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First Sunday in Advent - 2020
Vicar Vincent Shemwell Sermon Text: Matthew 25:31-46 November 28, 2020 |
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HOMECOMINGS
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Dear brothers and sisters in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, I have always been particularly fascinated by the idea of home – or rather, by the idea of going home – of returning to the place from whence you came, ya know? I mean, the notion of homecoming, right – of beginning a great journey from some distant land to the place of your own beginning, back to the place of your birth, or where you grew up, or just… to the place you’ve always called home. Certainly this is a classic and timeless theme in both art and literature. Take Homer’s The Odyssey, for instance, one of the very oldest narratives in the entire Western canon, which we all no doubt read at some point in school: it is all about the Greek hero Odysseus’ meandering journey home after the Trojan War. Examples of great tales like this throughout our history are virtually endless, as so much of literature and the Western experience has been considerably shaped by stories just like this – stories based around homecoming and the significance of the very notion of there being a place called home to which one may, through whatever trial, ultimately return. Surely nearly every Hallmark Christmas movie picks up on this or a relatively similar theme—whether or not those guilty-pleasure films are yet rightly considered part of the Western canon, I’ll let y’all be the judge of that. But anyhow, this fascination of mine, I think it has really taken on an even more concrete and experiential and personal tone now that my wife and I are both thousands of miles away from our own respective homes.
Going home for us is not a day’s drive, but is instead much more of an investment of time and energy—or if flying, money—it is thus arguably much more of an arduous adventure and potentially meandering journey even, than ever previously in our lives. This was felt especially this past week, as we spent Thanksgiving Day on the other side of the country from our own oft-missed hometowns. But we, too, when vicarage is over, we will return home. With our two dogs, a U-Haul and sports sedan, and a newborn baby. And that’ll be an adventure of its own – I’m sure nearly as epic as anything Homer had ever thought up. Going home, to our family and friends, to the places we know so well, to those places in which we grew up, to the comfort of familiarity, the immeasurable value of which all found again through a long journey of time and distance… and indeed discovery. The Oregon trail, “westward the wagons” and all… and then back again, for us, anyhow – back home in the end. Such a fascinating idea home is. Almost as fascinating as our incredible, insatiable longing for it, as men and women, having long ago grown up and ventured away from the places where we began, out into the wide world, and so often, then, back again, returning to, at last, in some nostalgic sense, create new ideas of home for us and for own families.
But why do I bring all this up, beloved? What does this young vicar’s waxing sentimental have to do with the Gospel or the first Sunday of Advent? Well, dear friends, Advent, this liturgical season which always begins the new Church year, it is all about homecoming. This is, of course, the season during which we anticipate and prepare for the coming of our Lord, Jesus Christ, by His birth on Christmas day. And yes, Christ’s paradoxically triumphal entrance into this world, through the virgin womb of a peasant girl, is a homecoming of its own. For there is definitely a sense in which our Lord, through His incarnation, comes home to us, to His people, to His beloved. But there is, however, more to the story than this, for our Lord’s incarnational homecoming is not His final destination – we know this well.
Rather His coming into this world, it is but a part of a much greater epic, a part of the greatest story of all Western narrative, this story of the Father’s Divine Economy, of the salvation of His people through His own Son incarnate. While Bethlehem would become Christ’s hometown, as it were—although He grew up in Nazareth, to be certain—that manger therein, in Bethlehem, would not be His final destination, obviously – it would instead serve as but the beginning of His ultimate journey to redeem us. Therefore, the real homecoming of our Lord, it does not take place within the context of a wooden manger, but rather, it happens by a wooden Cross. The journey of His homecoming takes Him from that manger, through crucifixion on a Cross, through death, and eventually, on the other side of death, toward His resurrection and ascension into heaven, into His final home, to be seated at the right hand of His Father.
