In the Genesis account of creation, it is God who is ascribed to be the Creator. When Abraham left the city of Ur in the land of Mesopotamia and ultimately went to the land of Canaan, God is the one the Hebrews ascribed to inspire Abraham to make that courageous journey. When the very elderly Abraham and his wife Sarah became parents of a son, the Bible gives the ascription for that birth to God. When baby Moses was rescued from the Nile River by the Pharaoh’s daughter, that highly unlikely occurrence was ascribed to the intervention of God. When the Red Sea parted, when Joshua and the Israelites conquered Canaan, when Gideon led the Israelites to defeat the Midianites, these occurrences were ascribed to God. The Israelites had no doubt God was the cause of all these things, and therefore they ascribed them to God.

Today is the first Sunday of Advent. The word “Advent” is taken from a Latin root which means “Coming.” During Advent, which always begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, and includes however many days there are in the actual week preceding Christmas Day, we prepare for the coming of Jesus Christ into the world. And so to be forewarned is to be forearmed: these “Christmas Song sermons” will be expository. That is, their essence will be an exposition of the verses upon which they are based. Not much more, and not much less. So, as they say in the Boy Scouts, Be Prepared.

It seemed like an innocent enough question. There was a man in a large crowd who had come out to listen to Jesus speaking. “Rabbi, bid my brother divide the inheritance with me.” Apparently the brother wanted either to keep all of the inheritance for himself or not to have their inheritance divided up at that particular time. We may deduce from this question that “the brother” had to be older than the man asking the question, because only the oldest son could delay the division of an inheritance, should he choose to do so. Most oldest brothers probably would not want to do that, because there normally would be no reason to prolong the distribution. Probably the greedy sibling wanted to keep the whole bundle for himself; Luke didn’t explain it.

Jesus had a special affinity for the dispossessed. Perhaps it is because he was born dispossessed. If the Christmas stories in Matthew and Luke are accurate, especially Matthew, Mary gave birth to Jesus in very trying circumstances. “There was room no in the inn,” Luke tells us. Thus Mary birthed Jesus when she and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem in the only available space for the holy family, a stable. Because King Herod wanted no usurper to seize his throne from him, he ordered all the male babies born in and around Bethlehem to be killed. Therefore Joseph and Mary left everything they owned back in Nazareth and fled to Egypt as political refugees, says Matthew. Thus Jesus always had an affinity for refugees, because he was born one.

Presumably Jesus of Nazareth was a poor man. We cannot know that for certain, but we may properly deduce it from those among whom Jesus spent most of his time in his three-year ministry in the Galilee. Only one verse in one Gospel indicates what Jesus’ occupation was. Mark 6:3 has a crowd in Jesus’ home synagogue say this about Jesus: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” Whether carpenters were generally poor in the time of Jesus is debatable, but most Church traditions have always assumed Jesus was poor. Apparently Jesus’ neighbors in Nazareth thought he was much too uppity as a poor man to be talking to them about anything.

As rich in meaning as this whole passage about love is in the First Letter of John, it is his last observation about love upon which I want us to concentrate for the remainder of this sermon. “There is no fear in love,” John wrote, “but perfect love cast out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and he who fears is not perfected in love.”

We human beings like to tell ourselves that we are cerebrally and ethically the loftiest species in the earthly created order. That is a highly debatable point, but it might be correct. Most ordinary people can accomplish things that even the brainiest of animals cannot do. Morally we can make good choices that even the kindest and most loving dogs or cats or horses could never even conceptualize. Nevertheless, we have all read how pets rescued their owners from burning houses or kept them from drowning, and so on and so on. However, almost always when heroic rescues are accomplished, it is human beings, not animals, who accomplish them.

The word providence, or more specifically the doctrine of providence, is not referred to much these days. It was a very important concept to St. Augustine, the greatest of the Early Church fathers, and to St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the medieval Church scholars. It became a much-discussed and written-about topic for Martin Luther and John Calvin. Since the Reformation, however, providence as a major Christian concept has slipped from the consciousness of most Christian scholars, clergy, or lay people.

I am convinced that faith comes much more easily to some people than to others, and it is primarily because of cerebral wiring or brain chemistry or who knows what. The thesis of this sermon is not based on any empirical scientific study or evidence. Rather it based on having known a few thousand individual people as a minister, several hundred of them quite closely. And I mean to suggest as clearly as I can that, for instance, just as various human bodies vary greatly in athletic prowess, and for essentially genetic reasons, so too do various human minds vary in their ability to affirm matters of faith.

Without question, there has been a long and strong tradition of communion in the Christian Church for all of its history. It originated, of course, from the widely remembered Last Supper of Jesus with his twelve disciples on the night before Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem. I have chosen two biblical passages which describe the Last Supper. The passage from Mark’s Gospel, ch. 14- vs. 17-25, is considerably the shortest account of the upper room episode in all of the four Gospels. It is all Mark says about the Passover meal.

