Texts: John 1:1f, Luke 2:1ff, Hebrews 1:1ff, and Hymn #28
Merry Christmas!
Now, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be always acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen.
Again, I say, Merry Christmas! I say this every year, but Christmas is absolutely my favorite time of year. For many of us, we’ve been in a general Christmas-mode for about a month now. But if you’ve spent much time around Anglicans or other liturgical Christians, you’ll have noticed that we can at times get a bit fussy about differentiating our Advent season of preparation from Christmas proper! Hopefully, that fussiness is usually good-natured! We were in a meeting a few days ago where the priest asked folks to share their favorite Christmas carol. When someone said, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” you can imagine the gentle and friendly ribbing he got for picking an Advent hymn!
But that got me thinking: when does it really feel like Christmas? I mean, we all know that liturgically-speaking, Christmas Eve is when we make the change. But subjectively, personally, when does it finally feel like Christmas? Is it when the tree or lights goes up? Is it when the stores start playing holiday music? Is it the first really cold day? Is it when the kids are off from school? Is it when we do Lessons and Carols? Is the change sudden or gradual?
For me, there’s a very definite moment when it feels like Christmas: the singing of “O Come All Ye Faithful,” particularly when the bass part drops about halfway through the first refrain. For me, that is when Christmas has finally begun.
“O Come All Ye Faithful” is certainly one of the more enduring Christmas hymns. Though we’re certain that it was first written in Latin in the first half of the 18th century, the exact authorship is a mystery. When John Mason Neale was re-introducing ancient Greek and Latin hymnody to the English-speaking world in the late 19th century, he included the hymn in his project, despite the hymn’s late composition. I don’t know if he just assumed it was indeed ancient, or if he liked it so much that he didn’t care that it was relatively new. Though the “O Come All Ye Faithful” is certainly of Roman Catholic origin, these days it is sung by most every denomination, and is included in every hymnal I am aware of.
The English translation we use has been tinkered with over the years, but it’s essentially that of Canon Frederick Oakeley, one of the early Oxford Fathers and a disciple of John Henry Newman. One of my favorite things about old hymns is the way they help us unpack the story of Scripture. Singing hymns is a wonderful method of learning and of applying our theology as we worship our Lord. When we sing all six verses of “O Come All Ye Faithful,” we see allusions to all the major Christmas Gospels, some of the Christmas Epistle texts, the Nicene Creed, and (at least in Oakeley’s translation) our Prayer Book’s version of the ancient canticle Te Deum Laudamus.
So, I thought we’d take some time this evening to look at “O Come All Ye Faithful” a bit closer, and see how it helps shed light on the things we just read and will be reading from our Bibles this Christmas season. You can find the readings beginning on page 96 in your Prayer Book, and the hymn is number 28 in your hymnals.
The hymn opens with the words of the title: “O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant. O come ye, O come ye to Bethlehem.” We’re called to put ourselves in the shoes of the shepherds, sent by the angelic choir to see the newborn baby king in Bethlehem. The fourth verse makes it even more clear that this is the thrust of the hymn’s imagery: “See how the shepherds, summoned to his cradle, leaving their flocks, gather nigh to gaze; we too will thither bend our joyful footsteps.”
When we look at our Gospel text we first encounter the shepherds doing what shepherds do: keeping their sheep. Some historians have surmised that they were keeping the temple’s flocks for the sheep that would be used in the next year’s Passover sacrifice. Others believe they were just ordinary shepherds looking after ordinary sheep. Either way they are initially afraid when they encounter the angel and God’s glory, a pattern we constantly see in the Old Testament. But the angel tells them not to be afraid. The angel tells them that the promised messiah has finally come. This is a message of joy and peace to all people. Yet the humble shepherds are the first to hear the message. Later in the chapter we see that they do indeed go to Bethlehem with great joy.
Back to the first verse of our hymn, we are addressed as the “faithful,” those who have trusted in the Lord God for salvation, for deliverance. Being the faithful certainly doesn’t mean that we’ve been perfect. It doesn’t mean we haven’t sinned and haven’t stumbled. Indeed, that’s why we must trust in the Lord God: we can’t trust in our own strength and righteousness! We cannot save ourselves. But because we are those who are full of trust, full of faith, we are also described as joyful and triumphant. We are joyful because we’ve been given the same messsage of peace and joy as the angels gave to the shepherds. We’re triumphant because with the coming of the promised Messiah, with the birth of our Lord, the World, the Flesh, and the Devil have been dealt a death blow. We must still fight. We must still persevere in the faith. But our triumph is sure. The enemy of our souls is defeated.
