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one of the ways that recent seminary graduates amused themselves is to talk about what they did not learn in seminary and often they do so in a vaguely accusatory tone, as if seminary faculty conspired to keep the

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vital information from their students. Now, this is of course it's not true. I can tell you from firsthand experience that seminary faculty are not very good at conspiring. Yeah, but it might seem to

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be true. And therefore in order to counter those patients, I am going to share something that is not often communicated in seminaries. Christmas is a pain . Christmas is a pain for pastors now, this

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is true even for pastors who are christmas junkies and a lot of them are, there are a number of reasons for this. First, pastors are often just coming off stirred ship season when advent begins and

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they are worried about the budget. Second, there are many additional activities during the christmas season. There are extra services, There are extra dinners, there are extra planning meetings, there are extra visits,

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there are extra extras and all of that is anxiety producing and physically exhausting but primarily and this is the biggest pain yeah, passengers have to deal with the cultural hash that christmas season has become, there are

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the requisite shepherds and magic eye and angels gathering around the manger in which the nutcracker is laid no in the presence of the annoying little drummer boy and the even more annoying time and tiny tim Well the television

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is saturated with movies depicting the true meaning of christmas which turns out to be a grumpy old miser discovering that there really is a santa claus and giving an overly expensive present to a bratty little kid. Yeah

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and they all lived happily ever after parappa pump pump . Okay. And pastors based the annual task of cutting through all that dreck in order to say something fresh and new enough that they are not bored to

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tears by their own sermons Well to do all that one has to keep in mind the purpose and pattern of the liturgical year. The liturgical year is dedicated to telling a story, the story, the story

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that starts in the beginning and concludes with come Lord jesus during the first half of the year. The story is out of the life ministry and teaching him jesus from his anticipation to his birth and through his

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death, resurrection and ascension and trinity sunday, which unfortunately is one of the lightest attendance wise summary Sundays of the year trinity sunday is the summation of all of that and is the kids that turns us to

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the story of the church christ, the king stunned A which articulates our expectation of the return of jesus and the establishment of a new kevin and a new earth concludes the story. Yeah. And then we

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start the story over the two feast days of christmas and easter are the highlights of the stories of course , but they make very little sense when they are separated from the story. So as pastors, we

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have to fight to keep the story together and tell our various stories as a part of the story, the overarching story of the love of God in christ jesus, our Lord. With that in mind,

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I'm going to tell you a story. I'm going to tell you the story of jake a border colleague who was one of my most effective teachers. Now you may or may not know that border collies are

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regarded as the most intelligent breed of dogs. There is a joke riddle that how many border college does it take to change a lightbulb? And the answer is only one. And while he's at it will

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bring your wiring up to code. Yeah. Well When my wife Jane and I moved to Austin some 19 years ago, we brought our dog Sammy with us. Sammy was a terrier mix and definitely not

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the most intelligent breed of dog actually. He didn't even know he was a dog. Yeah. He apparently thought that he was a little kid and what he sweater. Um, well drake knew it was

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a dog and he kind of resented it. Um , at any rate, we brought Sammy our dog with us and Sammy had just been diagnosed with an untreatable bone cancer and we knew he didn't have very

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long. Shortly before christmas. In that first year here we learned that bony cancerous growth that spread throughout Sammy's entire body and he was in unbelievable pain and we had to put him down well for a while

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. We were in deep. I agree. And then we started to tell each other it was kind of nice not to have to worry about the dog . And then we got another dog. That dog

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was jake. He was a year and a half old when we adopted him and he had spent his entire life up to that point in an animal shelter in new Braunfels. We saw his picture on an

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online pet adoption site. Then we tried to ignore it, but we kept coming back and looking at it and coming back and looking at it and coming back and looking at it. And finally one day

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we bowed to the inevitable and called and arranged to take him home. Now jake fell in love with jane instantly and I was used to that most people and animals did plants. Not so much. At

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any rate, I did kind of expected jake would like me. I'm not the dog whisperer, but we do usually manage to have a quiet conversation. Um, but he didn't like me. He was

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afraid of, I don't know why whatever happened to him in the shelter. He was afraid of males and he was hand shot. If you reached out to touch him or patch him, he would shrink

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away. Yeah, Well, I found that frustrating . I mean, what's what's the point of having a dog if you can't get the dog? Yeah . And finally I had jane put him on a

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leash and lead him to me so that I could hold him there and pet him and show him that I was a nice person. Well, he saw through that and he shook himself so violently that he

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came out of his collar and he ran to another part of the house. Well, after several days , I finally noticed that if I called him, he would always run into the bedroom. So one

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day I got up and followed him in. He was sitting next to jane side of the bed and looking at me rather expectantly. So I laid down across the bed and he put his paws up and

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got halfway on the bed and then he would let me pet him. And I realized that jane side of the bed was where he felt safe. That was where he felt secure enough to let himself be

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touched. Well, it went that way for weeks . If I would call jake, he wouldn't come to me, he would go to a safe place and wait. And gradually a safe place expanded to

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other rooms in the house and then to the yards . And he stopped shying away from me and he would let himself be petted no matter where he was , he still preferred jane, but I became an

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acceptable substitute. And so it went for about a dozen years and then Jake was diagnosed with cancer, different kinds of cancer than Sammy had, but equally untreatable. We had some drugs that slowed the growth

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of the tumors and that was the best we could do. Well. Day by day, Drake became slower and more feeble when he slept more and more and he ate less and less. All that was

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predictable as well as the end. One day when I was recovering from an episode of septic shock, laying in bed after a hospital stay, which is its own story. Jake came into the bedroom and

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he laid down in a safe place and he died . I grieve for him. Still one does a lot of grieving as one ages, but I will always be grateful for what I learned from Jake.

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What I know about Evangelism when it comes to telling the good news of a great joy that shall be to all people and encouraging people to become disciples of jesus. We have love and we are patient and

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that is all we have. And any time we think we have more such as power, such as the ability to admit people to heaven or more malignant lee, keep them out of it, such as

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control over the comings and goings of the Holy Spirit . Every time we think that we air and we said, and we do more damage than we know . And that's a lesson. The church is still

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learning even after 2000 years, it has not learned it well. And so now coming from christ the king sunday and toward the first sunday of advent, with all the patients and love it, we can

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master. We start the story over and try to