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[00:00:00] Good morning, St. Paul Lutheran Church. Ooh, it's getting close to Christmas, but it's still Advent. Although I think, you know, it's like. It's like you're in the backyard of your Advent house and Christmas keeps looking over the fence. That's really how this Sunday is. It's the Sunday drive to Church for December 22, Year of our Lord 2024, where Mary visits Elizabeth. So the baby Jesus in the womb visits the baby John the Baptist in the womb. And he's leaping and preaching with his feet kicking, Mary kicking Elizabeth saying, hey, this the Messiah who's here? This is so fantastic. A riddle in the epistle lesson. I think I'll preach on that. A prophecy in the Old Testament lesson. The theme of repentance in the psalm that we have. There's so much here. And we're going to sing Advent hymns that seem like Christmas hymns, especially O Come oh come Immanuel, which is anyway, what a great Sunday. So let's start with a prayer. Remember we mentioned that the collects for Advent are pretty unique. There's the three Stir up. Stir up your power, O Lord, and come. There's three of the four colics are addressed to Jesus, which is unique. Most probably 90% of the colics are addressed to God the Father, but not in Advent.
[00:01:12] We're back to that pattern of not being on pattern with a stir up colic directed to Jesus with this, the last of the Advent prayers. Let's pray. Stir up your power, O Lord in common. Help us by your might that the sins which weigh us down may be quickly lifted by your grace and mercy. For you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
[00:01:41] Psalm 80 is our Psalm and we have the first seven verses of that psalm. I'm flipping over to it and oh, it's not in the old hymnal. I got to get the new hymnal. I guess I could just get a Bible One second. That's always an interesting thing to me. You know, the hymnals don't have all the psalms. I would bet that our next hymnal will have all the psalms. For some reason, current hymnals don't. I always think that they're probably the same. I never have looked at the comparison list, but I had TLH, the old hymnal open on my desk. TLH has Psalm 77 and then skips to Psalm 82. LSB has Psalm 77, then 80 and 81 and skips 82 and goes straight to 84. So that's interesting. Anyway, the first seven verses of Psalm 80 are our opening psalm. It's an interesting thing to look at the whole psalm together, because there's a building refrain in this psalm, and it's verse three, verse seven, and at the end, verse 19. So I'll just read those three verses, and you can listen to verse three. Restore us, O God, let your face shine that we may be saved. Verse 7. Restore us, O God of hosts. Let your face shine that we may be saved. And then verse 19. Restore us, O Lord, God of hosts, Let your face shine that we may be saved. So the structure of this psalm is this building refrain, this prayer for restoration. So we have the first two of the three stanzas there, and turn us, or restore us, or repent us, or grant us repentance. This is what's going on here. And this is, for me, the chief text. When our friends who are free will theologians want to say that repentance is our work, we turn to Psalm 80 and we see no repentance is worked by God. He's the one who repents us. We can't even say it in English. We don't have that as a reflective verb or whatever, but it's God who is giving us this gift of repentance. Give ear, O shepherd of Israel. You who lead Joseph like a flock, you who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth. That's the picture of the Lord sitting in the temple in the Holy of Holies and radiating his glory before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh. Stir up your might and come to save us. So that's the tribes that are in the north. Restore us, O God. Let your face shine that we may be saved. And I think just to sort of reflect on that little picture that the. The Lord's shining face, which is the goal of every divine service, that's the telos. That's what we're pushing for, that the Lord would make his face shine upon us and be gracious to us. That's how every liturgy ends with that blessing from Numbers, chapter six. That the priest would speak. We get to hear it every Sunday. That the Lord's face would shine upon us. That's our understanding of grace and mercy. This was a big deal with the debate between the Roman theologians and the Lutheran theologians. And they wanted grace to be understood as almost a substance that could be infused. And the Lutheran said, no. Grace is how the Lord's face looks at us. Is the Lord smiling at us, or is the Lord frowning at us? That's how we understand grace. Okay? Micah is our Old Testament lesson. Micah, chapter five, the Bethlehem Promise.
