So when you were a kid, what do you remember the most about Christmas? Like think about those favorite memories that you might have from childhood. For me and my family, the way Christmas always worked is we did the Christmas Eve service at my dad's church and we woke up like super early on Christmas morning. I got my parents' rule was 5 a.m.
as we can wake us up and we would do the Santa Claus thing and then we would all load up in the family car and we would make the five and a half hour journey to Omaha, Texas, where my grandparents lived. And it was just, I remember still walking into that farmhouse and I can still, you would, my grandfather would be waiting for us on the back porch. He always wore like those Dickies jumpsuits with his name and boarder on the edge right there. You'll see those before he always had those things on.
And like the porch was there, the porch was just awesome and it was like fall down because there was like deep freezers all on the edge of it. Like keep it country straight up and you'd walk in and he had this fireplace and he had a fireplace insert and it was just cranking hot in there and it had to smell to it. Like still to this day when I smell a fire inside of somebody's house, I think about my grandparents' house at Christmas time. And then also like we only seen them a few times a year and my aunt and uncle would be there with their girls and we only saw them at Christmas hopefully once a year.
We'd go in and like they'd have like all of our favorite things there and it wasn't like this big extravagant like cookie spray. It was like you see now there wasn't like 19 different types of brownies but there were those things that we liked and they were ready for us. And when I was a kid my grandfather and my grandma would get ready for me coming by buying two things. Number one, they would have a bunch of the swan man deep dish frozen pizza, the little guys.
And then my grandfather would borrow, I would buy these tiny little Welch's grape juice and cans. It had a little foil tear off. Like when I showed up at my grandparents' house they were prepared for me. Like they had my favorite things right there waiting on me.
I bring this up because I want us to think about what Christmas looks like when we were kids. You know in childhood Christmas existed, it's this like one of those intentional spaces of the year. Like everything was planned, everything was prepared, it was just it was ready to go. In many ways I thought Christmas was this suspension of all that was normal.
Like time stood still for a few days. This is Advent, this is the beginning of the Christian New Year. And last week what I talked about was the fact that you know so many of us are yearning for a different 2021. But the thing that we need to be doing as the church is realize that there is an alternative calendar.
There is an alternative way to tell time. That Advent is the beginning of the season. It's an ancient thousands of year old tradition where we don't orient ourselves around the schedule and rhythm of the world. But we orient ourselves around the story of Jesus Christ, of his life, his death, his resurrection, and of his sending of the Holy Spirit into the world.
And so when we participate in Advent in many ways we're just telling this broken system that has never really done what we needed to. Especially this last year. We're telling you I want you to stop right now because I'm stepping into different space. Last week I talked about this idea that I'm calling renormaling.
And what does it mean to renormal? It means for us to allow God to redefine our everyday expectations with our willingness to step into that space that he has prepared for us. Because Advent is also about preparation. It's about perfect preparation.
Early this morning, deal your red, the beginning of the Gospel of Mark. That's a historic classic Advent reading that the church has read on the 2nd Sunday of Advent for longer than any of us have ever been on Earth. And I love that first verse. It kicks off.
It says this is the beginning of the good news about Jesus Christ. This is the beginning of this. No good news is the word gospel. It's a word that the church throws around a lot.
And I think sometimes we don't even understand what that means. It's a, the, Mark was the first gospel ever written. The first story about Jesus Christ. Mark was the, he was the scribe or the letter writer for Peter, one of the disciples.
People also think that John Mark was Peter's nephew. That was John Mark's family that owned the home or the disciples that was called the upper room where Pentecost happened. John Mark was at the beginning of a very young boy in the middle of this Jesus story. John Mark was also with Peter, with Paul and Barnabas on their very first mission.
And about halfway through he got freaked out and he bailed. But he's writing down this first story of Jesus Christ. This is the beginning of the good news. And he took this, this word in Greek, this Roman word of gospel and Greek it's called you as you on Gellion.
It's supposed to be about a royal proclamation, a decree when Caesar says, I've got something you actually need. This is a lot better than what you think you might have. And he took it and he subverted this word. So he says, no, we're going to talk about the good news of Jesus.
We're going to proclaim this. And this is the question I'm kind of asking myself here is are we asking God for a different vision of life this next year? One that we're willing to wait on and it's the case. What is the good news that you need to hear?
Every week we put together a little bit of... Turn myself off, that's my fault. I was reaching my phone. Every week we put together a sectional my foundry.life that's called message notes.
And we encourage you, especially in this time we're still like worshiping, socially distancing each other. To go over there and cruise there, but one of the things at the very bottom is we have some questions and we have some discipleship prompts. And this really is where this is taken from this next question. It's like, you know, what is the good news that you need to hear?
What's the good news that you need right now in December of 2020? There's all right to kind of whiff that up out. If you're by yourself, you might want to just kind of holler it out. If you're with your family, there might be some in your house that just needs you to admit something that you need.
But what is this gospel that we really need? It's all right for us to bring this up. John the Baptist is one of the most enigmatic characters in the New Testament. Like one day when I'm in heaven, I want to go talk to John the Baptist.
