Comfort, comfort My people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry to her that her warfare has ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins. We give thanks this morning for Your mercy, O Lord, and now we ask for more. We never exhaust Your mercy. We will never be in a position where we are not in need of more mercy, and so we ask now that You would help us, that You would speak, that You would use this frail, feeble, human instrument to communicate Your words of grace, to comfort and forgive, to speak and to draw near to us, that You would give us ears to hear just the word that You want us to receive. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Every year there is a debate about whether you should be allowed to play Christmas music before Thanksgiving. Clearly it should be against the law, punishable by fines or otherwise unusual torments. Really, they’re wonderful songs and why not hear some of the good ones as much as we can, but that’s just the problem. Only some of the Christmas songs are good ones, at least I’m talking about the ones on the radio and the ones in the mall. There are some amazing Christmas songs, and there are some dreadful ones.
So I was talking to some of my children, trying to compile a list of best and worst. If you like the list, they were my suggestions. If you don’t, they were my family’s. My best Christmas, O Come All Ye Faithful, Of The Father’s Love Begotten, Hark The Herald Angels We Have Heard On High, Come Thou Long Expected Jesus, I mean, you could go on. There’s lots of really good ones.
Here’s some of the worst: I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, very confusing for children, Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer, just really wrong on a lot of levels, I do not like the John Lennon So This is Christmas, Santa Baby terrible, The Christmas Song by Alvin and the Chipmunks [laughter]. Hearing that a half a time is one time too many. Well, there are many others, and you’ve probably heard those and we’re listening to some of the channels that just play Christmas music and they play about the same 10 or 12 songs all month long.
And while we all have a lot of those Christmas songs running through our playlist and in the background of malls and movies, perhaps we don’t think enough about the inspired Christmas songs. That is, those songs that we read in the Bible. We have been looking at them, beginning last week and now again this week, these songs in the Gospel of Luke.
Now, it’s doubtful that they came out of the mouth of Mary or Zechariah immediately as a song, but they have the look and the feel of music, of poetry, and they have often been called songs and they have often been put to music. They are known by their Latin names often, simply the first words of the song in the Latin vulgate, and so Mary’s song as we saw last week is sometimes called The Magnificat. This morning, the song of Zechariah is called The Benedictus, “blessing.” The song of the angels in chapter 2, Gloria, and then the song of Simeon later in chapter 2 often goes by the Latin name, though you may not have realized it, Nunc Dimittis, which means “now depart.” He says “now may Your servant depart in peace.”
We aren’t going to look at the song of the angels this year, but instead on Christmas Eve we’re going to look at what you might think of the, the fifth, or the honorable mention, of the songs, The Song of Anna, the prophetess. We don’t have her words recorded, except we know that she gave thanks and she spoke of the redemption of Jerusalem, and so sometimes it’s referred to as Anna’s Song, though we don’t have the words to it.
This morning we are back in Luke chapter 1, Zechariah’s song, The Benedictus. And let’s pick up the reading where we left off last week,
