Speaker 1 0:43

Well, Northgate friends. It is good to be with you. I always love getting to hang out with my bay area family up here. And if you're joining us online, we are glad that you are here as well as we begin a new series, taking a little break from Matthew in the Christmas season here, as we move towards Christmas with a , a series that we've called , uh , personality of Christmas, and we're gonna do over the next few weeks is we're going to sort of hone in on a few people in that first Christmas story and try and understand , uh , the way that they approach that first Christmas, what happened in them and through them. And what does that say to us about how we approach this season and our, our current moment in our current time. And, and so I'm excited to get to kick that off with you for those of you that are online. One of the things that we're gonna get to do today is to celebrate and experience communion together. And so I wanna encourage you to go ahead and get those elements, ready, get some sort of bread or cracker, get some sort of juice that you're able to use to be a part of that with us at the end of the message today. Uh , and if you have a Bible on you, I invite you to turn to Luke chapter two a and if you have no Bible, don't worry about it. Everything will be up on the ginormous screen behind me. And so you will definitely see it all. Uh , now at , at Christmas, I know like we all have different sort of family traditions that we do right there at things that happen during this time of year, that happen every year. Like for my family, one of the things that we do is we have certain Christmas movies that we have to watch this month that will do every single year to do any of you do that, that you've got movies. You're gonna watch it every year. Yeah. It doesn't matter. How many times, what was it? Die? Hard, die hard. Yes. Can we talk about die hard for a second and settle once? And for all that, it is indeed a Christmas movie, right? It happens at Christmas time . Christmas is an essential character in the diehard movie. It it's a Christmas movie that we need to watch, or there's like elf with will Ferrell . Right. Does anybody love El? Uh , so good. So many great lines. Smiling is favorite. You smell like old cheese, so many, so much goodness there, or there's there's Chevy chases , uh , Christmas vacation, like that is some good hilarity there. And , and I've got a neighbor who decided this year, like right next door, that he is making his house, the Clark Griswold the house. And it is my wife , uh , texted me last night and she goes, there's like 50 people out in front of his house tonight to watch all of the stuff he's doing. And so that's really fun to go visit. It's a very different thing. When the lights are all coming in your window and the music is all going. I was like, I , I liked it when I was at the church up on the hill, watching the Christmas lights here. It was a great thing here. Uh , or, or , um , there is the classic for my childhood home alone. As you've got Kevin, who's played by McColey Colgan and he gets left home alone at Christmas as his family travels to France for Christmas. And then the movie, the movie has his mom trying desperately to get back to him. And there's this, there's this scene where she's in Scranton trying to get like a car rental, trying to get on a plane, trying to get anything that will get her home. And, and she's just being told, no, like, no, there's no room for you. You're not gonna get home. That there's nothing available for you. No, no. And in her frustration, she tells the gate agent, who's telling her no to everything. She's telling the gate agent that she's gonna do whatever it takes for her to get home. And then she says this line that I think embodies everything that she does in the movie. She says, this is the Christmas season. The time of perpetual hope. Christmas is the season of perpetual hope. This mom who won't give up on getting home to her son, that there's, this, there's this reality out in front of her, that she wants to move towards, that she wants to get. And regardless of the obstacles that are there, regardless of all the hardships that are around her, even in the reality of that, not actually being true yet, she's moving towards it, hope driving her forward to push through all of that, to get home to her son. And so Christmas is this season of perpetual hope, except for when it isn't, cuz sometimes it doesn't feel very hopeful for some of us. Doesn't sometimes in fact, where the Christmas season does is it highlights loss and it highlights what we're missing this year. That sometimes what happens for us at Christmas is that we actually , uh, the , these emotions that have kind of been kept down, get sort of brought up and highlighted. Uh , this week we had gone to get our Christmas tree. We go, we still go get a live Christmas tree from the lot because our home, we believe that if you pull a tree out of a box, you make the baby Jesus cry. And so, so we're gonna go, we're gonna go get the real thing cause we don't wanna make baby Jesus cry. And so we get our tree and , and our tree, when it gets decorated, we pull out all the ornaments and, and when it gets decorated, it's just this random hodgepodge of ornaments that maybe it's like that near home. Some of you, maybe