Home        Contact     Meetings     Map        Sermons     Messenger  

There will be signs in the Sun, the moon, the stars and on the earth distress among nations…the roaring of the sea. People will faint from fear of what is coming.

Luke wrote his Gospel some thirty or forty years after Jesus walked this earth.

By that time, it did seem that the end was very near. The stars were still in the sky, but that was about all. The headlines were as bad as they are now.

Jerusalem lay in ruins.

The temple has been destroyed.

The emperor’s favorite pastime was thinking up new ways to kill and torture Christians.

The social order of the day was falling apart for Christians and non-Christians alike.

And we just dedicated this building as our new church home!

Of course we are Lutheran and wasn’t it Luther who, when asked what he would do if the world ended tomorrow, said he would become an arborist and plant a tree?

We are in Advent. Today is the first day of the New Year!

Each new beginning has new hopes. That is why some folk make New Years resolutions on Jan. 1^st

But here we are on Nov. 29^th with left-over Thanksgiving turkey still in the refrigerator and Christmas still 4 weeks away.

Boscovs, JC Penney, Sears, Best Buy, Neiman Marcus promise big discounts, if we clip coupons, get to the store by 4:00 a.m. and are among the first 100 people through the door. And only 2, only 2 per customer.

What is the church thinking reading these “APOCALYPSE Now” passages from the Bible at this cozy family time “of over the river and through the woods to Grandma’s house -- time of year, as we snuggle up with a blanket and dream of a white Christmas.

And it doesn’t get any better. Next week you will hear of a wild man dressed in camel’s hair calling for repentance… and telling us

“Don’t give me this ‘we have Abraham as our ancestor’ as an excuse for your apostasy.

It is not until we get to the Dec. 20^th -- 5 days before Christmas that we hear Mary’s beautiful and haunting hymn known as the Magnificat, and even that has some rather abrasive undertones… so what gives?

Even though each year our calendar starts with Advent, moves to Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter and Pentecost and starts over again the following year… we know that God’s time is not circular, it is linear.

To put into the language of science, it began with a “big bang” and will end when our sun will burn itself out and collapse creating a white dwarf… “puff”.

The Bible teaches that God created this world “ex nihilo” and it will end with a new heaven and a new earth.

Today, we start over while the rest of the world is till stuck with left over turkey and pumpkin pie... and maxed out credit cards from Black Friday.

While we follow a different calendar...

We are reminded in the Psalm, which echoes the OT reading from Jeremiah, who calls us to a new day “When I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel… I will execute justice and righteousness in the land.” Jer.33.14ff.

Some in the adult class were a little surprised when I told them that Advent is not a prelude to Christmas… Advent is a reminder that Jesus has come and will come again.

As the prayer of the day puts it “Stir up your power, Lord Christ, and come…”

All the signs are there – the atmospheric observatory in Hawaii reported last week that the Co2 levels are at an all-time high… that’s not good.

The people in the Andes are losing their glaciers and the people in New Zealand are dodging icebergs from Antarctica. Global Warming is real even if Rush Limbaugh doesn’t think so… the problem with Rush is, he doesn’t think.

In last week's Gospel you heard Pontius Pilate ask Jesus, What is truth?

Today’s Gospel tells us that truth demands a new way of understanding time.

God’s time demands that we are not weighed down with dissipation, drunkenness and the worries of this life. I had to look this one up Dissipation.

1. Overindulgence in the pursuit of pleasure by physical methods...

2. The use or squandering of resources for example, money, fuel, oil, the trees in the equatorial jungles.

You have been listening to a series of lay testimonials on stewardship. Today Jim S. spoke about…

The truth is that God’s word is always the last word. 

The truth is that all of our worrying, fretting, anxiety, all of our dissipation, all of our holding on to the status quo or whatever we are holding onto with so much tenacity

 – be it our money, our liturgy – if you are RC, the Latin one… will not bring us any closer to God.

MLC or any other church or faith community will thrive,

Will have all of its needs met – be that a mortgage payment, salaries, resources to address the needs of the poor… IF we come to the realization that Advent is not about waiting for Christmas.

Advent is about standing on tiptoes looking for Jesus coming into our lives as the Messiah of Righteousness.

And to do that you have to re-order priorities so that Black Friday becomes Good Friday.

Amen