Sermon Tone Analysis

November 30, 2008                                                                                                                 Feast of St. Andrew

 

/The next day John was there again with two of his disciples.

36 When he saw Jesus passing by, he said, “Look, the Lamb of God!” /

/37 When the two disciples heard him say this, they followed Jesus.

38 Turning around, Jesus saw them following and asked, “What do you want?” /

/They said, “Rabbi” (which means Teacher), “where are you staying?”/

/39 “Come,” he replied, “and you will see.”

/

/So they went and saw where he was staying, and spent that day with him.

It was about the tenth hour.

/

/40 Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, was one of the two who heard what John had said and who had followed Jesus.

41 The first thing Andrew did was to find his brother Simon and tell him, “We have found the Messiah” (that is, the Christ).

42 And he brought him to Jesus.

/

/Jesus looked at him and said, “You are Simon son of John.

You will be called Cephas” (which, when translated, is Peter).

(John 1:35-42)/

 

*Come and You Will See!*

* *

            What did you do on Friday?

Did you drag yourself out of bed and get to your favorite store by 5 a.m.?   Were you camped out on the sidewalk the night before to be first in line on Friday morning?

No one from my family was.

You couldn’t drag us to a mall or a department store on Black Friday.

But like it or not, the Christmas shopping season began on Friday.

In many people’s minds, that means that the Christmas season began then, too.

So some radio stations have changed over to the all Christmas song format.

You can’t go to a store without hearing Christmas carols.

Christmas lights and Christmas trees are going up all over.

And of course, in the church, the season of Advent starts today.

In many people’s minds, Advent is the beginning of the Christmas season.

Certainly, there is an undeniable link.

But the “Twelve Days of Christmas” don’t start until Christmas Day.

In the church, the Christmas season actually comes after Christmas.

But with our month long run up to Christmas, many of us are pretty much “Christmased out” by December 25th, so Advent stands in for the Christmas season.

Yet in the church year, Advent has a somewhat different flavor.

It’s about anticipation and expectation.

Advent means “coming”— Jesus coming.

That is the connection to Christmas.

But Advent focuses on more than just the coming in Bethlehem.

It looks forward to his coming at the end of time.

And it also reminds us of how Jesus comes into our hearts through the gospel.

Today, the Feast of St. Andrew, that coming into our hearts is very much on display.

To echo the words of Jesus himself, *Come and you will see!*

*I.*

*            *At the very beginning of his ministry – in fact just two days after Jesus was baptized – John the Baptist pointed him out to two of his own disciples and said, *“Look, the Lamb of God!” * The day before, he had said the longer version, *“Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”*

John was pointing out the Savior.

But who was he talking to?

Their names were Andrew and John, the future apostle.

But who were they really?

Were they robbers and thieves?

Were they the down and out of society?

Were they men who lived openly sinful lives and needed to change them?

No.

Andrew and John were fishermen.

They were “unschooled.”

But they were not the dregs of society.

In point of fact, they were both religious men.

They were disciples of John the Baptist.

They were students studying under a famous, if very unorthodox, rabbi.

We never hear whether they intended to become teachers themselves.

But they had not left their jobs yet.

So it may well be that they were sincere Jewish believers who were glad to have a teacher like John the Baptist, but who had no real thought of entering the ministry themselves.

If that’s true, then these men were very much like you.

They were church going, faithful people.

To them, John pointed out the Lamb of God.

To them, Jesus extended the invitation to come and see.

Does that mean that they weren’t believers yet?

Does it mean that they still needed to have some kind of conversion experience?

No.

Their situation was different from ours in one important respect: they knew a Savior was coming – the Messiah – and they believed in him.

But they didn’t know who he was.

John was showing them the answer.

Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

Now, what does that mean?

To understand the answer, you have to understand the way God’s people worshipped in the Old Testament and right through the end of Jesus’ life.

God commanded rituals and sacrifices for Israel.

They made Old Testament worship radically different from our worship.

Old Testament worship overwhelmed the senses.

In virtually every rite, there was a sacrifice.

They killed an animal and drained its blood.

In some cases, they ate part of it.

But in every case, they burned at least part and sometimes all of that animal.

Think about the smell and the smoke and time involved!

But the key element was blood.

They poured the blood out in front of the altar.

Sometimes, they smeared it on the horns of the altar.

In some rituals, they even threw blood out onto the crowd.

Why?

The blood removed their sin.

These Jewish disciples had seen God make this equation all their lives: the only way to get rid of sin is with blood, the blood of a substitute, the blood of one who has to die in your place.

When John called Jesus the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, those Jewish people immediately thought of the sacrifices God commanded to take away their sin.

Now, no animal blood could really wash away human guilt.

Our sin takes greater blood than that.

When I was growing up, daytime television was dominated by commercials for household cleaning products.

I still remember the detergent commercials.

They all were a variation on the same theme: compare our detergent with our competitors.

See!

Ours really washes the stain away!

The only detergent that could wash away the stain of our sin is the blood of Christ.

None of those animals could do the job.

But they all did serve a purpose: they prepared God’s people to understand that the blood of Christ, shed for us, really does wash all our sin away.

That’s what John was telling his disciples that day.

That’s what the Church still proclaims to this day.