Once again there’s no video or audio recording, but here’s my message from what should have been the fourth and instead turned out (due to tornado warnings last week) to be our third and final midweek Advent worship service of 2021. Our ecumenical Wednesday Advent series this year is Songs of the Season, and I and Pastor Joan Thomas, who serves First Presbyterian Church in Greene as well as the Greene United Methodist & Brethren Yoke, are alternating weeks. Here’s my first message, on the hymn It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.
This week, I’m looking at my favorite Christmas hymn, Of the Father’s Love Begotten, featured in the embedded recording of Hope for Resolution from Christmas at Luther a few years ago. I found the Hymnary entry on the hymn and on Prudentius helpful, as well as this blog post and the Wikipedia entries on Prudentius and the hymn. Scripture readings from Colossians and 1 John are included within the message.
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I don’t know how Christmas Eve works in all churches, but here at St. Peter, we pretty much sing the same dozen or so carols each year on Christmas Eve, because if we don’t, it wouldn’t feel right to someone. You have to sing Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Joy to the World, Silent Night, and the rest.
Tonight’s hymn, Of the Father’s Love Begotten, is not on that list, because it’s not most people’s favorite. Somehow it’s not on the playlist from Mel’s Appliance downtown.
So, my confession to you tonight is that I picked tonight’s hymn because this is my favorite Christmas song and if I don’t pick it, I might not get to sing it. And we actually came even closer to missing it, since this was supposed to be last week’s message and carol!
So this is not necessarily the easiest hymn to sing, but I think it’s beautiful. And there’s nothing in the words about Bethlehem or a stable, but the words manage to tell everything really important about the Christmas story, the story of God becoming flesh and entering into our world.
I think this is the oldest hymn in our hymnal, or if not, it’s definitely in the top five. Originally, it was a poem written by Marcus Aurelius Clemens Prudentius, who was born in 348 AD in what’s now Northern Spain, but was a province of the Roman empire.
We don’t know a whole lot about Prudentius, but he we do know he worked for most of his life as a lawyer and judge, and at some point, he served as governor of his province. And then, at the age of 57, he had a midlife crisis and retired from public life to write poetry and hymns about faith.
In this hymn, he’s addressing the question, “Who is Jesus?” and you can see a bit of his lawyer’s training coming through. That’s the question of Christmas, right? Who is this baby born in Bethlehem so long ago, and why do we care?
Prudentius makes a case for a particular answer to that question. Jesus, he argues, is God in the flesh, the savior of the world, the world’s redeemer, not just for one particular moment in time, but forever. God outside of time; God with us.
For the last few weeks we’ve been reciting the Nicene Creed in worship as our statement of faith, and one of the reasons I like to use it in Advent is because there’s some more detail than the Apostle’s creed around who Jesus is and where Jesus came from. In particular, the Nicene Creed was written as an argument against a guy named Arius.
Arius lived about a century before Prudentius, in the 200’s, and Arius was also trying to figure out who Jesus was. I’m oversimplifying his argument, but basically, Arius and his followers claimed that in the beginning there was God, and then God created Jesus. So Jesus is pretty important, but he’s not quite on the same level as God. God made him as part of creation.
Meanwhile, other Christians argued that no, God the Son, Jesus, God the Father, the Creator, and God the Holy Spirit are all God, always have been, always will be, equal, three-in-one. Trinity. There was a big debate about this in the city of Nicea—the council of Nicea.
As a side note, one of the people at that council was a bishop by the name of Nicholas, whom we remember as Saint Nicholas, Saint Nick, and he may or may not have gotten so angry about this controversy that he slapped Arius. Anyway, after much debate, the conclusion was that Arius was a heretic, he was wrong.
They wrote the Nicene Creed to clear things up, clarifying, “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.”
Do you hear the emphasis there? Begotten, not made. Begotten means of the same kind. People beget people, dogs beget dogs, cats beget cats. It’s not the same as making something different. Jesus, the Son of God, is God from God, light from light. Of one being with the Father. And this isn’t something that happens in time, and this is where our human brains start to get a bit overwhelmed. Eternally begotten. There has never been a time before God the Son. That’s the case Prudentius is making in this hymn.
Listen to how Paul explains it in Colossians 1:
He [that is, the Son of God, Jesus] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him.
He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything.
For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.
Jesus, the little baby born in Bethlehem, was and is God with us. God’s love made flesh. Begotten of the Father’s love. There was a time before Jesus the human was born, before God entered into human history, but God’s love existed before time began and will continue after time as we know it ends.
As we’ll sing in the hymn, Christ—God the Son—is alpha and omega (the first and letters of the alphabet in Greek), he is the source and the ending of all things, the things that are, the things that have been, and the things to come in the future. Now and forever. Evermore and evermore.
How exactly all this works is mystery. The Biblical writers try all sorts of ways to explain it; Christians for two thousand years have tried to explain it. This song is one attempt, but ultimately, it’s a mystery of faith, because our brains can’t comprehend eternity, or existence before time.
Which, of course, is part of why God enters into the world, in order to be seen and grasped and received in faith. God the Son takes on flesh to reveal God’s love to us.
One more Scripture passage, from 1 John 4.
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.
In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.
And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.
So, who is Jesus? Jesus is God’s love made flesh. Jesus is the Son of God, of the Father’s love begotten.
Jesus is the one spoken of by prophets, conceived by God’s Holy Spirit—or Holy Ghost in this song—born of the virgin Mary. Jesus is God with us now and forevermore and evermore and evermore.
Amen