Introduction: So the power goes off on a dark night and you can’t see a thing. You grab your phone and find the flashlight feature. Nice. Now you can see and you know where you’re walking. All at once the power comes back on. So you shove your phone in your pocket; you don’t need it anymore. An hour later you want to make a call but your phone is dead; you left the flashlight on.
Advent is kind of like the flashlight on your cell phone. Christmas is so bright and shiny that the lights of Advent don’t seem very important. In our society Christmas kind of takes Advent over. We light the Christmas tree three weeks before Christmas. We have Christmas parties in December; nobody has Advent parties. In some churches a Christmas candle stands in the middle of the Advent wreath as though Advent isn’t complete without Christmas. For most people, and probably for us, too, Advent is mostly about getting ready for Christmas. Maybe we should rename Advent and call it Pre-Christmas.
The truth is that Advent has a light of its own. The theme of Christmas is that when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, made of a woman. Christmas tells us that the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. But Jesus was born 2,000 years ago. We aren’t preparing for the birth of Jesus anymore. We aren’t like Mary and Joseph or the shepherds or Simeon and Anna who believed a Savior was coming. We believe the Savior has come and we believe that he finished what he came to do.
The lights of the Advent wreath lead us to Christmas but they don’t lead us only to Christmas. As we light the candles on the four Advent Sundays, their flames points us to every place Jesus comes to us. He came down to us in a stable, of course, but he also came to us on a cross. He lay in a manger but we also find him in the gospel. He was born for us in Bethlehem, but he will come again in the throne room of heaven and take us to be with him forever. So the theme of Advent is not Merry Christmas. The prayer of Advent is Come, Lord Jesus.
That’s exactly the prayer we heard from Isaiah in the First Reading for the First Sunday in Advent: Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down. As we hear his words this morning, they will lead us to join him in his prayer:
Lord, Come Down and Save Us
Save us from the disdain of your enemies
Save us from the devastation of our sins
1. Isaiah was a messenger or a spokesman whom the Lord used to communicate with the people of Judah and Jerusalem. We’re talking about 700 years before Jesus’ time. Isaiah had a lot of bad news. The glory days of King David and King Solomon were long gone. In the good old days God spoke directly to the kings and leaders of his people, but not anymore. The kings didn’t listen, and neither did the people. You and I would consider most of the people of Jerusalem to be pretty hardened unbelievers. God tried to get their attention. He sent marauders and guerillas to make their lives miserable and then a few full-fledged armies, but nobody took the hint. The average Joe Jew didn’t have any respect for the Lord and neither did the foreign forces. To them the Lord was just another idol who couldn’t do much for anybody.
There were believers in Jerusalem and Judah, not a lot but some. They were the ones who usually suffered the most, not just physically but spiritually, too. They had to listen to the slurs and the slights. You know how you feel when someone insults your kids. That’s how they felt when people insulted the Lord. There were hounded by the gross unbelief around them. They resented it, they were sick of it, and they were tired of it. They wanted to be done with it and they wanted the Lord to be done with it. Isaiah put the people’s thoughts onto his pen: Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you! As when fire sets twigs ablaze and causes water to boil, come down to make your name known to your enemies and cause the nations to quake before you! These believers remembered what God did to the nation of Egypt during the time of Israel’s slavery: For when you did awesome things that we did not expect, you came down, and the mountains trembled before you. They wanted more of that. They wanted God to do something about the disrespect and the disdain of their enemies and his enemies. In holy anger they prayed that the Lord to come down and save them.