[00:05:22] There's so many little riddles here. You, O Bethlehem, Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me, one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient of days.
[00:05:41] Okay? There's so many things just in that one little verse too. The first is that it says that the Messiah, the Promised One, is going to be born in Bethlehem, like David. Remember, David also was from Bethlehem. Bethlehem is, I don't know, four or six miles outside of Jerusalem. It's a suburb of Jerusalem. It's in the hills outside of Jerusalem. So it was covered with flocks. And Bethlehem was really unique because it had all these hills. Sorry, all these caves in the hills. So you can still go in the hills outside of Bethlehem and see all these caves everywhere. And from ancient times, the shepherds would. Would keep their flocks out in the hills at night, which is really unique. Normally you would bring the sheep back into town, lock them up in the pen, pay the high school kid to stay up all night looking after them, then take them out in the morning to find some pasture, lay them down by the green cool, still waters on the green grass, etc. But in Bethlehem, you could keep the flocks out closer to the fields because there was all these little caves in the hills. You could kind of lock the sheep up in there and sit out, camp out in front of them, which is what happens for the shepherds in the birth of Jesus, when they're out in the fields at night. Weird. But that's because they're in Bethlehem and the angels can appear to them and sing their great hymn. So here the promise is from you, Bethlehem, and it says, you are too little to be among the clans of Judah. When the.
[00:07:10] You remember when the wise men come to Herod and say, where is the Messiah supposed to be born? And he goes and asks the scribes, and they say Bethlehem. And they quote the text. They leave out the too little or they add a not, you're not too little.
[00:07:23] And why is that not in there? That not in there is probably because of this promise. In other words, Bethlehem is this tiny little out of the way town, but because it has this promise, it's elevated in glory and it's talking about the Messiah being born in Bethlehem. But then look what it says. Whose origin is from of old, from ancient of days. That's the kind of riddle that gets us going At Christmas. How can he be born in Bethlehem and also be from ancient of days?
[00:07:57] It says in verse 3, therefore he shall give them up until the time when she who is in labor has given birth, so that there's a birth that's happening. And the one who's born is going to be from ancient days.
[00:08:12] So good. I mean, we know that we can sort out the riddle with the two natures. He's born according to his human nature. He's eternal according to his divine nature. And so in this one singular person, Jesus Christ, we have both a birthday and an eternality brought together in the mystery of the incarnation and the two natures.
[00:08:34] That's amazing. And then not only does is his birth prophesied, but his resurrection is prophesied. I think that's what's happening in verse 4. And he shall stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God, and they shall dwell secure. This is now the promise for us. For he shall be great to the ends of the earth, and he shall be their peace. So I take that standing in verse four. Not everybody does, but I take that standing in verse four to be a prophecy of the resurrection of Jesus.
[00:09:07] He's laid down in the grave, and then he stands on the third day, and he stands in order to shepherd the flock, to be our good shepherd. Beautiful Micah, chapter five. Then Hebrews, chapter 10. We've studied Hebrews on Sunday morning in chapter 13.
[00:09:24] Today when you get there to church, some of you are coming straight to Sunday school.
[00:09:30] Hebrews, chapter 13. We got a couple of weeks to try to finish Hebrews 13 and get to this Bible study on prayer that I'm so excited about. But remember that Hebrews starts chapter one a little bit in chapter two. It has all these quotations from the Divine council about how the Father speaks to the Son.
[00:09:51] Today you are my Son, today I've begotten you. Psalm 2. Sit here at my right hand till I make your enemies your footstool. Psalm 110 and so forth. All these quotes from the Psalms. In Hebrews chapter 10, it quotes Psalm 40, which is not the Father talking to the Son, but rather the Son talking to the Father.
[00:10:12] When Christ came into the world, he said, Psalm 40. Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you prepared for me in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure then I said, behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is written of me in the scroll of the Book.
[00:10:32] There are actually A handful of riddles in this text, and I think I'm going to preach about them. So maybe I don't want to say too much about them here, but if you go back and look at the original Psalm 40, it says, an ear you have given me. Or even in the Hebrew, literally, you've carved an ear for me. But here it's a body you've prepared for me, and here, the prepared body of the Messiah. So this is Jesus, the Son of God, talking to God the Father, and he says, you've given me a body. And that is in contrast to the burnt offerings and the sacrifices.
