The world gets ready for this season on one level, and Christians get ready on another. The world gets ready for one big blowout on Christmas day, a kind of consumer feeding frenzy that focuses on buying more and more stuff. Just look at the headlines and stories we see and hear concerning preparation for Christmas. Your nightly news probably won’t be featuring any stories about people preparing for the birth of the Christ child, but you’ll see and hear lots of news about how much money people are spending for Christmas gifts – or, in a down economy, how much people are not spending on Christmas gifts this year. What’s under the tree on Christmas morning becomes more important than what’s in our hearts. The gift of God’s Son born of the virgin isn’t seen to be nearly as important as the gift of this year’s hard-to-find toy or got-to-have-it electronic item. By the morning of December 26, all that remains is a stack of credit card bills – a mountain of crumpled-up Christmas paper and boxes – and a mad rush to the stores for after-Christmas sales.
Things are different in the Christian Church. For us, when Christmas comes, it stays. It lingers through the weeks of Epiphany and continues all the way until Lent. We continue to ponder the incredible news that God has become man in order to redeem us from our sins. We will sing our glad hymns well into January. We make Christmas last.
But Christmas isn’t here yet – we’re still in Advent. We’re still getting ready. For us, readiness involves a lot more than sending cards and decorating our homes. It is a readiness of the heart. It is a readiness for the coming of our Savior. In our Collect of the Day we prayed, “Stir up our hearts, O Lord, to make ready the way of Your only-begotten Son.”
In our text we hear of the prophet – the final prophet – sent by God to prepare His people for the arrival of their Savior. Some 400 years before John was even born, the prophet Malachi was inspired by the Holy Spirit to write: “Behold, I will send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me.” Some 300 years before Malachi, the prophet Isaiah was inspired to write: “A voice cries: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.’” The messenger prophesied by Malachi – the voice in the wilderness prophesied by Isaiah – is John the Baptist.
John knew that a prophet’s true purpose is not to talk about himself. A prophet is a spokesman, someone chosen by God to reveal His divine will. Someone chosen and inspired by God to tell of something that will happen in the future or of someone who will do something in the future. Someone to prepare God’s people for the coming of their Messiah. And so we read that John “went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”
The word “baptism” means “washing” – and in ancient times, baptism was commonly known as nothing more than a ceremonial washing or cleansing. Cups and dishes were washed – were baptized. Upon entering a house, dirty feet were washed – were baptized. When a Gentile converted to Judaism, he was ceremonial baptized to indicate that he had been cleansed of his pagan past.
But John’s baptism was something different, something that people had never seen before. John’s baptism was intended for God’s covenant people, the children of Israel – the Jews – and it required them to repent of their sins.
This was new. This was big. Unlike the old laws that required them to repent and offer Temple sacrifices for their sins, John was proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And the words of his proclamation weren’t exactly politically correct or tactful. When the crowds came to hear him preach, he unloaded on them with words that were sure to offend. “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” Every faithful Jew who heard his words would remember that Satan took the form of a snake when he deceived Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, so they immediately understood that John was calling them the children of demons.
Now they were really offended. “We are children of Abraham,” they would say.” “We are God’s special, chosen people.” And they were right on both counts. But where they went wrong was in believing that they were automatically righteous in God’s eyes simply because they could trace their ancestry back to Abraham. Faith took second place to the family tree. As long as they went through the acts and the rituals of the Temple sacrifices, they thought they had absolutely nothing to worry about. They were God’s chosen people. And now this strange-looking man who lived such a strange life in the wilderness was demanding that they should receive a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins?
The noun “repentance” and the verb “repent” are words that we seldom hear outside the walls of a church building. But they are so very important to the life – and here we’re talking about the eternal life – of the Christian. Repentance begins with the realization that we are sinners, that we are by nature sinful and unclean, that we have sinned against our God in thought, word and deed, and that we deserve nothing but punishment for these sins.
But repentance means a lot more than just knowing that you’ve done something wrong. And simply saying that you’re sorry is not enough. The man who robs a bank may be sorry for his crime, but his sorrow may mostly stem from the fact that he got caught and is going to prison. His repentance may be genuine, or it may be something that sounds good before the judge announces his sentence.
When we repent, we bow before God our Father and beg forgiveness for the sake of His Son, Jesus Christ. That’s exactly what we did in the Confession and Absolution at the beginning of today’s Divine Service. Hear again the words that we said together just a few minutes ago: “I, a poor, miserable sinner, confess unto You all my sins and iniquities with which I have ever offended You and justly deserve Your temporal and eternal punishment. But I am heartily sorry for them and sincerely repent of them, and I pray You of Your boundless mercy and for the sake of the holy, innocent, bitter sufferings and death of Your beloved Son, Jesus Christ, to be gracious and merciful to me, a poor, sinful being.”
When John proclaims a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, he knows that the Messiah is coming. John prophesies that He is coming. John’s prophecies and his baptisms for the forgiveness of sins all point to Jesus. They prepare the way of the Lord. John’s voice that cries in the wilderness serves to awaken sinners from their false sense of security and indifference. Wake up! Get ready! The king – the true King of all Creation – comes to bring you from the wilderness of sin and death into the perfect, eternal kingdom of your Messiah. Your King. Your God. Your Savior by whose death and resurrection the iniquities of repentant sinners are forgiven. As I your pastor I announced, “Upon this your confession, I, by virtue of my office as a called and ordained servant of the Word, announce the grace of God unto all of you, and in the stead and by the command of my Lord Jesus Christ I forgive you all of your sins in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
We repent. We confess. We are forgiven. And now, in this season of Advent, we prepare. We prepare for our King who came in humility and poverty and lowliness to be born in the stable. And we prepare for the return of our King in honor and glory and power and might when he comes to judge the living and the dead.
So get ready. Get ready for Christ’s return in glory on that last day. Get ready for Christ’s birth in Bethlehem. Prepare your hearts for the coming of the Lord. And let this be your fervent and constant Advent prayer: “Stir up our hearts, O Lord, to make ready the way of Your only-begotten Son.” In Jesus’ name, Amen.Return to Pastor page
