In Him There is No Darkness At All

Glad Advent, Friends—

From the vault for you brood of vipers, I have a conversation I shared with my mentor and muse, Fleming Rutledge, back in Advent 2021.

Here is her closing prayer:

Thank you Lord Jesus for these promises, for these assurances. For these...it's not just an invitation, it's an assurance Lord. I hear you making...

Your voice known to all who will listen and sometimes to people who won't listen because you have that power. Speak today, tomorrow night, Christmas Day. Speak, speak Lord.

Come close to us. Shake us out of our disbelief, our lethargy, our depression. bring us, O Lord, into your light and let the festivities of the season point us to you, to your glory, the glories of your righteousness and wonders of your love.

Let us know you, Lord Jesus. Love you, come to you, seek you, and find you.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Amen.

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Here’s a rough transcript:

Fleming, it is a delight to have you on the podcast again. We heard from thousands of listeners demanding that you return. And so having you on again is an early Christmas gift. And we are talking the day before Christmas, which puts us during the week focused on hell during Advent, right before the light dawning on Christmas Eve.

The world seems a pretty dark place in many cases. I know many churches in my area have decided not to have in-person Christmas Eve services after all. Oh, no. There's all sorts of climate change stories in the news. Inflation is up. The January 6th committee has grim news every day. It's...

This Christmas seems darker than normal. And so I wonder, this has been a major theme in your preaching and writing. And so I wonder what thoughts you have this year.

Jason, I couldn't agree more with your assessment of the situation that we're in. I was alive during World War II, much too young to really understand the gravity of the situation, but it's hard for me to imagine a darker time in my sentient lifetime than we are in now. I have highlighted in my thinking three areas in which I think we are in great, great danger. So I will have those sort of at the forefront of my mind as we talk. And the first is climate change. And I will say that as a lifelong, well, adult life anyway, an adult lifelong convert to the importance of doing something rescue our planet from the ravages we've wrought upon it. I speak with considerable background when I say that the article that shook me up the most in the last two weeks was the front page article in the New York Times about the Ant-Octid current and how vital it is to the Earth and how disturbed it is. That shook me up more than any other single story.

And just our general heedlessness is almost indescribable. A lot of us recycle and a lot of us are careful about what we buy, but the greater forces that are at work among us are stronger than we are as little individuals. So climate change, number one. Number two, racial division. I'm so grieved about this because the black church can be faulted for many things as all church groups can be, but they continue to produce people who are released from prison after 20 or 30 years of being incarcerated for crimes they did not commit and they come out in a state of forgiveness. Now I just don't understand that. That is a miracle homage to the black church for the fact that we are not all cowering in our closets for fear of being shot by a rebellious force. I just don't understand how the black community goes on being so focused on redemption, but they do. And then third, the whole matter of truth.

Never in my lifetime have I ever heard people talking about your truth and my truth. And now we hear this all the time. So-and-so is going to speak their truth. He is going to speak his truth, as though the truth were simply an individual matter for self-determination. This is preposterous and it's scary. Yeah. And the whole matter of something…some huge percentage of Republicans are said to believe that Biden was not elected. I find that hard to believe, but I keep reading it again and again. And the whole QAnon conspiracy and all the related conspiracies that we're hearing about, just the mindset. It's the mindset that's so frightening because once a whole group of people is persuaded that there are various types of conspiracies.

That's an intoxicating idea. People like that feeling that they know about a conspiracy. And it's very, very difficult to convince people. That's a form of narcissism. Oh, good point, Jason. Yes, we know the secret. We are part of the inner circle who know. That's what narcissism is. Good for you. That is a great insight. I hadn't thought of it that way.

And that's been the enemy of the Christian faith since day one. As we know from reading some of the epistles, Gnosticism was there at the beginning. And the conspiracy theories are very much like that. They confer status on those who are in the know. And I don't mean to sound contemptuous of that because I know people that I like personally who are into conspiracy theories. And it dismayes me because it's very hard to argue with them.

Yeah, I think I read this. This is the 30th anniversary of this is the 30th anniversary of JFK, the Oliver Stone's JFK film, actually. The 30th anniversary of what? Oliver Stone's movie, JFK. Oh, which I have never seen, but I gather it's full of conspiracies. Isn't that right? Yes. Yes. Yeah, it was founded on a whole conspiratorial idea, as I recall. Yes, he was fond of that. So those three.

