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.