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The Great O Antiphons of Advent: O Wisdom • Sermon • Submitted
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For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
1 Corinthians 1:
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
A blessed Advent to you. Today we enter into what is known as the “Festival Portion” of the Church year, as well as enter into a new Church year. The readings switch today for the next year, with the Gospels coming predominantly from the Gospel of Mark. Our liturgy reverts to the old Lutheran Liturgy for the next six weeks of Advent and Christmass.
Advent is a time of awe and wonder. It is meant to be a penitential season as we heed the words of John the Baptist, “repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Spiritually, it is not a time of preparation for Christmas, though certainly our lives are marked with the craziness of the time. It is a season that often gets lost even on Christians, because we long to rush into Christmass. Yet, among believers, we remember that spiritually, this is a time of watching and waiting for the arrival of the Bridegroom who will close out history and take us to heaven. The relationship of Advent to Christmass is simply that in Christmas, we see God fulfills His promises. Messiah was promised and He came. This gives us hope as we watch and wait for His reappearing in the sky with His angels. And so these two themes interweave in our readings and in our lives.
Some have said, “I just don’t get a lot out of Christmas anymore.” Or “It’s too commercialized. The diagnosis of that problem is simple: You’ve missed Advent. This is why we do not sing Christmas carols before Christmas Eve. We focus on the richness of Who Messiah is, What He did for us when He came being born in Bethlehem, living a holy life, enduring the Stripes and Cross, dying, rising, ascending and reigning for His Bride, the Church. Put Christmas on hold. When it comes we will celebrate it with gusto and give it its full due.
I do find it ironic that those who insist on beginning their Christmas observation the day after Halloween are often the ones whose trees are at the curb on December 26. Christmas, of course, is 12 days long, going from December 25-January 5. That is when you’re supposed to celebrate Christmas. But much of the world is done with it on December 26 to make way for cupid in the card aisles.
Our journey through Advent this year will take us through the Great “O Antiphons of Advent.” They are so important that we use them every other year as the basis for our Advent sermons. They form the basis of the ancient Advent carol, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.”
An antiphon is like a refrain in a song. You start the song out with it. You sing it after each verse. And then you sing it at the end. You’re familiar with antiphons and refrains. We had one in our Gradual hymn today, where we kept coming back to that repeated verse, “O Lord, what a mornin’”
In the monasteries the monks would gather each night of the year for Evening Prayer or Vespers. One of the canticles that we always sing at Evensong is the Magnificat, Mary’s hymn of praise. The monks would surround this hymn of praise by singing the appointed Antiphon before it was sung and after it was sung. During the last seven days of Advent, they would sing a very special set of Advent antiphons, which we will study.
Each antiphon is a name for Jesus, the Messiah, taken from the Bible.
They are each actually a prayer. It starts out with a new name for Jesus each evening, then a characteristic of Jesus, then a call for Him to “Come” and ending with what we ask Him to come and do.
The antiphon that we are examining today is actually the one appointed for the Seventeenth of December, “O Wisdom.”
O Wisdom, proceeding from the mouth of the most High, pervading and permeating all creation, mightily ordering all things: Come and teach us the way of prudence.
The outline is simple today: We will use the word “WISE” to outline our text.
O Wisdom, proceeding from the mouth of the most High, pervading and permeating all creation, mightily ordering all things: Come and teach us the way of prudence.
The Word of God is Folly to the world.
The Word of God is Folly to the world.
The writer of Proverbs declares, There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.
Wisdom. It is a quality that many tout. It is a gift of God, and often comes with much age and experience. I am thankful for the wisdom that the Lord has given to Pastors who are much more experienced than I am. I look at some of the greats to whom I could go when I entered the ministry—like John Kavash, Hank Koepchen, Merlin Rehm, Stanton Yingling and Horace Garton—to whom I could go with pastoral questions. It wasn’t uncommon for them to say something like, “Well, you could do that, but if you do, this might happen…” Such wisdom proved to be invaluable. And when you didn’t listen to them, well… Hopefully the lesson was invaluable.
What exactly is wisdom? In our minds, wisdom implies intelligence, experience and the ability to communicate it to someone who may not have it. Like a seasoned soldier taking a Private under his wings. Or, like the person who has worked at a job a long time and passes on his knowledge to the new person in the shop. This kind of wisdom is invaluable, for sure. The book of Proverbs tells us that we all should strive to become wise. “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom.” There is some sage advice from Solomon.
I am sure that you have your “Yodas” in your lives as well- people to whom you regarded in high esteem, people who molded and directed you, people who became your role models for good reason. We thank God for people like that, for they are truly gifts to His Church and our lives. And, perhaps with age and experience, you now can impart wisdom to those who are younger and inexperienced.
The problem is this. Human wisdom has been destroyed by sin. Those who are wise in this world do not recognize this. Worldly wisdom is doomed.
Human wisdom is a gift from God. The problem is, just like everything, sin causes us to abuse the gift. Wisdom has this nasty habit of making people think that they are so smart that they edge God out with their own egos.
God’s Wisdom is foolishness to the world. By the way, the Greek word for “fool” is “moron.”
God’s wisdom is so different than mans.
Because God’s Wisdom is Jesus Christ and His Cross.
For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
Worldly wisdom can be seen in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were warned not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of the knowledge of Good and evil. And yet, after being tempted,
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.
It goes against everything we hold to be true in our lives.