you have the nice Christmas tree, it's all decorated monochromatic. And you've got like, we've got the one that is just randomness, but every ornament has a story and it has a memory. And what we do when we decorate our trees, we will pull out the ornament and be like, oh, remember when we got this, this is what we were doing. We'll tell some story from that, oh, this one, this one's from my childhood and reason it's Kermit. But the reason that Kermit's arm is melted off is because when I was a kid, the kinda lights that were on the tree, they actually got hot. And so Kermit leaned up against that light and his arm melted off our house. Didn't burn down, but we still have this ornament to remember that. And so we, every ornament has this like story with it. As we were pulling out the ornaments, I pulled out this green cheap plastic ornament. It's got a spot for a picture in the front of it. And it still has like the picture it came with with the random baby. That's like just there, who's probably like 27 now, but is a baby here. And , and it is this ornament that my grandma gave me. She gave it to me about 15 years ago and, and it , and it, this or ornament, you can like record yourself on it. And then you can hit a button on top and it plays that recording. And so every time you push that button, she would say, ho , ho, ho, Merry Christmas. And we'd push it . And she would say that, and she loved to give us these hokey gifts. And she gave this to us on her last Christmas with us. She died a few months after she gave this to us. And, and so every year we would pull out this ornament as we're decorating our tree and we'd turn it on and we'd push the button and we'd hear the last recording that we had of my grandma and her saying ho , ho , ho , Merry Christmas. And I tell my kids stories about their great grandma that they didn't really get to know. And every year we had pulled that out and then last year we pulled it out and we turned it on. We pushed the button and nothing, it didn't work anymore. And we opened it up, took it apart, put new batteries in a it and tried it again and nothing. It didn't work anymore. And I was shocked by how sad this made me this like stupid cheap ornament had stopped working and had stopped playing my grandma's voice. And I , and I mean, here's the thing that even in the midst of a good Christmas season, you can't help, but to be reminded of loss in the season of perpetual hope, there's brokenness all around us and you're gonna experience it in different ways. Maybe you're gonna experience it in your own home, where there is a seat that's gonna be empty this year. And it's the first time that it's gonna be empty. Maybe, maybe this is the first Christmas where you have split up your are separated from your spouse. And that in the way that it's working out with the kids, that the kids are gonna wake up in their home and not in your home. And it's just gonna be this sense of like, oh , like this is so different. And it feels like something is missing. There are people that you have lost this year that you're gonna be reminded of. And even, even as we have head into Christmas, I'm reminded of things that are happening outside of our personal homes and culture and society at large, where we're experiencing loss. Like for instance, just this week we had another school shooting. Gosh, I hate that. I even have to say another school shooting, should that even be a part of our vocabulary? The loss that those parents will experience this Christmas as their kids do not get to sit around the Christmas tree with them, the loss that our kids in the culture at large experience, going to school, having to do active shooter drills, that they shouldn't have to be a part of their school experience. And so all around us, all around us, there is of this brokenness that's happening in us. It's happening in our family systems, it's happening in society and larger sort of systems and structures. And the reality is that even during Christmas, the season of perpetual hope, we can not feel very hopeful. And so there are these two people that I want us to spend a little bit of time with today. Two people who are part of the original Christmas story, but we, we actually don't hear much about them. I've never seen them in an activity set. I have never seen them as a part of a Christmas pageant, but they are as much a part of the Christmas story of that first Christmas as the shepherds are and the mag I are , it it's a man named Simeon and a woman named Anna . Uh , she's a prophet. And their story is their story is told just after the story of the shepherds receiving the news of the birth of Jesus in Luke chapter two , as her gonna look there at the way that Luke tells the story of Simeon and Anna starts in verse 25, Luke writes this , he says, now there was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon who was righteous and devout. He was waiting for the consolation of Israel and the holy spirit was on him. It had been revealed to him by the holy spirit that he would not die before he had seen the Lord's Messiah. And so he's waiting for the consolation of Israel, which is just this phrase to simply say that he was anticipating the liberation of his people. It was this way of saying that he recognized that things were not right, that things were