Harbinger!

Text: Luke 1:26-38
Theme: “Harbinger!”
4th Sunday of Advent
December 18, 2011
First Presbyterian Church
Denton, Texas
Rev. Paul R. Dunklau

IN THE NAME OF JESUS


26 In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, 27 to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. 28 The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”
29 Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. 30 But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. 31 You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, 33 and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”
34 “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”
35 The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called[b] the Son of God. 36 Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. 37 For no word from God will ever fail.”
38 “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her.

The words you just heard have become, down through the circling years, the traditional text for today, the Fourth Sunday of Advent. It brings to our ears, hearts, and minds the story of the angel Gabriel’s announcement to Mary, the mother of our Lord.

For many Christians, this selection pulls double duty as it serves as the chief reading for the minor festival called The Annunciation of the Lord. That feast or festival, celebrated in the more liturgical traditions, is observed on March 25th every year. Interestingly, that’s nine months before Christmas Day. Divide nine by three and you get three: a first, second, and third trimester. Today’s selection locates us toward the end of the second trimester of Elizabeth’s pregnancy. Elizabeth, a relative of Mary, was the mother of John the Baptist.

Many congregations use today, the Fourth Sunday of Advent, to have the annual service of Lessons and Carols. That particular service – and a beautiful one it is! -- has a history that springs from the English church. It begins with the lovely bidding prayer which we paraphrased at our “Christmas Traditions” choir concert here at FPC this past Wednesday. Luke 1:26-38 shows up in Lessons and Carols, but, while there is a bidding prayer, there’s no provision for a sermon in that liturgy. As a result, it does stand to reason that the Gabriel and Mary encounter, while read from the Scriptures, is not proclaimed all that much. Today, thankfully, we get to buck the trend and spend a bit more time with this incredible event.We are informed that “God sent” the “angel Gabriel.” So the initiative – the opening “oomph” in this story, if you will – begins with God. Already, this tale bucks the trend.

We like to begin the story with us, and our plans, and our schedules, and our traditions, and our menus, and our shopping lists, and our guest lists, and our errands. “Whoa! Wait a minute,” this text seems to say. Look what’s going on here. “God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee.” No, God didn’t this angel with a personal name (Gabriel) to Rome and the Palatine Hill where the great Caesar surveyed his vast domain. Neither did God send Gabriel to Jerusalem to the great temple built by King David’s son, Solomon, and recently restored by the Herodian dynasty. No, He didn’t send the angel for a meeting with the Jewish Sanhedrin at their next scheduled session. Instead, he chooses Nazareth – nothing short of a little backwoods town in Galilee. If the story took place in Texas in 2011, the town might have been Gainesville or some such place. The town’s on the map. The town has people in it. It even has a nice golf course; I might add. But it’s not where all the action is. That’s what Nazareth was like.

There was a young woman there, a virgin – probably no older than a teenager. We discover that she is engaged to be married. Her fiance’ is named Joseph, and we are informed that he is a direct descendant of King David. He’s got some royal blood in his veins. And there, in that patriarchal, male-dominated society, where women were relegated to the periphery of life or pushed to the margins, something else happened. The angel didn’t just send for Mary to come to where the angel was at. Instead, it says that the angel came to her. The angel, Gabriel, was a dutiful servant. He was just following orders. He cared little for what the mores’ of society were. That’s refreshing to hear about, I say!

This isn’t the first time Gabriel shows up in Holy Writ. Centuries before this get-together in Nazareth, we read of Gabriel explaining to Daniel some visions God had given him about what was yet to come. He must have been good at that, because this is precisely what he’s telling this young woman whose name was Mary. Before the trip to Nazareth, Gabriel was also in Jerusalem, at the great temple, telling the old priest Zechariah that he and his wife, Elizabeth, were going to have a baby. To the extent that Gabriel reports on future events, he is a “harbinger” of things to come (hence, the title to today’s sermon).

