Advent 1

Matthew 21:1-9 - Advent 1 - December 2, 2012

  Blessed is He who Comes in the Name of the Lord

Christmas is coming.  But it’s not Christmas yet.  The church here is decorated for Christmas.  Your homes are probably decorated for Christmas, and I’m sure ours will be looking pretty Christmassy soon as well.  Our favorite department stores have been decorated for Christmas since like October 20^th, I think.   Christmas is coming.  But it’s not Christmas yet.  It’s coming.  That’s what the word “Advent” means: “coming”. 

Today is the first day of Advent.  We shouldn’t forget about this season, because during this season of the Church year, we Christians prepare for the celebration of our Savior’s birth.  Preparation is a good thing.  It’s necessary in fact.  And so I’d like to say a few things this morning about the season of Advent, because in order to know what it means to prepare for Jesus to come to us, there are three comings or advents of Jesus that we first need to consider. 

The first advent consists of Christ’s coming in the flesh.  That’s what Christmas is about.  The Son of God took on human flesh and blood in the womb of the Virgin Mary.  We call this His Incarnation / Enfleshment.  He came to join humanity as one of us – to be bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh – true Man, yet perfectly holy and without sin on account of the fact that He is also true God.  He came humbly.  He came with nothing but total dependency on His mother – just as each of us came – naked and helpless – although He was the very One upon whom all things depend.  At His birth the Son of God hid His divine glory just as He continued to hide it throughout His earthly life.   The Son of Man, as Jesus said, came to serve. 

And so He came in lowliness.  Jesus spent His time healing diseases, giving sight to the blind, making the crippled walk straight, casting out demons who tortured poor souls, and speaking to sinners the words of eternal life.  But He didn’t attract attention to Himself.  He didn’t demand celebration.  In fact, even in those moments when He did allow His divine glory to shine through while showing acts of divine mercy, Jesus often commanded the crowds to say nothing, giving glory instead to His Father in heaven.  Jesus came to reveal the Father, and so He humbled Himself.  He did so not only in order to serve selflessly, but also, in so doing, to direct all true worship to the God whom He had come to reconcile humanity to.  In order to do this, His coming would end with His going to the cross.  There the King of heaven, who came lowly to serve, established His reign on earth by purchasing sinners with His own blood.  This was Jesus’ first advent. 

There was nothing that mankind could have done to cause it to happen.  We stood in darkness, in ignorance, and in weakness, in unwillingness even to know God as He wants to be known. But God came in love.  Consider those beautiful words of the Advent hymn: 

Naught*, naught, dear Lord, could move Thee
To leave Thy rightful place
Save love, for which I love Thee;
A love that could embrace
A world where sorrow dwelleth,
Which sin and suff’ring fill,
More than the tongue e’er telleth;
Yet Thou couldst love it still!       

What could the world do to prepare itself for such love – for such an advent of grace and mercy?  Nothing.  It is God who prepares.  God prepared His chosen nation Israel by teaching them through the prophets who for millennia faithfully foretold of the coming Christ.  He is the Savior of all nations.  In the birth of Jesus, the Glory of God’s people Israel – as we sing in the Nunc Dimittis – became the Light to lighten the Gentiles.  This was His first advent. 

Now we consider Christ’s final advent, which consists of Him coming in glory.  It will be much different from His first.  Oh, He’ll come as the Son of Man, of course.  God is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, remember.  And He will never divorce Himself from the bond of His Incarnation.  In other words, God will from now on always be true Man.  As the Christmas hymn puts it well:

God is man, man to deliver;
His dear Son
Now is one
With our blood forever.

The same God who came in humility as true Man will come in glory as true Man.  And the mystery of the incarnation that we adore today in humble faith will be set before all sinners to see as our Lord descends to judge the living and the dead.  He will discern hearts and minds.  He will condemn what is unclean and unholy.  His first advent was easy to miss, and easy to despise.  But woe to those who did – for His final coming will be unavoidable.  All flesh will rise from their graves and be judged by Jesus – the righteous to eternal life, the unrighteous to eternal punishment.  This will be His final advent. 

What can the world do to prepare itself for such judgment?  Well, I suppose this is why we celebrate Advent.  We can do nothing.  But God must prepare us.  And He does.  It is as that same excellent Advent hymn puts it:

O how shall I receive Thee,
How welcome Thee aright!
All nations long to greet Thee,
My hope, my heart’s delight!
O Jesus, Jesus, set Thee
Thy lamp within my breast,
And by its guidance let me
Know what doth please Thee best.           

God prepares us for His final coming by setting in our hearts the burning lamp of faith that we talked about last Sunday with the five wise virgins.  He who came to be born and to suffer and to die for all nations shall come to judge all nations.  In the meantime, we need to be taught what pleases Him.  This doesn’t simply mean that we need to be taught how to be well behaved and nice.  We’re not waiting for Santa Claus.  No, but we need our God to guide us to a right understanding of our sin and of His grace and mercy so that we might know how to rightly receive Him as Christians — as Christians who have no righteousness to claim before their God other than the obedience of Jesus alone.  Just as God prepared His people to receive their Messiah by sending prophets who proclaimed His coming, so also God sends preachers of repentance today.   