And this, friends, is why this first Sunday of Advent, the appointed readings in our lectionary do not concern Christ’s incarnation, His birth, so much as they deal with the leadup to His Passion. That is, before looking to the homecoming of Christ through the incarnational miracle of Christmas—the Advent theme which will come in due time—we first must look ahead, beyond His incarnation, to His arrival in Jerusalem three decades later, wherein He would suffer and die at the hands of His own, that through such a death, He might win salvation for us. We first look to Christ’s triumphal entrance into Jerusalem because it foremost reminds us of why our Lord came home to us in the first place: that through Him, through His work on this earth, and finally through His work on that Cross, we might ourselves be brought to our true home – in life everlasting with Him, in our heavenly reward. And so, brothers and sisters, with that in mind, let us take another look at our Gospel text, that this amazing story of cosmic homecoming and epic salvation, may become all the more clear for us this first Sunday of Advent.
Our reading from the evangelist Mark is fairly short, so why don’t we hear it once more: “Now when they drew near to Jerusalem, to Bethphage and Bethany, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of his disciples and said to them, ‘Go into the village in front of you, and immediately as you enter it you will find a colt tied, on which no one has ever sat. Untie it and bring it. If anyone says to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ say, ‘The Lord has need of it and will send it back here immediately.’’ And they went away and found a colt tied at a door outside in the street, and they untied it. And some of those standing there said to them, ‘What are you doing, untying the colt?’ And they told them what Jesus had said, and they let them go. And they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it, and he sat on it. And many spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut from the fields. And those who went before and those who followed were shouting, ‘Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David! Hosanna in the highest!’”
Now the first thing to note here is that, obviously, this is an altogether familiar text, no doubt, for us all. This, or one of its narrative counterparts in the other synoptics, is usually one of the appointed texts for Palm Sunday, that final Sunday before Easter when we remember Christ’s triumphal entrance into Jerusalem as a King on a donkey before the Passover celebrations and indeed before His own Passion. But, dear faithful, was it a donkey? Or was it a colt? That’s a good question to turn to – in our reading today we hear of a colt, whereas many of us might recall this story with Jesus entering the city straddling a normal donkey. Yet while the evangelist Mark only gives us one animal, Matthew actually tells us that, in fact, both a donkey and a colt were utilized for Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem. Jesus rode both a donkey and a colt, in the sense that He and His entourage would have ridden both creatures through the city’s walls. But Mark only mentions the colt – the young male donkey. Why might that be?
Well surely, friends, Mark, being the most succinct of the evangelists, always getting directly to the point with haste, Mark speaks only of the colt because it is the colt which most vividly signifies Jesus’ fulfillment of a Messianic prophecy. Remember, the prophet Zechariah writes: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your King is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is He, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
Again, Matthew includes both animals, as are both given in Zechariah, but Mark, getting swiftly to the point, tells us that Jesus rides into town on not just any animal, but on a young male donkey, a small donkey – a diminutive donkey – the foal of a donkey – a colt. What significance might this have, friends? Well, upsetting the expectations of so many first century Jews for a worldly, temporally powerful and materially mighty Messiah, the true Messiah, the Son of Man, Jesus, He comes, just as Zechariah had prophesied, on a fairly unassuming equestrian beast – he arrives in the Holy City atop not a burly steed, but on a young male donkey – so not just any donkey, but a small, immature and unpretentious one. And how much this modest form of transportation tells us about this Messiah of ours, about this King. He is not merely some temporal leader, a king like all other kings, but rather, He comes as a Messiah decked out in humility and meekness, in peace and, in a sense, servitude. And just as Zechariah had prophesied, it is this meek and humble Messiah, riding into town on a young colt, Who, having salvation, eventually brings that very salvation to all mankind.
One might also see here in the reference to the colt, or young male donkey, an allusion perhaps to a previous journey of Christ’s – that journey He took in His mother’s womb, with her and His terrestrial father, Joseph, as they rode from Nazareth in Galilee to Bethlehem in Judea, where He would be born, also in humility and in the unassuming context of a manger.
