Does the season begin today or this past Friday, or even some time earlier? I've been hearing the Christmas music already for a while. On Friday I was out with my brother-in-law, and KKOK was playing Christmas music the whole afternoon. It was Black Friday, so I figured they were going to play lots of Christmas music so it would put people in the mood to buy.

Soon we'll be seeing lots of decorations and the slogans that had been put away for the year will be pulled out again. Jesus is the Reason for the Season. Let's see, I saw one that said, Tis the Season for Believing.

Then the one, "This is the season for giving." It's an admirable thought. With all the gift giving, and receiving, it's easy to think about what we get for Christmas, and focus on what we get. We become crass materialists. What am I going to get? Recognizing that tendency, the saying shifts our eyes from the receiving to the giving, a much healthier and seemingly more godly approach. It's about the giving, our giving. Yes, let's not be selfish. We ought to give.

But the first thought, the one they are trying to change, the one about receiving isn't so bad. What's our problem as Christians when we try to live the Christian life? I'll tell you. We think about what we do. We think the Christian life consists in what we do, how we respond to the Gospel. We think the Christian life is about giving, our giving--our giving to God, our giving to our neighbor. By no means is this bad, but this is not first. In fact, like I said, this is our problem. We want to focus on what we do, rather than on what God does. We are so intent on putting the cart before the horse.

Imagine the scene in the old days when this saying would have meant more. You have people sitting in the horse drawn wagon, turning around and looking at a horse standing behind them. Something is definitely wrong with this picture. There's nothing wrong with the horse. There's nothing wrong with the cart. It's just that they are in the wrong order.

Maybe I shouldn't say we put the cart before the horse. It's more a matter of size. We would put a huge cart behind an itty bitty horse. We have this huge wagon, and then hitch it up to a little Shetland pony. The cart is pulled by the horse. The Christian life is pulled by the Gospel. But we tend to not want to focus that much on the Gospel. We would have just a little bit of Gospel and expect it to pull us and motivate us to trust God and love our neighbor. We'll get through the obligatory Gospel message so we can move on to the Law and talk about what we can do.

Notice, I said what we CAN do. The Gospel says we don't have to do anything. It's all been done for us, but the Law will say what a Christian can do, and we like that. Like hearing it or not, we prefer the Law over the Gospel, because then we don't feel so helpless. It gives us the appearance that we're still in control of our salvation.

Making sure the horse is not only in front of the cart, but that it is bigger than the cart is what the Divine Service is all about. My old professor said it so well in his essay in the front part of the Lutheran Worship hymnal. "Our Lord speaks and we listen. His Word bestows what it says. The rhythm of our worship is from Him to us, and then from us back to Him."

It's all a way of saying, "It's about us receiving." So, I would argue that we are much better saying, "This is the season for receiving," because that is exactly what we are getting ready to do--to receive our Lord, to welcome Him. It's a season of Gospel, not Law. That's why I would rather put a big horse in front of your cart, to make sure when you try to be good stewards, as we will be talking about after the service, or as you will be doing after you leave, you have the horsepower to do it.

Jesus avoids the whole horse and cart thing this morning, by riding on a mule. Wasn't that clever? That was not His intent, though. He makes a different point, but it's still a strong, very strong Gospel point.

Jesus is on His way for the last time to Jerusalem. Our reading brings us to the outskirts of Jerusalem, the beginning of Holy Week. This is the week when He will die for the sins of all humanity. All the prophecies about Him are about to be fulfilled. He comes at Christmas, that is God becomes flesh, for one purpose--to serve us by dying. And that is what He is getting ready to do, as He comes to Jerusalem.

He sends two of His disciples ahead of him to find the donkeys that He is to ride. They are tied up. They are bound. They are not free to roam. They could not even do their master's will, even if they wanted to, because they are tied up.

There's nothing unusual about a donkey being tied up. It would seem stranger if they were just roaming around, walking the streets of the town like its residents, but this detail about them being tied up ties into us. We are like those donkeys. We are tied up.

Just to make this explicit, this is a law message. It's not talking about what we are to do, or what we do. It's what we are. Because of sin, we are tied up. We can't serve our master even if we wanted to.

I'll take this really slowly, because even though this is one of the most basic realities of our situation, we often don't grasp it perhaps because it is just assumed to be understood. By our sinfulness, we are tied up. We are not free to trust God or love our neighbor. We can not do any works that God would actually consider good. Even if we do the right things, because of sin we do them for the wrong reasons.

