Notes

Notes

The Lord be with you!
Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines forth. Our God comes; he does not keep silence! This is the Second Sunday in Advent. Christ is coming soon, but first we must wait. And yet waiting is not an idle task, because with the building expectation of our Lord’s return, there is also an obligation for us to make ready. Since we cannot fulfill that obligation due to our lethargic sinful nature, we rely on God’s gracious work that stirs up our hearts, and gives us the patient endurance and encouragement that we need while we wait.

Let us pray:
Stir up our hearts, O Lord, to make ready the way of Your only-begotten Son, that by His coming we may be enabled to serve You with pure minds; through the same Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
Amen.

Malachi 4:1–6
The Prophet Malachi was the last prophet’s voice to be heard in the Old Testament before the long wait leading to the New. There would be four hundred years of waiting as God set the stage for the perfect moment for Jesus to be born. Advent means waiting, as we have been reminded, and yet as we wait, we prepare. We are so diligent about our preparations for Christmas, simply because without our efforts to get ready, our celebrations will not just happen on their own. It’s different with our preparations for Jesus to come again on the Last Day. Malachi has for us three ways to prepare: set aside our self-centered arrogance, remember God’s teaching, and listen to the message of John the Baptist, who came in the power of Elijah in fulfillment of Malachi’s and the Old Testament’s final prophecy.

Romans 15:4–13
What do we need from the Lord while we wait? From God we receive endurance and encouragement, and that is a timely topic for us, not just in Advent or in the crazy year 2020, but as Christians who eagerly await our Savior’s return. He gave us this endurance and encouragement through the teaching of the Scriptures, both Old and New Testaments, which Paul describes here as a key purpose of the Bible, a major reason why it is important to read God’s Word every day. All that the Holy Spirit caused men to write in His Holy Book was written for our use, to receive endurance and encouragement as we await the return of Jesus. Not only to teach us how to do what is right and pleasing to God, but even more to turn our heart to Jesus our Savior, who through His mercy has brought us, Jews and Gentiles alike, into His everlasting kingdom.

Luke 21:25–36
The signs of the end look bleak, think about distress, foreboding, fainting with fear, perplexity and the roaring of the waves of the sea! Yet just as we can tell the signs of the changing seasons, even in a temperate place like Southern California, we can also tell the signs of the end, and that they do not mean for us a bad end. In fact, Jesus says we can finally straighten our bent backs and look upwards with joyful anticipation when everyone else is caught up in the spiritual pandemic of self-centered fears, dissipation, and the cares of this life. The fearful signs, He teaches, are clues to us and all the baptized that our redemption draws near. We don’t have to worry about how we’ll get through the tough parts of these signs, we simply pray and we will receive Divine encouragement and endurance that will carry us through before the glorious day when we appear before the throne of the Son of Man.

Here’s hymn 345, stanza 4:
    So, when next He comes in glory
    And the world is wrapped in fear,
    He will shield us with His mercy
    And with words of love draw near.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Pr. Stirdivant

Sermon for the Second Sunday in Advent: December 6, 2020 jj
Rev’d Mark B. Stirdivant, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Yucaipa, California
✝ sdg ✝

It’s been a long wait. No, I’m not talking about entering month number nine of a two-week shutdown, I’m talking about Advent. It’s a long wait for Christmas. It’s a long wait for the glorious return of our Lord and King Jesus Christ. When a wait becomes a long wait, naturally the question arises, What should we do while we wait? Yes, we have a Christmas-Corona baby boom nearly underway—that’s one answer. How about our voters’ meeting today– What should we do as a church as we consider what is ahead of us next year and past that? How do we prepare for conditions in a landscape that seems to be unpredictable from now on? We know that we need to do something, but where are the directions we need to follow?

There was a time of waiting during Bible times that we often overlook. It was a long wait. It’s only a flip of a page from the book of Malachi to the Gospel of Matthew, but the time-span is a leap of four hundred years! Four centuries zip by from this morning’s cliffhanger reading in the last chapter of Malachi to the dream of Joseph that identifies a developing fetus in Mary’s womb with the title God With Us. Between those two Biblical events, there was a whole lot that happened—much more than dozens of generations merely sitting on their hands.

God Himself had His hand in the developments of that time between the Old and New Testaments. He orchestrated a massive exile, a forced exodus away from the Promised Land, using the bloodthirsty Assyrians crashing like a wave on the beach, followed by a bigger wave, the Babylonian Empire. The Almighty Creator then used an even bigger conqueror, the Persians, to allow a few to return and rebuild Jerusalem’s temple. This four-hundred-year period actually is known to history scholars as the Second Temple period.