[00:11:09] And that is pretty amazing. In other words, Jesus is saying to the God the Father, you don't want all these rams and bulls and goats, but you've given me a body.
[00:11:22] And that body is for the purpose of sacrifice.
[00:11:27] Oh, boy. It's pretty amazing. I mean, this is the question of why Jesus needed a body. And it's probably one of the problems of orthodoxy is, is they see the incarnation as an end in itself, whereas the scripture looks at the incarnation that the eternal Son of God is in our flesh and blood as a means to an even greater end, which is the reconciliation of man with God. Again, we'll talk. What a text. We'll talk about that tomorrow. Okay. And then Luke, Chapter one. The visit of Mary to Elizabeth. In those days, Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country to a town in Judah. She entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. So remember that Mary is probably in Bethlehem, but she's going up north to visit Elizabeth. And she heard the greeting of Mary. The baby leapt in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why is it granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.
[00:12:47] Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord. There's so many things here. Number one, we have our doctrine of Mary, which is that even though we confess that Mary was sinful, like every human being, all have fallen short of the glory of God. All, except for Christ, are stained with original sin. And yet Mary was blessed. She was the one chosen by God to bear the Christ child in her womb to be the mother of God according to the unity of the two natures in the person of Christ that we call Mary the Mother of God, by the way, is part of our dogma or doctrine. It's not necessarily about Mary. It's more against the Nestorians. So Nestorius was an ancient heretic who kept this clear distinction between the two natures, divine and human natures. And so he was always talking about things like, well, Mary is the mother of the human nature of Christ. Mary is. The human nature suffers, the human nature dies. And so he denied the union of the two natures in the singular person. And the way that the church kind of would ask this question, they would say to the Nestorians, who is Mary? And that's the answer they'd give, the mother of the human nature of Christ. Whereas the orthodox Christians have always entered Mary is the mother of God according to the unity of the persons. The death of Jesus is the death of God. The blood of Jesus is the blood of God.
[00:14:25] And we can speak this way again because of the profound unity of the two natures in the incarnation.
[00:14:32] So Mary is blessed, and all generations call her blessed.
[00:14:36] The second thing that's confessed in this text is that the baby is the Lord.
[00:14:41] So Elizabeth, blessed with this wisdom from the Holy Spirit, says, why is it granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?
[00:14:49] That's an amazing thing, that to be ruled by a baby, to be older than your God, that's. That's what Mary and Elizabeth are. And yet it's this confession that the baby in the womb is the Lord, the ruler of all. And then this great comfort, I think, for so many families, especially those families who have lost children before they've been born and wondered if they could believe and be saved and so forth, this is such a great comfort that John the Baptist, even as a baby in the womb, hears the greeting of Mary and leaps for joy and preaches with his feet kicking in the womb of Elizabeth, saying, I trust also with you in this God incarnate in my aunt's womb.
[00:15:47] That's amazing. So amazing.
[00:15:51] And blessed is she who believe forth. Blessed is she who believe there be a fulfillment of what was spoken her from the Lord, that all this was accomplished according to the Lord's Word. Even the Incarnation was accomplished by the Word. So there's these great sermons where Luther would say that Mary became pregnant with Christ because the Word entered her ear and then Christ was in the womb. And I think the same thing. Well, not the same thing, but something similar happens also with us. When the Word is preached, it goes into our ear and it lodges itself in our heart so that Christ, as Ephesians says, dwells in our heart by faith. What an absolutely phenomenal, phenomenal promise. The hymn of the day. Oh boy, so much. O come o comma manual 357.
