Christmas Break

The services of Christmas Eve are fast approaching. There are soloists to rehearse, choirs to organize, organ registrations to select, and last stanzas to embellish. I will NOT be blogging for a week or two.

Merry Christmas, everybody! Sweet dreams.

"Hark! the Herald Angels Sing" versus Paganism

The best discoveries are sometimes made without intent, just from snuffling around in an area you like. I didn’t set out to look for the original lyrics to “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.” I knew from coffee hour conversation that Wesley had written about a “welkin” instead of “herald angels” originally, but beyond that I had no idea I was missing lovely words. In poking through The New Oxford Book of Carols in preparation for a concert this weekend, though, I found several unfamiliar lines with the notation “adapted.” Our dear friend the Cyber Hymnal provided the original. Here ’tis:

Hark, how all the welkin rings,
“Glory to the King of kings;
Peace on earth, and mercy mild,
God and sinners reconciled!”
Joyful, all ye nations, rise,
Join the triumph of the skies;
Universal nature say,
“Christ the Lord is born to-day!”

Christ, by highest Heaven ador’d,
Christ, the everlasting Lord:
Late in time behold him come,
Offspring of a Virgin’s womb!
Veiled in flesh, the Godhead see,
Hail the incarnate deity!
Pleased as man with men to appear,
Jesus! Our Immanuel here!

Hail, the heavenly Prince of Peace!
Hail, the Sun of Righteousness!
Light and life to all he brings,
Risen with healing in his wings.
Mild He lays his glory by,
Born that man no more may die;
Born to raise the sons of earth;
Born to give them second birth.

Come, Desire of nations, come,
Fix in us thy humble home;
Rise, the woman’s conquering seed,
Bruise in us the serpent’s head.
Now display thy saving power,
Ruined nature now restore;
Now in mystic union join
Thine to ours, and ours to thine.

Adam’s likeness, Lord, efface;
Stamp Thy image in its place.
Second Adam from above,
Reinstate us in thy love.
Let us Thee, though lost, regain,
Thee, the life, the inner Man:
O! to all thyself impart,
Form’d in each believing heart.

Look at the themes!

“Welkin” means “vault of heaven, upper air, sky.” It refers to the PLACE where the rejoicing occurs rather than the BEINGS who make the rejoicing. This is extremely important to the interpretation of the hymn. In Hebraic poetry, if you mention “sky and earth,” you mean also “everything in between”—in other words, “the whole of creation.” Wesley, no idiot scholar of the biblical languages, would have been aware of this. What the sky begins, the earth joins. “Universal nature” in the concluding thought means more than “that which is common to angelic and human beings.”

I suspect it means “all nature.” It rings with Watts’ line from “Joy to the World”: “He comes to make His blessings flow, far as the curse found.” Christmas is Christ’s coming to redeem the world, not just us humans. We as the stewards of creation are only the beginning of the glorious redemption of all the ladybugs and dinosaurs and parakeets. Redeeming us is a sign of the coming redemption for all.

It’s obviously important to the poetic thrust to keep the male gender intact: Wesley’s case for the power of Christ to redeem all of nature rests on Christ’s being the Second Adam, the fulfillment of the promise to the First Adam. (1 Cor. 15:22, 45: “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. … Thus it is written, ‘The first man Adam became a living being’; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.”) If you delete the last two stanzas (as is standard in most hymnals) and change the male references (for example, “Pleased as God with us to dwell”), you dissolve the power of the promise, the historical link between our first parents and their lost vocations with Christ and our restored vocations. Salvation is reduced, once again, to sort of a personal fling with Christ, rather than the restoration of universal harmony with a creation that is seriously out of whack.

Poor Wordsworth! Remember his “Great God! I'd rather be / a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; / So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, / Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; / Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; / Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.” He wanted to be connected to nature. So do most of the modern Pagans and Witches. Maybe they weren’t sung the full version of “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” when they were young.

Evangelism in Christmas Program

My church did a Christmas program last night. We had a small orchestra and maybe a hundred singers; we partnered with another church and held it in a high school auditorium. It was a great venue to reach unchurched people with the good news of Christmas.

However, somewhere back in the compilation of the musical the good news got a little mixed up. The narration stuck to evangelism but after the first couple songs, most of the music was straight-up worship: “Jesus, You’re beautiful to me”; “You’re wonderful, You’re powerful”; “I come to Bethlehem, I come to praise Him again and worship Him”; “If I can sing, let my songs be full of His glory.” As a member of the choir, I felt very self-conscious, like my personal piety was on display. I also wasn’t sure that a display of personal piety was the best way to evangelize someone, or to attract them to the gospel.

