Recap: An Advent Conversation with Will Willimon

Video Replay

Conversation Transcript

Eric Holmer:  We are here tonight to talk about advent framed by this book. Here I’ve got the blurb on Heaven and Earth, subtitled advent and the incarnation. This was written back in 2024, and I wanted to kick things off just by asking, you know, you’ve written quite a few books over the years on a wide range of topics. What inspired you to write about advent now, in this particular moment?

Will Willimon: Well, by the way, all of you Lutherans, you have me to thank for Eric. He arrived at Duke Divinity School unformed, even though the Lutheran church had done a great job on him. So, if you enjoy having Eric, thank me. Okay. Thank you. There were so many moments when I, Eric, would say something and say, you know, I think you ought to do it. And I said, Eric, don’t ever do that in the parish. So anyway, but wonderful to be invited among you. And this is kind of typical of Eric. He loves to initiate things. I know you feel you’re fortunate to have him.

Well, anyway, Eric asked me a question, and that is why advent? Why now? You know, advent in curious ways is a kind of countercultural time in the church year, even maybe un-American in the sense of a couple things. Advent says one, what we need, what we most need is not self-derived. It is not that which we can summon up from among ourselves. No, God has got to come to us. We have demonstrated time and again in our history we cannot come to God. God must advent among us, come to us, and God has in Jesus Christ. That’s countercultural in that I think as modern North American people, we’re sort of bombarded with the notion that, you know, we are the answer to our problems. Hey, if you can just get the right therapy, if you can get the right technique, you can self-help. You can lift yourself; you can deliver yourself. And self-help is kind of us. Advent says no. Advent says what we most need is not ours. It doesn’t arise from within us. It comes to us.

Luther called the gospel the verbum externum, the external word, the word that comes to us not from within us as modern North American people. We’re sort of conditioned to think, the most important words are those that are self-derived, those that arise out of, you know, says advent. No, the word comes to you. And that’s good news in the sense that, we have a God that seems to delight in advocating among us, showing up, coming to us, not waiting for us to come to our senses and get our act together and come to God. This God comes to us. I got a rabbi friend who says, you know, wow. When you say God impregnated a virgin and was born as a baby in Bethlehem coming to us. Wow. The Christian faith says, God knows that we have not within ourselves the ability to come to God. So, God shows up not only to us, but as one of us at the Babe of Bethlehem.

The other thing I think about advent that is countercultural, that is weird, that it’s different, is that advent also says that that the light otherwise known as Jesus Christ, the light shines in the darkness, that when it gets very, very dark in human affairs. And it was real dark in Judea in the beginning of the common era, number one, that when it gets dark, that’s when God shows up, when the light comes among us. I don’t know about you in Wisconsin, but the people I talked to, the churches I talked to, there are a lot of people who are deeply concerned about the present moment, about our country, about constitutional democracy, etc., about are concerned about the treatment of the most vulnerable among us. We’re in that time of the natural year when the days grow short, it grows cold, it grows dark. Well, how wonderful that the church says that’s just the kind of moment that the redemptive God loves to show up.

And I the other day I was reading a piece by Walter Brueggemann, biblical scholar of blessed memory. And Walt noted that at the darkest times in Israel’s history, such as Isaiah, when Isaiah the prophet was writing. That’s when Israel’s prophets ventured some of the most pushy, exuberant poetry about God’s deliverance. We will read during Advent and Christmas. Comfort, comfort you, my people. We will read from the prophet Isaiah. Behold, God is bringing us back from exile. The highways will be made straight. The valleys will be lifted up, the mountains will be brought low. We’ll go straight back home to Israel. Those words, we think, were written during the depth of Israel’s exile. When there wasn’t any light, when there wasn’t any hope. Well, advent trades in that kind of outrageous hopefulness because of our faith and who God is. So, it’s one of my great seasons of the year, I think.

Eric: Well, you mentioned this. It’s this good news that comes to us. But I wanted to ask about something you wrote because it’s not necessarily received as good news by everybody. I want to bring up a quote. It was in a sermon back in the advent of 1928, Dietrich Bonhoeffer preached that advent is about learning how to wait, but that not all can do it. Those that are satisfied and contented, and that life is the best of all possible worlds for them. They can’t do it. That it’s only possible to those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, and who look forward to something greater to come and heaven and earth.

