Witness, Mercy, and Life Together in Advent: A
Midweek Preaching Series
Witness
Bearing witness says Luther is nothing but Gods Word spoken by angels or men, and it calls
for faith.# In Acts 1:8 the risen Lord says of His apostles that they will be His witnesses in
Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and beyond those borders to the end of the earth. It is the
apostles who with their own eyes have seen the Lord, touched Him with their own hands, and
heard His voice with their ears (see I John 1:1-4) who are designated witnesses. We are witnesses
only in the derived sense that our words echo the reliable testimony of the apostles. To bear
witness is to speak not of ourselves but of another-Christ Jesus.
The great witness of Advent is John the Baptist. The prologue [of the Fourth Gospel] says that
God sent John to be a witness (1:6-8). A witness speaks in contexts where the truth is disputed. If
everything is clear, there is no need for testimony.# The witness of John the Baptist is twofold.
He bears witness to human sinfulness which separates man from God. In no uncertain terms he
names sin for what it is, showing his hearers their inability to recognize the One who stands
among them is their Messiah (John 1:26-27). John is not sent to bear witness to himself; he is the
voice crying in the wilderness (John 1:19-23). John is neither the light of the world (John 1:6-8)
nor the Christ (John 1:20) but the one sent to bear witness. Thus he proclaims Jesus Christ as
the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). Our witness is always this
confession of Jesus Christ.
Mercy
Oswald Bayer writes Mercy is not self-evident. It cannot become an existential or
epistemological principle. On the contrary mercy is actually something that is won and
something that, emerging, happens unpredictably. And as this justifying God is not simply and in
principle merciful, so also is sinful man not simply and in principle on the receiving end of Gods
mercy.#Mercy was not self-evident to Mary. She was greatly troubled (Luke 1:29) until the
angel comforted her with the good news that the son she would conceive and bear is the Son of
God. Only then was Marys lips unlocked to magnify the Lord, declaring the scope of His mercy
for all who fear him from generation to generation (Luke 1:50). Having received mercy, Mary
was enabled to confess her God and Savior who helps his servant Israel in remembrance of his
mercy, as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and his offspring forever (Luke 1:54-55). It is this
Lord who has According to his great mercycaused us to be born again to a living hope
through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead (I Peter 1:3). Mercy is not self-evident
for sinners; it is not something that the guilty expect. Mercy comes only by Gods doing in the
crib and on Calvary.
Hermann Sasse draws a contrast between Thomas Aquinas assertion that Christ cannot enter
into living communion with a sinner and Luthers statement of the opposite: Christ dwells only
among sinners demonstrating how Luther understands divine mercy: Every page of the NT is
indeed testimony of the Christ whose proper office it is to save sinners (I Tim. 1:15), to seek
and to save the lost (Luke 19:10). And the entire saving work of Jesus from the days he was in
Galilee and, to the amazement and alarm of the Pharisees, ate with tax collectors and sinners, to
the moment when he, in contradiction with the principles of every rational morality, promised
paradise, to the thief on the cross yes, his entire life on earth, from the cradle to the cross, is
one unique, grand demonstration of a wonder beyond all reason: the miracle of divine
forgiveness, of the justification of the sinner. Christ dwells only among sinners.# Advent
announces the arrival of this Christ who makes divine mercy certain for sinners.
Life Together
Advent is about God drawing near to humanity to save and rescue, to reconcile the world to
Himself by the blood of the cross. He gathers into one family, those who were left alone in their
sins-suffering alienation from God and estranged from one another. The imagery for life together
in Advent is Jerusalem, Gods holy Zion where the redeemed are safely gathered around their
Lord. Not forsaken and left desolate in their sin, they are brought to rejoice in the marriage feast
of the Lamb in the New Jerusalem. This is not a community that we create by our will to fight
loneliness but a communion established by the Triune God who has called us to fellowship with
Himself and therefore with one
another in the Gospel.
The Bavarian Pastor Wilhelm Lhe (1808-1872) wrote: The church of the New Testament is no
longer a territorial church but a church of all people, a church which has its children in all lands
and gathers them from every nation. It is the one flock of the one shepherd, called out of many
folds (John 10:16), the universal the truly catholic church which flows through all time and
into which all people pour.# We share a life together which is thicker and deeper than
nationality, ethnicity, or language. Bound together in Christ by a common redemption mediated
by the one Baptism instituted by our Lord we have life together. We hear and confess the same
apostolic Gospel and we eat and drink of the same body and blood in the sacrament of our Lords
new and eternal testament.
Along with Dietrich Bonhoeffers Life Together, Lhes Three Books About the Church is a lucid
exposition of what it means for Christians to live together in that holy community, the church of
Jesus Christ. Pastor Lhe published this classic volume in 1845, the year after his wifes early
death. Certainly his writing is reflective of a heavenly homesickness, no doubt intensified by his
young wifes death which left him in an abiding grief. Yet Lhe knew that this life together we
have in Christ Jesus is not broken by geography or even by death. There is one church that spans
heaven and earth: There is therefore one eternal church, part to be found here and part to be
found in eternity. Here it becomes smaller and smaller; but there it becomes ever larger, for the
yearning, struggling band is always being gathered to its people.From it death shall not
separate me, but death will for the first time bring me to complete enjoyment of love and
fellowship. To it all things draw me and nothing hinders me, whatever it may be. Praise be to
God!#
By Gods grace we are part of this church that Lhe paints with numerous images. One of his
images for the church is a long river that constantly moves from its headwaters to the ocean:
Springing up on Pentecost and Calvary, the church flows through the ages like a river, and that
same river and no other will flow unchangingly on through the ages until that great day when it
will empty completely into the famed sea of eternal blessedness.# Our life together is not based
on human preferences or attractions of particular personalities but in Christ Jesus who has
redeemed us by His blood, called us by His Spirit working through the Gospel, and incorporated
us into His body with the washing of the water with the Word. Jesus Christ is both the source and
end of our life together.
Hidden under the cross, we live trusting in the forgiveness of sins purchased and won at Calvary
and distributed in preaching and the Sacrament. It is this absolution that binds us to Christ, the
friend of sinners and glues us sinners to one another in that holy community which is the church.
We cannot create or engineer our life together it is a gift, unmerited and undeserved of Gods
merciful donation so that sinners are not left utterly alone in their sin. Life together is
jeopardized when it is grounded in anything other than the forgiveness of sins given by Christ
Jesus. This is why we confess in the Catechism that the Holy Spirit in this Christian Church
daily and richly forgives all my sins and the sins of all believers. Advent teaches us how to live
in this church by repentance and faith even as we cry out Come, Lord Jesus in anticipation of
the resurrection of our bodies to eternal life together in Gods eternal Zion.
Prof. John T. Pless
Rev. Dr. Albert B. Collver, Director of Church Relations
