NOT this week's sermon

A certain preacher did not preach last Sunday. So, for those of you who were here looking for yesterday's sermon, I am afraid that there isn't any.

However, I can give you a sneak peek into what the sermons for the next few weeks will be like!

Back when I was doing my part-time student associate pastorate at FCC Concord, my senior pastor there gave me a book to read entitled, "The Advent Conspiracy: Can Christmas Still Change the World?" It was co-written by three pastors, one of whom (Rick McKinley), I was familiar with in passing because his Imago Dei church is in my former hometown of Portland, Oregon, and I had actually visited Imago Dei on a couple of occasions.

The book itself is staggering on many levels, but first and foremost (to me) because of this: I felt like I was reading a book written by someone who understood my generation of millennials in a way that other pastors had tried to and failed by either repeating the same sermons of the past, or by skewing far too hard to the right in excluding people and characteristics that I would still consider to be a part of the body of Christ.

In short, the book is about reclaiming Christmas from the consumerist culture that currently surrounds the American holiday season, and the idea is that we can do that by both engaging in alternate gift-giving that is more meaningful than offering a sweater that he won't ever wear, or a fruitcake that she'll just re-gift next year (my granddad on my mom's side of the family swears that there is only one fruitcake in the world, and that it gets passed around every year at Christmas). That alone was enough to earn my permanent adoration, as my family can certainly attest to the peculiar and powerful loathing I reserve for having to gift-wrap ANYTHING.

Then, with the money you save from alternate gift-giving (which should be a pretty penny, since the average American household spends somewhere in the neighborhood of $800 on Christmas alone), you give to charity instead--in the Advent Conspiracy's case, this is Living Water International, an NGO in the business of drilling clean water wells in the Global South. But it can be any charity you wish.

Let me tell you, for a dorky little do-gooder who is just idealistic enough when he isn't being a cantankerous cynic, that book was some powerful stuff. Two years later, beat up and dog eared, it is now serving as the basis for this year's Advent sermon series, which begins this Sunday, the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

I hope to see you there.

Yours in Christ,
Eric