The Motive Is Love: Sermon for Advent 1, November 30, 2025

How many of us remember the old detective series Columbo on TV back in the 1970s?

As a mystery series, it was unique because each show started with the actual murder (always committed by that week's guest star). Then our rumpled detective Columbo, wearing a baggy raincoat, would be introduced to the scene, and we would wonder how he was going to crack the case. He would bumble along slowly in his abnormally calm, questioning manner, always waiting until just before he parted company with a suspect to ask a question.

By the end of the show, our hero the sleuth would reveal to us, piece by piece, the motive that would indict the murderer and solve the case. It seems strange to start a mystery at the end, so to speak, and then loop around, but it was a formula that worked. We know from the start Rather than a "whodunit," this format was called "howcatch'em," because the mystery isn't in who did it, but why they did it, and how they failed to cover their tracks. This formula worked so well that the current shows to follow this formula are Poker Face on the streaming service Peacock, or Elsbeth on CBS.

This is the first week of Advent, the very start of the Church's calendar. Advent is the name for the four weeks before Christmas, and despite all the commercialization that threatens to strip this season of all its religious context, most of us hopefully know that soon we will celebrate the miracle of Jesus's birth, the Son of God becoming human.

If you didn't know this by living in a nominally-Christian culture, the Christmas carols and the inflatable decorations at Menards that have been flung in our faces since October might clue you in-- because despite all the "Winter-Winderland-ing"  and the movie Elf playing on constant repeat and the depictions of Santas EVERYWHERE, this season is, in its essence, centered on a great mystery which is still questioned and debated: why did the Son of God become a human being, and what is the heart of his message of good news?

This first Sunday in Advent always comes so conveniently after Thanksgiving, another commercialized holiday that used to officially launch the season of preparation for Christmas. So if all you knew about the first Sunday of Advent was that it's the beginning of the month leading up to Christmas Day, you would probably expect that our readings would start with beginnings. And, look! our Hebrew scriptures this month will do just that, highlighting the prophecies that predicted the coming of the Messiah. But for our gospel passages, that's trickier-- most obviously because telling the story of Jesus's birth now would then ruin our expectation for Christmas four weeks from now.

In light of the constant bombardment of the season of partying and consumption that leads up to Christmas and the start of a new year, our lectionary this week might confuse by starting with predictions about the end. But we live 2000 years after the events of Jesus life on Earth began. We already know "whodunit"-- that would be God sending God's Son to humanity as our teacher, role model, and Savior. The mystery that begins in this season of Advent, and will continue for the rest of our lives, is why God became human, and what God was attempting to teach us through the life and ministry of Jesus.

We always have to remember that each of the gospels were originally written for a certain group of people in a particular context. Scholars believe that Matthew's gospel, which we will spend most of the coming year hearing, was most likely written for a community of mostly Jewish Christ-followers in Palestine or Syria, probably around the years 80-90 of the Common Era. This date is indicated because the author of Matthew probably used the gospel of Mark and one of their source, and Mark was written after the destruction of the Temple in the year 70 CE.

Matthew's gospel is written to show Jewish Christians at the time why Jesus was not an enemy of the Jewish law, but the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets. Matthew's gospel is even structured in five major parts, just as the Torah consists of five books. In Matthew, Jesus is shown interpreting the Torah, not rejecting it. But this Messiah, though descended from kings, as our portion from Isaiah asserts, is not a military leader or warlord. This Messiah is a teacher, a healer, and a moral guide. Jesus is depicted as the new Moses, leading his people from the slavery of sin into the promised land of eternal life.

These early Christians were the constant targets of violent persecutions-- and so another big question was "how will all this end?" That same question was also important to Jewish people throughout their history as a nation, a nation whose people were often persecuted, conquered, and exiled. And the first and second generations of Christ-followers believed that Jesus would return in their lifetimes-- the so-called "Second Coming" which would end their persecution, take the faithful up into heaven. and declare the victory of Christ over the entire Earth. They believed that they lived in an "in-between" time and they thought they knew what the end would be, but they didn't know when, or how.

For these early Christians, the entire story of Jesus was the story of two arrivals of Jesus. The story of Jesus being born, yes, and the story of Jesus returning and drawing his faithful flock to himself. But they believed, even to the point of death, that Jesus was the Messiah. Jesus's life solved the mystery of who God would send humanity to save us from ourselves, and the fear and jealousies that divide us, arrogant selfishness that too often turns us against each other, the casual cruelties that we use to oppress those we think of as "less-than" or "alien" or "other."

This acknowledgement of the human crisis, and the hope we have in God's call to us to turn away from the ways of death. is something we share with those early Christians, and all true people of faith in every great faith throughout the ages. We know the Christian answer to "whodunit." Our God is a living God, and a loving God, and Jesus is God made human on Earth. The mystery is what Jesus's teachings mean for us today, and what the motive is for God sending Christ to us in the first place.

Did Jesus come to conquer?

Did Jesus come to justify wars, or the political power of his followers, and the oppression of other's in Christ's name?

Did Jesus come to tell us how to take care of ourselves at the expense of others?

Did Jesus come to answer the question of what happens to us in death?

Some people today say yes to these questions. These are also the people who tend to think they have God all sussed out. They think they have solved the mystery.

But others of us are humble enough to know that God is God and we are not. We know far less about God than there is to know about God-- even with Jesus's help and teaching. But examining the prophecies, the birth, the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus, we ask a different question:

Did Jesus come to show us how to live, and not just survive, or endure, but to live life abundantly and generously? If so, how?

As a detective would ask, what's the motive?

When we step back from individual words and verses in the scriptures we have received, and when we see the impact of Jesus our living Savior in our lives today, the motive begins to take shape.

The motive, my beloveds, is love.

Love that focuses our hearts not on ourselves as the first consideration, but on the love of God and love of those around us.

Love that calls us to action to share with God in the revelation of God's love in the world.

Love that fulfills the great prophecies.

Love that gives shape and direction to living a life of purpose and meaning.

Love that is the only way of life, itself.

Love, that we will re-member in four short weeks, that came down at Christmas, and continues to live in the hearts of all who seek God.

Love that offers to solve the mystery of the purpose for our existence as being beyond ourselves into something greater, something grander, something that calls us to play a part in the healing of the world.

The motive is Love. The challenge is to make Jesus's motive our own, today and every day, in all that we do and don't do and say and don't say.

The motive is Love.

Amen.