Simple Gifts: Music Richmond s First Baptist Church, December 17, 2017 The Third Sunday of Advent Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; Psalm 126; John 1:6-8, 19-28

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1 Simple Gifts: Music Richmond s First Baptist Church, December 17, 2017 The Third Sunday of Advent Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; Psalm 126; John 1:6-8, In these Sundays of Advent we ve been talking about the simple gifts of the season: about light that shines in the darkness and food that is God s love made delicious. i Today we turn our thoughts toward music, and it really is a gift, isn t it? You might buy tickets for a performance of Handel s Messiah or the Nutcracker, but if you want to hear all the Christmas music you can stand all you have to do is go shopping. It s out there, in every store, and it has been since the day after Thanksgiving (in some stores the day after Halloween!). Do you remember where you were, this year, when you heard that first Christmas song? Do you remember what it did to you? I think I was in a coffee shop, jotting down notes for a sermon, when I realized, They re playing Christmas music! It was something sweet and almost sad, like Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, and the effect it had on me was like looking out the window and noticing that it was snowing: It woke up the child in me. Music can do that to you: it can take you back in time; it can make you ten years old again, just like that (snap!). And although a lot of Christmas music is about feeling the joy and wonder of the season, some of it is about yearning for something that used to be, or longing for something that hasn t yet come. A couple of years ago I talked about the song I ll be home for Christmas, recorded by Bing Crosby back in 1943, in the middle of World War II. Kim Gannon, who wrote the song, claimed that it was turned 1

2 down at first because the people in the music business thought the last line the one that says, I ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams was too sad for all those separated from their loved ones in the military. But when Crosby heard the song he loved it, and recorded it as the flip side of White Christmas. It was a huge hit, and became the most requested song at Christmas U.S.O. shows. ii Because it s a wonderful thought, isn t it? For the soldier lying in his bunk overseas and for his family waiting at home: the thought that on Christmas Eve the doorbell would ring and there he would be standing in the falling snow in his uniform, his duffle bag over one shoulder. But I read somewhere that White Christmas, the song on the other side of that record, became the number one selling song of all time. Not the number one selling Christmas song, mind you, but the number one selling song period. iii And it s not because Bing Crosby (who first recorded it) was the greatest singer who ever lived, or because Irving Berlin (who wrote it) was the greatest songwriter: it s because of what one writer called the aching and beautiful sentiment of the song, iv because of the way it expresses something that is in us a profound yearning still waiting to be fulfilled. But it couldn t be the words themselves; there are only 54 of them, barely more than a tweet. Bing Crosby had to fill up his three-minute version of the song with a lot of whistling and background singers. But when he sang, he sang this: I'm dreaming of a white Christmas Just like the ones I used to know Where the treetops glisten and children listen To hear sleigh bells in the snow. I'm dreaming of a white Christmas With every Christmas card I write May your days be merry and bright And may all your Christmases be white. v 2

3 Boil the words down to their essence and what you get is a dream and a wish: a dream of Christmases past and a wish that things could be like that again sweet and simple and full of childlike wonder paired with a melody that matches those sentiments perfectly. But what about the white part: the idea that you might wake up to a Christmas morning covered in freshly fallen snow? Where does that come from? In a sermon he preached a few years ago my friend John Ballenger observed that in Baltimore, where he lives, the statistical probability of a white Christmas was only about 5-10 percent that year, but in some places it was far less than that. What is the statistical probability of a white Christmas in Key West, or in Arizona? he wondered. Why would those people sing such a song? How could they dream of such a thing? vi Well, maybe it s because of something Frederick Buechner wrote years ago in a book called Telling the Truth. Buechner lives in Vermont. He knows about snow. He s probably had more than his share of white Christmases. But listen to the way he describes the magical effects of a snowfall: You wake up on a winter morning and pull up the shade, and what lay there the evening before is no longer there: the sodden gray yard, the dog droppings, the tire tracks in the frozen mud, the broken lawn chair you forgot to take in last fall. All this has disappeared overnight, and what you look out on is not the snow of Narnia [that magical country that C. S. Lewis used to write about] but the snow of home, which is no less shimmering and white as it falls. The earth is covered with it, and it is falling still in silence so deep that you can hear its silence. It is snow to be shoveled, to make driving even worse than usual, snow to be joked about and cursed at, but unless the child in you is entirely dead, it is snow, too, that can make the heart beat faster when it catches you by surprise that way, before your defenses are up. It is snow that can awaken memories of things more wonderful than anything you ever knew or dreamed. vii It s that line about the sodden gray yard, the dog droppings, the tire tracks, and the frozen mud, that gets me. It s a metaphor of the mess we can make of our lives 3

