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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Happy New Church Year! Today is the First Sunday in Advent, and so we begin another annual cycle of Sundays and festivals, all revolving around Jesus Christ as the Savior of the world and His sending the Holy Spirit to call, gather, enlighten, and sanctify the Church. The season of Advent with its blue paraments especially evokes hope and anticipation. Maybe our nearness to both recently‑passed Thanksgiving and looming Christmas makes the start of the new Church Year more stressful than hopeful or happy. There are countless things to squeeze onto our personal calendars, such as the congregation’s Christmas party this evening. Especially this time of year, there seem to be all sorts of comings and goings: in some cases people are coming to us, and in other cases we are going to them. That we have come here today is good, particularly as we reflect on “The King Who Comes”.
With the new Church Year, our series of appointed Gospel Readings switches to primarily using St. Luke’s Gospel account, and today we jump right into the middle of the account. As St. Luke reports just before today’s Reading, Jesus had drawn near to Jericho and healed a blind beggar, and, in Jericho, He taught at Zacchaeus’s house. Then, as He drew near to Bethphage and Bethany, His disciples, at Jesus’s direction, bring Him a colt, and He rides the donkey towards Jerusalem, essentially claiming that He was the king whose coming was long‑prophesied, as in the Zechariah verses used both as the antiphon for today’s Introit and as part of today’s Gradual (that is not to mention the prophecy of today’s Old Testament Reading from Jeremiah or Jacob’s blessing of Judah in Genesis). As St. Luke uniquely reports, Jesus’s enacted claim to be “The King Who Comes” gets two radically different responses: joyful praise from Jesus’s disciples and a command to rebuke those disciples from the Pharisees. Apparently the Pharisees either feared the Roman’s reaction to Jesus’s claim or thought His claim was blasphemous.
I do not imagine that many (if any) of you watched the B‑E‑T Soul Train Awards, which were recorded November 12th in Las Vegas and broadcast last Sunday on television, but maybe you read or heard what Terrell‑Texas-native Jamie Foxx said during the show. The actor, singer‑songwriter, and stand-up comedian referred to President Obama as “our Lord and Savior”. Since the broadcast, Jamie Foxx has said that his comment was a joke, but, as you might expect, the comment caused no end of furor. Even if his comment was a joke, you and I might still think it was blasphemous, but we probably are still glad in this country both that he is free to speak that joke if he wants to and that we are free to believe as we want. Or, are we? No, we are not in the land of Jesus at the time it was occupied by the Romans. No, we are not in present‑day Great Britain where a government agency refused to register a congregation as a charity because it gave communion only to its members. But, Obamacare is said to allow the federal government in a way worse than usual “to define not only what a church is but also what a church is free to do, or not to do”, for example forcing churches to pay for abortions. Such violations of our religious freedom may not yet directly affect you or me in our day to day lives, but would we notice if they did?
In the Gospel Reading, the Pharisees wanted Jesus to rebuke His joyfully praising disciples, to warn or threaten them in order to make them be quiet. How many of us are so public with our faith that such a threat of consequences for praising or confessing God would even apply to us? Can people around us in our lives tell from our deeds and words that we are Lutheran Christians? When was the last time you and I invited someone to join us here at Pilgrim for a church service? Or, have you ever made such an invitation? We may not be like the Pharisees of the Gospel Reading, opposing joyful praise of Jesus, but, sadly, too often we are also not like the disciples who publicly offered such joyful praise of Jesus.
In the Gospel Reading, Jesus told the Pharisees that, if the disciples were silent, the very stones would cry out. Jesus may have meant that statement quite literally, for God certainly could make such inanimate objects suddenly scream out praise to Him. Or, Jesus may have meant the statement more figuratively, for example, that, after Jerusalem was destroyed for rejecting Jesus, the rubble of stones would witness to the disciples’ having been right in praising Him. Perhaps either way Jesus’s rebuke of the Pharisees also rebukes us and so calls us to repent. God wants us to turn in sorrow from our sins—from our sins of not living our lives in such a way that our faith is evident to those around us, from our sins of not inviting people here as we should, or from whatever our sins might be—God wants us to turn in sorrow from them, to believe He forgives them, and to want to do better. When we so repent, then God forgives our sin. He forgives all our sin; He forgives all our sin for the sake of His Son, Jesus Christ.
Not just during the holidays but all year through, people are coming and going. Sometimes ordinary people can come into and then go out of our lives and leave us with emotional devastation. However, Jesus is no ordinary person: He is “The King Who Comes”, and His coming to stay brings us salvation. Jesus is not only human, but He is also divine, as His divine foreknowledge and control of His journey towards Jerusalem show. He claimed the privileges of a king, such as a royal mount. And, Jesus was drawing near to Jerusalem in order to suffer and die on the cross to save us from our sins. The whole multitude of His disciples apparently believed Who He was and what He was doing, as they not only honored Him with their cloaks on the colt and on the road, but they also joyfully praised Him, with the usual Passover pilgrims’ processional versicles and responses, saying, “Blessed is the King Who comes in the Name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” They confessed Jesus as blessed by God and as operating with God’s authority, making things right with God for them, and for us. Thus we can pray, as we did in today’s Collect, for God to stir up His power and come so that by His protection we might be “rescued from the threatening perils of our sins” and be saved by His “mighty deliverance”.
With God’s law having shown us our sin and with His Gospel having shown us our Savior from sin, God answers such a prayed response of faith with His means of grace. He rescues us “from the threatening perils of our sins” with His “mighty deliverance”—His “mighty deliverance” in the form of water with the Word in Holy Baptism, in words of individual Holy Absolution spoken by a called pastor, and in bread that is Christ’s body and wine that is Christ’s blood in Holy Communion. Especially there on the altar your and my King comes to us and is really, physically present, with the forgiveness of sins and so also with life and salvation. (His coming in such a way with wine and blood may also have been prophesied already by Jacob’s blessing of Judah in Genesis.) Like the whole multitude of his disciples in the Gospel Reading, we believe and confess Jesus to be Who He is and what He has done, singing, as we do in the Sanctus of the historic Christian liturgy, “Blessed is He Who comes in the Name of the Lord!”
Having received His forgiveness in these ways and joyfully praising Him, the fruits of faith manifest themselves in our lives. As St. Paul prayed for the Thessalonians in today’s Epistle Reading, God makes us “increase and abound in love for one another and for all”. He establishes our “hearts blameless in holiness” before Him at our Lord’s final coming with all His saints to judge the living and the dead. Though until then we continue to sin against God and against one another, with repentance and faith we live in the forgiveness of sins from God and with one another.
Beginning Advent and so the new Church Year by jumping into the middle of St. Luke’s Gospel account at its report of Jesus’s journey towards Jerusalem may seem a little odd. In fact, the report of His journey towards Jerusalem actually is quite appropriate for this First Sunday. Jesus is “The King Who Comes”. Jesus’s having come before in time to save us from our sins helps us be sure both that He comes to us now in His Word and Sacraments and that He will come again to receive us unto Himself that where He is, there we may be also. May God for Jesus’ sake so grant to us this First Sunday in Advent and always.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +