If there is one word that rings throughout the Advent promise, it is the word glory. When the messiah comes, chapter 40 of Isaiah proclaims, “the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together.” Today’s reading – words offering a promise of fulfillment for a people deep in yearning for a world to be made rich with love and shalom – an almost inexpressible feeling of wholeness – comes also from the prophet Isaiah, the great oracle of the promised coming of the messiah for Jews and Christians alike. For Christians the promise comes true in the person of Jesus Christ, and it is the joy of that deliverance to which we sing our great Advent and Christmas hymns and carols. Hark! The herald angels sing, “Glory to the newborn king.”
Isaiah proclaims this morning with joy, “Sing praises to the LORD, for he has done gloriously; let this be known in all the earth.” Isaiah 12 is a song of praise, a doxology, a gloria, a shout of thanksgiving, an exclamation of joy, responding to God’s goodness glimpsed in the present and assured in the future. Each of us and all of us are called to sing because God promises to dwell in the midst of God’s beloved, believing community. And that assurance is what causes the prophet to call us to share in his trust and not to be afraid. In Advent we are called out of fear and into trust and faith that God will come among us even in our hour of deepest darkness.
Walter Brueggemann tells us that in Isaiah 12 “the doxology is an act of confident hope that things in time to come (we don’t know when) will be happily resolved.” It is “an act of buoyant and determined hope that refuses to give in to debilitating present circumstance. . . . The doxology is to be one of thanks, of glad acknowledgement of [God’s] goodness and generosity.”
There is unrestrained corporate joy in God’s deliverance of the people. As Isaiah looks to the fulfillment of God’s promise, he calls on Israel “to give thanks, to call upon [Gods’s] name, make known, praise, shout, sing for joy. Israel cannot now restrain itself, for the unexpected, undeserved, inexplicable has happened. It is the sort of thing about which one cannot keep quiet. The news must be shared.”
So we, too, on this Third Sunday of Advent are called to sing for joy, to celebrate the ways in which God has delivered us, is delivering us, and will deliver us, until there is true peace, shalom, wholeness on earth and goodwill throughout the entire creation. “With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. . . . Shout aloud and sing for joy.”
On such a Sunday as this, we – congregation and choir – come together around a great doxology of our own time. For centuries the great classical composers have been moved to bring words and music together in praise of God. The Gloria we as a congregation are privileged to hear – and which our choir, soloists, and musicians are privileged to present – was written by Francis Poulenc between May and December 1959. It premiered in performance in Boston on January 21, 1961.
Poulenc would die two years later in 1963, and, as a music critic observes, “All the more amazing then, that late in his life Francis Poulenc [would write] a gorgeous soul-affirming work that combines modern brevity and freshness with traditional creed and technique to bestow a wondrous resource for our troubled times.”
All great music, it is said, empowers each of us to transcend our troubled times and to soar at the very peak of human endeavor. Let us be lifted up, then, into God’s presence through the music of and for the soul. Amen.