Gymea Anglican Church
Service of Lessons and Carols
Christmas Eve, 2008
The Service of Carols and Lessons has an interesting history - it began, like Christmas itself, in a barn. As the town of Truro (Cornwall, England) had no cathedral at the time, a temporary wooden shed was having to serve in its place. A man by the name of Edward White Benson devised the service, with the main aim of keeping men out of the alehouse on Christmas Eve.
Below is a quick run-through of the Service of Lessons and Carols that we recently celebrated in Gymea Anglican. Sing the carol if you wish... and bring a Bible to the table (for the night we used the ESV). Everything else is pretty well how it was.
Be warned - with eight readings it's a long entry, even with no song lyrics attached.
Welcome, and thank you for coming – Welcome to Gymea Anglican's Christmas Eve Carols and Lessons service.
To anyone visiting, good to have you here - please make yourself at home. You're among friends tonight.
Let's pray; Loving, Heavenly Father, thank you. Thank you for today, thank you that you are the Master of the day. And thank you for this time of the year – and the opportunity to freely and safely honour the birth of your Son, Jesus. Be with us as we sing, as we pray and as we remember this day as we read your word. In Jesus’ name… Amen.
The Lessons and Carols service has been a traditional way of celebrating Christmas since 1880, but the faithful gathered long before that to sing together and to remember, and to once again adore Christ the Lord. Let’s stand and sing our first carol...
First Carol: O Come All Ye Faithful
Ø In The Beginning
In the beginning, God spoke. And as he spoke, the world was made… and as he spoke, it was bought to order… And then he stooped low, and out of the red, rich soil he shaped, moulded and made man in his own image. He breathed his breath, his spirit, into the man’s nostrils, and man became a living being. God gave the man a partner, and gave them both everything that he had made, except for the one thing that the man was not ready for – knowledge of good and evil.
But the man and the woman forgot God. They listened to the quiet whisper of another voice who said “you will be like God.” And so, forgetting God and yet wanting to be like him, they ate…
First Lesson… Genesis 3:7-13
And so we were exiled – exiled by our own desire, and thus exiled from the perfect presence of our Maker. God’s people kept failing, over and over again. And yet he still loved them. The Lord established a kingdom for his people, with a wise and loving ruler in King David, and yet within two generations, that kingdom was broken apart before crumbling, conquered by surrounding empires and all but forgotten by the world.
Exiled by their disobedience, exiled by their desire to have their way and to be ruled by none but themselves. Just like us…
And yet even in the depths of exile, even when at the furthest distance from His presence and his heart, God has sent the voices of hope. In the words of Isaiah and Micah we hear the Lord beginning to reveal his great plan to rescue and redeem his lost children, and to bring peace to them all.
Second Lesson… Isaiah 9:5-7, Micah 5:2
The announcements of the prophets would soon be made by angels, heralding the coming of the King. Let’s stand and sing together,
Second Carol: Hark the Herald Angels Sing
Ø Son of David
Christ by highest heaven adored, Christ the Everlasting Lord. Wesley and Whitefield had a gift for words, didn’t they? Who would be this Christ? Who would be this Messiah to bring God’s people to himself?
Through another prophet, Nathan, God promised David that his kingdom would be eternal. He made covenant with King David:
“When your days are fulfilled,” he said, “and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom… I will be to him a Father, and he shall be to me a son.”
The kingdom of David faltered and failed, to the point that it would be very hard to imagine how this great promise could be kept. But although the kingdom faded, the offspring didn’t.
Matthew opens his account of Jesus, his Gospel, with a genealogy that stretches from not just King David but Abraham – the man whom God also made covenant with, and promised that the world would be blessed through his descendents. Abraham is at the start of Matthew’s line. It finishes with a man named Joseph.
Third Lesson: Matthew 1:1-24
Here we see Joseph, from David’s line, about to travel to the city of David’s birth… but that’s another story. Remembering the promise made to King David, let’s stand and sing
Third Carol: “Once in Royal David’s City”
Ø Son of God
A king of royal blood can often unify a people. A king descended from kings can raise an army to overthrow the occupiers, repel the invaders and re-establish powerful dynasties.