Similarly, you said that powerful and privileged people, like most North American mainline Christians. Hello. Get nervous when talk turns edgy. Apocalyptic because we tend to believe this world is as good as it gets. That basically faith is just another source of improvement alongside many others that we can tend to. So, for those of us that maybe identify with that category, how does advent come to us? What can we do? How can we learn to wait?

Will: This is reminding me that Eric has this kind of troubling tendency to quote back to me stuff I’ve written, and he knows this annoys me. Didn’t you say on page ninety-three, you know, I said, Eric, stop it. But thank you. Boy, to be quoted alongside Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a great honor. But advent is about yearning. Advent is a people who sit in darkness and yearn for the light. Well, you know, people in power, people at the top don’t do much learning. They tell us, hey, America is the best of all possible worlds right now. The economy is going great. Everybody’s happy. Things are going just fine. Thank you. Well, advent says no. There is a not having that we experience. There is a yearning. There is a waiting for the light. And waiting implies that you need something badly that you don’t have. Therefore, you wait. And maybe it takes a lot of courage to say this world as good as it is the present administration for any of its virtues. I don’t see many, but anyway, for any of its virtues. It’s not fully what God had in mind.

I remember a woman that when I was bishop in Alabama, and she had been working with the poorest of the city’s poor in Birmingham for twenty-five years. And I asked her; how did you keep going? How did you persevere before all the obstacles and all working with these desperate souls? And she stood there on the sidewalk and swept her hand over bombed out Birmingham, Alabama. And she said, I keep reminding myself this is temporary. God did not create Birmingham. We did. God did not design this economy. We did. God. God may have other things in mind. And God is going to get what God wants. And that keeps me going, knowing that God will do that. Well, that seemed to me a very advent thought. And if you notice in your advent lessons, like, say, last Sunday in your church, we indulge in apocalyptic talk. Jesus talks about the moon turning red, the stars going off their courses, the planets. Sorry if you thought Christianity was personal and private. And just a little something between you and Jesus. No, no, this thing is cosmic. It is large. Jesus doesn’t just want your little heart. Jesus wants the whole shebang. The whole world. And he says, during the lessons of advent, I’m going to get what I want. The creation that was begun in Genesis one and two. That creation is going to be brought to its fulfillment.

Now, maybe that’s bad news for some of us whom this world as it is, this economy as it is, has been a pretty good thing for me and my children. We’re quite happy and content generally. However, for those at the margins, for those for whom this the best of all possible worlds, has been hell. Difficult. To hear Jesus talk about the world being shaken and disrupted and turned upside down, in the last days. That’s good news. So, advent, maybe. Whether advent, the advent scriptures, the advent worship, maybe. Whether that’s good news. Jesus is coming or bad news. Jesus is coming. Maybe the difference is where you happen to be when you get the news. Bad news for those of us content and happy as pigs in mud on top. But good news for those for whom this world, as we have established it, has not been what God intended it to be.

Eric: You’ve served in a lot of parishes and a lot of different contexts over your ministry. And I imagine some of them have been from different social standing, different life experiences. Have you found that advent has resonated in those different ways, like you described with those maybe who are a bit more on the margins? You know, what has that experience been like from your experience?

Will: You know, I think maybe unfortunately, I’ve never served a parish with people on the bottom, utterly powerless people. But my last parish before Duke University Chapel was a blue-collar parish, Greenville, South Carolina. Inner city. And I remember I was meeting with the president of the United Methodist Women, and whom I was frightened by. And as all Methodist ministers are of the United Methodist Women’s Organization. Anyway, and I said to her, why can’t you have a meeting where people are not upset and yelling at each other? And, you know, you were having a meeting about the fall Halloween festival, and it broke up with people saying bad things about each other and their husbands and this kind of thing. Please. And she said to me, pastor, most of our women have no say so over their lives. They have no control. They nobody asked them what they want and what they’d like to see. And so, they come to church, to the meeting of the United Methodist Women. And it’s their one chance to have some power over their situation. So, it can get bloody. Okay.

It was a powerful reminder to me that that that church ought to be empowering to those who feel powerless. And maybe advent is the time when the powerless get the good news. Hey, God is on the way. And God is going to get what God wants. Maybe not tomorrow, but God will get what God wants. Therefore, all the advent texts tend to be future oriented and all.

