"If A Puppy Were Born There Would Be Some Little Stir..."

Martin Luther’s has some fine sermons on Christmas, and some of his finest are collected in Martin Luther’s Christmas Book, edited by Roland Bainton.

This passage about the Wise Men coming to Jerusalem jumped out to me this morning, perhaps because we have a new puppy in the house:

When the Wise Men received the divine revelation that the king of the Jews was born, they made straight for Jerusalem, for, of course, they expected to find him at the capital in a lordly castle and a golden chamber. Where else would common sense expect to find a king? But because they were so sure of themselves, the star left them. Then they were sorely tried, and had they relied solely on human wisdom, would surely have said: "Confound it! We have come all this way for nothing. The star has deceived us. The devil has led us by an apparition. If a king had been born, would he not be in the capital and in a palace? But when we come, the star disappears and we find no one who knows anything about him. Can it be that we foreigns should be the first to have news of him in the royal city? Everyone is so cold and unfriendly that no one offers to go with us and show us the child. They do not believe themselves that to them a king is born, and shall we come and find him? How desolate for the birth of a king! If a puppy were born there would be some little stir, and here a king is supposed to be born and everything is so still. One of our shepherds makes more fuss over the birth of a babe, and when a cow calves more people know about it than have heard of this king. Should not the people be singing, capering, lighting lamps and torches, bedecking the streets with roses and mayflowers? What a miserable king we are seeking! What fools we have been to let ourselves start on this quest!"

Nature wants to feel and be certain before believing, but grace will believe before she feels. Faith steps gaily into the darkness, trusting simply in the Word.

—Martin Luther's Christmas Book, p. 50 - 51.

The Old Testament Background to Christmas

Please join us for our 15th Annual Festival of Lessons and Carols
December 12th at 5:00 pm

Since 1918, it has been the tradition to hold a festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at Kings College Cambridge, on Christmas Eve.

It is a service of surpassing beauty and power. This is due in part to the setting of Kings College Chapel, an architectural gem with perhaps with the finest stained glass and choral acoustics known to the world. It is due in part to the glorious singing of the choir, which is likewise world-renowned.

But it is finally due to the surpassing power of the service itself, a power that is derived from its simplicity. Nine lessons are read straight from the scriptures, four from the old testament, five from the new, with appropriate carols interspersed, and a simple opening and closing prayer. 

Listen to the classic lines of the opening prayer, which capture the force of the event:

Belovèd in Christ, be it this Christmas Eve our care and delight to prepare ourselves to hear again the message of the angels: in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, and with the shepherds and the wise men adore the Child lying in his Mother's arms.

Let us read and mark in Holy Scripture the tale of the loving purposes of God from the first days of our disobedience unto the glorious Redemption brought us by this Holy Child; and in company with the whole Church let us make this chapel, dedicated to his pure and lowly Mother, glad with our carols of praise, etc. 

The Nine Lessons are powerful, because they underline the simple truth that the story of Christmas begins in the Old Testament. We understand the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ as Good News — the Gospel — only when we enter into the experience of those longsuffering Jews who had been waiting so many generations for their deliverer, when we hear the message of the angels as Mary heard it, as Zechariah and Elizabeth heard it, as the shepherds heard it. 

When Christmas is untethered from the Old Testament, from the covenantal promises it fulfilled, is when it is most susceptible to the empty, romantic notions that typify the holiday celebration of not only our broader culture, but of far too many Christmas sermons. You know the list of themes that are comfortably conveyed in Christmas cards: Joy, Peace, Love. It is not enough to insist that Jesus is the reason for the season, if all he is merely a symbol of love, peace, and joy. Yet, in a day of great and growing biblical illiteracy, even in the church, this is what we are too often left with.

That the story of Christmas — the Gospel itself — begins in the Old Testament is abundantly clear from each of the Four Gospels, which each present the coming of the Son of God as the fulfillment of the Old Testament in their own, distinctive way.

• John begins his story of the incarnation of the Word “in the beginning,” establishing his roots in the opening verses of Genesis.

• Mark announces “the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” by quoting the prophet Isaiah, and describing the ministry of John the Baptist, the voice crying in the wilderness preparing the way of the Lord.

• Matthew begins with a genealogy, which causes the eyes of many modern readers to glaze over with the likes of Amminadab, Nahshon, Jeconiah, Shealtiel, and Eliakim. But to the Jew, or the knowing Christian, this genealogy of the Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham conjures in a few quick penstrokes the entire sweep of Old Testament history, and more importantly, the tale of the loving purposes of God as expressed in the covenants made with Abraham, and David, and kept by the Lord through the exile, and through the many generations. Count them, three groups of fourteen, six sevens, with the seventh seven, the sabbath of sabbaths, coming in Christ.

• And likewise, Luke, the researcher, the chronicler, the historian. A gentile convert, Luke’s Gospel leaves little doubt that he was catechized into a thorough understanding of the Old Testament, and that the Apostle Paul, with whom he traveled, proclaimed Jesus as the righteous seed, long ago promised to Abraham.

