First Sunday of Advent

[00:00:02] Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen. [00:00:10] Here comes Jesus riding into Jerusalem. And. [00:00:14] Well, he's the king, and deservedly so, right? He's more than a king. He's the Son of God. [00:00:22] Become one of us for our salvation. He. [00:00:28] He deserves and has all glory in heaven and on earth. [00:00:34] He is the highest, most lifted up. To start with, we hear in Scripture in a few different places that through Jesus, all things were made. That he's the word of God who was with God in the beginning. [00:00:48] All kinds of mysterious things like that. He is God, become flesh for us. [00:00:55] But he comes riding on a colt, a young horse. Just imagine if he were. Let's say he's on the Mount of Olives, okay? So, like, lifted up on a mountain. We talk about mountains, right? Lifted up on a mountain, like on a high point. Okay? The Mount of Olives, which overlooks Jerusalem. There he is. And maybe the sun is coming behind him. You know, like some great movie scene or something. And there he is. He's on a big white horse. Let's make it a white horse. You know, for, like, purity. All right? And white horses are grand. I don't know. Theoden, the king of Rohan in the Lord of the Rings, he's on a white horse. [00:01:36] So is Gandalf, right? So let's make it a big horse, and let's say that he's the horse. Stands up on its legs. You know, there he is, and he's got this majestic face. Okay? You with me? Can you picture it? [00:01:52] It's pretty cool. Now, think about what the horse does in that image. [00:01:59] It's like, well, but there are two people there, you know, two things there. There's the king and the horse. And is the horse distracting from the king by rearing up on its hind legs, Like. No, it's adding to the picture. Why? Because it's like the horse is part of the king's body, right? It's like part of the king's expression. That's why somehow it's really majestic to have that horse get up on its hind legs. And you don't think, like, oh, wow, there are two things going on here. You just think, wow, that's a majestic king. Right? Why? Because. Well, partly because, you know that the king has control of the horse. [00:02:39] The energy and excitement and power of the horse, we transfer to its rider. [00:02:46] Does that make sense? Right. The horse has become part of the rider. [00:02:54] I've never owned a horse. I've hardly ever ridden A horse. But I love horses. I think it's just the neatest thing to think of a rider developing a relationship with a horse. From the little. I know. [00:03:07] I think that when you have like a rider paired with a good horse, and maybe especially as they get to know one another, the horse starts to embody the will of the rider. At least that's the goal, right? That the horse would embody the will of the rider. That maybe the horse even anticipates what the rider wants. But the horse more and more perfectly embodies what the writer wants. [00:03:44] All right, so here we have Jesus. He's not on a big horse, but he is on a colt. [00:03:52] Alright, so let's talk about this. [00:03:55] Here Jesus comes. Let's talk about Christmas for a second, okay? Because Christmas is coming and we're in Advent, we're looking toward Christmas. And it's another kind of Jesus coming. Jesus coming into Jerusalem. Well, Jesus coming into the world, he who already had everything as the Son of God, becomes a human being. He humbles himself. [00:04:17] This is the kind of movement that's a pattern with Jesus. [00:04:23] He has glory, but he takes on humility. I think that's partly why Luke lets us know that he's coming down the Mount of Olives. [00:04:33] When a king is anointed, he's anointed with oil. [00:04:37] Why? Because it makes him shiny, it makes him glorious. So there he is up on a mountain and it happens to be the Mount of Olives, which you could kind of say the Mount of Glory. That's where oil comes from. Okay, so here he comes from. He comes down the mountain and that's. I mean, that's the, the movement of Christmas. Jesus humbling himself, right? The Son of God humbling himself and becoming a man for us. So here he comes down the mountain and he's not on a big flashy horse, he's on a humble horse. [00:05:12] Well, he's on a colt, kind of like a. Well, he's on a baby horse, one that nobody's ever ridden. [00:05:25] Well, when Jesus comes at Christmas, he's born of the Virgin Mary and you could kind of say takes on a horse. I mean, he is just fully human, right? He's a human being. It's not that like he's moving. This human being, Jesus, he is fully man. He becomes a human being. So that's just. It's just him. You see Jesus and it's like, yep, that's Jesus. Not like there's the body that Jesus is moving around. Right? [00:05:54] But you could also think of it Kind of like a. Kind of like a horse. Okay, here's what I mean. [00:06:03] We were made to be. To be governed, to be ridden like a horse, you and I, right? One level you can think of that on is. Is your head and your body, right? [00:06:15] That's the way it looks anyway, right? So, like, as we've said before, I'm moving this thing. It's not anybody else, right? I'm moving this to do exactly what I want. And my horse is obeying its rider right now, right? And if it didn't, that would be chaos. Okay? So I manage, I ride, I govern the things that belong to me. [00:06:40] But we weren't made to govern ourselves. [00:06:43] We were made to be governed by God. [00:06:47] We were made to receive God's word and be governed by that. So the Christian faith, it's all about receiving God's word and then being shaped by it