Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent (December 3), 2017

Text: Isaiah 64:1-9

            Beloved in Christ, I would like to ask Isaiah: “Why are you so anxious? You are one of the greatest prophets who ever lived. Nobody has painted a more beautiful picture of what Christ would do. You foretold that He would comfort God’s people, that He would be the Suffering Servant who would bear the sins of the world, and that He would make everything right when He would return in glory. Indeed, in chapters 60 through 62 you portray how God would restore His people. You describe the church as a rebuilt Jerusalem, where the nations gather, where God is the light of His people and there is no need for sun or moon. So after all those wonderful words, words of hope and promise, why are you such a gloomy Gus? Why do you rain on your parade? Why do you pour forth your lament in chapters 63 and 64, including today’s text?”

            Well, I imagine that Isaiah could turn around and ask us some similar things: “Why are you so anxious? I lived before the Messiah came and did His work of redeeming the world from their sins. But you live after Jesus has come and won salvation for you. Why then are you so anxious? Why in fact do many of you find this entire time of the year so depressing? What could be more thrilling than to prepare to celebrate the birth of the Savior? And yet you are frazzled by all the shopping and the parties. You stuff yourselves with chocolate and eggnog, but you are still sour on life. You surround yourselves with friends and family, but feel so alone. You brighten your streets with festive lights, but you act as if you are living in great darkness. Why are you so anxious in this Advent season, when great joy is around the corner?”

            The truth of the matter is that both Isaiah and we have some grounds for feeling dissatisfied. Isaiah may well have known about what Christ’s arrival would mean for the earth. But He was still living in a time when people cared little for the LORD God, let alone for the salvation He would bring. Instead, they preferred worshipping their idols, no matter how often the false gods would disappoint them. So it is understandable that he would break out in a lament, weeping for the circumstances in which he found himself. And we too share in some of that same frustration that Isaiah did. For, even if it is true that Christ has already come and redeemed the world from slavery to sin, the ancient regime of the devil still holds sway over much of the earth. We have not yet received the fullness of our salvation, as we will when He returns in glory. And so sometimes the very sweetness of God’s promises in Christ leave a bitter aftertaste in our mouth, for we know that they are not yet fulfilled.

            But, beloved in Christ, if we listen to Isaiah’s lament today, we can get back on track. We can turn an anxious Advent into a blessed one. For Isaiah teaches us three good lessons that we should learn especially in this Advent season.

           First of all, Advent is all about God coming into our midst. In Advent we look forward to God coming in the future. We say with Isaiah, “Oh that You would rend the heavens and come down!” We want mountains quaking and the heathen shaking at the presence of the LORD God. We want no one to be able to doubt that there is a God and that He is exactly the one whom the apostles and prophets have proclaimed. We can hardly wait until Christ, the Son of God, returns in glory as our king. We want to see “every knee bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord to the glory of the Father.”

            But it is not just about the future. In Advent we look back at the past and see how God has come into our midst then, too. For us that means recalling the birth of Christ and His whole earthly ministry, including His riding humbly on a donkey into Jerusalem. But even Isaiah could recall how God had come into Israel’s midst before.

            He recalled a time when God “did awesome things that [His people] did not look for” and when “the mountains quaked at [His] presence.” He is probably referring to the time when God poured out the plagues upon Egypt and then led the Israelites through the Red Sea. Then they came to Sinai, where the whole mountain trembled as the LORD God descended upon the mountain. Even though it had been several centuries since those events had happened, Isaiah rightly remembered God coming to free His people from slavery. In the same way, it may be centuries since Christ was born and freed us from our slavery to sin and death, but we rightly remember His sojourn among us, even as we desire His return.

            But in the meantime, as we recall the past coming of Christ and await His return, we perceive that God still is with us today. Isaiah put it this way in his prayer to God: “You meet him who joyfully works righteousness, those who remember You in Your ways.” When we meditate upon God’s Word and call to mind all the things He has spoken, we meet Him. No, not visibly, as Christ appeared two thousand years ago and will appear sometime in the future. But the Triune God is with us, as we hear His Word and embrace it. And that truth helps us to live in these days between Christ’s past coming and His return. God is with us, even now, even in our anxious Advent days.