It was interesting how individualistic the worship songs were; maybe that’s what aggravated my feeling of “personal” piety. Maybe I have a different understanding of evangelism than the compilers of the musical do: I understand the good news as being welcomed into a family, as resulting in harmony with many people as well as with God. Also, because Christ created the universe that we inhabit but feel so displaced in, becoming reconciled to Christ further reconciles the Self with the Universe. We regain our ability to function as stewards of creation; we work toward harmony and justice in relationships with each other and with our environment; we gain integrity as we discover more parts of ourselves to turn over to the Lordship of Christ; we look forward to the peace of God (the Shalom) pervading all things in the new Kingdom. Therefore, our songs of worship express our reconciliation within the new community; we use the first person plural a lot in worshipping God—not primarily the first person singular.

It felt like the compilers of the musical understood Christianity as an individual reconciliation of the Self with God. Period.

In fact, towards the end of the musical, one of the narrators said, “If you’ve given Jesus that most precious of human gifts—your heart—then Christmas extends a second invitation. If you’ve received the gift of Jesus, you must leave the stable and open your arms to a waiting world. You must travel to the hills of the shepherds and to the cities of the kings. You must become a bearer of Christmas to a cold and lost world. You must bring them the wondrous gift of Jesus.” (Segue to the next song.)

The point of accepting Christ was here clearly stated as getting other people to accept Him, too. That made becoming a Christian seem pretty pointless, after all. “If I get reconciled to God, I try to get other people reconciled to God; what does being reconciled to God mean?” From the content of the musical, I think our imaginary questioner would conclude that being reconciled to God would mean having some warm feelings toward God and standing up in a Christmas show someday to try to get other people reconciled.

This is an odd message of evangelism because most non-Christians I know claim to have warm feelings toward God; they believe He/She/It is Love and totally approves of them. (They do feel a vague anger about “things”, but usually they don’t assign that to God.) They insist that they already feel “reconciled” to God—in an individualistic way.

But they are not part of a community of people reconciled to God and they are not whole in their relationship to Self, Others, or the Universe.

Anyway, I sang this mixed-up Christmas message with my church because I am part of that community (and God knows finding a good Christmas musical WITH orchestrations is nigh impossible! Other factors which I have not considered went into selecting that musical, I'm sure). Their actions are sometimes clearer than their words: they work toward harmony and justice in practical ways, like giving me and my husband gift cards for groceries.

Singing with people like this gives me hope. Even when we mix up the message, surely God will bless the intentions of people whose hearts are open to Him.

But we can’t stop at good intentions….

Children's Sermons: Valid as Worship Education?

Here’s a question for you: did children’s sermons do you any good when you were a child?

You know, the times when the pastor asked for “all the children to come forward,” and you all sat on the steps in front of the lectern, and the pastor crouched down too and spoke in an unusually mild and just plain unusual voice for several minutes.

I’m not asking about whether they do you good now, as an adult. In fact, children’s sermons seem entirely oriented toward the adults as they put on display “cute” answers blown into the microphone and the cute children themselves padding down the aisle and then wandering about the platform during their sermon. Who hasn’t giggled at the prim child who keeps raising her hand and the stagey child who keeps waving to his parents? Who hasn't experienced a thrill of righteous indignation against the particularly wayward child or its parents? I have enjoyed many children’s sermons as the best entertainment of the service. But do they meet any child’s spiritual needs?

My childhood was filled with object lessons from the children’s sermons. I remember sand pails and shovels, teddy bears and broken dolls, photographs of family members, paper hearts, paper shamrocks, rocks of many sizes, candy canes, doughnut holes, closed paper bags and empty paper bags—in fact, all the objects but none of the lessons. The moral of the lessons, based on my observations of children’s sermons as an adult, was something like “God loves you” or “Obey your parents” or “Be nice to each other” but was never presented meaningfully enough to sink in or change my behavior.

Mind you, these memories include many pastors and many denominations, too, whether my parents’ or people’s we were visiting—Christian Reformed, Covenant, Presbyterian (U.S.A. and Church in America), Baptist (American and Southern), Lutheran (Evangelical and Missouri Synod), Evangelical Free, non-denominational, Nazarene.

