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December 9, 2007
2nd Sunday in Advent
Psalm 130
Pastor Joel Zank

Put Your Hope in the LORD!

(Psalm 130)  Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD; {2} O Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy. {3} If you, O LORD, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand? {4} But with you there is forgiveness; therefore you are feared. {5} I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope. {6} My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning. {7} O Israel, put your hope in the LORD, for with the LORD is unfailing love and with him is full redemption. {8} He himself will redeem Israel from all their sins.

In the name of our +Lord Jesus for whom we wait, dear fellow redeemed,

Last week, Pastor Berger used his alarm clock to remind us how hard it can be to face the morning. His words rang true for me. I know how often I wake up at night, stealing a quick glance at the clock and hoping that morning is still a long ways off. Well, I brought his alarm clock back this week to make a slightly different point. While we sleepyheads might want the morning to never come, there are people mentioned in our text who spend the night longing for the first rays of dawn. Who are they? They are Jerusalem’s night watchmen. Picture them on guard atop the high city wall, peering constantly into the darkness. They know very well that night is the enemy’s favorite time to attack. So they can’t afford to sleep even for a second. But their work is so exhausting. Every shifting shadow, every rustling leaf puts the watchmen on red alert. And yet, for all the excitement, minutes pass like hours.  Daylight can’t come soon enough! The watchmen spend their whole night, every night, hoping that morning will come quickly and without incident.

We Christians are a lot like those watchmen. The darkness of sin is all around. The enemy is always ready to attack and overtake us. We must be on guard, but the work is so hard, so exhausting. How will we survive? The psalmist shows us the way. Today he urges you and me: Put your hope in the LORD! For 1)with him is unfailing love; and 2)with him is full redemption.

The psalmist begins, “Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD;” That doesn’t sound good, does it? “The depths” – that brings to mind the picture of a drowning man, but drowning in what? Drowning in sin and the trouble it causes. Maybe this man has had one too many arguments with his wife, and has ruined his marriage. Maybe he’s been lazy at work and has lost his job. Maybe he’s been a grouch and has chased away his very last friend. Maybe he’s cheated on his taxes or his schoolwork, maybe he’s lied to his parents or his children, and now the guilt of it keeps him up at night. It could be any or all of these or a thousand other sins that has this man in the depths. Can you relate to him? I hope so. Because the truth of the matter is, we’re all in the depths with him whether we realize it or not. You see, life doesn’t have to be the pits for you and me to be in the depths. In other words, we don’t have to wait to feel the troubles caused by our sin before we stop and acknowledge that our sin troubles us.

The psalmist teaches us a wonderful prayer here. Whether sin has brought our lives to a crashing halt, or we’re sailing along smoothly, we have reason to pray: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD; {2} O Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy. {3} If you, O LORD, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand?” A record of sins–we know what that is. We keep such records for the people around us–the lies the kids have told, the embarrassing actions of our parents, the loveless words of our spouse. All these we’ve committed to memory and are ready to recite anytime, anywhere. “There you go again!” we charge. “You did that very same thing two months ago last Wednesday!” What a memory we have for such things, and we use it! Because when you can nail it right down to the day, the charge is very convincing.

So, what if, as the psalmist suggests, God were to keep such a record of sins? By the way, the word here for “sin” is actually the word “perversion,” and refers to any deviation whatsoever from the Word and will of God. Think of what this means. From God’s point of view, sin makes people nothing less than perverts. And believe me, with his perfect memory God can recall every time and every way we’ve twisted and violated his commandments to suit our sinful cravings.

So what kind of record do you have? How long is your list of sins? Remember, this includes not just sinful words and actions, but every angry impulse,  every impure notion, every racist view, every selfish thought we have. And that’s not all, our sins consist not just of the bad things we think and say and do, but every failure to think and say and do what is right and loving. In other words, passing by an opportunity to show love or encouragement to our neighbor is as much a perversion in God’s sight as is doing something to harm that person. That makes for quite a list of sins, doesn’t it? Between all the awful things we do and all the nice things we fail to do, if we could somehow manage to keep our rate of sin down to just one per minute, we would still commit more than a million sins every two years, with every one of the those million being enough, in and of itself, to condemn us to hell forever. And still that’s not the end of it, for even if we could find a way to commit no actual sins, if we could be nothing but loving and kind all of the time, we still could not change the fact that we were sinful from the time our mothers conceived us and so were born corrupt and perverted. There’s no way for us to remove this from our record.

