December 24, 2017
A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices.
Finally some quiet.
The stores are closed, the packages wrapped, most people are home
wherever home might be except for us churchgoers, and hopefully almost all
travel has ended. It’s Christmas
Eve. And Christ is born. ‘A thrill of hope, [and] the weary
world rejoices!’
You are familiar with that phrase because it is a line from
the Christmas Carol, O Holy Night translated
by John Dwight from a French poem in 1855. I found it so compelling for this night because
truly this is a weary world in which we live and most certainly we need a
thrill of some hope if even just a tiny pin dot of light. We need hope.
O Holy Night is a
beloved carol but few people know of the origins of its story. One night in 1847 in a small French
town Placide Cappeau, a commissar of wine, was asked by his local clergy to
write a poem for Christmas. He was
quite surprised because he was not really a church-goer. But on his way to Paris by train he
imagined what it would have been like to be in Bethlehem the night that Jesus
was born and to witness his birth.
By the time he had reached Paris he had penned the poem ‘Cantique de
Noel’.
Once finished though he knew it was more than just a poem so
he asked his friend, Adolphe Charles Adams to compose some music. Adolphe was a popular classical
musician, often asked to compose music for orchestras and ballets. But this was different because Adolphe
was a Jew and he was being asked to write music for a day he didn’t celebrate
or a theology that he did not embrace. Nevertheless he did and the carol was sung at Christmas
Mass only three weeks later after Cappeau received the request.
But there is more to the story, which makes this carol,
‘Cantique de Noel’, so poignant for us tonight. The carol was well received all over France but when Cappeau
walked away from the church and became part of the socialist movement and it
was found out that Adolphe was a Jew, the Church uniformly denounced the carol
from being sung. The heads of the
Church deemed it in poor musical taste and that there was a ‘total absence of
the spirit of religion’ in it.
But the determined French people continued to sing it each
year in their homes, no one could stop them, and so an American composer, John
Sullivan Dwight, heard it and brought it to America and translated it to
English. Now Dwight, what you must
know, was an ardent abolitionist and saw something else in the song that moved
him beyond the story of the birth of Christ.
Dwight strongly identified with the lines of the third
verse: "Truly he taught us to love one another; his law is love and his
gospel is peace. Chains shall he break, for the slave is our brother; and in
his name all oppression shall cease." The text supported Dwight's view of
slavery in the South. The carol was published and Dwight's English translation of "O
Holy Night" quickly found favor in America, especially in the North during
the Civil War.[i]
Now there is even more to the story, part of which is
legend, but we’ll save that for another night. You see the important point of this carol was that it was
birthed into a weary world much like ours today as the French then were
preparing for another wave of revolution in 1848. And when this carol came to American soil, it came to
a divided America between the North and the South.
Even that night in which Jesus was born the prevailing
mood in Israel was anything but hope.
It was weary too. Under the
Rome occupation, life was not easy.
Common people lived with the burden of religious requirements from the
establishment without free expression of their own religious traditions.
So I’m not quite sure that the world has known anything
other than weariness. With each
passing day there is shocking and demoralizing news that we hear; of fires and
shootings, of hurricanes and nuclear threat, of war and terrorism, of
censorship, of apathy, of broken relationships. There is disillusionment everywhere and we yearn for
wholeness and peace, hope and contentment.
But what is this thrill of hope that we yearn for?
Is it hoping the weather will be good for the family
vacation or hoping that the St. Louis Cardinals will win the World Series, or hoping
that mom will be making her delicious figgy pudding for Christmas? While these are valid concerns of one’s
heart, this sort of hope is reduced to merely something that we want to happen
but have no real way of knowing whether at the end of the day it will. It’s a finger crossed hope that
everything will turn out exactly the way we want it to. Yet the reality is that often life just
doesn’t turn out the way we would like at times and the Cardinals will lose or
it rains all week on vacation.
This kind of hope lacks conviction and fundamentally isn’t all that
transformative to our lives.
But true hope does have the power to transform us because
it gives us something solid to hang on to. It is the hope of Bethlehem. It is the hope that Mary birthed so many years ago. It is Jesus who is our hope who will
strengthen us for the challenges we face. It is through him that we can ultimately hang onto hope amid
the turmoil of life. He is the one who fulfilled the promise of the prophets so
long ago that the wilderness and the dry land shall be glad and the desert
shall blossom with the crocus.
It is a hope that is based in profound love that what God
has created is good, and that we are good, and that there is redemption close
at hand. We don’t have to be perfect, nor does
the weary world have to be perfect for Christ to come and offer us true
hope. That’s what this night is
about and what Christ’s birth offers us.
Oh yes, the weary world rejoices because yonder breaks a new
a glorious morn!
The thrill of hope is within our reach, grab it, and never
let it go.
Amen. Let it be so.
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