The categories, climate, race, and truth are just three that I would like to highlight as being not unique to our time, but uniquely rampant and dangerous. I've been reading a biography of, the biography of Alexander Hamilton, and it's eerie how many echoes there are in the very, very early days of our republic of the kinds of things that are happening now and how alarmed Hamilton, especially, but other founders, were about the shaky foundations of our democracy. It's eerie to read today these pages. And when we think of the triumph of our Constitution over the last 200 plus years and think that all of a sudden we're not so sure that it will hold.

I didn't pay any attention to those, to people who said that at first, but when I started reading about all this redistricting and just the fact that Congress people now feel that they have the right to insult each other and refer to each other as liars, I never thought I would see that day. So it's a...

And then there's another factor. And yeah, I'm speaking directly, I think, to most of your listeners, if that's what a podcast person is. We are, I guess, mostly Christian believers or would-be believers or hoping to be believers or considering the possibility of being believers. And presumably many of you listening congregations or some kind of Christian community. I hope you are anyway. And the church can do so much more than it's doing to testify to the light in the midst of this darkness. And so I hope in the minutes we have to talk about how Jesus is light and how the Christmas message teaches us that how we can pay more attention than we usually do to what it means to say that Jesus is light, the light, the light that lightens every man, I'm quoting the King James, sorry, the light that lightens every man and woman and child. Oh, my goodness. I'm starting to get lost.

I was just going to raise a quote from the Epistle of James where we read that, in him there is no darkness at all. Maybe we could just hold that for a minute. In him there is no darkness at all. I think that we all need to think deeply, and by all I mean Christians of all stripes, need to be thinking, rethinking that we are related to Jesus Christ. I had a visitor from England, Sarah Yardley, last week, and she speaks openly of loving Jesus. And I was struck by that because I don't hear that all that often. Maybe I'm in the wrong circles. The direct way of speaking of love for Jesus grabbed me and I think we need to think more about loving Jesus and loving our love for Jesus. Excuse me, Jason? Is it in the friendly beef carol that refers to Jesus as our brother, strong and good? I'm not sure. Tell me. I know it's in one of the carols that refers to Jesus as our brother. I can't recall which...

Well, I can't at the moment either. I've got some carols to refer to here, but that one I don't remember that one. But I'm sure you're right, of course, but I just can't pull it up. She spoke of how she's one of seven children, Sarah Yardley. And she said, we all love each other and we all love Jesus. And that simple statement struck me. I wonder how many of us do talk just in a simple way about loving Jesus.

I wonder if I do. I wonder if I talk about that enough. I think my grandmother, who I talk about all the time, and her daughter, Mary B, I talk about them because they are the ones who taught me to love Jesus. If it hadn't been for them, in my very youngest years, three, four, five, six, I don't think I would have had this feeling of Jesus as a real, live person, the way I do.

And I think it's because they talked about him as a real living, present person who could be loved and who loved me. And I think we need to talk more in that way. Because Christian says…is about perceiving his living presence.

Day in and day out, throughout darkness, throughout perplexity, throughout danger. I didn't even mention the coronavirus. The coronavirus is such a blunt instrument of Satan. He keeps changing its shape and popping up here and popping up there. And we think we have a handle on it and we don't. It's really devilish didn't even mention that. We will probably get through the plague eventually, although they say it'll always be with us like the flu. But there's not as much that we can do about that as there is that I think we can do about the climate. I think there's a lot we can do about the climate, and we're not doing it. I think there's a lot we can do about the truth. I think there's a lot we can do about racial division.

And I think the churches need to be the front line. And I just don't see it happening. I think people, church leaders, are afraid of digging deeply into these crises unless it's just done. I don't want to be misunderstood here. I started to say superficial. And I don't mean that. I mean if a church, for instance, if a congregation goes all out for combating climate change. That's a good thing, a very good thing. But the trouble is that churches who essentially present as being various, as being in favor of various initiatives, whether it's Rainbow Coalition or climate change or Black Lives Matter, all these are important

But when the churches present themselves to the world as being essentially social agencies, who's talking about loving the living Lord? Jesus is not just a man who happened to be more religiously and spiritually gifted than other human beings. He was God incarnate.

He was the living Word of God tabernacling among us.

