Advent 2008 - Lamb of God

“O come, o come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.” “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight paths for Him.” “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” “The Lion of the Tribe of Judah has triumphed. …Then I saw a lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing in the center before the throne…” “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. …In that day, the Root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples, the nations will rally to him, and his resting place will be glorious.”

Such different texts, from completely different times and places, but they all come together and have meaning for us this Advent season. They matter. Advent matters. Even in a world that cares very little for Advent and texts like this.

Advent is about waiting, and praying. It is about being quiet and preparing for Jesus to come. It is about hope, expectation, peace, and joy. And I get frustrated because the rest of the world seems to speed up during Advent and pretend that somehow it is already Christmas. I suppose that has been happening for years now, with Christmas seeming to come earlier and earlier for everyone else. But this is the first time in 7 years that I have not been caught up in finals and papers. I have turned the radio on, and heard Christmas music in mid-November, and promptly turned the radio back off. I’ve been getting Christmas ads from stores for over a month. I’ve heard the panicked conversations of people who are worried about running out of time to buy presents.

The speed and chaos have been jarring. I’ve been blissfully ignorant for the past few years, too worried about papers for the radio or advertisements, and surrounded by other students. Buying presents was the furthest thing from our minds. So this year, I find myself more and more frustrated by the Christmas frenzy.

We have gotten Advent all wrong. Advent means coming. Advent is our time of preparing our hearts to receive the coming Christ. All too often we think that we have already welcomed the Christ who came, so we can jump straight to Christmas morning. And we forget that we do not know what it would be to welcome Christ more fully, more completely, into our hearts, our minds, our homes, our jobs, and our churches.

Advent is a journey, a journey on the path to Christ’s coming. The journey of Advent begins with hope. We sing and we pray, “O come, o come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.” This is the cry of a people who know that things now are not as they shall be. This is the cry of Israel who waited in literal captivity, in Egypt, in Babylon, in Persia, in Assyria, and in Rome. They know that God has set them apart to be his people and have God as their King and Ruler. They know that they are free people, and they waited and prayed for a Savior to deliver them.

But this is our cry and prayer too. “O come, o come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.” We too know that how things are is not how they should be. The world still languishes under the weight of sin. We still wait for Jesus to come into our world in new and more dramatic ways. We see hurricanes destroy cities, fires ravage communities, and terrorist attacks frighten the country of India and the world. We know that Jesus has already come, but we also know that we still need Jesus to come. We receive the promises of his coming in the prophets. They see Jesus’ advent in ways that the rest of us do not, and they point us to the coming Emmanuel.

The prophets tell us to watch for the coming one, to be ready when he arrives. So the 2^nd step in our journey through Advent is preparation. John the Baptist quotes Isaiah the prophet, “I am the voice of the one crying in the wilderness, 'prepare the way of the Lord.'” John called the people to repentance, to examine their hearts and minds for the ways that they had turned from the Lord. Israel should have known better, they had seen God lead and save them before, but God’s chosen people were still people after all. They still fell short of being the people whom God wanted them to be. They still needed to examine their hearts to be ready. So the people came out to meet this John character and to listen to his call to repentance.

John lived in the wilderness, away from the bustle and day to day life of the city. He dressed in camel’s hair, eating locusts and wild honey for his meals. This is not the man you would bring home to mom and dad. He’s not even what you would expect from a prophet, and the prophets did some strange things in Israel. But John’s presence in the wilderness does something that the people don’t expect. They have to leave behind the routine of their daily lives to go meet this messenger of God. They have to leave behind the relative safety of the city, the security of their jobs, the surroundings of the Roman guard and the rushed rhythms of life. They have to travel into the wilderness, where there is time for quiet and space for solitude. They have to leave behind their daily rhythms to be able to hear what God is saying, through John, and into their hearts.

Advent is the time when God is calling us to do the same as Israel. John the Baptist still calls to us, “I am the voice of the one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.” He still calls us to examine our hearts and to see where repentance is needed so that we can hear God clearly and be ready when he comes. Like Israel, we too should know better. We have been saved by the Messiah after all. But also like Israel, we are people, people who fall immensely short of being the people God calls us to be. So Advent is a time of repentance, a time to go out into the wilderness, leaving behind the rhythms of our lives. Turning off the TV’s, radios, and video games long enough to be silent. Changing our daily routines to provide space to hear God’s voice, and the quiet to be able to actually hear when he speaks. Advent provides the time to prepare our hearts to be ready when God comes, for we never know when or how he will appear.

Jesus comes in unexpected ways. Israel didn’t quite expect Jesus in John’s day. They knew that they were free people, people who were supposed to be set free from Roman rule. And they were looking for a Messiah who would set them free from the Romans who ran their cities and lives. Israel got something quite different. They got a baby, born in a stable not a palace, to an unexpected mother. Mary didn’t expect to be the bearer of God to the world. She was ready for God to come because she had been faithful to God, serving him with her life in purity and holiness. But she was more than a little startled when the angel appeared to her proclaiming that she would have a son, and she would name him Jesus, for he would save his people from their sins. Mary didn’t expect to be bringing God into the world, but when God came, her heart was ready, and she recognized him. For Mary treasured all these things in her heart” as she watched this infant whom she knew to be God interact with the world.

