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The Book of Isaiah, the 52nd chapter. This is one of the great messianic passages in the Old Testament. I'll read two portions of the chapter. I begin at verse 7. "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good tidings, who publishes peace, who brings good tidings of good, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, 'Your God reigns.'

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Hark, your watchmen lift up their voice. Together they sing for joy, for eye to eye they see the return of the Lord to Zion. Break forth together into singing, you waste places of Jerusalem, for the Lord has comforted his people, he has redeemed Jerusalem. The Lord has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth

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shall see the salvation of our God. Behold, my servant shall prosper. He shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high. As many were astonished at him, his appearance was so marred beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the sons of men, so shall he startle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths because of him, for that

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which has not been told them they shall see, and that which they have not heard they shall understand. And may God bless to us and to all those who will hear this reading from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

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We are at the beginning of another liturgical year. We're in the season of Advent. And I would ask you to think with me throughout Advent this year the idea that Advent is a kind of music. The score for it is the Holy Scriptures. The instruments on which it is played are not the singing spheres and not ten thousand harpers harping on their harps,

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but rather the Holy Spirit of God gently plucking and bowing on the strings of our hearts. And on the podium directing the performance is our Father God, molding our discipleship, beating out the rhythm of our lives, leading us in what we might call a symphony of salvation. This morning we look at the first movement of that symphony, and it is called "When Sovereigns

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Keep Silence." And the music is marked "Allegro Pomposo Lento Doloroso." That means the music begins majestically with royal enthusiasm. Trumpets and trombones, the rattle of snare drums, the roll of the timpani, the kind of music that you associate with the arrival of royalty. When you hear it, you think of ermine and crowns and silver scepters. But

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then the music suddenly becomes very somber. "Lento Doloroso." It is played slowly and with sadness. You see it here in the portion of the score which we're noting this morning, this reading from Isaiah. Isaiah begins, "Behold, my servant shall be exalted and lifted up." That's allegro, you see. That's the sound of the coming of royalty. But then, "Many

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will be astonished at him, for he was marred, he was startling to the nations. Kings shall shut their mouths because of him." That, you see, is slow and somber and disappears away into silence. Notice that phrase, "Kings shall shut their mouths because of him." What can make a king be quiet? Not beauty. I stood in the Tower of London and looked at the crown

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jewels and in the scepter of Queen Elizabeth II, there is one diamond which weighs 335 carats. Yet I've never noticed that the queen was startled into silence by these gems. I stood in the treasury in Moscow, part of the Kremlin, and seen there the solid ivory throne of Ivan IV. But it is written many times during the reign of Ivan IV, better known to us as

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Ivan the Terrible, that he sat on it with his feet. I've been in the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul, where the treasures of the Ottoman emperors are to be found, even their weapons so encrusted with jewels that they are worth a king's ransom. But there is no reference anywhere in history that any of these emperors were startled into silence by all this splendor.

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On two occasions I visited the Linderhof of King Ludwig II. You have to go two or three or four times to see all the magnificences. It's covered with gold and with the finest and the rarest porcelains yet. At the time when King Ludwig died, he was in the process of building another castle, Neuschwanstein, which he thought would be more appropriate.

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We talk about the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Kings and queens are rich and famous, and they're accustomed to beauty. It does not startle them into silence. Can calamity do it then? No, not calamity. In the days of the Emperor Caligula, the stands collapsed at one of the Roman games, and 50,000 Romans were killed all at one time, and Caligula

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only lamented that more had not died. A few years ago in World Cup play, Great Britain and Italy met in Belgium, and the fans became embroiled in a conflict in which finally 40 of them died. And there were official expressions of regret from both nations, but it passed very quickly. It didn't startle people into silence. Tomorrow, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev

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will sit down with Ronald Wilson Reagan, and they'll talk about peace and treaties and nuclear weapons and the like. I wish that Mr. Gorbachev could go to Afghanistan and see what's happening there. I wish that Mr. Reagan could walk the blood-soaked beaches of Lebanon. I wish they could both be translated to Hiroshima and see those places in the concrete

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where people were so instantaneously annihilated by the flashing heat of that blast that their ashes were pushed forever into the very surface of the cement. I'd like them to see that, but there really is no evidence that kings or sovereigns or prime ministers or general secretaries or presidents are silenced by calamity. What is it, then, that can silence

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a sovereign? Well, the flat slap of a high-powered rifle shot from the sixth floor of a Texas schoolbook depository did it. Or a sweet-faced young schoolteacher from New England who rode off into eternity on a rocket that exploded. She silenced kings. What does it, you see, is the death of the young, but more than that, something in the dying which shatters our

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expectations and turns all the fundamental symbols of our thinking inside out. It's not only the fact of dying, it's also a gross contradiction which exists within the death. The person who dies must be too young to die or too fair to die or too beautiful to die or too courageous or noble or filled with too many dreams, some idealist, some prophet.

