“Joy
to the World”
Luke
1:39-55
In those days
Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where
she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When
Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth
was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry,
“Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And
why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For
as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for
joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a
fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”
And Mary said,
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”
Introduction:
Perhaps
it’s just my take on things, the fact that I’m a pastor and all that, but I
find the Christmas to be a wonderful time for music. As some of you may know, I
went to the Philadelphia Orchestra for their Christmas performance on Thursday
night and it was spectacular. The music was a wonderful blend of the familiar
traditions and the surprising twists and turns that can shake things up. The
conductor was a hilarious Englishman from Vancouver. But in the midst of all
the merriment was a bit of angst. As he joked several times, “if you don’t know
the reference go read the book. It’s really quite a thrilling read.”
As I’ve
already indicated I’ve been enraptured by this series The Atlantic is publishing. Each day I’ve been looking forward to
reading the latest installment in The 12
Days of Christmas Songs series. There’s something marvelously refreshing in
seeing a mainstream journal publish reviews on the significance and histories
of Christmas tunes, religious and secular alike. In several instances, it’s
seemed like the authors diverge into sermons as much as reviews – pulling out
the strings of common experience as they address the theological themes of some
of our most cherished Christmas tunes.
In reference to God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman, Emma Green reminded the reader that,
“Amid cups of cocoa and romantic snowfalls and sparkly pine trees, it’s easy
to forget that Christmas, like Christianity itself, is a little dark. The
merriment is really existential relief: Humanity will, after all, be saved—from
evil, and from ourselves.
In its best renditions, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”
captures this haunting side of the holiday. The song brings tidings of comfort
and joy wrapped in a minor melody, a reminder that Jesus has come “to save us
all from Satan’s power when we were gone astray.” It’s a carol about the high
spiritual stakes of Christmas—after all, if not for the birth of Jesus,
Christians believe, humanity would be lost.”
In doing so she raves about the renditions by Annie Lennox – who interprets
the carol in a fashion reminiscent of David Bowie’s classic film Labyrinth. As one might expect she also
praises the rendition by Alison Krauss and Joshua Bell, while deriding the
versions by 98 Degrees, The Barenaked Ladies, and Nat King Cole. The point she draws out
is that peppy Canadian melody sounds more like the intro-song to the 90’s show Friends than long-held notes of what she
argues are the better versions.
Perhaps
it’s my taste for music that stimulates the mind as well as the emotions that
plays into this judgment, but I think I agree. Many of our Christmas songs have
wonderful lyrics whose meaning and context can be obscured under the rhythms of
Three Dog Night or the swaying
clap-along inducing tempos set by Mariah Carey. And I’ll be honest and admit
that sometimes I just want to dance around singing, “Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog…
Joy to the world and the fishes in the deep blue sea, joy to you and me!”
There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s beauty in reinterpretation, but we as
Christians should also be aware of the beauty in the original words of these
songs.
We Shall Overcome:
Some of
you may be wondering why I’m paying so much attention to music this morning. Perhaps
you’re thinking that this is just another one of my strange experimental
sermons. Who knows, maybe it is. In any case, I want to bring your attention to
a very strange and fascinating element of the Gospel of Luke. As you may
already know, Luke employs song frequently throughout the first several
chapters of his story about Jesus. In today’s reading, Mary sings in response
to the greeting she receives from her cousin Elizabeth. “Zechariah sings when his son John is born and his
tongue is finally loosened. The angels sing of peace and goodwill when they
share their “good news of great joy” with the shepherds. And Simeon sings his
song of farewell once he has seen God’s promises to Israel kept in the Christ
child.”[1]
After recognizing this an obvious
question comes to mind. “Why all these songs? I never realized that the Gospel
of Luke was a Broadway musical.” I think there’s a very basic answer to this.
Music is a powerful thing. It’s a wonderful medium through which we can express
our joys, camaraderie, and even our trials. In some cases, music can even be
called an act of resistance. Totalitarian states certainly take it seriously!