I've got some questions about the guy. Just super, super interesting. But here he comes in and we read in the story a couple of things that he's going on and really he's calling people to do a couple of things. He's going one to repent of your sins.
And the second is to turn and ask for forgiveness from God. Scripture tells us all the people of Jerusalem and Judea are coming out to see him. Jesus was not a secret. Jesus was something that was very well known.
This ministry, the anticipation people had of what was going on through his ministry was giant and huge. We read about it here in the story. But there's two things, repenting of your sins and asking for forgiveness. It's right as two concepts going on.
Number one, it's awareness and number two is action. If we want to think about renormaling and how renormaling happens, that's a great rubric for it. Awareness and action. Becoming aware of what needs to change and making the decision to make those changes in our life.
This is a big jump to repent from sins. Repentance means to turn. When was the last time you literally made an about face in your life and you said, I believe and allow this one way to control things and now I'm changing and I'm going in the opposite direction? No, repent means to turn.
It's an awareness of the things that need to be changed in life. But to ask for forgiveness, that's even tougher. Asking forgiveness is big. When was the last time you had to ask for forgiveness?
I had to call somebody this week. Then in my moment of just like stress and anxiousness in my moment of 2020, I had to ask for forgiveness for. Asking forgiveness is a tough thing. It's a big thing.
It's a mature thing. Imagine what does it mean to ask forgiveness from God once you've been made aware that you need forgiveness? These are big, big, huge jumps. If we look at the marked story and we try to figure out what is going on in this story, so much that people are willing to do this in a big way, in a public way, in a way that's really, really different.
It's that reading that Marty and his family did for us earlier from Isaiah. Because these words that John the Baptist was using in verse 2 and 3 said, Look, I'm sitting in my messenger ahead of you. You will prepare your way. He's always shouting in the wilderness.
Prepare the way for the Lord's coming. They knew these words. They hear that message from John the Baptist. Prepare the way for the Lord's coming and all these people who have been God's people and who have been waiting for hundreds and hundreds of years, their mind immediately went back to that prophecy in Isaiah 40.
I love that these words are words that call them, these words that reorient us. These words are words that allow us to take into the hard actions of renormeling. In the very first verse, Isaiah 40 says, comfort, comfort my people says you're God. One of my favorite Advent or Christmas practices is I love handles Messiah.
I brought my final copy of handles Messiah today. A couple of years ago on Sunday, the first Sunday I've actually played this record. No, I didn't do it this Sunday. Like I love to sit in my living room and to turn this on to have the Christmas tree lights on to build a fire, turn the lights off and just kind of sit there and listen to the Messiah.
Early this week, we started listening to the sign office and me and Madeleine kept like pretending to sing to Tinder so I'm not going to do it right now. I'm going to do it right now. We might do it on Instagram stories later this week. We were talking about how much we love them aside.
But this first word is comfort. Comfort my people speak tinderly to Jerusalem. You speak tinderly. You know, comfort is a complicated word in Hebrew.
The first thing that comfort does is comfort is a word of processing. So to engage in comforting means that you are deeply thinking about what's going on, that you're deeply thinking about what needs to change, that you're deeply thinking about things going on in your life that are causing other things to happen. But comfort also, it means it's a thing that we need in a moment of grief. What we're used to when we talk about comfort.
Now comfort is this action we need in grief, but here's the thing. You can't comfort yourself. Comfort always has two participants. Comfort is a corporate act.
It's not an individual act. And then the last layer of the onion and the Hebrew understanding of comfort is this. It's about engaging in known guilt. So we look at this word as concept.
It's a season of space of processing. It's a way of acknowledging grief. But it's also done inside of community. You know, corporate is what we need comfort and God is offering us that comfort.
But the thing that tells me, because if you read the Isaiah passage, you know, the Scripture is in it, my family died live. You read that. It's a little bit hard. It gets rough.
It talks about some tough things. But when we read these words from the prophecy, Isaiah, comfort, comfort, my people speak tinderly to Jerusalem, we realize this that God is safe and that repentance is safe. Now, sometimes we just need safe spaces and like we need safe things. We kind of, there's some folks we choose to roll our eyes with that word now.
But safety is a very big thing. And here you have God coming in saying, hey, in a moment of vulnerability, in a moment where you are being aware of things and you're acting in things, my response is to offer you comfort. My response is to be safe. My response is to be here with you.
You know, God offers his utmost compassion on those who choose to renormal and who choose to engage in these patterns of asking for forgiveness and of repenting. Our own consolation, we have in our life, we sing that song last Sunday, come now long expect to Jesus. And the last is Israel's strength and consolation. It's the power of God's people, the power and the might and all the things we think we need when things aren't right.
But then he also is offering us his comfort, his compassion, his consolation. And this is a promise of God. This is a prophecy that has been fulfilled. There is, this is the heart of God that's being directly spoken to us.
