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The text for today’s sermon is found in the readings appointed for this day, the fourth Sunday of Advent.
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, you are the light of the world. Grant us patience, wisdom, courage, and strength in order to press on in this life and to prepare for your coming. Help us to understand the trials that we have in life and how they may be used to strengthen our faith. Give us strength in times of temptation and deliver us from the evil one. Amen.
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
As a young child, my brothers and I had a paper route. As is the case in the Washington, D.C. area, every few years you have a snowpocalypse. This one year, it happened to be about two feet of snow dumped in the middle of the night. We woke up in the morning and looked out at the driveway, and the snow was plain clean by the wind. We could not find the newspapers. So my father told us to start digging.
We dug and dug and dug. My little brother decided he was going to dig to the end of the driveway and dig back towards us, but he was also going to tunnel. At one point, he hit newspapers. It was at that moment that my father said, “Boys, deliver the newspapers. Those people paid for them. They deserve them.” Cutting the long story short, our papers got delivered that day.
At the end of the month, when we went to collect, we got record tips. A few months later, there was a photographer that was sent out to our house. They took a picture of us and put us in the newspaper. It seems that during that snowpocalypse, we were the only newspaper route in all of Washington D.C. and Baltimore to actually deliver the Washington Post that morning, or that evening. Most of our customers called into the paper to let them know that they actually did receive their newspaper.
I tell you this not because of the tips that we received, rather an important life lesson learned. Our father instilled in us that day, if we wanted to deliver newspapers and we had the newspapers in our possession, there is nothing that should stop us from delivering them. This is obedience to the task and obedience to the Father, my Father.
Today’s lesson deals with a different obedience, the obedience of faith. Around the time of the Old Testament lesson, Jerusalem, under the leadership of King Ahaz, was being attacked by the combined forces of the northern ten tribes along with Syria. The Lord spoke to Ahaz, saying to ask for a sign. Ahaz said that he wouldn’t put trust in the Lord, but he didn’t want to put the Lord to the test. Ahaz instead had placed his trust in an alliance with the Assyrian Empire instead of trusting the Lord.
The Lord gave a sign to Ahaz anyway, and just as we heard, “Behold, the Virgin shall conceive and bear a son and call his name Emmanuel,” which means God is with us. It goes on, “the Lord will bring upon you and upon your people and upon your father’s house such days as have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah, the king of Assyria.”
In the past, when kings were faithful to God, God protected their kingdoms. Ahaz chased after the Baals and desecrated the temple. He was fascinated with the Assyrians, and he made a treaty with them for the defense of Jerusalem. This misplaced trust led to the Assyrians actually conquering Jerusalem.
Paul, in the epistle lesson, was called an apostle by Jesus himself in the book of Acts and was sent to the Gentile nations. In the book of Acts, we read that Paul, in a vision, was actually intending to go east, but in a vision he saw a Macedonian man saying, “Come here.” So instead he set his eyes to the west. He went to Asia Minor, which we know as Turkey, and then he also went to Greece, and eventually he went to Rome.
Sorry, I lost my place. Okay, there we are.
There are many examples of obedience to faith in the account of the birth of Jesus. Mary, when she was told that she would be with child, said, “Behold, I am a servant of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word.” Joseph, when he found out that his wife, his betrothed, was pregnant, even though they had never been together, according to Jewish law, there are only two acceptable methods to end that relationship. One is divorce. The second is to stone her. According to the law, he didn’t want to do that. He didn’t want to bring shame upon her. So he planned to secretly take her somewhere and divorce her, and it wouldn’t bring shame on her.
That night in a vision, a dream, an angel of the Lord appeared to him and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.”
I don’t want to give you a lesson in biblical Hebrew. I want to focus on one word. In the, I’m sorry, not Greek, it’s Greek. The word “ek” in Greek actually means “out of.” In the original text it would say it means “out of the Holy Spirit Mary is pregnant.”
Another thing to recognize in this lesson is when you hear a phrase multiple times, it means added emphasis, a lot of emphasis. So when you hear “out of the Holy Spirit” or “from the Holy Spirit,” and then a few words later you hear “from the Holy Spirit,” it means this is very important. Also, when you hear “amen, amen,” it’s a super amen.
This is not the last time the angel of the Lord would visit Joseph in a vision or a dream. Each time that Joseph received instructions from the angel, he followed it without question. This is obedience to faith.
You may say, “That’s all good and well, but what does this mean to me?” We are in the season of Advent, a season of preparation. Obedience of faith in this season is to prepare for the coming of Christ. We celebrate the birth of Christ, yet we prepare for him to come.
Knowing that we all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, in Jesus there is forgiveness. We need to be reminded of the grace of our Lord, that grace which may be found here in the body of Christ. Bring your burdens and lay them before the altar. In other words, repent of your sins. Receive the forgiveness of sins through absolution.
Hear the Word of God faithfully preached. Also, receive the body and blood of our Lord Jesus in the Lord’s Supper. These serve to remind us of the inestimable, and for the sake of the little ones in this church, that means too large to count, the inestimable love of God the Father.
The good news is that Jesus invites us, saying in Matthew 11, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
Let us pray.
Blessed Lord, you have caused all holy scriptures to be written for our learning. Grant that we may so hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of your holy word, we may embrace and ever hold fast to the blessed hope of everlasting life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The peace of God, which surpasses all human understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
