Sermon Tone Analysis

During Offering, read by Chuck, on screen:

Do You Hear What I Hear Intro (Chuck)?

Noel Regney was an aspiring composer in Europe with a deep love for classical music.

Is effort to create classical music was interrupted by World War II.

He was forced to fight for the Nazis but eventually escaped and joined the resistance fighters in his native country of France.

Instead of composing music that would bring others peace and joy, he was literally fighting for peace.

After the war, music brought him to the states and he was staying in the luxurious Beverly Hills Hotel in New York and he saw a beautiful woman named Gloria Shayne playing the piano in the dining room.

Even though he only spoke French and she only spoke English, somehow he introduced himself to her, they fell in love, and married within a month.

Their marriage was unique.

What did a French classical composer and an American rock and roll singer have in common?

They couldn’t even speak the same language.

Yet it was their unique personalities brought together, from different continents, different life experiences that would create a song that would cause millions through the decades to stop, look and listen at Christmas.

To magnify Christmas…to ponder it carefully.

Learned Lesson?

Through War?

Noel had prayed that World War II would be the war to end all wars.

Who would want to go back to such a bloody time in history.

Certainly the rulers of the world had learned their lesson.

But his heart was broken when the Korean War broke out and then Vietnam.

France was involved in both.

As more and more men died, Noel wondered if there would ever be true peace on earth.

As Noel picked up his pen to compose, his heart was drawn back to the first Christmas.

Fighting off some of the most horrific memories he had of fighting for the Nazis and then fighting in the resistance, and fighting back his anxiety about world events, Noel began exploring and magnifying the first Christmas, as he did the noisy dangerous world around him grew strangely quiet.

Noel remembered his childhood and the scene of sheep walking through the beautiful landscape of France.

Noel pondered the innocence of a newly born lamb.

Noel wrote the words, and brought the poem back to his wife and asked his wife to write the music because Noel didn’t want the song sounding classical.

He knew his wife could write in today’s music.

She wrote the melody, but she inserted one note that caused the lyrics to no longer fit the melody.

When Noel heard the beautiful melody, instead of deleting the one note, he added one word.

Instead of “said the wind to the little lamb” he wrote, “said the NIGHT wind to the little lamb…do you hear what I hear.”

When Gloria asked Noel to change one more line, Noel balked.

Gloria said, “I told him that no one in this country would understand, “a tail as big as a kite.

Yet he wouldn’t change that.

As it turned out, he was right, it is a line people dearly love.

The song became a hit and the husband and wife song writing team said that of the hundreds of times the song has been covered, their favorite is Robert Goulet’s version.

When he came to the line, “pray for peace people everywhere” he almost shouted the line as if demanding peace.

The hands of the woman who wrote the music have been silenced by a condition that stops her from playing the piano and the voice of the man writing the lyrics has been silenced by a stroke that rendered him unable to speak.

Yet their song plays throughout malls and concert halls every year, encouraging us to listen more carefully, to examine more closely, to magnify more deeply the only story in history that makes sense, Jesus coming into the world.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

Band Plays.

Mary and Elizabeth (lives turned upside down)

Mary and Elizabeth were a lot like Noel Regney and Gloria Shayne when it comes to their song writing.

Two broken women coming together, from different generations, with different callings and life experiences.

Elizabeth and Mary, who were cousins, out of nowhere, had their lives turned upside down.

Elizabeth, who was the mother of John the Baptist, was the wife of a high priest named Zechariah.

Zechariah had been visited by the angel Gabriel and had been told that Elizabeth would bear a son.

Zechariah and Elizabeth were way past the child bearing years so Zechariah asked Gabriel how he could know this was true…in other words, the man who had an angel standing in front of him, asked for a sign.

By definition, an angel visiting you and speaking to you IS a sign.

So Gabriel shut Zechariah’s mouth, rendering him unable to speak during Elizabeth’s entire pregnancy.

The very fact that Elizabeth was pregnant was a trial since she was old.

Their reputation as righteous spiritual leaders was at stake.

Mary, of course, was also visited by Gabriel and told she would also bear a son, Jesus.

Mary was a virgin, she was pledged to be married to Joseph.

Parents, imagine your teenage daughter telling you that she’s pregnant, but she has never had sex, and that an angel told her that God was the Father and that the Holy Spirit had impregnated her.

Imagine being her fiancé and hearing that.

Even after Joseph was visited by an angel, there were still tremendous trials ahead for them.

They would need to travel due to the Roman Census.

They would be on the run for the first few years of their lives.

Elizabeth and Zechariah also had many trials ahead of them as it is believed that Zechariah was martyred shortly after John the Baptist was born.

Hallelujah-Magnify

Mary’s song is called the Magnificat.

Magnificat is from the word magnify.

Last week we looked at just one word of worship, Hallelujah, which means praise the Lord.

We saw that brokenness in our lives can stay as brokenness or through Jesus that brokenness can become a Broken Hallelujah.

That all the hallelujahs in this life are broken in some way and that none of them are the final hallelujah which belongs to Christ alone.

That one day all of our broken hallelujahs will become part of that final hallelujah.

And today that one word of worship I want to focus on is Magnify.

Verse 46:

I love the word magnify.

The word magnify is only used here in the new testament and once in the book of Romans.

It is used a dozen times in the Old testament.

Magnify Defined

Magnify means to make something appear larger than your eye sight will allow you to see…so you can explore it more fully.

We all magnify something.

In fact, we major on magnifying.

We are magnifying machines.

That’s what we do…all day long.

We are always magnifying something.

Microscopes and Telescopes

Both microscopes and telescopes magnify objects—but in far different ways.

A microscope makes something small become much bigger than it actually is.

A telescope makes something that seems small or insignificant appear or be revealed to be as great as it actually is.

The question is this: are you a microscope or a telescope?

Mary could have easily have been a microscope.

There were so many smaller matters that she could have magnified when visiting her cousin Elizabeth.

She had all this stuff happening in her life.

She had people whispering about her, she had an uncertain future.

She could have easily been a microscope.

Our natural tendency is to be a microscope.

To take small matters, things far smaller than God, and put them under a microscope and study them.

Think about conflict.

You have a conflict with someone.

Someone has wronged you, treated you unfairly.

Someone made a decision that hurt you.

So we put that situation under a microscope and try to figure out what they were thinking, why they did what they did, what they meant when they said this or that.

What part of what they are saying is wrong and how can we prove it to them.

Fixating on small objects.

Or we magnify ourselves.

I read verses earlier that use the word magnify by magnifying God.

Magnify the Lord with me.