4 when left up to our own devices. Wouldn t we love it if someone could come along and clean it all up overnight? Wouldn t we love it if something like snow could fall, and transform the muddy back yards of our lives into something beautiful and new? Maybe that s why White Christmas is so popular: because we live in the often-unlovely reality between those Christmases we used to know and the ones we long for; because we still hold on to this wild and improbable hope that everything could change overnight. Buechner says that when you look out on a snowfall like that it can awaken memories of things more wonderful than anything you ever knew or dreamed. And, because he s a believer, I think he s talking about how things will be when God has his way in the world, as if we held in our collective unconscious some ancient memory of that. And maybe we do. The psalm for today is number 126 in the hymnbook of ancient Israel. It says, When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy. The psalmist is singing about those Israelites in exile, who woke up one morning and discovered that Cyrus, king of Persia, had conquered Babylon and set them free. In a state of stunned disbelief they gathered up their meager possessions and headed for home. But they didn t give the credit to Cyrus: they gave it to God. When the Lord restored our fortunes, they sang, then we were like those who dream. Maybe that dream is still in our heads somewhere: that dim, almost-forgotten memory of hearing the prison doors swing open on their rusty hinges and seeing the light of freedom pour in. Maybe that s what we re dreaming of when we sing White Christmas. Or maybe it s more than that. 4

5 Again, it s my friend John Ballenger who has noticed all the Santa songs we hear at this time of year and the longing that s in them: viii Santa Claus Is Coming to Town, Up on the Housetop, Jolly Old Saint Nicholas, Here Comes Santa Claus, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and the third verse of The Christmas Song. Remember that one? They know that Santa s on his way. He s loaded lots of toys and goodies on his sleigh. And every mother s child is gonna spy To see if reindeer really know how to fly. It seems improbable that a jolly old elf could load up his sleigh with toys for good girls and boys, hitch it up to a team of eight tiny reindeer (not counting Rudolph), and fly all over the world in a single night, stopping at every house to make a delivery, and doing it by squeezing down the chimney or climbing in through a window with his big bag full of toys. Improbable, I say: not impossible. Much of the music we hear at this time of year is devoted to the importance of believing in Santa Claus, believing that he really is coming, and believing that if we can only be good for goodness sake he will bring us everything our hearts desire, which is probably just how the Jews used to wait for the Messiah. They had come home from their exile in Babylon, strengthened the walls of Jerusalem, and rebuilt the temple, but things had never been quite the same again, or at least, not the same as they had been in the good old days: the days of King David. And so the people began to hope for a new king, a descendant of David, who would restore their nation to its former glory. When the Romans conquered Israel in 63 BC and took possession of the land the people s hopes became very specific: they began to look for 5

6 the Messiah, the anointed one, who would fulfill the prophecy from Isaiah 61 that we heard earlier; one who would say: The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor, and the day of vengeance of our God. It was not just a restored kingdom these people were looking for, but an avenging king. And that s why they got excited when John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness. There were some who thought that he, himself, might be the Messiah. In our Gospel lesson for today the religious authorities send some of the priests and Levites to ask, Who are you? John answered, I m not the Messiah, if that s what you re thinking. And they said, Who, then, Elijah, the one who will precede the Messiah? No. Are you the prophet-like-moses, the one he said would come someday? No. Then who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. And John said, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the Lord. And then he told them, I baptize with water, but among you stands one whom you do not know. I am not worthy to untie his sandals. Oh, you better watch out, you better not cry; you better not pout, I m tellin you why: Jesus Christ is coming to town! But that s what the people wanted, just like children want Santa Claus to come: they wanted the Messiah to come and make things right in Israel. They wanted him to usher in not only the kingdom of his ancestor David, but the kingdom of Almighty God. And yes, Jesus came. He was God with us. He was Emmanuel. That s what we celebrate at Christmas. That s why we sing, Joy to the world, the Lord is come! and 6