But on the other hand, I served, as Eric knows, at Duke University Chapel, and I noted that, I got a lot of criticism during advent of my advent sermons. And typical of the criticism would be, well, your sermon was interesting, but you didn’t remind us of our responsibilities, of our greater responsibilities for working for the kingdom and being busy. And, you know, I have my master’s degree, and my wife has her PhD, and we are responsible, powerful white people. They didn’t put it that way, but I knew that’s what they meant. And, you know, I come to church to be motivated to be, pushed to be enthusiastic about my fulfilling my responsibilities. That’s what you should be doing.

Well, I noted, generally speaking, the advent texts tell us to do nothing. I mean, they have nothing. You’re supposed to do. Okay. Church tomorrow. Monday. Why don’t you get organized? Do this at the text during advent are always about God and about what God is doing. God is coming. God is going to shake heavens and earth. God is going to impregnate a virgin in Nazareth. God is going to. And powerful people on top. people who think of themselves as resourceful and competent and able, I think, are threatened by that advent message. I’m sorry. Do good if you can. Be busy in the Lord’s name. Play your bit part in the revolution. But ultimately, we are all dependent upon God to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. And that’s advent.

Eric: It’s a season where, I’ve found in the past I. I’ve wanted to focus my attention on a certain practice or a certain discipline that I’m going to show up in a certain way this season. I’m going to, you know, whether it’s stick with this devotional throughout all four weeks or something. And sometimes I can find maybe in the same way sometimes, my attention span wanes or I come in with good intentions, or the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. I mean, it’s not unlike agreeing to watch the next episode of the show we’re streaming, and before the credits have rolled, I’m already asleep because, you know, I fell asleep. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t want to be a part of it. And so, in the same way I think about in advent, you know, ways that we can stay engaged because, again, many of us are coming to this. We’re thinking like there’s fifty thousand things going on in these weeks leading up to Christmas. Well, there’s any number of things calling for our attention, for our money, for our time, for our involvement. And yet advent comes all the same with this different invitation. And I appreciated a few things. Sorry to quote back at you your book once again, but a few things you called out. A few words you used, you talked about expectant alert, paying attention, staying awake, looking for signs of God’s presence in the here and now, and essentially being ready to be shook up, but maybe just going through a little bit. I mean, what does it mean? Again, instead of a posture waiting to say, okay, what can I do with all these abilities and things I’m bringing to the table? What does it mean to be expectant for God? Conversely, I guess maybe not directly opposed to that, but expectant versus just. I’m here to do something. I’m, you know, I’m bringing what I have, you know.

Will: You remind me of a number of the advent lessons, particularly like last Sunday, Sunday before, where Jesus says, stay awake. It’ll come like a thief in the night. You won’t. You’ll be surprised. You won’t be expecting it. Stand on tiptoes. Stay awake. Of course there’s irony there. We could say to Jesus. Okay. We we’ve been trying to stay awake now for two thousand years, waiting on your arrival. your end. And that’s a long time to try to stay awake. And we we find it hard.

I think, you know, maybe Jesus is saying, you know, you the God’s advent is up to God, and you don’t know when that is. And one of the perks of being a pastor, I think Eric will back me up on this. One of the perks of being a pastor is you get to hear some wild stories from laypeople. kinky stories about Jesus showing up. And I love these stories. And I try to get laypeople, you know, if Jesus shows up in your life, you come down here to church, and you tell me about it because I. I need the support. But invariably the stories are, you know, I was just I was washing dishes, and I And when thinking about God. And then I was I was staring out the window. And then suddenly I just felt embraced by this wonderful embrace. And I thought, I believe that that kind of thing.

So maybe Jesus is saying, try to stay awake, because when God shows up, it’s often unplanned, unprepared. It’s a that it because it’s up to God. It’s called grace. And the word grace means gift and all. And I think maybe we preachers sometimes er in turning advent into some kind of assignment about, Hey, church. Get awake. Hey, church. Get ready. Expected. And you say I’m fifty years old. I actually know that Jesus is going to be born on December the twenty fifth, so I. It’s hard to be expectant. But maybe advent is rather than an assignment. It’s the kind of promise. Hey, it’ll come like a thief in the night. It’ll come while you’re just busy keeping house. Another day at the office. Teaching school. Minding your own business. God will show up. God promises I will be there, for you. Maybe not on demand and maybe not on your time schedule. But I will be there, and I will. Advent. And maybe that’s the promise.

