Christmas Carols (2) Series

Christmas Carols (Zechariah)

Scott Bayles, pastor

Blooming Grove Christians Church: 12/6/15

We all have our favorite Christmas traditions, don’t we? Maybe it’s decorating the tree, visiting with family, baking cookies and setting a plate out for Santa, or just driving around town to check out all the Christmas lights. One of our favorite traditions is celebrating Saint Nicholas day (today). Saint Nicholas day is the day set aside to honor the man upon whom all the legends and stories about Santa are based. So in honor of Saint Nicholas we open our stockings, which is sort of like a pre-Christmas Christmas. And an important part of all our Christmas traditions is the soundtrack!

The music of Christmas is forever linked to the season of Christmas. We all anticipate the time when we can crank up Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas” or Nat King Cole belting out “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…” Those are wonderful musical decorations to be sure, but Christmas is not Christmas without the genuine Carols of Christmas—the hymns heralding the coming of Christ. From the ancient “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” to the cheerful strains of “Joy to the World”; from the hauntingly beautiful chorus of “What Child Is This?” to the quiet, assuring German folk hymn “Silent Night”—the Carols of Christmas reach deep into our hearts and stir believers to adoration and, I suspect, stir many unbelieving hearts to reconsider the true meaning of Christmas.

The Carols of Christmas is my theme during the Sundays leading up to Christmas, but not the ones we’re accustomed to singing and hearing on the radio. Rather, as I mentioned last Sunday, the tradition of singing carols at Christmas time can be traced all the way back to the very beginning. The nativity story, as told in the first two chapters of Luke, actually contains 4 short songs.

The first one comes to us from the heart and lips of Jesus’s young mother, Mary. In a praiseful solo entitled the Magnificat, Mary praises God for being mindful of her, for the mighty deeds he has done, and for the mercy he would show generation after generation through the birth of her son, Jesus.

But Mary isn’t the only soloist in this Christmas pageant. The next song we hear is written and performed by Mary’s uncle Zechariah.

Now, if you’ll recall from last Sunday, when Mary found out about her pregnancy she traveled to the hill country of Judea to visit her aunt and uncle, Elizabeth and Zechariah—who had recently experience a miracle of their own.

Zachariah and Elizabeth were both “very old” and had been unable to conceive a child. But one fateful day, Zachariah experiences a heavenly encounter that changed everything. As a priest, one of Zechariah’s duties included entering the “Holy Place” within the Temple and burning incense. This was done twice a day and the priests would each take turns doing it. So, the Bible says, “While Zechariah was in the sanctuary, an angel of the Lord appeared to him… Zechariah was shaken and overwhelmed with fear when he saw him. But the angel said, ‘Don’t be afraid, Zechariah! God has heard your prayer. Your wife, Elizabeth, will give you a son, and you are to name him John.’” (Luke 1:11-13 NLT).

Miraculously, the angel’s announcement came to fruition. Elizabeth became pregnant and nine months later, friends, neighbors and relatives rejoiced with them at the birth of their son. In the midst of their baby shower, Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and began to prophesy in poetic prose. The song in his heart explodes with pent-up praise. While the lyrics might not be catchy or memorable, they proclaim the coming of a mighty Savior whose birth would change the course of history. This Song praises God for deliverance from sin and the reign of the devil in the world. This is the announcement of a giant movement on the divine eschatological clock. A new era is upon mankind with the coming of Christ.

In this pre-Christmas Carol, Zechariah refers to a horn, a house, and a holiness—each representing an important result of Christ’s coming. First, Zechariah sings of a horn.

• A HORN

Zechariah’s carol, known at the Benedictus, opens with these lines: “Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come to his people and redeemed them. He has raised up a horn of salvation for us” (Luke 1:68-69 NIV).

This has been an intriguing image for me to hold up before my mind's eye this Christmas: Jesus as the horn of salvation. The kind of horn meant here is not a musical instrument, as we might assume in a Christmas carol; rather, it’s the deadly weapon of the wild ox.

The horn is a symbol of strength and a means of victory. As a kid I remember being terrified of the bull in my grandparents pasture. His back was high as my head. His neck as big as a barrel, and those two horns! Every time I’d go past I’d think, "What if that animal got angry?" My cousin Josh was braver (or stupider) than me. He would taunt and tease the bull. One day, he climbed over the fence and made the mistake of turning his back to the bull. That old bull dropped his head, pointed his horns, and closed the distance between them in two second. Josh went flying and luckily walked away from the experience with nothing more than a bruised bottom and new respect for the bull.