On Friday, November 30th, George H.W. Bush, the 41st President of the United States went on to be with his Lord and Maker … the Creator of all that seen and unseen … the Eternal President of the Universe. I’m sure he was greeted by family … especially his wife, Barbara, who died on April 17th … and many, many friends and admirers. Karen Tumulty, a reporter for the Washington Post, had this to say about the former President: “The last veteran of World War II to serve as President, he was a consummate public servant and a statesman who help guide the nation and the world out of a four-decade cold war that had carried the threat of nuclear annihilation.” Among his many accomplishments:
He was a decorated Navy pilot
Successful oil company executive
Congressman
A United Nation’s delegate
Chair of the Republican National Committee
Director of the Central Intelligence Agency
Vice-President under Ronald Reagan for eight years.
His body was flown to Washington, DC, on Monday, December 3rd, on Air Force One. He lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda until Wednesday. We probably all saw the viral photo of “Sully,” his service dog lying in front of the President’s casket. He had a state funeral on December 5th. It was attended by the current present, Donald Trump, and four former presidents: Obama; Clinton; his son, George; and Carter. There were many dignitaries, world leaders, movie stars, singers, and professional athletes. His body was then taken to College Station, TX, his adopted state, where he was buried at the George H.W. Bush Library on Thursday, December 6th.
“O come, all ye faithful.” So much ceremony … so much attention … so much praise … so much honor and respect for a former president of the United States. But when his Maker … when our Maker … stepped down from Heaven … well … there was a newly-wed couple … some barnyard animals … and some shepherds who came to adore Him and pay Him respect.
“O come, all ye faith … O come, all ye faithful … O come, let us adore Him, Christ the Lord.” The commands “come” and “adore” are at the very heart of this hymn.
The original title of this hymn was “Adeste Fidelis, Laeti Triumphantes.” “Adeste Fidelis, Laeti Triumphantes” was written by a Roman Catholic layman by the name of John F. Wades. Because of persecution arising from the Jacobite rebellion, streams of Catholics fled to France and Portugal.
How could Wade, a Catholic refugee, support himself while living in exile? He took a job as a music teacher in the famous Roman Catholic College and Ministry Center in Douay, France. He also became a renowned copyist of musical scores. In the mid-1700s, musical scores had to be meticulously copied by hand. It required precision and neatness and Wade’s work was exquisite. When Wade passed away in 1768, his obituary honored him for his “beautiful manuscripts” that adorned chapels and homes. They were considered works of art
In 1745, Wade produced a copy of a Latin Christmas carol beginning with the phrase “adeste fidelis, laeti triumphantes.” At one time, historians believed that he had simply discovered an ancient hymn by an unknown author, but most scholars today now believe that Wade himself composed the lyrics.
Wade died in France but when the persecution ended, and the English Catholics began returning to England, they brought Wade’s Christmas carol back to England with them. One day an Anglican minister named Frederick Oakeley, who preached at Margaret Street Chapel in London came across Wade’s Latin Christmas carol. Deeply moved by the beauty of Wade’s carol, Oakeley translated the first line … “adeste fidelis, laeti triumphantes” … as “Ye faithful, approach ye” … which didn’t catch on. Several years later, Oakeley tried again. By this time, Oakeley had converted to Catholicism and had become a Catholic priest. His grasp of Latin had improved, so he translated “adeste fidelis, laeti triumphantes” into the more vigorous and well-know “O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant.”
Now … somethings get lost in translation. This hymn is filled with “imperatives” or “commands” … twenty to be exact. Sixteen of them are “venite” … “come” … or more accurately “you come” … “you” being in the familiar and translated as “ye” in Old English. Some of you may not know this, but “ye” in Old English was the familiar, personal pronoun … like “tu” in Spanish or French. The pronoun “you” in Old English was the polite or formal pronoun … like “usted” in Spanish or “vous” in French. There are three commands to “sing” and one to “behold.”
Then there are the “soft” imperatives. Wade commands … or more accurately “invites” … us to “adore” Christ twelve times. In fact, the refrain starts with a double imperative: “venite adoremus.” Remember “venite” … “you come” … “you” in the personal … followed by “adoremus” … “we adore.” I pray you hear it. “You,” my friend, “come and join with us.” The singular joining with the plural. You, my friend, come and adore Christ the Lord with us! Beautiful use of language, amen?
“O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant, O come ye, O come ye, to Bethlehem” (stanza 1). [Read Luke 2:8-20.]
“O Come, All Ye Faithful” uses beautiful poetic language to call us … to invite us … to join with the angels and the shepherds that night in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago. It calls us to imagine what it would have been like to be one of the shepherds out tending his flocks as they usually did every night and have an angel suddenly before you announcing the birth of the long-hoped for messiah. “O come, all ye faithful … see how the shepherds, summoned to His cradle, leaving their flocks, draw nigh to gaze” (stanza 1a, 4a].
