Every Christmas Eve day, at 10:00 in the morning, I faithfully listen to the live BBC broadcast from King’s College Chapel, Cambridge of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. There’s just something about the solemnity and grandeur they manage to bring to the occasion.
To say nothing of the music. I absolutely love it, particularly the congregational singing, more so even than the stellar choral anthems.
I love the earthy resonance and sheer weightiness of the organ, together with the slow, measured, yet always spirited tempo of hundreds of voices seamlessly joined together, topped off by an arrangement for the sopranos that soars impossibly and resplendently above the entire proceedings, all worthily contained within the improbable acoustics of the old, majestic chapel.
As such, when the announcer informs his listeners at the end of the service that the sun is now setting over the winding, dense streets of the old university town, I’m thoroughly charmed.
But more to the point, I’m filled with the Holy Spirit. After listening to the gentle words and sounds of the service, the world seems almost to stop, a hush falling over all human striving, replaced by an ethereal calm where heaven and earth seem to co-mingle as one.
Years ago, while Christmas shopping, I bought a CD of Christmas music from this same King’s College Choir and listened to it for the first time as Linda and I drove up from New Haven to Boston.
At first, my mind was completely distracted by the rush of crowds at Toys-R-Us and Border’s, to say nothing of all the aggressive, impatient motorists dead-set on having a Merry Christmas even if it kills them.
Because of this, the music at first had only minimal effect. It sounded pleasant, to be sure, but I was simply too wrapped up in all the holiday madness to give it my full attention. After a while, though, as we drove north and east along I-95, the music began to alter my sensibilities. By the time we reached Providence, I was a goner.
Approaching the city, the traffic suddenly became concentrated and dense. The sky was overcast, as in some sense it ought to be this time of year, and the city took on a gray, eerie cast.
At one point, passing warehouses, billboards, and all manner of urban chaos, I saw an emergency vehicle under the overpass ahead, its lights flashing menacingly, which only heightened the mood of human frailty and vulnerability.
Normally, such broken electric images might have generated a kind of emotional unease, rattling the nerves and unsettling the mind. But instead the music generated a curious stillness, and a tenderness one might even describe as heartbreaking.
It was this stillness that descended implausibly upon an otherwise godforsaken scene. Yet it was not as if the music had blocked out the reality of what I was seeing. If anything, the moment seemed even more real to me somehow, heightening the experience.
In other words, rather than experiencing it all as mere sensory data, I became spiritually alert to its deeper stirrings. Yet I was neither alarmed nor dispirited.
It was as if this everyday human scene had been swept up and enveloped by God, joy and sorrow intermingled, suspended, held, as if of disparate musical parts flowing and commingling within the majestic confines of King’s College Chapel. God was in the mix.
It occurred to me how much of modern life is devoid of the oft-hidden evocations of God’s Holy Spirit, the same Spirit who continually seeks to temper and conjoin all our experiences. Most of the time, that is, we spend our days dragged to and fro by blind, impersonal events and random sensory impressions, oblivious to God’s ever-present grace.
For we moderns have learned to separate out, or remove altogether, the things of the Spirit, having replaced holy mysteries with cool, detached reason. We take the Bible and squeeze out every last vestige of its awe and wonder. We dismiss its witness as the product of an ancient, superstitious mind.
Yet by rejecting anything we cannot quantify with our five senses, we rob ourselves of what, in effect, has sustained the human race for the vast majority of its existence.
Which is why, every year, crowds are drawn to Cambridge to hear the ancient biblical stories that speak timelessly of God’s undying love for us all. Improbably, they find themselves heartened by the willful suspension of modernity’s hardened and sophisticated “realism,” allowing for but a moment the world of mystery and wonder, even of angels and archangels – a world each of us, deep down, knows is the truest reality there is.
As we drove through Providence that day, I became acutely aware of the truth of God’s “providential” care for all of life. I was reminded that Christian joy is not, properly, the absence of suffering and pain, for in life suffering and pain simply are. For Christians, joy contains within it the awareness that humanity’s suffering and pain is overcome by and inexplicably bound up with God’s saving empathy and grace.
That day I was reminded of the undeniable connectedness of life and a kind of hope that defies objective reasoning. It is an impossible hope that comes to us as sheer gift, like the Christ Child, a gift that need only be received to be made real.
In the midst of our broken and anxious world, God reaches out to us – over and over again – to awaken us from the habitual daydreams that obscure the grandeur and wonder of this broken, though magnificent, God-haunted world.
On that bleak December afternoon years ago, as the music waved its magic wand over an otherwise dark and strife-ridden city, I was able to see that which I normally cannot – the essential harmony of life; that mysterious though unmistakable oneness found even in the midst of a seemingly random and chaotic world.
I thought of a quote from a book on Christian history I read years ago. Referring to the city of Edinburgh during the medieval period, a time of intense religious devotion, the author wrote: “In those days, the skies hung low over the city.”
The sense of intimate, everyday discourse between heaven and earth was palpable, in other words. God was real and present everywhere, in studied contrast to our present secular age.
In our scripture lesson this morning from Jeremiah, the prophet is speaking to a religious people who have seen their beloved homeland betrayed, destroyed, desecrated. Here they languish in Babylonia, cut off from their physical and spiritual home, surrounded only by loss, brokenness, and despair.
As we entertain the end of this momentous calendar year, we too have had our share of disappointment, loss, even fear, though perhaps on a lesser scale. But as with the ancient Israelites, we face an uncertain future absent the assurances of the past and the succor of that place we call home (for many of us are indeed cut off from those we love most).
Note that Jeremiah gives those living in exile a message of confidence and hope. To a dispirited people he reminds them (and us) that life goes on, that while heavenly comforts may seem far away (if not cruel reminders), the God of Israel, our God, is sovereign still:
He writes: Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.
We Christians also live as strangers in a strange land, leading provisional lives here on earth as we await heaven’s glorious consummation. But like the Babylonian exiles, we are urged to not lose hope, even in these days when heavenly consolations seem distant, if not unattainable altogether.
In a recent essay entitled, “Down to Earth,” Christian scholar Ephraim Radnor uses the title of Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, “The Sun Also Rises,” written by a self-professed member of the “lost generation” in the aftermath of WWI’s horrific desolations, as an entryway into a larger discussion of Ecclesiastes, from which the title is taken. Qoheleth (“the preacher”) writes:
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever…The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose…
“Generations rise and fall,” Radnor writes, “for the reason the sun also rises, because ‘the earth abideth’ still. The world continues and our place within it carries on, whatever blows we suffer.”
“Against our modern tendency to imagine that we are in some way facing unprecedented circumstances,” he continues, “whether of untold promise or of unbearable grief, Ecclesiastes draws our attention to ‘ongoing-ness.’”
Though Christian faith rightly locates our truest home as with God in eternity, and this world as of qualified standing (which one day surely shall “pass away”), the Old Testament effectively grounds us in the here and now, reminding us that the earth does indeed abideth still, even “in the face of our fatigue and disillusion.”
Thus, in this time of pandemic and its consequent effects, among generations now of lost faith, and within a secular culture that broadly denies the mysteries and wonders of the ineffable, God’s divine, providential care abides among us ever still, powerfully though if at times veiled, standing athwart this age’s pessimism and forfeiture, bequeathing light amidst the darkness, hope and assurance amidst doubt and uncertainty, with sufficient strength and an unfailing vision to meet the challenges of this or any other age. Amen.