The Third Sunday in Advent The Earth Brings Forth Its Sprouts Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ! Amen. In the last verse of today’s Old Testament, God gives us a precious figure of speech for thinking about our Lord Jesus Christ and His powerful Word in our midst: As the earth brings forth its sprouts, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to sprout up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to sprout up before all the nations. Dear Christian friends: Photos of Chernobyl have recently appeared in the news media. As many of you remember, Chernobyl is the site of a nuclear meltdown that took place in 1986, spilling high levels of deadly radiation into the environment and ruining hundreds of square miles for a few thousand years. The recently published photos show something more than the rust and decay of our most devastating failures. The photos of Chernobyl also show green grass and growing trees. Perhaps we should think of the flourishing plant life at Chernobyl as a sermon on these Words from God’s Book of Psalms: “O Lord my God… You renew the face of the ground” (Psalm 104:1, 30). In the high peaks region of the Adirondack Mountain Park in upstate New York, there are boulders everywhere—boulders the size of a Volkswagen. The truly amazing thing is not the boulder, but the tree that grows on top of it. Or think about the red cedars you often see here in Missouri, growing out from the side of a rock cliff, seeming to cling for dear life but not going away. Then there is that pesky dandelion growing in the middle of the sidewalk at your house. “The seed is the Word of God,” says the Lord (Luke 8:11). “You have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding Word of God,” says the Lord (1 Peter 1:23). Plant life at Chernobyl; hemlocks on boulders; cedars on rock faces; dandelions in concrete: Every time we see a plant growing in an impossible place, we think of it as a sermon, an illustration, an example of what God does for us with His Word. As the earth brings forth its sprouts, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to sprout up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to sprout up before all the nations, says the Lord. Today’s Old Testament promises comfort and assurance, not merely to each of us Christians individually, but also to the entire Christian church on earth, “all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours” (1 Corinthians 1:2). Why is today’s Old Testament such good news for you and me and all the baptized of Christ, individually and personally? The first two reasons are found in these Words: “The Lord God will cause righteousness… to sprout up before all nations.” (The following three paragraphs are excerpted from the sermon for Advent 1, two weeks ago) God has to two kinds of righteousness that He wants very much for you to have. Let’s call the first kind of righteousness “The Righteousness People CANNOT See” and the second kind “The Righteousness People CAN See.” 1. The first righteousness—your unseen righteousness—was given to you in your Baptism, when you were clothed with Christ Jesus. God calls this unseen righteousness “the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe” (Romans 3:22). This righteousness is completely yours and it will never be taken away from you. It is “The Righteousness People CANNOT See.” 2. The second kind of righteousness that God wants for you is “The Righteousness People CAN See.” This second kind of righteousness has nothing to do with your salvation and eternal life. This second kind of righteousness—this visible righteousness—has to do with the way you act every day, according to God’s Ten Commandments. This righteousness has to do with what your neighbor hears and sees and receives from you. What does God promise you today? God promises that He “will cause righteousness… to sprout up before all nations.” These Words mean you have nothing to worry about: 1. When it comes to the invisible righteousness that gives you salvation—that is, the righteousness of your sins forgiven in Jesus’ blood—today’s Old Testament indicates that this righteousness is entirely God’s work, sprouting up like green grass in a radioactive wilderness. You do not add to or help with the forgiveness and salvation God has given, just as a boulder offers no help to the hemlock that defiantly grows on top of it. Forgiveness is yours and mine, sown and growing within us, despite the impossible surface of our hearts and minds. Thus it is written, “GOD will cause righteousness… to sprout up before all nations.” 2. Today’s Old Testament also means your visible righteousness—that is, your kind and loving treatment of your neighbor and your visible keeping of the Ten Commandments—these things are also the exclusive work of God and His Word within you. God wants you to know that your good works sprout up like a seed planted and growing in an impossible place. “GOD will cause righteousness… to sprout up before all nations.” 3. God also says here that He is more that capable of even causing the praise of His name to sprout up upon the earth. We should probably take these Words as a bit of a warning. The praise of God’s name comes about as the natural result of His goodness and generosity toward us, both in forgiving us and in providing for us. Praise of God’s name is like the fruit of a tree or the head of a dandelion: praise simply happens as the result of green plant that God has planted. Praise of God’s name is also what draws other people these shores of forgiveness and life in Christ. This is why God says He causes “praise to sprout before all nations.” Why should we take these Words as a warning? Because we Christians can be compared to granite rock when it comes to our begrudging attitudes and our cold thanklessness toward God. We should change our minds about this. In view of God’s gifts, we should spend every day with praise in our mouths and thankfulness in our hearts. But even if we should remain thankless, the Lord our God remains undeterred “and the grass won’t pay no mind.” Trees grow on top of boulders. Cedars spring out from cliffs. Today’s Old Testament does more than promises comfort and assurance to each of us Christians individually. Today’s Old Testament speaks hope and joy to the entire Christian church on earth. It is no secret that our Christian confession of faith is losing popularity in the world, to say the least. Everywhere we look, everything that is clearly NOT Christian seems to be embraced and loved far more dearly than those things that ARE Christian. Today’s Old Testament wants all God’s saints to know that it does not matter whether things are growing worse in our world. The righteousness of God endures. The praises of God cannot and shall not be silenced. Even if our entire Christian confession should be melted down and poured out and encased in concrete, there will yet be nothing to fear. The Word shall remain. The Word shall not be overcome. The Word shall do precisely according to the good pleasure of God and nothing shall be lost. Thus it is written in Isaiah the prophet; thus God has sworn; thus it shall be done: As the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall My word be that goes out from My mouth; it shall not return to Me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it (Isaiah 55:10-11) Again, from last week’s Old Testament, A voice says, “Cry!” And I said, “What shall I cry?” All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the Lord blows on it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of our God will stand forever (Isaiah 40:6-8). And again today, As the earth brings forth its sprouts, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to sprout up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to sprout up before all the nations, says the Lord. _______________________________________________ Sermons mailing list Sermons@cat41.org http://cat41.org/mailman/listinfo/sermons
