Advent Proclaimed: Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus - Luke 2:1-20

The Advent season runs four Sundays leading up to Christmas, and of course, Christmas Eve, we always have this service.

Through Advent season this year, we have taken an approach to four different themes on the Sundays.

We had Advent foreshadowed in Genesis, Advent promised in Isaiah, Advent fulfilled in Matthew, Advent fully realized as we looked forward in time to all that the Lord will do in his second Advent.

And we looked at that in the book of Revelation just this past Sunday.

Tonight, we'll be looking at Advent proclaimed from Luke's Gospel, which Pastor Matt read earlier.

And for me, three words jump out of that chapter.

And those words are wonder, worship, and witness.

I'm taken first with the chapter because it begins with history.

It's set in space-time history.

It came about in those days when the decree went out from Caesar Augustus.

This is the first Roman emperor.

He ruled from 27 BC to 14 AD.

So this is a guy who lived in space-time history in a very specific place, very specific time.

And the story of Jesus is couched right into the middle of that historical opening of Luke chapter 2, Jesus' birth, comes to us right there.

Luke 2 · chapter mention

Bethlehem is two Hebrew words.

Bethlehem, and it means house of bread, and so it's a specific city.

It's a tiny little town.

If you were gonna be a king and come into the world and start a big world movement, why would you pick a little village like that instead of Rome?

Some place where even maybe if you were, if you were gonna be in Israel, maybe Jerusalem.

No, Bethlehem was where he came.

And that's we've been singing about that a little bit, haven't we?

And so I think of wonder when I read this.

Wonder that God would do that.

Why would he do that?

Why would he do it that way?

Why would he come to a peasant couple who are engaged or betrothed to be married but aren't married yet?

And they're living in the middle of a social scandal.

They're pregnant and not married yet.

And it's been probably several months since she heard from the angel, or Joseph heard from the angel.

Either one of them.

The angel appeared to, an angel appeared to both of them.

But it's been a few months.

And maybe now, after a few months, they're starting to wonder is this thing really happening?

Is it really of God?

As they go off to the census that's going to be taken, because Joseph is from the line of David, which Messiah was promised to come from.

And so he had to go to the city of David, which is this little town called House of Bread.

Bethlehem.

Bethlehem.

And so they go there, and wonder of wonders, that's where the King of Kings, the Prince of Peace, the Lord of Lords, the Savior of the world, chooses to appear into this world without any pomp and circumstance of a military band or a marching parade, without, you know, any kind of any kind of large, wealthy, uh, you know, very well-educated group of people standing around.

No, just some simple shepherds.

And that peasant couple that couldn't even get a room in the hotel.

Wonder why God did that.

Wonder is one of those things that I think is missing in the world in which we live right now.

And yet I think it's something that we desperately need.

Little children maybe have an edge on all of us adults, don't they?

Because they still have a sense of wonder.

There's a knock at the door, who's that?

Most of us just go, it's somebody trying to sell us something or some Jehovah's Witnesses coming around or something.

The kids are still like, who's that?

You know?

And you go open the door and it's like, who is it?

And it's your crazy Uncle Eddie.

He's come for Christmas dinner.

And he's bringing all the things that are gonna break your house apart.

And uh wonder why God chose the way he did to come into this world.

It could have been so different.

It could have been so much more of a splash.

It could have been so much bigger, so much brighter, so much more well-produced.

And yet it wasn't that.

Um, in July, I think it was, I sent my first photo from the Costco aisle that had the first Christmas ornaments.

Anyone been there?

You see what I'm talking about?

Yeah.

I sent that photo home partly in shock.

I have what we call shock and joy.

Not shock and awe, but shock and joy about that whole feeling.

I love Christmas.

I love lights.

I love the ornaments, I love the Christmas trees.

I'm looking to see what's gonna be the best new light system I can get.

Sadly disappointed this year myself, but that's another story.

But I'm always into all of the signs and the symbols of the holiday that humanity has sort of put together and that I know is all sort of a, you know, a sort of commercialized thing.

I get that.

But I'm happy to enjoy lights.

I think twinkling lights remind me that I need darkness to be dispelled.