In today’s world all we have to do is look at Russia. It seems like the
all-girl band, whose name I probably shouldn’t say from the pulpit, is being
imprisoned nearly every other month.
Music is a powerful thing. Think about
the spirituals the slaves here in our own country wrote or the significance of We Shall Overcome for the Civil Rights
movement in this country. Perhaps in a hundred years’ time the world’s most
recent reincarnation of Justin Bieber will appropriate We Shall Overcome and turn it into a peppy club tune. Perhaps
that’s okay. But perhaps we should also hope that the real meaning of that
song’s struggle and life would remain intact. The songs that survive history
have a life that transcends the peppy highs you may get from Elvis or I might
get from Passion Pit – an alternative
rock/electronica band. They survive because they speak to things that are
deeper than the moves and grooves of the latest club scene.
Leipzig:
Many of you probably remember the 1989
protests in Leipzig well. While the musical element of those protests often
gets overlooked, as do so many musical histories, the “velvet revolution” had a
striking one. For months preceding the fall of the Berlin wall, the citizen of
Leipzig gathered on Monday evenings by candlelight around St. Nikolai church –
the church where Bach composed many of his cantatas – to sing. Over the course
of two months this small number of people grew from 1,000 to nearly 300,000, over
half the city. And as they sang songs of hope and protest and justice, they
shook the powers of their nation and changed the world. When one Stasi officer was interviewed later
regarding their failure to break up the protests, he replied, “We had no contingency
plan for song.”
The Scripture:
I think something like this is going
on in the Christmas story that Luke tells. Both Mary and Elizabeth knew how
ridiculous their situation was. One was too old to bear a child and the other
was so young she was not yet married. Yet, they were both called to bear
children of promise and deliverance, through whom God would change the world
and start a revolution. These two women probably knew how little account the
people around them paid them, tucked away in the middle of nowhere far away
from the centers of power and influence. They both knew the hardships of life.
It’s likely they both had witnessed brutal massacres where thousands of people
were put to the sword. “Yet when faced with the long odds of their
situation, they did not retreat, or apologize, or despair, they sang.
They sang of their confidence in the Lord’s promise to upend the powers that
be, reverse the fortunes of an unjust world, and lift up all those who had been
oppressed. When you’re back is to the wall, you see, and all looks grim, one of
the most unexpected and powerful things you can do is sing.”[2]
The
Point:
Our Christmas
hymns do something wonderful. They combine a realism of the world with the
promises of Christ. Mary and Elizabeth demonstrate a path that follows neither
naïve optimism or pessimism, instead they follow the path of hope. Hope, you
see, recognizes that there are difficult situations in the world. Hope
recognizes that we have to look beyond ourselves for rescue and relief. Mary
and Elizabeth knew that they could trust in God’s promise to hold onto them
through all of their trials. So they sang! They sang in joy because they knew
that God’s promised deliverance was at hand. They sang because they knew that
inside Mary’s belly was the Savior of the World. They sang because sometimes the
best thing to do is to sing!
Conclusion:
When we sing Joy to
the World we are ironically participating in a bit of an irony. As I
mentioned earlier, Isaac Watts hadn’t intended for the song to be a Christmas
tune. The song mentions nothing about Christ’s birth, but instead references
his second coming. But perhaps that’s why we should sing it at Christmas. We
shouldn’t separate Christ’s coming from his return. So perhaps it’s appropriate
that Joy to the World has retained a
folksy and infectious melody that has made it one of the most published
Christmas songs in North America.
We celebrate Christmas because we have joy. We have joy in
the promises of God and we sing because we cry out of ourselves with a need for
that hope. We sing because we remember the story of Christmas, where humanity
is saved from evil and from ourselves. We sing because Jesus saves us from all
the powers that would hold us down. God offers us joy and that is the reason
for the season. So let us now celebrate the birth of our newborn king with Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.