Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, Christmas Eve, 2023. Texts: Isaiah 9:2-7; Psalm 96; Titus 2:11-20; Luke 1:26-38
On Mondays our three year old granddaughter Lucy spends the day with us, and while we usually try to limit her screen time, we usually let her watch a movie midmorning while we get lunch ready. Lucy’s film choice are predictable. This fall, “Moana” and “Frozen” have been in heavy rotation, but lately she’s been clamouring to watch The Grinch (the 2018 animated version with Benedict Cumberbatch).
I was doing something nearby in the house when I realized that I was hearing carollers singing “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”. I was surprised that a fairly secular seasonal film would include the words “Remember Christ our Saviour was born on Christmas Day, to save us all from Satan’s power when we have gone astray”. It’s a comic scene, as the carollers break into a jazz tempo and pursue an increasingly frantic Grinch through the pristine streets of Whoville.
The carol’s words promise salvation for those caught in “Satan’s power” because Christ has been born to save humanity, and while the Grinch is a fairly harmless example of sin, he will be redeemed by the end of the story, brought out of isolation, made whole, and restored to community. Even in the midst of the highest grossing Christmas film ever (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grinch_(film)) , this snippet of a carol does exactly what a carol should, it does the work of the gospel, announcing to the good news of Christ to those in darkness, which explains the power and persistence of the old carols.
The word “Carol” probably first meant dance music, but the term became associated with Christian belief and worship, particularly in the seasons of Advent and Christmas. Perhaps we can distinguish between hymns and carols in that while hymns are usually sung in churches, carols can be taken to the streets and other public places. In my first parish, the choir would lead a carol sing in the village pub every December. While there are many lovely medieval carols that tell biblical stories (Angelus ad Virgenem tells the story of the Annunciation, the haunting Coventry Carol tells of the Massacre of the Holy Innocents), perhaps the most well known carols are the Victorian ones such as Hark the Herald Angels Sing with their robust four part harmonies and unapologetically evangelistic themes. Which is why, for me at least, modern Christmas songs like “Blue Christmas” or “I”m Dreaming of a White Christmas” are not carols.
The persistence and power of the old Christmas carols appeals even to those who don’t really believe in Christmas itself. Recently I read a column entitled “I Want Carols - Not to Be Converted”. The author, a self-described “faithless caroller”, described attending a carol service at a Church of England parish in London which featured an advertisement for the Alpha program and where “the priest tried to make evangelical Christians of us all”. The author was offended and “three of the group we’d come with left – two atheists among them”. What the author had been hoping for, she said, and what she found the next night, was a traditional service with old carols, a choir in full regalia, and a proper organ.
I think we need to resist the temptation to sneer at such sentiments, and to look charitably on what attracts the “faithless caroller” to these old songs at this time of the year. Is it just nostalgia, the desire to hold on to a cultural tradition in an increasingly secular world? Or, is there something within the carols themselves, some power within them that comes from their subject matter, the salvation of a world by a gracious God who loves us enough to share our human condition and to die fo us?
Sister Carino Hodder is that rare thing, a young Roman Catholic nun in a western country. In a recent essay, she describes being raised in a non-believing family who never went to church, but she credits her coming to faith with the Christmas carols that she learned in her grade school. As a teen and young adult, she writes that she had no connection to or affection for the Christian faith, but the carols she learned as a child continued to speak to her and to draw her towards God.
I was well aware, of course, that Christmas was really just the credulous pilfering of a pagan winter festival. And I’d been told the Virgin Birth was a fabrication based on a deliberate mistranslation of an Old Testament prophet. And yet I couldn’t walk the snowy paths home from school or watch Christmas lights go up in my town without hearing a refrain within me, subtle and deep-seated as a heartbeat: O come, let us adore him; O come, let us adore him.
I would want to say that the power of Christmas carols comes not just from some cultural nostalgia, nor only from some deep rooted childhood memory, but from their witness to Christmas as God’s loving and saving action.
The carols acknowledge our human anxieties and insecurities, “the hopes and fears of all the years”. The carols allow us to sing what St. John speaks of the in the mighty prelude of his gospel: :”very God begotten not created / Word of the father now in flesh appearing”.
The carols speak of God’s willingness to live amidst us, amidst the greatest poverty of our existence, for “his shelter was a stable and his cradle was a stall”.
The carols likewise acknowledge the poverty of our resources to properly acknowledge God’s coming amongst us: “What can I give him, poor as I am”? The carols explain the mystery of the incarnation and how our human condition is dignified through childbirth and a mother’s love, as Mary “worshiped the beloved with a kiss”.
Finally, the carols help us to understand that through the birth of this child, the heavens and earth, eternity and temporality, sacred and secular, are united. The “glories [that] stream from heaven afar” are received here on earth, guiding shepherds and kings alike to the manger. The heavenly brightness and the angel choirs are signs of the divine “love [that] imparts to human hearts the blessings of God’s heaven”.
It is through this love that we are changed and rescued by “Christ the saviour [who] is born that “man [we] no more may die”, and the carols tell us that in this child God’s covenant with humanity, a covenant as old as Abraham is renewed, so that “good will from henceforth from heaven to earth begin, and never cease”.
The carols are echoes from Bethlehem, seismic shock waves emanating from the manger, travelling from the Christ event to the present, knocking down the walls built around our hearts, banishing darkness and death, assuring us of God’s love and presence. The carols are calls to rejoice, they promise joy to all the world, they call us to be as glad as Christians of old who have received this message and sung these songs before us.
So no wonder these old songs have power. No wonder they persist. The carols chase us across time, they lure ‘faithless carollers” to evening services, they whisper of divine love and they plant seeds in the hardest of hearts, even in the dark and hardened hearts of Scrooge and Grinch. They are calls for help, cries of longing, love poems and shouts of joy. Open any of the great carols and you’ll find all these sentiments addressed to the one who was born, who died, and rose again for our sakes.
O holy Child of Bethlehem,
descend to us, we pray;
cast out our sin and enter in;
be born in us today.
We hear the Christmas angels,
the great glad tidings tell;
O come to us, abide with us,
our Lord Emmanuel!
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