(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “When Is Now”,
originally shared on December 17, 2025. It was the 389th 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?
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.
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.”
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