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O COME, O COME, EMMANUEL
Songs of the Season, Part 1
Isaiah 7:10-14; Matthew 1:18-23
December 3, 2006 – First Sunday in Advent
Pastor Bob Sanders
Matthew 1:18-23 (TNIV)
18 This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. 19 Because Joseph her husband was a righteous man and did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.
20 But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins."
22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: 23 "The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel" (which means "God with us").
Songs of the Season
Welcome to Advent. It’s a Latin word that means “coming towards,” and in this season we celebrate God’s coming towards us, and finally dwelling among us, in the person of our Lord, Jesus Christ. When I was growing up the Presbyterian Church didn’t do much with Advent. Christmas came without much warning, and was gone before you knew it. But in recent years, more and more churches have discovered the value of using these four Sundays to prepare for the real thing at Christmas. We light candles. We listen to Scripture. We ponder the meaning of our Lord’s incarnation at Bethlehem. And as Christmas Day draws near, we sing the songs we love to sing: the great Christmas carols, the “Songs of the Season.”
That’s the title of this year’s Advent sermon series. We’re going to take a different carol each week, look at its history, and consider its meaning in light of Scripture. And, of course, we’ll sing the carol – along with a number of other favorite carols as well. I hope this will deepen your understanding of these songs of the season, and maybe encourage you to memorize the words to some of them. Wouldn’t that be great – to know the words beyond just the first verse to these carols!
Next week we’ll look at Isaac Watt’s magnificent hymn, “Joy to the World!” The week after that will be Charles Wesley’s “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” On the final Sunday of Advent we’ll sing and savor Phillips Brooks’ beloved carol, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” And on Christmas Eve, what else could it be but “Silent Night”?
The Oldest Carol
This morning we begin with what is probably “the oldest Christmas carol still sung” – “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.” The author is unknown. In all likelihood, it was a monk or a priest who penned the original words sometime before 800 A.D. He would have been a scholar with a rich knowledge of both the Old and New Testaments, for the hymn draws on lots of Scripture, as we’ll see in a moment.
In its original Latin form, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” was a series of seven verses known as the Great Antiphons. “Antiphon” means a prayer or a verse sung in response, and these seven antiphons were sung during worship the week prior to Christmas, one antiphon per day, in response to a reading of Mary’s Magnificat in Luke 1. Each antiphon began with the word “O” and was then followed by a biblical title for the Messiah.
You can see a summary of the seven Great Antiphons on the cover of your bulletin:
O Wisdom, from the mouth of the Most High…
Come and teach us the way of salvation.
O Lord and Ruler of the house of Israel…
Come with outstretched arm to save us.
O Root of Jesse, rising as a sign for all the peoples…
Come quickly to deliver us.
O Key of David and Scepter over the house of Israel…
Come to set the prisoners free.
O Dayspring from on high…
Come shine on those who sit in darkness.
O Ruler of the nations and their desired One…
Come and save us all.
O Emmanuel, our King and Lawgiver…
Come and save us, O Lord our God.
Sometime in the 12th or 13th century A.D., another unknown poet rearranged the antiphons so that the last one about Emmanuel became the first, and added the refrain: “Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!” It was picked up by many churches across Europe and became an important part of their Advent worship. Now remember – this is back in the Dark Ages when very few people had access to a Bible. So what this hymn did was instruct people as to what the Scriptures had to say about the Messiah – who he was, what he represented, why he came to Earth. It brought the story of Christ the Savior to life during those centuries of ignorance and darkness, and so it ranks as one of the most important hymns in the history of the Christian church.
The way it comes to us is through an Anglican priest named John Mason Neale. He was born in 1818, educated at Cambridge, and became a brilliant scholar who could write and speak more than twenty languages. But church leaders at the time thought him too evangelical, so rather than make him a pastor in London, Neale was sent to the Madeira Islands off the northwest coast of Africa. While there, Neale threw himself into serving the poorest of the poor: he took his meager salary and founded an orphanage, a school for girls, and a house of refuge for women forced into prostitution.
At the same time he continued his lifelong study of Scripture and any Scripture-based writing he could find. And it was during these studies he came across this Latin chant, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” in an ancient book. Gripped by its text, Neale translated the words into English. His first version began, “Draw nigh, draw nigh, Emmanuel,” but soon thereafter he changed it to the wording we know.
The haunting melody is called “Veni Emmanuel” and is also of ancient origin. It’s based on one of the earliest known forms of sacred music – the chant or plainsong. Neale’s translation of the lyrics coupled with the melody was first published in England in the 1850s and within 25 years it became one of the best known songs of the season throughout Europe and America. In the version we’re using today, the first two verses are from Neale’s original, and the final verse is a translation by Henry Sloan Coffin, pastor of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City, written in 1916.