            But if God is coming to us constantly, why would we ever having an anxious Advent? Why wouldn’t we always rejoice? From Isaiah we learn a second truth: Advent gets us to acknowledge our sins. “We sinned” and “[God was] angry.” No, it isn’t just that we sinned, but that “we have been a long time in our sins.” The sins that disturb us most aren’t the casual, one-off sins. We can convince ourselves that they are a fluke. They don’t represent who we really are. Rather it is the sins we repeat again and again, the sins we resolved last December 31 finally to conquer, only to see ourselves repeating them this year.

            Sin leaves a mark on us over time. “We have all become like one who is unclean,” like a leper that nobody wants to have anything to do with. “All our righteous deeds” in the end turn out to be “like a polluted garment,” Isaiah says. Actually, “polluted garment” is a cleaned-up way of expressing it; I can’t say in polite company what it really means. Or to use a different metaphor: we are a shriveled-up leaf that is blown in whatever direction the wind of our iniquities sends us.

            And so we come to the heart of our anxiety: Whether God comes or not, it doesn’t calm our anxiety over sin. If He doesn’t come, His absence shows that He is still angry about our sins. If He does come, His presence terrifies us because of our sins. But thank God that He comes to restore us to fellowship with Him!

            And this leads us to the third truth we learn from Isaiah: Advent is calling us back to childlike trust in the LORD God. It is not enough to know that God comes, especially the second Person of the Trinity, namely, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Neither is it enough to know that our sins make us fear His coming and His absence alike. Instead, we must know that God comes to be our redeemer. He had brought His people out of Egypt to Mount Sinai, not because He wanted to scare the living daylights out of them, but because He wanted them to be saved from the grinding slavery to the Egyptians and to know Him as their loving God.

            In Advent we learn to confess, “O Lord, You are our Father; we are the clay, and You are our potter; we are all the work of Your hand. Be not so terribly angry, O Lord, and remember not iniquity forever.” Let us work our way backwards through those thoughts. First of all, in Advent we learn that God will “not remember [our] iniquity forever.” We have sinned. We have ingrained sin into our being. But because Christ has redeemed us by His holy life, suffering, and death, God will not remember our sin forever.

            Not only does He not remember it, He purposely forgets it, because it has already been dealt with. Therefore, there is no reason for Him to come in anger or be “so terribly angry” against us. Instead, we can acknowledge that He is “our Father” and that “we are all the work of [His] hand.” We can call upon Him as our beloved Creator rather than as our terrifying Judge.

            But can this all help us when we face the winter blahs and when it seems as if the festivities all around us are pointless cheer? Yes, it can. For God comes to us in the midst of our sorrow, no less than in our joy. He doesn’t gloss over our problem—sin—but neither does He come to destroy us for that reason. Instead, He comes to make us His beloved children once again. That, beloved in Christ, is the antidote to an anxious Advent. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent, November 29, 2015

Text: Luke 19:28-40

            Beloved in Christ, whenever Christ shows up, He shakes up everything. It doesn’t matter if Christ is coming in a lowly manner or in great glory. Things never stay the same. The world is turned upside down. Evil is forced to go on the run. God’s faithful people are encouraged. Joy breaks out. Gloom and despair come to an end.

            But when exactly does Christ show up? Many people know of only one time when He came, namely, two thousand years ago, when He was born in Bethlehem, lived his life in Galilee and Judea, was a pretty decent chap and taught others to be so too, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate. And they assume that was all. These people know that Napoleon and Michelangelo and Shakespeare came only once, and so they assume that Christ came only once and will never return. But they don’t even understand why Christ came the first time. They assume He was just an ordinary man, living an ordinary life and trying to do a little good in this world.

