READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Jeremiah 23:5-8
Romans 13:11-14
- St. Matthew 21:1-9
Mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you.
Who speaks to us on this first Sunday of the Church Year,
through His Gospel parallel from St. Luke (19:38) saying,
“Blessed is He who
is coming; The King in the name of the Lord; peace in heaven, and glory in the
highest.”
Though St. Matthew also calls Jesus “king” here, St. Luke
brought it out more clearly. St. Luke, and the other Gospel authors, wanted to
be sure that we hear Jesus clearly, that He is proclaiming Himself King, worthy
of sitting on David’s Throne forever, and that He is coming to claim that
right.
Jesus does this in every gospel book and God includes this
here to show us our king, Jesus Christ, our Hero, Who has defeated His enemies,
ensuring prosperity for His people. This points us towards the necessity of
heroes of the faith. That there are evils in the world, but they can be
defeated. Primarily by our Lord and secondarily by us, by faith in Him.
As we begin to look forward to the Advent season, to the
coming of Christ in the flesh, the Church has put heroes in our path to getting
there. For before we get to the manger, we must celebrate those who have stood
in faith in front of governors, princes, and execution squads. All because they
would not say “I renounce Christ.”
We will look at a few of those heroes on our Wednesdays
during Advent, but today, as we hear of Jesus, the king riding triumphantly
into Jerusalem, we see the most excellent hero, the hero of heroes: Jesus
Christ, as the crowds sing: “Blessed is the King”.
Now what makes a hero? Is someone with superpowers who can
get anything done at amazing speed and get it all done, a hero? Is a hero
someone who gets paid for doing their job, their regular job, that anyone of us
could go to school and learn how to do?
Or is a hero someone who does all the right things, says all
the right things, and never goes off script? No, all those are false heroes,
fake heroes, and they degrade the meaning and definition of the word. Not only
that, but they also degrade the very fabric of society, because when a society
no longer has heroes, its values die.
One of those values that go to die is Courage. Courage to do
duty, courage to stand up, courage to tell the truth from a lie. And when that
dies so also our psyche. We can no longer raise up our boys into men. We can no
longer raise up our girls into women. We have lost the courage to do so. We
lose that culture war.
Another thing that gets buried under the rubble of
destroying our heroes is a sense of the truth, especially when God comes to
reveal and speak to us Himself of His own Truth, The Truth. In sin, we reject
and crucify God’s Truth. In mercy, the heroes of the faith who were given such
a measure of grace and mercy as to stand up against the world and proclaim that
truth, were not heroes at first. They were saints. And Saints must be made.
Repent. Advent is given to us to prepare us for just such a
happening. More than that, Advent is given to us to prepare to undo all those
lies that the world has made us believe, for if we are to prepare for the
coming of our Savior, of our King, our hero, then we must understand what a
hero is.
Throughout the Old Testament, Jesus has proven Himself to be
a hero. That, we can understand at least. That hero, who comes down and fights
for His people. Who literally defeats enemies and ensures prosperity for those
who believe in Him.
Jeremiah and the other prophets are told to paint a
different picture of our King. Though He remains Almighty, the picture is of
righteousness, of humility, of accomplishing those things that human nature
fails at, time and time again.
Those things include righteousness, as our Old Testament
reading has told us. They include wisdom, they include justice, they include
security, they include private property. All of these things we dig for, in
this world, and maybe find them. But like grass to the lawnmower, they are
quickly chopped down there, quickly raked up there, quickly thrown away.
This just means that our great hero, and king Jesus, has not
come to bring us these things in this life only. He has come for you. He has
come to secure faith in him, forgiveness of sins, and eternal life, for you.
This is what our superhero Jesus accomplishes, for it could
only be God himself Who produces such things that have permanence among humans,
who have impermanence. But a superhero only goes so far. They’re called
superheroes because they are super-humanity. Meaning, they are over humanity
beyond humanity, and do not and can not relate.
But our superhero does not stop at just being a mighty God.
