(December 1, 2002 sermon transcript)

Isaiah 64:1-8

        Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, just a few days ago, in this nation, we experienced the biggest shopping day in the history of the year; the day after Thanksgiving. We have been informed that lines outside of places like Macy’s in New York began to form from between three and five o’clock in the morning, waiting to get in so that they could access all the treasures contained in the store and spend hard-earned money on.

        And so we begin the season of Advent, waiting and anticipating, and of course, shopping. They were waiting for the manager to come to the door, those people, the store manager, who would unlock the door and who would grant them access to the treasures within.

        As people of Christ, we long for the heavens to be opened and for the Advent of Christ to come and to take us to the treasures of our eternal home. That is certainly one of the main themes of the season of Advent, and by the way, Happy New Year. This is the beginning of the year for Christians. We long for that Advent of Christ that He would come and bring us into the new Jerusalem. The one which we look for and where our true citizenship, even now resides. But we must wait. God is with us, and the treasures of heaven have been opened to us.

        The request of Isaiah the prophet has been fulfilled, and indeed there is the Advent of Christ. Or the other aspect of the Advent season is that Christ has come, and is with us, and that God has become human flesh and we await that advent as well

        Our prayers, and the prayer of this text today then, has already been answered. God is with us. But keep in mind that can be a scary thing as well, depending on who’s listening. For most of the world it would be, well, nothing short of terrifying if the heavens were to open and God were to come. And the reason for that is quite simple. The prophet Isaiah is a believer in the faith and promises of God of the coming Messiah. That faith, as our faith, is waiting for the fulfillment of those promises. We have faith in the Messiah who has come. Isaiah had faith in the Messiah which was promised and which was to come. We are vastly more blessed as God’s people, living in the age in which we live, for we see the fulfillment. We have seen the reality. We know that Christ has come, that He has taken on human flesh, the He has walked among us, that He has suffered and died for the sins of the people, that He has risen from the dead, that we now only await the final and complete fulfillment of all the promises that have been made, even though the salvation promises are ours already.

What a promise God has made!

        You see the only safe ground on which to stand, if we are to request that God come down and open the heavens, is the ground of faith in Christ Jesus. For their is no other access to the Father, despite words to the contrary in many of today’s churches that there are many ways to God. But Jesus says, "No". I am the way, the truth and the life, and no one comes to the Father except by me. No one comes to the Father, He says, unless the Father who sent me draws him. God has provided a solution. His solution is singular. And His solution bears the name of His son, Jesus Christ. If it were not so, His death on the cross would have been completely and utterly in vain. For it would have have been unnecessary if there were others ways by which to gain access before God and on ground on which to stand which has no fear upon his return.

        We are speaking of the very Gospel itself here, the message that God has come in the flesh, that He has laid down his life for the forgiveness of sins, that He has granted those who have faith in Him, granted by Him, to be his children now and forever. Sometimes people have a misunderstanding about the scriptures. Thinking that perhaps God has revealed Himself differently in the Old Testament than He has in the new. But of course God is immutable. He is changeless, and He cannot change, nor would He. God never had a Plan A in the Old Testament and then suddenly abandoned that, and said "Well, that didn’t work. I guess we’ll go to Plan B in the New Testament." He didn’t say to the Jews, "You can sit there and obey your laws, and if you do that you will be my people and you will be saved". Rather He said, in the very beginning, The seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent. And He will be the one who fulfills the law.

        Dear friends in Christ, if you want to postulate that God had Plan A and Plan B, you have a problem. Because first of all, if you do, you must postulate that we have two Gods, who are at odds with each other. And if that’s not the case, then you have to postulate that we have a God who changed his mind. And God of course need not change his mind. God never needs a plan B because He is absolutely perfect, He is absolutely all-knowing, and when He makes a plan, it will be carried out from the beginning to the end, and no Plan B is either needed or necessary.

        God brings us his solution, which was determined before the foundations of the world were laid, before Adam and Eve were even created. God says, "here is my son, my beloved one, with whom I am well pleased, and He will be the redeemer of the world."

        Those whose faith is not in Christ Jesus then, would never, under any circumstances, want the heavens to be opened and God to come down. Why? Because it would be terrifying. Because when God returns He will return in all his holiness. Not meek and mild in a manger, but with all of his righteousness, with all of his justice, with everything that God is, and we will see it loudly and clearly, as will everyone else who occupies this globe or ever has occupied this globe. And all sin will be exposed for the ugly reality that it actually is. And that will be done simply because we will see the holiness of God, and by comparison, there is no comparison.