Gabriel. What an incredible name it is. It’s a compound word. It comes from the Hebrew gabar (which means to “prevail”) and the Hebrew el, short for elohim, which is the title of God. Literally, his name means “God prevails.” Later, when he told the young woman, Mary, that “nothing is impossible with God”, he was simply being true to his name. This kind of obedience to God’s commands joined to a robust confidence in God’s ability is really quite refreshing to read about in our day and age. Unlike Gabriel, we humanoids tend to pick and choose what, from God, we want to obey, or highlight, and look for confidence in our own abilities to steer our lives or church in the direction we believe it should go. Gabriel is a happy resource against this.

Gabriel starts the conversation with an angelic greeting: “Hail, you who are highly favored. The Lord is with you.” Artists have had fun capturing on canvass what they imagine this scene must have been like. Did Gabriel have human characteristics, or did he appear – as he did in one famous painting – as a flash of bright light. We are not told. Apparently, what he said was far more important than the experience. This, too, is quite refreshing to consider in our day and age. We like to think that a good life, even a godly life or spiritual life, is the sum total of the “experiences” we have had. Marketers and advertisers have a field day in the “holiday season.” They aren’t stupid; they play right into our hand. Everything is geared toward making our Christmas “experience” a warm and special time. Think about that when you’re waiting in the check-out line at Dilliards, or Macy’s, or Best Buy this week! Are you having a “warm and special” experience?

Meanwhile, back in Nazareth, this young woman named Mary freaks out. But it’s not her fear over the presence of the angel. Rather, it’s what the angel said that momentarily stunned her in fear before she could engage her “fight or flight” response. Gabriel, obviously anticipating this, nips the fear in the bud.
Gabriel declares: “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end. “ Someone queue the “Hallelujah Chorus”: “And He shall reign forever and ever.” It’s all going to take root and take wing with this young, peasant girl sitting alone, in her little world, in ordinary, run-of-the-mill Nazareth in Galilee.

Being the sensitive souls that we are or at least claim to be, we would be shocked if we were Mary. We would need time to “process”, as psychologists and therapists like to say, this announcement. We might write it off as due to drinking too much Bacardi 151 in our eggnog the night before. We might scoff and deny and say: “What a bunch of flim-flam and hooey this is.” Or we might burst into mental overdrive: “Oh, my goodness, gracious! I’m going to have a baby!” I like that commercial for Nissan cars. A woman looks at her husband with amazement in her eyes and says: “We’re gonna have a baby!” The husband upon hearing this is momentarily stunned. Then he runs outside, looks at his Nissan 350Z 2-door coupe, and ponders his options. Then he grabs the back bumper and starts to pull, and, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, his pull causes the little car to magically turn into a 4-door Nissan Maxima sedan. Pleased with his work, he says: “We’re gonna have a baby!”

Meanwhile, again back in Nazareth, the virgin Mary simply said what she said. Without over-reacting or under-reacting, and seemingly without any drama, she says: “How will this be since I am a virgin?”

With a precious, wonderful, total lack of drama, she asks the obvious question. Gabriel chimes in with the reply: “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. For no word from God will ever fail.”

Mary’s reply to Gabriel, the harbinger of things to come, is, if I may say, one of the most precious and powerful statements in the entire Bible. We think of precious as being very dear and valuable and fragile. Something dear and valuable and fragile can easily be dispensed with by power which we think is oppressive and aggressive. But here, in Mary’s words, the precious and the powerful combine as one and give us the way to live as children of God and brother’s and sister’s of Mary’s baby boy, the Son of the most high.

Mary says (and I provide a literal translation from the original Greek): “Behold, the servant of the Lord. Let it be to me according to what you have said.” It is not “Let it be to me according to my plans”, not “Let it be to me according to my best hopes”, not “Let it be to me according to my vision of the future, not “Let it be to me according to what my family says, or my politics say, or my government decrees, or my bank account reports, or my physical health dictates.” No, it’s far deeper –and simpler – than any of that. It’s “Let it be to me according to what you have said.”

Mary references nothing – except the Word of God delivered by the angel Gabriel. This, of course, is faith which rests on the Words and promises of God.
How shall it be with us this week, this Christmas? Will it be just another holiday experience like any other? Will we come out of it with more gifts and more debt and more weight? May I suggest an alternative? Hear again the story, so old and ever new, that “Unto you is born a Savior.” And then say: “Behold, the Lord’s servant. Let it be to me according to Your Word.”