At the very beginning of this sermon, I want to assure you it will not be about what you might think it will be about. I preached on that subject a few weeks ago, and I’m not going to preach on it now. You can’t relax, exactly, because what I am going to talk about will not be very cheerful, but at least it won’t be that, so you can rest somewhat easily.

Why is Smith always sick, but Jones never is? Why does one family go sailing through life with favorable winds and never a storm, while another family has one stormy crisis after another? Why are Connecticut and New Jersey relatively so affluent, and South Carolina and Mississippi relatively so un-affluent? Why are rich countries so rich, and most of the countries of Africa and Asia are so poor? Why are the western states ablaze with so many fires, and the Southeast, Northeast, and Midwest are currently free from serious natural disasters? It is those kinds of questions we think about when we think about the fairness of God.

From the outset, you need to understand that this sermon is going to be largely educational, and not inspirational. If there is any inspiration at all, it will come toward the end of the sermon. This morning I shall be much more of a rabbi, a teacher, than a pastor or preacher. Having forewarned you, however, I hope you will listen attentively anyway. It can’t hurt you, and it might even deepen your understanding of what the Bible is - - - and isn’t.

Jesus and many of his followers believed that the apocalypse was just around the corner. God was going to end the world, and all the righteous would go to heaven to be with God, and all the unrighteous would be destroyed on the earth. That didn’t happen. Nonetheless there was much tribulation ahead for those who were the first followers of Jesus. Within forty years of Jesus’ death, the Romans, not God, destroyed the kingdom of Judea and scattered most of the Jews to the four winds. At the same time some of the Roman emperors began to persecute the Christians in Judea, Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome. When the fourth Gospel was written, tribulation was widely experienced everywhere in the world where there were Christians and Jews. Jesus could not have spoken about that at the Last Supper, because the disciples could not understand what Jesus would have been saying. But tribulation came nonetheless, and the writer, who believed that Jesus was God, believed that God, by means of Jesus, would overcome the tribulation.

Throughout the Bible, there are numerous instances where God is reported to have chosen certain individuals or certain peoples for His own purposes. Almost always in those instances, God doesn’t give His reasons for doing what He does. He just does it. For example, God seemed to favor Abel over Cain, because God was more pleased with Abel’s offering than Cain’s. Cain was a shepherd, and he brought a sheep to God as a burnt offering. Abel was a farmer, and he brought some grain to God as a burnt offering. So does God prefer farmers to shepherds? In other words, does God like agriculture better than “agniculture”: the growth of grain more than the growth of sheep? Genesis 4 offers no explanation for God’s choice; it just states it.

“He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.” If God restores our soul, it means that it needed to be restored. “I once was lost, but now am found/ Was blind, but now I see.” We delude ourselves into supposing that we are doing just fine in life, thank you very much. But at times we are not doing fine, not fine at all. At times we become lost, and we need to be restored to the flock by our Shepherd. To imagine we are making it on our own is to fall into one of the most lethal of life’s traps. Great pride goeth before great pratfalls.

There about sixty different people who come to The Chapel at least once every two months. Here is what I am suggesting that each of you can do to keep us a vital, if also inevitably an older, congregation. Invite three people of your acquaintance to join you for one Sunday here. When you invite them, explain to them why you attend The Chapel. Then, either bring them with you, or meet them here. Don’t bring all three at once, unless they are all related to one another. Invite each one separately in order to make it a special occasion for them, and for you. If they come back the next Sunday, we shall shout hallelujah and rejoice, although only figuratively, of course. People such as we do not visibly and vocally shout hallelujah or rejoice, for heaven’s sake. But you’re only asked to get them here once, not twice or more. And remember: Of people who attend a new church for the first time, the highest percentage come because someone invited them – not because of the building or the programs or the preacher or other such things, though those are factors, but because someone invited them to attend.

The prophet’s heart is broken by the sins of his people. His mind is thrown into deep depression by their willful violation of the laws of God. He feels duty-bound to tell his friends and neighbors about their misdeeds, and he knows it will make him a community persona non grata. However, because he is undeviatingly committed to speaking on behalf of God, he goes on saying what he believes he must say, knowing that it will be met by increasing resistance. Nevertheless Hosea was sure it must be said.

The prophets have never had an official place in either the Jewish or the Christian religions. Almost never in history was a prophet ordained to become a priest or bishop, an elected denominational president or chief executive. Prophets usually speak out against the religious establishment, not for it. It is the vocation, the divine calling, of prophets to condemn rather than to congratulate. That’s why they are never welcomed into the inner circles of any religion. They are agitators, not assimilators, irritating provocateurs, not irenic proclaimers.

The prophecy of Hosea is the first of twelve biblical books which are collectively known as the Minor Prophets. The word “minor” in this context does not mean they are less important than the Major Prophets, but rather that each of these books is shorter in length than Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, and Daniel. They are the five books of the Major Prophets.