Today is a special feast day, especially in
the Western Church, and it's called the Feast
of the Holy Name of Jesus.
The Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus.
And I can't think of a better way
to begin the first day of the new
year than by celebrating the Eucharist together, which
is a corporate...
what we're doing right now is a corporate
ascension into the Kingdom of God, into the
Heavenly Kingdom, with saints and angels.
We're worshiping before the throne of God together
today.
That's what the Eucharist brings us into.
And so, as I said, the liturgical calendar
brings us to the eighth day after the
birth of Jesus, a day in which Christ
was both named and circumcised, and it is
the first shedding of His blood.
The Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus
is a time to contemplate the revelation of
Jesus' name given to Joseph in a dream
by an angel, and likewise the revelation of
the same to Mary by the Archangel Gabriel
at the Annunciation.
You shall call His name Jesus.
It was divinely ordained.
The angel appeared to Joseph, and we saw
this last week, in a dream and said,
You shall give Him the name Jesus.
You shall give Him the name Jesus because
He will save His people from their sins.
Matthew 1.21 Jesus is a name that's
transliterated from the Hebrew name Yeshua, which is
the English name Joshua.
Right.
Very common name now.
The Hebrew meaning of Yeshua is Yahweh is
salvation.
Jesus is the new Joshua, the final Joshua,
who leads His people into the Promised Land,
the final wedding feast of God and His
people.
That's what the Promised Land is going to
be for us.
It's going to be the final wedding feast
of God and His people.
God wants to marry us.
And those of you who are Christians this
morning are betrothed to one Lord, Jesus Christ.
And we're awaiting that final consummation of the
ages.
The age to come, as the Creed says.
Where God, as Paul says, will be all
in all.
Just think about that for a moment.
What it might be like for God to
be all in all.
Wow.
All creation's groaning for that, right?
So let's take a look at just some
of the lines in this passage that Father
Les read out of Luke 2 beginning at
verse 15.
I just kind of want to walk through
this for just a brief moment.
It said, When the angels went away from
them, talking about the shepherds, into heaven, the
shepherds said to one another, Let's go to
Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened,
which the Lord has made known to us.
And they went with haste.
And that's echoes of the annunciation when Mary
went with haste after the annunciation by the
angel Gabriel.
The angel Gabriel, she went with haste to
see Elizabeth.
There was a sense of urgency in her
step from this revelation of Christ.
So they went with haste and they found
Mary and Joseph and the baby lying in
a manger.
And when they saw it, they made known
the saying which has been told them concerning
this child.
And all who heard it, they wondered what
the shepherds told them.
But Mary kept all of these things, pondering
them in her heart.
Shepherds returned glorifying and praising God for all
they had heard and seen as it had
been told them.
And at the end of eight days, when
he was circumcised, he was called Jesus.
The name given by the angel before he
was conceived in the womb.
I think it's just worth noting that it's
shepherds and not royalty nor the religious elite
or elites that received this heavenly revelation.
Shepherds were about the lowest of the lowest
on the economic scale.
And the shepherds experienced the worship of heaven
out in the field.
The sky, as it were, opens up and
their eyes open up to see what's beyond
the clouds.
Millions, it's just countless angels were worshiping God.
And you know what they were singing?
They were singing the Gloria.
Glory to God in the highest and peace
to His people on earth.
That's where we get it in our liturgy.
Glory to God in the highest and peace
to His people on earth.
Heaven is singing about earth.
It's a beautiful thing.
And this Deliverer, this Savior, Christ the Lord,
is not to be found in a palace,
but a manger.
And a manger is a feeding trough for
animals.
This is the cosmic Redeemer of the universe
beginning out His human existence in a poor
family with no room to house Him for
a birth worthy of His name that we're
celebrating today.
And so they find a manger, a feeding
trough.
And there He is.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us
to experience our human condition beginning as a
vulnerable infant.
This is the Word that was in the
beginning.
The Word who was with God and the
Word that was God.
He's beginning that downward journey now into a
poor subsistence and becoming an infant that's so
vulnerable and dependent on His parents.
God became a poor baby and was named
on the eighth day Yeshua.
Yeshua.
Yahweh is salvation.
To live and die is one of us.
To reconcile us to God, the Father of
all.
His obedience led Him to taste death for
all, as Hebrews says, so that we might
be delivered from this reign of sin and
death, as Paul says, that we are being
saved from the reign of sin and death
from this present evil age.
