What Sweeter Music?
25 December 2010
Daily Office Christmas Year 1
Zech 2:10-13; 1 John 4:7-16; John 3:31-36
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. (1 John 4:7-16)
“Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God; … those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”
We often miss the point of these phrases in the first letter of John. We tend to turn them on their head and read them as if they say “whoever knows God and is born of God learns how to love, and those who abide in God and in whom God abides practice love.” We might be lead to do so by the fact that the passage says “God abides in those who confess that Jesus Christ is the Son of God”
But this text argues in the opposite direction—the author says the practice of love brings about and embodies personal closeness to God, not the other way around. The distinction is an important one, since we generally tend to think that the experience of love in some form or another is more generally common and shared among human beings than is having knowledge of God or being born of God, particularly when we associate such “God-talk” with submission to a particular religious tradition.
The “love” referred to here, of course, is not just our love for other human beings: “God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son.”
This is not an argument that we simply “confess Jesus as Lord” with our lips and “God will take care of everything.” For 1 John, love comes first, and God’s action in our lives takes care of the rest, including the personal attachment to Jesus that he says from his experience is at the heart of having abiding love. This is not a sectarian call to sign up for a doctrinal program or a partisan religious affiliation. It is a call to love and trust, with all that those words imply. And he bases this call on the fact that God sent Jesus, i.e., that God took on flesh and became truly human.
At root here is a key element in classic Christian theology of the incarnation. Christians have long reflected on what it means when we say, together with the Gospel of John that “the Word of God took on flesh and became truly human.”
That God somehow took on flesh and became truly human marks a radical continuity between our human lives and God’s, and that implies a sacredness in all it means to be human. Human love, friendship, the enjoyment of the simple pleasures of our world, and even our sorrows and pain—all these are taken up into God the moment God takes on our flesh. As one of the great theological doctors of the Eastern Church, Saint Athanasius, wrote: “[God], indeed, assumed humanity that we might become God.” (De Incarnation 54).
We often miss the point, wrongly thinking that somehow God came among us without truly being one of us. This “God incognito” paid for our sins and somehow made it possible for us to be more like God, and less like human beings. That is a total warping of the meaning of the incarnation.
God became truly human in all ways (except in resisting God), and that means it’s O.K. to be fully human. In fact, it means God calls us to be fully human, and to do that he calls us to follow his example when he was among us, and not resist God so much. It is only thus that we can find our true and full humanity.
We often hear this time of year calls to “put Christ back in Christmas.” People complain about commercialization, too much partying, and not enough praying. This phrasing of the question gets the issues all wrong. It separates the partying and celebration from spirituality. Granted, some people see the holiday solely as a consumer or marketing event. The holiday is thus diminished, often becoming a source of stress and depression.
We often hear this time of year calls to “put Christ back in Christmas.” People complain about commercialization, too much partying, and not enough praying. This phrasing of the question gets the issues all wrong. It separates the partying and celebration from spirituality. Granted, some people see the holiday solely as a consumer or marketing event. The holiday is thus diminished, often becoming a source of stress and depression.
The problem, however, is not too much celebration, but too little. “I will greatly rejoice in the LORD, my whole being shall exult in my God” says Isaiah. It is not just “the spiritual side” of us that should rejoice. To want to turn Christmas into a sectarian prayer meeting rather than the public, boisterous, and commonly shared party that it currently is—regardless of beliefs—stems from bad theology.
In the history of the Church in England, this issue once came to a real crisis point and literally caused the government of England to “cancel Christmas” for two decades. After the English Reformation, some Christians there believed that the Church had not been reformed thoroughly enough, that it was not sufficiently “biblical,” and that it still was corrupted by what the early reformers called “the enormities of Rome.” They wanted to get rid of fancy vestments, bishops, organs, and even the daily or weekly celebration of the Eucharist itself. These Puritans focused their political activism in Parliament on eliminating corruption and privileges of the Royal Court and the nobility, including the bishops, whom they tended to call “certain popish persons.”
When the Army raised by Parliament won the Civil War, the Puritan regime that came into power was narrow, fundamentalist, and harsh, somewhat like an English Taliban. They banned Prayer Book worship and bishops, and set into Law a whole range of austere measures aimed at purifying the country.
