Today is the 21st day of December.

Welcome to a brand new shiny, sparkly week.

And this is the last Sunday in the season of Advent.

So this Sunday represents love, the decisive love of God to come in person.

For us, so happy. Fourth Sunday of Advent, the season of Advent obviously ends while at midnight on the 24th Christmas Eve.

And this brand new shiny, sparkly week brings us into Christmas week. We are here indeed.

And I am grateful to be here with you around the global campfire today.

To take the next step forward and the next step forward has day by day step by step and leading us into new books practically every day.

Today isn't different in that we're beginning a new book, the 11th of the 12

minor prophets. But as a surprise, we won't read the whole thing today. We'll begin the book of Zechariah,

and we'll hang out in Zechariah right up until the last two days of the year.

So we get to settle in for a minute.

Zechariah and Haggai were contemporaries, even though Zechariah continued his ministry

long after Haggai did, and they were prophesying at the same place, at the same time, for the same

reasons, the rebuilding of the temple.

Zechariah's grandfather Edo was named among the first leaders of the priestly families to return from exile with Zarubabal.

So this tells us that Zechariah was probably a priest,

or at least a part of a priestly family, his name means God remembers.

And this covenantal remembering and the resulting restoration is central to the book.

Zechariah is a lot longer than Haggai and is broader in its scope and deeper in its

style. For example, Zechariah tells of eight night visions that he experienced that are

pretty apocalyptic in nature and deeply symbolic apocalyptic literature, much like what we are reading in the

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