Luke’s telling of the birth of Christ is both more historical, and more narrative and lyrical. After his prologue, Luke’s opening verse sets the birth of Christ in its historical context, and then immediately introduces us to Elizabeth, Mary’s cousin, and her husband Zachariah, a priest who we meet ministering before the altar in the temple of Jerusalem.

Both Elizabeth and Zechariah are of the priestly tribe of Aaron, and both of them, as well as the temple itself play a prominent role in the opening scenes of Luke’s Gospel — one thinks of the prophecy of Malachi, “and the Lord, whome you seek, will suddenly come to his temple, and the messenger of the covenant in whom you deligth, behold, he is coming, says the lord of hosts.”

Their names are not insignificant: Elizabeth means “God is an Oath,” and Zechariah means “Yahweh remembers.” Immediately upon being introduced to them, one wonders what it is that Yahweh remembers, what oath has been given that reveals god’s presence with his people. This name, Zechariah, is an extremely common one in the Old Testament, occurring 29 times, and reflecting the same reality we find in Matthew’s geneaology, that generation after generation had celebrated the Lord’s faithfulness to his covenant promises, and looked forward to the day of their fulfillment. 

This post was taken from a sermon by Brian Lee, “Is Anything Too Hard for the Lord?”, originally preached on November 30, 2008.

Our 15th Annual Festival of Lessons and Carols

All are invited to join us
for our 15th annual Lessons and Carols service
on Sunday, December 12, at 5:00 pm
at the Capitol Hill Adventist Church, where we hold our Sunday Services.

Since our founding in 2007, Christ Reformed Church has celebrated the Advent season with a traditional “Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols,” which is patterned very closely on the annual service held at King’s College Chapel in Cambridge since 1918. We read the same nine texts, but substitute congregational singing instead of choral performance.

Over the course of the next five Sundays, we will be preaching through the nine traditional scripture readings from this service in a series called “Why Lessons and Carols”? In this series we’ll explore not only the rich pattern of promise and fulfillment that these Old and New Testament lessons illustrate, but also consider how the Reformed tradition exhibits a unique grasp of the unity of the scriptures around the covenantal promises fulfilled in the birth of Christ. We’ll also spend a bit of time considering the unique view of the church calendar held by the continental Reformed tradition, and defend it as a via media between the extremes of Puritanism and superstition.

A number of years ago I wrote an article at The Federalist in which I described this service in greater detail and explained its value called, “Keeping Christmas in Christianity: A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols”:

The Lessons and Carols service reminds us of a basic interpretive key: Jesus is the center of the whole Bible, and that truth should guide how we read and apply these texts. Promise and fulfillment is the basic pattern of the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible. Jesus and his apostles viewed his coming as the fulfillment of centuries of promises delivered to the people of God, and the New Testament was written in support of this case. In an age of biblical illiteracy, we mustn’t underestimate the value of this simple lesson.

Lessons and Carols is a service of nine scripture readings, or “lessons,” interspersed with the singing of Christmas carols. (You can get more background and examples here). The carols typically vary each year, but the nine readings are fairly well fixed, with some small variety. The first four are drawn from the Old Testament, the last five from the New.

Each reading is prefaced with a brief explanatory rubric, something which we desperately need in our current dark age of Bible reading. Thus we begin by reading Genesis 3, with this introduction: “God tells sinful Adam that he has lost the life of Paradise and that his seed [offspring] will bruise the serpent’s head.” The lessons proceed to speak of this promise of a coming “Seed” as it was extended to Abraham in Genesis 22, with the expansion that “in this Seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.”

In the final two Old Testament readings, we are reminded that the basic outlines of the Christmas story derive in the Old Testament prophecies of Isaiah (drawn from chapters 7, 9, or 11), that a coming Savior would be born of a virgin, in the town of Bethlehem, and would bring in his train a universal peace not just for the people of Israel, but for all the earth.

New Testament lessons focus on how these Old Testament promises of a coming redeemer are fulfilled in the birth narratives of Christ, with readings drawn from Luke 1 and 2 and Matthew 2. Mary, Joseph, angels, shepherds, and wise men, all of these are not merely random characters in the Christmas play. They each are instrumental to teaching us that in the birth of this human child, Jesus, God has fulfilled his promise of the ages and “saved his people from their sins.”

Finally, the closing reading is always drawn from John 1, reflecting on the theological significance of the eternal Word becoming flesh. The famous prologue makes explicit the deep theological truth implicit through the prophecies: This is no ordinary child, this is the divine Word made flesh. (read more)

The reception after our Lessons and Carols service has always been something of our annual Christmas party and celebration, and we have welcomed may wonderful visitors and guests over the years. We hope you will join us on December 12th. Click here for more information.

Calvin on Christmas

It is good to set aside one day out of the year in which we are reminded of all the good that has occurred because of Christ’s birth in the world, and in which we hear the story of his birth retold…

which will be done Sunday.

From John Calvin’s sermon preached on Christmas day 1551 in John Calvin, Sermons on the Book of Micah, trans. Benjamin Wirt Farley (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2003), 302–04. (H/T R. Scott Clark at The Heidelblog).