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…and heaven and nature sing, and heaven and nature sing, and heaven, and heaven and nature sing. Merry Christmas! Are you ready for Christmas? Have you had enough Christmas cheer? How about the music? Is anyone tired of roasting chestnuts? In the Episcopal Church, we love the season of Advent and its music. We sing as little Christmas music before Christmas as possible. But if you come back on Sunday morning, you can be part of a beautiful Christmas Lessons and Carols service here at 10:30. Unlike tonight, there will be no sermon! No worn-out Christmas pop songs. Just Christmas carols, led by our wonderful choirs. Where do Christmas carols come from? What combination of skill and gift do you need to bring a carol to life? First, let me state the obvious: carols, hymns and songs have both words and music. Long before cell phones, there were “texts” and “tunes.” Some people are good at creating tunes, some are good with texts, a few can do both well. For as long as I can remember, I have loved to take old hymns and put new texts to them. It’s fun to sing something we know by heart, while using different, unexpected words. Or to sing old words to a different melody. How about singing “Amazing Grace,” as if it were a familiar Christmas carol (the tune we associate with “Joy to the World”)? Three hundred years ago, Isaac Watts wrote a new Christmas carol. A Congregational minister in London, he also published books on logic, grammar, pedagogy, psychology, ethics, astronomy, geography and theology. Yet Watts was best known as the father of English hymnody. From more than 700 of them, seventeen of which are found in our Hymnal 1982, many of his hymns are still sung, including “O God, Our Help in Agers Past” and “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” The text we know as the Doxology – “Praise God from whom all blessings flow” – is also his. But Isaac Watts may be best known for an amazingly grace-filled text we know as “Joy to the World,” a hymn he wrote while sitting under his favorite tree. First published in 1719, “Joy to the World” is found in more books on this earth than any other Christmas hymn. We did not choose “Joy to the World” as one of the carols we’ll sing tonight. But I have chosen it to help us focus for a few minutes on why we are here this Christmas Eve. For I have come to believe that it is not a “Merry” or a “Happy” Christmas we need. No, we need some “Joy to the World!” “Joy to the world,” the second stanza starts, “the Savior reigns! Let us our songs employ; While fields and floods, rocks hills and plains / repeat the sounding joy, repeat the sounding joy; repeat, repeat the sounding joy!” Is that why we are here tonight? Are we here to employ stanzas of joy while all creation sings the refrain? What is this repeated, sounding, resounding joy all about? What strikes me about Isaac Watts’ hymns, and about “Joy to the World” in particular, is his awareness of all of creation, including himself, as part of God’s magnificent, heaven-and-earth choir. “This is the day the Lord hath made,” he wrote in another famous hymn. “Let heaven rejoice, let earth be glad…” (Hymnal 1982 #50). Listen to this stanza from a hymn we usually sing to a tune called Forest Green: “I sing the almighty power of God, that made the mountains rise, that spread the flowing seas abroad and built the lofty skies. I sing the wisdom that ordained the sun to rule the day; the moon shines full at his command, and all the stars obey….There’s not a plant or flower below, but makes thy glories known; and clouds arise, and tempests blow, by order from thy throne; while all that borrows life from thee is ever in thy care, and everywhere that I could be, thou, God, art present there” (Hymnal 1982 #398). With every valley and mountain, in harmony with all seas and skies (maybe even snowstorms?), here was a man who could not keep from singing glory and praise to God. Why? Because, over his lifetime, he had come to love God for God’s sake, to love God for who God is. And Watts loved God’s greatest gift, the gift we celebrate here tonight – the gift of a child who miraculously saves us from sin, from all the ways we fail to sing God’s glory and praise. Watts loved the babe who came – and comes tonight and will come again – to conquer sin and death for us, to give us eternal life. This hymn-maker loved the God who made him and us and all creation. And I think his love for the God who loves us this much (hands outstretched) is contagious. I believe God’s love for us is more viral than any epidemic, if we will just let ourselves catch it. Yet sometimes, it takes a while to catch God’s love. It may have taken quite some time for Watts. The day Isaac was born, his father, also a preacher, was in prison for holding views that did not comply with Church of England doctrine. As she nursed her newborn son, Isaac’s mother kept vigil outside those prison walls, protesting her husband’s treatment. The oldest of nine children, Isaac never married or had children. After he followed his father into the family business, Isaac was eventually forced to leave his parish pastorate, due to a violent and continual fever from which he never fully recovered. His frequent and serious health problems included a stroke, which left him paralyzed for the last nine years of his life. If all this suffering wasn’t enough, this powerful preacher stood just five feet tall. Even so, his hymns make it clear that Isaac Watts came to love God with joy. He gave one-third of his modest earnings to the poor. And his parish grew, seeking a deeper life with God through music. Poets, like hymn writers, are often members of God’s joy-making family. Years ago my wife Eyleen introduced me to the poetry of Mary Oliver. Those words of love and joy were unlike anything I had ever heard – except some of the songs I had sung in church. This Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, who has lived close to God’s creation nearly all of her adult life, now writes from a place of real grief after losing the beloved partner of her life. Mary Oliver writes poems that are like hymns for me, using words like these: I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I’ve been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? (The Summer Day) Life, as we come to learn, is not without sadness. For joy is not about being perpetually happy and merry and bright. Joy, we Christians believe, is about the abundance of God’s glory in the midst of all of life’s inevitable pain, suffering and grief. Joy is about death and resurrection, dying and rising, even when we can’t see the light in our darkness. Joy is about God drying every tear from our eyes, in this life and the next. So why is it not surprising that, when I asked Eyleen, “What does Mary Oliver say about joy?” she went to Google and came up with this: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief. What a time they have, these two / Housed as they are in the same body” (We Shake With Joy). Sisters and brothers of God’s creation, Isaac Watts and Mary Oliver have something to teach us this Christmas Eve. They can teach us about joy. They can teach us about shaking with joy, joy that sounds and resounds. They can teach us that we and all creation exist to praise and give glory to God. In the midst of our pain, suffering, grief – even in our death, they teach us that we can learn to sing, as do heaven and earth, with joy. Tonight, let us ask God to help us be more like Isaac and Mary and the rest of God’s creation. Let us pray in words like the ones from our Psalm (96), one of those great old songs of praise to God: “Let the heavens be glad, let the earth rejoice, let the sea roar, let the field exult, let the trees sing for joy.” Tonight, let us sing a new song, or at least, an old song with new words: Joy to the World, our Christ has come, Let earth be strong and green! May every child enjoy our global home, And all creation sing, and all creation sing, And all, and all creation sing! The Rev. Thomas A. Momberg |
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For more on the interruptions of life, go to http://fathermom.wordpress.com |
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