St. John United Church of Christ, Arlington Hts., Illinois
December 27, 2009 – First Sunday after Christmas
Rev. Jeffrey L. Phillips, pastor
History of Christmas Carols

 Today’s sermon comes from an article in the December 2005/January 2006 Elks magazine, “Christmas Carols: The History of the Most Enduring Holiday Songs,” and a resource provided by Roberta Morand for which I do not have a citation.

Music enriches any holiday, and this is particularly true at Christmas.  Starting each year in November, homes, churches, and shopping malls are filled with the music of Christmas carols.  But where did they come from?  Who were the first carolers?

The word “carol” is most likely derived from the Old French word caroler, which meant to dance in a circle while singing.  Christmas music did not actually become part of Christmas festivities until December 25 was established as Christmas in the fourth century by the Roman Emperor Constantine.  Early observances of the day occurred in churches, and the music consisted of chants and psalms.

In 1223, all of that changed.  An Italian monk named Francis, who lived in the town of Assisi, wanted to find a way for common people to learn about Christmas.  Deciding that the best way to do this was to act out the nativity story, he borrowed animals from the local farms and talked the people into portraying characters in the story.  Francis put together a live nativity scene with shepherds, wise men, and a holy family, and carols were sung.  Francis wrote a Christmas hymn in Latin called “Psalmus in Nativitate,” which inspired the joyous spirit of caroling that soon spread across Europe.  Francis became known as the father of the Christmas carol.

Christmas carols soon became the songs of the common people.  “God Rest you Merry, Gentlemen,” written in the fifteenth century, was a response to the somber church music of that era.  This joyful Christmas song allowed people who were disenchanted with the church’s solemn music to sing and dance, and it remains popular today.  An example of a carol used to convey Christian teachings is “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” written in code to teach the faith to Catholic Christians who were not allowed to practice their religion in sixteenth-century England.  The two turtledoves represent the Old and New Testaments, and so on.

Christmas carols came to North America in 1645, first sung by French missionaries at the Huron Mission on the northeast shore of Lake Huron.  What’s ironic about this is that while the French were using carols to try to convert Native Americans, often described as pagans, the Puritan-controlled colonial governments in New England had outlawed the celebration of Christmas as being too pagan.  In the English colonies, fines and jail terms were imposed on those caught celebrating Christmas.  Back in England, many carols were actually lost during the seventeenth century after Oliver Cromwell banned them, along with all Christmas festivities.  Their joyous themes offended Protestant leaders who felt Christmas should be observed as a solemn holiday.   

As time passed, attitudes toward carols changed, and the nineteenth century became known as the Golden Age of Carols.  Over twenty of today’s best-known Christmas carols and songs were written during this period: “O Holy Night,” “Good King Wenceslas,” “We Three Kings,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” “Angels We Have Heard on High,” and “Silent Night.”  Anyone who has witnessed the power of a simple song like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” to warm hearts and spread cheer can easily understand how carols have become such an essential part of the holiday season.

And now, the histories of the carols….

The night before Jesus was born was quiet…so very quiet.  The world would soon be changed by a little child.  It was so quiet that when shepherds talked to each other, they whispered.  If you listened, you could hear faraway voices.  They were waiting voices…, watching voices…, praying voices.  Then, all of a sudden – Glory to God in the highest!  Gloria in excelsis Deo!  No one knows who first praised the Christ-child with music, but some think it was the shepherds in the fields, who may have sung right along with the angels.  I wonder how it sounded on that first holy night. 

The earliest version of the anonymous French carol that uses this text from Luke 2 was first published in 1855.  There have been numerous English translations since the 1860s, but the carol did not gain widespread usage until the first half of the twentieth century.  Let’s sing “Angels We Have Heard on High,” Hymn No. 23, verses 1 and 3.

Most carols were written by two people – one who wrote the words and one who composed the tune.  In 1867, on a night shortly before Christmas, a young priest in Philadelphia was watching feathery snowflakes fall gently to the ground outside his study window.  He was planning a Christmas sermon, but the words that came to Phillips Brooks that night did not fit his style of flowery oratory.  They were simple, quiet words.  He was remembering a trip to Bethlehem three years before where he had attended the Christmas Eve service in the Church of the Nativity near the spot where Jesus had been born.  Now the feelings of that evening came together within him as an inspired poem:

O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie,

Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by….

After writing the poem, he asked Lewis Redner to set it to music.  Redner responded, “You know I’m not a composer!  I’m barely an organist!”  Brooks retorted: “I know you can do it.  It’s for our Sunday School program next Sunday.”  “All right, I’ll try,” Redner said.  Redner did try; every morning and evening that week, he tried - and failed.  At bedtime on Saturday he gave up, convinced that it was not in him to do this.  Then, as he slept, something happened….

The next morning he awoke, went to church, and spoke to Father Brooks, “It came to me as if in a dream.  I’m convinced that this music is not from me.  You wrote the words, Phillips, but I’m sure that angels wrote the music.”  The carol was sung that Sunday by six teachers and 36 children, and then was published in a church magazine.  They titled it, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”  Let’s sing it, no. 44, verses 1 and 4.

