Dec2011 Team-W.Pub

Trinity Team December 2011 Page 1 Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church 10014 81 Avenue Edmonton, AB T6E 1W8 Phone: (780) 433 1604 Email: [email protected] Trinity Team Website: www.trinity-lutheran.ab.ca December 2011 “Dave cooks the turkey” and other traditions Inside this issue: Soon and very soon …I will be listening pinewood mixed with the smell of a turkey Reflections to one of my favourite Christmas stories and festive music and family and food. • Dave Cooks the Turkey 1 again: Dave cooks the turkey. It is a story Christmas means meeting friends after wor- • Bishop’s Message 2 about Dave and his beloved wife Morley ship and reconnecting.” The world is • Saying Goodbye 3 and a story about a promise: Dave promises changing rapidly and it seems that people • Christ’s Cradle his wife that he will take care of the Christ- are looking and longing for safe and well • Thoughts from across the 4 mas dinner. But as it always happens ( and I known places, places where they don’t have Lane know about this phenomenon) - every year to worry about changes. Well, Christmas • Advent & Christmas - 5 Christmas seems to come earlier and earlier time is here again and some things shall How do we Observe it and Dave realizes that he hasn't even re- remain forever. membered to buy a turkey, let alone defrost But when we don’t want anything to ever Called into Worship it. The result is a humoresques struggle to change, we are, in fact, celebrating the • Worship Opportunities 7 beat all the odds and some- greatest moment of change • Lanternfest how get an unappetizing, in human history. We are, • Reconciliation and Heal- frozen, and slightly scarred in fact, celebrating a mo- ing on Eve of Nov 11 8 bird home and roasted in ment when God enters into Called into Learning time. This story was written history and nothing is ever • Living Up to Our Name 9 by Stuart McLean 1998 and the same after that. since then he has told this Christmas means change. Called into Giving story on every Christmas Mary, the mother of Jesus, • Trinity Legacy Fund 11 season broadcast of The knew that. The evangelist • Are you a Tipper 12 Vinyl Cafe. Except two Luke tells us that she began years ago when he changed to sing after the angel had Our Church Family tradition and broadcast an- told her that she would give • Christmas Calendar 12 other story – but a consider- birth to the savior of the • Youth at Trinity able number of letters and world. And what a song it • Individual Privacy Pro- 13 complaints convinced him to stick go back is: God totally changes the order of things. tection to his original story. We love our Christmas God takes that which is on the bottom; God • News from Mulhurst traditions, don’t we? We have our Christ- turns everything upside down, and puts the • Limited Authorization 14 mas family traditions and we have our bottom on top and the top on the bot- Form Christmas church traditions. I don’t know tom. God revolutionizes the way we think, • Did you Know 15 about you, but I don’t want Christmas to the way we act, and the way we live. God ever change – Christmas evening without turns it upside down. The poor are put on Comings, Goings, Celebra- 16 Silent night? Or the nativity story told dif- the top; the rich are put on the bottom. It is tions ferently? For many people Christmas is like a revolution; God’s revolution. (Luke 1: 46 Looking Ahead “coming home”. Coming home to a place – 56). Some years later John will ask Jesus: they know forever and where they have “Are you the one who is to come” and Je- been known forever. “What does Christmas sus will answer: “The blind receive their mean to you?” I asked a student. sight, the lame walk, the lepers are “Christmas means” she answered after cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead raised and thinking about it for a while, “Christmas means going home to a place I know very well, Christmas means the fragrance of ...see Christmas - page 2 Page 2 December 2011 Trinity Team Christmas (Continued from page 1) human life. Since that holy night God knows, really knows, what it means to have fear, to feel alone, to the poor have good news brought to them.” (Luke 4: 16 – grieve, to be an outcast, to be pursued, to be in jail, to be 19) Christmas means change. tortured, to be killed. But he also knows what it means to And for some of us Christmas means more than change. have friends, to love and to be loved, to laugh and to en- For some of us Christmas means a challenge. At the same joy life. All our images of a distant God are destroyed by time that we celebrate beauty and wonder, we carry with the cry of the child born in Bethlehem. A child called Je- us the deaths of loved ones, and deep grief grips our sus Immanuel – God is with us. God is with us – in all our hearts. At the same time that we celebrate this "family" messes, in all the circumstances of our life. God is with us holiday, we are aware of the brokenness of families. At in our joyful, sad, happy, desperate colourful lives. Be- the same time that we toast each other's good health, we cause he knows all about the circumstances of human life are aware of those whose health is not good, those who – since he was born as a child. carry the burden of illness. So let us wait – with patience and with prayer. Let us We are waiting for a child to be born. This birth sing old and learn new songs. Let us think about things changed the world. God is revealed in a human body. God we may want to change and let’s talk. Let’s talk about is revealed in flesh. God became a child and a child be- what Advent and Christmas really might mean to us. Let came God. us ignore the “Holiday season” and really wait for Christ- God does not exist as a thought, as a spirit only. God mas, when the “word became flesh and lived among came to us as a child, with a body, with a nose, a mouth us” (John 1:14). and ears, with feet and hands. Yours, Pastor Ingrid Doerschel Who can really understand what this means for us? Since that night God knows all about the circumstances of Bishop’s Message for December 2011 In spite of the sturm und drang (translated “storm and mankind and of nations that puzzle and perplex and hor- stress”) that continues to preoccupy us as the Evangelical rify. In the common, in the trivial, in what we might con- Lutheran Church in Canada and the Synod of Alberta and sider the inappropriate moments to recognize the presence the Territories in the wake of the National Convention’s of God…coming to us. The whole world is alive with decisions in July, invariably life goes on. We rest in the God’s comings – quite literally! Advent [and Christmas] faithful hope that nothing in all creation will be able to opens our eyes to the wonder that God keeps coming, en- separate us from the love of God in tering into dialogue with us, to speak in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom. 8:39) The love, where [and when] we least expect…. human tendency is to wring our hands In the big, overbearing problems of a and wonder where God is in all of world in radical change, or in the simple this. The answer, of course, is that God delights of daily life, God’s literally all is where God always is: alive and at work over the place hoping that we’ll have the in the midst of his world, in the midst of eyes to see and the ears to listen to his his people. Sometimes the revealed God coming.” (As found in For All The Saints, (deus revelatus) seems for all the world Vol. III, pg. 11 and 12). like the hidden God (deus obsconditus), The story of Christmas is a living meta- but that is simply our failure to see God where God is. In phor for the living of our days. Humanity was not stand- those moments, when we feel God is absent, we have to ing “all in their places with bright shiny faces” when the walk by faith and not by sight. Christ of God burst forth from the Blessed Virgin’s In my devotional readings, I have recently discovered womb. The world was messy. In no way was it ready for vignettes from Pastor Edmund Steimle (1907 – 1988), who the Savior of the world. Ready only in this sense: KAI- at one time taught homiletics at Lutheran Theological ROS! … the fullness of time, God’s suitable moment, had Seminary, Philadelphia. I find some of his thoughts very come. A Holy Advent and a Blessed Christmas to us, each salient, especially as we – seemingly mired in chaos – nev- and all! ertheless enter Advent and the impending feast of the In- carnation. Steimle writes (in his book FROM DEATH TO BIRTH): “Perhaps we can be on the alert to hear the voice +Ronald B. Mayan, Bishop of God coming to us in the turmoil and change of the big Synod of Alberta and the Territories, problems around us.

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