<font color='black' size='4' face='Times New Roman, Times, serif'>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">Tranquility in the Midst of Turmoil</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">Two
artists were commissioned to paint their conception of peace. A panel
of distinguished judges would determine which artist had best captured
the idea. The winner would get a rich commission. And after they had
been painting for a long time, the judges assembled to view their work. <br>
<br>
The first artist unveiled his painting, and there was a beautiful,
magnificent pastoral scene, with a farmer coming in after a hard day in
the fields. His wife was cooking, his children were playing around the
hearth, and all was at peace in this tranquil and beautiful farm. <br>
<br>
"That's it," said the judges, "but we'll look at the other rendering
anyway." They removed the veil of the second painting. Instead of a
tranquil, pastoral scene, there was a raging waterfall producing a mist
which communicated hostility. But over on the side of the waterfall was a
tiny branch of a tree growing out of a rock, and on the end of the
branch was a bird's nest. And on the edge of the nest was a mother bird,
singing her heart out in the midst of the turbulence around her. The
judges thought for a moment, then said, "This is peace, tranquility and
celebration in the midst of turmoil." <br>
<br>
We need a little Christmas right now, but the little Christmas that we
need is the courage that comes as the favor of God. We must remember
that the Christian community has done its best when it has gone against
the wind. </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">William L. Self, Have I Got News for You!</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">________________________________</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">Expect Great Things</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">British
missionary William Carey’s famous quote, “Expect great things from God,
attempt great things for God” is very meaningful to those who have
received a special challenge or calling from God. Like Mary and Joseph,
we may be called on at any time to walk a path for Him that has rarely,
if ever, been walked before. We must teach our family not to fear
“surprises from heaven,” but to face them faithfully and obediently.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">Ken Blackwood, Surprises from Heaven</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">__________________________</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">God's Grace at Work</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">Anne
Lamott, author of the wonderful book Traveling Mercies tells of how in
her church babies get passed around the moment they're brought into the
sanctuary - everyone takes care of everyone else's babies. Every baby
instantly has more parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles than he
ever knew.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">Imagine
what that teaches children about Christian community! What they learn
about love even as infants! For the adults everyone gets a chance to
remember the miracle of birth, God's hand in our human being. </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">If
there is a heresy today it is that we're so preoccupied with other
things that we fail to pay attention to the fact of God's spectacular
grace at work in and through our humanity, God's miraculous unmerited
love in evidence around us. God's Son born to bring us Second Birth
while we labor under the assumption that we have to do it all ourselves.
</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">Peter Buehler, With God Nothing Is Impossible</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">___________________</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">The New Age</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">Every
year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, there is displayed,
beneath the great Christmas tree, a beautiful eighteenth century
Neapolitan nativity scene. In many ways it is a very familiar scene. The
usual characters are all there: shepherds roused from sleep by the
voices of angels; the exotic wise men from the East seeking, as Auden
once put it, "how to be human now"; Joseph; Mary; the babe -- all are
there, each figure an artistic marvel of wood, clay, and paint. There
is, however, something surprising about this scene, something unexpected
here, easily missed by the causal observer. What is strange here is
that the stable, and the shepherds, and the cradle are set, not in the
expected small town of Bethlehem, but among the ruins of mighty Roman
columns. The fragile manger is surrounded by broken and decaying
columns. The artists knew the meaning of this event: Th
e
gospel, the birth of God's new age, was also the death of the old world.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">Herods
know in their souls what we perhaps have passed over too lightly: God's
presence in the world means finally the end of their own power. They
seek not to preserve the birth of God's new age, but to crush it. For
Herod, the gospel is news too bad to be endured, for Mary, Joseph, and
all the other characters it is news too good to miss.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">Adapted from Thomas G. Long, Something Is About To Happen, CSS Publishing </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">_____________________</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">Trust and Humility</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">Years
ago, TIME magazine reported on a 2-foot-long, 40-pound package that
arrived at the post office in Troy, Michigan, addressed to a Michael
Achorn. The post office phoned Achorn's wife, Margaret, who cheerfully
went to accept it. As she drove the package back to her office in
Detroit, she began to worry. The box was from a well-known mail-order
house, but the sender, Edward Achorn, was unknown to Margaret and her
husband, despite the identical last name.<br>
<br>
What if the thing was a bomb? Fearing the worse, Margaret telephoned
postal authorities. The bomb squad soon arrived with eight squad cars
and an armored truck. They took the suspected bomb in the armored truck
to a remote tip of Belle Isle in the middle of the Detroit River. There
they wrapped detonating cord around the package and, as they say in the
bomb business, "opened it remotely."<br>
<br>
When the debris settled, all that was left intact was the factory
warranty for the contents: a $450 stereo AM-FM receiver and tape deck.
Now the only mystery is who is Edward Achorn and why did he send Michael
and Margaret such a nice Christmas present?<br>
<br>
We live in a cynical age -- an age of terrorists and corporate
charlatans. Who can talk of angels and humble maidens and divine
revelation in the same breath to such a generation? Yet, on such a
foundation does our faith rest.<br>
<br>
</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">King Duncan, Collected Sermons, <a __removedlink__1613389811__href="http://www.Sermons.com" target="_blank">www.Sermons.com</a></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">_______________________________________</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">The Future of the World in the Hands of Girl</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">“She
struck the angel Gabriel as hardly old enough to have a child at all,
let alone this child, but he’d been entrusted with a message to give
her, and he gave it. He told her what the child was to be named, and who
he was to be, and something about the mystery that was to come upon
her. "You mustn’t be afraid, Mary," he said. And as he said it, he only
hoped she wouldn’t notice that beneath the great, golden wings he
himself was trembling with fear to think that the whole future of
creation hung now on the answer of a girl.”</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">Frederick Buechner</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">_____________________ </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">Bring Peace</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">Ultimately,
we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in
ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others. And
the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our
troubled world. <br>
<br>
Etty Hillesum, died in Auschwitz in 1943 at the age of 29. From An Interrupted Life, a compilation of her diaries and letters. </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">______________________</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">Humor: Mary vs. Eve</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">One
week a Sunday school teacher had just finished telling her class the
Christmas story, how Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem and how Jesus was
born in a stable and laid in a manger. After telling the story the
teacher asked, "Who do you think the most important woman in the Bible
is?" Of course, the teacher was expecting one of the kids to say,
"Mary." But instead, a little boy raised his hand and said, "Eve." So
the teacher asked him why he thought Eve was the most important woman in
the Bible.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small">And the little boy replied…</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: small"><span style="color: black">The conclusion to this illustration and many additional illustrations and sermons for Advent and Christmas can be accessed at <a target="_blank" __removedlink__1613389811__href="http://mail.churchmail.com/lists/lt.php?id=Kk8FAAAKDgNUD0kCAQ9KDAtXUVw%3D">www.Sermons.com</a>. </span></span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: small"> </span></div>
</font>