I kind of feel when we talk about advent in the church, it’s like the church is saying, By God, we’re going to get Christmas back. We are going to get Christmas back from all this commercialism and sentimentality and crap that’s on Netflix. And we’re going to get Christmas back. And advent is our way of rent, getting Christmas back from all the people who’ve stolen Christmas and perverted it and commercialized it. That’s kind of good. That’s good. However, there’s also and it’s embarrassing for me as a Wesleyan to be reminding Lutherans of this, but I’ll go ahead and do it. We’re saved by grace. Your relationship to God is not your assignment. It’s up to God in Jesus Christ. Your destiny with God is not in your hands. It’s God’s. And I almost hear the Lord saying, hey, how much more have I got to do to show you this ain’t up to you. Impregnate a virgin. Show up with this peasant family in Judea. God with us. Emmanuel. So maybe, maybe advent. Maybe a good word for advent is, just try to keep your eyes open, for when God shows up. Relax. And and get ready to be encountered.

By the grace of God, we had, we had two events in succession. We had Anne Lamott. Y’all know Anne Lamott? She’s a writer, Christian writer and all. I think wrote a wonderful book, Traveling Mercies, but she was at our place, and she was talking about her son that she mentions in a couple of her books. Her son has been drug, alcohol addicted, all kind of problems and which she talks about in her books. And she said the other day her son called and said, mom, I just want you to know that, hey, I’m a Christian. I’m a believer. He said, Jesus came into my life, and I just want you to know that. And Lamott said, honey, that’s wonderful. That that’s an answer to my prayers. That’s wonderful. And she said, well, how did you decide, finally to ask Jesus into your life? And my son said, I didn’t ask him. He just barged in. Anyway, I didn’t want him, and he just. He wanted me. And I think that’s powerful. That’s advent.

The other thing we had the poet from Yale Divinity School, Christian Wiman, some of you might know. Wonderful poet. He grew up in Texas. Fundamentalist Baptist family. He rejected that. By the time he was a teenager, he spent most of his college years getting as far away from Christianity as he could. Then he went through cancer. I think he went through a divorce. All kind of issues. And he said, I’m now a Christian. I am really trying to follow Jesus Christ. Well, during the discussion after his presentation, someone said, you know, it’s so inspiring to hear about your connection with Jesus Christ. What did you do during your time of sickness and divorce and all? What did you do to access God? What did you do to come closer to God? And Christian Wiman said nothing. I did nothing. This isn’t a story about my ascent to God. It’s a story about God’s descent to me. And so, gee, that sounds very Lutheran somehow. And so, advent is about that.

Eric: You mentioned, you know, the, the challenging texts that were encountered with, unexpected maybe in advent. And I wanted to ask, when you think about the readings assigned, is there one in particular you’ve had the most challenge, the most difficulty preaching on one that sticks out? Or perhaps if that one doesn’t come to mind, one that you enjoy coming back to when it shows up in the lectionary, one that you’ve appreciated. Of the many advent readings we have assigned.

Will: You know, I guess it’s the apocalypses, the apocalypse there in those first Sundays of Advent that I’ve mentioned. Luke was twenty-one or something. The text where Jesus speaks of the end, the disruption. And partly I think if you’re a mainline North American Christian, you you’re really uncomfortable with texts like that because that’s the kind of text that these wacko, fundamentalist, evangelical, premillennial people get into. Well, we’re too sophisticated for that. We’re not into that. And we’re a little embarrassed when Jesus talks about the end in such a way.

But I have to ask myself, maybe I’m uncomfortable. Not because I’m so sophisticated and educated and all. Maybe I’m uncomfortable because of the kind of car I drive. That, of an economic stratum. When Jesus shows up and says, by the way, God’s going to burn all of this down. God is going to blow up everything. That doesn’t sound like good news. And I maybe mention this in the book, but I led a group of Duke students to Honduras, and we did a medical clinic in a little village in Honduras with some Duke doctors. And in the evenings we would build a fire and everybody would sit by the fire and we’d sing. And the Hondurans all spoke Spanish. And so, I had to get my translator, a woman, a nurse next to me translating. Well, somebody had the bright idea, let’s all go around and share our favorite Bible verse. And Methodist just hate that because we’re not that good on scripture, you know. And so. And somebody took Jesus wept and somebody looked love your neighbor, you know. And I took.