The first verse of our hymn concludes: “Come and behold him, born the King of angels.” The angels are another major character in the Christmas story, especially in tonight’s Gospel from St. Luke. Verse three of the hymn sums up their role in the Gospel text: “Sing, choirs of angels, sing in exultation, sing all ye citizens of heaven above; glory to God, all glory in the highest!” The angels in heaven rejoice to see our salvation. They’re not distant and uncaring about God’s people on earth.
Liturgically, we usually sing their song from the Gospel as a thankful response after receiving the sacrament of Holy Communion. But in Advent, our custom is to put away the Gloria in Excelsis as we build the Advent expectation. Tonight, we will bring it back. That Christmas Gloria is always joyful indeed! The angels announced the joy of the Incarnation, and we continue to sing their song in praise to our God.
One of the natural, but wrongheaded, impulses of humans who encounter angels is to worship them as gods. The angels shine with God’s power and glory, and human beings are naturally overwhelmed and awed. Throughout the Old Testament, we see that angelic messengers must stop people, even God-fearing righteous people, from worshiping them. But not always. Every so often the Angel of the Lord (with a capital “a”) shows up and not only speaks for God, but speaks as God and receives worship as God. When looking back at those texts with New Testament, Trinitarian eyes, we see see that those instances are examples of a Theophany, a pre-Incarnation appearance of God the Son, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. Tomorrow’s Epistle passage from Hebrews 1 speaks to this when describing the greater glory and more excellent name of the Lord Jesus compared to the angels:
For unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee? And again, I will be to him a Father, and he shall be to me a Son? And again, when he bringeth in the first-begotten into the world, he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him. And of the angels he saith, Who maketh his angels spirits, and his ministers a flame of fire. But unto the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever: a scepter of righteousness is the scepter of thy kingdom. Thou hast loved righteousness, and hated iniquity; therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.
Not only is the baby in the manger the promised Messiah announced by an angelic choir, but he is the Son of God and God the Son. In that little baby God took on human flesh and came among us. This naturally brings us to the second verse of our hymn: “God of God, Light of Light eternal, Lo! He abhors not the virgin’s womb; very God, begotten, not created.” This is the most profound and theological verse of our hymn. This verse peels back the curtain to show us a glimpse of the true glory and true nature of our Lord Jesus Christ.
If the words seem familiar, they should! They are taken from the Nicene Creed, which we sang just a few minutes ago. The Nicene Creed was penned as the Church’s answer to the question of who Jesus really is. Back in the 4th century, some folks simply couldn’t believe that God would take on human flesh. They couldn’t believe that God would humble himself to become a baby and become one of us. So, they concluded, Jesus must have been some other created being. Perhaps we could call him divine, but of lesser divinity. Not God himself. Our humanity is too low, they thought, too corrupt, to icky, for God to become one of us. In response, the Church gathered all her bishops together and definitively concluded that the message of the Scriptures is indeed that God himself took on our flesh, just as we read in John 1 and Hebrews 1. The Nicene Creed has become the whole Church’s universal summary of the Bible’s teachings on the Holy Trinity and on Christ’s mission to save us.
The importance of this message is that only God himself could bridge the gap. Only God himself could save us from our sins. Only when God takes on human flesh can we have a perfect representative for both God and man in the great Covenant of redemption. And because God the Son took on flesh, we can actually know and love God. Indeed, he has forever taken on flesh. He is now forever one of us. That’s what the incarnation means. Humanity wasn’t too corrupt and icky for God. He abhors not the virgin’s womb. As we read in tomorrow’s Gospel:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. …But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.
What is our response to this mystery? As the last two verses of our hymn say, we are to worship him, to worship this holy child. “Child, for us sinners poor and in the manger, we would embrace thee with love and awe; who would not love thee, loving us so dearly?” Notice that there is no comma after the word, “poor.” When we are born of God, when we become sons of God by receiving the Christ child, we become like him. We become united to him. The child is poor and in the manger. We sinners are also poor and in the manger.
And thus we love him who first loved us. “Yea, Lord, we greet thee, born this happy morning; Jesus to thee be all glory given; Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing; O come let us adore him, Christ the Lord.” We have this amazing feedback loop in our worship! We love him because he loved us so dearly. We greet him and give him glory, who brings us to the Father, enabling us to give more glory, uniting us further to him who unites us further to the Father.
Almost every year there is a moment when we sing “O Come All Ye Faithful” when I get a bit overwhelmed and can’t continue singing for a few moments. Sometimes it’s when Francis brings in the bells on the organ to accentuate the last verse of praise. Sometimes it’s the first time we basses come in on the refrain. I have to pause and regain my composure. The manger and shepherds are such a humble scene. But the glory of God is hidden there. The majesty of our Lord is concealed there. But every year, we get a glimpse behind the curtain in our carols, in the Scriptures we read, in the candlelight. That glimpse of glory is what Christmas is all about. O come let us adore him, Christ the Lord!
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
