The sermon for December 3 was based on Matthew 21:1-9.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

It's coming on Christmas. People are buying and wrapping and hinting at presents. Children are busy compiling lists and merchants are doing all they can to drum up sales. Even those of us who aren't that acquisitive have some idea of what we'd like to get this year.

We Christians, of course, are focused on God's gift of forgiveness given in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Today, on the first Sunday of our new liturgical year, we anticipate Jesus' birth by contemplating His triumphant arrival in Jerusalem. We likewise look forward with eager anticipation to His second coming at the end of time when we shall all be taken to paradise.

We're setting up our nativity scenes and decking our halls with evergreen symbols of the endless life offered us in Jesus. Jesus, we are reminded, is the reason for the season and He is the ultimate gift of gifts. But I'll confess to you (and perhaps for you as well) that Jesus is not what I want for Christmas. In the same way that Jews wanted a Messiah who would trample the Romans and give them political triumph, I want a Savior who will destroy my sin and give me victory over all my vices and shortcomings. I want God to send me someone who will perfect me.

I don't want some baby who needs the protection of a carpenter and the constant supervision of a girl who by today's standards would be way to young to even be married, much less do I want a God who's motorcade consists of to donkeys and a pack of people throwing leaves on the street. I want a Messiah who will make me worthy of God's love. I want a Savior who will make me respectable and admirable in the eyes of God the Father. What I want for Christmas is to be made pure and holy and perfect. I want not to need the Jesus God sent me.

As usual, though, I don't get what I really want for Christmas. Instead of being made radiant and noble and sinless, I get a Savior who's gift it is that my eyes are open to the filth of my own fallen heart. Jesus speaks to me through the Holy Bible and what it reveals to me is a heart that is desperately wicked. I see in myself what you see in yourselves, what all Christians who are no hiding behind the lies of the world see in themselves, a heart so corrupted by sin that it's like a pit of writhing snakes, a perpetually restless and lethally venomous entanglement of sin.

So horrified am I by own sinfulness that I am constant danger of despair, I am endlessly fighting to keep all the joy in my life from being sucked away by the awareness of my own guilt. Jesus, though, doesn't seem to mind. He comes down from heaven and joins me in my mess. He takes on my flesh and bone, adopts my needs and limitations. He even becomes the sin that I so loath and detest. He rides around on donkeys as if there was nothing more natural in all the world than that the Creator of the Universe should be shlepped around town by some thick-headed mule.

He keeps us company in this astoundingly humble way without ever once pretending to be anything other than the Lord of Life and the God of our Salvation. When He enters Jerusalem, the royal city, He does so in procession. When He is born, He is attended by His angelic host and when He returns He promises that it will be in glory. It's not as if after all these millennia God suddenly found our fallen lives respectable enough for His to share. He is still God and His perfect righteousness is still righteously offended by our every sin. Its just that love is stronger than righteousness and that God loves us without having to respect, admire or approve of us.

And while He is with us in this world He is constantly assuring us that His every power is bent on securing for us the blessing of heaven. So great is God's love for us that He promises to give us, when the time is right, that sinless nobility for which we so desperately long. That is the joy of heaven and it is to ensure that we are with Him there that Jesus has come to us at all. Jesus doesn't come here to ignore our sins. He comes here to pay for them with His life and death. He comes to win for us a future that is better than the present and present that is better than the past.

The reality of that promised future is assured. God has forgiven our sin and won for us a place in His everlasting kingdom. This isn't some pious hope or merely wishful thought. We will, one day, be the kind of people we wish we were. God gives us assurances of that reality in His specially chosen Means of Grace. Each time we gather at the altar to receive His Body and Blood we are forgiven the very sins that separate us from God and from one another and we are also allowed to join the saints and angels in the presence of our gracious God.

In Holy Baptism and in the proclamation of His Word, Jesus further assures us that the snake-pit of our sinful hearts has been dealt with. The sins and venom are still there while we live in this world but they have been glassed in and encompassed by the overpowering grace of God. You and I would probably still like to see them eradicated in this life. That's because we want the shape of our life in this world to be one of triumph and victory. The shape of our life in this world, however, is one of confession and absolution. Jesus consoles us with His forgiveness.

This is what St. Paul says too. Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh. We want so badly to think of ourselves as worthy and respectable that we are tempted to ignore the one true comfort God offers us in this world. We have the forgiveness of sins in the person and work of Jesus Christ. The whole point of being sinless is so that we can be with God and bask in His love. It turns out that because Jesus took our place on the cross, we can be with God and bask in His love even while we are yet sinners.

Sin is a problem chiefly in that it keeps us from God. Jesus' grace and mercy rob sin of that separating power. Moreover they give me the strength of His own Holy Spirit. God will help me, even in this life learn to better love and honor and even obey those who are undeserving.

God is with us, which is what we confess whenever we sing of Emmanuel and that means that we have begun to be with Him. The good work He promises to complete in us at the end of time has already and really begun. He will help us in our struggle against ourselves. Amen.

The peace of God, which passes . . .

Last Updated: 7/15/2008