Well, this woman, this Honduran woman said her favorite text was like, from the end of the Gospel of Luke where Jesus says, the earth will end. The sky, the stars will fall out of the sky. Everything will be burned and changed. And, you know, I’m getting this from a translator next to me, the nurse. And I thought your favorite verse. Really? Jesus said a lot more comforting things than that, lady. And so, I looked over the nurse and I said, she is. Is that what she’s saying? And the nurse said to me, I talked to this woman today in the clinic. She’s had five children. Three have died before age six due to malnutrition. Got it. I don’t like Jesus talking about the world being shaken and turned upside down. But if you’re a woman in Honduras who’s lost most of your children, to malnutrition, when Jesus comes and says, hey, hey, this ain’t what God wanted. God, this is not what God intended. When God created the world and God’s going to keep creating til God get what God wants. That’s good news.

Eric: Thinking about, you know, it’s a couple years out of it, but we all experienced the pandemic together, and it feels like it was one experience where no matter your station in life, everybody was isolated, everybody was locked down, everybody was experiencing a sort of, apocalyptic moment in some ways. In your experience and your ministry experience in your life, you know, how did that maybe line up with this? You know, this advent experience? Did you see, you know, people get a taste of that? I mean, if you go further back, I know obviously, you know, when you had to speak after nine over eleven or, you know, people going through the financial crisis, there’s maybe moments where people don’t necessarily have those same experiences, like the Honduran woman that you encountered, but where those moments do come to all of us in some ways to where there’s this, this moment in time where we’re faced with kind of a reckoning we weren’t expecting at, you know, pastorally, what have those experiences been? Have you found people that it’s, maybe shaken them up in a way kind of the ways you describe that advent does and makes them opens our ears. What’s been your experience in those seasons, I guess?

Will: Yeah, I thought about that. That’s fascinating. You know, Covid Lockdown as advent. I wonder if I use that ever? In a sermon on one of those mini zoom sermons we did during Covid? I do think, well, the poet T.S. Eliot said, why should people love the church? Because she speaks of sin and death and other unpleasant facts of life. We’d like to forget. Well, advent maybe is a time where we think about those things. This afternoon, I visited a man in the hospital, whom I knew. And he, it appears, is moving toward his end. His apocalypse is, he is near death. And I think it’s an appropriate analogy to say, well, that’s kind of close to what some of the advent texts are talking about. And maybe the church is one of the few places most of us are associated with that has the guts to talk about that kind of stuff and say, by the way, there will be a day for you when there will be no tomorrow. There will be a day for you when it is. If the stars are falling and it’s over. Well, here in church, we actually can talk about that and think about that.

And also, there may be, I know, toward the end of advent year, in Matthew’s gospel, It says, the. But the wise men, the Magi come to King Herod and they. Anyway, King Herod hears about the birth of the child in Bethlehem and, the birth of this baby. And Matthew says, And Herod was troubled, and all of Jerusalem was troubled with him. When the wise, the Magi come to King Herod and they say, hey, we’ve come all the way from the east, because there’s a king being born, and we’ve come to worship him. And Herod says, excuse me, there’s already a king, and I’m it. Why don’t you go find this king for me, you know? Well, it’s, you know, it’s pretty gutsy of the church to say in the present moment. I’m sorry. There’s only one king. The throne is already occupied, and there’s not room for any other pretenders on that throne. Hey, Herod, with your armies and all your power up at the palace. The gold plated palace. You’re right to be nervous. There’s a new king in town. It’s the baby Jesus, and he is going to rule. And so maybe we are. Advent is an answer to a lot of our questions, I must say. And dilemmas.

But back to the Bonhoeffer quote that I heard. You give it? It’s maybe not the answer we expected. That wonderful moment there when King Ahaz, I guess, comes to the prophet and says. The Assyrians are at the door. The. The Syrians are getting ready to take over Jerusalem. Give me a sign that God is with us. I need a sign that God is on our side, that God is going to protect us. Give me a sign. And the prophet Isaiah says, you want a sign? Okay, I’ll give you a sign. A virgin will conceive and bear a baby, and they’ll name him Emmanuel. And King Ahaz says, I don’t need a damn baby, I need chariots, I need, I need swords, I need an army, I. Well, in such moments, we’re just reminded how wonderfully weird. The Christian hope is that that’s the truth about God, and it may not be a truth the world finds easy to hear. It may not be the truth the world is desperate to hear. Yet it is the truth about God, who God is and what God’s up to. Advent.

