Sermon Tone Analysis

One of many signals that the Christmas season has come is, wondrously, the change of music.

The cheesy songs (Santa Baby, All I Want for Christmas, Mele Kalikimaka) and the religious songs and carols (O Holy Night, O Come All Ye Faithful, Silent Night) fill the month of December.

For some of you sinners, you listen before Thanksgiving (there is forgiveness, even for the gravest of sins).

Christmas songs play in your car as you head to work.

They play on the stereo as you wash the dishes and prepare dinner for the family.

They play quietly in the background during our candlelight Christmas Eve service.

If you’re anything like me, your daily playlist is filled with Christmas music; in fact, I was listening to my favorite Christmas album as I was writing this sermon.

The Christmas station on Pandora will, at times, play from our family room when we have people over.

And then, before we know it, Christmas has come and gone, it’s New Year’s Eve, the Christmas trees and nativities come down.

The songs that play on the radio and in the stores go back to normal because it’s January.

So, in the spirit of Christmas, while Christmas songs are playing in our homes and churches and in the stores as we shop, we’re going to look at the nativity; not the nativity that’s all sentimental and beautiful, where Mary looks remarkably unlike a woman who has just given birth and Joseph looks amazingly unconcerned about how much his new family is going to affect his monthly budget.

The nativity most of us picture tends to romanticize the scene.

We can just look at it and go, “Oh, that’s sweet.

I like Christmas.”

But there’s nothing in it that arrests you; there’s nothing there to deal with, nothing that makes us think.

There’s nothing that says: “Listen.”

So in the spirit of Christmas, with Christian eyes and ears, we are going to look at the nativity—the Biblical nativity—back to the first four songs of the first Christmas; songs heard before, during, and after the birth of the baby who lies at the heart of the real Christmas.

We’re going to look at some songs that will make us pause and listen.

We return to Luke 1-2 almost every Christmas; we revisit the familiar and glorious stories again and again.

And this is good for our souls.

These pages in my Bible are so worn, I actually had to fix a torn page this week.

These pages now have a built-in bookmark in my Bible, and rightly so.

These are important pages, worthy of being worn out.

The Gospel of Luke—one of the four historical accounts of Jesus—punctuates the story of the birth of Jesus with a series of songs.

These songs are meant to change us, to prepare us for Christmas properly, and to celebrate joyfully (as songs tend to do).

Luke writes his Gospel as an orderly account for his old pal, Theophilus.

Luke begins his retelling of Jesus’ life and ministry like this (Luke 1:1-4):

Luke is reporting facts.

He isn’t making this stuff up.

He’s not coming up with some new mythology.

He is introducing well-researched facts—staggering facts.

Luke offers these events to us, not as poetic speculation, but as pure history.

That’s Luke raising the stakes for you, for me, for us.

Considering these events will take more thought than humming “Jingle Bells” or quickly glancing at the nativity scene.

We won’t merely be considering a 6-pound 8-ounce tiny, silent, baby Jesus, but the One who was very God and very man; the One who was and is the Son of God.

The first song recorded in the Gospel according to Luke is Mary’s song—a song that will make us think about what we think about God.

>What do you think about God?

What words come to mind?

Everyone has some view of God.

You might think He’s non-existent, or distant, or everywhere, or loving, or angry, or fluffy, or faithful.

Your view of God might be based on a hunch, on some fleeting feelings, on what your family believes, or on what some author or teacher says.

Everyone thinks something about God, and lots of us think different things about Him.

So, how do we know that we’ve got it right?

Imagine if you had an experience, an encounter, that enabled everything to click into place, so that you weren’t just guessing, but really did truly know about God—whether He is there and what He is like.

Mary had such an experience and she sings a song, inspired by her role in the events of the first Christmas.

But she doesn’t sing about herself, but about God—a song which gives us three words to describe the God who came down to us.

The story behind the song is wonderfully familiar.

This wonderfully familiar story begins like this:

The background of the story is a combination of the natural and the supernatural—the intermingling of the very ordinary and the distinctly extraordinary.

A lady is going to have a baby.

That’s ordinary news—great news, but ordinary news.

The baby is going to be conceived by God Himself.

That’s extraordinary news, to put it mildly.

The announcement is made by an angel sent from heaven by God = supernatural.

But then Mary responds in a very natural way:

Basically, Mary responded, “I need to go and talk to someone about all this.”

So she heads to see some of her family, her relative Elizabeth and Elizabeth’s husband Zechariah.

Elizabeth, though decades older, is also pregnant.

Mary and Elizabeth are having a girls’ night; popcorn, Hallmark movie, and talk about their pregnancies and the upcoming birth of their sons.

It’s while Mary is at Elizabeth’s that she breaks out in song—the first Christmas song, you could say.

If you have your Bible (and I hope you do) please turn with me to Luke Chapter 1.

And if you’re able and willing, please stand with me for the reading of God’s Holy Word.

Luke 1, beginning with verse 46:

May the Lord add His blessing to the reading of His Holy Word!

He is Mindful of us

You’ll notice that Mary speaks initially in very personal terms (v.

48)—for He has been mindful of the humble state of His servant.

This is her saying, in other words, “God has been mindful of me.

God could have picked someone of means, someone rich and noble and powerful.

But He has chosen not to do so.

He’s come instead to a lowly girl who has no apparent or obvious significance whatsoever.

He’s come to me.”

This word mindful means: taking thought, taking care, keeping remembrance of something.

And this is precisely the reason Mary glorifies the Lord and why her spirit rejoices in God her Savior—because He has taken thought of her, taken care of her, because she’s in His remembrance.

“I may be very small and insignificant in the eyes of the world,” says Mary, “but I am valuable in the eyes of One who made the world.

He is mindful of me.”

But Mary doesn’t sing in personal terms only.

At the end of her song, she also sings in “people” terms (v.

54)—He has helped His servant Israel [an entire people] remembering to be merciful.

God is mindful of Mary as an individual because He is mindful of His people as a whole.

Her significance lies in the fact that she is part of God’s plan for His people.

You remember, around 2,000 years before Mary sang this song, the God about whom Mary sings had made great promises to a man named Abraham.

Abraham is called out from his people, from his family, from his country.

Abraham is told to go to a place God would show him.

God spoke to Abraham and told him that He would make Abraham into a great nation and that he would be blessed; that all the peoples on earth would be blessed through him.

All throughout the Old Testament, God says again and again to Abraham’s descendants: “I am mindful of you, I am remembering you, I will fulfill the promise I have made.”

God sent prophets to reaffirm these promises over the centuries leading up to the birth of Jesus, the One through whom all of Abraham’s descendants would be blessed.

For instance, some six hundred years before Mary was born, the prophet Isaiah said:

And the people living during those centuries before Mary and Jesus, especially those of faith, those with eyes to see and ears to hear would have heard Isaiah’s prophecy and thought,

“Well this must be part of the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham.

A son will be given who will fulfill all God’s promises, because God is still mindful of us.”

And then, a young woman named Mary comes on the scene of history, Gabriel announces to her that she will give birth to the Messiah, and Mary sings that God has been mindful of her—mindful of her and of His people as a whole.

This is what God is like.

God is mindful.

He is personally involved with humanity.

He is not some distant deity, disconnected from us.

He is personal and personally involved with us.

The greatness of God is not revealed in His isolation from us; the greatness of God is revealed in His intimacy with us.

We tend to think of greatness in terms of isolation.

The more money you get, the higher up in the building you work, the longer your driveway is, the taller your privacy fence.