One of these measures banned the celebration of Christmas. Its very name—Christ’s Mass—was far too Roman for the Puritans’ tastes. The fact that is was marked by twelve days of mid-winter partying, singing, drinking, and, for the more religious, Eucharists, were equally distasteful. Special church services, mince pies, hanging holly, big parties were banned from 1644 to 1660.
Now in fairness to the Puritans, it must be said that they were rightly concerned at the excesses of some of the partying: then, as now, serious public drunkenness and debauchery were among the abuses attendant to the celebration of the season by some.
Sir John Hutchinson
(I feel the need here to be fair to the Puritans. One of my ancestors, Col. John Hutchinson of Nottingham Castle, was one of the “Parliament men” who signed the death warrant of King Charles I after Charles was tried and found guilty of war crimes and mass murder. Col. Hutchinson, concerned with the excesses of the Court of Charles I, had initially supported the Roundhead Army in opposing the “King’s men” or Cavaliers. But he was spared a traitor’s execution after the restoration of the monarchy because he equally opposed the excesses of the Puritan regime headed by Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell and had prevented retaliatory war atrocities being perpetrated on Cavalier prisoners of war. The fact that his wife Lucy’s father was a royalist nobleman who helped in restoring the monarchy after the Commonwealth did not hurt either. Despite the fact that the Puritans “won the war but lost the peace” only to have the monarchy restored, the whole affair changed the nature of the British crown, and prevented in England the kind of traumatic revolution that happened in France in 1789. Many of the political ideas and slogans of the Roundhead puritans were taken up part and parcel by the American revolutionaries in 1776.)
The Puritans, throwing away the baby Jesus with the bathwater of overdoing it in Christmas partying, banned the holiday outright. “Christmas is a pagan celebration,” they said, “and must be done away with by true Christians.”
Note the theology at work here—it was exclusionary, not inclusive: “true Christians” needed to show their “trueness” (and, in so doing, point out who were “false” Christians and pagans). It shows a contempt for many of the simple pleasures shared by people regardless of their belief or tradition. It gets the "first love, then know Jesus" process described in 1 John backward.
At Midnight Mass last evening at the American Cathedral in Paris, I was moved very deeply when the choir sang John Rutter’s setting of a modern adaptation of a poem by Cavalier poet Robert Herrick written just after the monarchy and Christmas celebrations were restored. Herrick, an Anglican priest who had lost his living during the Parliamentary interregnum, wrote the poem for a Christmas party of the newly-restored King. In it he argues for the celebration of Christmas against the position taken by the Puritans, and he does so wholly on religious and theological grounds. He uses good incarnational theology: the sacredness of all of human life , love, and enjoyment in the wake of God becoming flesh. I love the poem, and have sung it with other choirs over the years:
What Sweeter Music
What sweeter music can we bring
Than a carol, for to sing
The birth of this our heavenly King?
Awake the voice! Awake the string!Dark and dull night, fly hence away,
And give the honor to this day,
That sees December turned to May.
Why does the chilling winter’s morn
Smile, like a field beset with corn?
Or smell like a meadow newly-shorn,
Thus, on the sudden? Come and see
The cause, why things thus fragrant be:
‘Tis He is born, whose quickening birth
Gives life and luster, public mirth,
To heaven, and the under-earth.
We see him come, and know him ours,
Who, with his sunshine and his showers,
Turns all the patient ground to flowers.
The darling of the world is come,
And fit it is, we find a room
To welcome him. The nobler part
Of all the house here, is the heart.
Which we will give him; and bequeath
This holly, and this ivy wreath,
To do him honour, who’s our King,
And Lord of all this revelling.
What sweeter music can we bring,
Than a carol for to sing
The birth of this our heavenly King?
--Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
May we all during this season sing, eat, drink, and love each other well. Let us reconcile with each other and mend family and friend relationships that have gone bad. Let us celebrate with our whole being, since in Christ our whole being is being made one with God. Let’s not begrudge our neighbors who celebrate and love without recognizing the source of their joy and love, the source that our experience tells us is God made flesh in Jesus Christ. Merry Christmas, one and all.
In the name of God, Amen.
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