Eric: Towards the end of the book, you talk about, or rather, you lament the idea or the notion that people tend to think of church only as a place where we talk to all the reasons that we need to be saved, basically point out all the problems, which again, maybe rightly, there’s a place for that. But you talk about that. It also needs to be a place where we joyfully celebrate not just that we need to be saved, but that we already are saved. That we live in that reality too. I think we’re not as good at doing that though, the celebrating side of things. But how have you seen that done?

Will: Well, it appears that’s a Lutheran problem. I mean. I remember. Yeah. No. Lutherans are big on the cross, and Lutherans have been historically, you know, willing to admit to sin. And good for you…And maybe there is a sense in which, you know, in advent, when we speak of our longing, our yearning, our ways, sitting in the dark, not singing joyful Christmas carols. We’re Lutherans, we sing advent dirges. We don’t you? We’re not going to let you sing the Christmas carols Do we get to Christmas? You know, kind of thing. And maybe that sense of unfulfillment and all is, is almost easier than the claim that the Nativity puts upon us to say, God is here. Christ, you know, for unto you this day is born a Savior. Who is Christ the Lord. And that joy, the joy may be harder for us.

I remember preaching a sermon on the, the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, and I had said about the joy of eating together bread. Isn’t it wonderful that Jesus, you know, says you want to know what I’m up to? Here, have some bread. Here, take some wine. This is what it’s about, people. And a person came out of church and said, how can you celebrate bread and meals and food where millions are hungry in this world? How can you do that? That is so insensitive. I could see the point, but, you know, your church. I don’t know how big your church is. I don’t know how rich and powerful it is. If you are rich and powerful, please consider inviting me to do a preaching series at your church. But, I bet your church is not the biggest, most powerful thing in town. Compared to the hospital or the courthouse or, you know. Believe our God has come. Our God has fully revealed to us our God rules. That all the necessary work to put things right between us and God has been done in Jesus Christ. You don’t have to work hard and try to get your slate clean and be all cleaned up. You know, you’re Lutherans. You know you’re saved as sinners and you never stop being sinners. And that’s good because Jesus only saves sinners.

Well, that that is a cause for celebration. And it is. Maybe the church is where we come to rejoice. Maybe I was looking at the evening news a few weeks ago, and maybe our president said something stupid again. And maybe I said to Patsy, my wife, I’ve just I’ve given up hope. I mean, I’m just I’m in despair over the future of constitutional democracy. Supreme Court now. And Patsy in love said, is it despair, a sin in the Christian faith? Are we permitted to give up hope? Are we permitted to despair? And I said, wait, I know more about that than you do. Don’t remind me of that. Well, you know, the joy of Christmas, is a is a joy of victory. It’s a joy that. Hey, you look at our little struggling church. Not everybody in town has gathered here. We’re not the most powerful and prestigious. And yet we know the truth. The secret of where it’s all headed and what shall happen. Maybe not tomorrow or the next day, but it shall happen. And thus we sing.

And I remember my friend the rabbi saying to me at Duke Chapel, as I was saying, oh, I’m we’re moving into Christmas. We got so much to do. I’m having six services in the next two weeks. And the rabbi said, you Christians got all the good music, you got all the best hymns. And I said, thank you. And he said, you know, it all starts out when you says, God Almighty became a human being. If you really believe that, you’re going to write some good music. And I said, wow, I’m going to use that in the sermon Sunday. But it the joy and, maybe that’s why your church will have a good attendance on Christmas Eve. On Christmas Day. And I hope you won’t sit there and make snide remarks, because I guess people in Wisconsin don’t make snide remarks, but you won’t say, oh, look at all the people here today. Where were you last Sunday? Where were you back in August? You know, you show up on Christmas Eve. And maybe those poor, uninformed people I’ve got the good sense to know. Wow, something is afoot here. This is really joyful. Good news. God Almighty wants to be with us. God wants to be in relationship with us. God has come to us. Advent. And thus we sing. And I love it when you know. They don’t know a lot about the Gospels and they’re not. They’re a little shaky on their scripture stuff, and they find it hard to find their way around the Lutheran Book of Worship. But they do know Silent Night, and they know joy to the world. And maybe that’s enough.