And I'd like to call attention to the hymns and carols of Christmas, because I don't have hearing anymore. But my hearing is so distorted now that I can't listen to music at all, which is a terrible affliction, I can tell you. But the only time I do listen to music in my car, I have a couple of recordings of Christmas carols. And I put them on in the car. And instead of listening to them, sing them loudly so as to drown out the discordant sounds coming from the disc. And I do know all the words, and because I know all the words, I can focus on the words and what they mean, and it just jumps out at me over and over and over again these wonderful words. For instance, in the bleak midwinter, Christina Rossetti, who was a deeply faithful Christian woman.

She writes this verse, our God, heaven cannot hold him, nor earth sustain. Heaven and earth shall flee away when he comes to reign. The hymn begins in the bleak midwinter, this baby is born, and we listen always, I think, to the first verse. Most of us know the first verses of all these songs.

But it's in the second, third, fourth, and fifth, and sixth verses that the deep theology comes out over and over and over again. And I'd like to urge everyone who might be listening at this time of year to pay attention to all the words of these carols. For instance, everybody I think who knows anything about English church music knows the hymn once in Royal David's...because it's the one that the boy soprano always sings at the outset of the Christmas carol service, and everyone is oohing and awing about how adorable he is and how he didn't know he was supposed to be singing until the last minute and all that kind of thing. And so they know the first verse, Once in Royal David's City, but they don't listen or know to listen to the words of the last two verses. I'd like to read them.

There are three or four or five, there's four verses about the birth and the wonder of the birth. And then the fifth and the sixth verses, which are very short, go like this. And our eyes at last shall see him through his own redeeming love. For that child who seems so helpless is our Lord in heaven above. And he leads his children on to the place where he has gone.

Not in that poor, lowly stable with the oxen standing round shall we see him, but in heaven, where his saints his throne surround, Christ revealed to faithful eye, set at God's right hand on high." Now that's an amazing, just as I read it I was thinking, this is amazing. This little ditty that people think belongs to children's choirs ends with this eschatological vision. And it takes aim almost at the stable and the oxen. Not literally, of course, but I mean it just says, look, if you're looking at the stable and the crush and the oxen and all that, just remember we're going to see him in heaven at God's right hand on high.

Friends in Christ, always to be reminded and to remind others that this is what we see. Now, that doesn't mean that we skip over the wonder of the incarnation. But too many sermons that I hear, at least at Christmas time, stop there. They talk about the wonder of babyhood.

Christmas service in a famous church and a preacher started the sermon by telling the story of the birth of his own child. And it was very elaborate and very long. And it was just very disappointing because there was no elevated Christology in it. It was just about babyhood and how precious it is, which it is, of course. I love babies. I'm crazy about babies.

But to stop there is to rub that Christmas Eve audience.

of the majesty and glory that has been born among us. There is no darkness in him at all. He was born into darkness and the darkness has not overcome him, cannot overcome him so that when we go out of the church, into the dark, we shouldn't go out carrying this notion that a precious little baby was born and there were nice animals and shepherds. That's all true. I love the story, but the story is told by the evangelists in the service of the greater message. And that reminds me of...one of the most remarkable verses in the Christmas music. Let me see. I'm looking for it. Oh, yes, I think most people know the first Noel. And I remember as a child liking the idea of going up high in the last repetition of the word Noel. I'm not trying to try to sing it.

But that was kind of a fun thing. It was like waiting for the high note of, oh, holy night. So the First Noel is pretty popular. And I think almost everybody knows the chorus, maybe the first verse. But listen to this last verse of the First Noel. Then let us all, with one accord, sing praises to our heavenly Lord that has made heaven and earth of naught and with his blood mankind has bought." Now just imagine that if everyone who was singing the first Noel really paid attention to the last verse, a lot of people would have to stop singing because they just don't believe that. But others might be someone to understand what it is we are celebrating. Now let's do this again.

Sing praises to our heavenly Lord that hath made heaven and earth of naught." Now that can mean two different things. It means that heaven and earth, which are part of the creation, are really, in a sense, nothing because He is the one who holds creation, heaven and earth, at His will. And so, compared to the...everlasting being of God, Heaven and Earth, or not much. But it meant something even more profound. It means that He made Heaven and Earth of nothing, of naught. The famous doctrine of creation ex nihilo, creation out of nothing, which is stated so magnificently by Paul in Romans 4. I'm not going to be able to quote it right now. This is my age showing. But at the end of that, in Romans, you can.

