Impossible AND YET True
This sermon was preached by Pastor Ted Carnahan for the Fourth Sunday of Advent on December 21, 2024.
Transcript
Grace, mercy, and peace be with all of you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
The Purpose of Advent
Several people have asked me a question this year: "What good is Advent?" What is it useful for? Why don't we just have a time of getting ready for Christmas where we just do Christmas stuff? Why bother with an Advent wreath as we get ready? Why bother with avoiding the Christmas carols and focusing on these hymns of anticipation and hope? Why bother with Advent?
It's a reasonably good question, especially because in our society, there have, for probably two generations now, been two different holidays that we call Christmas, but they're not the same thing. In our society, we have Secular Christmas, which is Santa Claus and Christmas trees and "ho, ho, ho," and gift giving and that sort of thing. Those things are good. There's nothing wrong with those, but they're kind of a different sort of thing than the Christian celebration of Christmas, which is about the coming of Jesus into the world, light banishing darkness, and the Son of God taking on human flesh in order to live among us and become for us our great sacrifice.
Advent as Preparation
It's a fair question: "Isn't it just a time for getting ready for Christmas?" And it is. Advent is absolutely a time for getting ready for Christmas. It's a preparatory season as we prepare ourselves to receive Christ at Christmas. But I have consulted a calendar, and it's the year 2024. Jesus was born, depending on who you want to talk to, somewhere around the year 1. So Jesus has already come and is already among us. He has been among us for over 2,000 years. So what is this business of getting ready for Jesus to come?
Well, it's because Advent isn't just a time of preparing for Christmas and its celebrations. Advent is also a time of preparing for the return of Jesus. It's not the first coming of Christ in a manger in Bethlehem, but the second coming of Christ when he comes to wipe every tear from every eye and to make all things right.
It's a preparation for the second coming of Christ.
Anticipation and Celebration
But what the first coming of Christ and the second coming of Christ have in common is that they both create for us a sense of anticipation for Christmas because, of course, of all the good things that we celebrate at Christmas, whether we're thinking about the secular version of it or the Christian version of it. I think everybody here probably is celebrating both of those, and that's just fine. We look forward to presents under the tree and gathering with friends and family and all the wonderful things that we do and the good food that we eat. This is good stuff. It's warm and fuzzy.
In fact, the stuff that we attach to Christmas is so good that I ask my confirmation students to kind of catch them up a little bit. I ask them, "What's the most important Christian holiday?" And they invariably say Christmas. And that's wrong. It's important, but it's not as important as Easter because Easter is the source of our hope.
Looking Forward to the Second Coming
So we do have this anticipation. Christmas: there's going to be presents and celebration and light and a Christmas tree and all the wonderful things that come with the season. But it's also a time of anticipation as we look ahead to the second coming of Jesus. The coming of Jesus that still lies in our future. The second coming that Christ will return in glory instead of the humility of a manger. Victorious instead of in a small backwater of the Roman Empire. With power and majesty instead of as a tiny baby. That he will come in glory and judge the earth. That as Micah the prophet says in our reading today, "He shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord."
So there's anticipation. Getting ready for Christmas, but getting ready for something more than just Christmas. And anticipation requires faith. Anticipation looks forward to the future and trusts that there's going to be something there for us, something to look forward to. Anticipation requires belief, which is why Advent is such a valuable thing for us as Christians.
The Essence of Christianity
Because what is Christianity all about? It's not about good behavior. Everybody in this room, myself very much included in that, is not wonderfully excellent when it comes to our behavior. We're all sinners in need of a Savior. What Christianity is really all about, actually the thing that differentiates the teaching of Christ from all the other religions of the world, is the idea that Christianity, instead of saying, "Do this," it says with Christ, "It is already done." It's a religion of faith. A religion of things that we know are impossible, but are nevertheless quite true.
It's impossible for a virgin to conceive and bear a child, and yet Mary was very pregnant. It is impossible for a man to be God's son. But here is the babe of Bethlehem to show us how little we really understand. It's impossible for an unborn child to recognize the voice of a woman that he has never heard before. And yet John the Baptist leaps in his mother Elizabeth's womb upon hearing the voice of the Blessed Virgin. It's impossible for human beings to be justified before God by our good behavior. And yet here is Christ, born among us, not to offer sacrifices for us, but to be the body prepared for us in place of sacrifices and offerings. To do God's will for us when we cannot.
The Impossible Made Possible
Christianity is the religion of a frightened and confused teenager who is told by angels that the child that will be conceived in her womb, though she is a virgin, will be great and called son of the Most High. She goes and visits an older relative, Elizabeth, and finds something else that she also thought was impossible is also true because Elizabeth is pregnant too. And Elizabeth is an old woman and her womb was thought to be barren and impossible for her to bear children. And not only is she pregnant, but she prophesies, filled with the Holy Spirit. She says, "Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me," she says by the Spirit, "that the mother of my Lord comes to me?" Because even though it's impossible, impossible that Elizabeth is pregnant, impossible that Mary is pregnant in the way that she has been told it would be, nevertheless, she knows it's true and she trusts the promise.
These things don't meet up with scientific scrutiny, but that hardly matters. There are plenty of things that scientists will never be able to understand. That even though the strong and powerful always seem to get ahead in this world, that Jesus Christ is coming and he will raise up the meek and the lowly and the pure in heart. That even unborn children can have faith and can believe in God's promises and can leap for joy and deserve to be loved and protected as full human beings. That every closed door, every difficult "no," is not final. Because as long as God in Christ is king, there's still a chance.
The Promise of Advent
And so perhaps that's what we need out of Advent. To know that God has promised that he is turning the world around. That the things that defy and deny God in this world don't win in the end, no matter how powerful and permanent they may seem. Because in the incarnation, in the enfleshment of Jesus, the Son of God made a human being in Bethlehem so many years ago, God is coming to fulfill his promises. So that we can say, not just that Jesus came 2,000 years ago, but that he is coming to save us. Not just a God of the past and of history, but that Jesus Christ is God of our present and our future.
And maybe that's just the kick in the pants that we need to turn our hearts back toward God. So that we can give up being jaded about the world and its failings and the blindness of people who don't recognize the true reason for the season. So that we can greet with joy the coming of Christ. We can receive Christmas like a child: with anticipation, with wonder, with hope.
Conclusion
May you be prepared to welcome Christ at Christmas. Not just a child born in a strange place 2,000 years ago, but a man who loves you and gave himself to die for you and has promised that he is coming again for you. That God is coming to turn the world around and to do the blessings for you that he intends for you in his Son, Jesus.
And may the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, keep your hearts and minds strong in Christ Jesus, our Lord, to life everlasting. Amen.