For it is very likely that the poor peasant Mary and Joseph would have made that journey on a similar animal, probably a lowly donkey or even a young colt. Christian artists throughout the Church’s history have surely assumed as much. So perhaps in our text Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a colt not only to fulfill the Messianic prophecy and symbolize the humble nature of His Kingship, but also to remind us of His utter humanity and of His utterly human journey from the womb and from His hometown to Jerusalem, to the Great City, to the place of His own death, to the place of His tomb. And so perhaps this Gospel lesson we hear today, while not ostensibly a text about the nativity and the incarnational miracle of Christmas, perhaps it still harkens back to that story with its imagery, in some sense. Perhaps it brings the entire homecoming of Christ full-circle. He came home to us, on a donkey or colt in His mother’s womb. He came home to us in His birth as God made flesh. But then He heads home once more, as a man, atop a colt, through the Great City of Jerusalem, the dwelling place of the One God, Yahweh, Yahweh’s earthly home, as it were, and rides through that dwelling place onto His final destination, through the brutality and suffering of the Cross and the fullness of death, and through resurrection and a glorious ascension, to His rightful home at the right hand of the Father, in heaven. And in this way, by bringing this story of homecoming full-circle, Christ shows how the earthly dwelling place of God, Jerusalem, the Temple, is superseded by Himself, superseded by the Messiah, and by His final sacrifice, by the Sacrifice of the True Passover Lamb, of His own Body, for the atonement of all sin – and for the salvation of all men. And in that salvation, that salvation which comes at the end of our Lord’s lifelong journey, through birth, childhood, and adulthood, teaching, preaching, and healing, suffering, death, and resurrection, and eventually, through ascension, in that salvation, we, too, realize the course of our own homecoming – of the end of the journey of our present lives as saved sinners – when the promise of forgiveness and life eternal is consummated in the fulness of time, when our Lord comes again.
Yes, this is precisely what Advent is really all about. It’s about looking to Christ’s return. For it is through Christ’s return that we will each be brought home, brought home at last. The course of our journey was decided the moment our Lord gave up the ghost on that Cross two thousand years ago. In His work on that Cross our salvation was fully won – then and there, forever and always. And it was granted to us freely by the Father through the power of the Holy Spirit, Who works faith in Christ within the hearts of all believers. But while we are presently saved, to be certain, the journey, the adventure of our homecoming, it is not yet over, dear faithful. The course is undoubtedly set, but until Christ’s return, or until we draw our last breath on this temporary home we call earth, the journey continues. It does indeed. And as we aren’t yet truly home, how do we, then, as sinners saved, as those to whom the Father has granted grace and in whom the Spirit has worked faith, all in the salvific labor of the Son, how do we, then, as sinners saved, stave off our homesickness? We are not there yet, friends, though we have every certainty and assurance of the safe and sure navigation of our journey. But while we still struggle here, meandering through a world still plagued by sin, death, and the devil, how do we stave off our homesickness and keep our eyes on the way ahead – on Christ’s return and eternal life?
Well friends, it’s simple. We are kept whole, kept strong, and kept able for the journey through those very things which so clearly remind us of and direct us toward our journey’s end, toward our heavenly home. Those very things which are our North Star, so to speak. We are kept whole and strong and able by those means through which our home, heaven, reaches through the barriers of time and space and into this earthly life. Yes, friends, we are kept whole and strong and able for this present journey by the Means of Grace – by the Means which the Father has so graciously given us to receive the promises won by the salvation of His Son.
We are kept whole by remembering our Holy Baptism and the salvation it brings us and by remembering our lingering sinfulness before God’s Law, which itself, in turn, drives us to confession and Holy Absolution. And we are kept strong by gathering here together and hearing the precious Word of God – of the Father’s Holy Law and of the sweetness of the Holy Gospel of His Son, and by bringing our prayers and thanksgivings before the Triune God with sincere hearts. And finally, brothers and sisters, we are kept able, kept together for this long homecoming journey of life, by that foretaste of our heavenly home itself, by the foretaste of heaven, by the eating and drinking of our Lord’s own Body and Blood in the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar – by the Meal of Holy Communion. Yes, by Word and Sacrament, by these alone, by these Means of Grace alone, are we kept whole and strong and able to withstand all things, strengthened for the long haul, through whatever meandering way this life should give, all toward that final reward at the end – all toward the reward of everlasting life, when we finally make it home, on the other side of glory, to be with God, the Father, with Christ, His Son, and with the Holy Spirit, forevermore.
