The Best and Worst of Christmas Carols

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and we’re picking up from last week with the songs of Christmas, if you will. We are discussing Simeon’s song.

We didn’t quite have the Latin last time, but we do this time. It is the Nunc dimittis. Don’t heckle me over pronunciation. I was not a Latinist.

That was actually pretty close.

For those of us who don’t know Latin, what does the title mean?

“Now let thy servant depart in peace,” which is like half the song. It’s very short.

Dimittis is like what it sounds like – “Send me away. Now let me go. Mine eyes have seen your salvation.”

So this is the song of Simeon upon the occasion of Jesus being presented at the temple for circumcision on the 8th day of his life.

Let me go ahead and read from there in Luke 2 -

And behold, there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon, and the same man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Ghost was upon him. And it was revealed unto him by the Holy Ghost, that he should not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ.
And he came by the Spirit into the temple and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him after the custom of the law, then took he him up in his arms and blessed God and said, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.

And Joseph and his mother marvelled at those things which were spoken of him. And Simeon blessed them and said unto Mary his mother, Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel and for a sign which shall be spoken against. Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.

And then Anna the prophetess comes in and we continue.

This actually is not the circumcision. This is the presentation of the child as a male who opens the womb, and it’s also when Mary comes to offer her own sacrifice for purification, so it would be quite a bit later.

Oh yes, those are two different things.

They are, but the one is kind of crammed next to it so it’s easy to miss the “and also…”

Between Luke 2:21 and 22 there’s a gap of time.

The funny thing about this incident, and it is kind of funny, though it’s removed by several weeks from Jesus birth it’s a whole lot closer than the visit of the Magi, and yet the visit of the Magi is always connected with Jesus’ birth, and usually this is like, “You know what, wasn’t there an old guy or something?” Yes, there was an old guy and an old woman. They were waiting, and that was a lot closer, but they didn’t come to the manger either.

We could do a little high school Christmas play – “These did not come to the manger.” That actually might be a great high school Christmas play. Look at all the people who could have come, should have come, but didn’t. Hmm. So ladies, thoughts about this song, this poem, this prophecy?

I’m going to throw in something that’s only tangentially relevant. That is that at the time of this recording we have just passed Candlemas, which is the liturgical observation of this event in the Anglican church calendar.

And how is it observed in the Anglican church, because none of us are Anglicans.

Apparently they light candles, which is cool, I think. I’m going to reference here a Substack that I subscribe to called Cary’s Almanac. James Cary is a member of the Anglican church and he’s a sitcom writer for the BBC and he’s Reformed.

Wow, three things that don’t normally go together!

Right, but he has a great little running commentary. Every Friday I think he sends out some little research and thoughts about wherever we are in the liturgical year. This past weekend was about Candlemas and he offered some really interesting thoughts about why we don’t observe this and why we should observe this. He blames Thomas Edison, in short, and also the Reformers who said that candles stink of popery or something like that.

He points it out as a quarter day, which is sort of just dividing up the year among the seasons, and he sort of points out something that I’ve been feeling for several years, which is that we’ve kind of lost control of the narrative of the year.

The world sets the calendar for us now with bank holidays and television series starting and stopping. Those are the things that mark when in the year we are. If you’re into sports it might be football season or baseball season, but it’s definitely not the Church anymore and that’s a departure from the last 2,000 years of history and I think it’s harmful.

This is the biggest thing that I’ve changed my mind about theologically in the past several years. I used to be like, “No, a church calendar is silly. We should just make every Sunday the same.” But observing those patterns is not only grounding and helps provide some God-honoring rhythm to the passage of the year, but is also a great way to remember history, which is relevant for this podcast.

Throughout scripture God gives his people ways to live out the memory of history of the works of God in history, and I think we really stopped doing that by and large, which I would say is a Bad Thing in the sense of 1066 and All That.

And by the way, if you have never picked up a little copy of 1066 and All That – do you remember who the author is?

No idea.

It’s a telling of English history as former English history students remember it 10 or 20 years later, and therefore is somewhat hilarious because I know what my students remember after just a few weeks, and sometimes it ain’t much - the common knowledge that is shared that is actually completely inaccurate.

That was a random hole. I didn’t say anything cohesive there.

No, you did and I’m going to take us even further. Feel free to yank me back a little bit for a while.

Yes, it’s fine to blame the Reformers because they were trying to get rid of everything that was not rooted in scripture, and it was very hard for them where they were to see what that might and might not be. It’s surprising what things they left that to the modern American evangelical would just seem, “What? Benediction, what’s that? Greeting? That’s when the pastor says good morning, right? Salutation, what is that?”