broken and needed to be fixed and they needed to be made whole. And what was happening at the time for them is that Israel was being occupied by a foreign government. And that foreign government was incredibly oppressive to the people in all kinds of different ways. And one of the ways was they created this heavy taxation on them that pushed those who were in poverty further and further into poverty. And that those who were wealthy were able to work the system to get wealthier and wealthier, creating this larger and larger income gap that was happening there. This occupying force that was there, not allowing them to be able to live fully in who they were design and created to be not able to live fully in the way that they were called to live. And so there was this longing at the time to say, God, God, will you come and rescue us? God, will you come and make things right? God, will you remind us that we are not alone? Will you show us that you're with us? Will you remind us that you care for us, help us to remember that you're not abandoning us. And so when it says the con , he was waiting for the constellation of Israel, it's that sort of anticipation, it's that sort of longing. And when Luke describes Simian, he uses this word to describe him. He says that he was devout. Now that word devout in its original language that Luke writes in here, he doesn't ally write in English. He writes this in Greek, and then the original language that has this like sort of nuance with it, this nuance with it, that makes it mean more than just, well, he showed up and he did the right thing. Well , the nuance it carries with it was that he sort of like kept showing up and doing the right thing in a way that he had done for years and years and years, it carries with his , the sense that he was a sort of like Sage who'd been through the highs and the lows of life and had been steady through it and had carried on. He had some years under his belt. And for Simeon, this sort of Sage who's been through it, it's been revealed to him in some sort of way that he won't die until he's seen the Messiah. Now, I don't know about you, but if in some sort of way, it had been revealed to me that I'm not gonna die until I seen the Messiah and somebody comes around and they're like, here's the Messiah. I'd be like, where I , I don't see him . Like, keep that thing away from me. I don't like, I'm gonna keep going, but that's not Sam's experience. He's lived his life waiting, waiting for something that he didn't know when it would happen, but he knew it would happen. He believed it would happen. His life then is in this sort of like in between space. Have you ever felt like you were in the , in between space, this space where it's like, things are not the way they're supposed to be. Things in my life are not the way they're supposed to be things. My family are not the way they're supposed to be things. As I look at society and culture, what's going on at large, this is not the way it's supposed to be. Things are broken. And I feel like I'm in this in between space, because I believe that this is not the end of the story, but right now the reality, the reality is that there's a longing, that's waiting to be. And so Simeon believed that this longing would be fulfilled, but there had been so many moments where that hadn't been the case. So many moments where I could imagine Simeon waking up on countless days, wishing that it was a season of perpetual hope, but the reality of what was happening around him, to him, to his people, what was happening around him, didn't quite feel like that. And so SIM's been waiting for something that he knew would happen, but he didn't know when here's how the story goes on verse 27, moved by the spirit. He went into the temple courts and when the parents brought in the I Jesus to do for him, what the customer of the law required, Simeon took him in his arms and praised God saying sovereign Lord. As you have promised, you may now dismiss your servant and peace for my eyes have seen your salvation. By the way, notice he says your salvation. I've seen your salvation. Jesus is your salvation. Not an I , not something to like ascribe to. It's a person. The person of Jesus is your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all nations. This is for all people, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and the glory of your people, Israel. So he's been waiting and he's been waiting for Israel for his country of , for his people to be brought out of oppression. He's been waiting for God to rescue them. And then when he looks at the infant, Jesus, who is just eight days old at this point, he essentially says, Lord, I can die. Now this , this is what I've been waiting for. This is what I've been holding out for. This is the hope that I've been clinging to. And now his hope has been fully realized. And when you hope for a thing that you now have you no longer hope anymore, because you have it. You can only hope for something you don't have. You can only hope for something that isn't yet realized. You can only hope for something that's in the future that you haven't yet obtain. But once you obtain it, you no longer hope for that thing because you now possess that thing. Is there something that happens in the waiting in the , in between time when we don't yet have