In Douai, France in 1740, an Englishman named John Francis Wade made his living copying music for the Catholic Church.  Compositions and arrangements of other musicians were brought to him to be transcribed for individual voices and instruments.  Wade found joy in his work because it brought him into contact with many of the world’s great composers.  Sometimes when he would finish the work of intricate masses and oratorios, he would take some time for himself, writing simple hymns and cradle songs.  Most of these he destroyed, seeing nothing in them that approached the beauty of the music he prepared for others.  But occasionally he would be taken by what he had created, and would timidly show his work to the composers he most respected.  Most just ignored his compositions. 

Several years later, a Portuguese priest was sorting through some of Wade’s manuscripts while visiting his home.  He came upon some scribbling with an unfamiliar Latin title: Adeste Fideles.  “John, what is this?” the priest asked Wade.  “Just a Christmas hymn I wrote two years ago.”  The priest continued, “This is a beautiful melody, and would make a fine processional for our Christmas service.  May we use it?”  And that was the first use of a Christmas carol that has now been translated into more than 120 languages.  In English we call it “O Come, All Ye Faithful.”  Let’s sing verses 1 and 2 of Hymn No. 41.

It was a cold winter night in Weston, Massachusetts 160 years ago.  This night, two weeks before Christmas, the village was sleeping beneath a heavy snowfall.  Only one light reached out into the midnight darkness.  Its warm reflections came from the second floor window of the manse of the Unitarian Church.  Rev. Edmund Hamilton Sears sat in the flickering light of the kerosene lamp writing a letter his United States senator.  When he finished it, he tore it into two and let it fall to the floor.  He thought to himself, “What a foolish man I am to think that my words could turn the nation away from its madness.  I barely have the courage to deliver my weekly sermon, and now I propose to tell a senator what to do?  I am indeed a silly, proud man.”

Rev. Sears was deeply disturbed by the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act and the onrush of what he believed to be an inevitable war between the states.  More than anything else, this shy, retiring pastor wanted to find a way to speak of peace that others might hear.  In his despair that evening, he wrote some lines that only a few people have ever heard:

Beneath the angel-strain have rolled

Two thousand years of wrong,

And man at war with man, hears not

The love song that they bring.

O, hush the noise, ye men of strife,

And hear the angels sing.

These lines inspired more, and long into the evening, Sears wrote until he had completed one of the most heart-felt poems ever written. The next day he sent the stanzas to his friend Dr. Morrison in Boston, who immediately had them published in The Christian Register.  Later they reached the eyes of a young composer named Richard Storr Willis who set them to music.  Soon, this Christmas carol was being sung in churches of all denominations throughout America.  Though the first verse about war is no longer included in the hymn, everyone knows the others.  Rev. Edmund Hamilton Sears’ carol is, “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear,” No. 38, verses 1 and 4.

The humble German farmers of Pennsylvania often found more meaning in Jesus’ simple birth in a stable than in wordy sermons.  It’s now believed that the “Pennsylvania Dutch” were the first to sing the cradle song generally thought to have been written by Martin Luther.  It’s unfortunate that this was after Luther’s time, for he would have enjoyed it more than anyone else.  Luther loved to sing, and from his first days as a choirboy, he enjoyed most of all to sing of the infant Jesus.  Let us worship the baby Jesus by singing, “Away in a Manager,” No. 25, verses 1 and 3.

Charles Wesley wrote: “I never thought of myself as a writer of anything except, perhaps, letters of state or business.  But an event on shipboard changed me, inspiring me to do more with words than I thought myself able.  While returning to England from America in 1736, I listened to a group of Moravians sing hymns every night.  Their music came from their souls, and reached into the deepest part of me.  So moved was I that I prayed that the gift of music be given to me so that I, too, could worship in this way.”

Charles, with brother John, had spent a year in America as secretary to the founder of the colony of Georgia.  Ill health and a great longing for home put Charles on the ship that changed his destiny.  Counting from that event, he wrote more than 6,500 hymns.  His tireless inspiration brought music to the world, and helped considerably in the founding of Methodism.

Among his favorite hymns was one he put to the music of Mendelssohn.  Though the words and music were created separately, no greater marriage of mood has ever been achieved than in the carol, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” No. 31, verses 1 and 3.

Sometime around 1690, a young man who worshipped with his family in Southampton, England, complained to his father that the hymns used in the service were dull and of poor quality.  His father responded, as parents often do, that the son might try and see if he could do better.  Isaac Watts accepted his father’s challenge, becoming the first writer to paraphrase the Bible into texts for hymns.  Watts wrote over six hundred hymns, most often drawing words from the Psalms.  One of his most famous adaptations is of Psalm 98, the basis for the text of “Joy to the World.”

Watts’ words were set to the music we know today by an American composer, Lowell Mason, who in 1830 chose melodic lines from Messiah by Handel, writing them into a complete work.  Today, such an act would lead to lawsuits, but Handel would not have disapproved because he himself often borrowed from other composers.  The first four notes of “Joy to the World” can be heard in the first four notes of “Lift Up Your Heads, O Ye Gates” from Messiah, and the middle section of the carol (“and heaven and nature sing”) comes from the opening recitative of Messiah, “Comfort Ye My People.”  Singing the carol now, the words and music seem inseparable.  No. 40, verses 1 and 4.

This is our last story for now, but I will tell you the history of Silent Night at the end of today’s service.