Sermon: "Joy to the World"

4th in the "Forgotten Verses of Famous Carols" series.
Delivered December 24, 2009 by Rev. John Schmidt.
Sermon Text: Psalm 98; Isaiah 49:5-7; Philippians 2:6-11

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Let's pray: Lord, we thank you for this opportunity to spend a few moments thinking about you, thinking about your Word. We pray you open our eyes, open our hearts. Help us to respond to the grace that you give us. For we ask it in Jesus' name, Amen.

I'm going to state the obvious to you. It's Christmas Eve. So that means tomorrow is Christmas day. And so I want to help you imagine what it might be like tomorrow morning. I think we should wake up around 5:30. That's a good time. Okay? Because it's a really exciting day. So we wake up real early. We throw on our warm robes. We go down to whatever room the Christmas tree is in.

We get around there, and we start to circle around there, and mom or dad runs over into the kitchen for a moment to start the coffee, because that's another essential thing you have to have. And so you circle the tree, and everybody sits there and begins to talk about the wonderful gifts that people gave each other a thousand years ago, because there are no gifts under the tree.

Now when I shared that at the family service a few hours ago, even the little kids there realized there was something seriously wrong with this story because everybody knows it's Christmas. And in Christmas, you're supposed to have lots of presents under the tree. This whole idea of getting around the tree and sharing some kind of story about other people getting gifts some other time, maybe that's another holiday for another group of people, but it's not Christmas.

And yet, I feel like sometimes when we get to the spiritual reason behind Christmas, when we start to think about Jesus, we sometimes slip into that sort of attitude the way that what we're celebrating here is a gift that was given thousands of years ago. And it doesn't have a whole lot of reality right now for us. Sure it's a great story. We like to remember it, and we like to rehearse it. The story of God coming to earth in Jesus and all the wonder of the love that that shows about God. But to be honest about it, often times that's where it ends for us. It's a nice story. Something to remember. We don't expect a real, life-changing gift from God now. There is nothing under the tree.

At the end of today's service, we're going to be singing one of the most famous Christmas carols ever. Silent Night is one of them, but the one we're going to be singing after that is Joy to the World. Joy to the World was written by Isaac Watts nearly 300 years ago. Isaac Watts wrote poetry his whole life. Even as a kid, he had this gift for making rhymes.

Once, as the story goes, his father caught him with his eyes open during family prayer, as the family would pray every day together (which I think is a great idea). And they were praying, and the father noticed that Isaac is kind of looking up at the ceiling. When his father scolded him for not paying attention, Isaac explained that he was watching a mouse run up a rope in the house. But he didn't say it that way. Instead he said this: "A little mouse, for want of stairs, ran up a rope, to say its prayers."

Well his father really didn't think that that was an appropriate response, and so his father began to punish him. Naturally Isaac didn't know when to shut up, and so he cries out, "Father, do some pity take, and I will no more verses make." I'm glad his poetry got better as he grew older. Isaac Watts is now considered one of the greatest hymn writers ever in English, but he wasn't always appreciated in his own time.

You see, just like his father had troubles with his poetry, people in Isaac Watts' day had trouble with his poetry as well, because hymns were different than what we sing now. His contemporaries considered his lyrics too worldly. The people in that era thought that we should just sing the psalms, that section in the Bible that has poetry and songs called Psalms. And they felt like Watts took too many liberties. He got too theological. He got too personal with the information there. And so his hymns outraged so many people that some congregations split, and some pastors got fired over using his hymns.

Still in the midst of all that controversy, Watts knew that God had given him this gift from childhood. And so he kept at it all of his life. One of his best-known hymns is Joy to the World. We sing it with gusto every Christmas, and we sing it in a number of different languages all around the world. The funny thing, though, is that he didn't write it as a Christmas hymn. He had no intention of it being sung specifically for Christmas, because what he is actually doing is he is writing a hymn based upon Psalm 98. Psalm 98 doesn't mention the birth of Jesus at all.

I'd like to go to Psalm 98 just for a moment so that you can know what it does say. Psalm 98. You'll find that on page 548 of the Bibles that you can find under the chairs in front of you.

"Sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous things; his right hand and his holy arm have worked salvation for him. The Lord has made his salvation known and revealed his righteousness to the nations. He has remembered his love and his faithfulness to the house of Israel; all the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God."

"Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth, burst into jubilant song with music; make music to the Lord with the harp, with the harp and the sound of singing, with trumpets and the blast of the ram's horn - shout for joy before the Lord, the King. Let the sea resound, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it. Let the rivers clap their hands, let the mountains sing together for joy; let them sing before the Lord, for he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples with equity."

This psalm is wholly given to praise. It's just praise. The first three verses, the psalmist calls us to sing with praise. The theme of the opening verses is the resounding victory of God. He is talking about the end of history here, and the word "salvation" comes up three times in the opening verses. God's salvation just comes out and explodes upon the world. It goes out to everyone. Nations, the very ends of the earth, see the salvation of God. And this is good news, and he is calling everyone to praise God for this.