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That's the kind of person, someone to whom death should not come, and it does. That silences even kings. And that's what Isaiah is talking about here. He says that this one who comes will be exalted and lifted up and be very high. There's no silence then. There's drums and trumpets. But then he says, "And this one will be marred and messed up and broken

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and bloody." And then even kings shut their mouth. It's not Christ coming, you see. It's the way he chose to come and to live and to die. That's what silences, softens. Ray Bradbury, one of our best-known science fiction authors, has a story about a group of people who are going out to be pioneers in a new area of space, not out west, but

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out into interstellar distances. And there's one young lady in the group who is very much in love with one of the advanced pioneers that's gone ahead, and she's going to go out to marry him, but she wants to be sure about it, so she places an interstellar long-distance call to discuss the matter with him. But the electrical interference is so great that she

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can't hear anything that he says from the end of the line where he is, except this word, "Love." And on the strength of that one word, she leaps off into the universe of new planets and new stars. It's not a very good science fiction story, but it's a good illustration. Because you see, if you try to figure out why the King of Kings came to this plundered

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planet we call our home, this little blue jewel that floats through space, it can all be summed in one word, "Love." He leaped into the midst of life as we know it, all the hardness and all the hell of it, just because of love. And it was quite a leap. A lot of people focus on the manger at this time of year, and they use it to represent somehow the humility of

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Jesus. The manger has never struck me that way. You see, a little baby is not conscious of her surroundings. All a baby really requires is someone to give it love, to feed it and clean it and care for it. And Jesus had all those things, even though he was born in a manger. It's not that cradle in a barn that gets me. It's the cross that came just 30

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years later. You see, for the deity, for the Trinity, for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, a thousand ages, the Bible said, is like an evening gone. There is no time or space for the God who is before all and in all and after all. So when God looks down upon us, there is no time at all between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. They're only 20 miles apart,

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even for us in our mode of transportation, whatever it might be. But for God, who has no space or time, this step down from heaven, you see, and the cross that was a part of it, well, it's all one. And that's what makes me awed and silent before the reality of his coming.

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Occasionally, we encounter people who offer themselves for the sake of others and do it with real sacrificial love. Now take Albert Schweitzer, for example, a medical doctor and having two other PhDs, and he devotes his whole life to the service of Africans in Lamborghini. Once he came to a seminary in France where he was to give some guest

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lectures and the faculty was very concerned because the student body was very disputatious, rather insolent in their young arrogance, and they were afraid that the students would not properly respect Schweitzer. When Schweitzer arrived, everyone was in the dining room having lunch and he came through the door alone looking for people. And when the students saw him,

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they stood and were silent until he was seated. So struck, you see, by the costliness of his sacrifice. Here's a medical doctor, John Hunter, who injects himself with gonorrheal pus in order to prove that gonorrhea and syphilis are the same venereal disease. His theory was wrong. They are in fact not. But imagine the sacrificial love of a man who would inject

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himself with such a thing for the benefit of others. You have to be silent. There's no word that can explain that kind of sacrifice. Here's Eleanor Chestnut, who goes off to be a medical missionary in China and in her time of service there, spends herself so that once she even took from her own body patches of skin to cover the burned areas in the body

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of a Chinese beggar. And eventually the multitudes led by the forces of evil turned against her and they took her to kill her. And as they were dragging her down the street, she looked and saw a little boy who had been hit by a stone and she broke away from her captors and ran over from her captors. And she ran over and took a strip of her own garment and

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bound the boy's wound and then presented herself to her captors again, who took her and killed her. And you don't describe that readily, do you? That kind of makes a feeling come to your heart that's deeper than anything we can put into words. Here's an Elizabeth Elliot, whose husband is murdered by the Indians he seeks to save. So what does she do? She

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goes and lives amongst those same Indians for five years and completes the mission for which her husband gave his life. She wins them for the Savior. Now all of these, you see, are doing it for love's sake and they strike us dumb if we try to articulate the depth of the sacrifice. But these, you see, are only reflections of what Jesus did. Because

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he came from deity to the level of humanity. He allowed his infinite sovereignty to be stabbed. Oh, it started with a star. But then there was a stable and a lot of servants. And then there was suffocation on a cross being offered as a sacrifice. And then there was death. The one who loved being crucified for all those who do not love. The one who

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loved even his enemies being killed for their sake. The reality of that, if you truly think of it, has to shut you up. And that's all I'm pleading for. I'm pleading this morning that somehow we might be quiet during this Advent time as we move toward the mystery of his coming. Last Friday night, a week ago, I went to the symphony and the first work

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on the program was Brahms' First Piano Concerto. It's very beautiful and it was performed by Misha Dichter and he performed it in a very sensitive and refined way. Sometimes it's performed with great bravado, that was not his approach. I'll never forget the concert, not only because of the way he presented it, but because of the two people who were sitting

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beside me. They were a young couple, I don't know them, but I'll recognize them anywhere. She never shut up the whole evening long. She never stopped talking. In the beautiful adagio movement of the concerto, she started telling him about how a strap on her shoe had irritated her foot. And then she put her foot up on the seat in front of her and took

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off the shoe and showed him the offending strap. And then she waved her foot around so that he could see the mark. I'll never forget them. Well you see, they had no sensitivity at all. No sensitivity for the music, no sensitivity for the musicians, no sensitivity for those who sat and listened. And there are a lot of people who approach Christmas like that.