I think carols, even songs that are just with Giddy Up and, you know, and kind of, you know, grandma got run over by her rain, all that stuff.

I still enjoy all the festivities and the fun of Christmas, the secular holiday, but I get to do it with the deeper meaning of what we read about in Luke chapter 2.

Luke 2 · chapter mention

The wonder that God would come at all into space-time.

Yes, why the first century?

Why not this year?

A lot of you are out there wondering if God would just show up.

I'd believe in him.

He did show up.

He chose to do that in the first century.

In a run-through country, a pass-through country called Israel, occupied and oppressed, taxed real heavily, threatened with violence all the time by the Roman government.

And it's into that world, wonder of wonders, that Jesus came.

I'm stunned by the wonder of it all.

Albert Einstein once said this the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.

It's the source of all true art and science.

He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead.

His eyes are closed.

I haven't got a clue what the status of Einstein's theology was.

Um I just know that when I read The World as I see it, this essay that this is taken from from 1930, I thought he's on to something there at least.

Human beings need wonder.

We need a wonder that can push back the darkness around us.

We need a wonder that's so thrilling, so amazing, we can't figure it out.

Because we need mystery, we need transcendence.

We don't need stuff that we can figure out and control.

That's what we crave, what we lust.

We've craved and lusted that since the Garden of Eden.

That's how we got fooled.

See, you can be as smart as God, you can be like God, you can have the last word yourself.

And um, what we need, though, is wonder.

And we were built and designed by God, he put eternity in our hearts so that we would wonder and be in rapturous wonder over him, that he came, that he loves us, that he would set his love on us at all.

So I seek to persuade you that the birth of Christ restores wonder to a disenchanted world, and perhaps you are disenchanted.

We live in a world that is turned away from transcendence.

Curiosity has been eclipsed by cynicism.

I think that's one of the, if you know, if a town has a sin, I think that's one of our great sins in Nashville, cynicism.

That's one, it's at the in the top 10 or 20 of our great sins in this town, cynicism.

Well, oh, the list is longer than that.

What are y'all talking about?

Curiosity has been eclipsed by cynicism.

Please, this year, will you get curious again?

Do yourself a favor, become curious.

You do not know it all, said the man pointing his finger at all of you.

I don't know at all either.

And we are here, we are the fellowship of the wondering, wondering fools.

Fools for Christ, because we trust and believe in him, the one who would choose a little church like this in a 100-year-old convent building to plant a church and have a bunch of people gather once a week to worship and to wonder.

And that's that leads me to that second word I wanted to talk about, which is worship.

The birth of Christ not only restores wonder to us, our disenchanted world, but the birth of Christ redirects our worship to the God who came near.

Here the angels are singing, the shepherds are just out there on an average night, probably just one guy awake, the other guys are sleeping, the sheep are snoring.

I mean, you can just kind of picture the whole thing.

This is not, these guys were not sort of any kind of elite social class at all.

They weren't well educated, they were probably despised and looked down on by everybody.

They probably just couldn't get another job, a different job.

And maybe that's maybe that's you.

Maybe you feel like your career is like that, you know?

I don't know.

But that's who Jesus sent, and God the Father sent the angels.

Go sing to those dudes.

You mean don't go sing to Carnegie Hall with a big, and there's nothing wrong with singing to Carnegie Hall, by the way.

I was there last week.

It's awesome, it's amazing, wonderful.

But when God the Father told Gabriel and Michael and all the little angelic choir to get ready, we're doing a road trip, and they got all excited and rehearsed it all up.

And where are we going?

Where we going?

Where we going?

It's we're going to a field.

Are we singing for thousands?

No, we're singing for a handful.

Guys that'll go without names in the Bible.

I don't even know their names.

I can't wait to get home and meet them, but I mean, what you know, and that's wonder of wonders.

The guys that got inspired to run to Bethlehem, as the passage tells us, and begin to worship this one who the angels sang about.

Pretty amazing.

Eugene Peterson says, worship.

It's the strategy by which we interrupt our preoccupation with ourselves and attend to the presence of God.

Could we do that some more?

I need more of that.

I don't need more of just attending a building with a pointy steeple on it.