It was a time that God intended and used as a restart, a renewal and restatement of the original promises He originally made to Abraham, but it was still going to look different. The first temple, the one Solomon dedicated and Nebuchadnezzar burned to the ground, was far and away more spectacular than the smaller, humble structure that was erected in its place. Alexander the Great soon swept in and claimed all of the Mediterranean region as well as Persia for the Greeks. Then the Romans took over what they called Palestine, with their roads and governors and crucifixions signifying their absolute dominance. Then the Roman Republic became an Empire, which brings us to Caesar Augustus sending out an executive order to count everybody under his ruling thumb, forcing the entire known world’s population to report to their ancestral hometowns, ready to pay whatever taxes he could dream up.

This was a long time to wait, but there was lots that God got done while the world waited for Jesus to arrive at the first Christmas. By the time the New Testament era began, there were remarkable developments, like the first translation of the Bible into the widest-known language at the time. Or the habit of gathering into Synagogues to hear regular readings of God’s Word and to pray when you’re not visiting the actual temple, which by the way, King Herod started rebuilding into a bigger structure. We have these new groups of people of whom the Old Testament gives little to no background, people like Samaritans, Pharisees and Sadducees; thankfully there’s some help for us to find out about them in the Apocrypha, which is a collection of non-Biblical books whose stories stem from the Second Temple period.

The reason I am pointing all these historical developments out is to highlight how God was very busy at work while the time of waiting was going by. The arrival of Jesus was growing ever closer, but all the separate parts needed to be brought together into the perfect combination so that His arrival truly would bring the salvation of all mankind into world history. The moment was absolutely right when Christ our Lord was born of the virgin Mary. Good Friday was the perfect day when He died to reverse the curse that had ruined this world. Even though we don’t know when it will be, we are nevertheless certain that the moment will be absolutely right also when Jesus comes again in glory to judge both the living and the dead. Our merciful God remains busy at work; even today on a day of rest, He is busy blessing you with His forgiveness, His gifts of salvation, making His baptism promises come true for you as you continue to live in this broken and sin-filled world.

It’s been a long wait for us. And if God is busy doing all of this blessing while we wait, the question remains, what should we do while we wait? For that, we can get some helpful directions from the Old Testament’s final prophet, Malachi. Through his mouth God warns us first to abandon arrogance on one hand, thinking we have our own lives under our control, but on the other hand to stop our anxiety that imagines during difficult episodes in our lives that God has in some way abandoned us. Neither of those are true. We do not stop being a church if our money runs out. Nor are we a better church if we have overflowing resources. We have God’s precious treasure of His Word, the Word that provides us endurance and encouragement. I don’t have to remind you especially this year that endurance and encouragement are essential to have, not only for getting through pandemics, times of fear, distress or dissipation, but we need God’s strong, saving name to be busy at work forgiving and strengthening us until the day Jesus returns.

Secondly, Malachi said to those who waited in his day and to us today, keep diligent in the Lord’s instructions. Read and reflect on the Bible that you read, bearing in mind that the Commandments He wants you to do, He has also done them perfectly for your good, so that now you use what He has commanded to help your neighbor, your family, your church.

Finally, in these very last verses of the Old Testament that look forward to the dawning of the New, we should listen to the message of John the Baptist. He was the one Malachi prophesied would come in the power of Elijah. John gave us the call to repent, stop sitting on our hands, and just like Elijah told those who heard him to abandon their false gods and idols, we must hear today that we need not fall prey to the spiritual pandemic of worldliness, greed and hatred of our neighbor because of one sort of temporary privilege or another. We know better than that, we repent of that temptation, and we take comfort in the forgiveness of sins and the promise of a perfect life everlasting.

Who knows? Maybe just like the long four-hundred-year Second Temple period was a time that God used to restart and renew His Old Testament church, perhaps God is using this time of trial and struggle in our lives and in our congregation as a way to restart and renew us right where we are. When we value what really matters in life, when fathers turn their hearts to their children and children to their fathers, then we realize that God has been very busy giving us all these blessings while we wait. Yes, it’s been a long wait. Yes, we’ve been given something to do as Christians and as a church in this very place, and we’re not left all to ourselves to decide what to do. Most of all, we have been given Divine endurance and encouragement, because God has not planned for us to falter or give up. He has given us Jesus, and everything else with Him that truly lasts. Trust Him, what we’re waiting for, that’s truly going to be worth the wait!

In the Name of the Father and of the ✝ Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Readings:
Mal. 4:1–6 the Sun of Righteousness shall arise
Psalm 50:1–15 Every beast of the forest is mine
Rom. 15:4–13 written for our learning, that we … might have hope.
Luke 21:25–36 lift up your heads, because your redemption draws near