“I can hear the angels sing…”
Thank you, Courtney…and choir…
I can hear the angels sing…
“…that glorious song of old,
From angels bending near the earth
To touch their harps of gold.”
It Came Upon the Midnight Clear
Well…if you’re looking at the same weather forecast I am…a Midnight Clear is not very likely here in Portland tonight.
But the Christmas carols and, in fact, the whole Christmas story…none of it was intended as a scientific, accurate description of that night so long ago when a babe was born someplace in Palestine…
A babe born in the perfectly natural way, born to a young mother…that whole “virgin” business was a mistranslation…ooops… A babe born to a young mother who delivered with pain and pushing…as most mothers do even today…
Most of the tellings of the Christmas story offer an idealized version of that birth…written to glorify that dusty, itinerant rabbi…whose preaching put forth a radical alternative to the empire of his day…
He claimed that love was real …and he claimed that love could rule…he called it the Kingdom of Heaven…we call it the Beloved Community…
We gather every year on this date to tell that idealized story of his birth…not because we believe his birth took place that way…
No angels trumpeted the announcement. No Wise Ones followed a stationary star in the sky…
We tell the story not because we believe the specifics, or all the claims but because we still hold hope that the heart of that story , the wisdom at its heart…that that hope could become true…that the power of love might just be more powerful than the love of power… and that the Beloved Community might be a possible future… could be… our future…
It Came Upon the Midnight Clear. It is the only carol in the Christmas canon written by a Unitarian…Rev. Edmund Hamilton Sears…in 1849.
Sears had studied to be a lawyer, then thought better of it. Taught for a while but then heard the call to ministry, inspired by the writings of William Ellery Channing. His first position was as a Unitarian missionary to the wild and wooly frontier…around Toledo, Ohio.
It was when he was serving the Wayland, MA congregation later that he wrote “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.”
It is considered the most “humanist” of the Christmas carols and was criticized for never mentioning the Christ-child. One critic called the carol “just an ethical song, praising peace.” Most of us wouldn’t think there would be anything wrong with that.
In fact, Sears was one of the most conservative Unitarians of his day.
But it was likely not his theology but the events of those days that prompted the message of that carol.
1849. The revolutions of 1848 in Europe …most of them…failed. The monarchies remained.
In the US, Manifest Destiny justified a violent land grab that the history books call the Mexican-American War, adding what would become the states from Texas to California and the Mountain West. Only fear of brown people kept the US from simply taking all of Mexico.
1849, the divisions that led to the Civil War were becoming harder and harder to compromise.
Sears confronted a world in which hope was hard to find…just as hard or even harder than in our own times.
“Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long
Beneath the angel strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong.”
Sears saw the repeated patterns of injustice in history. And he refused to simply assume that the Kingdom would come, that those centuries of wrong would magically be redeemed.
Sears had trouble believing in the Christmas promise of peace on earth.
Like most of us.
The promise of a magical change in the world…or in our own hearts, for that matter…is not what this night means for us.
We too know the pessimism that an honest look at history can cause.
But we do hear, in the Christmas story, a reason for hope.
It is not a guarantee, of course.
The world did not change miraculously when that babe was born either.
He had to grow into an adult. He had to be called away from a life of physical labor to a life of spiritual effort in which he knew himself as God’s child…
And he knew that whatever power he possessed…he knew that it drew from that source, that source that was somehow also within him. He was a child of God.
We say that the Spirit of Life moves within us…is our claim that much different?
We say that the Spirit of Life moves among us…he said that the Kingdom of God would come…could come…in this world, not some better and future world…
He said that the Beloved Community could be not only our future…but could be the present…
Present for them back then…present for us now…if we begin living as if it were.
What we know…and celebrate tonight…is that each child born is another possible redeemer…another voice that can point the way toward reconciliation and a peace based on justice…
That rabbi, long ago, became known as the Prince of Peace after all.
And because each child born is another potential redeemer…that means each of us is, too. Each of us can help the Kingdom come…here and now.
On this night we tell his story again.
And on this night, we think about his mother, too. His mother, that young girl who got to “yes” when an angel told her she had been favored. That young girl, like so many, who are faced with a reproductive decision. I think of that mother getting to “yes” and by that “yes” opening herself to suffer the loss of his life for the Good News that he preached. The gospels say she followed him right to the end.
I think of his mother and all our mothers on this night.
We gather to tell again a story filled with human struggle and human sadness…out of which people…so many people just like us…have discovered hope.
We gather tonight to ask again whether what he promised might be real.
This is not an easy year to get to hope.
There are so many signs that the world is going in the wrong direction.
But that is exactly what was happening when that babe was born, 2000 years ago.
You didn’t come tonight for historical analysis. You didn’t come for much theological reflection, either.
We come tonight to light a candle and sing Silent Night… here in the darkened sanctuary or at home with our families…
We come to take some comfort in repeating these rituals…
To remind ourselves that life will go on…just as it has after every other Christmas Eve…
I imagine Edmund Sears coming to that same conclusion when he sat down to write “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.”
That it is good and right to spend this night together, blessed by the flames we each kindle…or this year the lights we click…and blessed by the love we can share.
I think we arrive at a place that knows we cannot resolve all the political or theological issues, and knows that some of the days ahead will be hard…
There is no denying that…
But we come to this night knowing, somehow, that recognizing this night… and repeating these quiet rituals together …will help see us through.
That we can allow this night to work its magic for us again…
That for us this can be a midnight clear…despite the weather…
When we can listen for the voices of the angels…all around us…
This can be a Midnight Clear, when we can begin to sing with our lives the song that now only the angels sing.
Amen
Topics: Devotion