “Christ”ians, and have been transformed. We celebrate Christmas as a day that began the salvation of our true selves for which the baby Jesus grew up to die.

   The Christmas message of the angel is the same message to you today, and to everyone you know, in Luke 2:10-11,

10 But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: 11 to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.

   Make this Christmas be the time for you to receive and to proclaim the Good News of restored life that our Savior Jesus Christ was born in order to die so that all people who believe and baptized will receive life in his Name.

   Jesus is the reason for the Season. Jesus has reconnected us to God, the source of eternal life. Alleluia! Live from the inside out in that New Life. Amen!

389 When Is Now

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “When Is Now”, originally shared on December 17, 2025. It was the 389^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 are two ways to say, “When is now”. Which one will you choose this week?

   Christians all over the world will be celebrating the fourth Sunday in the season of Advent this coming Sunday. The word “advent” means coming. It’s a season in which Christians prepare for the celebration of the first advent, Christmas, from “Christ Mass”, and a season to prepare for the second advent, or coming, of Jesus in judgment and restoration.

   Yet, oddly, this Sunday we will be reading the Christmas story.

   Why? Are we impatient children, shaking the wrapped presents under the tree? Has there been so much bad news in our world and in our lives that we can’t wait to hear something good?

   Luke has the longest and most familiar of the four Gospels’ stories of Jesus’ birth. Mark skips it entirely. John is written for a non-Jewish audience and describes the birth in abstract, philosophical terms.

   We’re in the year of Matthew now, though, and Matthew may be somewhat more relatable, but he gives us the barest of bones for the story, in Matthew 1:18-25,

18 Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. 19 Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. 20 But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 22 All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:

23 “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,

and they shall name him Emmanuel,”

which means, “God is with us.” 24 When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, 25 but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

   But why are we proclaiming this story now? We’re still in the season of Advent, the season of preparation and of waiting, not of the event itself, Christmas.

   Maybe reading this lesson in Advent is a concession to an increasingly secular season, a way to get the word out as quickly as possible. Or maybe it’s because we’re not sure if people will come back for worship during the week with family and friends visiting, which seem to trump faith these days. Maybe it’s like when we make Palm Sunday into Palm/Passion Sunday, because we think that people will not come to church on Good Friday.

   Or maybe it is a mistake, an operator error.

   As with the woman who came to the point in her life where her family had grown to where buying Christmas presents for everyone was too much. She couldn’t keep track of what everyone needed or wanted. So, she wrote a stack of checks and filled out a pile of Christmas cards, written to everyone with the message, “This year you can buy your own Christmas present!”.

   She brought them to the family gathering and passed them around.

   Toward the end of the evening, she noticed that people were looking at her kind of funny. Something wasn’t quite right but she couldn’t put her finger on it until she got home and saw, on her writing desk, a neat stack of checks.

   All her family got from her that year was the message, “This year you can buy your own Christmas present!”   😊

   Or maybe it’s because the people who put the Christmas story in during Advent agreed with the a-week-after-Thanksgiving Christmas song from the Broadway musical “Mame”, “We Need a Little Christmas”:

“For we need a little Christmas

Right this very minute,

Candles in the window,

Carols at the spinet.

Yes, we need a little Christmas

Right this very minute.

It hasn't snowed a single flurry,

But Santa, dear, we're in a hurry;”

   Except that it has almost nothing to do with Christmas. We’ll give “carols at the spinet” the benefit of the doubt. But traditions, by themselves, are not Christmas.

   Like with the headline of the article on the satirical website “The Babylon Bee”, “Jesus Kinda Bummed He Was Born on December 25 And Now His Birthday Will Be Overshadowed By Christmas Every Year”. 😊 

   Or maybe this lesson is placed in Advent to bring us a word of hope: redemption is just around the corner. The second coming will come just as the first one did, after God’s people waited for a very long time.

   We are now closer to 2074 than we are to 1974. That’s putting things in perspective!

   Paul gives us a similar wake-up call in Romans 13:11-14,

11 Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; 12 the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; 13 let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. 14 Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

   Paul uses “the flesh” as a technical term referring to those who have not put on the Lord Jesus Christ, those who are not yet Christians.

   He tells those who are Christians to wake up! To start being who they are! To live lives that reflect their status as a New Creation!

   He calls us to live as people living between the two advents.

   We don’t know when Christ will return, therefore we are to be ready at all times.

   I heard of someone saying once, “I live every day as if it were my last. That’s why I never do laundry, because who wants to do laundry on the last day of their life?”

   OK, maybe that’s a bit too literal. 😊

   The second advent of Jesus may come in the next millisecond or in the next millennium, we don’t know. But there is no difference in terms of our preparation. The time to be on alert is right now.

   There are two ways to say, “When is now.”

   The first is as a question, “When is now?” Time is always in motion. As soon as something happens, it is in the past. “Now” is only an abstraction. It never really exists, except as we perceive it. That’s why, in a quote generally attributed to “The Family Circus" cartoonist Bil Keane, it can be said, "Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift—that's why they call it the present,". We celebrate the gift of Jesus with the presents given at Christmas.

   The second is as a statement, “When is now”. To the question, “When will Christ return so that we can be ready?”, the answer is, “Yes”. To God, every moment, as we can conceive of time, is the present. So, we prepare by being ready right now. We prepare on God’s time, not on our time.

   I remember when, a few years ago, a stand-out high school football player had been successfully recruited by USC. He said, at the press conference that followed, “My mama always told us, ‘If you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready.”

   We find strength in the first coming of Jesus as we long for his second coming.

   We stay ready.

   “Advent” means “coming,” and Christians have longed for it from the beginning.

   Near the very end of the last chapter of the last book of the Bible, we see one of the first prayers of the Church, in Revelation 22:20,

20 The one who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.”

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!

   The word “Maranatha” which has roots in ancient Greek and in ancient Aramaic, is familiar to many Christians. It can mean “Our Lord has come!” and it can mean, “Our Lord, come!” It is a reflection of both advents.

   It has been the Church’s prayer from the earliest days of the Church. We are waiting.

   The world has been celebrating a faux Christmas for months now with a frenzy of buying and selling, with pastel-colored harmonies of easy-listening elevator music and Christmas radio, with snowmen where there is no snow, with a baseless and cliché-ridden call for peace on earth, a sad secular holiday, a nostalgia for imagined Christmases past, vapid angels and a whistling in the dark through all the things that Christmas is not.

   We don’t need that kind of Christmas. At all.

   So, here we are in Matthew.

   What we need is an advent. We long for that second advent, the Second Coming of Christ, at least as much as we celebrate His first advent in His birth.

   We pray that that second advent might come as the first one did. And that our hearts may be ready. And that it might come soon.

   Amen. Come Lord Jesus.”