Well, no, I was. So since you were quoting Christmas carols, I was reading, I was reading a church dogmatics recently and I came across Bart quoting a Christmas carol that I'd never heard of by Paul Gerhart. And it goes, thy love, O Lord, before my birth, thou did elect to show me and for my sake did come to earth before I erred did know thee, yea long before thy gracious hand created me.

Thy grace had planned to make Thee mine forever.

Paul Gerhardt must have been one of the great hymn writers of all time. I wish we had more of his work. Maybe he's in the Lutheran hymn more than he is in ours. I only became aware of Paul Gerhardt fairly recently, but he must have been one of the very best. Of course, it always loses a lot in translation, but that's a good, that's a great example of the way that he apparently, from what I've been able to pick up is able to bring the deepest theology into these simple verses. I would like to remind everyone that for those who will be in church on Christmas Eve, and I don't know how many people will be able to do that, but for those who are all who are worshiping online, most services, at least in the circles I move in, are singing, Oh come all ye faithful at the beginning of the service. And for those like Episcopalians who sing all the verses. There's so much, there's Nazian doctrine in the, in, oh come all ye faithful, begotten, not created. Now people sing that and they don't know what they're saying because they haven't had a chance to be taught or learn it. Jesus is begotten, not created, that's a way of saying this is the Son of God. He was not a creature of God. He is God, therefore unbegotten. And that's a sophisticated point that was made in the early Church fathers, but it's just as important today as it was then that Jesus is not a creation of God or derived from God in some way. He was God in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

That's the lesson for Christmas Day, Christmas Morning, Christmas for grownups. But one of my favorite themes for Christmas is I don't know who said this. I don't know whether it was Bart or someone way, way, way back before Bart in the early centuries. That Christmas is the feast of the Nativity dogma.

Now of course that's terrifying to most people, but very off-putting at the very least. But when it's expounded...

It's the greatest news that we have ever heard or ever will hear, that God himself has become part of our story in such a world as this. Now that's a line that I just love from the hymn. It's not a hymn, it's more of a carol. Let's see, it's from the winter snow, something about winter snow. Let's see. I've not got it here. I think I can remember it.

The song is called, Be Amidst the Winter Snow. It's on a lot of the English choir carol service albums. And it has this one line that arrests me every time I hear it about how Jesus was born into such a world as this. The rest of the carol is just typical sort of Christmas sea atmosphere. But when it says, born into such a world as this, that brings us, that snaps us back into the darkness in which we must live. This is a world in which we hate each other, tell lies to each other, deceive each other, ravage our planet, divide each other up

Such a world is this, a world in which an innocent person can serve 20 or 30 or 40 years in prison, a world in which the living Son of God is tortured to death in public. Such a world is this.

That's what Advent teaches us, to look at this world and understand the forces of darkness that operate in it.

I was reading this morning about how there have been several initiatives in housing codes to build shelters in the middle of large industrial operations like Amazon's warehouses, where if there's a tornado, people can be sheltered and saved. And the point of the article is that this has been brought up over and over.

But it isn't ever done because it costs too much money. And the companies want to save money. And so these life-saving measures, which is not all that expensive, apparently, only $15,000 to create a shelter, is deemed to be not important. That's just built into the way we operate. It's all about money. It's all about getting the most money out of whatever the situation is that we possibly can. And this is the way business operates for the most part, with some rare exceptions. Same thing with the homeless shelters in New York City, which are mostly run by some other man who is considered the worst landlord in New York City, but he runs all the shelters for the city. It makes sense of that, if you will. It's crazy. It's insane.

It doesn't take much looking to see how much we are in the grip of forces that are greater than we are. This is what Jesus came to suffer. Excuse me, go ahead, please. No, so you're a Calvinist. How would you think or preach about God's providence at Christmas time? Because it does feel as though the world is out of...control.

Well, this is where...

eschatology is so crucial.

Christian faith really requires us, in the last analysis, to hold on to the promise, the promise of God Himself.

That there will come a new day and the city of God will come down from heaven and that God will make his home among human beings and there will be no night there. And there will be no need of any sun for the Lord himself will be their sun. I'm sort of struggling to recover some of the wonderful phrases in the book of Revelation.

