Advent begins and the excitement is already here.  In the world, Christmas is upon us already.  The decorations, the music, the sales, the controversy.  What is Christmas? What is about? Who is it about?  The world often tries to take Jesus out of the festivities and turn the month of December into another reason to party. 

But we know better.  There may be a sort of battle over the reason for Christmas, and the lack of acknowledgement concerning the existence of Advent, but we know what all this is about.  It’s all about Jesus.  The last couple of weeks we hear of Christ’s return, mostly of judgment upon the unbelieving and sinful world.  Today, we have a king coming with salvation, riding humbly upon a colt.  We joyfully sing with the crowds on Palm Sunday as the King of kings comes to us. “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!  Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” These words proclaimed as Jesus enters Jerusalem echo the angelic hymn of praise at Jesus’ birth, “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among those with whom He is pleased!” (Luke 2:14).  While at His birth, there is peace on earth, as Jesus enters Jerusalem for His passion and resurrection, there is peace in heaven.  Thus earth and heaven and joined in peace through the incarnation and atonement of Christ.

And this is the perfect place to begin our journey this Church Year. For the coming of the Son of God in the flesh of Jesus of Nazareth was for this very purpose, that He comes into Jerusalem as King of the Jews, and die there. Jesus came to die. You cannot understand Advent and Christmas without Holy Week and Good Friday. This is the grand mistake so many make who come to church only come around the holidays. Without Good Friday, without the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, without His suffering and death, Christmas is meaningless. It’s just the birth of another baby. If you only come to Church on Christmas, you’ve missed the point entirely. You’ve totally misunderstood Christianity, the Bible, and Jesus Himself.

Martin Luther wrote on this very thing in a sermon in 1521.  “This is what is meant by 'Thy king cometh.' You do not seek him, but he seeks you. You do not find him, he finds you. For preachers come from him, not from you; their sermons come from him, not from you; your faith comes from him, not from you; and where he does not come, you remain outside; and where there is no Gospel there is no God, but only sin and damnation, free will may do, suffer, work, and live as it may and can. Therefore you should not ask, where to begin to be godly; there is no beginning, except where the king enters and is proclaimed” (Martin Luther, Sermon for First Sunday in Advent, 1521).

As Christians, we do not have to win the battle being waged over the meaning of Christmas.  We have already won in Christ.  His victory over sin and death is our victory.  We do not have right all the wrongs of the world, repair every injustice, fix every broken thing, heal all wounded, or prove our relevance, worthiness, or might.  It is done.  Christ the king has done it.  He is all in all. 

All we have to do now is wait.  Not the absent waiting of a people who know not what or whom they await.  Not the empty waiting of a people who busy themselves with busy work.  No, our waiting is for Christ who has promised to come again and as we wait we focus on His promises that with us in the means of grace.  We wait as a people who have a purpose and a mission, the living out of the gift of our baptismal identity.  We are the called and set apart by grace, whose old lives have died in the drowning of the water, and whose new lives have risen from that watery grave in Christ and with Christ.  We know who we are and therefore we know what we are to do.  That is decidedly NOT winning the world.  Christ has already done that.  We tell the world He has won.  That is enough.

We face constant critics who decry the looming irrelevance of Christianity, its impending death, and the sins, weakness, and ineffectiveness of the Church and her ministers.  It would seem that we must constantly reinvent ourselves merely to survive.  But that is not true.  We have only to wait and we will win.  “Thy king cometh.”  He has promised to come again, that we will be where He is and we will be with Him.  This is most certainly true.  But He has also promised that the old will pass away and the new will come.  Heaven is not some sanitized version of today in which the horrors of the news are replaced with good and happy stories.  Heaven is the old done and the new begun, the today that becomes the eternal tomorrow, when the victory of Christ brings to culmination all things as He has promised.

We have not to win.  Only to wait.  Think about that.  The next time you think that we must fix worship or the Church will be empty... that we must entertain folks or we will lose them... that we must sacrifice doctrine and truth in Scripture to the relative truths only one person wide and deep.  The next time you hear a critic who says change or die... adapt or give up... reflect the present in order to be eternal... 

The Church has a long memory because we have a long future -- one not of our own creation but of the Lord's.  We are here to make known what He has done in the past, what He does in the present, and what He will do in the future. We tell the story of His death and resurrection, we wash those who hear in the water that gives new life, we gather those washed around the Word and Table of the Lord, we teach them the old song which is ever new -- the song of victory that is done and still coming.  And we wait on the coming King... the joyful wait of a people who are confident of our future and who neither are consumed with the present nor in love with the past. 

We have not to win... Christ has already done that.  We have only to wait.... on Him....

*Some of this was modified from a blogpost by Pr. Larry Peters.