[Machine transcription]
Say to the daughter of Zion, Behold, your King is coming to you.
Amen.
You may be seated.
In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints, the season of Advent helps us to meditate on the truth of the Scriptures that Jesus, our Lord, comes to us. Now, this runs counter to all of our intrinsic theological intuition, all of our religious instincts. And we want to remember that we are all born with a religion. Even our sinful flesh is religious, but it wants to worship God on its own terms.
In fact, your flesh and mine, our default religious mode, is to present ourselves to God in order to climb up the ladder to Him, to go on pilgrimage so that we could see Him, to somehow improve ourselves in such a way that we can now appear before God. It’s about us and our ascent, our climbing, our striving, our doing, our efforts.
But Christianity says to all of this, no, God comes down to you. Your Savior comes to you. And we consider in Advent the three ways that Jesus comes to us: that He first came in the flesh to bear our sin and be our Savior. That’s especially what we’ll consider in the third and fourth Sundays of Advent as we’re preparing to celebrate Christmas and to remember that Jesus has come in our flesh.
We also, in Advent, like we did the last couple of weeks, remember that Jesus is coming again in glory to judge the quick and the dead. We’ll hear about that especially next week. But today, it’s for us to consider that Jesus is not only the One who came back then and who will come again in glory in the future, but the One who comes to us now, as He Himself promised, I will never leave you or forsake you. Behold, I will be with you always, even to the end of the age.
Jesus comes to us, and He comes in weakness and meekness and mercy to serve us. In fact, that’s what happens every Sunday in the divine service.
Now here’s a question. If you go and you ask people—limit the survey to Christians—you go and you ask Christians, what is worship? What happens when a Christian worships? I think you will get an answer something like this: Worship is presenting to God our praise and thanksgiving. Worship is where we go to serve God according to who He is and according to what He’s done. Worship is where we gather together to give God all the glory for all that has happened and all that will happen.
Now that’s true, that’s part of it, but I want to suggest to you that that’s the least important part of worship. What worship is, is not our gathering together to serve Jesus, but rather, what about this? According to the Bible, worship is our being gathered together so that Jesus can serve us.
Remember how Jesus says it in the Gospel of Mark: I did not come to be served but to serve and to give my life as a ransom for many. Or, when Jesus was giving the disciples the Lord’s Supper, He said to them, “Who’s greater, the one who sits at the table or the one who serves them? Is it not the one who sits at the table? And yet, says Jesus, I am among you as the one who serves.”
This is still true. Now we grate against this idea because it should be us serving God, not God serving us, and we are like Peter. Remember when Jesus took off His robe, wrapped a towel around Him, and went to wash His disciples’ feet? He came to Peter, and Peter said, “Lord, it shouldn’t be this way.” Peter knew that he should wash the feet of Jesus; it shouldn’t be the other way around.
And yet, Peter is told by Jesus, “Unless I wash your feet, you have no part of me.” We must be served by Jesus. We must be blessed by Him. We must be cleansed by Him. We must sit at the table, and He must serve us; otherwise, we have no part of Him.
And so, Christian worship turns your self-fleshy religion on its head. Instead of appearing before God to serve Him, we appear before God so that He can serve us. And that’s what we do week after week. That’s why we come here on Sunday. That’s why the Holy Spirit gathers us for worship. This is just astonishing. It’s why the Holy Spirit gathers us for worship, so that the Lord can bless us and serve us.
And this theology is captured for us in the liturgy. Now, there have been, I mean, for the last couple of generations, fights about the liturgy and all this sort of stuff, but we want to recognize one of the things that the liturgy does is it grabs hold of this theology that God is coming to serve us and holds it before our eyes constantly so that even if we don’t realize it, it’s being taught to us every day.
The backbone of the liturgy—I’m going to tell you this because what I’m really going to preach on today is the Sanctus, so we’re headed there—the backbone of the liturgy is these five hymns, which we call the Ordinaries. There are, in the liturgy, the Ordinaries and the Propers. The Ordinaries stay the same almost every Sunday. The Propers change based on the Sunday or the season or whatnot.
The five basic hymns of the Ordinaries are the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Creed, the Sanctus, and the Agnus Dei. Every Sunday, every liturgy, we have these five parts, except for rare exceptions, like the season of Advent when the Gloria is omitted, waiting for Christmas.
Now all of these hymns are from the Scriptures, drawn from them, or, in fact, quoting them, and so this argument against the liturgy—that it’s a traditional sort of thing, that that’s just the traditions of men—is just sort of fall short because the liturgy is the tradition of Christians singing the Scriptures.
And amongst these five great hymns, perhaps the most wonderful is the Sanctus. I want to look at the words of it. It’s on page 195 in your hymnal, if you’ll open with me. As I was digging around for the origin of the Sanctus, this hymn, I found this quote. It says that this hymn, the Sanctus, is the most ancient, the most celebrated, and the most universal of all Christian hymns.