Here's why I say this: Everything we do is supposed to be done freely and with a joyous heart. It is to be done out of love. Everything is to be motivated out of love. If it's not, we are sinning. We may be doing what appears to be the right thing, but it can't be the right thing if it is done for the wrong reason. To put it plainly, "If it's not out of love, it's sin." For any of our sin, any of it, that is anything that not done out of love, we deserve hell. Now how can something be done out of love, when you have already been told you are damned? How can you love someone who is threatening you? When we have the threat of eternal punishment, how could anything we do possibly be free? It's not. Do you see how we're like the tied up donkeys?

Jesus comes to set us free. He unties the donkeys, and He unties us. He unties us by fulfilling the Law's demands. We can't love when we are threatened with hell, therefore we can't do anything but sin. So He removes the threat of hell from each of us, by taking its punishment Himself. This is what He has come to do. This is why this is the season for receiving, because He has come to give us freedom. He has come to set us free. Here in the Divine Service, that theme continues as He gives us freedom in His Word spoken in the absolution, which brings us the payment He made so we would be free, and He gives it to us in His Supper, as we are given the very body and blood that was the price.

But having felt nothing but futility because no matter what we do, it's still going to be sin, and then being set free as we are in the Divine Service, we still don't feel free. Our lives don't look like we are free.

If we are truly free, if we are truly a new creation in our baptism, then it should figure that everything we do ought to be god pleasing. But we know that is not true. We try to do good, but we don't. We try not to do bad, but we do. It's frustrating. It's infuriating. It's depressing. We might even come to the conclusion that we might as well just sin and ask for forgiveness afterward since we are going to sin anyway. But that's not right either. We are treating forgiveness as though it were giving us permission to sin. Now, that's just plain wrong. We take a nonchalant approach to sin, because we don't consider what are its consequences, that in order to remove it, God had to die, and that if He didn't, we ought to. But when we do consider sin's consequences, when we do realize that God had to die so we didn't, then we get really frustrated that we keep on doing it, that we keep on sinning.

That's when the donkeys are a message of Gospel. No, not just because they are untied, like we were talking about before, but because they are donkeys. Donkeys are symbols of peace. Horses are symbols of war. You don't want a symbol of more war, when you already feel you are at war, and you yearn to be given peace.

Jesus has come to bring peace, peace when our souls are stressed out from trying to do the right thing and finding we do only the wrong. His peace is to say, "I know you. I know what you are made of. You are not capable of doing only the right things as much as you may try, so you don't have to stress out over it. I have taken care of it all. I don't even see the sin that is stressing you out. It is covered by my righteousness. This is the peace that He intends all to know who are stressed out by their sin and their sinfulness.

Hopefully you see the difference between the person who treats forgiveness as permission to sin, and the one who finds peace in the Gospel. To the one who is stressed out and is seeking peace, the Divine Service is a glorious medicine, and the message that Jesus has come to bring peace, news that seems too good to be true, and yet is definitely true.

As Jesus rides the donkeys and comes down the road toward the city gate, He is greeted by people shouting Hosannas. Hosanna means "Save us." It was the cheer that was reserved for the Messiah. Most said it, because they figured He was the Messiah, and they were tired of the Romans ruling over them. They figured He was going to set Israel free, and so "save us," sounded right. But they didn't realize how right it was. "Save us," meant more than the people realized, just like the donkeys had no idea they were a symbol of peace or that being untied pointed to our freedom.

"Save us." This is what we say when we have heard the Law spoken to us. When we have heard the Law say what we have been hearing the Law say to us today, we are left without any excuse. We have nothing to say in our defense. We don't say, "Everyone else does it." We don't say, "You'll just have to take me the way I am." We don't say, "This is the best I can do." We say only one thing, "Have mercy on me, a sinner." We say what the people lining the streets that Sunday had said, "Save us! Save us, because we are nothing but lousy sinners, and our only hope is in your mercy."

And again the Divine Service is the answer to our plea. "Save us, Lord." And He responds, "I already have at the cross, and I bring to you all I gained in my victory on the cross. Eat my body; drink my blood. I give it to you as further forgiveness, as the mercy you seek and for which you have been crying."

So, you see, this season is all about receiving. It's a time for us to give to others, yes, but it's much more about receiving. It's a season of Gospel not Law, of Him giving to us much more than we could ever give to Him. It's a season to welcome Jesus as He comes to us.

AMEN