            Now we Christians ought to know better. Christ had more in mind than just going through the normal human lifecycle from birth through childhood and adulthood to death. Instead, He came to deal with the ugliness of sin in human life. For it is sin that makes our life a drudgery. It isn’t being born that is the problem, but being born with a sinful nature, where our vices seem to be as much a part of us as our skin and bones. It isn’t childhood that is the problem, but rather the fact that even as adults we behave all too often as bratty children, who gossip about our peers, are mean to those we dislike, and want our way and want it now. It isn’t work that is the problem, but rather the fact that our work is easily frustrated. We labor and build, only to see things decay over time. We expect help from our coworkers, but receive none. It isn’t marriage and family that are the problem, but the way that this institution created by God has been turned into a place where we fight and claw against the people whom we ought to love the most. In short, every facet of human life has been ruined by our sin and that of others.

            Life wasn’t supposed to be this way. God had created a beautiful world, but we have marred it by our sin. It is as if we had been invited to the most wonderful party we could imagine, a party that we had been dying to attend. But once we show up, we start quarreling with others and they put up a fuss. The party ends with all the guests being hauled to the police station and spending the night in the pokey. That is the real world, life as it is lived in this sinful, fallen world.

            Christ came to deal with the sin in this world. That meant that He had to do everything right that we had done wrong. This was no vacation Christ was on. It was work. That is why He came into Jerusalem on a donkey rather than on a horse or in a chariot. It was the ancient equivalent of driving into town on a forklift or in a work van rather than in a limousine. Christ meant business. He was on His way to Jerusalem to die on the cross, bearing all our guilt. But Christ didn’t leave anything undone. He completely atoned for all the sins of every last human being who would ever live. There was no sin overlooked. That sin that you think is too small and not worth being atoned for by Christ—well, it was dealt with by Christ on the cross. That sin that keeps you up at night and that you think is too big for God to forgive has also been dealt with once and for all on the cross. There isn’t a sin or sinner that was overlooked. Therefore, do not stubbornly cling to your own sin. Do not continue in the old evil ways, as if sin were really no big deal and it didn’t matter what you did. Instead, see the enormous cost of your sin: it drove the Almighty Son of God to have to take on our flesh and be led even into death. At the same time, though, trust that God has indeed removed your guilt and forgiven you. Trust with all your heart that you are now dear to Him and that He wants to live with you forever.

            If you understand that this is why Christ came the first time, you will also understand why He will come a second time. The first time around, it was all work for Him. He died on the cross and rose again so that repentance and faith could be proclaimed to the nations. But when He returns, He will gather all those who trust in Him into His kingdom. We will bow before Him with as much eagerness and excitement as that crowd did on the first Palm Sunday. But if our Lord looked majestic on that day, it will be nothing like His glory on the final day, when His face will shine like the sun. If you think that the throng that stood outside Jerusalem on Palm Sunday was a sight to behold, wait until you see the countless millions or billions who will greet Him with joy on the Last Day.

            Not everybody appreciated Christ’s first coming. The Pharisees told Jesus to keep His disciples in line and to stop them from praising Him. But He told them, “If [the crowd were] silent, the very stones would cry out.” Well, on the Last Day, the stones and the hills and all of creation will cry out, acknowledging their Lord and King. Even the Pharisees, atheists, and every other person with a heart of stone will have to acknowledge “that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” and bend their knee before Him.

            Therefore, we do well to worship now the Lord Jesus Christ and His Father who sent Him and the Holy Spirit whom Christ sends. We do well to worship them as the Holy, Blessed Trinity. We will do this for all eternity, and so even now we should begin to delight in doing this. After all, what could be dearer than loving the one who loves us so much? And that leads us to consider one more coming of Christ. Wait, you say. How can there be another coming of Christ? He came once long ago in humility and He will come again in glory, to stay with us forever. So how can there be another coming of Christ? Well, that is the one coming most often neglected: He comes to us whenever His Word is read, proclaimed, and preached.

            If we neglect Christ as He comes to us daily through His Word, it will matter little that He came long ago and it will bring us no joy that He will return. But Christ comes to us through His Word so that we may believe in Him and live a life full of faith and godliness until He comes in glory.

