Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
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Christmas Expectation
Moratorium on Christmas music.
Until after my birthday.
Hymns are okay, those don’t count.
We only get like 5 weeks of advent together.
My moratorium is on “Santa Baby” and “Last Christmas...”
But what I can’t put a limit on is “Christmas Expectation.”
Excitement.
Anticipation.
For almost all of our kids, Christmas comes not too long after their birthday.
So any disappointments they had, gifts they didn’t receive for their birthday, that anticipation transfers right over to Christmas.
Advent
In the liturgical calendar, “Advent” starts tomorrow.
> a time of expectant waiting and preparation for the nativity or birth of Christ and his return in the Second Coming.
Expectations built by prophesies of the Messiah.
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
Church tradition is that Luke interviewed and spent time with Mary and learned the story of Jesus’ birth from her.
So he writes of how Mary learned of Jesus’ birth.
To Mary it is revealed: the time is now!
The long awaited “when” is here.
We’ve been studying the prophets, and there are some common threads throughout them.
We hear the glory of God, and the call to repentance.
The call to justice and righteousness.
And again and again we hear the need for a Savior… and that God is sending a Messiah.
Who told Mary???
The angel Gabriel.
You remember that guy?
The same angel that kept showing up to Daniel!!!
(By the way, if an angel, messenger of God, appears to someone and tells them a message from God, and then that person tells someone else, what do we call that person?
Prophet!) Mary is a prophet of God, as is Joseph.
Maybe 500 years earlier, Gabriel is revealing to another prophet.
From Daniel.
300 years earlier, to the prophet Isaiah
And writing at the same time, God reveals through the prophet Micah where the Messiah would be born:
2-300 years earlier, roughly 100 years before Christ, the prophet Nathaniel speaks to King David:
Yes, Solomon is the near fulfillment, and he does in fact build a “house for YHWH’s name...” but what was all that throne forever stuff???
In expectation of Jesus, on the throne forever, building a house for the LORD of us!!!
But even before David, to generation after generation, back to Moses who saw a prophet coming after:
And 400 years before that, to good old Father Abram!
That very first promise that created the people of Israel in the first place:
But even that, not the beginning.
All the way back to the beginning, from the very moment of the fall, there was promised a Savior who would destroy dragons!
Enter into expectation
The sense of expectation.
Desperate expectation.
All of God’s people, all of Creation, waiting for salvation.
Waiting for God.
What’s He going to do?
What will the Messiah, the Anointed One, be like, look like?
How will we know him?
How will he come?
The vast majority of the people of God missed Jesus.
They missed the Messiah.
Maybe because they weren’t looking for him.
Because he did not conform to their expectations (more about that next week).
In advent, we enter into the expectation of the Messiah.
As they would have felt it for thousands of years: the desperate need for a Savior.
And, more present to our own need for a Savior, to return once more and make all things new.
All things good.
All things perfect and whole.
We practice expectation.
Enter into Christ-Mass Celebration
That we don’t treat Jesus like my kids treat last years Christmas presents.
Or the year’s before that.
Most of those things, gone by the way side.
In the trash or donate pile.
Unremembered.
Uncherished.
Taken for granted.
Joy, unspeakable joy!
Behold, we have a Savior!!!
Everything changes.
Let’s count the years up to and after this day.
And with the angels we seeing:
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