Verses 4 to 6 continue that. Shout for joy; burst into jubilant song. Again, calling us to joy. Trumpets, blast of horns, everything we can do as human beings to raise up praise before God. It's worth it because of what God is doing. Then, in verses 7 to 9, all of creation is commanded to join us. Humanity, the seas, creatures of every kind, even the mountains are called to praise God for what God is going to do. And at the end of the psalm, we get the idea of why are we called to praise. For God comes to judge the earth.

When all of human history is over, when God's kingdom comes in its fullness to all of the earth, it says here that there will be righteousness and equity. Everything that's unfair will be made fair at the end of history. And "judge" here just doesn't mean... We always think of the word "judge" as punishing evil, but another part of the meaning of this word "judge" is to rule. And so what it's saying is that in this final day, no longer will there be a veil between God and creation and all kinds of human powers and spiritual powers that are distant from God, but God himself will rule with justice.

And so the call here, the message, is that this is good news. The sick, the wounded, the afflicted, the poor, the ecology of the world itself is called to praise God and get the good news that when God comes with all of his fullness at the end of history, he will set the whole world right, and he'll set the whole world right for their benefit. Incredible news! And so the psalm tells us, "Rejoice! Praise! Clap your hands! Shout out loud! You have good news on the way." An Old Testament message.

Joy to the World picks up this theme.

"Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare him room,
and heaven and nature sing.

Joy to the world, the Savior reigns!
Let all their songs employ;
while fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains repeat the sounding joy.

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
nor thorns infest the ground.
He comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found.

He rules the world with truth and grace
and makes the nations prove the glories of his righteousness
and wonders of his love."

An incredible reflection of the joy and scope of the original psalm. But the question is... why do we sing it at Christmas? Why has this become one of the central ways we express the message of Christmas? One of the reasons is in the beginning of the hymn. It says, "Joy to the world, the Lord is come! Let earth receive her King." So there is that picture there you can imagine as being the Lord coming as a Baby, and we being invited to receive Jesus as King. And I think that's totally legitimate.

But the future is also in focus here because the lyrics that are here point to the fact that God has an ultimate vision for creation. What Jesus came to do as a baby in becoming a human and living out a human life and dying in exchange for us and coming back to life in resurrection, all of this is the beginning of a plan that God has yet to bring to completion. And we're living in between the start and the end. We receive the blessings of it, but we don't receive it all yet.

It's good news not just in the past. It's good news now because we're living inside of an era of grace. And it's good news in the future because God's promise is that it will only at the end get better for all who know him. Joy to the World is a reminder of that. It's a reminder that we're still waiting for the day that Jesus returns and rules in perfect peace and justice.

And so at Christmas, we don't just look back in history at an amazing act of love. We don't just remember things. At Christmas, we look forward to the consummation of what God is doing, to the goal of what God is doing, when the Savior and King comes and rules the world, and we recognize that right now, there is a gift under the tree. We don't just talk about a gift that was given. There is a gift to receive right now.

Until that day, the hymn reminds us, "Let every heart prepare him room." Make room now for the King to work in us. That same love that sent Jesus, that same love that's going to restore the earth to total fairness and equity and will fix a broken world... that love is given to us today.

And so if you've never ever received that love, I just want to invite you that we are now living. It's 2,000 years so far. We don't know how long it will go from now, but we're living in a time of grace, of favor where we can actually receive a gift that won't be complete until the future, but a gift now where God comes to heal our brokenness.

The hymn expresses it another way. "No more let sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground. He comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found." Far as the curse is found. Whether it's the curse in the dark corners of our own life, God has come to bring grace even into the most distant corners of our own personality. There is good news. And God is bringing good news to the most distant corners of the world. Places filled with pain and sorrow, God's salvation will ultimately prepare.

So what God has done in Christ is not just something to remember. Jesus began something that's real now. We look at the past, and we look at the future so that we have hope in the present. So it's good news. It's good news not for people who already have it all together, but for people just like us, people who feel the curse, people who fall short, people who feel the sorrow of their lives as they are right now.

I can remember 38 years ago or so where right before Christmas this became a reality for me. And I realized that this wasn't just fairytales or old stories about something that happened long ago, celebrating some kind of present given in the past that we should appreciate, but that there was a reality right now that God could do in me spiritually. And when I took that step of trust and received what God had promised that he would forgive me and change the kind of life I lived.

I can still remember how amazing that first Christmas was, because all of a sudden all those hymns weren't talking about stuff that happened once upon a time. It was talking about a promise that was being worked out right now in my life because there was a present under the tree for me. Joy to the World (we're going to sing it later) reminds us there is good news. Good news, people! Christ came for you. We celebrate it on Christmas. Christ is here for you right now. We celebrate that too. And Christ is coming again for you. And so as the hymn reminds us, heaven and nature sing for joy.

Let's pray: Lord God, we are reminded by the words of this hymn and by the words of Scripture of just how amazing your love is. And so now we bow our knee, we bow our hearts, and we open up our lives to the grace that you are willing to give. And we thank you for so much goodness given to us in Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray, Amen.

© 2009, Rev. John Schmidt
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org