There’s a lot they actually left, and to go back and look at the liturgies from Geneva or Stroudsburg is to see some very beautiful well thought-out well-organized patterns for worship. There were things they left out, but having gotten past that I think we can put a whole lot more blame at the feet of the American founding fathers.

They were trying to create a nation that was nominally Christian, decidedly moral, but where every colony, every state had had its own established religion, and many did for a long time after the Constitution was ratified, because the Constitution didn’t tell the states they couldn’t have established religions. It just told the federal government it couldn’t do that.

With this in place there became this desire to unify the American people, but not in terms of anything that would offend anybody religiously, because people were very jealous of their denominational traditions.

We can look back from there and say, “But by and large they agreed on most things,” yes, but not on everything, and some things were like, “Church calendar? That’s popery!” So instead of honoring saints we’re taught to honor American heroes, patriots. Instead of a church calendar we began instituting national holidays. Thanksgiving was instituted not as a church worship day but as a national day of thanksgiving, and this has continued.

We separated America very self-consciously, although not everyone was paying attention to it, from the church calendar and from church history. We focused on American history and we spun a lot of fine tales about America’s early heroes – some of them are even true – but we ended up with a calendar that has things like Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s birthday. That was before we got President’s Day, for you younger folk. We got the 4th of July and Thanksgiving. We kept Christmas because it was pretty generic. New Year’s Day – what’s that?

And harvest season? As more and more Americans moved into the cities, Thanksgiving stopped being a harvest festival and just became a day to give thanks because the president said so, and because we’ve always done it because we like turkey.

And don’t ask to whom.

Yeah, we’re not supposed to do things like that. So the assumption that the church calendar is necessarily evil sort of begs the question. Now of course we have our dear friends in Presbyterian circles who scream “Regulative principle. The Bible does not say anything about creating feasts and festivals.”

“I’m sorry, which Bible are you reading? The one where Esther and Mordecai establish a feast called Purim, without any obvious divine revelation? And this is even more horrible – when the Maccabees established this thing called Hannukah, and Jesus actually attends it.” God obviously does not object – Jesus didn’t – to God’s people celebrating his great acts in history, and even having special days to do so.

So as we work our way through the Middle Ages – we haven’t had Rome fall yet, but once Rome falls we’ll get into the Middle Ages, the Age of Faith, and probably we’ll come back to the life in a medieval village, the life in a medieval city, and the influence the church had on such things as the church calendar.

Most of us, myself included, are woefully ignorant, and I’m not suggesting we all become Anglicans, but back to the point you made. When I was a kid there were a couple days that were really important – school’s out, school’s starting, and the new line-up of Saturday cartoons is starting this Saturday morning and we’ve been in school about a week or two. That was so huge because you watched those cartoons through the rest of the year until maybe summer or so.

How are we going to mark time? It is a religious process. We note that when we do things like say BC and AD, and when we get upset about BCE and CE, and we rightly should. So those are some things that come to mind in the light of celebrating Candlemas. Candles are not evil but, as you say, Thomas Edison gave us electric lights and they’re more useful for a lot of things, but not quite as beautiful.

There used to be this connection too between the church calendar and the agricultural year, which goes back to Genesis 1. God gave the moon and the stars for times and seasons, and we don’t let them do their job anymore. Our culture today is largely not as agricultural, although Rachel, you live in a more agriculture area now.

I was going to say, having lived in very much a farming community, I have gotten a much greater sense of the calendar as related to crops, because in our church the majority of the men work related to farming in some way. So we know in April and May all the men are going to be really, really busy, and these particular men might not even be able to make it to church because of emergencies that they have to help with, and the same thing for harvest.

It’s been interesting praying in church now for those things, because when we pray for rain for the crops it’s very real that it’s the livelihood of people that are sitting in the room right there. And when there’s that relief of November, the crops are in and everything is done, it has a much greater significance when you can look out your window and see rice fields or drive through almond orchards and things like that.

It does definitely change things, although I will say one of the things I had appreciated in going down to the RCUS church in Sacramento, Covenant, is that they do cycle hymns through the year. They purposely pick Thanksgiving hymns that are often about harvest and things like that around the October/November time that I thought helped also connect us back into that need to give thanks in particular ways based upon the time of the year of what the Lord provides or what we need the Lord to provide.

I do recommend that everyone subscribe to Cary’s Almanac.

