Lutheran Church of the Resurrection

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I. The Season of Advent As we begin a new year on the Church's calendar, it might do us well to briefly survey the lay of the land that lies ahead. What is this four-week season all about? What's its purpose? Where is it leading us?

The season of Advent leads us right to Jesus. So, in that sense, it's no different than every other season of the Church year. The purpose for all six seasons and all 52 weeks in the Church year is to lead us to Jesus. Every year, year after year, from the 1st Sunday in Advent to the Last Sunday of the Church Year, the appointed readings for each Sunday carefully guide us along the way that follows Jesus from His eternal existence before the beginning to His coming again in great power and glory. Every year we move through the life cycle of Jesus' life. And each season of the Church year has its individual purpose and goal of leading and guiding us through a particular part of the life of Christ.

The season of Advent guides us through that part of the life of Christ that precedes His coming into the world. And so, Advent is filled with anticipation and announcements to get ready and instructions on how we should prepare for Christ's coming.

Of all of the seasons of the Church Year, Advent may be the trickiest one to navigate. Tricky, because as we've just pointed out, there are really two comings of Jesus into this world. There's His first coming, which has already happened and a second coming that hasn't happened yet. His first coming happened when He was born of Mary in the village of Bethlehem, witnessed only by a couple local shepherds who were tending their flocks by night. His second coming, as we heard last Sunday, will be much different. Then, every eye will see Him. He'll not be wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger, but He'll be wrapped in the fullness of His glory and great power and standing in the clouds.

And so, living as we do, between Christ's first and second coming into this world, we listen to our Scripture readings during the season of Advent with the understanding that they not only lead us to Jesus born of the virgin but also to the same Jesus appearing in the clouds.

His first coming is to take upon Himself the sins of the whole world and crucify them on the cross in His own body and in doing so, cleanse the world of our sin and guilt. This is what He is doing as He rides into Jerusalem on the donkey. So Palm Sunday is as representative of His first coming as Christmas morning.

On the last day, He will come again and His purpose in coming again will be to judge the living and the dead. The Bible talks about that with metaphors since it hasn't actually happened yet. It'll be like a fisherman separating the good fish to keep and the bad fish to be thrown away. Or like a shepherd who separates the sheep from the goats. Or like a farmer who separates the wheat from the chaff or the wheat from the weeds.

For you and me who live on the A.D. side of history, Christ's has already come and already atoned for the sin of the world, which includes yours and mine. He has already risen from the dead for our righteousness and He has reconciled us sinners with God the Father almighty. The work of His first Advent is complete, just as He announced from the cross, "It is finished."

So, if you want to know how you can be certain that you are one of the good fish or a sheep, or wheat that's brought into the barn, you look back to Jesus' first advent. You look back to His cross and tomb and believe without doubting that that's where and when you were saved. You look to your baptism where all that Christ did for you on the cross and in the tomb was connected to you, personally, individually. The eternal election of God was carried out right in your baptism.

But that still leaves us in between His first and second Advent. And the road that runs from our baptism to Christ's coming in judgment is a narrow road. And we keep falling off of it. We're prone to doubting what is most certainly true which makes us afraid to step out in faith because we not sure where is leading us.

We walk by faith but our faith is weak and we stumble and fall along the way. We fall off the road on the one side every time we forget who we are and whose we are and live as though we were not Christians and as though Christ's death and resurrection means nothing to us. And we fall off on the other side every time we are give into the temptation that surrounds us to take an easier, wider road. The one that everyone else seems to be traveling on and who all seem to be so happy with their life.

And so we need the season of Advent, because Advent reminds us that our Lord and Savior has come to us and is coming to us and in fact, is always with us and has never left us as we walk the narrow road.

I have this hunch that the thing that will shock us and humble us the most about the 2nd coming of Christ is that we the veil will be lifted from our eyes and we'll suddenly realize that He has been with us all along, every day of our life, every step along the road. And carrying us in His body the whole time. Suddenly, in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, we'll see Him not by faith but with our eyes. And all of our doubts and fears will be gone. Suddenly we will know that we have arrived at our destiny safely, and solely because Christ has brought us safely home. Not because we have been faithful but because He has been faithful.

How much we need the season of Advent.

II. "I will fulfill the promise I made." "Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David, and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days Judah will be saved, and Jerusalem will dwell securely. And this will be the name by which it will be called: The Lord is our righteousness."

The prophet Jeremiah preached this wonderful Advent sermon 600 years before Christ's first coming. But it is just as wonderful to us today as it was to the "house of Israel and the house of Judah" then. Judah and Israel needed to be reminded and reassured as much as we do to continue to walk the narrow road and live by faith because the Lord always fulfills His promise.

