Peace on earth. The church has been celebrating this sentiment for a whole season, and in fact the assembly declares it every time it proclaims the Gloria: On earth, peace to people of good will! But how do you track these people down? Maybe the trouble locating them is one reason you do not see much peace on earth, no matter how often you sing of it.

People admired our family on Sunday mornings. My parents would herd the eight of us kids into the station wagon, haul us to church, and shepherd us into a pew midway up to the front. Stretched across the whole row, we created a barrier of familial piety for those behind us.

In God we trust. It must be true: We print it on our money! It’s interesting that we confer this sentiment on currency—the one thing we’re tempted to trust more than God. Maybe it was originally put there as a warning: Don’t trust the dollar over the giver of all good gifts.

I learned one valuable liturgical lesson living in the southern California desert for nine years: Deserts do bloom! It’s not a miracle but a fact of nature. A desert is geologically defined as a place that is very short on water, so some years spring comes and there is no bloom. You have to wait for the flowers. You have to be patient.

A shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse. Justice will flourish. A time of hope and encouragement is blossoming in our world. Prepare the way of the Lord!

Happy new year—the new church year, that is! We’re beginning a new cycle of readings, leaving behind the storytelling of the Gospel of Luke and attending to the teaching accounts of Matthew. We are reinventing ourselves as an Advent people again: the people who wait for a “blessed arrival from ahead of us,” as theologian Jürgen Moltmann says. Now’s the chance to shake off the dust of a dry old year, with all of its missed opportunities, failures, disappointments, and losses.

Most of us don’t bow a lot. We’re citizens of a country that does not have a tradition of much civic reverence. We remove our hats to sing the National Anthem, but no one thinks of kneeling when the presidential motorcade goes by. This country was founded on the principle that no person is greater than another.

Can you name the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World from grade-school history class? In case those days are as fuzzy for you as they are for me, let me help. They are, in order of completion: the Great Pyramid at Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, and the Colossus of Rhodes.

In the endtimes, seven is the number of the day. Seven equals perfection, and when the Lord of Lords comes again (Lord of Lords=777 in numerology), the perfect new creation will arrive with him. We’re closing in on the end of another church year, and the closer we get, the more talk of final things we’ll hear.

Who says it’s hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God? Well, Jesus does, in the previous chapter of the Gospel of Luke from which we’re hearing today. The metaphor of the needle’s eye sums up a wealth of sayings and stories about the danger of accumulating riches.