So back to this. “Let your servant depart in peace.” Simeon is talking about his death, or so we assume at least. We assume he’s an old man. It doesn’t actually say so, but it seems to be what he’s saying. “I’ve waited for the Messiah, I’ve seen the Messiah, now I’m ready to die,” not ready to simply go home and do other things. But this hymn has been taken as a hymn that traditionally closes worship. When we have through the preaching of the Word and the sacrament seen Jesus, we are at the end and able to say, “Lord, mine eyes have seen thy salvation. Now let your servant depart in peace.”

And that word dimittis, the root of it is the Latin word Missa or mass.

Not missions?

Well, it comes from there too. It’s the root of both – one corrupted one way, and the other corrupted or enhanced the other way. In missions God sends us out into the world to spread the gospel, and that same word “Let us depart. Dismiss us with your blessing” which is how it’s phrased sometimes in some hymns, it’s the same Latin word that gave us the word “mass.”

Mass in and of itself did not mean either the eucharist, let alone transubstantiation, although it’s kind of come to be identified with that. A lot of people object to Christ-mas because there’s a ‘mas,’ there, and Candlemas because there’s a ‘mas’ there.

Not to mention candles.

Not to mention candles, but what are candles compared to mass? But that wasn’t the original meaning of the word, and it took a long time for it to acquire that meaning. So this is what we’re looking at.

In the language of one modern hymn it’s, “Lord, dismiss us now with thy blessing.” Why? Because we’ve seen Jesus in the preaching of the Word, in the Lord’s Supper, in the prayers and the praises of God’s people, in the face of one another. We have seen the body of Jesus, we’ve seen Jesus, and so now we are ready to be sent out into the world to do God’s will.

It's a wonderful sort of hymn and it speaks of Jesus and a couple of things that we’re told about him that the other hymns perhaps didn’t emphasize enough because the first two came before Jesus was born. This one comes after. He’s right there, so “I’ve seen your salvation.” It’s not, “I’ve seen the Savior,” which of course would be true, but he doesn’t say it that way. “I’ve seen your salvation.”

Salvation is a person, and to partake in salvation is to partake in that person, to be united to that person by faith and by the Holy Spirit.

Another way that you could say “your salvation” – he’s speaking to the Lord; therefore, he’s saying Jehovah’s salvation or Jesus. It’s another way of saying his name.

Very good. “Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people.” He realizes, as not everyone did, that this is not just for Israel, but it is for Israel. “A light to lighten the Gentiles,” referring back to Isaiah 9, and Zechariah did this too. “And the glory of thy people Israel.”

That doesn’t mean that Israel is going to be dumped into the trash can of history, and that’s a topic for another time, but there’s very much the sense of, “This is just the beginning. I can step out of this because, God, you have a plan. You’ve got it covered. You know where this is going, and it’s going to involve not only the salvation of the Gentiles, of the nations, a blessing of all nations, but it’s still the glory of your people.”

It's not the shame of Israel in that she’s going to reject him and that’s that, but Jesus really is the glory of Israel, and Israel needs to understand that. And according to Paul in Romans 11, one day she will. That too is a story for another time.

Thoughts otherwise about this particular song?

We haven’t noted the recurrence of the light imagery.

That’s what I was thinking too.

“A light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel” – Mary also called on that same prophecy from – was it Judges?

“The people who walked in darkness saw a great light”? Is that what you’re thinking? That’s Isaiah 9 but it is a reference back to Judges because that whole passage in Isaiah is drawing allusions from the battle of Barak and Deborah against Sisera. Barak’s name means a flash of light or lightning.

As you read through the rest of that prophecy there are explicit mentions of those battles and of other battles in Judges. Of course, Barak himself was from a town in Naphtali, and those battles were fought just south of Galilee and the Gentiles, so there is a decided reference back. That battle against Sisera was fought in the plains of Megiddo (Armageddon) and it is one of the most decisive battles in the history of the world, although hardly anybody pays any attention to it.

It was just so striking that Mary and Simeon both reference this.

Zechariah does. I don’t remember, does Mary?

I thought they all did. Let me double check. No, I must have meant Zechariah. Zechariah and Simeon both reference this event that I don’t think is well-covered in Sunday Schools nowadays.

It ends with this woman putting a nail through the head of a home invader, and women aren’t supposed to be like that. They’re supposed to be dainty and timid and faint, not drive pegs through the anti-Christ’s skull and crush it to pieces, and there are people who have never forgiven Jael for that. There’s one Bible that has as its heading for that chapter, “On the murderess Jael.” What?

I have a friend who wants to turn the book of Judges into a graphic novel, like super hero style, and Jael is the main heroine.

That would be so much fun. You could almost do it without ever having to show pictures of the Angel of the Lord or such. That would be funny.

