" OUR HOPE”
Midweek Advent Worship I
December 2, 2015
Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church
Glenshaw, Pennsylvania
TEXT:
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by command of God our Savior and of
Christ Jesus our Hope.
1 Timothy 1:1 (ESV)
Many people have associated the Advent season with the season of
Lent. Both are penitential seasons in a sense, meaning that during
these particular times of the year we focus on our sin and
unworthiness. But Advent is not quite as penitential as Lent is. In
today’s lingo, we might say that Advent is kind of a “Lent lite.” The
Hymn of Praise in the liturgy is omitted during both seasons, but the
Alleluias are not omitted during Advent as they are during the Lenten
season. The subdued mood of Advent is not so much one of penitence as
it is one of longing. During this season of preparation for Christmas
we long for the coming of our Deliverer. Closely related to this
feeling of longing is the feeling of hope. We can endure the longing
because we have hope. We can joyfully and confidently long for
Christmas because we know that Christmas is coming. We can joyfully
and confidently long for Jesus to come to us now because, according to
His promise, we know that He is present with us in His means of grace.
And we can joyfully and confidently long for His return in glory
because we know that He will come again to make everything perfect and
to deliver us from this world of sin and death and grief and take us
to His glorious kingdom.
Hope, as the Scriptures describe it, is not quite the same thing as
the “hope” that the world talks about so much and claims to have. The
world sees hope as nothing more than a desire for particular uncertain
and unpredictable things to take place: “I hope that the economy will
improve.” “I hope that my favorite sports team has a good season.” I
hope that So-and-Son makes it home for the holidays.” But when the
Bible speaks about our hope in Christ, it’s talking about a sure
thing--as sure as Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. In tonight’s
sermon text the apostle Paul speaks of “Christ Jesus [as] our Hope.”
He also speaks of “God [as] our Savior.” As part of our Advent
preparation we will examine this evening these two expressions to
rediscover the confidence that we have in the face of all the
challenges to that confidence that confront us in this fallen and
broken world.
“God [is] our Savior” in that our salvation began with the redeeming
love that our God has had for His fallen creatures from the very
beginning. In the midst of pronouncing the judgment for and
consequences of the fall in the garden, God also promised our first
parents that a Descendant of the woman would defeat the one who had
tempted them into sin. Sometimes people misinterpret our salvation in
such a way that they see God as a vengeful Judge who is gracious
toward us only because Jesus has come to the rescue and appeased Him.
It is true that the righteousness and justice of God cannot tolerate
sin and that they have been satisfied in the sacrifice of Christ, but
we need to remember that it is the love of God for sinners like us
that moved Him to provide that sacrifice of atonement in the first
place. For many people the Gospel in a nutshell is Jesus’ well-known
statement to Nicodemus: “God so loved the world that He gave His only
Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal
life” (John 3:16). It was the love and mercy of God for sinners that
initiated the salvation accomplished in the life, death, and
resurrection of Jesus.
Moreover, it was God Himself who, in love, chose to permanently unite
Himself with our human nature when He became incarnate in Christ. The
Jesus who lived and suffered and died and rose again to justify us in
the sight of God is God Himself. He is the One who said: “I and the
Father are One” (John 10:30)--the One to whom the apostle Paul was
referring when he wrote: “In Christ God was reconciling the world to
Himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Corinthians
5:19). It is not as though God wanted to condemn us and Jesus, by His
sacrificial life and death, convinced Him not to; it is God who wanted
to save us so much that He became incarnate in Christ so that He could
satisfy His own justice and at the same time manifest His
compassionate, redeeming love for sinners.
This God-in-the-flesh--Jesus Christ--is “our Hope” because He has
redeemed us from sin and death. He did this by vicariously taking our
sin upon Himself and enduring the punishment that that our sin
deserves and in return giving us His perfect righteousness--the
perfect righteousness with which we will stand before God’s judgment
on the last day. This exchange between Christ and us is affirmed in
very simple and yet profound terms by the apostle Paul, who wrote to
the church at Corinth: “God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us,
so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God” (2
Corinthians 5:21 NIV). This is what makes Jesus “our Hope”--“our
[only] Hope” in the face of the judgment and condemnation that we have
earned by our rebellion and sin. It is not like the world’s “hope”--a
mere desire; it is a certainty, gained for us by the perfect life and
innocent suffering and death of the incarnate Son of God and
guaranteed for us by His glorious resurrection from the dead.
This “sure and certain hope” (Lutheran Service Book Agenda, page 130)
in which we live and die is the knowledge that the One who has
redeemed us will come again and take us to be with Him forever in the
glory of heaven. This season of Advent is one in which we celebrate
the coming of Jesus. His coming is really threefold: He came to us
in the past as a helpless Baby lying in a manger in Bethlehem. He
comes to us right here and now, according to His promise, in the means
of grace that He has appointed: His Word and Sacraments. And He will
come again in glory at the end of time to bring all things to a
perfect conclusion and to take us to himself, where He will give us
everything that He has gained for us and will deliver us from this
life of temptation and sin to live forever in perfect peace and joy
and in perfect fellowship with Him and with all who have lived and
died trusting in Him.
In this season of hope we have every reason to hope because our hope
rests not in ourselves nor in the warmth, the generosity, the
decorations, the carols, or any of the other trappings of this joyous
time of the year. It rests solely in the One who truly is “our Hope”:
Jesus Christ, the almighty and eternal God, the Maker and Ruler of
all things, who in love chose to permanently unite Himself with our
human nature to redeem us from sin and death and to reconcile us to
Himself--the God of perfect righteousness and justice who we have
offended by our sin. He truly is la-wnmu--God with us. In Him we
have hope that endures despite everything that confronts us in this
hopeless world, as the apostle assures us: “Through Him we have . . .
obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we
rejoice in hope of the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in
our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and
endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope
does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our
hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans
5:2-5).
Amen.
May the One who once came as an Infant in Bethlehem prepare you for
His coming again in glory by His Means of Grace, through which He
comes to you even now. May He equip you to be His witnesses so that
you, like the Baptist in the wilderness, may prepare the way of the
Lord. He who calls you is faithful, and He will do it. Amen.