            Do not underestimate what happens when Christ comes to us through His Word. On Palm Sunday He spoke a few words to His disciples, and they spoke those words to the owners of the colt. All He said was to tell them, “The Lord has need of it.” Without any further explanation, that was enough to get the owners of the colt to release it. That is the power of His Word. Christ didn’t have to be seen by those people. Instead, His words were authoritative enough on their own.

            His words still have that power. That is because He is the Almighty Son of God, and He is wherever His Word is. Now He can be resisted, much as the Pharisees resisted Him during His triumphal procession into Jerusalem. In fact, our Lord can be resisted all the way until He comes again in glory. But that is not how He would like you to greet Him. Instead, He stands before you with forgiveness, eternal life, and salvation. Therefore, embrace Him enthusiastically, just as the crowd did two thousand years ago. Welcome Him and hail Him as the one “who comes in the name of the Lord.” Call out, “Hosanna,” that is, “Save us, please,” and hail Him as the one who came to Jerusalem to be your Savior. In short, welcome Him as He comes to you today. Then you will be ready for Him when He comes again in glory. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Advent, December 21, 2014

            Luke 1:26-38: In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”

            And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”

            And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God. And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” And Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her.

            Beloved in Christ, you will hardly ever find a better example of a Christian than in Mary. No, she was not without sin. No, she is not our intercessor or a co-redeemer. She, like us, needed Christ to be her Savior. And yet there is something special about her. She was given the honor of being the mother of God. Her piety should shape our own, for she sought to be nothing more than a faithful child of God. By being humble and faithful, she was greatly exalted, and the same is true for us.

            When we first meet Mary, we see an angel appearing to her and greeting her: “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” She was greeted as one who had received the Lord’s favor. What is more, the Lord was with her. But she is not the only one to be greeted in this way. We too have received God’s favor and the Lord is with us. But just hearing that greeting does not mean that we will appreciate or understand it.

            You see, God has been greeting humanity for thousands of years, but that doesn’t mean that we have welcomed Him. It all began when Adam and Eve heard the voice of God in the Garden of Eden and immediately ran and hid themselves. God spoke loving, gentle words: “Adam, where are you?” They were loving, for God wanted to have a tender conversation with Adam and Eve. But Adam and Eve knew that they had sinned against God by eating the forbidden fruit. They knew that they deserved nothing but death, for death had been the penalty fixed by God for their action and they had been warned in advance. All they could think of doing was hiding. It was rather foolish when you think about, for how can one hide from God? But they tried to, and we have been doing so ever since.

            We, their children, have much to fear before God. We have been given God’s holy law, and we (at least in our saner moments) recognize it as good. We know that God intends only the best when He demands that we worship Him alone and not any other gods, for everything else will disappoint us in the end, just as the forbidden fruit ended up disappointing Adam and Eve. We know that life is better if we are not cursing, rebelling against our parents, murdering, committing adultery, stealing, and lying. In fact, we know that it isn’t just these actions, but the thoughts that lie behind them that bring us great misery. God has warned us dozens of times, but we refuse to listen. We should have learned from sad experience, but we haven’t. There is no fool like an old fool—and that is what humanity is.

            And so to hear a greeting from God troubles us. It troubled Mary. She didn’t know “what sort of greeting this might be.” But the angel elaborated upon his greeting. First, he said, “Do not be afraid.” Now it is appropriate to have a healthy fear of God, for that means we take His commandments and our sin seriously. But God loves us and He wants us to take that love seriously. And so the angel told Mary, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.” God loved her so much that He didn’t want her to be afraid. Now when we come to the phrase, “You have found favor with God,” we could easily misunderstand it. We could assume that Mary had done something great—perhaps lived an exemplary life—and so deserved a special standing with God. But that would be contrary to everything that the Scriptures teach. A better translation would be, “You have received grace from God.” In other words, God wanted to show His good loving kindness to Mary, purely out of the fact that He is a good God and loves to give gifts, especially to people who cannot claim any merit.