[00:16:41] This is one of the few hymns. Oh, this is interesting. It's one of the few hymns that has more stanzas than in the LSB than it did in tlh. I think there's only four in tlh, but this is a. A wonderful old hymn that gathered up all the different prophetic names of Jesus and kind of piles them up one after another after another. And it's in that way the perfect Advent hymn. So stanza one. O come, oh come, Immanuel. That's from Isaiah, chapter seven, where the Lord was promised the virgin will conceive and give birth to a child, and he will call his name Emmanuel. God with us. O come thou wisdom from on high. Thinking of Proverbs, chapter 8. O come, thou Lord of might.
[00:17:28] That's kind of everywhere, but specifically it's talking about Sinai. Who to the tribes on Sinai's height in ancient times didst give the law and cloud and majesty and awe, so that Christ was there on Mount Sinai in the pillar of fire by day and the pillar of.
[00:17:45] Pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night.
[00:17:49] The angel of the Lord.
[00:17:52] That's Jesus. Verse 4. O come thou branch of Jesse's tree. That's the root from the stump of Jesse promise that comes up over and over again. That great promise where, remember, the Lord says, well, I can still make a branch for you. I can chop you down and still make a branch. Oh, come now, Key of David. Come. That's also from Isaiah. Oh, come thou day, spring from on high. That's probably from Micah, Malachi, and maybe even the Balaam prophet.
[00:18:20] Balak. Balaam. Balaam's prophecy. Oh, come. Desire of nations. That's from. Where's the desire of nations Is from Micah. I should look that up. I didn't have to look it up. I have it written on my notes. Because in the hymnal. This is interesting. In the hymnal, on the page that's looking at O come, O come Emanuel. It says the great. O Antiphons. Now, there's a long history to this. Let me tell you what I know. It won't take that long because I don't know that much. But for each season, when you have matins, vespers, there's various antiphons that you can use that come before the psalmody. And there was a special set of antiphons that were appointed in ancient times for the days leading up to Christmas. So it looks like here there's seven of them starting on December 17th and going all the way to December 23rd. And it looks like a lot of these parallel with the stanzas from O Come O Kamanual, these great o antiphons. So December 17th, O Wisdom. Look, I've got the verses written down here. Isaiah 11, 2 Proverbs 8:12, Dec. 18 O Adonai, Exodus 3:20 and 6:6, Dec. 19 O root of Jesse, that's Isaiah 11:10 and quoted in Romans 15:12, Dec. 20 O key of David. That's Isaiah 22:22, quoted in Revelation 3:17 O dayspring O orans, that's Job 38, Luke 1, Isaiah 9. And then O King of nations, ruler, they long for the cornerstone uniting thy people desire of nations. That's Isaiah 28:16, Psalm 2, Psalm 118, 22, and Isaiah 64, verse 8. And then the last one, O Emmanuel, Isaiah 7:14.
[00:20:20] And the interesting thing for these.
[00:20:25] So this makes a riddle.
[00:20:27] I don't know how much we. I'll tell you what the riddle is. If you take the Latin for the various O antiphons, it's Sapienta adonai, radix, clavisorans Rex and Immanuel. It makes S, A R, C O R.
[00:20:46] And if you put that backwards, you get aro crass, which means I will be present tomorrow, apparently in Latin. And so it became this kind of ancient embedded riddle in the liturgy driving up to the joy of Christmas Day. And that's all kind of on the page. So when you look at O Come, O come Emmanuel, and you. And you're looking at the, at the page that's staring it down on the other side, you'll see those great O antiphons. And that's what's going on over there. You know what? Maybe I'll. I'll try to take a picture of.
[00:21:26] Of this page where I have all my notes and send it out in my See a Sunday see you tomorrow email too. So that's really cool. So this old tune that's keying off of the even older tradition of these O Antiphons, that's all leading up to the celebration of our Lord Jesus Christ. There's so much stuff. So again, today is. It's like our neighbor Christmas. He's looking over the fence. He's going to be here soon and just in a few days. Just think it's Monday, then Tuesday, Christmas Eve already, and then Wednesday, Christmas day and the celebration not only of the incarnation of Jesus, but the birth of the nine month incarnate Jesus in Bethlehem. And we rejoice with the angels and the shepherds that this is also for us. All right, there's your Sunday drive to church. We'll see in a few minutes. God's peace be with.