There is lots to say about the season of Christmas preceded in the church by the season of Advent. There are the lights, the candles, the special food, the cards and greetings, the presents, the travelling but for me it is all about the music. And not just for me. This past weekend there were concerts put on by various musical groups on Friday, Saturday AND Sunday nights. And we are just one small town – imagine the music that was being offered across the country. Our church choir has been practicing for weeks the music for the Service of Lessons and Carols this coming Sunday. Last Sunday, at each morning service, our small but stalwart children’s choir of four girl singers sang out beautifully “Gloria Deo’.
The resonant sounds of praise begin in Advent with the old classic, ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’ and with the newer offerings of ‘People, Look East’ and ‘All Earth is Waiting’. But people long to sing the favourite Christmas carols that they have been singing for years. ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’ ‘Joy to the World’ and ‘Silent Night’. Everyone has a favourite from ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ to ‘The First Nowell’ people know the verses by heart and sing them lustily.
Today we have been hearing news reports of the fall of Aleppo and the devastation and deplorable violence that has overtaken many, many citizens. Innocent civilians have been killed and the city destroyed by the violent aggression of Assad. As I think of the tragedy that has beset them I am reminded of the lines of my favourite carol, ‘It Came Upon the Midnight Clear’. IT is in verse three that we sing:
Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world hath suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love song which they bring:
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing.
The carol ends with the longing for peace. How our world needs peace but instead it seems that the rhetoric of violence and one-against-the-other gets stronger. Mistrust of others has escalated in the past little while, in part, I believe, fanned by the attitude and platitudes of Donald Trump. I pray God that Canada will not go down that slippery slope but we kid ourselves if we don’t realize how possible that slide might be.
So I sing, I sing the age-old carols, I sing the fun new songs, I sing with the angels that herald the birth of God into the world, I sing to raise my spirits and I sing to save my soul. I sing, because for thousands of years people have sung, sung alone and sung with others, sung words of hope and words of longing, words of joy and words of celebration. And to me that is what Christmas is about.
