First Sunday in Advent—Advent and the Story of Our Salvation
In the Name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
“The disciples went and did as Jesus commanded them. They brought the donkey and the colt, laid their clothes on them, and set Him on them. And a very great multitude spread their clothes on the road. Others cut down branches from the trees and spread them on the road. Then the multitudes who went before and those who followed cried out, saying, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the LORD! Hosanna in the highest!’”
We've come to the beginning of a new Church Year. The season of Advent is now upon us. And that means that we are in this new part of the Divine Service—that “Divine Service through the Church Year” part of that bulletin insert—where we're talking about the Introit and the Kyrie. I just said it, but I'll say it again:
The theme is that we come before God as sinners needing mercy for all things in life, and we await Jesus who will Advent to us and bring us peace.
Like I said, this week there are a few questions and answers related to the Introit and the Kyrie. Introit comes from Latin—introitus, “entrance.” And Kyrie eleison—that’s “O Lord, have mercy upon us.” That part of the service that we sing, “Kyrie eleison,” is Greek. Most of the other—or all of the other—parts of the Divine Service that are called “ordinaries,” because they're ordinarily sung, like the “Glory be to God on high,” they all have Latin names. The Kyrie is the only one with a Greek name: the Greek words for “Lord, have mercy upon us.”
The Divine Service technically begins with the Introit, and the Confession and Absolution is a preparation for the service. There's these things like the theme—I didn't come up with it myself. It comes from this video I’ll send out this week in our This Past Sunday email. And you can see it on our “How We Worship” page on our website. But at the bottom there's this video called Liturgy and the Life of Christ.
And it shows us not only how the Church Year takes you through the life of Jesus, but also how the Divine Service every Sunday takes you through the life of Jesus and the story of salvation. And we're going to talk a little bit about that today. But that video shows you the whole big picture.
Like I said, the Divine Service technically begins with the Introit, and then we sing the Kyrie eleison—“Lord, have mercy upon us.” And it's Greek. It comes—so it's from—you can find it in the New Testament, the original New Testament in the Greek, the words for “Lord” and the verb for “to have mercy.” These words used in close proximity to one another happen in Matthew 15, when the Canaanite woman is coming to Jesus and begging Him to help her demon-possessed daughter.
They happen in Matthew 17, where a father begs Jesus to heal his son who is suffering from epilepsy and a demon, and His disciples were unable to heal the boy.
And the third spot in the Gospel of Matthew where Kyrie and eleison happen together is in Matthew 20, where the two blind men who heard that Jesus was passing by cried out, saying, “Have mercy on us, O Lord, Son of David!” The multitude that followed Jesus warned them that they should be quiet, but they cried out all the more, saying, “Have mercy on us, O Lord, Son of David!” So Jesus stood still and called them, and said, “What do you want Me to do for you?” They said to Him, “Lord, that our eyes may be opened.”
So Jesus had compassion and touched their eyes, and immediately their eyes received sight, and they followed Him.
That last example of the Kyrie eleison—the “O Lord, have mercy upon us”—points us to a miracle unique to the work of the true Messiah, of whom the prophets wrote, the Anointed One that God would send to save His people and establish the New Covenant in His blood. That miracle was healing the blind.
God had spoken through the prophets words like this (Isaiah):
“I, the LORD, have called You in righteousness,
and will hold Your hand;
I will keep You and give You as a covenant to the people,
as a light to the Gentiles,
to open blind eyes,
to bring out prisoners from the prison,
those who sit in darkness from the prison house.
I am the LORD, that is My name;
and My glory I will not give to another,
nor My praise to carved images.
Behold, the former things have come to pass,
and new things I declare;
before they spring forth
I tell you of them.” (Isa. 42:6–9)
The cry of “Lord, have mercy,” or “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy,” is more than just people asking for help. The two blind men are saying something more than just asking Jesus for help. It is a confession of faith in the Messiah that all God's people of the Old Testament looked forward to seeing for themselves.
The lepers who cried out eleison, “Have mercy on us,” the parents of demon-possessed children, and the blind—all believers in the Messiah cry out for our Lord’s first Advent among His people.
They are the multitudes who went before, like in our Gospel this morning. They looked for the day of the first Advent of our Lord. And we now sing the same words with them as we call upon that same Lord to make His Advent among us in the Church through the Means of Grace. And we await Jesus who will Advent to us and bring us peace on the Last Day.
We join in the same song for the same things.
Some of you might've wondered—maybe it was only me—why we would sing “Lord, have mercy upon us” right after we received Absolution. Because the first thing that comes to my mind, at least when I say, “Lord, have mercy upon us,” is I think I'm confessing sins. And that is one way to say, “Lord, have mercy upon us.”
You can also say, “Lord, have mercy upon us,” like we do in the Litany, when we're praying for people or something bad has happened to us or our neighbors and we cry out, “Lord, have mercy.” But there’s also another way to cry out, “Lord, have mercy.”
Like the two blind men—they cry out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy,” confessing these words even when they are told by the multitudes to be quiet. We sing these words with them as a confession of faith in the Son of God.