Eschatology, a shorter word for it, an easier word, is simply the word promise. And I, over and over and over, recommend to people who are interested, every sermon should contain a promise.

Christmas is a promise. Epiphany coming is a promise. Isn't it something that Epiphany is January 6? From now on, January 6 is going to always be known as the time, the day in which an insurrection occurred in the United States Capitol, January 6, the feast of the Epiphany. And yet Epiphany continues to be a feast of Christ's glory, a feast day in which the promise of God holds stronger than any human reality, any human reality. And the only guarantee that we have of that is faith in the crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord and our love for the man Jesus who undertook to make this journey through such a world as this even unto death and abandonment and degradation, humiliation, torture, and the tomb, and raised again on the third day, and never to die again. And death shall have no dominion over him, or over those who belong to him.

I don't know who belongs to him in terms of unbelievers and people who don't know and people who've never heard. I don't know about them because God knows that. But what I do know is that Jesus has promised to those who believe him and believe in him. He has promised the life of the city of God. And you know, one of the famous…

One of the most important themes of the Epiphany season, which begins on January the 6th, is the wedding at Cana. Apparently, not only did Jesus enjoy going to dinners, he went to a lot of dinners, we know that. And he invited his disciples to have dinner with him on the night before he was betrayed, the night that he was betrayed.

But not only that, apparently he also wanted people to have a good time. And he wanted them to have fine wine to drink. And all of this, I think, is reminiscent of the passage in Isaiah where it is promised that God will lay out a feast for his people and the wine will never run out. So when we think about it,

The promise that lies within the Christian message, we think of the adult Jesus working this miracle of the wine at the wedding and it ends this way, the story. And his disciples saw this first sign that Jesus did and they believed in him. They could see that Jesus...held the power of the promise that when he promised something he could make it happen, and that he will make it happen, that he will lay a feast, that will last forever and that he will invite all those who love him into that feast in the middle of the night.

The bridegroom cometh. The great cry at the beginning of Advent, wake, awake, the night is flying. The watchman on the height is crying. Awake, Jerusalem, arise. All of that is present in the Christmas message. And those who have truly observed Advent will appreciate it so much more, and will be strengthened to look ahead to what lies ahead of us, God knows. Every sermon should contain that promise. We're not just talking about wishful thinking here. We're talking about God Almighty in the person of this infant that comes to us incognito. He's still incognito. But those who know Him and love Him...

Recognize, at least from time to time.

Recognize in others who love him. We know him. We knew him. We know him. We wait for him. We trust him.

We love Jesus. We trust Jesus. We wait for Jesus Christ. He will come again.

And in the meantime, he is with us.

In this present darkness.

But I don't want to end there. I want to return to the theme of what the church is called to do and be. I don't think we're doing a very good job of it except in little small nooks and crannies. I think about the church during World War II, the church in Czechoslovakia, the church in East Germany, or just Germany, or East Germany during the communist regime, the church in India today.

That today is on the front page of the New York Times. Christians are being ruthlessly persecuted in India. But on the other hand, in Hungary and in Poland, where Roman Catholicism is a sort of state religion, state religion is holding itself up as a deity greater than God himself.

So we've got two churches here. We've got the martyr church and we've got the dictatorial church, the tyrannical church, the church that oppresses and suppresses and tells lies and won't tell the truth. I just don't know what the answer is about the American church because it's

It seems to be a choice between churches which are founded almost entirely on social gospel ideas without a corresponding Christology and churches which have no social justice concerns whatsoever but concentrate on individual something. I'm not sure what it is. It certainly doesn't surprise me as real love for Jesus. It's

Or love or knowledge of the Bible, it certainly appears to have something to do with Jesus and the Bible, but I don't recognize it. And in the middle, then, we have all my friends, and probably, you know, I'm not in the ministry, I'm not in active ministry anymore, so it's easy for me to talk, but I have so many dear friends and younger pastors and...faithful laypeople who talk to me and nobody seems to quite know what to do because we don't want to alienate people and drive them out of our congregations and we don't want to lose our family members and our friends who will sit up in the middle of the table and start talking about you know who. I shouldn't have said that but I do think that something was sick in the United States before Donald Trump became the president. And he had an evil genius for milking that, drawing it out. And he continues to have this power, and it has taken hold. And that's why we have so many people openly talking about overthrowing the country, the democracy, and openly talking about insurrection, because the church just doesn't even know what to do.