In the eyes of the religious folk in Bethlehem … and all of Israel for that matter … the shepherds would not have been called among the “faithful” but the “faithless.” The shepherds were the great unwashed … the agricultural laborers who did the manual labor of looking after the sheep day in and day out. It was nearly impossible for shepherds to observe all the rules and traditions regarding ritual washing. The nature of their work also made it impossible for them to observe the Sabbath and the religious holidays. After all, sheep don’t tend to look at each other and say, “uh, gosh! It’s the Sabbath … we’d better not wander off today and get lost.” Free-range livestock have to be protected and fed and cared for 24/7 … and that’s what the shepherds were doing when the heavens opened up and the angels appears.
The call of Wade’s hymn is not a call for sinners to come to Christ but for believers to come together and worship Jesus. And I want you to once again hear the call for the individual, personal “you” to become a part of the faithful “us.” O come, you who are faithful … O come, you who are joyful … O come, you who are triumphant … come, join with us, who are faithful … come join with us who are triumphant … come, join with us who are faithful. Come, join us as we who are faithful adore God. Come, join with us who are joyful as we adore God. Come, join with us who are triumphant because Jesus Christ died for our sins and gave us the victory over sin and death.
The call to come and worship God with other believers is found throughout the Scriptures. The writer of Psalm 95 invites us to come and sing to the Lord … to shout to the Rock of our salvation … to come into God’s presence with thanksgiving … to make a joyful noise with song and praise! To bow down and worship the Lord our maker. “The shepherds went back, glorifying and praising God for all that they had heard and seen,” writes Luke, “just as had been told them” (Luke 2:20).
Psalm 100:1-2 says: “Make a joyful noise to the Lord” … who? “ALL the earth!” (emphasis mine). Make a joyful noise all of us … everyone … every “you” and every “us” on the planet. “Worship the Lord with gladness … come into His Presence with singing.” In other words, “O come, all ye faithful, joyful, and triumphant … O come ye, O come ye, to Bethlehem” (Stanza 1a).
In Bethlehem, not only were Mary and Joseph and the shepherds there to worship and adore this newborn king, the angels too were in Bethlehem to worship and adore this “King of the Angels.” And so, the “us” of “venite adoramus” … “O come you and let us adore Him” … is the “us” of Heaven and earth, singing and praising this newborn King together. And when we sing hymns and carols like “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” we who are faithful, joyful, and triumphant join with the shepherds and the angels and all the others who are faithful, joyful, and triumphant in praising and adoring our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ!
The shepherds rush to Bethlehem. “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us” (Luke 2:15). And when they get there, they found everything just as the angel had told them. They found Mary. They found Joseph. They found the manger. They saw the clothes. They saw the baby. “When they saw this,” says Luke, “they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds had told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart” (v. 17-19).
They thought about the things that were said to them. They pondered upon what they had heard. And it was so incredible that they “wondered at the things which were told them” (v. 18). That’s what it means to “adore.” “Adore means to worship. But it also means much more that that. “Adore” means to love … to search … to be amazed … to be filled with awe … as all who were there in the manger were doing that night. They were pondering and thinking and marveling at what God was doing.
I’m sure that they didn’t fully understand what was going on in that moment. Just like the Disciples who walked and talked and sat at Jesus’ feet, they knew a little … but after the fact. When they had time to reflect on everything … when they had time to digest it … when they had a chance to filter what they had experienced through the Scriptures … when the Holy Spirit came and gave illumination … then they, like us, could understand that Jesus was the Christ and that He had come to suffer and die for our sins.
Jesus’ life and His sacrifice on the cross call us to sing His praises, amen? The angels were praising God that night. “Glory to God in the Highest Heaven, and on earth peace among those whom He favors!” (v. 14). The shepherds were praising God that night. “The shepherds went back, glorifying and praising God for all that they had heard and seen” (v. 20). And we are called to adore Him. We are called to sing His praises.
And in case you didn’t know what to wonder and what to ponder, what to sing praises about, Wade lays it out beautifully in stanza 2: “True God of True God, light from Light Eternal. Lo, He shuns not the virgin’s womb, Son of the Father, begotten, not created.”
Ward quotes from the Nicene Creed almost verbatim: “God from God, light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made.” The Nicene Creed was written early in the fourth century AD. If you remember your church history, the church faced some intense persecution in its early years. Frist from the Jews … then from the Romans. This persecution went on for over 250 years.
