Homily for Advent I Midweek Vespers

[Text is Sunday's OT reading: Jeremiah 23:5-8

Oh that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion! When the Lord restores the fortunes of his people, let Jacob rejoice and Israel be glad.

So we sang in tonight’s first Psalm. This salvation for Israel, this restoration of the fortunes of God’s people that gladdens their heart is what Jeremiah prophesied in our reading. Jeremiah, recall, served in the waning days of the Kingdom of Judah. Israel, the northern Kingdom, had long since succumbed to the Assyrians – it was only a memory. And now Judah was facing imminent destruction. Jeremiah made no bones about that – Babylon was coming and when she came, she would wipe out the nation.

To a people who had no future in earthly terms, to a people who faced the loss of everything in their lives that they took for granted, to a people terrified and hopeless, Jeremiah spoke words of hope from God. He spoke hope because he saw the day when salvation for Israel would arrive – Salvation for both kingdoms, south and north.

“Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord. Messianic words from the get-go. A new kind of day is arising, the Lord announces, and it will be a different kind of day from all that has gone before.

“I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as King and deal wisely.”

Branch sounds strange to us. But Jeremiah prophesied long years after Isaiah, and Isaiah’s words were emblazoned on his heart and on the heart of all who ached for the restoration of the fortunes of God’s people. You see, Isaiah had foretold that the Lord would cut down his people like a tree, till there would be nothing left but a stump. Yet the holy seed would be in the stump, and from the stump God would raise a righteous branch.

From the long cut-down house of Judah, from the royal house of King David, a tender branch would spring and bloom. Hope for all Israel, for Judah and for the north Kingdom. Hope also for the Gentiles. A king would come who would be king for all and bring His justice into all the earth.

The angel, coming in, spoke to the Virgin: “You shall conceive in your womb and bear a Son. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His Father David, and of His kingdom there will be no end.”

From the Virgin, she of royal David’s line - a line long bereft of any earthly glory or kingship, from the stump that seemed dead, would come the tender Branch, the King who would deal wisely, and execute justice and righteousness in the land.

Execute how? Not by paying the wicked back for their wickedness, no tit for tat with this King! Instead, with Him there is another kind of righteousness. He executes righteousness not by making us measure up, but by being our righteousness Himself. “In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely, and this is the name by which He will be called: Yahweh Zedekenu, the Lord IS our righteousness.”

The peace and security He comes to bring is unshakable because He is our righteousness. Think of what that means! For all the days of your life and also for the day of your death, when you stand before the All Holy One, whose holiness is a terror to all unrighteousness, you need have no fear if you have Him as your righteousness, the Lord Himself.

In the Branch of David’s house, the royal child of the Virgin, you have the one whom God made for you wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption. He is your shield before the All-Holy One, God in your flesh come to take your sin upon Himself, to suffer and die for you, to rise from the grave for you, that you might stand before the All-Holy one as holy yourself, holy in Him, and so serve and worship the Blessed Trinity forever. That is life!

Zacharias upon the birth of the Baptist had his tongue loosed and he sang a song of praise: “That we should be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us, to perform the mercy promised to our fathers, and to remember his holy covenant, the oath that He swore to our father Abraham, to grant us that we, being delivered from the hands of our enemies might serve Him without fear in holiness and righteousness before Him all the days of our life.”

If you can stand before the all-holy one without fear because you stand in holiness and righteousness then you know the fulfillment of the promises of God. Such holiness and righteousness is yours in the Branch, in Child of the Virgin. He IS your righteousness. You either stand before God robed in His righteousness as gift; or you presume to stand before God in the tattered and spotted garment of your own righteousness. That is to despise the gift He gives and to think you don’t need it.

But you do. For, as we also sang in the Psalm: “The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of men to see if they were any who understand, who seek after God. They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt; there is none who does good, not even one.” None except for that One who is the Lord of heaven come down to earth in human and flesh and blood, to do for us what we could not do for ourselves, to be for us what we could never be in ourselves, to give to us what we could never achieve for ourselves.

“The Lord our Righteousness.”

Here is something you can hold tight to when everything in your world is collapsing around you. It holds in the good times and in the bad, in youth and middle age and when we are old and gray. It holds because it is certain and sure in Him.

“The Lord is our Righteousness.”

Having Him, we need no other righteousness with which to stand before God but the Righteousness which IS the Child of Mary, the Branch of David, the Son of God, given into the flesh to be our brother and our Savior. To Him with the Father and the Spirit be all glory and honor, now and ever and unto the ages of ages! Amen.