Beloved, it has been a rough year. I know it. We all know it. I don’t need to remind you all of that. Along this journey home of ours, this particular year has proven quite a struggle – a Scylla and Charybdis all its own. But there is no need to be discouraged. There is never need to lose heart. Our Lord is coming back. And soon. And that’s why we utter those words often, just as they did so long ago when our Lord rode into Jerusalem triumphantly on His colt – that’s why we sing: Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest! We sing these words, singing “Hosanna” – that He may come soon to save us, to bring us home. That’s what Hosanna means: save us soon, Lord! And so, this year, in 2020, this Advent, in this new Church Year, while things may seem dark and confusing at times – let those words never leave your lips, my dear friends. Sing Hosanna always.
For our Lord is coming back. He is coming back to gather together all us saved sinners, all His flock. And through His return and His gathering together of all His own, we will each be brought home. We will be taken to that home for which we’ve longed our entire lives – since the moment we drew our first breath as miserable sinners. We will be taken home to that place of peace and comfort, beyond all death and pain and sadness. And that will be the story of our homecoming. We aren’t bound for Ithaca like Odysseus once was. Nor for any land we’ve ever known as sinners in this broken world. Rather, we are bound for heaven – for our home in Christ. So this Advent, friends, this new Church year, let us keep our eyes on that end – let us keep watch toward that day – let us be steered northward, as it were, by Word and Sacrament, with prayer and thanksgiving, and with Hosannas ever on our lips – let us carry forward, headed home.
And so, my brothers and sisters in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, my dear fellow venturers on this lifelong journey of homecoming, with these words, words of hope and expectation for life everlasting in our home above, at last, words given from the Savior, Himself, to us, His own, with these words, shared this first Sunday of Advent and of the Church year between a saved sinner and other saved sinners, toward greater anticipation for the arrival of our Lord at Christmas and for His final return at the End of Days to come, with these words, may you now, by the grace of our God, by the presence of Christ in both Word and Sacrament, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, may you be forever kept in the eternal security of Our Lord’s Heavenly Bosom. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Dear brothers and sisters in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, I have always been particularly fascinated by the idea of home – or rather, by the idea of going home – of returning to the place from whence you came, ya know? I mean, the notion of homecoming, right – of beginning a great journey from some distant land to the place of your own beginning, back to the place of your birth, or where you grew up, or just… to the place you’ve always called home. Certainly this is a classic and timeless theme in both art and literature. Take Homer’s The Odyssey, for instance, one of the very oldest narratives in the entire Western canon, which we all no doubt read at some point in school: it is all about the Greek hero Odysseus’ meandering journey home after the Trojan War. Examples of great tales like this throughout our history are virtually endless, as so much of literature and the Western experience has been considerably shaped by stories just like this – stories based around homecoming and the significance of the very notion of there being a place called home to which one may, through whatever trial, ultimately return. Surely nearly every Hallmark Christmas movie picks up on this or a relatively similar theme—whether or not those guilty-pleasure films are yet rightly considered part of the Western canon, I’ll let y’all be the judge of that. But anyhow, this fascination of mine, I think it has really taken on an even more concrete and experiential and personal tone now that my wife and I are both thousands of miles away from our own respective homes.
Going home for us is not a day’s drive, but is instead much more of an investment of time and energy—or if flying, money—it is thus arguably much more of an arduous adventure and potentially meandering journey even, than ever previously in our lives. This was felt especially this past week, as we spent Thanksgiving Day on the other side of the country from our own oft-missed hometowns. But we, too, when vicarage is over, we will return home. With our two dogs, a U-Haul and sports sedan, and a newborn baby. And that’ll be an adventure of its own – I’m sure nearly as epic as anything Homer had ever thought up. Going home, to our family and friends, to the places we know so well, to those places in which we grew up, to the comfort of familiarity, the immeasurable value of which all found again through a long journey of time and distance… and indeed discovery. The Oregon trail, “westward the wagons” and all… and then back again, for us, anyhow – back home in the end. Such a fascinating idea home is. Almost as fascinating as our incredible, insatiable longing for it, as men and women, having long ago grown up and ventured away from the places where we began, out into the wide world, and so often, then, back again, returning to, at last, in some nostalgic sense, create new ideas of home for us and for own families.
