QUARANTINE BLOG # 266

December 21, 2020

The closing pieces this month have all been Advent meditations.  This week as we approach Christmas Day I have prepared special blogs (the “regular” offerings return next week) to help our celebrations.  Each day features the story of a Christmas Carol – with musical accompaniment – and beginning tomorrow, the Advent meditations are pieces I wrote while I was doing my column, “Not For Sunday Only,”  online and in The Augusta Chronicle.

**  The words of “O Holy Night” were written in 1847 by a French wine merchant named Placide Clappeau, the mayor of Roquemaure, a town in the south of France. We know little about him except that he wrote poems as a hobby.

We know more about the man who composed the music, a Parisian named Adolphe Charles Adam. The son of a concert pianist, Adams was trained almost from infancy in music and piano. In his mid-twenties, he wrote his first opera and thereafter wrote two operas a year until his death at age fifty-two. Late in life, failed investments left him bankrupt and depending upon charity.

It was John Dwight, the son of Yale’s president, who discovered this French Carol, “Christian Midnight,” and translated it into the English hymn “O Holy Night.”

After graduating from Harvard and Cambridge, John was ordained as minister of the Unitarian church in Northampton, but his pastoring experience wasn’t happy. In 1841, George and Sophia Ripley founded a commune named Brook Farm “to prepare a society of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated persons, whose relations with each other would permit a more simple and wholesome life.” John was hired as director of the Brook Farm School and began writing a regular column on music for the commune’s publication.

When Brook Farm collapsed in 1847, John Dwight moved into a cooperative house in Boston and established a career in music journalism. He penned articles on music for major publications, and in 1852 he launched his own publication, Dwight’s Journal of Music. He became America’s first influential classical music critic.

How odd that a wine merchant, a penniless Parisian, and a liberal clergyman should give Christianity one of its holiest hymns about the birth of Jesus Christ, Savior of the world.

👉  Way back in the before-time I was a member of the Junior High Chorus at Southern Garrett County Junior-Senior High School.  Each year for our Christmas program – back when you could say “Christmas” and sing songs about Jesus – our teacher, Miss Colabrese, had us process in to “O Holy Night.”  There was a single line of us, each carrying a battery operated candle, winding through the gymnasium as we sang.  Maybe it was that memory, maybe it was the power of the words, but this became my favorite Christmas Carol.  One of the most moving versions I’ve ever listened to is this rendition by GENTRImusic featuring The Gentlemen Trio.

👉  A strip from Hi and Lois for the season”

👉  Today’s sermon, “All Is Calm? All Is Bright?”preached yesterday at Crawfordville United Methodist Church.

👉  The Third Monday in Advent

A New Decision

In that region, there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for see – I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord”  (Luke 2:8-11).

Christmas is the celebration of the new decision of God.  You know that decision well: “to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”  Not Caesar in Rome, not Herod in Jerusalem, not Pilate as governor, not all the presidents and premiers and executives and generals, not any of them will be king, because the world has been turned to a new way.  It has been turned so that a king shall come from Bethlehem, not from the great city, but from a little city filled with filth and poverty.

But think what it means.  It means, to anybody who knows, that the promises of God have been kept.  He is faithful.  He has not reneged.  For a thousand years earlier he has said, I will keep this royal family and this royal promise and this royal vision.  I will send the true David, and he will turn the world back to its sanity.  Where there has been fear, he will bring joy.  Where there has been oppression, he will bring justice.  Where there has been suffering and sorrow, he will bring wholeness.

All the kings of the world hustled to keep their thrones.  They are panic-stricken powers, scared of everything and everyone, but they don’t know how to work at it except to kill and destroy, and our whole human history is like that.

Except God has made a fresh decision, and this new one does not come as threat but as child.  He does not come as victory but as helpless child.  He does not come in pride but in a way almost unnoticed by the world.  But he is king.  He is not robed in splendor but in baby clothes.  He is not in the royal nursery but in a barn.  None of it makes any sense.  At least it does not make sense to people who think they have all of life reduced to a pattern and a formula.

The Christmas event in Bethlehem makes no sense unless you allow that it is a fresh announcement from God himself about the new shape of the world.  All of that came with the new announcement of the king.  And then that messenger was joined by the chorus of angels who gave the theme of the divine decision: glory and peace.

Christmas is a time for leaving our sober, sane world of budgets and schedules and rules and for just a moment blowing our minds with the thought that God intends other ways for us to live.

Break into our staid lives with the power of your holiness.  Break up our old patterns and expectations, and transform us through the good news brought by the singing of angels: “to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”  Amen.

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