He steps down into our image and likeness. He takes on our sinful flesh. He
becomes like us in every way and in the dust of our flesh accomplishes His
super human feats.
And in doing so, He includes us in the plan. He unites
Himself to us, such that His super human feats become our human feats. He joins
us in our weakness, in order that His strength becomes our strength.
In the incarnation of God in the flesh, Jesus Christ has
secured a place for all humanity. He has raided the heavenly treasury and
poured out His gifts among men, which He has secured for them, that is the
forgiveness of sins, faith in him, and eternal life. These are the gifts given
by our Hero of heroes and thus these are the gifts that we trust in.
Trust in when there is no hope. Trust in when there is no
light. Trust in when there is seemingly no sign of God around us. Trust in,
because the Lord keeps His promises, no matter what.
And so in that faith, in that belief, we retain our heroes,
and in retaining our heroes, we retain the faith and belief necessary in
Christ, because now there is a possibility of salvation. Now there is
possibility of redemption and the forgiveness of a hero, coming to save us.
But He does more than just come and save us. He gives us
strength and courage to face the evils of our day, and although we will not be
given all the right answers, all the right decisions, or magic to take it all
away, we will not be left without hope.
And so we can look to others who have bettered themselves,
who have done better, and have been the better person we always wanted to be,
and hope. We can look up to those people and not expect them to be perfect, but
expect them to offer us glimpses of the heavenly way that our Savior has trod
before us.
Such that when we find heroes to believe in, we do not
believe in them, we do not trust in princes or in this world, but we believe in
the good that has been produced in them that our Savior has purchased and won
in His Body and Blood for us. We believe in the faith taught to us and are
rewarded with courage, in the glimpses of Heaven along our way.
So let us learn about heroes, if only for the sake of our
boys. And let us teach them about our Church Heroes, the Saints as well so that
they don’t only know how to fight imaginary dragons, but that they also know
how to fight the real dragon and their chief enemy the devil. Let us tell them
of the Saints, who have stood up, and have offered their lives as a sacrifice
of Thanksgiving.
For our children are also part of this heroic bloodline. Not
only have they been baptized into the faith by the blood of their hero Jesus
Christ, but they now share the same Sainthood that has been granted to the
heroes of old through the same gifts of the Holy Spirit in His Church.
For the Saints, as we popularly understand them, are
deserving of a threefold honor in the Church. That of Thanksgiving, for those
examples of mercy that God has shown to us through them; that He wishes to save
men, and that He has given teachers and other gifts to the Church.
That we see those men who have faithfully used these gifts
and by that example strengthen our faith. Such as, when we see the denial
forgiven Saint Peter, we are also encouraged to believe all the more that grace
truly superabounds over sin.
And finally, they give us a life to imitate. And we need the
lives of men to imitate because we cannot imitate the life of God. Everybody
likes to imagine themselves wanting to be like Daniel, but nobody wants to be
like Jesus, because Jesus had to suffer and die for the sake of the whole
world.
But that is his work. Our work is the work of the Saints on
earth, that is believing that Christ has saved us and it being so, just as we
believe. For another definition of Saint that is not popularly understood is
simply that: believing that Christ has died for your sins and rose to new life
justifying you by grace, for His sake, through faith. That makes a saint.
Your sins washed away in baptism, makes you a saint.
Communing with the holy, precious blood of Jesus Christ, makes you a saint.
Dear saints, you are all heroes of the faith. You’ve been
baptized into the noble line of king David. You’ve been grafted into the branch
of Jesse. You have been adopted as a son of Abraham, and therefore an inheritor
of eternal life with His true Israel: Jesus Christ.
What can this world do to you that it hasn’t already done to
its Lord and Creator?
What can your life take from you that has not already been
taken from Jesus?
In faith, you have won the race. In faith, you have trampled
Satan under your feet. In faith you have swept in, just in the nick of time, to
be who you are in Christ, to live under the fullness of His grace and mercy,
and to be brought into the perfect union of God and man in Jesus.
Congratulations hero. You are baptized into Christ
No comments:
Post a Comment