7 Go, Tell It on the Mountain, and Hark, the Herald Angels Sing! and Ding Dong Merrily on High. But if we re honest there is still that yearning within us for something more, and what it is, I believe, is a yearning for the fulfillment of those old promises once and for all: for God s kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven and for God s king to come with it. We d love to raise the blinds tomorrow and find that the muddy back yards of our lives have been transformed forever into something beautiful and new. That s what we pray for all through the year, but at this time especially our hopes are intensified. Maybe all those songs about Christmas are really songs about the kingdom, and maybe all those songs about Santa are really songs about the king. Here in church, of course, we can be a little more specific: we can name our yearning for what it really is. O come, O come, Emmanuel, we sing, and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here, until the Son of God appear. Within that same verse, the hymn moves from yearning to assurance, and then to something more: Rejoice! it says, Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel! But how long, O Lord? How long? Did you know that hymn dates back to the eighth century, AD, and that it originally had seven verses, each of them expounding on a different title for the Messiah? Listen to what our spiritual ancestors were yearning for in those Dark Ages: O come, O Wisdom from on high, who ordered all things mightily; to us the path of knowledge show and teach us in its ways to go. Refrain O come, O come, great Lord of might, who to your tribes on Sinai's height in ancient times did give the law in cloud and majesty and awe. Refrain 7

8 O come, O Branch of Jesse's stem, unto your own and rescue them! From depths of hell your people save, and give them victory o'er the grave. Refrain O come, O Key of David, come and open wide our heavenly home. Make safe for us the heavenward road and bar the way to death's abode. Refrain O come, O Bright and Morning Star, and bring us comfort from afar! Dispel the shadows of the night and turn our darkness into light. Refrain O come, O King of nations, bind in one the hearts of all mankind. Bid all our sad divisions cease and be yourself our King of Peace. Refrain Can you picture the saints of God gathered in some cold, stone church somewhere in England centuries ago, singing that hymn? Scholars believe that it was originally used during evening prayer, in a call and response fashion. ix The two halves of the choir would face each other, and one half would sing plaintively, O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel, to which the other half would respond with confidence, Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel. One scholar notes that the original text of the hymn created a reverse acrostic, with the first letter of each verse spelling out ero cras, which means (in Latin): I shall be with you tomorrow. Music is one of the simple gifts of this season. It makes it possible for us to express what we could not otherwise put into words: our greatest yearnings, our deepest desires. Is it possible that what we want more than anything else is for Christ to come, and to bring God s kingdom with him, so that when we raise the blind on Christmas 8

9 morning we will see the world made new, and our oldest and most enduring dream come true? Jim Somerville 2017 i This quote is attributed to Norman Wirzba. ii This information was gathered from the I ll Be Home for Christmas entry in Wikipedia. iii Evan Bailyn, The Top 20 Christmas Songs You Never Get Sick of, Huffpost, December 19, 2013 (updated December 6, 2017). Bailyn says White Christmas has been recorded by everyone from Bob Marley to Bette Midler, from Kenny Rogers to Taylor Swift. iv Ibid. v Irving Berlin, White Christmas, vi John Ballenger, Simple Gifts Christmas Music, Woodbrook Baptist Church, December 11, vii Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: the Gospel as Comedy, Tragedy, and Fairy Tale (Harper & Row, 1977), p. 96. viii John Ballenger, Simple Gifts Christmas Music. ix O Come, O Come, Emmanuel at Hymnary.org (excerpted from the notes). 9

AN ADVENT LITURGY O ANTIPHONS

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