But why do I bring all this up, beloved? What does this young vicar’s waxing sentimental have to do with the Gospel or the first Sunday of Advent? Well, dear friends, Advent, this liturgical season which always begins the new Church year, it is all about homecoming. This is, of course, the season during which we anticipate and prepare for the coming of our Lord, Jesus Christ, by His birth on Christmas day. And yes, Christ’s paradoxically triumphal entrance into this world, through the virgin womb of a peasant girl, is a homecoming of its own. For there is definitely a sense in which our Lord, through His incarnation, comes home to us, to His people, to His beloved. But there is, however, more to the story than this, for our Lord’s incarnational homecoming is not His final destination – we know this well.
Rather His coming into this world, it is but a part of a much greater epic, a part of the greatest story of all Western narrative, this story of the Father’s Divine Economy, of the salvation of His people through His own Son incarnate. While Bethlehem would become Christ’s hometown, as it were—although He grew up in Nazareth, to be certain—that manger therein, in Bethlehem, would not be His final destination, obviously – it would instead serve as but the beginning of His ultimate journey to redeem us. Therefore, the real homecoming of our Lord, it does not take place within the context of a wooden manger, but rather, it happens by a wooden Cross. The journey of His homecoming takes Him from that manger, through crucifixion on a Cross, through death, and eventually, on the other side of death, toward His resurrection and ascension into heaven, into His final home, to be seated at the right hand of His Father.
And this, friends, is why this first Sunday of Advent, the appointed readings in our lectionary do not concern Christ’s incarnation, His birth, so much as they deal with the leadup to His Passion. That is, before looking to the homecoming of Christ through the incarnational miracle of Christmas—the Advent theme which will come in due time—we first must look ahead, beyond His incarnation, to His arrival in Jerusalem three decades later, wherein He would suffer and die at the hands of His own, that through such a death, He might win salvation for us. We first look to Christ’s triumphal entrance into Jerusalem because it foremost reminds us of why our Lord came home to us in the first place: that through Him, through His work on this earth, and finally through His work on that Cross, we might ourselves be brought to our true home – in life everlasting with Him, in our heavenly reward. And so, brothers and sisters, with that in mind, let us take another look at our Gospel text, that this amazing story of cosmic homecoming and epic salvation, may become all the more clear for us this first Sunday of Advent.
Our reading from the evangelist Mark is fairly short, so why don’t we hear it once more: “Now when they drew near to Jerusalem, to Bethphage and Bethany, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of his disciples and said to them, ‘Go into the village in front of you, and immediately as you enter it you will find a colt tied, on which no one has ever sat. Untie it and bring it. If anyone says to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ say, ‘The Lord has need of it and will send it back here immediately.’’ And they went away and found a colt tied at a door outside in the street, and they untied it. And some of those standing there said to them, ‘What are you doing, untying the colt?’ And they told them what Jesus had said, and they let them go. And they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it, and he sat on it. And many spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut from the fields. And those who went before and those who followed were shouting, ‘Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David! Hosanna in the highest!’”
Now the first thing to note here is that, obviously, this is an altogether familiar text, no doubt, for us all. This, or one of its narrative counterparts in the other synoptics, is usually one of the appointed texts for Palm Sunday, that final Sunday before Easter when we remember Christ’s triumphal entrance into Jerusalem as a King on a donkey before the Passover celebrations and indeed before His own Passion. But, dear faithful, was it a donkey? Or was it a colt? That’s a good question to turn to – in our reading today we hear of a colt, whereas many of us might recall this story with Jesus entering the city straddling a normal donkey. Yet while the evangelist Mark only gives us one animal, Matthew actually tells us that, in fact, both a donkey and a colt were utilized for Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem. Jesus rode both a donkey and a colt, in the sense that He and His entourage would have ridden both creatures through the city’s walls. But Mark only mentions the colt – the young male donkey. Why might that be?
