Sermon - Advent 1 - Mark 11:1-10

 

A blessed Advent to all of you.  As we take these few weeks of solemn preparation for our Christmas celebration, it might strike us that the church is a bit out of step with the world.  And that really shouldn’t surprise us.  For as Christmas celebrations creep earlier and earlier every year, the Church holds on to the season of Advent, a time of preparation. 

We put ourselves in the shoes, as it were, of the Old Testament people who waited longingly for the Messiah to finally arrive.  We sing songs like, “O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel – that mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appear”  Christ is coming.  Throughout the Old Testament God reiterated his promise to send the seed of the woman that would crush the serpent.  And slowly he revealed more and more of this plan – born of a virgin, born in Bethlehem, meant to suffer for the sins of the people, to die – and to rise again.

By the year 33 A.D., the sense that God’s Messiah was coming had reached a bit of a fever pitch.  The air was electric and thick with expectation.  But many expected less a savior from sin and more a savior from foreign oppression.  Judas Maccabeus had led the revolt against the Seleucid Empire just some 200 years prior, and many thought he was the Messiah.  But their hopes were dashed, when once again Israel fell under the rule of another foreign power – the Romans.

This Jesus, he was causing a stir.  He was doing some amazing feats, miracles, even raised Lazarus from the dead!  Might he be the one?  The promised Messiah?  The Son of David?  And as another annual Passover feast rolled around, and the population of Jerusalem swelled with pilgrims, Jesus made his entrance – and we know it so well, on Palm Sunday.  His Advent, if you will, to his Holy City.

Of course they welcomed him as a king and a savior, the Son of David, even. They praised his name with their shouts of “Hosanna!  Save us!” But little did anyone seem to know that he came to save them by dying.  That he came to save them from sin and death, not Romans and Herodians.  That this Jesus was a miracle worker – but perhaps not the kind of miracles they wanted, or expected.

We might be able to relate.  We know Jesus is the Savior, but from what do we wish to be saved?  Stress at work?  Money problems?  Grief?  Pain?  Anxiety?  Depression?  Fears about tomorrow?  Fears about today?  Loneliness?  Worries about our loved ones?  Something else?

We may not have the boot of the Romans pressing on our neck, but we have many and various problems and troubles, what preachers used to call, “felt needs”.  Ask a random person on the street, “What’s your biggest problem right now?” or to put it another way, “What one thing would make you happy?”  Or, if Jesus comes to “save us”, from what do we really need saving?

Sing your Hosannas, today, Christians, for the Son of David comes to save you from sin and death and devil.  Sin, that corruption that touches every corner of our existence, which infects our thoughts, words, deeds, our very nature.  Sin which has also dragged down this creation with it.  And it, and we, each of us, need saving.

And death – the wages of sin – the caboose on the sin train.  It always follows.  It cannot be avoided.  Death is always hanging around, hovering over us, waiting for that one moment from which there is no return.  And like sin, its dark tendrils squiggle their way into every corner and crevice, “change and decay in all around I see”.  We need saving.

The devil?  Not so easily seen, but pulling what levers he can behind the scenes.  Cheering us on in our sins, tempting us away from faith, hope and love.  Working through his proxies and levying his accusations – “Your sin is too great to be forgiven.  Not even God could love you.”  Or else, trying to lull us into false security, “It’s not really a sin.  God doesn’t really care.  You will not die.”  Save us from these lies, these accusations, these temptations, oh, Lord!  And only Jesus can.

Hosanna, Save us!  And he does.  He comes to save.  He came to Jerusalem to save his people not from Rome, and not from their felt needs, but from their deepest need, and their true enemies.

So too, for us.  He comes. He comes to save.  But not as some might expect.

Jesus did a miracle in his advent to Jerusalem.  He exercised just a bit of divine knowledge and authority by sending his disciples to go get that donkey.  Maybe this miracle gets lost sometimes in the fanfare of the palms and shouts of “Hosanna”.  But let’s not pass it by.

The Lord of Creation knows exactly what is required.  He tells his disciples exactly what they need to know, and what to say.  He even selects a particular donkey to ride, a colt, on which no one has ever sat – a sort of a firstfruits fit for a king, reminiscent of the new tomb in which no one had ever been laid.  But Jesus goes first, into death, and into resurrection, to chart our course of life and salvation.  The beast of burden carried the Christ into his holy city.  But only the Christ could shoulder the load of all sins, as he carried his cross outside the city, and in his body put all sin to death. 

Save us.  The king comes to do just that.  But today, among us, he comes not riding a donkey, nor swaddled in a manger.  Today he comes humbly, but hidden, in simple bread and wine.  He comes just as surely to save us from sin and death and devil.  He comes according to his words of promise, “This is my body.  This is my blood… given and shed for you, for the forgiveness of sins”  That’s how he saves us, by forgiveness.  A forgiveness won at the cross, and freely given at the altar, and at the font, in the absolution pronounced and the gospel proclaimed.

And yet, we still wait longingly, we still mourn in exile here.  We still look forward to the coming of the king.  Yes, our sins are forgiven.  Yes, salvation unto us has come.  Yes, God has answered our prayers of Hosanna in the one who died to save us.  But we still labor.  We still suffer.  The flesh still clings to us, with all his warts and fusty uncleanness.  We’re still feeling needs.  And so we look forward to Christ’s coming in glory.

We pray, “Hosanna” and look for his coming in the clouds.  We pray for his Second Advent, “come quickly, Lord Jesus!”  We are anchored in the hope of that day, when Christ returns to judge the living and the dead, to raise the faithful to glorious life, to dissolve this broken world and bring about the new heaven and new earth, and to sound the dinner bell for the marriage feast of the Lamb in his kingdom which has no end. 

Blessed is the kingdom of our father David, that has come in his blessed son, Jesus Christ.  And blessed is the kingdom to come, when he brings this age to an end, and makes all things new.  Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!  Hosanna in the highest.  Amen.