Once that baby had grown up, he was even less of what Israel had been expecting. In the first chapter of John, as we learn that Jesus is God, the light in the darkness, the Word, the Son of God, the Son of Man, and the Messiah, we hear John proclaim that Jesus is the “Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” This is a very strange title for a King. The lamb was used in Israel for the Passover, for the time when every family killed one perfect lamb for their family, or themselves and their neighbors, and spread the blood on the doorposts of their homes so that death would pass over their homes. The Lamb brings about the salvation of Israel by releasing them from death and captivity into life and freedom with God. The Passover Lamb gets slain, not crowned. And that is exactly what John proclaims, and what Jesus lives. The Lamb of God, the Son of Man and King of Israel, must die to save his people from their sins. The dying savior. This is not what Israel expects, but it is what John knows to be true. The man who calls people to follow this Savior recognizes him when he comes. God had told John that the man on whom the Spirit descended was the Messiah, and John proclaimed, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” John and Mary were ready for God to come, and open to seeing him come in ways that they could never have expected. Are we?

In the Lord’s Supper, we proclaim together, “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” We know the Messiah who is the Lamb of God. We have seen him crucified to save his people from his sins. The world did not expect a dead man to rise. Israel did not expect it. We do not expect it. Dead men stay dead. But when Jesus rose again, the disciples, together with us, were ready. We didn’t expect it, but when God came to us, we recognized him. And we have seen the slain Lamb of God rise again. So we proclaim his salvation, and we proclaim his final victory as we proclaim that “Christ will come again.” We still wait for Christ to return. He has begun the redemption and transformation of the world through his blood on the cross and in his rising from the grave, but that redemption and transformation has not yet been completed. We still need Christ to come to us. And we are like Israel, not quite sure what it will look like when he comes. But Advent is a time for us to be expecting Jesus so that we will recognize him when he comes, even if we didn’t quite know what that would look like before he appears. We wait with hope and expectation to see how Jesus will come to us. What message will he bring to us this Advent as he comes into our lives in new ways? What message will he have for our church as we live the gospel in this neighborhood? How will Jesus appear in our homes and our families? How will he transform the world? How will he come again?

We wait during Advent, with hope and expectation in our hearts, for Jesus to come again. We continue to do the things we do every Sunday. We partake of the Lord’s Supper, and we pray the Lord’s Prayer, but we do them differently during Advent. These things are reminders that Advent is a time of waiting for Christ to come. They are reminders of the hope of Christ’s return. Just as we proclaim the promise of Christ’s return in the Lord’s Supper as we proclaim that “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” We also pray for Christ to come and for the world to be transformed as we pray the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” We know that the world is still not as it should be. As much as we have seen God’s transformation in our own lives, we have also seen that the transformation is not yet complete. We feel the weight of our own sin. We see the destruction of a world that is still captive to the deceptions of power and control. And we see the earth shudder under the weight of the fall as all of creation groans in anticipation of that day when Christ will come again. So we pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” We do not just say the words. We pray them. We pray for Christ’s return, and we take time in Advent to consciously wait for that return.

We wait for the transformation of the world with ready and open hearts for we know that the Lamb of God is worthy to win the battle and transform the world. The Lamb of God who was slain is victorious. John the Elder watched as “the one who sat on the throne” held a scroll which was sealed, and no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth was found worthy to open the scroll. And John wept. But the elders said to him, “Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, has triumphed. He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals. Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing in the center before the throne….” Jesus is the Lamb of God who was slain and who is worthy. He has already been the Passover Lamb for the world, unblemished, and killed for the redemption of his people. His sacrifice makes him able to open the scroll, able to completely transform this world from sin and death and destruction to life and wholeness and peace with God. Jesus has already conquered, and Jesus remains forever the Lamb who was slain. He will complete the transformation of the world.

And we will see that final transformation, and it will be unlike anything we could have imagined or expected. Just as Isaiah preached the coming Messiah, so he proclaims the still coming Messiah. Isaiah proclaims,

The Branch From Jesse

1 A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse;
from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.

2 The Spirit of the LORD will rest on him—
the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and of might,
the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the LORD—

3 and he will delight in the fear of the LORD.
He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes,
or decide by what he hears with his ears;

4 but with righteousness he will judge the needy,
with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth.
He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth;
with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.

5 Righteousness will be his belt
and faithfulness the sash around his waist.

6 The wolf will live with the lamb,
the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling ^[a] together;
and a little child will lead them.

7 The cow will feed with the bear,
their young will lie down together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox.

8 Infants will play near the hole of the cobra;
young children will put their hands into the viper's nest.

9 They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea.

10 In that day the Root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples; the nations will rally to him, and his resting place will be glorious.

This is a world we can’t even imagine. Everything is reversed. Predators are removed. Children are free to lead. It is a strange world, but if we are ready, if we are prepared and waiting with expectation, we’ll know him when he comes.

And we will continue to wait through this Advent season, being formed as we wait for Christ to come. We will continue to participate in the Lord’s Supper, that constant reminder that this world is not as it should be. We will remember that Jesus has brought redemption and begun his transformation, but that he is not finished yet. And as we partake of the Lord’s Supper, we will long for his heavenly banquet when we will feast with Christ and all of the world will be fully redeemed. Maranatha! Lord come quickly! Amen.