Words of Welcome

Isaiah 35:1-10 Advent is a season of expectation and anticipation. Signs of Christmas are all around us, but it hasn’t arrived. We’re still waiting to join together in celebrating the coming of the promised one, the one born in Bethlehem who will inaugurate the realm of God.   On this third Sunday of Advent, we look forward with great anticipation to the coming of the day of everlasting joy. We recognize that this day hasn’t been revealed, but we find hope in the promise that a day will come when we “shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”

Isaiah 35:1-10 The Mitchell Report was released on Thursday. It told us what we already knew, there are problems in Baseball. It also told us that Barry Bonds isn’t the only one implicated in the scandal. Yes, Baseball, America’s sport, is broken. We also learned this week that the CIA destroyed tapes that showed agents using waterboarding to get information. Waterboarding is considered torture by the Geneva Conventions. There were bombings in a number of nations and shootings at a church in Colorado. It would seem that we live in a broken world. As psychiatrist Paul Tournier pointed out many years ago: "Its ills are innumerable; it writhes in pain."1 In the words of Frederick Buechner: The world floods in on all of us. The world can be kind, and it can be cruel. It can be beautiful, and it can be appalling. It can give us good reason to hope and good reason to give up hope.2 Life it seems fragmented and unpredictable, and as a result we often become reactors to the world...