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The Facts Matter

          Were you surprised just a little when Pastor Huebner read the Gospel of the Day a few minutes ago?  Do you remember?  It was the story of Jesus entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.  We all know this story; some of you could retell it from memory.  But the time of the year we’re used to hearing this Gospel is in March or April, whenever Palm Sunday falls, and Palm Sunday always falls on the Sunday before Easter.  I’m a little behind my schedule these days, but I know we’re not close to Easter.  This is November 28, today is the First Sunday in Advent; we’re on the way to Christmas.

          The truth is that from the time of the emperor Charlemagne (that’s 800 AD) until my senior year in college (that’s 1972) the Gospel of Jesus entering Jerusalem was read in most Christian churches every single year on the First Sunday in Advent.  And nobody tried to read this Gospel and connect it to Christmas.  The connection was with the Christian calendar.  Today is the First Sunday in Advent, but today is also the first Sunday of the new church year. 

          I don’t want to bore you with liturgical irrelevancies, so I’ll try to make this short.  About 40 years ago, some bright-eyes scholars took a careful look at the Christian calendar and the traditional readings that were read on the Sundays and festivals of the year.  The changes were good, and we’ve heard much more of the Bible than our grandparents ever did on Sunday morning.  One of the revisions was to remove the Palm Sunday Gospel from the First Sunday in Advent.   If we were doing things the way we usually do them, we would be hearing Jesus tell us that no one knows the hour of his second coming and urge us to keep watch.

          But we’re going back to the old tradition this morning and we’re going to focus on the church year.  Some people call it the Christian calendar; if you want to be fancy, you can call it the Year of Grace.  Most of you know this calendar isn’t like the secular calendar.  For one thing, it doesn’t start on January 1. Obviously, today is November 28, not January 1 and the calendar begins today. This calendar doesn’t have months either; it has seasons: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, and End Time.  The church seasons do have one thing in common with the seasons we know in the Midwest; the colors change: blue in Advent, purple in Lent, white in Christmas and Easter.  Each season has a set of Sundays, and certain Bible readings, hymns, and prayers are assigned to those Sundays every year.  The Prayer of the Day Pastor Huebner spoke earlier—“Stir up your power, O Lord, and come” has been prayed in Christian churches on the First Sunday in Advent since the sixth century, and Lutherans have been singing “Savior of the Nations, Come” on this Sunday since the time of Martin Luther.

          So what’s the connection between Jesus entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and the church calendar?  On this day King Jesus is beginning his annual visit to our congregation.  There aren’t any stretch limos parked on Broadway, no Secret Service agents walking up and down the aisles scanning the balcony.  King Jesus doesn’t arrive with that kind of hoopla.  He comes quietly on the pages of the Bible and in our prayers and hymns.  As Jesus comes to visit us, he won’t announce any new programs or offer a new agenda.  Over the course of the next twelve months most of us won’t learn anything we don’t already know.  Like we did last year, we’ll hear John the Baptist urging us to repent, we’ll see the child Jesus lying in a manger and listen to the angel announcing his birth to the shepherds.  We’ll go to the Jordan River and observe his baptism and then to the wilderness to take in his temptation by the devil.  Just like last year we’ll watch him heal the sick and confront his enemies.  We’ll go with him to the upper room on Thursday of Holy Week—just like last year—and then we’ll follow him to Calvary.  We’ll rejoice on Easter Sunday and again on Pentecost.  And then the summer will come and we’ll hear Jesus remind us what it means to live our lives as Christians.  We’ll do the same thing next November we did these past Sundays and remember that Jesus is coming again in glory at the end of time.

          The Christian calendar repeats the same truths year after year after year.  In the seasons and the Sundays of the church year our worship retells the story of the life of Jesus—what he said and what he did while he lived here on earth.  Is it repetitious?  Absolutely.  Is it boring?  Maybe to some; not all Christian churches follow the Christian calendar.  But to many more Christians, and hopefully to the Christians here, the church calendar is a wonderful way to remember the Bible truths we consider most important.  And so today, as Jesus begins his annual visit, we say what Christians have said on this day for more than a thousand years: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of Lord” and we pray with believers across the centuries: Hosanna—save us Lord.  And why do we say and pray such things?  Because The Facts Matter.         