that? When that hasn't been realized, when we hope, when we wait, there's something that, that waiting produces within us. There's a character that's developed in us that can only be developed in the waiting. It can only occur in that space. There's something that gets created in us. There's something that is done in us. That only happens when there's something that you're hoping for, that you don't yet have a , and you already know this. I mean, you've experienced this yourself, but even you experience this, for those of you that are parents, you experience this at times in the way that you parent it , your kid has something that they want and you and your spouse, you , you have this conversation to try and figure out well, is this something that we just give them? Cuz sometimes we just give them that thing, cuz we want to, or there's other re all kinds of reasons, right? Like you might just give it to them . But sometimes what you say is actually I think it would be good for them to work for it. I , I think it might be good for them to earn it a bit. I think it might be good for them to wait for it, to not get it right away. I think like they need a little bit more maturity before they can handle that thing. I think it wouldn't be good for the development of that character if they just always get what they want. And so we could give it to them, but we're gonna choose not to give it to them because there's something there's something important that can only happen in them. If they wait. There's something that happens in them when they hope for that thing that they don't yet have. And they have to keep hoping for it. And if I just give it to them, then I might be actually taking away from them, what it could do in them, what it could produce in them. And they might actually be missing out on that. And so sometimes parents, we will do something right . That because we know, we know that there's something that the waiting does in their development, that it will form in them, something that is in significant that they will miss out on. If they don't have to have that waiting. Now, now I'm not saying I'm not at saying friends that God is this God who like holds back good things from you. Cause he's like, you gotta learn from this and I'm gonna dangle a carrot in front of you to mess with you. Like that is a sadistic picture of what God is like, God's not like that. But I am saying this, that there are these moments in our lives that we go through where hope hasn't been fully. There are these moments in our lives where we know that there is brokenness that's there, there are these times where we look around at what's happening and we're like, things are not right. Systems are not right. There are people who are being pushed aside. There are people who are being oppressed. There are systems that are set up against like this isn't the way it's supposed to be, who are not supposed to be against each other. And these , the , the stuff is not supposed to be happening. When we look around, when we see those moments and perhaps they're in that place, there's a kind of character and quality that can be produced in you that can only be produced in that place. And perhaps even for Simeon, it was in that waiting. It was in that, waiting that I wonder if that's where he becomes that devout man, that it was in the longing and the anticipation that something happened in him that one day Luke would then write his story. We would a couple thousand years later be reading about it and he would say, oh, Simeon was devout. And I wonder, I wonder if we were able to go back and to ask him, like, how did he become devout? I wonder if he would tell stories about what happened in the waiting and that happened inside of him. And so Simeon Simeon has been waiting, holding onto some kind of hope. That gets real when he encounters the infant. Jesus, but he's not the only one who's been waiting. The story goes on and talks about the prophet. Anna in verse 36, we'll skip down to there. Luke writes this . There was also a prophet honor , the daughter Ofu of the tribe of Asher . She was very old. Uh , I love that. Cause I feel like , um , Luke has given this little like sideways dig to her, like Anna , I'm gonna tell about you, but like you are really old. It reminds me a bit of like the way that my wife and I tease each other. Sometimes she is 18 months older than me. And like when I was young and we were dating, like that was like, I eating an older woman and now it's like, I get to tease her that she's the older woman. And so we'll have some, like, we'll be talking about somebody who's a bit older than us. And, and I'll say to our kids like, oh yeah, he's closer to your mom's age than to my age. <laugh> I feel like Luke has given a little bit of that. She was very old. She had lived with her husband seven years after her marriage and then was a widow until she was 84. So what's Luke telling us here saying that she was married for seven years and then her husband dies and she's been a widow ever since her husband has died. She never left the temple, but worship day and night fasting and praying, coming up to them at that very moment, she gave thanks to God and spoke about the child to all who were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem. Now that phrase redemption of Jerusalem is