It's an assertion that Jesus is Lord, begotten of the Father from all eternity—“Lord, have mercy upon us.” And then “Son of David, have mercy upon us” is a confession that He is conceived in time, God in human flesh, born of the Virgin Mary—that He is the God-Man, and He is our Lord. He is God in human flesh, and He has come to show us mercy.
That's another way to sing, “Lord, have mercy upon us.”
The Kyrie is the beginning of the Divine Service right after the Introit, and it is a part of that story of salvation that I told you about, where we're going through the whole life of Jesus in the Divine Service. The Kyrie is reminding us that the story of Jesus saving us starts before He's born.
It starts in the Old Testament people of God—the Old Testament Church. They had the oracles of God, the prophecies of the Messiah. The Old Testament Church were like a woman preparing to give birth to the promised Seed like Eve, the promise given to her in Genesis. And their cry altogether is, “Lord, have mercy upon us.”
The same cry of the two blind men: “Lord, Son of David, have mercy upon us.” When we sing, we're remembering that that story starts before Jesus is even conceived and born.
But we also cry out with the saints that follow our Lord’s saving work on earth—that we follow that saving work—and we're joyfully preparing to receive mercy from Him here and now in the Divine Service.
And we also cry out for Him to make that final Advent.
During Advent, to emphasize that, we don’t sing the ‘Glory be to God on high.’ It was accidentally printed in the bulletin, but Linnea reminded me not to sing it. That’s to emphasize the importance of it, because we're going to sing it again on Christmas. Because these were the words that the angels sang to the shepherds. So we sing it with those who came before, to announce to us the birth of the Lord, the birth of the Messiah. We sing the same words.
We also sing them with the saints who come after the Lord was born to save us—and as ones who He's going to come and dwell among us in humility under bread and wine, the same as He came and dwelt in humility in body and blood as a Baby in a feeding trough—and those who wait for Him to come again in glory. We are those who follow after, and we sing it with those who came before us.
We sing, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is He that comes in the name of the Lord!” in the Sanctus, before we partake of the Body and Blood of Jesus. We sing it along with those who came before the Lord Jesus, like in the Gospel this morning, as they saw their Messiah coming into the great city of the King, to offer up this place where the temple is—to offer Himself up as sacrifice for sins on the altar of the cross.
But we also sing it with the saints here, who are about to see Him come here to His people, who are now His temple, to give that Body and Blood that He offered to the Father for our sins to us as a sacrament and a seal, assuring us that our sins are forgiven, assuring us that we can wait for Him to come in glory—not as a Judge to destroy us, but as our Savior to bring us body and soul into His eternal kingdom.
That's how we sing those same words that we heard in the Gospel this morning.
Now, we sing it with those who came before our Lord, and who follow after, and who look for Him to come again.
And we sing that “O Christ, Thou Lamb of God,” the Agnus Dei, on this day.
The “O Christ, Thou Lamb of God”—we sing it with Saint John the Baptist, who came before the Lord to prepare the way before Him, the Lamb of God who would take away the sins of the world. We sing it with him.
And we sing it with those who follow after—after He has dealt with our sins, after He has become the propitiation for not just our sins but the sins of the whole world.
And we sing these words not to a dead Lord, but to a crucified and risen Lord.
We sing it as those who follow after Him, crucified and risen, and we sing it as those who look forward to the day when we will sing it—that same song to the Lamb with all the angels and archangels and all the company of heaven.
The same way you hear it in Revelation:
“You are worthy, O Lord,
for You were slain,
and have redeemed us to God by Your blood
out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation,
and have made us kings and priests to our God;
and we shall reign on the earth.” (Rev. 5:9–10)
That is what they will sing, and we will sing, in the resurrection to our slaughtered yet standing Lamb.
And that is what we are doing when we sing the words that Saint John the Baptist spoke before us. We join with all the saints who came before the Lord entered to save us from sin, death, and the power of the devil.
We join with all those saints who now follow after the Lord, receiving mercy from Him now as He enters this place to keep us firm in His Word and faith until we die.
And we sing with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, and all the saints dwelling in the earth, the same songs as we await for the final Advent of that same Lord, our Savior Jesus Christ, who was offered once to bear the sins of many—our blood-brother and Redeemer—who, to those who eagerly wait for Him, will appear a second time, apart from sin, for salvation.
Let us pray. O Lord Jesus Christ, King of all wisdom, power, righteousness, and grace, look today with mercy upon us who are troubled, and through Your holy Word, grant us Your blessed friendship. And because You are the eternal Light, and nothing is hidden from You, behold today our misery, danger, and distress. Come to our aid with Your grace and might. By Your meekness, cover our burdensome sin and transgression. Impute to us Your righteousness, and despise not our penitential sighing and wailing. Receive us, O blessed King, into Your protection, and stand against the devil, the world, sin, and hell, that they may have no power over us. Grant that we may spend our time here among the flock of Your people and Your Church. Strengthen our hearts with the rich consolation of Your Word, and refresh our bodies and souls through the partaking of Your true Body and Blood. To this end, we commit unto You not only our clothes and temporal goods, but our whole selves entirely. Lead us, Your poor orphans, upon the right way and ascent to eternal rest, that with Your dear angels we may know, honor, and praise You fully in eternity. For You live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one true God, now and forever. Amen.
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