Amen.

Advent in 4-D!

Text: 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24
Theme: “Advent in 4-D”
3rd Sunday of Advent
December 11, 2011
First Presbyterian Church
Denton, Texas
Rev. Paul R. Dunklau

IN THE NAME OF JESUS

16 Rejoice always, 17 pray continually, 18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.
19 Do not quench the Spirit. 20 Do not treat prophecies with contempt 21 but test them all; hold on to what is good, 22 reject every kind of evil.
23 May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 24 The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.

At the end of A Christmas Carol, the famous story by Charles Dickens, Ebeneezer Scrooge was a changed man. No longer mean and miserly, he was the epitome of joy and laughter, kindliness and generosity. The ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future had done their work. Dickens wrote, at the very end, that old Scrooge knew how to “keep Christmas well.”

There’s something magnificent about this thought of keeping Christmas well. Luke says of Mary, the mother of Jesus, that she “kept all these things” (the announcement of the angel Gabriel, the holy birth, etc) and “pondered them in her heart.”

The temptation, old yet ever new, is not to keep Christmas. Actually doing that would require the engagement of our minds, hearts, souls, and a certain amount of time. What’s familiar to us about Christmas is really that it’s NOT kept. We may observe it; we may rush through it; we may count down the shopping days until it’s here. But do we really, truly keep it?

I have to confess that I’ve actually “kept” the Advent season this year. For reasons that I’m not entirely convinced of, this time of preparation we call Advent has been particularly meaningful to me in 2011. I’ve benefited greatly from the Advent devotions by O.P. Kretzmann that our Worship Committee has offered. I’ve found myself, for whatever reason, immersed more deeply in the Advent Scripture readings. My prayers have been less scripted and more personal. I didn’t see this coming; I didn’t expect this to happen. Like many of you, I’ve got a lot going on in my life, and I have entertained thoughts of Christmas kind of getting in the way. There were moments when I wanted Advent and Christmas to hurry up and be over with.

Then, a little over a week ago, while lifting a 65 lb dead weight over my head at LA Fitness, a thought occurred to me. It created what actually was a feeling of grief. Somewhere along the line, that sense of childhood wonder had died and I was mourning its loss. My intellect, my mind had glossed over that word of Jesus that we must become like children. And children – like my grandson Noah watching Yo Gabba Gabba on Nickolodeon – have a sense of playfulness and wonder about them. And that becomes amplified at Christmas.

I want that playfulness and wonder back, and I don’t want it to leave anymore. I don’t want to check Christmas off on my long list of things to do and then move on. Like Scrooge, like the mother Mary, like baby Noah, I want to keep Christmas well.
I’ve got a fighting chance for that to happen this year, and I can’t understand why. It’s certainly not due to any hard work – spiritual or otherwise – on my part. Part of the answer, I’m persuaded, lies in circumstance. I’m at a point in life when I’m making some serious decisions about my two oldest daughters who live in Indiana that are both disabled with autism. My father and stepmother, who reside in Nebraska, are now facing the unpleasant realities that their advancing age brings. The foundations of the global economy are nothing if not wobbly. Tens of thousands of dollars that some people are depending on for security in their retirement years can vanish in one day’s trading on Wall Street. Then I look to the Presbyterian Church (USA), the denomination that our congregation is part of, and I see strife and division that diverts it from its mission. Statistically, the membership of many of the old, mainline Protestant denominations is dropping drastically. I look at our congregation and what it has been through in the last ten to twelve years. I’m aware of what many of you, today, are going through as you face the limits of life. Ill health can come on slowly or suddenly. You wonder what the next day – or the next hour! – will bring.

Martin Luther, one of the great reformers, was a busy man. Like many of us, he had a lot going on – so much, in fact, that he once remarked that he needed to spend the first three hours of the day in prayer just to get through what lay ahead.

The best prayers are the ones that flow out from the Word of God. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once remarked, “The Word of God ought to determine our prayer – and not the poverty of our own hearts.” And during this season of Advent, as I’ve found myself once more immersed and bathed in the Scriptures of the season, there has been much to pray about because there have been so many words from God for us to consider.