very similar, has similar connotations to the phrase that we heard earlier, the constellation of Israel, it was about this longing, this desire, this recognition that things are not right. Things are broken and we long and desire for them to be made whole. And so Anna is this prophet . His husband has died seven years into their marriage and she's lived the rest of her life as a widow. After that, she stays in the temple day and night worshiping and fasting. And she's lived this life oriented towards God towards seeking God worshiping God. And she's 84 years old at this first Christmas when she sees the infant, the one who would bring about the redemption of Jerusalem. And I , I wonder for Anna , I wonder like what keeps her going for all of those years? What keeps a woman like that continuing to go? I mean, we don't know for sure exactly how long she lived as a widow, but we can have some good guesses based off of what we understand about the culture of the time, what the text tells us and , and my best sort of like edge kid to guesses. She was probably a widow for somewhere around 60 years. Maybe even a little bit longer than that. And , and friends, it was not easy for widows during this time. They were often living in poverty. They were just sort of scraping to get by. There were some of the most vulnerable members of society. In fact, as you read through the scriptures, you'll notice that there are three groups of people that continu are brought up together as the most vulnerable members of society that God has a certain heart and concern for and calls his community to care for talks about caring for the foreigner, that person who is born outside of that place, who is brought in and doesn't maybe have family systems and structures, doesn't have a built in support system and says, you care for them says care for the orphan. The kid who's growing up without parents and is vulnerable as a result of that. And then also says, and you care for the widow because in this time in this place, widows were incredibly vulnerable that, that they, it would be difficult for them to be able to make a living. And so they would end up doing work like, no , not even work like existing as a beggar in society, they would end up taking jobs like becoming a prostitute or doing menial work for really low income . And not because they weren't qualified for something more than that, because that's all that was available for them in that cultural context. And so they could easily be taken advantage of, and yet Anna , Anna is shown as a strong single woman, which, which just by the way, is this like little aside from what we're talking about it it's one of the things that Luke does in his gospel account is he tells the story of Jesus and particularly is he tells this birth narrative, that Christmas story. One of the things that he does is he Levis and he highlights women in ways that would've actually pushed against cultural norms at the time in , in a society that was rigged against women in a society that was rigged against single women in a society that was rigged against widowed women who are some of the heroes of the story. I mean , who are some of the ones who show STR and perseverance in the midst of hardship? It's the women. Luke is showing us that in this new community, that's being formed of people who are following Jesus, that in this new community, that the cultural division and societal oppression, it won't have a place in this new community. It'll be a new kind of community that will defy all of those things. And so, and so Anna , Anna is alone and she's spent the vast majority of her life alone. And while we don't know the specifics of her specific situation, we can have a good educated guess that it was a less than ideal situation. And what is it? What is it that keeps somebody like her going and moving forward in the midst of all that, what causes her to keep showing up and keep worshiping in the midst of her situation? It's hope, it's hope in the Messiah that God's anointed one would come and make things right, and hope, hope isn't a quick resolution. It's not an easy answer. Hope often involves struggle and pain. Hope , hope happens in the midst of the man. Who's , uh , been waiting for the promises of God to be fulfilled and he doesn't experience it and he doesn't see it and he keeps waiting, but he keeps holding onto it. And then one day it's realized for him and then hope happens when there's the 84 year old woman, who's lived most of her life alone as a widow. And she keeps showing up, regardless of her circumstances, hope shows up in that place. A and a lot of times we will miss out on the transformative power of living with hope, because what we want is we want resolutions and we want easy answers. We want to skip the pain and the struggle, and we want it to get fixed really nicely. It it's like we watch a movie like home alone. And in the span of 90 minutes, you get the inciting incident that creates tension and struggle and the story, and you watch that struggle happen. And the struggle happens of the mom gonna get back to her son and the struggle of this eight year old trying to live on his own. And so you see the struggle happen, but then, then we experience the resolution of that as the family's brought back together and the family's made whole , and