Sermon from December 19: O Hear the Angels Sing – Presbyterian Church of the Master

O Hear the Angels Sing
Advent IV; December 19, 2021
Revelation 14:1-8

Yet with the woes of sin and strife the world has suffered long;
Beneath the heavenly hymn have rolled two thousand years of wrong;
And we at war on earth hear not the tidings that they bring;
O, hush the noise and cease the strife to hear the angels sing.[1]

If you’re not a little torn this time of year then I suspect either you haven’t taken the season seriously enough or you’ve been taking it too seriously. I mean the season of Advent, of course, the season when we look straight into the darkness and pray, “Come, Lord Jesus.” If you’ve not been taking it seriously enough, then you’ve headed straight from Thanksgiving to Christmas and skipped Advent completely. If you’ve been taking it too seriously, then you’ve given in to the darkness and forgotten what John said in his Gospel: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

Although it is almost certain that Jesus wasn’t born in December, it is no accident that we celebrate his birth in December. The date was chosen intentionally to coincide with the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere. The date of the solstice has drifted on the calendar, but it’s still close enough to December 25 to make the point. The night of the winter solstice is the longest night of the year; it is the night when there are more hours of darkness than any other. Our northern hemisphere ancestors observed the sun rising later, setting earlier, and peaking lower every day from June until December; it was as if the sun was dying. Then at the night of the solstice, they knew the sun was closest to “death” and that the next day it would be reborn: daily it would rise a little earlier, set a little later, and climb a little higher in the sky. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

So is that not the perfect time to celebrate the birth of the Light of the World? As the northern hemisphere is wrapped in its deepest darkness, we look into the sky for the angels to sing Gloria in excelsis Deo! We pause to hear them sing. And we follow the shepherds to Bethlehem to look for the child of promise.

In Advent we remember the darkness before Christ came, so that we are ready to celebrate his coming when Christmas arrives. But we also look at our present darkness, so that we do not fail to pray, “Come, Lord Jesus.” The present darkness is so deep, isn’t it? A global pandemic that has now assaulted us for two years… the excitement of finally acknowledging the systemic racism that plagues our society but the backlash from those powerful people who demand that we deny its reality… the threats to democratic self-government throughout the world, including in our own country… the widening gap between the rich and the poor, between those who can jet off to Cozumel whenever they want and those who have to choose between diapers and dinner… and the increasingly obvious effects of climate change… One of my colleagues suggested the other day that it feels like the Apocalypse. I agree; it does.

And in the midst of John’s Apocalypse the Lamb appears with his 144,000 singing praise, and an angel announces that God’s Day of Judgment has arrived while another angel follows after, announcing the fall of Babylon the Great. Keep reading to see more of the fall of Babylon, but just as we pause on Christmas night to hear the angels sing Gloria in excelsis Deo let’s pause a moment to hear the angels announce the judgment of God and the fall of Babylon.

When we pray, “Come, Lord Jesus” we are praying not only for a child to snooze in a manger; we are praying for the Lord’s Day of Judgment to come and for the fall of Babylon. And that’s why I’m a little torn, at least, and I suspect you are too if you’re paying attention. In chapter 18 you will see that Babylon is the home of prosperity, the focus of commerce, the source of all that makes merchants happy and wealthy. In saving God’s people, God destroys commerce. And I like my comfortable living, even if most of the rest of the world is unable to share it. And I don’t know how eager I am to face the Lord Jesus in judgment. I think most of us are happier with little Lord Jesus, asleep in the hay, than we are with the avenging King of John’s Revelation.

And yet… that avenging King is a Lamb, a Lamb who was slaughtered. The 144,000 who are the Lamb’s army do not strap on swords and stride off to kill bad people; they sing a song of praise that only they are qualified to learn, for they were martyred. They died rather than desert the Lamb or kill in the Lamb’s name. The light that shines in the darkness is not a targeting laser, but a candle that glows softly but steadily in the night.

What I am stumbling to say to you is that the feeling of being torn is real and appropriate. Judgment Day looms before us: when Babylon is cast down and the New Jerusalem replaces her, when the meek inherit the earth, when devotion to stuff is thrown away and replaced by devotion to the God who loves us and to the people we love. Yet Judgment Day has already come: it started when a young Mother wrapped her baby in bands of cloth and laid him in a feed-trough, and shepherds came to visit. It reached its climax when that baby, a man of thirty-three, was nailed to a Cross because a world of darkness cannot bear his light, and it concluded when a puzzled angel said to some women, “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen, as he said.” Judgment Day – all thirty-three years of it – came some 2022 years ago and the world has been denying it and rejecting it and ignoring it ever since, because we human beings prefer the ways of Babylon the Great. Yet, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” As the song says, take a break and hear the angels sing.

Robert A. Keefer
Presbyterian Church of the Master
Omaha, Nebraska