We live in a country that guarantees religious freedom and we live in very safe communities where attacks against our church are unthinkable. So we don’t always feel this disdain and disrespect that comes from the enemies of God. Or at least we think we don’t. We don’t always identify the marauders who convince our children to stop coming to church after their teenage years. We don’t worry too much about the guerillas who destroy Christians we know with pornography and alcoholism and drug addictions. Too often we stand quietly by while Satanic armies crush what God says about abortion and alternate lifestyles. There comes a time when we have to come to grips with the reality that God is more than something our parents handed down to us or a convenient habit for Sunday mornings. We need to make personal what the believers of Isaiah made personal: Since ancient times no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him. You come to the help of those who gladly do right, who remember your ways. There is no one who does more for us and no one who does more for our children and our friends and our world—no one who does more than the Lord. And there is no attack, whether it’s quiet and sneaky or loud and blatant—no attack that does more to disrespect God and destroy us and the people we love than the attacks of God’s enemies. It’s time for us to pray: Lord, come down and save us. Save us from the disdain of your enemies.
2. The believers in Judah and Jerusalem felt the pressure and the pain of these God-mockers inside their country and outside their country. That’s why they prayed. But they felt personal pain and pressure, too. They knew what God thought about sin. They saw plenty of sin around them, but they saw sin inside themselves, too. Isaiah was speaking for all those faithful Old Testament believers when he wrote: But when we continued to sin against your ways, you were angry.
There’s no long list of sins here; there’s no check list to compare thoughts and words and actions with the Ten Commandments. Isaiah isn’t interested in sins with an s at the end. He’s talking about sin without the s. He’s talking about the character of sin. If you compare sin to a disease, he’s talking about the infection, not the symptoms. Isaiah cuts to the chase when he writes: All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away. The awful truth is that sin makes us gangrenous to God; it turns us into an open land fill. Sin is disgusting to God and sin makes us dispensable to God. He would just as soon squish us up and throw us away. When sin controls us (Isaiah admits this to God) no one calls on your name or strives to lay hold of you. Because of sin God lets us go. You have hidden your face from us and have given us over to our sins. Sin isn’t like cancer or Covid. We can die from cancer or Covid, but we also can recover. We can’t recover from sin.
It isn’t easy to talk this way to Lutherans. Lutherans believe that God forgives sin. You all believe that; forgiveness is the heart of our Christian faith. But we need to remember how awful sin is so we remember how awesome forgiveness is. The believers in Jerusalem remembered: Yet you, Lord, are our Father. We are the clay; you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand. Without God, we’re homeless orphans; without God we’re lumps of wet dirt. But God adopted us into his family. He molded us and created us to believe in him and trust his promises. When we know what we were because of sin and when we believe what we are because of God, we pray, Do not be angry beyond measure, Lord; do not remember our sins forever. Oh, look on us, we pray, for we are all your people. We pray: Lord, come down and save us. Save us from the devastation of our sins.
On a Sunday long ago, Jesus mounted a young donkey and rode into the city of Jerusalem. He had enemies in Jerusalem, just like the enemies of God Isaiah knew. There were believers in Jerusalem, too, just like the believers Isaiah knew about. 700 years separated the believers Jesus knew from the believers Isaiah knew but their prayer was the same: They waved their palm branches and they cried, Hosanna, hosanna: Come and save us, Lord. And that’s what Jesus did. He took their awful sins to the cross and died an awful death and he rescued them from the devastation and destruction of sin.
That’s the prayer we need to pray each day of Advent: Come and save us Lord. Save us by leading us to repent of our sins as John the Baptizer urged. Save us by taking us to the manger where you were born with our blood and our bones. Save us as we watch the Spirit descend from heaven and hear your Father say, This is my Son whom I love. Save us as we view the cross where you died in our place. Save us as we see your empty tomb and hear you say, Because I live you will live also. Save as we hear the words and works we have heard before, for faith comes from hearing the message and the message comes from the Word of God. Save as we remember the water which made us members of your family. Save us as we taste the bread and wine which holds your body and blood for the forgiveness of sins. In the year to come, that is exactly what Jesus will do.
If Christmas is a time for celebration, then Advent is a time for prayer. And so we pray: Come and save us from the disdain of your enemies and save us from the destruction of our sins. And with that prayer, the lights of the Advent wreath will lift our eyes to Christ and lead us to long for his coming again. Amen.