The persecutions ended in 311 AD when Roman Emperor Galerius issued the famous “Edict of Toleration.” This declaration ended the official persecutions of Christians. For the first time Christmas were able to unite across the entire Empire. Prior to this, Christians had to meet in secret, in small groups dispersed all across the region. And this isolation began to produce some divergent and conflicting ideas and theologies concerning the nature of Christ and His relationship with God. Was Jesus God? Was He fully divine? A kind of avatar that looked like a human, was shaped like a human, but was purely supernatural? What He a man? A regular, ordinary man that the Holy Spirit had chosen to inhabit? What sort of being was Jesus? What was His nature? Until the persecution ended, Christians and the Church simply had no way to gather and wrestle with these issues.
Then the Roman Emperor Constantine, a Christian himself, ordered the church to gather in the city of Nicea to resolve the issue of Jesus’ nature and His relationship to the Trinity. In 325 AD, they came up with the Nicene Creed. Let’s read part of it … the part that speaks of Jesus’ nature and relationship to the Father … together:
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
The only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
Of one being with the Father;
through Him all things were made
For us and for our salvation
he came down from Heaven,
was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary,
and became truly human.”
Ward does such a beautiful job of encapsulating our core belief about Jesus’ nature and His relationship to the Trinity in stanza 2 … and truly gives us something to ponder, amen?
And the beautiful thing about pondering is that it naturally leads to adoration! Ward’s hymn is a passionate summons to come: “O come, people of God … come and join me … come and join the angels … join with the shepherds … join with us and sing and adore the miracle that was born that night in Bethlehem. Please … come and join us.” And in the very act of singing this hymn we are, in fact, answering the summons. By singing, we have joined with the angels … we have joined with the shepherds … we have joined with Ward … we have joined with our faithful, joyful, triumphant Christian brothers and sisters around the world and through the ages in worshipping, praising, and adoring Jesus … Emmanuel … God made flesh in the womb of a virgin.
And the three-fold repetition … “O come, let us adore Him; O come, let us adore Him; O come, let us adore Him” … truly drives home the point so that by the third repetition we are shouting it and meaning it with all our hearts! Yes! Let us adore Him!
Verse 2 of this hymn acknowledges the full worth of Jesus Christ to receive glory. Revelation 5:12 says: “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing. To Him who sits on the throne and the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!”
John’s gospel tells us that Christ is the “Word” … capital “W.” And that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” “… He shuns not the virgin’s womb; Son of the Father, begotten not created” (stanza 2). And because of what happened that night in Bethlehem, “we have seen His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
This truly amazing truth is the core doctrine and the very heart and spirit of Christmas! Take a few moments today to think, to “ponder,” upon the magnitude of that statement. The Word of God, who was “in the beginning with God’ and who was God … the Word of God who has no beginning and who has no end … the Word of God through whom and for whom all things were created … took on created human flesh and subjected Himself to being born as a human being … a baby human being at that. And is there anything more helpless than a human baby? Yet the Almighty Son of God willingly robed Himself in human flesh and voluntarily … He didn’t have to do this … put Himself in this helpless, disabled state. It there any greater humility than this? And yet it reveals to us how great and worthy of praise this child truly was and is! O come, let us adore Him, Christ the babe … Christ the Lord.
“Shout joyfully to the Lord, all the earth … serve the Lord with gladness; come before Him with joyful singing” (Psalm 100:1-2). Are you coming? Are you continually coming to Jesus? We can’t go to Bethlehem this morning … not physically … but even if we could board a jet now and fly there … guess what? He wouldn’t be there! Jesus is in Heaven with His Father … with the angles and heavenly beings. So how do we come to Him … right here … right now? We pray! “Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has passed through Heaven, Jesus, the Son of God,” the writer of Hebrews reminds us, “let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness but we have one who in every respect has been tested, as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:14-16).
Anytime, anyplace, you can come to Jesus in prayer. In fact, the Bible calls us to “pray without ceasing” (1st Thessalonians 5:17). This is our life … one of prayer. Constantly coming to the Lord … constantly praying to Him … constantly adoring Him! “True God of true God, Light from Light Eternal; lo, He shuns not the virgin’s womb; Son of the Father, begotten, not created” (stanza 2). This is the true beauty and mystery of Christmas … that God, the true God, Light from Light Eternal, would come into the womb of a virgin and dwell among us as a human being. And not only that, but that His coming would be unto death. He would not be received as a king. He would be humiliated and treated like a criminal … condemned to die on a cross between two thieves.
The good news of Christmas is this: that His death upon the cross was for our sins! Jesus died in our place that we might gain eternal life with Him. As Ward says in stanza 5:
“Child, for us sinners
poor and in the manger,
we would embrace thee
with love and awe.
Who would not love thee,
loving us so dearly.”
So, in the spirit of this great carol …
Venite!
Come!
Venite all you faithful!
Venite all you joyful!
Venite all you who are triumphant!
Venite all you angels in Heaven!
Venite adoramus!
Come, all of you, and let us adore this King of Angels … Christ the Lord!
Let us pray …