Eric: I want to thank you for, for all these stories, for all that you’ve shared with us tonight. But I wanted to be sure also to give some time for questions from everybody that joined us. So if you’d be willing. I wanted to open the field to anybody who had a question that maybe something we didn’t cover about advent, something that you came in tonight hoping to talk a little bit more about. But you can use the chat function or, raise your hand, as it were, if you wanted to add something to our conversation here tonight. And again, just really grateful for the time you spent with us, people of good Shepherd here. So the field is open for questions if you have any.

Attendee: Eric, I don’t have a question, but I do have a comment, and that is I’m sure I’m going to be thinking about advent a whole lot differently in the next few weeks. It’s just a lot of what pastors talked about here that, I hadn’t looked at it from that perspective, or if I had, it’s been a long time and I’ve kind of lost, lost that focus. So I appreciate you coming and thinking out loud for us and letting us share your wisdom.

Will: Good. And. Yeah. I mean, for a lot of us, maybe that’s what we, we hope for in church is that this these old, familiar stories and patterns and all, become fresh. And when they do, that’s a kind of a sign of the, the grace of God and the spirit moving among us. Absolutely. And I gotta say, there’s, you know, to be to be Lutherans, during advent, Christmas must be a particular treat because so much that the rest of us have enjoy about this time is a gift from Lutherans. And, you know, not maybe not this year, but many years I get out. I’ve got a book of Luther’s Christmas sermons, and I read them and he just they’re so incarnational and that Luther just never loses his wonder that God Almighty, the one that created the world, that hung the planets, in the skies and all it has become a baby in Bethlehem and has drawn all these ordinary people of when Luther preaches, like about the Virgin Mary. He’s not so impressed with her being the god bearer, the queen of heaven. He keeps stressing she was a young girl. She. And he says, and just like a lot of you young girls in the congregation. And she was confused and she didn’t understand all that was happening there. But she said yes. And she stumbled and followed. And anyway, it’s must be a great this is a great time of the year to be a Lutheran.

Eric: We’re going to quote you on that one. That’s great. Put it on the shirt. We had one question I liked. I don’t know if it was made partly serious, partly in jest, but she writes, “do we need a weird welcome party for advent versus somber waiting?” Yeah. Does it feel, you know, out of tune off key to add this? You know, this other kind of thread that we’re talking about here, maybe, going on with the somber waiting.

Will: You know, I might see that except, during a somber waiting can be quite an achievement these days. I was talking to a woman a while back, and I said, well, how are you? How are you doing at your church? How are things going? And she said, oh, God, I’m in a happy church. And I said, what? She said, A happy church. We’re just so, so happy. The pastor comes out on Sunday morning. Looks like he’s on some kind of drug or something. He’s prancing around and he says, isn’t this awesome? He said, it’s just, isn’t it great to be here? And I’m thinking, it’s not all that awesome. It’s not all that great. Anyway, she said, there’s some Sundays. I just want to shout out, hey, there are people here who’ve got a stage four cancer diagnosis. There are people here who are really upset about what they saw on the evening news Thursday night. Would you stop being so happy? And so, The to to be able to years to wait to say all that we need. We don’t yet have. God has not yet given us everything. That takes some courage. And so, I, I kind of like the yearning.

I know I had experience, I, I went from a kind of a raucous Christmas party, Episcopalians, to on Saturday night to church the next Sunday. And it was advent. And in church it was dark. We were singing O come, O come, Emmanuel. We were singing these advent hymns on the altar. There weren’t any Christmas decorations in the church and all. And I thought, yeah, yeah, you it it we got to kind of admit to the neediness that we have, perhaps before we can fully experience the light and the joy and all. And it’s it’s almost kind of nice where you have advent, and then you get to Christmas, and the crowds are smaller oftentimes than you had on Christmas Eve, anticipating Christmas. When you get to Christmas, Sunday after Christmas, it can be pretty low and the choir is off because the choirs, you know, it’s almost a gift to say, okay, well, you’ve had your big Christmas extravaganza, you’ve had your big Christmas blowout. You’ve overextended your credit. Yeah, yeah. Great. Fine. Well, now the church gets together, and. And I remember one Sunday sitting there with about thirty or forty people and, Sunday morning on the Sunday after Christmas. And, man, it just really felt like a drop from the high we experienced with the candlelight and singing and on Christmas Eve. And I said to them, okay, while the world now is exhausted from its Christmas celebration and all the church gathers and we get to say, let’s just pause for just a moment and ponder the wonder that God Almighty became flesh, became our flesh. That God didn’t just appear to become a human being. God became a fully human being Like us. It’s amazing. I know you thought God was omnipotent and omniscient and up there. And we’re down here. Forget about it. God’s us here. Anyway, so. Say a good word for the yearning. And I kind of like the way lutheran’s kind of force you to pray these prayers, whether you feel like it or not, or you want to or find it personally fulfilling. Your pastor just says, you know, hey, Lutheran Book of Worship, do it. And I kind of think, therefore, the church year is a great way of kind of taking time to say, hey, people, do we all understand the world’s calendar with its definition of what’s important time and not important time. Here’s a rescue from that. It’s called the church year. Advent. Christmas. Does Eric let you sing Christmas carols during mid-December?