So light, revelation, truth, wisdom, pushing back the darkness, uncovering reality, bringing it down where we can see it – Jesus of course himself is light, the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world – so you could also draw a line from here straight to the first chapter of John and to his version of the Christmas story. That’s where he starts.

That’s what I was thinking. John particularly focuses on light and speaking of Jesus as the light, and also bringing up the contrast of the light and the darkness, and the ways that the darkness is not going to understand, that even as Simeon’s eyes have seen salvation, there are other eyes that we know will be blind, those who are not waiting for the coming salvation and will despise it.

That also goes to what Simeon will say later to Mary, of him being set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign to be spoken against, and a sword shall pierce through her very soul. It's both the beauty and the glory and the wonder of how he is going to shine into the lives of many, but that there is still darkness. The darkness cannot overcome, but it’s going to try.

John pursues this theme, or our Lord does, in chapter 3 when after “For God so loved the world…” he says –

He that believeth on him is not condemned, but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For everyone that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.

So the light has two very different effects on people, and the source and origin of the good effects is the prior work of the Spirit of God or the simultaneous work within the light, as the light enlightens the heart. The God who commanded light to shine out of darkness has shined into our hearts to give us the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. We could do an entire biblical theological lesson on light.

It’s the connection that we keep seeing between light and face, both the Lord’s face and then the faces of people because light first and foremost interacts with our eyes. But again, as you say, we could do a whole study on both of those and them together.

And this is a history podcast.

Yes, we aren’t going to be sucked into the biblical theology.

It’s just too fun, though.

We all love it so we can’t help ourselves.

However, having looked at these songs, our thought was that we would look at some of our modern carols and weigh them in the balance in terms of what God thinks is an appropriate Christmas carol.

We all know that some hymns are better than others. This is obvious, if only because there’s a whole bunch in your favorite hymnal that you don’t sing, so they’re obviously in your mind not as good because you don’t sing them. The problem comes when there’s a song that you want to sing and I think that it’s really anemic, spiritually weak, and even doctrinally questionable. Then we start having disagreements, even if I say, “Yes, it’s a very popular sweet song, but there are better Christmas carols.” I’ve gotten in trouble on that one a few times.

Our school got in trouble on that once upon a time because there were a couple songs, and I won’t tell you what they are – we’ll see if they show up in our discussion – but to my mind they were rather weak and inaccurate, very popular, rather mystical sounding, but there are so many better songs so we just said, “Let’s just not emphasize those and not sing them, unless they come up some other way.” And people heard about that and they were upset. “But these are our favorite songs. What’s wrong with them?”

“You don’t want me to tell you what’s wrong with them.”

So now we’re going to tell some people what may be wrong, but certainly what’s right about some of the better carols.

So ladies, a hymn or carol that in your judgement stands in this tradition of emphasizing the saving nature of Christ, not only for the soul but for history, for the nations, for the poor and downtrodden, a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of God’s people Israel – what songs would you want in any good hymnal for Christmas season?

The first one that comes to my mind was not originally a Christmas carol – Joy to the World.

Yes, it’s based on Psalm 98. Interestingly enough, if you read comments by hymn historians they will generally tell you it’s based on Psalm 98 and therefore was originally designed to be a song about the second coming. It was Isaac Watts, wasn’t it?

Yes.

I don’t know what Watts had in mind, but I know the passage and I hate to tell you the passage is actually about the first coming of Christ. “But it talks about him coming to judge the world.” Yes. One of the recurring themes of the prophets was “when Messiah comes as judge,” and this is what John the Baptist said – “Whose fan is in his hand and he will thoroughly purge his floor and gather his wheat into the garner, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”

From the time of Jesus’ preaching till the destruction of Jerusalem, Israel was judged and the nations were judged in consequence as they had to respond to the gospel in one way or another.

I just read in my Bible reading schedule about Jesus purging the temple, which is case in point.

Yes, the center of the world to the place where God is worshiped, the place where God is present, that’s where he goes and that’s where he begins. Judgement must begin at the house of God, Peter tells us.

One other thing to note in that song that makes people think it’s the second coming is it speaks about removing the effects of sin, so I think they would say, “Well, we don’t have that until the new creation,” but again there’s a missing of the totality of Christ’s victory here in this world. And even as we live and put sin to death, but also as we cultivate the world, there is a real sense of “No more let sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground.” We are tearing out the thorns and we are building and planting and those sorts of things.

So I think there’s maybe an over-spiritualization of this world that keeps us from appreciating that those are actually also ways that we are undoing the curse in the small beginning versions that we do here.

