WEEKLY SERMON
SUNDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS – December 27, 2009
Hebrews 2:10-18
LOOK AT YOUR BABY BROTHER
Pastor Thomas Kneser
It’s also a time when we ponder the future of that child, what
their lives will be like.
I’m sure we all have high hopes and dreams, especially for our own
children. Will they become
successful as students and in their careers?
Will they have long and happy lives?
Will they marry well and have great families of their own?
Will they have any great accomplishments?
We know those things are in God’s hands, that only he knows the
future. But we also pray
that we work together to raise these little children to follow their
Lord and to love their Savior, to be faithful Christians throughout
their lives. We want all
those things for their future.
Today we want to take a peek at another baby, one whose birth we
just celebrated in the last few days.
No cameras recorded the event.
We just have a brief account of his birth, perhaps retold by his
mother to the gospel writer, Luke.
And then we heard today a rather unusual account from his
childhood when he was 12 years old, where he told Mary and Joseph that
he had to be about his Father’s business.
And he wasn’t talking about being a carpenter as Joseph was.
He was talking about the work set before him by his heavenly
Father, work that was planned way back in eternity, work that would
affect, not only his future, but that of every other human being who has
ever lived.
This letter from which our reading was taken was written to
remind its first readers of what that work all involved and what it
meant for them. They had
been wavering in their faith, wondering if being a Christian, a follower
of this Jesus, was worth it.
They had begun to lose sight of what he had accomplished for
them. I don’t want that to
be the case for any of you here today, just in case you are wondering
what your future will be, especially in connection with this child.
Let’s look at the pictures, the word pictures which are described
here about this Babe of Bethlehem.
LOOK AT YOUR BABY BROTHER
I.
He is the one who suffered for you.
II.
He is the priest who brings us freedom.
One of the emphases in the business world at this time of the
year is the setting of goals for the coming year.
Action plans are then made so that the company can achieve those
goals. God has a goal as
well, a goal for you and me as human beings.
It’s the business that Jesus was talking about in our gospel
reading. It’s stated very
simply here, that Jesus’ goal is to
bring many sons to glory.
That means that God wants all of us to share in the glory of
heaven. He wants to save
you and me so that we can live with Jesus forever.
God can have that kind of a goal because this is his world and we
are his children.
Everything in this world is for him and exists through his efforts.
He created this world and everything and everyone it this world,
including you and me. And
the reason we are here is to serve God and to make ourselves right in
his sight so that we can be with him forever in heaven, so that we can
share in the eternal joys and blessings of heaven.
The big problem is that we can’t serve him well enough to
accomplish that. We cannot
earn that glory on our own.
No matter how successful we are in business or in sports or in our
families, the Bible tells us that we have fallen short of the glory of
God. We have sinned.
There’s a word you won’t hear much outside of church.
You certainly won’t hear it from the health nurses in Milwaukee
public schools as they hand out free condoms to the students.
But you will hear it here, and hopefully in all your homes, and
certainly in our schools.
You and I and every other human being, we are sinners.
We do things that are wrong.
We go against our heavenly Father’s laws and commands.
It’s not our mother’s fault, not our father’s fault, not the
government’s fault, not the school’s fault.
We are all personally responsible to God for our own sins.
We can’t blame anyone else.
Being honest with ourselves before God, as we must be, means
confessing and acknowledging our personal responsibility for our own
sins.
And because of sin there is suffering.
That is the consequence of sin.
We suffer when there is abuse, when there is crime, when there is
disease, when there is pain, when there is death.
Those are the results of sin.
It comes from within each one of us, as well as because of the
sins around us, from the sinful world in which we live.
Sin brings suffering, it’s that simple.
So the one who wants to save us from sin, to bring us to glory,
the route he has to take would have to include suffering.
He would have to be one of us who would suffer the same
consequences of sin, just as we do.
That’s why when we look at this baby in the Christmas manger we
must see that our baby brother would have to suffer.
His perfect work of salvation had to include suffering for sin.
Now, it was not his own sins that he was suffering for.
Rather, he was suffering because of our sins.
He never did anything wrong.
He never spoke an untrue word.
He never had a sinful thought.
His whole life was one of perfection.
He never gave in to the temptations of the devil.
He never strayed from that plan of saving the world, of achieving
the goal set before him.
You can’t say that about any other baby born into this world, as cute
and as innocent as they might appear.
And yet he suffered.
Always above the manger there is the cross.
This baby born in Bethlehem was destined to die on Calvary.
He gave up the glory of heaven to become one of us, to become our
brother, sharing in our humanity, taking on flesh and blood.
He did it so that he could be the author, as it says here, the
source of our salvation.
You see, this is not just another cute little baby in the manger.
One of our favorite Christmas carols asks the question, “What
Child Is This?” And we sing
the answer, “This, this is Christ, the King, the Babe, the Son of Mary.”
Through the miracle of the virgin birth, God became a human
being. This is the king of
the universe. This is
Emanuel, God with us, the second person of the Trinity.