We’re a natural spring of sin, flooding our life every day with an ocean of guilt. We are drowning in it all. How can we hope to stand before Holy God and make the case that he should bless us here and one day take us to heaven? What can we do, my friends, but cry out from the depths of our sin and guilt and the shame and plead for God’s mercy: Please, God, don’t treat us as our sins deserve. And what does God say to all this? What does he do? So much more than we could hope for! We might hope that he would go easy on us, cut back bit on the punishment, but instead of simply cutting back, he does not punish at all. How can this be? You hear the same sense of wonder and astonishment in psalmist’s prayer to God, “But with you there is forgiveness; therefore you are feared” (Psalm 130:4). When the psalmist speaks of “fear” he does not mean “terror.” This word might be better translated “to revere or honor.”  Oh and how we have reason to honor our God, because the forgiveness that he shows to us is unlike any other.  He might have said, “I’ll let you off the hook this time, but don’t ever let it happen again!” Friends, given how sinful we are, given how much and how often we sin, we would have used up that kind of mercy before God had even finished announcing it. No, God’s forgiveness is truly unique. He offers full and unconditional pardon for all sins – past, present and future. This is the God who says in Jeremiah 31:34 “...I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”

Have you ever heard anything like it? He who has a perfect memory, the One who could keep the most complete and detailed record of sins, promises to be perfectly forgetful when it comes to all the evil that is in us and that spews from us. Remember that argument you had last week–those awful things you thought and said? You might remember it. Your family and friends might remember it, but God does not. For with him it is truly forgiven and completely forgotten. But will it stay that way? Or will the time come when God has had enough. Will you wear his patience so thin that he finally snaps and gives you the punishment you have coming? Christian, that will never happen. Put your hope in the LORD, for with him is unfailing love–unfailing! The love God has shown you so far, the love he is showing you today cannot help but be there tomorrow to forgive you all over again. This is your hope, hope not in the sense of a wish, but hope in the sense that is what you can look forward to with confidence; you can expect God’s loving forgiveness to go with you to your dying day, because your expectation is built on the unbreakable promises of God’s Word. So says the psalmist: “I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope” (Psalm 130:5).

The idea of waiting on someone implies that he has the knowledge, skill and strength to do what I cannot do for myself. If my car breaks down, I wait on the mechanic to fix it. I don’t know how; I won’t try. Like the psalmist, you and I are waiting on the LORD. The forgiveness we have from him today is a present reality. It is ours right now. We wait on him, that is, we depend on him to show us this same forgiveness tomorrow, and the day after that, and the one after that. Waiting means, we’ll let God do this for us. We won’t try to fix what is broken in our lives by excusing our sin or by justifying ourselves. It won’t work. It can’t work. So in faith, we’ll let God work, as he always does, through his Word and Sacraments. We’ll wait on him and the power of his Word to defend us from the attacks of sin and Satan and free us from guilt. We’ll put our hope in God to bring us through the long and exhausting night of sin. We’ll trust him to keep us his people till he claims us for heaven. And this hope of ours will not be disappointed. Listen again to the psalmist: “O Israel, put your hope in the LORD, for with the LORD is unfailing love and with him is full redemption. {8} He himself will redeem Israel from all their sins” (Psalm 130:7-8).

The words redeem and redemption are key to our Christian hope. The forgiveness that we have from God is not the result of him simply choosing to ignore our sins. God cannot do that. No, he forgives us because we have been redeemed. To redeem means to “buy back from sin.” You have no doubt heard it said that while our forgiveness is free, it was not cheap. It cost the Redeemer dearly. Even though he lived long before Christ, the psalmist understood this. He put his hope in the greatest promise ever made, the promise that God himself would come to redeem Israel and the whole world from sin. A thousand years after the psalmist wrote these words, God kept his promise and sent his own Son to pay sin’s wages. Jesus Christ came down from heaven to join us in the depths of this sinful world. He came to give us the life-saver of his own righteousness, righteousness that lifts us all the way to heaven. He came to take our sins from us, and then, wearing them like cement overshoes, Jesus plunged into the fiery lake of hell. There the wrath of God held him down till the price of every last one of our sins was paid in full. And when it was, our Redeemer had just one thing to say: “It is finished.”  With that he jumped right of that burning lake. How do we know this? He proved it just thee days later by bursting out of the grave too. So you see, God must forgive us, for our sin has been paid by God himself.