Except for a very few courageous people. What are you doing, Jason? I know you, Jason. I know that you are preaching substantively. You can put that out on this podcast. This podcast is substantive and I know you're doing something. So you can't edit that out. You have to keep that in. So, Funding, imagine, let's say that you are preaching on Christmas Eve to a congregation full of preachers and church leaders.

What would you preach to them? Well, I would do what I always do, because I have no help within myself for this. I would select a text or be selected by a text from scripture. Probably not the Nativity story. Probably some passage.

I always avoid Luke because of something you said in an earlier podcast to me. What did I say? That I should preach on Christmas Eve and avoid the Nativity story. Well actually, I do love the first three chapters of Luke and I recommend to everyone Raymond Brown's book, The Birth of the Messiah, which is quite a chunk of reading, but it is a wonderful commentary on Luke's story but it's a three-chapter story and all the part about Zechariah and Gabriel and Elizabeth and the whole thing, the whole three chapters is very important. It has the most wonderful atmosphere and it includes the purification of the presentation. Those chapters are really wonderful. If they can preach theologically then go for it by all means, but I just think it's very chapters theologically on Christmas Eve, because the sermon can't be too long. I think I would pick something from the traditional Christmas readings from the epistles, maybe. But something about how this, look, people, this is God. We are not talking here about religious feelings and sentimental hopes. We are not talking about...

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas. I heard this long program this morning while I was doing my exercises on Irving Berlin's song. And it was interesting to hear. It was all about nostalgia. And that was why it was such an important, and why it's been such an incredibly popular song for so long, because it milks nostalgia. The church cannot afford to be nostalgic. And that's why I think preaching on Christmas Eve can be very, well I started to say it can be very challenging, but it can also be extremely exciting for the preacher to reject nostalgia. I have this old box from, I think it's Land's End. It came with some Christmas present in it and it's several years old and it says something to the effect that the only thing I want for Christmas is just make me a child again just for tonight. To be a child again just for tonight maybe other people feel that way. I don't want to be a child again. I mean, I'd like to live my 20s and 30s over. I would love to live my 20s and 30s over, but I don't want to be a child running around on Christmas Eve. I want to be a grown-up understanding what's happened. What has happened in history?

That God has done. God has done something that we can point to and identify as His unique work. God the Creator has entered the creation. This is incredible. There isn't any other story like this in the world. There are stories about God coming to earth, but that's not the same thing. That's why the theology is so important. We have to focus on the

Let's see, oh come all ye faithful, God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not created. A lot of churches omit that verse, but that's the most important verse. That's what makes the whole hymn. And it was originally a Latin hymn, so it was in all those beautiful Latin phrases, but it's fine in English. God of God, light of light, very God, a very God begotten, not created. Oh, come let us adore Him." That's very exhilarating. I want people to know I would like the preachers to let... It's not what I would like, never mind what I would like. I think the church needs to hear preachers say, come let us adore Him because...

This baby is the Word of God incarnate. And the Word of God is living and active sharper than a two-edged sword piercing through the core of joints and marrow. And as God says in Isaiah, my word shall not return to me empty. Preachers, remember that. My word shall not return to me empty. It shall accomplish that for which

I have purposed it, says the Lord. If you're preaching strictly, not strictly, that sounds too disagreeable. If you're preaching ardently, ardently from the Word of God itself and not from your own ideas or what the society is telling you should be saying, if you are preaching warmly from the living Word of God itself, something will happen to you.

Something will happen to you as you preach. You should expect that. You should expect to be converted by your own preaching. I mean that quite literally. A lot of preachers have said that, that they were converted or reconverted by their own preaching because the Word became alive. I'm gesturing wildly as I say this. The Word becomes alive in spite of us. It

In spite of us. It's not our possession. It escapes from us. But only if we stay close to our text and not start embroidering it with a lot of personal notions or illustrations that go on too long and that are not really illuminating. I guess I just want to say over and over, commit yourself to the gospel.