But through his work, through his suffering, we become part of
God’s family. He is our
brother by reason of his humanity.
And now, through faith in his perfect life and his innocent
suffering and death, we are adopted into his family.
We are made holy through the one who makes men holy.
Jesus earned glory for us.
We can stand before God clothed in robes of perfection,
righteousness, because we have received it as a gift from our brother,
the baby in the manger. He
makes it all possible. He
did it so that we could become his brothers and sisters.
We have his gifts of forgiveness for all our sins, salvation,
life with God here on earth and eternal life with him in heaven.
That’s why we love him and honor him, despite his humble birth in
the manger. He’s our
brother, our brother who loved us so much that he suffered for us on the
cross. That’s how badly he
wanted us to be part of God’s family.
Do you see all that when you look at this baby?
That’s all included in this picture.
II.
What did he accomplish by his suffering?
He is the priest who brings us to glory, who gives us the best
kind of freedom, by sacrificing himself for us,
He had to be made like his
brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and
faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement
for the sins of the people.
There are two concepts here we really need to understand in order
to full appreciate what the writer is saying here.
We need to know what the high priest was and the work he did,
called atonement. The
function of any priest is to help people in their worship in their
worship of God. The OT
priests were to take the offerings and sacrifices which the people
wanted to give to God, and they were to place them on the altar.
They served as go-betweens.
Through those sacrifices, the people were reminded that it took
suffering, this case, on the part of ht animal which was offered, in
order to make them right with God.
That was the role of the priest.
The high priest did that on behalf of the entire nation.
On one special day of the year he would enter the inner sanctuary
of the Temple and sprinkle blood on the mercy seat, part of the Ark of
the Covenant. That blood
was for his own sins and for the sins of all the people.
That day was called the Day of Atonement.
That sprinkled blood demonstrated that someone or something had
to die, give its life, so that sin would be paid for.
That kind of blood sacrifice which paid for sin was called the
sacrifice of atonement. It
brought the holy God and sinful humans back together again, made them
one.
Now, by giving his blood on Calvary’s cross, by pouring out his
life for the sins of the whole world, Jesus became the great high
priest. In service to God,
our brother made atonement for the sins of the people, not just the
Jewish people, but for all people of all time.
When he cried out from the cross,
It is finished!
He was declaring that all the
punishment which was piled up by the guilt of our sins, it was all taken
care of. He had sprinkled
his blood on God’s altar so that we might have forgiveness.
Again, that’s why we must always see the cross in connection with
the manger. Our baby
brother was also the servant of God who out of love for us and out of
duty to his heavenly Father offered himself as the perfect sacrifice for
sin. That was his work as
our great high priest.
What a host of accomplishments that sacrifice achieved!
Our sins were paid for.
Forgiveness was earned for every human being.
The doors to God’s throne of glory were thrown open to all
people. Our brother made it
possible for us, his brothers and sisters in the flesh, to become his
brothers and sisters for all eternity.
Through faith in his work we will live in heaven.
But even for right here and now, our high priest has earned
blessings for us. Not only
did he conquer our sins, he also conquered the one behind the sin, the
one who continually tempts us to sin, who tries to ruin the relationship
we have with our baby brother.
By his death Jesus
destroyed him who holds the power of death – that is, the devil – and
freed those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of
death. In the Christmas
manger lies the one who breaks the stranglehold of sin and death and
Satan.
Death is something that is all around us.
There is fear surrounding death, fear of the unknown because we
haven’t experienced anything like it.
And we love life. I
like being alive, enjoying this time of grace God gives us.
But this life will end.
And there is fear surrounding death because of our sins.
That’s the wage sin pays.
And if we remain in our sins, if we don’t believe in God’s
solution to sin, we will die in those sins, die here and suffer
eternally in hell. That’s
Satan’s stranglehold on us.
But our baby brother conquered sin.
He defeated Satan.
He showed his power over death by rising from the grave.
On Good Friday, Satan was probably whooping and hollering,
thinking he had won. But
Easter morning Jesus descended into hell to proclaim his victory.
He had the last word.
The victory belonged to him.
And now through faith in our brother, it belongs to us as well.
We are free. We are
free to serve God with our lives.
We are free to resist temptation.
We can say no when Satan dangles his enticements in front of us.
We can fight him off by staying close to our baby brother.
BY the power of Jesus living in our hearts we are motivated to do
the kinds of things that are pleasing to God.
We can live decent and honest and moral lives.
We can love our children and fellow human beings.
We can worship our God freely and lovingly.
We can offer him the best in our financial gifts and in our
actions of worship and praise.
We can call on him in prayer and have the confidence that he
hears us and will answer us.
WE can use his word and sacrament to be strengthened in our daily
battles with the sin which still surrounds us.
And we will win. We
are free because our brother was victorious on our behalf.
This Christmas manger holds the God-man, our brother, our Savior
and Lord. He carried out
his Father’s business to the last detail.
That’s what we need to know and understand and believe when we
look into the manger. This
baby is our brother, our Savior. AMEN.