It is old. In fact, we can’t figure out where it came from; it just was there seemingly from the very beginning. In fact, the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, this famous Eastern Orthodox liturgy that shaped up around the year 390 or so, has the Sanctus right there.
Now, if you’re looking on page 195, you’ll notice that the hymnal is kind of nice; it gives us the Latin name, the Sanctus, and then it gives us the English translation, “Holy, holy, holy,” and then to the right of it, it gives us the Bible passages from which the text is drawn. We see that there are two texts, Isaiah chapter 6 and Matthew chapter 21.
The first phrase, or the first couple of lines of the Sanctus, come from Isaiah 6: holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth, heaven and earth are full of your glory. Now what was going on there? You remember Isaiah chapter 6 is about the call of Isaiah the prophet. In fact, we have it on the Isaiah window, on the prophet windows that go across the bottom on the side of the sanctuary. The Isaiah window is there, and it says “Sanctus” on it, so that we shouldn’t miss that.
In fact, that might be the most—if you can see it—the most stunning of the windows. You can see the red circle. It’s really one of the only pieces of glass that you can see from the outside of the sanctuary. Stained glass is meant to be viewed from the inside looking out, but that little red glowing thing is so bright you can see it from outside the wall.
We were looking at it with our confirmation class a couple of weeks ago, and I asked them, “What does that look like?” And they said, “It looks like a man eating a spicy chicken nugget.” But it’s even burning hotter than a chicken nugget. That is a fiery coal.
And here’s the story. You’ll remember that Isaiah was a prophet in the temple. No, he was serving in the year that King Uzziah died, and he was there in the holy place. Perhaps he was tending to the altar of incense or the showbread or the candelabra. He was there serving in that place, and all of a sudden, the veil that hides the throne room of God from all of us—that veil is simply torn back, and Isaiah can see.
There was a veil there that protected the Ark of the Covenant and the cherubim, but that’s not the veil that’s torn back. The veil that’s torn back is the veil that prevented Isaiah from seeing the glory of the Lord.
And he sees the glory of the Lord, and the Lord is sitting on the throne, and His robe is filling the temple, and around Him are flying the cherubim, these angels appointed for the worship of God, and they’re flying around the throne and they’re singing this hymn, holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth, heaven and earth are full of your glory.
Then the Lord says to Isaiah, “Who will go for us?” And Isaiah falls on his face in fear, and he confesses to the Lord, “I’m a man of unclean lips and I live amongst a people of unclean lips.” So look what happens. An angel takes a pair of tongs and goes and grabs a hot coal from the burning altar, and he brings it to Isaiah and presses it into his mouth, on his lips and on his tongue.
And the Lord says, “Your iniquity is taken away. Your sin is forgiven.” And then He says, “Who will go for us?” And Isaiah says, “Send me.” That’s the first story, and that’s where the first line of the Sanctus comes from: holy, holy, holy. It’s the Lord of the cherubim that were flying around the glory of God, holy Lord God of Sabaoth, heaven and earth are full of your glory.
Then we get to the second part of the Sanctus. I’m again on page 195, the second line at the very end, where we read these words: “Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he, blessed is he, blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord. Hosanna, hosanna, hosanna in the highest.”
Hosanna is a Hebrew word; it means “Lord save, Lord deliver, Lord rescue, Lord come and be for us the one that we need,” hosanna. If you were to go and just look for this text in the Bible with your concordance, you know what you’d find? Psalm 118, verse 25. That’s where this verse is—Psalm 118, verse 25 and 26.
But look at what it says at the top of the page. It doesn’t say Psalm 118; it says Matthew 21, verse 9. Why? Because these are the words that the people sang as Jesus came into the city of Jerusalem. This is the gospel text that we just heard, and here’s the story there.
It’s five days before Jesus’ crucifixion, seven days before Jesus’ resurrection. Jesus is staying in Bethany, and He sends His disciples over to the village across the way to get a colt, a donkey that’s never been ridden on before, and they bring it back, and they throw their coats on the top of it, and Jesus sits on it, and He rides over the top of the Mount of Olives and down into the city of Jerusalem.
The people all gather around Him for this. It’s an amazing sort of thing. Mostly, it seems like most of the crowd that is surrounding Jesus are the people from Bethany who were there when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, and they believe in Him, that He is the Messiah. And then the children come, and they gather around Him as well, and they throw their coats on the ground as Jesus is riding along, and they cut palm branches from the trees, and they put them on the way so that Jesus is walking on this carpeted path down the way into Jerusalem.
As Jesus is riding into Jerusalem, the people around Him start praying and singing Psalm 118: “Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” Now the Pharisees—and we’ll treat this text more fully in a couple of months on Palm Sunday and talk about more of the text—but here we want to make note that the people there are recognizing that Jesus, the one who came to deliver them, is now coming into His own city, into His own people.