Well surely, friends, Mark, being the most succinct of the evangelists, always getting directly to the point with haste, Mark speaks only of the colt because it is the colt which most vividly signifies Jesus’ fulfillment of a Messianic prophecy. Remember, the prophet Zechariah writes: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your King is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is He, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
Again, Matthew includes both animals, as are both given in Zechariah, but Mark, getting swiftly to the point, tells us that Jesus rides into town on not just any animal, but on a young male donkey, a small donkey – a diminutive donkey – the foal of a donkey – a colt. What significance might this have, friends? Well, upsetting the expectations of so many first century Jews for a worldly, temporally powerful and materially mighty Messiah, the true Messiah, the Son of Man, Jesus, He comes, just as Zechariah had prophesied, on a fairly unassuming equestrian beast – he arrives in the Holy City atop not a burly steed, but on a young male donkey – so not just any donkey, but a small, immature and unpretentious one. And how much this modest form of transportation tells us about this Messiah of ours, about this King. He is not merely some temporal leader, a king like all other kings, but rather, He comes as a Messiah decked out in humility and meekness, in peace and, in a sense, servitude. And just as Zechariah had prophesied, it is this meek and humble Messiah, riding into town on a young colt, Who, having salvation, eventually brings that very salvation to all mankind.
One might also see here in the reference to the colt, or young male donkey, an allusion perhaps to a previous journey of Christ’s – that journey He took in His mother’s womb, with her and His terrestrial father, Joseph, as they rode from Nazareth in Galilee to Bethlehem in Judea, where He would be born, also in humility and in the unassuming context of a manger.
For it is very likely that the poor peasant Mary and Joseph would have made that journey on a similar animal, probably a lowly donkey or even a young colt. Christian artists throughout the Church’s history have surely assumed as much. So perhaps in our text Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a colt not only to fulfill the Messianic prophecy and symbolize the humble nature of His Kingship, but also to remind us of His utter humanity and of His utterly human journey from the womb and from His hometown to Jerusalem, to the Great City, to the place of His own death, to the place of His tomb. And so perhaps this Gospel lesson we hear today, while not ostensibly a text about the nativity and the incarnational miracle of Christmas, perhaps it still harkens back to that story with its imagery, in some sense. Perhaps it brings the entire homecoming of Christ full-circle. He came home to us, on a donkey or colt in His mother’s womb. He came home to us in His birth as God made flesh. But then He heads home once more, as a man, atop a colt, through the Great City of Jerusalem, the dwelling place of the One God, Yahweh, Yahweh’s earthly home, as it were, and rides through that dwelling place onto His final destination, through the brutality and suffering of the Cross and the fullness of death, and through resurrection and a glorious ascension, to His rightful home at the right hand of the Father, in heaven. And in this way, by bringing this story of homecoming full-circle, Christ shows how the earthly dwelling place of God, Jerusalem, the Temple, is superseded by Himself, superseded by the Messiah, and by His final sacrifice, by the Sacrifice of the True Passover Lamb, of His own Body, for the atonement of all sin – and for the salvation of all men. And in that salvation, that salvation which comes at the end of our Lord’s lifelong journey, through birth, childhood, and adulthood, teaching, preaching, and healing, suffering, death, and resurrection, and eventually, through ascension, in that salvation, we, too, realize the course of our own homecoming – of the end of the journey of our present lives as saved sinners – when the promise of forgiveness and life eternal is consummated in the fulness of time, when our Lord comes again.
Yes, this is precisely what Advent is really all about. It’s about looking to Christ’s return. For it is through Christ’s return that we will each be brought home, brought home at last. The course of our journey was decided the moment our Lord gave up the ghost on that Cross two thousand years ago. In His work on that Cross our salvation was fully won – then and there, forever and always. And it was granted to us freely by the Father through the power of the Holy Spirit, Who works faith in Christ within the hearts of all believers. But while we are presently saved, to be certain, the journey, the adventure of our homecoming, it is not yet over, dear faithful. The course is undoubtedly set, but until Christ’s return, or until we draw our last breath on this temporary home we call earth, the journey continues. It does indeed. And as we aren’t yet truly home, how do we, then, as sinners saved, as those to whom the Father has granted grace and in whom the Spirit has worked faith, all in the salvific labor of the Son, how do we, then, as sinners saved, stave off our homesickness? We are not there yet, friends, though we have every certainty and assurance of the safe and sure navigation of our journey. But while we still struggle here, meandering through a world still plagued by sin, death, and the devil, how do we stave off our homesickness and keep our eyes on the way ahead – on Christ’s return and eternal life?