The Bible uses lots of different metaphors to describe Jesus Christ to us. He is the "seed of the woman," the "Lamb of God," the "Lion of Judah," the "bright morning star." And each image of Jesus carries with it its own special meaning and tells us something unique about the Christ. What about "the Branch"? There's a picture of Jesus we may not be so familiar with.

I know that some of you have spent some time tracing your family tree. Even if you haven't, I think we all understand how it works. You start with your parents and work backwards to their parents and to their parent's parents, as far back as you the data will take you. As you lay all of this out on paper the branches of your family tree begin to take shape and you learn something about your ancestry, which tells you a lot about who you are.

If you follow your family tree back far enough, and there's only one set of data that allows you to do this, what you find is that we all trace our roots back to one man and woman whose name was Adam and Eve, no last name.

Now here's where the science of genetics is helpful. My father had heart problems and high blood pressure and my grandfather died of a heart attack. My grandfather on my mother's side was bald. Science has helped me to understand that these things gets passed down from generation to generation through the genes and so I have to be careful about my heart and my blood pressure who knows but one day, I may start loosing my hair.

Likewise, the Scriptures tell me that lots of bad stuff gets passed down to me from my parents and grand parents through their spiritual DNA. You can summarize all the bad stuff that gets passed down from one generation to another with one word – "sin." Actually, we learn even more about ourselves by tracking our ancestor's spiritual DNA than we do their physical DNA.

The really depressing thing about all of this is that there's nothing you can do to change any of this. You can't go back and change your family tree or the genetic makeup of your ancestors. There's nothing that you can do to escape your past and there's nothing you can do to escape passing your past onto your children and your grandchildren and great grandchildren.

And so what we will see, if we will see with the eyes of faith, is that every one of our family trees looks eerily similar. They all end up looking like a cross, the emblem of suffering and shame and death, and its all the result of the sin in our spiritual DNA.

But now, on this first Sunday in Advent, we hear that there is another branch that has been superimposed right over top of our family tree. It's a branch that is altogether different than every other branch. It is a "righteous branch" which means that it doesn't carry the same spiritual DNA that the branches of our tree do. There is no sin in the "righteous Branch."

And yet you can still trace this Branch through a human ancestry. You can trace it all the back to David, and from David all the way back to Eve. He is the 'seed of the woman.' But when we follow this Branch forward, we see that it comes right from God the Father in heaven, through every generation of men and women, right to you and your children and your grandchildren.

Now, here's the science of horticulture is helpful. St. Paul says that we have been grafted into this righteous Branch. I saw how this works one time at Herb Schartner's apple farm. You take a shoot from one tree, bore a little hole in another tree and place the shoot into the hole and the shoot become a branch of that tree. It's that simple.

God grafts us into the "righteous Branch" through Holy Baptism. In your baptism, you were cut off from your family tree and grafted into Jesus Christ. You have been cut off from the tree of suffering shame and death and grafted into the tree of life.

Now, as with every analogy and metaphor for Jesus, none are perfect. Actually, when we graft shoots from one variety of apple tree into another variety of apple tree what we get is a hybrid, some blend of the two. But that's not the way it works with us and the "righteous Branch." When we are grafted into Jesus Christ, we become like Christ, not a hybrid of the righteous Christ and sinful man. He comes with righteous and justice, and grafted into Him, we are righteous with His righteousness and justified with the justice that He carried out on the cross for us.

III. Our Righteousness And this is the name by which it will be called, "The Lord, our righteousness." United to Jesus Christ like this we now trace our family tree as it runs through Him, and by faith in His promise, we rightly call Him "our Brother," and His Father is now "our Father."

For a while still, we continue to trace our family tree through our parents and grandparents as well as through Jesus Christ. We remain the sinful human beings that we are through our biological parents and the righteous and justified saints that we are through "the Lord, our righteousness."

But we know our destiny. The axe is already laid to the root of the tree of shame and suffering and death. "He shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days Judah will be saved, and Jerusalem will dwell securely."

Related Entries:

» Sermon Index – Lutheran – LCMS
» Worship This Sunday – 1st Advent – 12/2/07
» Sr. Youth White Water Rafting Adventure
» Advent 1 – "Your King Comes To Judge" – Isaiah 2:4 – 12/2/07
» Sermon – 2nd Advent – "Bear Fruit In Keeping With Repentance" – Matthew 3:1-11 – 12/9/07
» Sermon – "Advent Faith" – Mark 11:1-10 (1st Sunday in Advent)

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 29th, 2009 at 5:22 pm and is filed under Audio Sermons, Sermons - Lutheran - LCMS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.