That’s hearkening back as well to the Noahic covenant of God’s promise to the ground to lift the curse.

This is kind of a side issue but it’s relevant. When I was a kid there were these things called zoos. You think, “Of course, we know what zoos are.” No, you don’t probably. I went to one in Fresno when I was 6 or 7. It was a dim dark building with lots of cages, and all the animals were in these very small cages. And aside from being able to clear away their manure and stick food in, that was about it. That was all the range of motion they had. It was disgusting, and this was what almost all the zoos in the world were like at that point, especially if it was a small town zoo. Fresno is not a huge city.

It would be within a very few years that the idea of – I forget the name, but it’s the kindness training of animals – became a thing. Rather than beat the animals or cage them, try to reach out to them with kindness and befriend them, and then put them in an environment more like their own.

Now there’s still a lot to be done, obviously, but the kind of zoos that children go to now are nothing like the zoo I saw. There’s an attempt to open them up to the sky and to the world and to treat them kindly and make sure they’re well-fed. This is a huge change in the way that we perceive animals that’s happened in my lifetime.

Along these lines, there used to be these things called Barnum’s Circus animals. Do you remember? They’re not called that anymore. They’re simply called Barnum’s animals. I don’t know if they’re even keeping Barnum anymore, once people realize who Barnum was.

The boxes don’t have cages on them either.

No, the animals are out free because the other no longer sells. That’s a huge step forward toward Isaiah’s vision of the wolf lying down with the lamb.

I watched a TV show in my youth called Daktari, set in Africa. It was a medical veterinarian reaching out to animals and it was based on this premise. “We can have animals live together, work together, interact with each other and with humans, and it can work,” and a lot of it was based on true stories.

There was one particular tiger and I believe a German shepherd. I think the tiger had been very sick, and the German shepherd somehow befriended him, and they developed this sympathetic relationship where as long as they were together everybody was doing great, and if one went away the other got very sad and depressed. So the people in the series were trying to work to see how to use this and how to understand it so they could benefit other animals.

Again, 50 years earlier, no. “Animals are for shooting,” and unfortunately there are some Christians that still think so, but the prophecies of Isaiah point in a very different direction. We’ve begun, but we’re a long way from the redemption of creation and the new heavens and the new earth. We’ve begun but we’re not there, so Joy to the World is both reality and it is most certainly promise.

The second coming comes not as a removed separate event, but as the proper culmination of what Jesus accomplished in his first coming. It is the fulfillment and the wrapping up of the redemption he bought on the cross and in his resurrection.

So yes, we begin now with the earth and with the animals and with the environment, and there’s nothing socialistic or namby-pamby about this. It’s God’s plan and it’s God’s world and we need to – as Schaeffer quoting the Beatles would say – be careful of what we’ve done to our fair sister.

Who has another song?

My favorite of the Christmas songs is “Comfort, Comfort Ye My People.” It’s not based upon one of the classic Isaiah passages for Christmas. It’s more Isaiah 40, although it is weaving a lot of different things together. I love it because it’s very rich in scriptural language and pulls in a lot of the images we were talking about, including darkness and light.

I was looking at it and realized it doesn’t actually mention Jesus by name, but when you’re listening to what it’s talking about in terms of sin being blotted out and that the anger of the Lord is being turned away and our suffering being turned into gladness, those are all from the coming of Jesus in his birth and his whole life, death, and resurrection.

I think George Frideric Handel agrees with you. I believe this is the opening text for Handel’s Messiah. Am I wrong about that?

It’s been so long since I’ve seen the whole thing done, I cannot tell you. Rachel, do you remember?

I don’t remember how it begins, either. Apparently, I need to listen to it next Christmas because it’s been too long, but I know the piece from Handel’s Messiah and I love it. I just don’t remember where it falls in the order.

I think it’s first.

In one of those two versions is there not the phrase “…and the glory of the Lord will be…” – that’s actually a separate song, isn’t it?

Yes, but I think it follows. “Comfort, comfort” is a solo and then “The glory of the Lord” is the full choir, and I believe it follows directly, if I’m remembering correctly.

Because it does come from Isaiah 40, and of course the glory of the Lord is Jesus. There’s no doubt there. The Old Testament prophets didn’t exactly know his name, although they came close a few times in their prophecies, but they’re talking about God coming into human history and manifesting the glory of Yahweh. These are beautiful songs.

I’m going to throw in “What Child Is This?” Yes, the tune of Greensleeves…

I listened to the original and was like, “What is this?”

Originally it was a Celtic love song, if you want to call it that.

There’s a Snickers commercial that’s absolutely hilarious that features the folk song.

