 We live in a world that has forgotten how to wait.
Everything is instant now. Same-day delivery. Algorithms that predict what we want before we know we want it. Waiting feels like a glitch in the system, an inefficiency to be solved. But the Church still knows how to wait. Not the passive, resigned waiting of people who've given up, but the active, expectant waiting of Advent. The kind of waiting that believes something is coming.
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 Holy Trinity Lutheran Church was founded in 1950. Ankeny’s population had grown to a little over 1,200 people and prospects for continued growth were buoyed by the new John Deere sprayer production facility that had moved into the old munitions plant in 1947. The American Lutheran Church started a mission that met in the American Legion Hall in uptown and became Holy Trinity.
 It's Thanksgiving week. Families are traveling. Tables are being set. We're preparing for the gathering; the food, the conversations, the complicated dynamics that come with bringing everyone together. There's excitement and anxiety, joy and exhaustion, all mixed together.
And woven through it all is this expectation that we should be grateful. That we should feel thankful. That this should be a time of abundance and warmth.  I know that the title seems backwards. I mean, ends always follow beginnings, right? We Christians, however, are a peculiar people. This Sunday we will observe the Festival of Christ the King. It is an ending. We have spent the last year telling the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Our gospel guides have been Luke and John. This Sunday we will celebrate and anticipate the completion, the consummation, of the reign of God and redemption of all things.
 Every three months they take pictures of my scarred liver. The scar is a good thing, a friend, a sign of grace. The scar is where the cancer used to be. The scar is a sign of life where death used to reside.
 We live in a world that doesn't quite know what to do with grief.
People die, and we send a card or drop off a casserole. There's a funeral, maybe. Then, within a week or two, the world expects things to go back to normal. You return to work. Show up at church. Smile. Move on.  Reuters reports that that is the number of hungry people who will be pushed more deeply into food insecurity and hunger this weekend because of the government shutdown. Forty-Two million people. That’s the number of pawns in play as our divided and irresponsible government plays political games with people’s lives.
 I have been doing stewardship work in the church for thirty-seven years. That seems like a lifetime. It has been rewarding as congregations came together to fund mission, build buildings, and grow spiritually as they tended gifts of generosity. It has also been a challenge because we live in an age in which coming together and growing in generosity are far from people’s minds and hearts.
 We live in a world that's explained everything away.
Google gives us answers in 0.3 seconds. We've reduced sunsets to wavelengths of light. Love becomes oxytocin and dopamine. Beauty gets analyzed until there's nothing left to marvel at. We've turned mystery into data points and wonder into Wikipedia entries. Somewhere along the way, we forgot how to be amazed.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the great American Poet of the 19th century wrote a poem called The Rainy Day which contains the familiar line: “Into each life some rain must fall. Some days must be dark and dreary.” I suspect however, that this fragment of the poem becomes less familiar as time goes by. These days, the reality of sadness, suffering, and pain is not to be acknowledged, but avoided. Suffering is what happens to losers. Sadness is a kind of sickness to be treated and eliminated. If I pretend it won’t rain, I won’t get wet.
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