History through hymns ...

There's a story here. Hymns are living texts, words we make alive each time we sing them, and through them the stories of Christians from centuries past come alive to us.

Christmas 1 Dec. 3o, 2007 St. Paul’s
Isaiah 61:10-62:3 Psalm 147 Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7 John 1:1-18

The baby has been born. The reality of our lives has changed forever. Now, we ask, what does it all mean?

Jesus is a shock to the human family, just as the birth of a baby is a shock to any individual family. All those angels and their frightful appearances. Shepherds coming in from the fields. Rich kings from the east. More frightful warnings of danger, and a midnight flight to escape a vengeful king. What does this all mean, this baby born to a refugee family, this baby on the run, this Jesus, this one whose name means he will save his people from their sins?

The Word was made flesh and dwelled among us, full of grace and truth. As Christians pondered what the birth of this child meant, they began to understand this astounding gift of God come to live among us as one of us, God made flesh, and bones, and heart and voice – and as Christians began to incorporate this reality of God among us into their lives, they prayed about it, talked about, wrote about it, and sang about it. When one sings, St. Augustine said, one prays twice. And so this morning, we are going to look at – and listen to, and sing – some of the music of Christmas, some of the ways, over the centuries, Christians came to understand, and to articulate, what this baby in their midst meant to them, in their time and place.

Hymn 82: Of the Father’s love begotten – This was written in the late 4th century. The church was pretty well established across the Roman Empire, but the theology, the doctrine, the orthodoxy of the faith were in flux. What it all meant was up for grabs. So this hymn grapples with these difficult questions of the nature of Jesus: human? Divine? Both? Half and half? We know that words, and what they are trying to explain, have power if they last, and these words lasted in the church for a thousand years, and were so well known and so well used that in the 13th century they were put to music, and sung by Christians during their Christmastime services. We are also singing music from the Middle Ages when we sing two other familiar carols: 107: Good Christian friends, rejoice, which is In dulci jubilo – Charlie played two organ variations on that tune on Christmas Eve – and 110: The snow lay on the ground, to the tune Venite adoremus.

Our hymnal contains several other religious songs from the Middle Ages. 103: A child is born in Bethlehem – is a 13th century text, set to a 14th century tune. With 98: Unto us a born is born – we can begin to see some jauntiness in the music for Christmas. Unto us a born is born came from Germany in the 15th century. It was originally in Latin, but was very popular in German from the 16th century onwards. We sing it today, as we sing so many of these medieval carols, because scholars and clergy in the 19th century found old manuscripts and translated them. Our hymn 98 has four stanzas, but listen to the fifth one:

Omega and Alpha he!
Let the organ thunder,
While the choir with peals of glee
Doth rend the air asunder.

Our other medieval carols are very jolly, and we like them still because they are folk songs, songs ordinary people sang in their homes, around their fires, walking from house to house drinking wassail. 105: God rest you merry, gentlemen – the word “rest” in the first line at the time meant “keep”, so the song begins, “God keep you merry” or “Merry Christmas!” This stanza found printed on a song sheet in 1800 shows this to be a rollicking wassail song:

God bless the ruler of this house,
And send him long to reign,
And many a merry Christmas
May live to see again.
Among your friends and kindred,
That live both far and near,
And God send you a happy New Year.

109: The first Nowell – is also a folk song, retelling the Christmas story with some creative license. Drama was another medieval medium to tell the Christmas story. In some plays, the shepherds were given names, and in one English play they are given the hearty names of Harvey, Tudd and Trowle. The word “Nowell” shows how language and song crossed borders: it comes from the French “Noel” which is derived from “the Latin natalis, meaning “belonging to a birth” … That it was a cry of joy to celebrate the birth of Christ is clear from Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale:

And “Nowell” cryeth every lusty man.”

After the middle ages, we have a big gap in music. The Puritans, who dominated the 17th century, refused to celebrate Christmas. The holiday had gotten too bawdy, too full of pre-Christian customs to celebrate the solstice, and besides, there is nothing in the Bible to say that Jesus was born in December. So there: no music, no wassail, nothing which smacked of Catholic or European excess. Just the plain truth, please.

Early in the 18th century, we see some joy creeping back into this dour Protestant faith. Isaac Watts, who wrote hundreds of hymns based on the psalms – for Puritans, only the psalms could be sung – took Psalm 98 and came up with this all-time hit, 100: Joy to the world. Watts would change the psalms a bit, to make them reflect the Christian theology of his day, so if you look at the original psalm side by side with a Watts interpretation you get a picture of the 18th century and not ancient Israel. Many hymnal editors took texts like Watts’ and put them to popular tunes. “Joy to the world” echoes the opening chorus of “Lift up your heads” from Handel’s Messiah.

We know several other of Christmas’s greatest hits from the 18th century, big, loud hymns, popularized in Britain, which, as you know, was getting bigger and more imperial. 83: O come, all ye faithful – the words are older, originally in Latin, but the tune was composed by the organist at the chapel at the Portuguese Embassy in London, which was apparently a wildly popular and fashionable place for music in the late 18th century. It was an instant hit.

Two 18th century hymns were composed as poems. The massively prolific Charles Wesley wrote a “Hymn for Christmas Day” which was put to a tune by Felix Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn had written a piece to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Gutenberg and his press, and specifically noted that this lively tune was NOT suitable for sacred music, but lo and behold, the combination of Wesley’s words and Mendelssohn’s Gutenberg melody took off as 87: Hark! the herald angels sing.

106: Christians, awake, salute the happy morn – was written by John Byrom, the same man who invented shorthand. His little daughter, Dolly, asked for a poem for Christmas – this was 1749; Puritan piety was still influential – and on her breakfast plate she found this “Christmas Day for Dolly.” In 1750, Byrom’s poem was set to music by the church organist in Stockport, England: John Wainwright.

If 18th century Christmas hymns reflect the confidence and security of Protestant piety and British imperial expansion, we can see sentimentality and an awareness of social disharmonies creep into 19th century Victorian church music. 78: O little town of Bethlehem; 89: It came upon a midnight clear; 102: Once in royal David’s city; 112: In the bleak midwinter – all tell the Christmas story, but reflect a modern dis-ease with how far we are from the innocence of those early days. These poems reflect urban life – the “dark streets” of the little town of Bethlehem; one can hear the anxieties leading up to the American Civil War in It came up on the midnight clear:”

And man, at war with man, hears not
The tidings which they bring;
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing.

The 4th stanza of that hymn is positively Dickensian:

And ye, beneath life’s crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow, --
Look now, for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing:
O rest beside the weary road,
And hear the angels sing!

But all was not gloom and fear in the 19th century. American poets and musicians contributed two rousing songs to Christians around the world.101: Away in a manger – was not composed by Martin Luther, but was first published in an American Lutheran church school hymnal in 1885. And 128: We three kings of Orient are – was has been called “the first modern American Christmas carol,” was written by a professor of church music at General Seminary in New York in 1857.

And you? Your favorite hymn? The one that speaks to you of the Word made flesh?