Well, ignoring that, it’s still a beautiful melody and the lyrics point to the cross. They actually mention the cross, one of the few songs that actually does – “Nails, spear shall pierce him through, the cross be borne for me, for you. Hail, hail the Word made flesh, the babe, the son of Mary.”

It takes us to Bethlehem and to the manger, to the Word made flesh, but it doesn’t romanticize it. As Simeon did, it looks at what’s going to happen. This child is born to die, and when that happens there will be people whose hearts will be broken, Mary’s certainly among them, probably first of all. It doesn’t matter who you are, when your firstborn son dies horribly and you know he doesn’t deserve it, what do you do with that?

And when you’re told, “But it’s God’s will and he’s going to bring great things out of it,” it’s “Yes, and I try to believe, and yet somehow I don’t get it.” And it wasn’t until presumably she saw him at some point after his resurrection – the way the music is structured is not light and frothy. It is very serious. It moves slow but with purpose, and it moves us both through how Mary is perceiving this, but ultimately through the historical reality of what’s going to happen to this baby and what it means for us. He didn’t just die. He died for me. He died for you. There is more we could say, but I’ll just leave it at that.

Now perhaps we can take a pot shot or two at hymns that maybe aren’t quite on the same level, shall we say, as the ones we just suggested.

I went in search of the Gnostic bell on purpose so that we could talk about “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem,” which I actually really enjoy as a song, but we need the Gnostic bell if we’re going to talk about it.

Rachel, do you have the words perchance?

I do have them right in front of me, yes.

Could you read the relevant portions?

The fourth verse especially I would say.

“Oh holy child of Bethlehem, descend to us we pray. Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today. We hear the Christmas angels, the great glad tidings tell. Oh come to us, abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel.”

A lot has to do with interpretation. When the church prays in Acts they speak of Jesus as they’re speaking to God. They say, “Your holy child, Jesus,” even though he’s a grown man and he’s sitting at the right hand of God. “Descend”…

Jesus does say he came down, but he doesn’t keep descending. He went back up. He is with us. The Holy Spirit descends.

You could say, “Well, Jesus is in your heart, so that would be coming down.”

That was my biggest problem with that verse, that whole “be born in us today.” That’s just weird.

That’s the thing because it’s just moving the birth of Jesus from a historical event into some spiritualized experience that we are supposed to have.

Like he’s alive in our heart, he was born in our heart, all that.

And you could find verses that kind of maybe justify some of that, but here’s a problem with this. We’re singing to be born again. Any good Calvinist will be horrified at that because the unregenerate sinner does not call for Jesus to give him new birth. The new birth comes first and then we give thanks to God in faith and in repentance that Christ has, to use a Pauline phrase, been formed within us.

There are a couple hymns that are like this where we’re asking Jesus to do what he must have already done if we’re even asking. Whether it’s Arminianism or whether it’s Gnosticism, a search for some kind of mystical experience, the fact that we can’t tell is part of the problem.

Yes, and as part of an exercise in literary interpretation I would look at the date when this is written and say “1868, I can guess which way this went.” I mean maybe that’s sweeping with a really broad brush, but there are no coincidences. Can I ring the bell though? Is it suitably Gnostic?

Oh, I think it is.

<ding!>

When I think of Gnostic Christmas carols, that’s the second one on my list because of not only the words but also the feeling created by the music. It is very otherworldly.

Sentimental.

It’s very sentimental and it belies the reality that this is a young woman, maybe 16, giving birth to a child. She’s in a stable. Her husband is acting most likely as the midwife and he’s never done this before. There is blood everywhere. The baby is crying.

I know which song you’re talking about!

Mary is screaming, because that’s what you do when you give birth. And the baby is put in a feeding trough for cattle. It’s true that it will be another year or two before soldiers come in and try to kill every child nearby, but even without that the night was hardly silent.

What about “No crying he makes” either?

That’s the one I was thinking of, “Away in a Manger.” In the first few hours you get that nice long like 3-hour stretch before you never sleep again for a long time.

Did you have Silent Night there, by any chance?

I do. Which verse would you like?

Oh, how about verse 3.

“Silent night, holy night. Son of God, love’s pure light. Radiant beams from thy holy face, with the dawn of redeeming grace. Jesus Lord at thy birth, Jesus Lord at thy birth.”

He is Lord at his birth.

Yes, that part is good. The other part I didn’t used to like until I thought about it a little bit. I think you can rescue it by appealing to a passage I mentioned earlier where Paul says that we see the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. That doesn’t mean that his face is a flashlight.

That is the way it comes across.