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And what I'm saying is, this is the time of the year when we ought to shut up for a while and think, with whatever royalty that's in us, about the love of God. This is a time for reverence and awe. Oscar Wilde has a little fairy story, he calls it, called "The Birthday of the Infanta." The Infanta was the princess of Spain, a very little girl. And she was

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having her birthday party and many friends were in. And first they played games and then they had a mock bullfight. And then a circus was brought in to entertain. And there were tightrope walkers and jugglers and there was a puppet show and there were musicians and there was a bear that could dance and apes that could do stunts. And then there was a

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little dwarf, an ugly, misshapen, hideous little creature. He'd been found only the week before in the forest, evidently long before his parents had abandoned him in the woods, ashamed of his ugliness, ashamed of his misshapen body and face. So they left him there. But someone found him and they brought him in and he did a dance for the

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Infanta. And the children loved it, thought it was one of the funniest things they ever saw. But he thought their applause was for the grace and beauty of his dance. Well, it began to get hot and so the children went into the shade of the palace. But this little dwarf, he was so thrilled with what he'd seen and so captured by the beauty of the princes

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that he went and plucked a white rose to take and give to her. And he went into the palace and began to search for her. Great, vast rooms, magnificently decorated, but he paid hardly no attention at all. No one was there as he went through room after room. And finally he came into the most splendid room of all. And there was no one there except across the

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room an ugly little man, curious, misshapen and deformed. He bowed to the man, the man bowed to him. He smiled, the man smiled. And the man even had in his hand a white rose, just like his white rose. He approached this creature that he saw with diffidence because, well, the creature was so ugly he did not want to come too near. And as he got closer,

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he became afraid, for he noticed that everything that was in the room behind him was also there in front of him. He ran up to where the man was and put his hands out to touch the man, but he couldn't touch him because there was in front of him some kind of wall of water that was so thin he could see through it as if it were not there. And now he was truly

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frightened and so he kissed the white rose and when he looked up he saw that this hideous little creature looking at him had kissed his white rose. And suddenly the dwarf understood. He was looking at his own reflection. He'd never seen a reflection before. Did he look like that? So ugly? So misshapen? So broken? So hideous? So unpleasant to look upon? If

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that were so, then the children had not applauded because of the beauty of his dance. They were laughing at him. And realizing that, he took the rose and he tore it all apart and let the petals fall to the marble floor where they mingled with his shed tears. And he fell down upon his knees and just at that moment the princess and her little guests came into

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the room. And they stood and watched him as he sobbed there on his knees. And the princess said, "Why, his acting is almost as funny as his dancing." And then, imperiously, she said, "Dwarf, dance!" And he looked up at her and suddenly he gasped and he clutched his side and he fell still on the floor. She turned to her chamberlain, "Tell him to get

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up and dance!" The look of Chamberlain's face was very, very serious and he approached the little dwarf and put his hand where the little one's heart was. And then he said, "My princess, he will not dance again." "And why will he not dance again?" she asked. And the chamberlain said, "Mi bella princessa, it is because his heart is broken." And she scowled and pulled

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herself up to her full three and a half feet height and said, "In the future, let those who come to play with me have no hearts." And that's just what the world says. The world, in all of its hatred and ugliness and misshapenness and brokenness and lovelessness, doesn't want anyone around with a heart. Let no one come to play with us who has a heart. But we, as

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brothers and sisters in Christ, are in this world though we are not of it. And we have to come with our hearts. And when we see what is here, and when we think of what He did to cure and to claim what is here, well at such a moment we have to silence our horns and throttle our trumpets and silence our drums and shut our mouths. A broken king dying

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for a broken world. For the love of God, let's not slouch toward Christmas again this year. Let's face it for what it is, the greatest contradiction of the centuries, that God does not order the broken and the ugly and the misshapen from His sight. Instead, He enters into their life and becomes one with them. And if we would approach Christmas in such

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a way that here is where our journey begins at this table. For no love that in a family dwells, no caroling in frosty air, not all the steeple-shaking bells can this single truth compare, that God was man in Bethlehem and lives today in bread and wine. This is where kings shut up. This is where queens grow silent before the mystery of His love.

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That love which could be and do so much, such an amazing grace. Don't order it away. In all the clamor of these days, don't order it away. Say in the future, "Let only those come to play with me who have no hearts." Instead, let your own heart break with His. Let the whispered sound of it be sweet sadness to your soul, lento doloroso, and quiet, quiet

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joy to your spirit. This is the way to come to Christmas, silent and on our knees. This is the place to begin the Holy Toast with me. Let us pray. O God, silence us before the sacrifice of your Son. May we meet Him on our knees. May we bow low before Him. And may we like Him, offer ourselves in service to a world that

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wants no one to have a heart. We pray our prayer in Jesus' name. Amen. [music] [music] [music]

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