Worldly wisdom does not listen to God; it does what it wants.
We think that being good is a virtue before God. God declares us all to be sinners.
There is nothing more scandalous to earthly wisdom than the Cross.
We think that we can initiate a relationship with God on our terms and when we feel it is necessary. But it is God who initiates the relationship with you.
First, because earthly wisdom does not acknowledge sin. Confrontation implies “you’re judging me” and we are too intelligent to allow others to judge us. Just ask John the Baptist, who lost his head because he confronted Herod Antipas for committing adultery and incest with his brother’s wife, Herodias.
We think that when someone has really hurt us we don’t need to forgive them. God will understand. God tells us that if we do not forgive everyone totally and completely from our hearts we cannot ever be saved.
Wisdom listens to the Law of God. But if there is no God, there is no law. And wisdom takes one down the path of no return. Earthly wisdom sees no need for a Cross.
Modern wisdom excludes all possibility of supernatural interventions. It seeks for explanations of miracles. It denies God’s omnipotence by insisting that the earth must be millions of years old, and that creation could never have taken place in six normal days. God says “there was evening and there was morning” for each day of creation.
Second, wisdom
Second, there is no possible way that someone could die for the sins of all, if in fact there were such a thing as sin. The idea of one person dying for another is noble, like a hero, but the idea of one person dying for the entire world is impossible. Remember the infamous words of Caiaphas:
It was Caiaphas who had advised the Jews that it would be expedient that one man should die for the people.
Wisdom believes that we must rise up to the level of God. God shows us that He comes down to us.
And remember the response of the people?
Wisdom holds things spiritual to be better than physical. Jesus comes to earth with flesh and blood.
And all the people answered, “His blood be on us and on our children!”
Be careful what you wish for! They meant it for harm; God meant it for good.
And wisdom hates Jesus. It hates anything to do with Him.
Wisdom holds that I can
The Cross. The idea that someone would die on a cross and could take away the sins of the world is foolishness to the world.
This is called regenerated wisdom- it is wisdom given by God to us and acknowledged that it is His gift.
From the know-it-all at work that points out your deficiencies to make himself look better, all the way to those wh
Wisdom has been destroyed by sin.
Here, we must go deeper than just human wisdom. We need to look at God’s Wisdom. And when we do, as our text tells us, we find something that makes absolutely no sense.
There were times in the Bible, when people began to think that they had more wisdom than God. It starts in the Garden, where Adam and Eve wanted to be like God:
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and she ate, and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.
Surely, God notices the good things we do and rewards us for them, we think. Surely even though someone is a member of a cult, but is “such a nice person” that God couldn’t condemn him. Surely God could not have created the world in six days. Surely God loves everyone, so He approves of anything or everything that people do today with and to their bodies.
In , the people sought to display their wisdom as they built the Tower of Babel. God changed their languages so they couldn’t build it.
When wisdom goes awry we see the result. Take the Tower of Babel, for instance in Genesis. God destroys the Tower and scatters those who are building it, confusing their languages so that they cannot communicate with one another. “
Sin has a terrible way of showing itself forth as wisdom. And this is the wisdom that we often choose.
There is a way that seems right to a man but it ends in the way of death.
You don’t have to look hard to see it. It is all around us. All sorts of rationalizing that goes on because the world rejects God or because it thinks it knows better than Him. Sociological issues abound that can draw us in, too: Abortion, Euthanasia, same gender marriage, protesting against police and the order that the Lord Himself has established, the lawlessness of the government, all of these things are simply accepted, unquestioned and the norm of today. Those who don’t accept them or who hold to a high moral road are labeled as today’s extremists.
But this kind of wisdom goes even deeper than social issues. It has burrowed itself into your heart. Sin, death and the devil cast the winning votes in our lives, and we begin to think that our own wisdom is greater than God’s: That He has to answer to us; that our opinions, thoughts and pursuit of freedom trumps His clear word, and there is the problem. This is what causes us to choose the way that seems right to us, but its end is in death. This, beloved, is the daily war in which you are engaged. How are we to escape?
Jesus Christ is Wisdom. Our Wisdom. Just as He has given you His perfect life, just like you are baptized into His death and Resurrection, You are also baptized into His Wisdom. Of it the Bible says,
The foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. ()
This plays out in our Gospel. There is both foolishness and wisdom.
The foolishness can be seen by the people heralding Jesus as their King. Their earthly King. If this one could raise the dead Lazarus, he could do anything. We want Him as King. It was this understanding that ultimately led them to crucify Jesus. His Charge: Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.
But there is wisdom here in Jesus. He knows why He is coming into Jerusalem. It is to die for each one of these people who are heralding Him as King, whose protest would change to “crucify Him” five days later. In that you see their foolishness, but His wisdom.
Paul tells us: For the word of the Cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God…. Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ Crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the Wisdom of God.
As Jesus enters Jerusalem for the last time, it was to die for their sins. And yours. And mine. Something that makes no sense to a world that sees Jesus as a failure because He died; but something that means the world to us as we died with Him on that Cross through Baptism and thus will live forever. That is the scandal of the Cross.
And so, with the Church on earth and Heaven, we call upon Jesus, our wisdom:
O Wisdom, proceeding from the mouth of the most High, pervading and permeating all creation, mightily ordering all things: Come and teach us the way of prudence.
And, with the confidence that this King of Glory came at Christmass for us and will come again to usher us into heaven the cry rings out:
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to you, O Israel.