a Lutheran’s Confessions

     Christianity is not about God per se, but about God in the flesh and God on the cross. God is not a warm feeling, nor is he some sort of vague puff of smoke in the sky. The God of the Bible created the material world and, in the fullness of time, became part of the material world in the person of Jesus Christ.

     In Christ, God has flesh and bones. This alone is our comfort as sinners. A God who is only spirit cannot bear our sicknesses and carry our sorrows (Matthew 8:17), no matter how sovereign or majestic he may otherwise be.  A God who is only spirit cannot suffer and die for our sins and for the sins of the world (1 John 2:2). A God who is only spirit cannot sympathize with our weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15). But the incarnate God, God in the flesh, does all these things.

     In Christ, every sinner can now say of God what Adam said of Eve, “this one is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” (Genesis 2:23)

     In Christ, God has become our relative or kinsman, and that makes him our redeemer as well, for in the Bible, redemption, or rescue from indebtedness, was the duty of one’s relative (Ruth 4:14).

     God has already paid your debt of sin in full by his own suffering and death in your place at the cross (2 Corinthians 5:19). Only one who is your relative can do that for you, and God has done that for you in Christ. Believe this Good News that you are already forgiven and dearly loved by God!

     In the flesh of Christ alone is our salvation. This is why the angels sang at Christmas, for God was now present in the flesh of Christ to do what only God can—to reconcile all things to himself through the flesh of his Son (Colossians 1:20-22).

     Our culture tends to esteem spiritual reality and to disparage physical reality, assuming that spirit and body are opposites and cannot intermingle at all. But the Bible speaks a different reality.

     God, who came in the flesh at Christmas, continues to come to us today in very physical ways, not to redeem the world, but to distribute the fruits of Christ’s redeeming work in Word and Sacrament. Preaching the Gospel is a very physical activity, and yet it brings salvation and other spiritual blessings to those who hear (Romans 10:17). Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are very physical activities, and yet, like preaching, they are God’s means of delivering to you personally what Christ accomplished for everyone at Calvary (Matthew 26:26-28; Ephesians 5:26-27; Titus 3:5-7).

     Christmas, the celebration of God becoming flesh, reminds us just how important the physical world and all of us are to God. Our bodies matter to God. What we do with our bodies matters to God. The resurrection of the body matters to God.

     Christ the creator has entered our creation as a creature in order to make all things new.

     We are following the historic (one-year) lectionary this year, rather than our normal practice of using the three-year lectionary. This means that for each Sunday in the church year, we are using the same readings as Luther and other Christians since the fifth century AD. Not only is the one-year lectionary an interesting link with our past, but annual repetition of these readings can be helpful in a biblically illiterate culture such as ours.
     This fourth Sunday in Advent is known as “Rorate coeli” (ro-ra-tay chel-lee, meaning “shower, O heavens”), and is taken from the opening words of the Introit for today, “Shower, O heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain down righteousness.” (Is. 45:8) This is an exquisite poetic expression of the longings of the patriarchs and prophets who awaited the coming of the Messiah. They longed for a righting of all wrongs and for the corrective of God’s righteousness. What they longed for we have received in our Savior, Jesus Christ, whose coming caused the rise and fall of many in Israel who still brings down the mighty from their thrones and who lifts up the lowly through ministry of the Law and the Gospel. The righteousness of Christ indeed rains down on us, and the song of Mary (Luke 1:46-56) becomes our own.

     The historic lectionary designates this as the Sunday of “Populus Zion” (“Daughter of Zion”) taken from Isaiah 62:11b, which is part of our Introit for today,

“Say to the Daughter of Zion, ‘See, your Savior comes! See, His reward is with Him, and His recompense accompanies Him.’”

     Literally, “populus” means “people,” not “daughter,” but “daughter” here is a collective noun, referring not to a single person but to the whole people of God. Therefore, “Daughter of Zion” is a way of referring to the whole people of God in the Old Testament, and it means the same as the ‘Bride of Christ” (the Church) in the New Testament. The Savior of God’s people in the Old Testament—Jesus Christ—is the same Savior of God’s people in the New Testament, as our epistle reading for today makes clear. We are all one people of God in Christ. We are the “Populus Zion!”

     Rejoice, for God delivers us out of all our troubles!