        And so, sometimes we like to invent gods of our own making to get around that kind of reality. Sometimes we like a god who never condemns, never prepared an eternal punishment called hell, never under any circumstances does anything but bring blessings to all, regardless of whether they believe in Him, respect Him, or not. That is the great American mush-God. That is the one that we worship in American Civil Religion. The one who never condemns, and never ever does anything that would be harmful to anyone. But it isn’t the God that is revealed in the scripture. The God revealed in the scripture is quite beyond our ability to comprehend Him. This is the God who says, "you shall not touch the ark of the covenant", and even when it slips by accident and one tries to save it, He dies. This is the one whose justice is beyond our ability to understand or comprehend, yet we know it to be utterly and absolutely perfect.

        No, there is only one true God who comes down from heaven to earth in all his glory, in all of his righteousness, in all of his justice. There is nothing but terror for those who trust in themselves to be able to stand on their own ground before God when He comes. But I assure you my friends, there is no hope, there is absolutely no hope before God in our human efforts to please Him. There is absolutely no hope in our self-invented gods, no matter how cute and cuddly and warm and fuzzy we make Him. The only hope, the one divine solution for human sin, which God Himself has provided, is his son, only his son, and the name of his son, who is Jesus Christ our lord.

        If I might paraphrase Dante’s Divine Comedy. Over the gates of hell was an inscription in his comedy - strange name for a comedy - it said, "Abandon hope all ye who enter here". I would suggest that over every man-made scheme in which we find attempts to justify ourselves before God, that same inscription should be written. "Abandon hope all ye who attempt this." Abandon hope. Or rather, your hope is only and alone in Christ Jesus, the one on whose advent we await.

        Well, surprise, surprise, surprise. God has already answered Isaiah’s prayer. The heavens have been opened, and He has come down. But He has not come to issue his condemnation for the world, He has come to redeem the world, to save it. He is precisely here because, in this season of advent, it is that opening of heaven that we celebrate. The opening of heaven that the angels announced to those poor shepherds so long ago outside of Jerusalem. You know the words, Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,"Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests."

        And then we know that the apostle John put it equally succinctly when he wrote, From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

        The Advent of Christ literally joins heaven and earth together. His first advent does that, amazingly enough. He comes to us, born and conceived in the virgin Mary. And again in the scriptures we read, In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin's name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, "Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.... and you will bear a son and you will call his name Jesus, for He will save his people from their sins.

        Born of a virgin, a human, sinful virgin, like every other human being. And so we find that He is wholly and truly man. Human flesh, like you, like me. Conceived of the holy spirit to be truly and fully God. For a man you seen, cannot die for your sins, but only a man must fulfill the law. And so God in his son, provides both answers. He is the one who fulfills the law. And He is the one who pays for our sin with his own death. His purpose in coming is abundantly clear. We read about it in John chapter 1. Again we read, He was in the world, and though the world was made through Him, the world did not recognize Him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive Him. Yet to all who received Him, to those who believed in his name, He gave the right to become children of God--children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.

        You know, we have all been born as children of God’s wrath. Conceived and born without hope and without salvation. We needed a redeemer, a rescuer. And so God’s great love and compassion moved Him to send his son. Obedient, humble, not coming with flaming chariots, but as a baby born in a manger, to go to an ignominious death on the cross, executed by the hands of the Romans and at the instigation of the Jews. And this is how God brings us a victory, strange though it may seem. But God is in to doing things in a surprising way.

        St. Paul in Romans writes these words: Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men,...But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God's grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many. Again, the gift of God is not like the result of the one man's sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

        These powerful words of St Paul echo to us, that we are joined with heaven. It is not just a promise for our future, it is our present possession, as we speak. For we were joined to Him in our baptism, and in our baptisms we joined in in his burial, into the death, the penalty of death which He pays. And we are joined together in his resurrection, into life now and forever in heaven, so that heavenly citizenship, that joining of heaven and earth, is already an accomplished reality.

        We do not look for what we hope to have. We look for what we do have. We look for what God has already provided. We recognize this, and will, in just a few short minutes in our liturgy, for the joining of heaven and earth is clearly stated there. Very soon we will hear these words, "therefore with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven we laud and magnify your glorious name, ever more praising you and singing, ‘Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna in the Highest'"

        Therefore dear friends, let us lift our voices in praise of the grace and mercy of God. For on this first Sunday in advent we celebrate God’s great and lasting love in keeping his promise of coming, of joining together heaven and earth. He comes with the forgiveness of his Son. He comes with his Son’s victory over death. He comes to take our heavenly home, with our present heavenly citizenship and give it to us now. It is ours, now and forever, so that we might no longer fear his coming. But rather with great preparation and anticipation, we might sing the praises of Him who will rend the heavens once again and will come to bring us home. In his name, we conclude. Amen.