rather than by my own ideas and desires. That's what Eve gets into when she looks to the serpent and looks to the fruit and sees it's tasty and. And all of a sudden she's being driven by her own. She's being ridden by her own desires or by the word of the devil. [00:07:12] We were made to be ridden by God, to embody his will. [00:07:18] And that's what the life of faith looks like. Embodying his will and repenting when we don't. [00:07:24] Repenting and turning to him to be ridden by him like a horse. [00:07:29] So when Paul says, I no longer live, but Christ lives in me, what he's saying is, you see me moving and thinking and speaking, but by faith, that's God moving and thinking and speaking through me. [00:07:45] Just like a horse. You see the horse doing what it's doing, and you're not like, wow, that horse has some pretty good ideas. [00:07:51] Or, like, what a kingly horse. You say you attribute it to the master, to the rider, like, oh, those are the ideas of the rider embodied in the horse. That's the life of faith. [00:08:05] Well, we gave that up, right again. Adam and Eve, they sinned against God. They turned away from God and they didn't want to be ridden by God, and so they started to ride themselves. And that's chaotic, and that's sin and rebellion against God. That's the whole reason Jesus came. [00:08:24] Jesus came so that we would be ridden by God again, so that we would be governed by God, so that we would have faith in him again, turn to him again. [00:08:39] How did he do that? By sending his son Jesus for us. [00:08:46] Well, who's Jesus? Jesus is a Human being, but a human being unlike any other because he was written by God, right? Like, who looked to God and trusted in God no matter what Jesus. Like, he is the man who works properly, who's ridden by God. So you see that when Jesus is out in the wilderness being tempted by the devil, he's like, no, I'm not going to be ridden by you. You know, don't give me some other word to shape my life. And he turns to God's word, right? [00:09:22] Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. He quotes back to the devil, or shall worship the Lord your God and serve him only. [00:09:34] He quotes back to the devil. He's going to be ridden by nobody, but he's going to be governed by no one but God. [00:09:43] So back to our text. [00:09:46] Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a colt that's never been ridden. You could say it's like this pure virgin's offspring, pure and fresh. We sang in our first hymn, like, that's what that's talking about. He's born of the Virgin Mary, conceived by the Holy Spirit like a fresh human being. [00:10:12] Never been ridden, ridden only by God. [00:10:16] So he rides into Jerusalem on this colt. [00:10:21] You could think of that as his humility again. [00:10:24] Coming down the mountain, humbly riding a colt, you could say, taking on our humanity, human nature, but in a fresh way, conceived of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary for us and for our salvation. Now, like, how do we get this, though? How does this become ours? You know, great for Jesus that he's pure and perfect and embodies the will of his master as he looks to him in faith. But you and I, we're sinful, sinful human beings and, well, that's not us, right? [00:11:01] And so the disciples put their cloaks on the colt. Just think about what that means. It's like here, Jesus is riding and mastering this colt, and they throw their lot in with him. [00:11:17] They take their clothes. Imagine if you took your coat or your jacket off and you put it on, on Jesus horse for him to sit on. [00:11:28] It's kind of like. [00:11:30] I mean, we're united to Jesus. He becomes one of us and then he unites us to himself. We just saw that with Sadie this morning in baptism. [00:11:41] She's been united to Christ in his death and resurrection, baptized into his name so that his name is her name, just like his name is our name. We've been baptized into Christ. That's why we're called Christians. [00:11:59] In German, the word for Christian is just Christ. [00:12:04] It's Christ. That's kind of cool. You know, Christian means like, little Christ. [00:12:11] So, like, we have his name, our lot is with him, our cloaks are on his donkey, and he rides us by faith. This image of riding a horse, it's the same thing as governing a kingdom. You and I, we're members of Christ's kingdom through faith. [00:12:33] He rides us, he governs us so that as our king, he gives us his word, his will, what he wants, and it shapes us. That's what we've come here to do, is to hear God's word and to be shaped by it together in faith. And then that's what we do when we go out. [00:12:52] All right, one more cool thing about the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Here he comes into Jerusalem riding this colt that's never been ridden. They throw their lot in with him and say, you're our king now. Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord. [00:13:09] And then again there's this repeat of Christmas. Glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace among those with whom he's pleased. Although phrased a little bit differently, peace in heaven and glory in the highest. [00:13:21] Okay, so a couple paragraphs after this. In the Gospel of Luke, what does he do? He goes and he cleanses the temple. [00:13:32] So here Jesus comes, entering Jerusalem, and you could think of that as him entering into you or entering into us as his people, as our king. [00:13:45] You can learn a lot about the readings and how they've been interpreted throughout the history of the church from our hymns.