you've got the youngest son who's been looked down on by everybody. And suddenly now he's respected by everybody. And in the midst of 90 minutes, we see struggle and we see resolution and we watch it get all wrapped up with a nice bow. And when we start to get conditioned to expect that, I mean, it's not that any of us are so naive that we think life is actually like a movie, but if we watch enough of them, what begins to happen? Is it just sort of like subtly creeps in? And what we expect is that like, yeah, there going to be struggle, but it's gonna be short and we're gonna get through it on the other side. And when we get through it on the other side, everything is gonna be nice and neat and clean, and it's gonna be resolved and it's going to be fixed. But that is not the case. Oftentimes is it? It's the season of perpetual hope even, and it doesn't feel very hopeful maybe for some of you, it's a bit like this ornament that I wish could be fixed. And the reality is it's a cheap drugstore ornament. It lasted longer than it probably should have, and it's just not going to be fixed. And while I long to hear my grandma's voice again on this, that's not gonna happen. And maybe that's the reality for some of us is this recognition that it won't get fixed quickly. But when we come to that point where it doesn't get fixed quickly, we can end up in a couple of different places. One place where we can end up in is we can really quickly move to despair. And despair is a place where we just start saying things like, well, why do I even keep moving forward? Why do I keep showing up what it's not even worth continuing to hope? Why do I keep trying? Cuz I just keep being let down. And so I start saying things like this, I say, well, it just is what it is. This is just the way that it is. There's nothing that I can do. And I move into this cycle of despair, which sucks the life from me. We can easily end up in that place. But the other place that we can really easily end up in is also this sort of like shallow optimism. And you know, the people who have this sort of like shallow optimism where they almost like don't pay attention. They got blinders up to the reality of what's going on. And they're like, everything is great and good and no matter what's happening, it's great. And it's good. And you're like, Hey, you lost your job. You have no money in the bank. How are you gonna pay mortgage this month? And they're like, I don't know, but it's gonna happen. I believe it's gonna happen. And they're like, well , you haven't gone to a job interview yet. You haven't done like, and it , but no, but I believe it's gonna happen. And you're like, you are living in denial. And actually what psychologists call this is they call it toxic positivity. Have you experienced that out with somebody where toxic positivity is where you like sort of drum up this happy optimistic state, regardless of the circumstances around you and you live in denial to the reality that's happening around you, you minimize it. You invalidate actual experiences and you actually in toxic positivity, positivity, you actually end up missing out a live being the full human experience because you're trying to deny a part of the human experience, but friends, the , the recognition that things are difficult and the real , and seeing the reality around you, that things are broken and owning that does not have to move you into a cycle of despair. And that at the same time, believing that this is not the end of the story and that this is not all that there is. And that things will be made whole and right, and good believing that does not have to move you to a place where you deny reality and just sort of live in toxic positivity instead, actually hope. Hope is what happens when those two things sit side by side hope is what happens when we acknow is the reality. That's all around us when we can be honest about what's happening in us and around us and in our family and in systems and structures in society. And we can be honest about that. And we can say, yeah, those things are there and they're broken and that is not right. And that's not the way that things should be. And so we put that up on a shelf and right next to that, on that shelf, what sits right next to it is this belief that the good God who brought the universe into existence, the good God who breathed life into you and I , the good God who makes the sun rise and the sunset, the good God would come and live on earth. And the person of Jesus who would walk among us and who would then one day go to the cross and give of himself dying a brutal death and who would then be raised from the dead that, that good God will come and make things right. And so hope is what happens when the reality of what act actually is sits right next to this belief of the way things can be and will be. And they both sit there side by side . We don't have to let one rule out over the other. They both sit there. And what happens in that space, what happens in that space is a deep, rich experience of hope. This thing that keeps you moving forward and in a way where you experience the full breadth of human emotions, cuz you are created to experience the fullness of your humanity. You don't have to deny what's going on. You don't have to pretend you don't have to pretend like things aren't