Singing Our Prayers
Look at the words in your hymnal or bulletin. Sometimes when we’re singing a hymn I’m tempted to stop us midway through, have us close our hymnals or put down our bulletins, and then ask different ones of us, “Can you tell me what you just sang? What did the words mean to you?” It’s easy to sing a song like this and not think what we’re saying, not feel the impact of its message. So let’s take a closer look at what this hymn says.
The first thing to notice is that it’s a prayer. It’s addressed to our Lord. So if we sing it rightly, we’re praying. We’re lifting up our deepest longings to this Advent Lord. We’re asking him to come into our lives, to come into our world, to come into our situation. We’re praying that he will come to us and to all those who need him, bringing his hope and his healing and his salvation.
We’re singing our prayers. If you’re like me, you need all the help you can get when it comes to praying. Most of us get sick of our own prayers. We can’t think of what to say. We’re distracted. And what we do manage to pray seems so feeble and half-hearted, so same-old-same-old and boring. It’s why I love great hymns like this one. It’s why I memorize them. They help me in my praying. When I sing them, I try to think about what I’m singing and direct the words to God. And when I’m stuck in my own prayers, I turn to these hymns and let them guide me into something richer and deeper.
Look at the final verse. It begins, “O come, Desire of nations.” That title comes from the Old Testament prophet Haggai, who spoke of “the desire of the nations” of the world filling the house of God. The same image is found is Isaiah 2:2-4, one of the classic texts of Advent, which declares that all the nations of the world will come to the house of God and learn his ways. That text ends with these famous words:
They shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.
Remember, when this verse was written it was 1916. Thousands were dying in the trenches across France, and in a matter of months the United States would enter what became known as the First World War. That was ninety Advents ago. And in the time since, we’ve seen the Second World War, the Korean War, the Cold War, the Vietnam war, Afghanistan and now Iraq (which is lasting longer than any of the others). How appropriate and important for us to sing and pray in this Advent:
O come, Desire of nations, bind
All peoples in one heart and mind;
Bid envy, strife, and discord cease;
Fill the whole world with heaven’s peace.
That’s the first verse – a prayer for peace. The second verse begins, “O come, Thou Day-spring.” That title comes from another classic Advent text – Zechariah’s great song in Luke chapter 1 (also known as the Benedictus), where he says, “The dayspring from on high” will come “to give light to those that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.”
The coming Messiah is the Dayspring, the One who brings light into our darkness: the darkness of fear or depression, the darkness of grief and of death itself. In the opening lines of the Gospel of John we read, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” Whatever our darkness, Jesus Christ is our bright morning star, our unfailing light. And so in a world of darkness we sing and pray:
O come, Thou Day-spring, come and cheer
Our spirits by Thine advent here;
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death’s dark shadows put to flight.
The Dayspring. But it is the first verse that has the greatest Advent image of all. It begins, “O come, O come, Emmanuel.” As we’ve already heard, it comes from Isaiah chapter 7 and from Matthew chapter 1 where we read: “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel (which means ‘God with us.’)”
Think of that. God – the Almighty, the Eternal, the Holy One – and then that crucial preposition with – God with. And then us, you and me and the whole human family. Not God above us. Not God apart from us. But God with us. God beside us in every circumstance – in our joys and in our sorrows, in our deep gladness and in our desperate pain. Not only God with us, but God one of us. The good news of Christmas is that God comes in human form to pay the ransom price, freeing us from captivity to sin and death. So the angel announces to Joseph that the Child Mary is carrying is none other than God’s own Son. “And you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” Emmanuel – the God who is with us, the God who comes to save us. And so we sing and pray:
O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.
From the Heart
We’ve sung it many times, haven’t we? But have we grasped what we were singing? Did we think about the meaning of these magnificent words? I suspect both authors – the anonymous ancient monk and the exiled Anglican priest – would be very surprised that we still remember their work. But what I think they most want is for us to join them and countless other believers through the centuries who not only sing these words but pray them from the heart:
O come, Desire of nations,
bind all peoples together in Your peace.
O come, Thou Day-spring from on high,
dispel the dark shadows of fear and death with Your light..
O come, O come, Emmanuel,
and ransom us from our long captivity to sin.
When we sing those words to our Advent Lord and mean them, then we can join with all God’s people in the glad refrain:
Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!
It’s such a great song of the season. Let’s pause for a moment of silent preparation, and then let’s sing it – and pray it – together.
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