Grace and peace to you in the name of Jesus Christ, who has come to make us clean. Amen.

Lord Jesus Christ, Shepherd of the Church, in the waters of Baptism you have given us new life, and at your table you nourish us with the food of salvation. Lead us along safe paths through the darkness of this world, dispel the terrors of death, and bring us at last to your house, where you dwell with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

New Testament holidays—at least the way that we celebrate them—aren’t nearly as much fun as Old Testament ones were. Easter is the biggest festival of our church year, and the week leading up to it will be full of special services and activities here at church and at home. Children will color eggs, and parents will hide them. Easter baskets will be filled with candy. There’ll be special services and an Easter breakfast.

This is a big holiday. But our celebration pales in comparison to Old Testament holidays. Old Testament holidays included trumpet blasts and scapegoats and bringing lambs into your home and treating them like pets. But not one holiday was more engaging—more fun—than the festival that we’re considering tonight. Jewish people call it Sukkot, which is the Hebrew word for huts, or lean-tos. We know it better as the Feast of Tabernacles, or the Festival of Booths. The key feature of this holiday was a weeklong camp out in your yard. Wouldn’t your kids love that? This was a joyous feast. But like all the commands of the Old Covenant, there was much more to this feast than the outward trappings. Even this camp out was a picture of Christ. What do we see in this Feast of Tabernacles? We see Jesus giving us eternal life.

The Feast of Tabernacles was one of three primary Jewish celebrations, which are often called the pilgrim festivals. On these three holidays, all adult males traveled to God’s sanctuary, ultimately in Jerusalem. All Israelites were to live in tabernacles, or huts, for seven days. They were supposed to enjoy the fruits of the harvest and God’s blessings. Today observant Jews still practice Sukkot, usually in mid-October. They still construct their shelters, even though most of them don’t actually sleep in them anymore. Of all the great festivals of the Old Testament, this is probably one of the least familiar to us. But the Israelites showed its importance during the Old Testament period. Every seven years, at this festival, the entire Law of Moses was supposed to be read to the people. King Solomon chose this festival to dedicate his temple.

Moses told them to celebrate it for generations to come "so your descendants will know that I had the Israelites live in booths when I brought them out of Egypt. I am the Lord your God" (verse 43). Moses gave this command at Mount Sinai. It took God’s people three months to travel from Egypt, where God had freed them from slavery, to Mount Sinai. They stayed at Mount Sinai about a year. For that time, the people were living in tabernacles. This holiday was to celebrate escape from slavery and moving into the Promised Land of freedom. For the next 1,500 years, God wanted his people to celebrate leaving Egypt for the Promised Land. God built into this feast a call to faith in his promises that reached far beyond just living in Palestine.

This celebration emphasized God’s love for his people. Moses says, "On the first day you are to take choice fruit from the trees, and palm fronds, leafy branches and poplars, and rejoice before the Lord your God for seven days" (verse 40). We have to admit that it’s difficult to say absolutely what all these plants really were. But it is clear that they were not desert scrub. They were plants with large leaves and fruit—plants that needed water to grow. God’s people decorated their booths not with the materials of their journey but with the materials of their destination. The booths pointed to God’s grace in bringing his people home.

This festival was a picture of Christ. It was a prophecy of the people of God on their journey home. In the last decade or two, celebrating a Christian Passover has become popular in many Christian congregations. But I’ve never heard of a Christian Feast of Tabernacles. Yet spending a week in a tent would be a wonderful illustration of what the Christian life is really about. We are on a journey. Our destination is heaven. While we’re on the way, we rejoice in God’s love. Above all, we rejoice in where we’re going.

It isn’t easy to live in this world. People we love die. People we care about get sick. We lose jobs; we lose friends. All those things happen because sin has wrecked this world. It should eternally destroy us. But it hasn’t, because Jesus has undone our sin. He’s freed us from sin’s curse forever. Now we’re going home. We know that because God poured the Holy Spirit into our hearts through Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. That means that no matter how hard the sins in our hearts try to blur it, God keeps our destination in focus. The promise of our arrival is a constant source of joy.

An old missionary couple had been working in Africa for years and were returning to New York to retire. They had no pension; their health was broken; they were defeated, discouraged, and afraid. They discovered they were booked on the same ship as President Teddy Roosevelt, who was returning from one of his big-game hunting expeditions. No one paid any attention to them. When the ship docked in New York, a band was waiting to greet the President. The mayor and other dignitaries were there. The papers were full of the President’s arrival. No one noticed this missionary couple as they slipped off the ship.

That night the old missionary’s spirit broke and he said to his wife, "Something is wrong. Why should we have given our lives in faithful service for God in Africa all these many years and have no one care a thing about us? Here this man comes back from a hunting trip and everybody makes much over him, but nobody gives two hoots about us. God isn’t treating us fairly." His wife replied, "Why don’t you go in the bedroom and tell that to the Lord?" A short time later he came out from the bedroom, but now his face was completely different. His wife asked, "Dear, what happened?" He said, "The Lord settled it with me. I told Him how bitter I was that the President should receive this tremendous homecoming, when no one met us as we returned home. And when I finished, it seemed as though the Lord put His hand on my shoulder and simply said; "But you’re not home yet."