It sounds very Roman Catholic – putting the little halo ring around the face.

But now if you look back at a previous verse, however, “All is calm, all is…” what?

Bright.

Where?

“Round yon virgin.”

Mother and child. So for some reason it is strangely bright around not just the child, but the virgin mother as well. Where is this light coming from? Now you could argue, “Well, see, there was a hole in the roof of the stable, and that star up there that Luke doesn’t mention was shining through and it shines right on them, so that’s where the light’s coming from.”

If you want to do a movie or stop-motion animation version of the Christmas story and show it to us and then play it, it would make sense. But without that, what you’re saying is the baby is glowing or there’s a spotlight. I don’t know, there’s something. Somehow they were bright.

They were not bright. There are not halos. The baby doesn’t glow. The Shekinah glory is not present. It’s an ordinary baby to all appearances, doing what ordinary babies do when they’re born, and an ordinary mother who has just given birth and there is no notion that it her pain was eased in any way.

You can look at the end of the verse and also it sounds very – I don’t know if you would say Gnostic necessarily – but removing Jesus from being a regular baby in that he was sleeping in heavenly peace. I think Jesus had normal sleeping patterns. I don’t think he was given the heavenly peaceful sleep of every night, so that also just sounds very removed from normal life.

He bore our infirmities. He went through all the pains and stresses and things that we go through, without sin, but everything that was hard he experienced.

I used to wonder years and years and years ago whether or not Jesus could break an arm or break a tooth or get a cavity. Then at some point, not all that long ago, I think I realized, “Wait, he was circumcised. His skin was cut. He bled as a baby.”

There wasn’t this aura of protection around him. His skin and human body was not invulnerable until he got to the cross and then dropped the protection. He got colds. He got the flu. He could have cavities. He could have bad nights and he could scream, not out of sinful anger as many babies do, but simply because he’s hurt and it’s the only way he has to communicate with the world and say, “Could you please fix something for me?”

And if we say that he can’t be injured, we’re saying that being injured itself is sinful, not an effect of the curse on the world but that the actual individual is being harmed because of their sin.

There’s the also whole nailed to a cross and stabbed in the side bit that happened. That very much happened.

Well, there were Gnostic cults that said that didn’t happen, but that’s why they’re Gnostics.

<ding!>

Yeah. Rachel, do you have a least favorite Christmas hymn before we head out?

I like “Away in a Manger” because it’s nostalgic to me as a child in terms of the tune and the words, but if you actually listen to it, it is kind of a terrible song so maybe I would put that in there. There are some other ones – “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” also has some really funky stuff in there.

Yes. Again, a really beautiful song. The melody I think is just lovely.

The author was a Unitarian, just for the record.

We should talk about “O Holy Night” sometime.

Oh, don’t touch my song! [laughing]

I know, everyone loves it, and then you listen to more than the first verse.

I liked the original, which is the French version and totally different words.

Yes, it’s the translation, by a Unitarian, by the way, that gets us into trouble.

But the words are completely different of “O Holy Night” compared to the original “Minuit Chretiens,” which means midnight Christians. It has wonderful words, although I do like O Holy Night.

We won’t go there, but there is the whole question of can Christians in good conscience sing songs that have been written or translated by unbelievers, and it’s not always an easy answer. I for one cannot listen to any song sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I don’t care who wrote it and how beautiful the song is and how much I would sing it in a different context. I don’t want to listen to a bunch of polytheists celebrating their god under the cover of celebrating mine. My faith does not go there, but that’s another issue. Maybe it will come up in some other discussion in the future.

If we have suitably torn apart some of our favorite songs, we should sign off with some recommendations. I will start with something totally irrelevant, Porco Rosso. It’s a Japanese animated film from Studio Ghibli about a seaplane pilot who is a pig. There are seaplane pirates and adventure and romance and a lot of fun. We’ve watched it like four times in the last month because Gretchen is really into it, but it’s good.

You said Studio Ghibli? It can’t be that bad then.

Yeah, it’s fun. It feels like watching old cartoons because the pirates are sort of jolly and good at heart, so there’s nothing too terribly scary, although there is like cartoon violence but it’s also a cohesive story that is really touching at points. Good for all ages.

Very nice. What I would like to recommend is a book that I recently finished called Five Lies of our Anti-Christian Age by Rosaria Butterfield. It’s her latest book and it is dealing with a lot of similar content to things that she’s already written, but it’s more focused on five particular issues that she sees in our culture.

The lies that she addresses are the fact that homosexuality is normal, being a spiritual person is kinder than being a biblical Christian, feminism is good for the world and the Church, transgenderism is normal, and modesty is an outdated burden that serves male dominance and holds women back.