          I want to give you an example of this by taking a look at the Second Lesson for today from 1 Corinthians 15.  St. Paul was dealing with some difficult problems that had cropped in the congregation in Corinth.  There were a lot of problems to fix, but the worst was that some people in the congregation weren’t convinced that their bodies would rise again after they died--or at least they had the feeling that a bodily resurrection wasn’t all that important.  This was a huge problem.  You take away life after death and what’s the point of life before death?  If we don’t live alive again after we die, then we live and we die and that’s all there is to it.  Life after death is the bottom line of the whole Christian religion.

          How did Paul deal with the problem?  He had some options, I suppose.  He could have given the Corinthians a good tongue lashing.  Paul wasn’t afraid to speak strongly when the situation called for it.  He could have pushed a few emotional buttons; you wind people up just the right way, you can get them to do almost anything.  He could have tried a miracle; he had raised a dead man to life once before.  But Paul didn’t do any of that.  He went to the facts didn’t he?  “I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand.  For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also.”

          Any conversation about life after death begins and ends with Jesus’ resurrection.  If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, then we won’t rise, either.  If Jesus did rise from the dead, then we will rise, too.  Paul went to the facts: Jesus rose from the dead.  He actually died, he actually was buried; his death wasn’t fake.  And he actually came back to life as the Old Testament Bible said he would.  People saw him, a lot people saw him, and you can ask those people if you want to because most of them are still around.  No tongue lashing, no harangues, no miracles—just the simple facts.  This is what Jesus said and this is what Jesus did.

          I don’t know all of you all that well, but I assume most of you are convinced that we will live again after we die.  You probably wouldn’t be here today if you didn’t believe that.  We’re not like the people in Corinth.  But we have our own set of challenges.  We all have friends and acquaintances, maybe even some family members, who don’t think much of our brand of Christianity.  They’re not into sin and guilt like we are.  Their consciences don’t bother them like ours bother us. They don’t buy the moral values we accept.  They don’t have the same priorities we do.  And sometimes, their way of thinking and their way of living seems pretty appealing.  We all feel the temptation to follow the crowd and make life easier.  Well, what did Jesus say?  What did Jesus do?  Oh ya, we remember.  Then there are those days when everything comes crashing down.  The cupboards are bare, the credit card is maxed out, and the home isn’t happy.  How do we deal with those days?  What did Jesus say?  What did Jesus do?  We remember.  The conscience attack in the middle of the night, the nagging regret over something we said or did, the gruesome feeling that God would never forgive us for that?  Have you ever felt that way?  What did Jesus say?  What did Jesus do?  We remember.  And as we hear those facts again and again, the Holy Spirit plants them deep in our hearts and lead us to believe them.

          Brothers and sisters, too much religion these days revolves around how I feel or how you feel.  Too many churches these days focus on high-profile preaches who can’t keep their promises of power.  The truth is the facts matter!  At the center of the Christian Bible are the facts about Jesus.  At the center of Christian religion are the truths about Jesus.  At the center of our Christian faith is what Jesus said and what Jesus did.  And so we proclaim those facts about Jesus year in and year out.  What Jesus said and what he did tell us the truth about our sins and our guilt and what we deserve from God.  What Jesus said and what he did tell us the truth about redemption and forgiveness and peace with God.  What Jesus said and what he did tell us the truth about our concerns in this life and our hopes for the life to come.  And that’s what led Paul to write: “By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you.”

          The church year is a human invention; it’s been passed down to us across the ages by Christians who have gone before us.  It’s not inspired; it didn’t descend to earth on the wings of an angel.  There will be people in heaven someday who never heard of the Christian calendar.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not important.  Call it a vehicle or a vessel, it’s something that holds and arranges the facts of the life of Jesus: his birth, ministry, teaching, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension.  Those facts really do matter.  That’s why we call this calendar the Year of Grace.  And that’s why we say: Blessed is he who comes to us in the name of the Lord.  Come now and save us.  Amen.     

Preached at Grace Lutheran Church, Milwaukee, WI (www.gracedowntown.org) on November 28, 2010

Services

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Mondays 6:30 pm

Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church | 1209 North Broadway Milwaukee, WI 53202 | (414) 271-3006

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