This brings us (if we’re not already there) to the third advent of Christ that we need to consider.  It is the current and present coming of Jesus who comes to His Church through word and sacrament today.  Advent is what we call a penitential season.  We call it a penitential season because it is only by repenting of our sins that we are prepared to receive the Lord Jesus who was born in Bethlehem.  It is only by confessing our sins and iniquities, as we do in the Divine Service here, that we are prepared to rejoice in our King who comes to us through such lowly means.  It is only when we consider our need for God’s service that we see His power to save in such lowly means. 

Lowly means.  The words of a sinner like me spoken in the stead and by the command of our Lord are not merely the words of a sinner like me.  But they are Christ’s own words of eternal life and pardon to you who have confessed sin to God.  Lowly means.  Water is water.  But with the word of God’s command and promise attached, we have His own guarantee, that though the water dries and we have no real memory of it anyway, through the washing of Baptism, God joined us to Christ’s death and resurrection, washed away our sin, and made us His forever.  Lowly means.  Bread and wine – not nearly enough bread to satisfy hunger or enough wine to bring any amount of joy.  And yet, in this meal our Jesus comes to us with His very body and blood for us to eat and to drink for the forgiveness of sins — All so that we might be satisfied with the righteousness for which our souls hunger, and that we might be given more joy than what our earthly hearts can contain.  What greater love could bind us to God than the love that gave His own Son into death to save sinners? 

But He comes in such a lowly fashion.  And in this lowly fashion, because we are flesh, because we are sinners, it is so hard to see the divine glory behind it all.  And so it is easy to dismiss as irrelevant.  But the King of glory who rescues from sin, death, and the devil, and who fights and wins every spiritual battle that you lose, comes to us with victory.  Lowly.  In our Gospel lesson this morning, the prophet’s words were fulfilled as Jesus came riding into His holy city on a donkey.  Lowly.  But it was a cause for the daughter of Zion to rejoice.  Why?  Because the one who came lowly was the same one who would some day come in glory.  That’s why.  The one who would judge sinners first came to serve sinners by giving them a righteousness that will shine bright in the judgment.  That’s why.  Because the one whose glory would soon be revealed for heaven and earth to see and tremble at - came this day to Jerusalem to be crucified and die in order to reconcile all sinners to God.  That’s why. 

Jesus came in humility.  And those who wanted a more glorious king – whether those whom Zechariah rebuked with his prophesy, or those who were disbelieving in Jerusalem when his prophecy was fulfilled in our Gospel lesson, or those today who are unimpressed with the means of our King’s coming – all those who want something more glorious, more exciting, don’t know what they want.  We need the King of glory to come and serve.  Only in His humility do we come to know Him as our merciful God who saves. 

Jesus came in humility.  But in the exact same way that the little baby of Bethlehem was nonetheless the almighty God of God despite His humble appearance, so also the poor, miserable, beggar of a king on the back of a beast of burden was nonetheless the one who by His death would destroy the power of sin and death forever.  The events of Palm Sunday point ahead to the events of the last day when our King will come in glory to lead us in shouts of joy to our eternal reward.  He is our King!  But at the same time, they also parallel the events of every Lord’s Day – every Sunday – here at Trinity Lutheran Church.  He comes in lowliness. 

In order to demonstrate this, I’d like to conclude by briefly considering those words of our liturgy that we sing together every Sunday before we receive the Lord's Supper.  We call it the Sanctus, which means holy – for obvious reasons – because we begin by singing what the angels shouted in the prophet Isaiah’s vision as he stood before the throne of God: “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth, heaven and earth are full of Thy glory.”  We confess that the one who comes to serve us in the Sacrament of the Altar is the very eternal God whose glorious presence compelled Isaiah to cry out, “Woe is me, for I am undone!”  He is a fearful God.  It is no child’s play to come into His presence.  The holy angels themselves covered their faces and feet.  But what do we cover? 

Nothing.  We bear our hearts and confess our sins, not to Him as an all-consuming wrathful God—No!—but to Him whose wrath has been fully satisfied in the atoning death of Christ.  We come to Him who comes to us in the name of the Lord to make us holy as He is holy.  We come to Jesus who comes to save. 

The people cried out, when Jesus came: “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”  And then Jesus proceeded on His way to the cross to bear the world’s sin, and so guarantee our joy.  And so we take their words and sing them to the same Holy, Holy, Holy God who comes in power and might to serve us today.  “Blessed is He, blessed is He, blessed is He who cometh in the name of the Lord.  Hosanna, hosanna, hosanna in the highest.”  This means save us now.  Hosanna.  And He does.  He saves us by giving to us the peace that He earned on the cross where He reconciled God in heaven to man on earth. 

This is what we look forward to in Christmas.  This is how we prepare for His coming.  We prepare for His final advent by learning the purpose of His first advent.  And so in faith we receive Him in His advent today. 

In Jesus’ name, Amen.