That is His outworking in His physical body
going to the cross.
Delivered from death as the final word to
His creation.
And so, that's kind of the backdrop.
That's not what Luke is telling us right
now.
But Mary is pondering all of this in
her heart.
Mary is a contemplative, you see.
And so, can you imagine just being Mary
for a moment and all of a sudden
being visited by the angel Gabriel, the archangel.
It's not a cherub that's overweight.
It's not a cherub fashioned after Cupid.
Some of the great Renaissance depictions of angels
tend to be overweight cherubs.
They're not cute in that sense.
They're awesome.
And she's, in a sense, confronted by this
being of glorious light and announces the gospel
to her.
She hears the gospel from the angel.
And Joseph hears the gospel from the angel.
You will call His name Jesus for He
will save His people from their sin.
And so, she's pondering all of this.
What the shepherds told her.
What Gabriel has told her.
And on that eighth day, Jesus is named
out of obedience to divine revelation and sheds
His first drops of redeeming blood.
A child of the covenant shall become the
new covenant.
In today's passage out of Philippians, it jumps
right into the middle of the great descent.
And it says, therefore.
Right?
Our reading today begins with a therefore.
We should have read the whole passage actually.
Based upon this great and glorious divine descent
where the Word becomes flesh and He descends
and becomes a servant and becomes obedient.
Even obedient unto death.
Death on a cross.
That's the reason why this one is born.
He's born to die.
And by death, to trample down death by
death.
Because of His extreme humility, which is really
an attribute of God.
God is humble, right?
If you've seen me, Jesus said, you've seen
the Father.
So this humble one is portraying a part
of the nature of God in that great
descent of becoming the redemption of the cosmos.
Our Redeemer.
And that is the backstory for verse 9.
Therefore, God has highly exalted Him.
We sing about that in all of the
lyrics today.
God is highly...
The Father has highly exalted the Son.
And bestowed on Him the name.
There it is again.
The name which is above every name which
was not of human origin, even though it
is a human name.
Yeshua.
Joshua.
Right?
And at the name of Jesus, Yahweh is
salvation.
That's the character of Jesus.
Yahweh is salvation.
Our salvation is a person.
Our salvation is a human being.
Fully divine and fully human.
He is our salvation.
And at the name of Jesus, every knee
should bow.
Paul is saying.
And I love this.
Where we're at right now.
In heaven.
Every knee is bowing in heaven.
And that's why sometimes we bow.
We kneel.
We don't have kneelers in the gym here.
But you know, you who are hearty of
knees can do that.
But every knee will bow.
Prostrate themselves before this one.
In heaven, first of all.
And then on earth, it says.
In heaven and on earth, every knee will
bow.
And under the earth, right?
The realm of the dead, where Christ preached
the gospel and led captivity captive.
That's the way I see that passage there.
Under the earth.
It's a figure of Christ descending even lower
than the earth into the depths as it
were the bowels of the earth.
That word bowels, you know, of the earth.
And he takes that captive audience, the realm
of the dead, and tramples down death by
death.
He's the only one that could do that,
you see.
And every tongue confess.
Every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord
to the glory of God the Father.
It was Caesar, the Roman army, and that
whole system of the empire that actually thought
they did away with Jesus.
But now, Jesus Christ is being proclaimed Lord
over all earthly powers to the glory of
God the Father.
Here's another therefore.
Therefore, because of that, right?
Because of what we have just heard, Paul
is saying, my beloved, as you have always
obeyed.
So now, not only as in my presence,
but much more in my absence.
As you have always obeyed, right?
Now in my absence, because as an apostle,
he's moved on.
And then here's a word that some Protestants
don't like.
So, think about this.
Work out your own salvation.
Work out your own salvation with fear and
trembling.
Work out your own salvation with fear and
trembling.
For connector.
For God.
Why?
How can we do it?
And why can we do it?
Because we don't do it alone.
We do it in participation and union with
Jesus Christ.
For God is at work where?
Yeah, within us.
God would never ask us to work out
our own salvation without the Incarnation happening in
us.
There's an Incarnation that happens in us.
God, very God, the power and presence of
the Holy Spirit is incarnate in all of
us now because of the Incarnate One.
The indwelling power of the Holy Spirit.
Oh, how we need it.
Oh, how I need it.
Is at work in you.
So, he's not saying, work out your own
salvation by yourself and I hope you do
well.
Right?
This is Immanuel.
God with us.
In us.
God for us.
