LISTEN TO THE AUDIO HERE.
Who speaks to you today saying,
“John answered them, ‘I baptize with water, but among you stands one
you do not know’”
Dear
Christians, all too often we sacrifice the physical for the spiritual,
contenting ourselves with a mess of a life, if only God would give us good
feelings instead of actually acting, especially during the holidays. We strain
our necks looking up at the clouds and burn our eyes staring at the sun,
waiting for God’s action in our lives.
So God sends us to John the Baptist and we are extremely
disappointed with this command, as much as the priests, Levites, and Pharisees
are. God commands us to look down, when we want to look up. But when all we see
is a mad-man in camel hair, eating locusts and honey, and living in the
wilderness we deny its very possibility of being real.
Like Nicodemus who can’t take in the physical act of being born
again and like the high priest Caiaphas who could not fathom God sacrificing
Himself on behalf of all people. We just cannot connect our lives to the life
of faith and heaven in any other way but that of a spiritual metaphor.
When God tells us to love Him, we hear it in a spiritual way, as
in its left up to our imagination and the emotions we can conjure. When God
tells us to love our neighbor, He means only the ones close to us that are
friendly and that anyone else just gets thoughts and prayers.
When God says seek my face in Psalm 27, and seek the Lord while
He may be found in Isaiah 55, He just means to feel those special feelings of
uplifted, breath-taking, amazing, beautiful, awe inspiring, and spectacular
spirituality. God doesn’t really have a face to seek…does He?
Jesus’ opponents, the Pharisees, priests and Levites get it. You
may be disappointed by that fact, but they get it. They get the fact that they
must be looking for a man, but they are unhappy on both ends of things. Today,
we hear them seeking a man and asking him if he is the Christ.
They know! They know God is going to take a body, that He is not
just going to be spirit, and that He will come to them in this way. In the same
way they know that Jesus is going to rise from the dead, so they set a vigil
over His tomb. Both revelations disappoint them.
The Gloria in Excelsis, in the Divine Service, is our safeguard
against our sinfulness in taking the side of the Pharisees, priests, and Levites
and we have removed it from our Advent Services in order to prove this to
ourselves.
Unlike the Kyrie, the Gloria has been in Service from the
beginning. Finally written down in the Second Century, the Gloria stands as our
own confirmation and inclusion in the work of God. It commands that we look up,
look down, and rejoice that God was made man.
“Glory to God in the Highest”
means above all things, not simply far away in heaven. God’s glory, His will,
and how He acts are far above our glory, will, and acts and yet God performs
those things on earth. The song of the angels on the first Christmas show us
this by tearing open the fabric between heaven and earth revealing that God has
come down.
This you can also be taught by any good Church art and
architecture. If you ever happen to visit one of the big basilicas, the walls
are covered in fresco and mosaic, icons and statuary. You are forced to look up
and view all the images of heaven and its occupants. But, though you look up,
you notice that all the depictions up on high are looking down. You look up for
God’s glory, but as the angels tell us, we find the babe wrapped in swaddling
clothes, not the clouds of heaven.
In the phrase, “and on earth peace, good will toward men”, we have a
bit of grammar trickery going on. The ESV Bible that we usually hear from in
Church translates this as “on earth
peace among those with whom he is pleased”, from Luke 2:14. The problem is that
it sounds like God is only pleased with some on certain parts of the earth and
not all, as He has said in John 3:16, God so loved the whole world.
So we must hear this phrase as declaring to us that there is
peace on earth, because God is pleased with men. “Pleased as man with man to dwell, Jesus our
Immanuel” as “Hark the herald angels sing” tells us. God is pleased with man
because He is a man. There is peace on earth because a man has come to ransom
captive Israel
“We praise thee, we bless thee, we
worship thee, we glorify thee, we give thanks” should not be seen as some sort
of good work that we do to earn salvation, since it sounds like we are chanting
all about us. Instead, we chant this section in light of true Peace being on earth,
forgiving our sins. We praise, bless, worship, glorify, and give thanks,
because God dwells with us. We are sanctified to be able to sing this, in
Christ.
Next, the Gloria once more moves us into the heights of “lord God” and “heavenly king” and “father almighty”.
Again though, the very next phrase takes us down to how God is Lord, where this
heavenly king is, and what it means that we call Him “almighty”.
In the “only begotten
son”, the “Lamb of
God that takest away the sin of the world” and has mercy and receives prayer,
God tilts our head down to where Jesus is. God is Lord, because He is proved
the master of sin and death, in His Son, the man. He is heavenly king because
He makes His throne the cross where He is as a Lamb Who is slain. He is
almighty because He can and does do all this and remains God and man, losing
neither.
It is this man Who sits at the right hand of God. It is this
Lamb only, Who is holy. It is this God-man alone Who art the Lord; Father, Son,
and Holy Ghost.
The Shepherds sing this song of the angels as they seek the
mother and her Child, in Luke 2. It is this song that is remembered by those 12
that Jesus chose and it is this heavenly hymn that the Church guards so
closely, even today. Because in it She finds the answer to the Pharisees’
question and St. John’s
If they would have sung this song of heaven; this Gloria in
Excelsis, they would have known that their Christ, their Prophet, their Elijah,
their baptizer was none other than the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of
the world, as St. John declares in v.36 of the same chapter our Gospel reading
is from.
Had they but held this heavenly chant close and guarded it with
reverence, they would have known that the Lord’s prophet from Deuteronomy 18
would speak words from His own mouth, for God would be made man and be His own
Prophet.
Would we but employ this hymn on Sundays and every day, we would
rejoice, as St. Paul
For the Peace of God that fills the whole earth, because He is
pleased with men, communes in His Church. The Peace of God which surpasses all
understanding is given and shed for you. The Peace which guards your hearts and
minds in Christ Jesus, does so from outside and inside, being placed on your
tongue.
The Gloria in Excelsis places God on the Altar of His Church,
which is what all the host of heaven stares at continually in wonder, that the
Lord could be crucified and yet live forever. The most holy mystery of all and
the constant headline in heaven is that The Crucified is pleased with men and
is the Peace on earth.
The Gloria switches the spiritual for the physical and the
physical for the spiritual. It lifts our eyes towards heaven and points us to
the manger. It fills us with the heavens and sits us down to an earthly feast.
It says God is on high and reveals that God is on High, communing with us. It
does not allow us to see the things in heaven or the things in earth without
Jesus and His cross in view.
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