Comfort, comfort my people. Speak tinderly to Jerusalem. There's limitless significance here. The depths of everything that God wants to offer us are offered into us through this pattern of repenting, asking for forgiveness and engaging and interacting with the comfort of God.
Now this is God's heart coming directly into our heart. The next part of this Isaiah prophecy that I love and it shows up as just repeating thread all throughout Isaiah that gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. It's called the highway of holiness. And I love just these passages of verse two, make it straight highway through the wasteland for our God.
Fill in the valleys and level the mountains and hills straight in the curves, smooth out the rough places and the glory of the Lord will be revealed to all of the people together because the Lord has spoken. It's this highway of holiness. So last week we started off our reading, our Advent Candle with these words from Isaiah chapter seven when it says, a people walking in darkness have seen a great light. Now we started off with stumbling last week and this week we moved to a queer path has given us directly into the presence of God.
A path is being carved throughout the troubles of our life towards the compassion and comfort of God. The highway of holiness passages they show up multiple times on Isaiah. We kind of find their ending in Isaiah chapter 62 verses 10 through 12 and this is what they say. Go out through the gates, prepare the highway for my people to return, smooth out the road, pull out the boulders and raise a flag for all the nations to see.
And the Lord has sent this message to his land, tell the people of Israel, look, your Savior is coming. And see he brings his reward with him as he comes and they will be called the holy people and the people redeemed by the Lord. And Jerusalem will be known as the desirable place in the city no longer forsaken. Comfort come from my people, speak tenderly to Jerusalem.
This path is being carved out through every single thing that we need and the way that we get on this road is just to begin that process of renorming. And the one of the discipleship prompts that we have there on that message section of my foundry.life, I want us to kind of take a moment right now just to think about this. It's how we expect Christ to come and realize and how we expect Christ to come and how do we realign our imagination towards what actually needs comforting in life. Now think about that.
Where do you need comfort? Now these last few minutes as we've walked through this biblical idea of comfort, we see that comfort only comes through our own awareness of sins and our actions towards those sins. It comes through our repentance and our need for forgiveness. That is where we find the comfort of God.
So with that in mind, where do you need comfort right now? You know, if renorming things is about awareness and action, where do we need to begin to ask for the forgiveness but also the comfort of God? So what if 2021 and what if a new vision of life that's promised by God and is offered to us is only unlocked by us engaging in this biblical pattern that we have seen and that we celebrate on this second Sunday of Advent? He's cleared a path for us.
He's made his way for us. He's made this easy for us. Now I think many times we get confused about what does it mean for God to prepare things for us or what does it mean for us to prepare things for God? You know, we like to think in terms of power and strength and might and all and all these just like really just kind of intensive things.
What I think about so much is I think that for years the way I expected God to prepare things or to ask me to prepare for stuff, I think about one of my favorite movies. It was one of the things to watch during the Christmas holidays, I was home by myself all day long, but it's the John Wayne classic, the green burese. John Wayne plays this like army commander in Vietnam and they send him to this outpost in the middle of nowhere that things are about to get really rough and he shows up and says all right, we got to get 400 yards of the trees down to make the jungle even further away from our lines and let's put up more barbed wire and let's dig, I pitse and put spikes in them and I just get ready for this assault. And we think that's what it's like when God's trying to prepare us for things, but if we read the scriptures and we find out that God actually comes in like our grandparents and he's excited to have us in there, that he creates this perfect environment for us to thrive.
But just like my grandfather would always have the tiny little welches of grape juice, he creates this space for us because he wants us to experience good things, he wants us to grow through these good things. And that us just simply being in his presence is much more powerful than anything we can imagine. We think we need to prepare for battle sometimes, but what God does is prepare us for care. The last verse of the Mark reading we read today is this, John the Baptist says, I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.
Now John came to those folks 2000 years ago to offer them repentance, but when Jesus came, he offered us healing. You know, healing is worthless without repentance, but repentance is worthless without healing. Now what are the spaces in life that you might have right now where you need to see and experience the fullness of the comfort of God? Let's pray.
Holy Father, we thank you for doing things bigger than we can. We thank you for doing things more complicated than we can. What we thank you for doing things differently, God, and we all need difference right now. And God in this space where we just ask for forgiveness from is that sometimes we confuse your difference.
As we've always said that our core values of the church is that we believe God's vision for this world is bigger than our vision for this world. God, we think we need strength in all, but what we really need is comfort and care. You came to bring that to us today to do that. Shrink pray, amen.
Before we just finish out worship this morning, I just want to encourage you, we've got some unique discipleship opportunities that are over there on the message notes section. And one of the things that we've asked people to do this week is to grab a piece of paper and to kind of make a map of what your years look like, to make a map of your mountains and your valleys. You have to name the highs that you have had, but also to name the lows that you have had. You know, you're creating a space to celebrate and be thankful for what God has done, but we're also creating the space for us to ask God for comfort and for healing those things he offers us.
And it ends up, you'll create this visual map that you used to orient your prayer through this year. So I just want to encourage you to pop over to that and make sure you engage with that this week. Let's continue singing. Amen.