The Word of God takes on all these circumstances we face, and Advent becomes more than just shopping days before December the Twenty-Fifth!
Advent becomes not one dimensional, not two dimensional, not three dimensional, but four dimensional. The four stands for four words that begin with the letter D: drama, doctrine, doxology, and discipleship.

Drama involves the facts, the story, the narrative: the Messiah was prophesied and prepared for. John the Baptist, as he declared in today’s Gospel, was the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Jesus was born at a certain place and a certain time. He began a public ministry of preaching and teaching and healing. He instituted a Supper, the meal of His new covenant. He was crucified. He rose from the grave bodily. He issued a commission to go into all the nations to baptize and teach. He ascended into heaven. His Spirit was poured out at Pentecost. These are not fractured fairy tales. These are the facts. All of this is the drama.
The second D word is doctrine, and the doctrine – or teaching – is this: You and I are part of the drama. We are part of Christ’s story. His narrative is our narrative. Christ was born for us, lived for us, died for us, rose for us, ascended for us, sent His Spirit for us. Why? Because only God in Christ could do for us what we could not do for ourselves. Why? Because God loved – and loves! – us even when we were God’s enemies.

This leads to the third D word: doxology. Doxology literally means “glory words” or “right praise.” In simple terms, it involves worship. Realizing that the drama is our drama and the teaching that flows from it enlivens shapes our lives, we respond with much, much praise and much, much thanksgiving. We are only too ready, in public worship, to hear the drama and to study the doctrine over and over again. Why? It is because the forces of evil, the world, and our own sinful selves are always trying to distract us – to pull us away from and out of the drama and the doctrine.

So the drama leads to the doctrine. The doctrine leads to the doxology. And the doxology leads to the fourth and final D word: discipleship.
A disciple, quite simply, is a follower and student of Jesus Christ. Discipleship is taking our following and learning right out into the world we live in, into our various callings at home, in our schools, in our places of employment.
This Sunday’s New Testament reading from First Thessalonians is particularly appropriate to this matter of discipleship. We are encouraged to “rejoice always, pray continually, and give thanks in all circumstances.” This encouragement has direct application to the four D words I’ve brought to mind. But especially, it treats discipleship.

Best of all, we are encouraged to rejoice, pray, and give thanks not because they are good ideas, or means to an end, or methods of self-improvement or fulfillment. We are not encouraged to do these things, as Christ’s disciples, so we can have “our best life now.” There’s only one reason for us to do these things –and it is right there in the text: it is God’s will for us in Christ Jesus.

You see, that’s the reference point; that’s the North Star. It’s not our own circumstances – good, bad, or ugly. It’s not our own dramas or stories. Jesus didn’t come to simply give us insights or principles for holy living, or to help us write a better script for the movie of our lives. Jesus came, as He Himself said, to “seek and to save the lost.”

If I focus only on myself, I’m lost. I can’t find my way. My heart is impoverished and filled with evil. I’m the black sheep gone astray. I’m dead in my trespasses and sins. Put a fork in me; I’m done. But when I look to Christ and what He has done for me in His advent, birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension, I find that I’m part of the greatest story ever told. I’m strengthened in this when I hear the Gospel of God and I recall the baptism that sealed me into God’s story. And then I get to partake of the bread and the cup, the body and the blood of Christ, as a foretaste of that great banquet I’m going to enjoy with you when my life’s journey ends and I’m at home with God and with you.

Drama, doctrine, doxology, and discipleship! Don’t miss this for the world!

Amen.

The Dragnet Gospel

Text: Mark 1:1-8
Theme: “The Dragnet Gospel”
2nd Sunday of Advent
December 4, 2011
First Presbyterian Church
Denton, Texas
Rev. Paul R. Dunklau

IN THE NAME OF JESUS

1 The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah,[a] the Son of God,[b] 2 as it is written in Isaiah the prophet:
“I will send my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way”[c]—
3 “a voice of one calling in the wilderness,
‘Prepare the way for the Lord,
make straight paths for him.’”[d]
4 And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5 The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River. 6 John wore clothing made of camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. 7 And this was his message: “After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. 8 I baptize you with[e] water, but he will baptize you with[f] the Holy Spirit.”