I don't need more religious rules to follow.

Maybe you're like me in that regard.

I do need some behavior modification, but that's not going to save me.

What I really need is to come to know the living God and be have my relationship with him set right.

And there's only one person that can do that for me.

There's only one person that can reconcile me to God.

And that's God Himself and the personal work of Jesus Christ, His Son.

So I, proper response for me is to like these, like these shepherds, run, go and see.

Is it true?

And then run, go and tell everybody you can find to tell.

And that's where my third word, witness, comes in.

The birth of Christ restores wonder to a disenchanted world.

It redirects our worship to the God who came near.

And the birth of Christ compels us to witness about the good news of great joy to all people.

You know how it happens.

You go, you find a great deal on something, you immediately text a few friends, hey, look at they're selling those for, they're giving those away, whatever.

You're just always excited to tell somebody about something awesome that you found.

Why are we so timid about the gospel?

Why do you don't you know that your friends at work, that your friends and your family, they're disenchanted.

They're wondering, is there really anything more to this world, to this life?

Is there something transcended at all?

They're wondering that.

And we're sitting around here just being quiet.

You know, we we need to not be so timid about this great news we have.

Because it's, I'm not gonna go tell my friends they need to follow these rules.

I'm gonna go tell my friends the good news about Jesus, who came and paid the price for my sins and their sins as well.

And by hoping and trusting and believing in him, we can find life in his name.

That's really good news.

Um, we're not gonna, you know, step out on the line and yell at everybody and scream at everybody.

That's not why we, the Lord Jesus saved us, not to do all of that.

We have a whole lot of people in our world that are refugees to uh as C.S.

Lewis calls them in this next quote.

Um, and they need to be told the good news.

He says, as we meet the incoming tide of refugees from the meaning crisis.

What does that mean?

That means they don't have any meaning or purpose for their lives.

They have no idea why they ought to get out of bed tomorrow.

You know?

And there's a lot of them, and maybe you're one of them.

I feel like that from time to time myself.

Maybe you do too.

But as we meet the incoming tide of refugees from the meaning crisis, the church needs both apologists, those who will seek to persuade others in the academy and storytellers in the arts.

We need people in the mold of C.S.

Lewis showing not only that the story is true, but why we have wanted to believe it all along.

And this is from Justin Brierly's.

I misquoted it earlier, but it's Justin Brierly's book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.

Great book.

Put it under somebody's Christmas tree or under your own tree if you're if you're yet to buy yourself something that somebody gave you a gift card for.

This is a really, really excellent book.

And he makes a great point there.

There are people longing for wonder, perhaps you're one of them.

There are people longing to find out where I should direct my worship.

I've tried money, sex, and power.

And I just, it's just not doing it for me.

I still find life meaningless.

I'm still wanting something else.

And if that's you here tonight, great news.

I think the something else you're looking for actually has come here for you.

He, 2,000 years ago, came to a very humble setting so that all of us, no matter who we are, no matter what our status of life, might know he came for us too.

Not just for them, but for us as well.

Tim Keller in Hidden Christmas says the gospel narratives are telling you not what you should do, but what God has done.

The birth of the Son of God into the world, it's a gospel, a good news.

That's what gospel means.

An announcement.

You don't save yourself.

God has come to save you.

Let's pray.

Lord, this year flood our hearts with wonder.

So much so that we have to turn our worship to you.

And so much so that we have to tell somebody.

We have to, in word and deed, live out the gospel.

Lord, we recognize that you took the ordinary and turned it into a stage for the extraordinary.

When you came to a field or sent your angels to a field with shepherds in it.

And when you came yourself to Israel, to that couple, to that day and time.

We need the salvation that you have brought.

We need you, Lord, to fill us with wonder.

Re-enchant our dry hearts, our desperate souls.

And may the birth of Christ draw us back into wonder worship and to go out and proclaim that good news of great joy, like the angels sang that night.

Help us, Lord, to sing glory to God in the highest, in the way we live, in the way that we are in our families' relationships, in the way that we do our work.

May your glory be our passion in life, we pray.

In Jesus' name for his sake, amen and amen.