He’s making His triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The Pharisees know what’s happened, so they try to make everybody stop. They come to Jesus and they say, “Do you hear what these people are saying? They’re praying and singing to you like you’re the Messiah, like you’re the Christ. Make them stop.” And Jesus says, “If they stopped singing this song, then the rocks would start singing. The rocks would cry out.” The song must be sung of Jesus coming into the midst of His people.
Now the Sanctus then, this beautiful hymn that we sing in the liturgy every Sunday, is a mash-up of these two texts, of Isaiah chapter 6 and Matthew chapter 21. And we want to ask the question, why? I mean, what does it mean that our fathers and mothers in the faith, centuries ago, put these two texts together and have us sing them every Sunday right before the Lord’s Supper?
I mean, the Sanctus comes after the prayer, the proper preface, right before the Lord’s Prayer and the words of institution. I mean, there’s no more sacred time or moment in our liturgy than that, and these two texts are brought together right at that precise moment. Now why?
Now, I can’t pretend to know their mind fully or to know, in fact, the fullness of the theology here, but there are a couple of things, aren’t there, that we can notice about it? I mean, just as Isaiah was standing in the temple and knew that God was present, so we are gathered here, and we know that God is present, that God is here.
Now you say to me, “Pastor, well, isn’t God everywhere?” True enough, He’s everywhere, but He’s here to be found. He’s here to bless you. He’s here to forgive your sins. So, we know that the throne room of God is in this place, and just as the angels who flew around the throne of God sang, “Holy, holy, holy,” so we join together in their songs with angels and archangels and all the heavenly hosts singing, “Holy, holy, holy.”
And like the children and the disciples who were there when Jesus made His triumphal entry, we also sing, “Hosanna, Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,” confessing that just as Jesus entered into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, so He comes into our midst, truly, week after week to bless us.
And look, it’s not the burning coal from the altar that the Lord puts on your lips, but the very body and blood of Jesus. Now this is not pretend; this is not play acting. This is as real as the words of Jesus who says, “This is my body and this is my blood.” And we confess this. When we sing together the Sanctus, this is exactly what we’re confessing, that Jesus, who sits at the right hand of God, is coming into our midst to bless us with His presence and with His promises.
Now, look, I’ve been in a lot of conversations as a pastor where people are wondering things like, “What would I have done—what would I have done if I was there next to Isaiah when the veil tore open and the presence of God was manifest? Or what would I have done if I was part of the crowd that was there on the Mount of Olives when Jesus was riding by? Would I have sung His praises or would I have stood in the back?” In other words, we always are thinking about what would happen if I was around when Jesus came the first time.
But dear saints, you don’t have to wonder about this because Jesus still comes. He still comes into our midst. Today, He comes to us, the same Jesus, the same exact, precise Jesus, born of the Virgin Mary, crucified, died, and raised at the Father’s right hand. The same Jesus who sat on the donkey has His body and His blood in the bread and the wine for you to drink.
The same Jesus who is coming again in glory on the last day, who will rend the heavens and call the dead forth from the grave, is here in His Word to forgive you all of your sins. The One who came and the One who is coming continues to abide with us. He comes to us, and He finds us, and He loves us. And He forgives you all your sins.
Now this is important. We live or die by these words of Jesus, “This is my body and this is my blood.” We live and we die by this promise of Jesus, that this is given for you for the forgiveness of all of your sins. You know that the devil wants us to doubt; always the devil wants us to doubt. He wants us to doubt that God is real, he wants us to doubt that God’s word is true, he wants us to doubt that Jesus is coming again.
He wants us to doubt that Jesus was in our flesh the first time. He wants us to doubt that God forgives us and saves us and brings us to life eternal. He wants us to doubt all of it. But all of this doubt, all of this wondering, is done away with when the body and the blood touch your lips for the forgiveness of sins.
How do you know you’re a Christian? I mean, when the devil comes to you and says, “How do you know that you’re a Christian? Look at all these things that you’ve done. Look at all the doubts rolling around in your mind. Look at all the sin bouncing around in your heart. Look at all the trouble that’s echoing in your conscience. How do you know that you’re a Christian?” What do you say?
You say, “The body of Jesus touched my lips. Jesus gave me His blood and He said that this is for me, for the forgiveness of all of my sins, that my iniquity is taken away, that my sin has been purged, that I have seen that my King has come to me, and He comes righteous and having salvation.” Week after week He comes for you. Day after day He comes for you. Moment by moment, Jesus tracks you down so that He can forgive you your sins and make you His holy ones.
So come, let’s eat. The Body and Blood are here. Let’s confess that Jesus is in our midst, and let’s rejoice that He comes to us with His life and salvation. In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Say to the daughter of Zion, behold, your King is coming to you, righteous and having salvation.
Amen.