            Think of what Mary could have done up until this point in her life. She was a lowly teenage girl. She was no apostle or some other leader among God’s people. She had no money to be a major donor to the temple or a local charity. I am sure that she was not a wild and unruly teenager, but she was probably like hundreds of young women then and now, who live quiet, anonymous lives. But God loved her and wanted to do something good for and through her. He gave her the privilege of being the mother of Christ.

            Now God doesn’t just love Mary or the apostles or the great saints we always talk about. You too have found favor with God. Just as Mary had nothing to boast about before the Lord, neither do you. But that is all right. God comes to sinners who have no righteousness to boast about. He brings His forgiveness and mercy. Indeed, He has been doing this since the beginning of time. Adam and Eve ran away from God, but God pursued them nonetheless. Yes, He chastised them for eating the forbidden fruit. The curse of death was not set aside, but was confirmed. Nor did God gloss over the troubles they had brought upon themselves by their disobedience, for life would be full of toil and pain. But God also pursued them because He wanted them to know some good news: He would defeat Satan, who had tempted us, and He would reverse the curse upon mankind. Ever since then God has come to His people with the word of forgiveness made possible through Jesus Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection.

            The words spoken to Mary remind us that God has more than a vague plan to be nice to us. There was only one way to reconcile us to Himself, namely, by God taking on human flesh and dealing with our life and its problems while in the flesh. A mere wave of the hand from a distance wouldn’t do the trick. No, God had to send His Son into human flesh. Yes, at one time the Son of God was a simple zygote, a one-cell human being in whom all the fullness of the deity dwelt, despite His weakness and smallness. And yet this tiny child growing in Mary’s womb was none other than Jesus, “the Lord saves,” “the Son of the Most High.” To Him by right belonged “the throne of His Father David,” for His is an eternal kingdom that encompasses the entire universe.

            This is something that we cannot entirely fathom. Mary rightly understood the angel to be saying that she was going to become pregnant very soon, not in the distant future. She understood that these words would be fulfilled as soon as they had been spoken, and not after she and Joseph had settled down and were well into their marriage. But she was a chaste virgin. She had taken God’s law seriously about matters of sex and she knew that she was to abstain from sex before marriage and to be faithful within marriage. She didn’t use the excuse that we might use today that at least she was engaged to Joseph and that made it all right. And Mary wasn’t stupid when it came to biology. People back then may not have known all we know about biology, but they did know how babies came to be. You can’t have a baby unless a man and a woman come together.

            The angel revealed that God would do something miraculous. “The Holy Spirit [would] come upon [her], and the power of the Most High [would] overshadow [her]” so that she would conceive a child. Only twice previously in human history had a human being come into existence in an extraordinary way, in a manner other than the normal mode of procreation: Adam had been created from the earth, and Eve had been fashioned from one of his ribs. Now God would do something as miraculous and astonishing as He had done in Eden, so that He could restore the lost world and bring us back to Paradise.

            And so this child was no ordinary child. Adam and Eve had been formed in an unusual manner, but they were ordinary human beings, nonetheless. But Christ was “the Son of God,” for He was conceived by the Holy Spirit in such a way that Mary remained a virgin. He was holy to a degree that even Adam and Eve in their state of bliss had never been. He didn’t grow up to become the Son of God. No, He was already the Son of God, even in His mother’s womb. He was the eternal Son of God already when He was conceived. He was the Son of God when a few weeks later John the Baptist leaped in his mother’s womb when he knew that the unborn Christ was present. And thus we rightly call Mary the Mother of God. (She is not God, but is the Mother of God, for Christ is God.) What a marvelous thing! She is an ordinary human being, just like you and me, and yet the child she bore was truly God, yes, even when He was still in her womb.

            As I said, we cannot complete fathom this truth. Mary couldn’t. Instead she simply said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” That should be our attitude too. God has drawn near to us. He has done all the hard work of redeeming us. What can we say or do? All we can do is to say, “Lord, You have spoken the truth. You have given me the gift I never deserved. You wish to continue to reveal that gift through the words you speak. Let it be to me according to Your word.” In Jesus’ name. Amen.