We are going to home heaven. What do we see in this Old Testament festival? We see Jesus, who gives us eternal life. That’s what Christian lives are all about.

The Feast of Tabernacles was a celebration of God’s love. Most of it was engaging and exciting and even fun. Building those shelters was at least as much fun as setting up a Christmas tree. Sleeping and eating in them gave families a chance not only to be together but to come together around the Word as they recalled how God led their ancestors through the wilderness. The great assemblies on the first and the eighth days were mass worship services, with prayers and psalm singing. But there was one major part of this celebration that has no parallel in our holiday celebrations: the blood and the gore.

Even on this joyful holiday, the Old Covenant could never escape from blood. Our text mentions it only briefly. But Moses goes into more detail in Numbers 29 where he spells out the offerings for each day of this festival. During those eight days they offered 71 bulls, 15 rams, 105 lambs, and 8 goats. And with each offering the priest laid his hands on the head of the animal and killed it and sprinkled its blood in the tabernacle. Each offering included atonement for the sins of the people. If you had been there, you would have seen the priests splattering gallons of blood on the altar to symbolize paying for your sins. To butcher and completely burn 199 animals in eight days on one altar, this must have gone on from sun up until sun down. When you woke up, when you slept, when you ate, you would’ve smelled it. At times your eyes would’ve watered with smoke. All of that would have reminded you of what we see every time we come together this year during Lent: it takes blood to make us right with God. The celebration of homecoming demanded an enormous amount of blood. For God’s people to get home to heaven requires Jesus’ blood.

The confession of sins in our liturgy simply doesn’t have the same gut-wrenching impact as the constant repetition of blood and fire and smoke. But our sin is just as real as the Israelites’ was. Do we want our pastors to adopt the kind of "in your face" approach to sin that God built into every aspect of Old Testament worship? It’s never pleasant to hear about our own sin. And there’s a part of us that twists and turns every time it comes up. There’s a part of us that compares our Lutheran preoccupation with sin to the "feel good" message of the massive, nondenominational churches of our day and says, "We should be more like them!" But at the festival of joy that rounded out the Jewish high holy days, God drenched his people in their sins.

Tonight when we reflect on this Jewish holiday, it’s only natural for us to examine our devotion to God, because love for God is the fulfillment of his law. Would we be willing, year after year, to dedicate a full week of our vacation to a church celebration? Would we be willing to travel great distances, not to visit family and friends but to be in church for the holidays? God does not demand that we New Testament believers observe any holiday. But he does demand that our hearts be totally dedicated to him every day of our lives, from the moment we wake up in the morning until the moment we go to bed at night.

God never says that we must be in church every Sunday or every Wednesday in Lent. But he does say that worshiping him is to be at the heart of our existence, because he comes first in our lives. Does he? Always? Aren’t we all guilty of putting him in second place at least sometimes? Now some of you might be saying to yourselves: "Come on, Pastor, be reasonable. We don’t get to sit in our study and think about church all day every day. We have real lives and real jobs. And we’re the ones who did made it here tonight. Save your speech for someone who needs it." You are here. But God isn’t "reasonable." He calls himself a jealous God who insists on total, unflinching, lifelong devotion from us. Anything less, he says, deserves hell.

Our limited devotion is idolatry in God’s eyes. It should send us to hell. But it doesn’t, because God sent Jesus there instead. Jesus suffered hell on the cross when God abandoned him there. Jesus shed his blood and died to pay for our sin. He rose to give us the eternal life that we are celebrating this evening. And God drenched this holiday with blood to teach his people where to find true joy: in Jesus, in his horrible sufferings and triumphant resurrection. Those things give us eternal life. This holiday is about eternal life.

At the end of the Old Testament, God sent the prophet Zechariah, who looked forward to heaven as he saw all nations gathered in Jerusalem to worship God. Do you know what he saw them doing? Celebrating the Feast of Tabernacles.

Now that was a vision. It doesn’t literally mean that we will live in Jerusalem after Christ returns. It doesn’t even mean that we’ll build huts and live in them for a week. But it does mean that we will experience the reality that this shadow looks forward to; we will live with Jesus forever. We will celebrate the journey from hell to heaven. We won’t weep over the sin that dragged us down or over the sorrow that plagued our lives. We will rejoice because Jesus is greater than our sin, greater than our sorrow. He brought us up out of hell and gave us eternal life. That’s what his life was for. That’s really what Moses wrote about. What do we see in this festival? We see Jesus giving us eternal life. That’s what Jesus’ life was all about.

Holidays are supposed to be memorable. But as much as we enjoy family time, as much as we remember the looks in our children’s eyes and seeing Grandma and Grandpa again, what’s truly memorable in our church holidays is Jesus. That’s whom we see in this festival tonight. Rejoice because he has given you eternal life! Amen.

May the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, equip you with everything good for doing his will, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen. (Hebrews 13:20-21)