as bad as they really are. You don't have to invalidate it's somebody's horrific experience because you want it to appear better to you. You can own that. That's reality. It's reality for you. It's reality in society, it's reality for their experience, that's actually happening. And it's actually true. And at the same time, at the same time, right next to it, I can hold on to the good God who breathe life in me will come and will make things right. Uh , I don't , I don't know if you know this, but the season that we're in right now in the historic , uh , church calendar is actually called advent. It's not Christmas time . It's actually advent. And , and I had always thought, I didn't know for a long time what advent was, I'd always at advent was just another word for Christmas time that we kinda like used them interchangeably, but actually in the historic church calendar, that's, that's not the case in the historic church calendar. Christmas time actually begins on December 25th. And it goes for 12 days after the 25th, which is where we get the song. The 12 days of Christmas from singing about that experience. And that the , the time that we're in now is called advent. And what advent is, is advent is a time of waiting. It's a time where we remember that the people of Israel were waiting for the Messiah. It's this waiting for the birth of Jesus. It's this time where we remember people like Simeon and Anna who had been longing for who had been anticipating when things could be made, right? We remember them, but we also remember our own waiting. We acknowledge where things are broken in our own lives. We acknowledge where things are broken

Speaker 2 33:24

In society around us, where we acknowledge the brokenness in other people's lives. And we wait, we wait for when things will be made whole. And when things where things will be made, right? And advent is this period of time where we sit in hope in hope, where we acknowledge the reality of what is, and we trust that the good God will come and will make things right. The good God will redeem and restore and renew all things. So one of the things that we're gonna do together today is we're gonna have a time of communion and we're gonna do it a , maybe a little bit differently than you've experienced before we have communion stations. For those of you that are in the room, we have them around the room. We've got a table over on that side. On that side, in here, up front where the elements of communion are there. And communion is simply a simple piece of bread and a cup of juice. The bread represents Jesus's body that was given for us. The juice represents his blood that was shed for our forgiveness of sins. And when we take those, we're remembering, we're remembering that Christ would come and he would die and he would give of himself. And one of the things that I was realizing as I was thinking about advent in this period of time, that we're in is in some tradition of the church . One of the things that they do as they prepare to take communion is they proclaim. What's been called the mystery of faith. And it's three things. The mystery of faith is that Christ has come, Christ has risen and Christ will come again. This recognition that Christ has come, we're celebrating Christmas, that God would come in the form of a person who would be completely God and completely human at the same time. And that Christ has risen that he would be , uh , crucified, but that he would raise from the dead defeating death and the grave that sin and death could not hold him. And he would defeat those things in his resurrection. But at the same time that we live in this in between time, where we an faith that Christ will come again and that Christ will come and will make things right. And so we live with this longing. And so as we take communion, we recognize, we recognize a great mystery of faith that Christ says come, that Christ has risen. And that we live with this longing for when Christ will come again and will come and make things right. Here's what I wanna encourage you to do is to actually in a moment, get out of your seats to go to one of those areas, to take communion. And I wanna encourage you if you're with somebody to go with them. If you came with a friend with a spouse or the boyfriend, a girlfriend with your children to go and to even feel free, to take communion together, to feel free, to move into different art of the room and to pray together and to acknowledge together that God that here are some things where we're feeling some brokenness, here are some areas where we need you to come and to make things right. And so we acknowledge that Christ you have come that Christ that you have risen. And we anticipate when you will come again, would you come Lord come and make things right? And so it does something to us when our posture is a bit different when we don't just sit and receive and do what we normally would do. But when we actually get out of our seats, it engages in a different kind of way. And so we're gonna sing a song over you as you do this. And I just want to encourage you to move out of your comfort zone a bit and to experience God at the communion table, whether that's on your own, whether that's with some friends, with some family, if you would go and do that during this time, as we sing over you, I .