In this new church year, only over a week old, the majority of the Gospel lessons that are slated for Sunday morning will come from the Gospel according to Mark. For you lectionary buffs, we are in Series B of the Revised Common Lectionary. For those of you who like to – or have to -- live fast-paced lives, zipping from one thing to another, then you will thoroughly enjoy Mark’s Gospel and its prominence in Series B. It is the shortest; it gets finished in sixteen chapters. For example, you could leave church, go to your Sunday brunch, and finish reading Mark all before the Cowboys game at 3:15 in Arizona this afternoon! How about that! The word “immediately” shows up over forty times – “immediately” Jesus did this, or “immediately” they did that. You can almost get a good cardio workout reading Mark; as you read the narrative, you barely catch your breath before you’re off doing the next thing. And I’m sorry to disappoint you, but there’s no Christmas story in Mark. (You’ll have to read Matthew and Luke for that; John gives a kind of interpretation of the Christmas story.) You know, there may be folks – more than likely grown-ups -- who are entirely okay with that. Christmas can be a time of ramped up expectations that are almost impossible to meet. The “holiday season”, as our culture likes to call it, does seem to put peoples’ lives on steroids.

In public worship, we read our Gospel lessons from the NIV (New International Version) translation which is in your pew. The Presbyterian Church (USA) tends to prefer the NRSV (New Revised Standard Version) translation which is not quite as literal -- or, I should say, faithful to the original text – as the NIV. Today’s reading is given on page 1045. Now the NIV, generally speaking, is pretty accurate in its translation from the original Greek language. However, they slip up a bit – right off the bat – in the first verse of this morning’s text. It reads: “The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God.” A direct translation from the Greek would read a smidge differently: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The word “Christ” and the word “Messiah” are interchangeable; they mean the same thing, so there’s really not a problem there. But we must note that the good news is not about Jesus Christ (as the NIV puts it). It is the good news OF Jesus Christ. In other words, the good news belongs to Him. It’s not just “about” Him. It is entirely possible for churches, including our own, to talk about Jesus constantly while never getting around to actually proclaiming His message, the good news that belongs to Him.

The Greek term at the heart of things is Evangeliou. Evangeliou, literally translated into English, is “evangel”, or “blessed message”, or “good news”, or “gospel”. They’re all interchangeable terms. From evangeliou we derive the English word “Evangelical.” Now, this term “Evangelical” has a history. It gained traction during the Reformation era in the days of Calvin and Luther. Then, it meant what it said. But, unfortunately and sadly, the term now has negative connotations. Nowadays, an “Evangelical” is considered to be something of a religious fanatic, a right-wing ideologue, a social conservative, a fundamentalist. It’s rather sad that we’ve twisted this term into something that it, by definition, is not. If words still mean things, then an “Evangelical” is someone who is of and about the Gospel. He or she has received, believed, and endeavors to live out the Gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ.

Mark starts not with the basics of the evangeliou or the “principles of God’s Word” as we might say, Mark starts with the beginning! And the beginning points to that Advent prophesy of Isaiah: “I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way, a voice of one calling in the desert, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for Him.’”

The Gospel begins with preparation, and that preparation is embodied in the one we know as John the Baptist. There he stands at a certain place (the desert region around the Jordan River) and at a certain time (nearly two thousand years ago). He, too, has a message: a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

Certain messages catch on – as do the messengers that bring them. Such is the case with John the Baptist, the great preacher of the Advent season. We are told, by Mark, that “The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River.” As John saw it, a “Don’t ask; don’t tell” policy toward sin was not in the cards. The option, rather, was to confess their sins, to “come out of the closet” with them, to come clean. John’s preaching was heavy on the Law of God. It convicted them of their sins. But instead of holding on to them, instead of attempting yet again to try and deal with them on their own, John gave the option of confessing them.