These lessons had three effects on me: (1) they intensified my smug sense of self-importance because I usually knew exactly where the pastor was heading and, if not, "Jesus" was a safe bet for an answer (I was the prim child); (2) they made me long to be dismissed to Sunday school; (3) they induced either a general sense of good will toward the pastor, if he produced doughnut holes or candy from the paper bag at the end of the lesson, or a general sense of resentment toward the pastor, if he did not.

What I really remember are all the Bible stories from Sunday school and every one of the songs from the Sunday school and the adult services. I can still remember the story of Zacchaeus and the accompanying song (“Zacchaeus, YOU COME DOWN, for I’m coming to your house today”), the story of Peter’s calling (“I will make you fishers of men, if you follow Me”), the lame men being healed in the temple (“Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have give I you; in the Name of Jesus Christ the Lord, in Jesus’ name, rise up and walk!”), and all the grown-up songs that I had to stand on the pew to sing out of my mother’s hymnal: “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” “Holy, Holy, Holy,” “When Peace Like a River.” These songs and stories have stayed with me and enriched my life over the years far more than the object lessons and little talks with pastor up at the front of the church.

I believe that most of these pastors are of good will. I’m not accusing them of dismissing children’s needs when they struggle to create their “edifying” chats, but does anybody remember what it was like to be a child when they are crafting those dread object lessons? Has anybody surveyed children WHEN THEY ARE GROWN UP to see if the children's sermons stuck with them, or is the phenomenon of the children's sermon based merely on good intentions and the theory that children will remember an abstract moral message if it is linked to a concrete visual?

I have come to a decision; as an adult, I can make this difficult sacrifice: I could give up the weekly entertainment if it would free the children for Sunday school and singing.

"How Lovely Shines the Morning Star" 2: Scriptural Structure

Disappointment set in. The more I sang “How Lovely Shines the Morning Star,” the more I missed the presence of a story line. Unlike Nicolai’s other "greatest hit" "Wachet Auf", this seemed to have no beginning, middle, and end. Every stanza, though beautiful in its own right, sat like a pearl on a necklace without a clasp, an unending circle of the beauty of Jesus. Without an obvious progression, it’s been very hard to remember which stanza comes next.

For several days, I said, “Fine, that reflects the seventh stanza’s depiction of Jesus as ‘Beginning without end, the First and Last, Eternal.’ I can learn to live with that.” From readings on the German version of Wikipedia, I knew too that Nicolai was a mystic—into blessed feelings of oneness and theological arguments about the absolute unity of God and man—so I guess that kept me from looking further for a while.

But about twenty minutes ago, the light dawned. Although each stanza is intensely personal and full of the first person no matter the scriptural references, the general structure seems to be based on the Old and New Testaments.

These references are not comprehensive, but are noted as evidence:

Stanza 1—references to the Old Testament
Morningstar, Jesse’s root, David’s son from Jacob’s stem, king and bridegroom
Stanza 2—Old Testament and Gospels all mixed up together
Mary’s son, highborn King, Gospel as milk and honey, King as heavenly manna
Stanza 3—Gospels
Part of the Lord’s body as branch is to tree
Stanza 4—Gospels
Lord Jesus as giving me Spirit/Word/Life/Blood
Stanza 5—Epistles
God the Father has loved me from beginning of world, I’m wedded to Your Son
Stanza 6—Old Testament, (possibly Gospels), Epistles
All instruments praise God, Jesus is my bridegroom, everyone should be jubilant and thank the Lord the King of all the earth
Stanza 7—Revelation
Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End, He will take me to Paradise; “Amen, amen, come…do not wait long” (reminiscent of second-to-last verse of Revelation)

Whew. Nicolai takes us through the Prophets right up to Revelation, even touching on the historical books through his references to David. Only one thing he neglects: he doesn’t seem to mention anything about the Law. Hmmm....

P.S. Here is the most helpful article (in German) on Nicolai that I struggled through!

Hymnbook Holder

A few years ago my husband bought me a most useful present--a cookbook holder. This is designed to extend from the shelf of a closed cupboard door and was intended to save me counter space in our tiny kitchen. I do use it for this purpose, but a few weeks ago, I thought of a new use: a hymnbook holder.

Now, I rig it up when I do the dishes, usually with a photocopy of whatever hymn I'm studying (to avoid the pages of an actual hymnbook getting wet).

This is a pleasant accompaniment to dishwashing, and really the only time I can fit hymn study into my present schedule.