Ask God before you start writing the sermon. Ask God to be present with you, to write it for you, so to speak, to allow you to be a vessel. Oh, Lord, make me a vessel. Make me a vessel tonight for your grace, your mercy, your creative power, your promise, now in the time of this moral life. In such a world as this, in the darkness, has not overcome the Word of God. I remember… You talked about loving Jesus and being loved by Jesus. I'm wondering, at this time in your life, how do you feel loved by Jesus?

Well, I certainly don't feel it in a vacuum. I feel it when I hear other people talking that way. I feel it when I read the scriptures with real attention, which I'm not necessarily all that good at, because my attention is so scattered now.

I feel it when I'm talking to you in this podcast and knowing that people will listen to it. I feel it as though it were a personal presence working through me that doesn't belong to me. Jesus, His love, His conquering love, the way He addressed every single individual with profound understanding of who they were and what he gives them.

It just blows the mind. I keep thinking if only people could understand the depth of the way he interacted with people and see themselves as the various people he spoke to and walked with and taught, we can see ourselves in all of these people, male and female, young and old, believers and unbelievers.

We sense Him, a real person who is alive. Jesus is alive. That's the message.

I wish we could hear that so much more from the pulpit. Jesus is alive, He is at work, He is not waiting for us to be good and come to Him. He has come to us. There's just too much exhortation in sermons. There's too much if-then instead of because, therefore, that's from Philip Ziegler and Aberdeen, or over in Aberdeen I should say. It's not if-then, it's not if we are good, then Santa Claus will come.

It's because Jesus is good, therefore we can do things we never thought we could do. We will be directed in directions we thought we could never move. We will see light where we never saw light. We will be restored where we are failing.

That's been my experience all my life. I find myself drifting 95% of the time right now, just trying to get through the day. But then there are these breakthrough moments when I... A lot of times it's from singing a hymn. It should be more often from reading the Bible, but I'm not very disciplined. It's from hearing the Bible read in church sometimes, if the reader is good.

If I didn't go to church, either virtually or in person, I would drift away very quickly. I have to be with God's people, listening to the Word, singing the hymns, receiving the Eucharist. But most of all, listening to the Word, singing the hymns being focused on, I'm putting it in the passive voice, being focused by the power of the Living Word. I just don't think the Eucharist by itself does it. My sister and I both both have talked about that. We've talked about the fact that we grew up in a parish, a low church parish in Virginia where we only had communion once a month. And therefore we don't feel deprived if we don't get communion every Sunday.

In other words, if we just listen to a sermon online, what we miss is being with the other people of God. But we don't feel deprived, my sister and I have talked about this, we don't feel deprived of not having communion because we're not used to having communion every Sunday, we weren't. And we were nourished by the hymns particularly, by the readings and sometimes by the sermons, not all the time, but some of the time.

And so if you have really nourishing preaching to listen to, it's not as grievous a loss not to be able to take communion in person, because the living Word of God is food. Jesus said that. His Word is food. His Word is nourishment. His Word is what we live by.

So I am always hoping for more Bible, more reading of the Bible, and more attention to the powerful presence that is being made known to us in all the passages of the Bible one way or another, even Ecclesiastes and places where there doesn't seem to be any presence of God at all.

It's all there if we open ourselves to the fact that God's Word is living.

There's so much to say, Jason. I just feel inadequate to say it. I just wish I could explain more powerfully. What? You've done a great job. And I want to respect your time. Can you pray for all of those who might listen to this? Yes, I'll be glad to try. Let us all gather our thoughts expect God to work through our meager thoughts about Him, because it is He who thought first about us and who thinks about us now, far ahead of where we are.

Because our destiny is in Him, and He has already prepared our destiny.

That's why Advent is such a wonderful preparation for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, because it tells us how God has...planned our future as part of his beloved family. Thank you dear Lord. Thank you Lord Jesus for these promises, for these assurances. For these...it's not just an invitation, it's an assurance Lord. I hear you making...

Your voice known to all who will listen and sometimes to people who won't listen because you have that power. Speak today, tomorrow night, Christmas Day. Speak, speak Lord.

Come close to us. Shake us out of our disbelief, our lethargy, our depression. bring us, O Lord, into your light and let the festivities of the season point us to you, to your glory, the glories of your righteousness and wonders of your love.

Let us know you, Lord Jesus. Love you, come to you, seek you, and find you.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Amen. Plumbing, it's so good to talk with you again.

Well, as often happens, I am rather overcome by what I'm saying. I hope that means that the Lord was present in it.