Eric: I should clarify, I am not a pastor at good Shepherd, but I am a staff member here. Just for clarification.

Will: Oh, so somebody here pastor is determining what will be sung. All right. Okay. Well, fine. I would like to have the respect for my people that Lutheran pastors appear to garner. At least they say. You know, maybe just close by saying one of my Lutheran things. I had a guy at Duke. He was an MD PhD student. Wow. And that’s smart. I mean, these these are the smartest of the smart and the hardest. Anyway, I was asking him. I said, well, now that you’ve been in the medical school a year or so, what have you learned? What’s impressed you? And he said, well, it my, he said, might interest you. He said, I, I’m really glad I’m a Lutheran. And I said, really? Why would you be happy of that? And he said, well, I’m not just a Lutheran. I’m a Missouri Synod Lutheran. And I said, whoa, wow. You people take it on the rocks, don’t you? It’s. Yeah. Okay. And he said, do you know anything about Missouri Synod Lutherans? I said, well, I know that their pastors won’t come to the ministerial association meetings. I know that and all.

But he said, you know, Missouri Synod Lutherans are really big on sin. And kind of the only way you can be damned is a Missouri Synod Lutheran is to think that you might not be damned. And so. And and you’re a sinner when you become a Christian, and then you’re a sinner while you’re a Christian and you’re, you’re you’re never get over, you know. And I said, oh, okay, okay. Well, what what what what’s what are you happy about that? And he said, well, I go into the Duke Medical Center every morning and I look at it and I think, you know, a lot of good will be done here today in the medical center, but a lot of bad will be done here, too. A lot of, sad, cruel things will occur. We won’t intend to do them, of course, but it’ll work out that way. And he said whenever a patient dies, we always have a morbidity and mortality conference. And that is all the doctors and nurses, and everything have cared for the patient. Sit around a table and we talk about what went wrong. And he said, everybody’s always defensive. They say we follow the same procedures. They followed any medical center. We did everything right. We did fine. And it was it was perfect. The surgery was perfect. And he said, I will sign. I say, yeah, will the the patient died? That that wasn’t what we wanted, was it? And they said, well, that can’t be blamed on us. We did it. And he said, I had, as a Missouri Synod Lutheran, I had never been around people who have to be good, who have to get it right. I know I’m not right. The church keeps telling me I’m not right. The church. I’m a sinner, and and I’m never going to get it right. So therefore, God will have to do it for me.

You know, and I said, that is the most beautiful testimonial to being a Missouri Synod Lutheran I’ve ever heard. That’s that’s wonderful. Well, I think, you know, to be a part of a church family which says to you, you know, you’re a well-meaning, intelligent, a good person in so many ways. And yet, the important thing is God is good and that God is busy making a way to you. It’s called advent that I think. Boy, that that’s a message the world is literally dying to hear. And I hope you will now rush out wherever you are and start making more Lutherans and, giving people the news that that God isn’t mad at you. God is not here to condemn you. God is here to be Emmanuel. God with you. Well, joy being with you.

Eric: We, greatly appreciate you spending time with us this evening. Thank you for, for sharing, for fielding our questions, for being with us. And the thunderous applause you can hear over muted speakers from, screens across Madison, Wisconsin. There you go. And again, the the book is, is heaven and earth, advent and the incarnation. And for the next two Tuesday nights, we’re going to be meeting at six thirty p m, again on zoom, but also in person at the Madison campus to go over this book and continue some of the themes we talked about tonight. So, thank you.

Will: And, as far as Eric is concerned, hey. You’re welcome. Okay. Good night.

Eric: Peace, everybody. Thanks so much.