Well friends, it’s simple. We are kept whole, kept strong, and kept able for the journey through those very things which so clearly remind us of and direct us toward our journey’s end, toward our heavenly home. Those very things which are our North Star, so to speak. We are kept whole and strong and able by those means through which our home, heaven, reaches through the barriers of time and space and into this earthly life. Yes, friends, we are kept whole and strong and able for this present journey by the Means of Grace – by the Means which the Father has so graciously given us to receive the promises won by the salvation of His Son.
We are kept whole by remembering our Holy Baptism and the salvation it brings us and by remembering our lingering sinfulness before God’s Law, which itself, in turn, drives us to confession and Holy Absolution. And we are kept strong by gathering here together and hearing the precious Word of God – of the Father’s Holy Law and of the sweetness of the Holy Gospel of His Son, and by bringing our prayers and thanksgivings before the Triune God with sincere hearts. And finally, brothers and sisters, we are kept able, kept together for this long homecoming journey of life, by that foretaste of our heavenly home itself, by the foretaste of heaven, by the eating and drinking of our Lord’s own Body and Blood in the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar – by the Meal of Holy Communion. Yes, by Word and Sacrament, by these alone, by these Means of Grace alone, are we kept whole and strong and able to withstand all things, strengthened for the long haul, through whatever meandering way this life should give, all toward that final reward at the end – all toward the reward of everlasting life, when we finally make it home, on the other side of glory, to be with God, the Father, with Christ, His Son, and with the Holy Spirit, forevermore.
Beloved, it has been a rough year. I know it. We all know it. I don’t need to remind you all of that. Along this journey home of ours, this particular year has proven quite a struggle – a Scylla and Charybdis all its own. But there is no need to be discouraged. There is never need to lose heart. Our Lord is coming back. And soon. And that’s why we utter those words often, just as they did so long ago when our Lord rode into Jerusalem triumphantly on His colt – that’s why we sing: Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest! We sing these words, singing “Hosanna” – that He may come soon to save us, to bring us home. That’s what Hosanna means: save us soon, Lord! And so, this year, in 2020, this Advent, in this new Church Year, while things may seem dark and confusing at times – let those words never leave your lips, my dear friends. Sing Hosanna always.
For our Lord is coming back. He is coming back to gather together all us saved sinners, all His flock. And through His return and His gathering together of all His own, we will each be brought home. We will be taken to that home for which we’ve longed our entire lives – since the moment we drew our first breath as miserable sinners. We will be taken home to that place of peace and comfort, beyond all death and pain and sadness. And that will be the story of our homecoming. We aren’t bound for Ithaca like Odysseus once was. Nor for any land we’ve ever known as sinners in this broken world. Rather, we are bound for heaven – for our home in Christ. So this Advent, friends, this new Church year, let us keep our eyes on that end – let us keep watch toward that day – let us be steered northward, as it were, by Word and Sacrament, with prayer and thanksgiving, and with Hosannas ever on our lips – let us carry forward, headed home.
And so, my brothers and sisters in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, my dear fellow venturers on this lifelong journey of homecoming, with these words, words of hope and expectation for life everlasting in our home above, at last, words given from the Savior, Himself, to us, His own, with these words, shared this first Sunday of Advent and of the Church year between a saved sinner and other saved sinners, toward greater anticipation for the arrival of our Lord at Christmas and for His final return at the End of Days to come, with these words, may you now, by the grace of our God, by the presence of Christ in both Word and Sacrament, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, may you be forever kept in the eternal security of Our Lord’s Heavenly Bosom. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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