If God be for us, who can be
against us?
So we are in this, I'm going to
say the word again, ontological union.
It's a real union that we've been placed
in, in the Spirit.
As the Father is in me and I
am in the Father, so you shall be
in me.
That's very mystical language, but we are in
that place just like we're before the throne
of grace right now as we're hearing these
words.
If you've been risen with Christ, Paul says,
you are, seek the things that are above
where Christ dwells.
Right?
And so the Divine Liturgy, the Eucharist, whatever
you want to call this thing that we're
doing this morning, it has many different names.
If you're in the Eastern Church or the
Western Church, the Eastern Church calls this the
Divine Liturgy because there is that sense of
ascending.
When you say, blessed be God the Father
and the Son and the Holy Spirit, blessed
be His kingdom now and forever.
Blessed be His kingdom.
That one church, right?
There's only one church in heaven and in
earth.
And we're connected through the communion of the
saints, through Jesus our mediator who pours forth
the Holy Spirit inside of us so that
we are one body.
Not two bodies.
One body in heaven and in earth.
That's how divinely connected we are.
Because God became a baby.
God became a baby!
Not just any baby.
Baby.
God became a baby, fully God and fully
human to do this work for us.
And so now as a result of that,
Emmanuel, God with us and in us, God
is at work in you and me both
what?
Both the will and to do.
There's a great power here, you see, where
it's not our work, but it's a participation,
right?
There is a participation where God says, come
along with Me.
Be yoked with Me.
Right?
Take My yoke upon you.
Let's do this together.
I'm going to give you the power to
do it.
You're never doing it alone because then if
you are, that's not the Gospel.
Right?
You're doing it in the obedience of faith
Paul talks about.
And all of that is through grace.
From grace.
From grace to grace.
Right?
And that makes us beautiful people when we
respond to the amazing grace that He pours
out upon us.
And then it's not grinding it out and
trying to please God because Christ has pleased
God for us.
Right?
And so as long as we're in union
and we're yoked with this one, we're in
that place for His good pleasure, it says.
God is at work in you, both the
will and to work or to do.
Alright?
You can substitute the word do there.
Both to will and to do for His
good pleasure.
The Father has pleasures that we have yet
to experience.
Right?
And He wants all of us to experience
His good pleasure.
And if you leave here today and you're
still struggling with the good pleasure of God
over you, may the love of the Father
and the grace of Jesus Christ and the
communion of the Holy Spirit just get all
over you.
I need more of that, Lord, because that's
truth.
That's truth.
And sometimes my experience or feelings or what
I'm going through and my anxieties and fears,
right?
Light is breaking in.
Light is breaking in a stable for a
throne, we're saying this morning.
Light is breaking in in the most unimaginable
places.
This is the good news, Emmanuel, God with
us, in us, and for us, both through
will.
Boy, I really want to meditate on that
because I think that's where my problem lies.
My will, right, is not too weak, as
C.S. Lewis says.
It's too strong, in a sense, from a
human perspective.
But then he turns that around and he
says, We're really not strong people.
We're very weak people choosing and making decisions
when actually we're kings and priests, as it
were, and we're settling for, what, sand castles
at the beach or something like that?
Mud pies.
Yeah, mud pies where?
In slums.
Mud pies in the slums, yeah.
Oh, I love my congregation.
They know C.S. Lewis.
Better than I.
Yeah, it just kind of came dimly into
my little brain, but that's a beautiful image.
Yeah, we're not alone.
We're not alone, but have been united through
Jesus to the heart of God.
You believe that?
You're united right now to the heart of
God through Jesus Christ.
We're right there.
And it's beating for us because He became
man.
He became a human being.
That's what the word is.
And the heart of God is the Holy
Trinity, you know?
God is one, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
And it's through Jesus that He brings us
into that fellowship of the Holy Trinity.
We can now participate in Christ, working out
our own healing.
So now we can participate in Christ working
out our own healing, working out our own
salvation.
That's what salvation is, healing what has been
disordered through the reign of sin and death.
Working out our own healing with a sense
of holy awe, fear and trembling, right?
Holy awe.
For God is at work in us, both
the will and to do according to His
good pleasure, not just my good pleasure, but
His good pleasure, which I get to experience
and you get to experience.
Jesus Emmanuel is the word become flesh.
Our salvation, as I said, is a person,
fully God and fully human, who trampled down
death by death, bestowing life.
Bestowing life.
Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ
will come again.
Amen.