But that’s not what God’s people need rescuing from. We need rescuing from ourselves.
What king can do that? Where must a king be descended from to have that sort of authority?
The Pharisees understood it well. They would say that only God can forgive sins, only God has the authority to forgive sins. It needs more than God’s authority vested in a king to be able to do that.
Fully God. Fully Man.
Let’s hear what happened.
Fourth Leson: Luke 1:26-38
Son of God, love’s pure light. Let’s stand together and sing a song that turns 190 years old today:
Fourth Carol: “Silent Night.”
Ø The Birth
When Queen Elizabeth II visited Australia in the early sixties, she travelled with a great retinue, including support aircraft. My dad first saw Australia when he came out with one of those aircraft – and, fortunately, he fell in love with Australia. But wherever the Queen went, vast crowds came to see her.
Royal visits, state occasions, pomp, ceremony… for the monarch of an empire that had peaked in Victoria’s day and was waning. What grandness should accompany the arrival of the King of the world? What would be the most fitting way to celebrate the arrival of the King who would rescue his people?
Let’s hear as Luke tells us how this mighty King arrived.
Fifth Lesson: Luke 2:1-7
A manger. A cow’s foodbox. That’s how King Jesus came. Not in displays of wealth and influence, but in a way an Indian beggar would be familiar with.Close your eyes and picture it as we stand and sing together:
Fifth Carol: “Away In A Manger”
Ø Witnesses High and Low
We still have a tradition, don’t we? It’s an odd one – if there’s an important document to sign, we need witnesses – so that all parties know that this really happened.
CNN and BBC and Reuters news services are the best at what they do, because their reporters and cameramen go to places to see what’s happening, to report… but we can see that they’re there. We know that they are witnesses.
Angels are the messengers of God. They travel with the word of the Lord, and they make His announcements, as we have already seen a couple of times.
Now they come to proclaim, to break the news, to bear witness. And who receives the news first? Emissaries of Herod’s royal court? Diplomatic envoys for the Roman Emperor Augustus?
We Aussies should love this – the people God chooses to tell first? Sheep farmers.
Let’s hear Luke tell us how God told them.
Sixth Lesson: Luke 2:8-21
There’s only one carol fitting here, isn’t there?
Sixth Carol:“While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night”
Ø Honours Bestowed
On the birth of a son of an emperor, or a king, protocol had it that ambassadors to various countries would approach the palace and offer their countries good wishes to the King. They would then send a dispatch to their own country to let their own rulers know of the happy event.
Matthew shows us something very unusual. Nobody knows who they are, where they came from or where they went. But people came – first to the palace of the Roman-appointed King Herod, then to the birthplace of David, the birthplace of Jesus. Were they sent? Did they come of their own accord? We don’t know.
But they knew whom they sought. And they bestowed honour fit for a king to a child born in poverty. And they never hesitated.
Let’s hear how Matthew records it:
Seventh Lesson: Matthew 2:1-12
Let’s sing about those strangers, who gave such honour to King Jesus
Seventh Carol: “We Three Kings”
This is our collection song (no irony intended)
Ø In The Beginning…
In the beginning, God spoke. And as he spoke the world was made… and as he spoke it was bought to order… And then he stooped low, and out of the red, rich soil… he shaped, moulded and made man in his own image. He breathed his breath, his spirit into the man’s nostrils, and man became a living being. God gave the man a partner, and gave them both everything that he had made, except for the one thing that the man was not ready for – knowledge of good and evil.
But the man and the woman forgot God. They listened to the quiet whisper of another voice who said “you will be like God.” And so, forgetting God and yet wanting to be like him, they ate…
But... but... But before all this, God had seen it all. And He knew. In the beginning was the Word.
Eighth Lesson: John 1:1-17
This is Good News This is the Gospel, the Good Message that brings joy to the world – That from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace; that grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
Let’s stand and sing together our final carol tonight:
Eighth Carol: “Joy To The World”
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