O Come Let Us Adore Him: A Sermon for 1 Christmas

The season of Christmas is good for my spiritual growth. It invites me out of my comfort zone and into the practice of awe-inspired adoration of God. You might be surprised to hear me – a priest – say that I’m not accustomed to offering my unbridled adoration to God. But that is the truth.

The hymns of the Christmas season do a good job of inviting us into the space of adoration. “O Come all ye Faithful” is a great example, where we sing “O Come let us adore Him” several times throughout the hymn. One might even confuse it for a contemporary Christian praise chorus that repeats the same line over and over again! But in all seriousness, the hymns of Christmas remind us that our primary vocation as Christians is to praise and glorify God. The adoration for God in the Christ child brings about a light in the darkness of winter that is palpable and infectious.

The hymnal of the Bible – the psalter - also does a good job of employing  language of adoration towards God. The fact that Psalm 147 was appointed for today reminds us that we are still in the season of celebration, adoration, and praise. It opens with the not-so-subtle – “Hallelujah! How good it is to sing praises to our God! How pleasant it is to honor him with praise!” And then it continues to adore and praise God for twenty more verses!

But like I said before, my default mode of spirituality isn’t adoration. An abiding, dignified, solemn reverence for God was modeled for me at St. John’s Episcopal Church, which is where I was raised and formed in the faith. But reverence and adoration, though related, are not the same thing. Given that our ecclesial roots are in England, it is natural that the Episcopal Church – generally speaking – errs on the side of a stoic, staid spirituality. And that is what I grew up with. It wasn’t until I ventured outside of my home church that I first experienced a deeply emotional adoration of God. I think it was at boarding school, when I went to my first-ever Young Life event. I was shocked by how much these adult leaders seemed to truly love Jesus on a personal, emotional level. I had never seen or experienced anything like it. It was so palpable that it actually made me uncomfortable.

Now, there are always exceptions to the perceived Episcopal “norm” – most notably being our Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry. His adoration for Jesus is so real and authentic that it can’t be contained by our staid, stoic roots. And it has been a wonderful thing for those inside and outside our Church to witness. 

But the adoration of God isn’t limited to the high-energy, emotional, extroverted adoration of God. On the other side of the ecclesial spectrum, the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions do an excellent job of adoring God through their prayer, liturgy, and traditions. Their adoration, among many things, is directed towards the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Blessed Sacrament, the Saints, and icons of the church. As such, there have been times when I have felt equally as uncomfortable in these type of settings as I was at that Young Life event in high school. The adoration I was witnessing wasn’t overly emotional or sentimental. But it felt irrational and even superstitious to me.

At this point in my spiritual journey, I have come to recognize that there are many ways to worship, praise, and adore God. And if some of those ways make me feel uncomfortable, that doesn’t negate their value to the Christian faith. What I need to discover for myself, and what I think we all might consider exploring, is how we might incorporate the adoration of God into our own personal lives of prayer.

During this most recent season of Advent, at our daily Morning Prayer services, we added a reading from a book entitled “Advent with Evelyn Underhill.” Evelyn Underhill is a 20th Century English mystic, and one of my more recent spiritual heroes. I added these daily readings from Underhill after having recently read a paper she presented to a clergy conference in England back in 1926. This paper, entitled “Concerning the Inner Life,” has had a profound impact on my own spiritual life since I read it. One thing that Underhill points out in “Concerning the Inner Life” is that “One’s first duty is adoration, and one’s second duty is awe, and only one’s third duty is service. And … for those three things and nothing else, addressed to God and no one else, you and I … were created… Two of the three things for which our souls were made are matters of attitude: adoration and awe. Unless these two are right, the last of the triad, service, won’t be right. Unless the whole of your…life is a movement of praise and adoration, unless it is instinct with awe, the work which the life produces won’t be much good.”

In other words, the mission of the Church must be grounded in a deep, abiding, intimate relationship with God…one that produces adoration and awe towards God first. And only after that are we to offer our service to God and others. If our good deeds, charity, and partnerships with those who serve the marginalized of society are not grounded in adoration and awe towards God, then, as Underhill points out, they “won’t be much good.”

I’ve never thought of it this way before, but after reading Evelyn Underhill, I’m seeing Christmas in a whole new light. The Feast of the Nativity and the Season of Christmas arrive as we are wrapping up our calendar year, as well as beginning our plans for the upcoming year. We are tallying up our results from our stewardship campaign, and making important budget-related decisions for the year to come. And as we know, our budget priorities and decisions end up reflecting our missional priorities. Budgets may appear to be merely pragmatic - even secular - but they are deeply spiritual processes and documents.

All of this being said, what an opportunity it is for us to frame all of these important year-end and beginning of the year decisions within the context of Christmas – the season of adoration and awe. I think adoration, awe, and gratitude go hand-in-hand. So before we launch into making big decisions as a parish - what if we first made the space to glorify and praise God for all that God has done and is continuing to do in our midst? What if we paused to simply be awestruck by God’s grace, mercy, love, and abundance? What if we joined the prophet Isaiah as we heard on our first reading today, and “greatly rejoice[ed] in the Lord, [and] with our whole being…exult[ed] in [our] God?” Isaiah goes on to say, “For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.” Let us take to heart the wisdom of the prophets, the psalmist, our hymn writers, and Evelynn Underhill. Let us sow seeds of adoration and awe towards God in song, prayer, and in our daily lives. And let us trust that spiritual and missional growth will follow.