As a note on her modesty thing, she does talk about clothing, but she actually focuses more on the tendency in our culture towards kind of exhibitionism and letting everything hang out, lacking self-control and seeing self-control as not a virtue but as basically restriction, male dominance on you and that sort of thing. She goes through all of those in quite a bit of detail biblically speaking, and then adds her own personal experience.

In the book her goal overall is to give encouragement and tools to people who are facing any or all of these challenges in their own life and among their own loved ones. So if you have a child that is pursuing homosexuality or transgenderism, or the friend that is very much into feminism, basically how do you approach these things biblically in order to be true there. I would say the book is a little long. I think she probably could have been edited a little bit, but it has wonderful content. She goes back through some of her own story of being converted.

In one of my favorite parts she must have a recording or something where she goes through the initial lesson that the pastor who converted her did for her before she was a believer. He had sent her a message and said, “You have this literature class. Do you all know the full story of the Bible? Can I come and do a special lecture in your class so that they can know the story of the Bible?”

She went, “Oh, well, I have to vet this story from this guy,” and so she went to listen to it and has both what he said and then her notes as she went along, and the ways in which she listened to the message of the story of scripture, how she saw it as a lesbian feminist and everything, but even the way that it started immediately to work on her heart and convict her and that sort of thing. That was a very compelling part.

That sounds really neat. I really appreciate that modesty is not a number of square inches in her definition. Every time I hear the word modesty just in the last 40 years or so it’s like, “Oh, modesty. Here’s the stick that we use to beat women with,” especially among Christian circles. I feel like the world just doesn’t care, and then there was this movement of, “It’s your fault if people are lusting,” specifically to women. Maybe that’s a subject for another podcast.

It probably is, but she does address the fact that we should still have a care and concern for our Christian brothers and be careful, including how we’re dressing, but it’s more the heart attitude that loves your brother.

Because modesty in scripture is an attitude of the heart.

Yes.

There’s this Peanuts cartoon where Lucy and Linus and Charlie Brown are looking at the clouds and Lucy says, “Linus, what do you see?” and he says, “Well, this one reminds me of the famous painter Thomas Eakins, and this one reminds me of the stoning of Stephen, and over there you can see St Paul, and this reminds me…”

“Very good, Linus. Charlie Brown, what do you see?”

“I was going to say I see a horsey and a doggie, but never mind.”

This is how I feel at the moment, because what I have is nowhere near as spiritually profound or theologically important as what you said. I want to mention a writer who I happen to like a whole lot because I like mysteries – Dame Edith Ngaio Marsh. She was from New Zealand but spent a good deal of time in England.

Her detective, Inspector Roderick Alleyn, is with the Metropolitan Police, Scotland Yard in England, and he’s your standard single (at least initially) detective. There actually is a love story that’s woven through the novels and it’s probably the worst part of the novels. Ngaio Marsh seems to have trouble understanding – I don’t know, it’s embarrassing. If Roderick is really this bad at expressing his feelings to a woman he’s never going to marry anyone, but once they’re married it’s a wonderful marriage and it works well.

Her publisher is billing her as, “Well, it’s time to start comparing Agatha Christie to her rather than the other way around.” She’s pretty good, but besides the fact I just finished reading two of her novels, the thing that strikes me, as it does with Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers and some of the people who were writing then, even as late as P.D. James, is how well they knew the Bible, the prayerbook, and Shakespeare. They don’t have to reach for an allusion. It just comes bubbling out.

Sometimes their companions will even say, “That’s Shakespeare, isn’t it, boss?” because even in those days not everybody was well-educated. “I don’t read Shakespeare. I’m more into murder mysteries,” but it’s an example of to what degree Christian culture (first the Bible and the worship service, and then particularly the phrasing of the Book of Common Prayer, and then Shakespeare as the greatest Christian writer of all time) was so much a part of these people that even when they themselves were no longer Christians, when their characters are no longer Christians, they know about the Church. They know about church worship. They know about the church calendar. They make these references as if every educated person would know what in the world they’re talking about.

It’s a very different world, and it’s a world that I think particularly some teenagers and 20-somethings should visit a little bit, just to see that the world has not always been the world you know, but they’re also good mysteries. That’s Ngaio Marsh, one of the queens of crime in the golden age of detection fiction.

Great, thanks very much, and thank you both for this conversation. It’s been a delight.

Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband, and a big thank you to our financial supporters who keep the show rolling. If you’d like to join their number, Dear Listener, you can visit our Patreon at patreon.com/haltingtowardzion.

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