This past week I took a road trip to Nebraska to see my folks. On the way up and on the way back down, I became something of a student. I listened to a number of podcasts. One podcast, The Whitehorse Inn, featured Michael Horton, a professor at Westminster Seminary in California. He was interviewing a gentleman who is the pastor of The Protestant Church of Smyrna in Turkey. Turkey is largely, if not exclusively, a Muslim country, and they aren’t allowed to call it a church. They have to call it a “club.” Thus, officially, the church is called “The Protestant Church of Smyrna ‘Club’”. In the interview, the pastor related how he, a former Muslim, came to faith in Jesus Christ. It took a long time. He related his experience that it takes quite awhile for others to convert as well.

The most fascinating part of the interview was when the pastor told of a Muslim gentleman who started attending the Protestant Church of Smyrna “club” and began reading the Bible. The pastor guided him through a set of readings undertaken over a period of time. Much later, the man came in to share something of a confession. It turns out, initially, that he had a hidden agenda. He told the pastor that his real goal, at the outset, was to read the Bible in order to show how corrupt it is. “Did you find any corruption?” the pastor asked. “Yes,” the man said, “but I didn’t find it in the Bible.” “Where did you find it?” replied the pastor. “In my own heart,” the man said.

Something happened to that man. Basically, the message of John the Baptist rang true. He understood himself convicted of sin. The beginning of the Gospel, the preparation for the Gospel, worked. He confessed the corruption of his heart. The path was straightened; the rough place was made plain. He heard – and believed! – the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who was put to death for his sins and raised from the grave for his justication. The entire trajectory of his life changed as the gospel of Jesus, the good news of forgiveness, began to dawn on him and take root.

John the Baptist, who stands right there at the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, did not, like some religious figures did then and do now, toot his own horn. He didn’t found an organization called “John the Baptist Ministries” that you could support and become a part of for a love gift of $100 or more!

His job – his vocation, his calling, if you will – was to point away from himself to Jesus Christ. Mark says that “This was his message: ‘After me will come one more powerful than I, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.’”
Read through Mark’s Gospel before the Cowboys game and you’ll involve yourself with something of a newspaper report – a narrative that gives you the facts about Jesus and His good news. And here we mark one of the differences between Christianity and all other religions. Every religion gives you teachings, and from those teachings you can derive principles. Such principles, it is said, are designed to help you lead a transformed life, a more fulfilling life, a more contented and happy life. They assist you on the path toward self-actualization – or something like that.
But then comes Christianity. Better yet, then comes Christ with His good news. And what is it based on? Facts! It is founded on such historical events as these: Christ was born! Christ died! Christ was risen! Christ instituted a mission to baptize into and teach the world His good news. In His Supper that He actually inaugurated in history, His presence is still among us to seal the gifts of faith and forgiveness and life and love to us all.

In this advent season, think for a moment about the advent of television. Its history has included many programs devoted to law and order and police work. Think of, yes, Law and Order, or Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. Then you have Hawaii Five-0 – both past and present. Some of you will remember T.J. Hooker and the Streets of San Francisco. Then there’s that program that was called Dragnet. It featured the actor Jack Webb playing a character – a police detective – named Joe Friday. He would interview witnesses to a crime, and sometimes the witnesses would go off on some tangent. He would have to get them back on track. He would say, “Just the facts, ma’am.”

Like the witnesses we are, we, too, can get off on tangents. But we have a world that is asking about – and, dare I say, desperately needs – the facts. Only the Gospel of Jesus Christ delivers! Only the Gospel makes Christmas truly what it is. Only in the Gospel do you tap the power of God unto salvation! It is exactly what it says it is: Good News!

Amen.

THE GRATIA INFUSA AWARD!!!

Your friends at THE STRAIGHTFORWARD PULPIT are proud to announce that an annual award has been established. Entitled The Gratia Infusa Award, the recognition honors, posthumously, individuals who have made significant, ongoing contributions to the advancement of American Religion*. The name of the inaugural honoree will be announced, annually, on the Second Sunday of Advent.

Speculation is sure to abound, but, for now, take a look at the photo above. This is an image of our first recipient. See if you can guess who it might be, and reply via response to this post or on our editor's wall (Paul Dunklau) on Facebook. The first to guess correctly wins a venti Peppermint Mocha Latte at Starbucks!

*=note that "American Religion" is NOT synonymous with historic Christianity.