Christmas Carols Week 1

Hark, the herald angels sing!

The tune originally had nothing to do with Christmas.

It was written by famous composer Felix Mendelssohn in 1840.

It’s original title is Festgesang or Gutenberg Cantata.

It was originally an ode to Johannes Gutenberg.

It was first played in town square of Gutenberg’s hometown, Leipzig, on the 400th anniversary of the invention of the printing press.

One of the lines of the song went like this, “Gutenberg, you valiant man, you stand glorious on the square!”

Mendelssohn desperately wanted to set English words to the song so that he could market it to an English audience.

But, he could not find any lyrics that fit the tune.

He even said this about the song, “If the right [words] are hit at, I am sure that the piece will be liked very much by singers and hearers, but it will never do to sacred words…”

Unknown to Mendelssohn, 100 years earlier, the words that we associate with his composition had already been written.

In 1739, just a year after his conversion, Charles Wesley published a music-less hymn entitled Hymn for Christmas Day.

It was more of a poem than a song.

But, it started off with a declaration, “Hark, how all the welkin rings!”

How many of you are familiar with the word “welkin”?

Don’t feel bad, it is an ancient english word, that wasn’t widely known when Charles used it in 1739.

“Welkin” is a term that referred to heaven.

Hark! How all of heaven rings.

Charles published over 6,000 hymns in his life.

This is one of the first.

In a time before copyrights, people would regularly print other people’s work without permission.

Charles commented on this in one of his hymnals.

He said...

I beg leave to mention a thought which has long been on my mind, and which I should long ago have inserted in my public papers, had I not been unwilling to stir up a nest of hornets. Many gentlemen have done my brother and me (though without naming us) the honor to reprint many of our hymns. Now they are perfectly welcome to do so, provided they print them just as they are. But I desire they would not attempt to mend them, for they are really not able.Therefore I must beg of them these two favors: either let them stand just as they are, to take things for better or worse, or to add the true reading in the margin, or at the bottom of the page, that we may no longer be accountable either for the nonsense or for the doggerel of other men.” (doggerel: verse or words that are badly written or expressed)

Why do we read all of that?

Because we are, obviously more familiar with the first line of the song as it sung today.

Who made the change from welkin to herald angels?

It was actually a well-known preacher friend of the Wesley brothers.

George Whitefield made the change in 1753 when he published a hymnal entitled Collection.

All of us collectively say thank you to Whitefield.

Hark, how all the welkin rings probably wouldn’t have caught on in quite the same way.

We would have never heard all those jokes about Harold the angel singing.

The story isn’t quite finished however.

How did Wesley’s poem and Mendelssohn’s composition find each other after over 100 years?

Well, it all starts with an alto choir boy in 1847 who was performing in Mendelssohn’s choir.

William Cummings went on to become a famous British tenor that was a professor of music at many prestigious schools.

He toured the United States twice.

He is most remembered for accomplishing what his former choir director both did and didn’t think could be accomplished.

He made Festgesang immensely popular by marrying it to English words.

Though Mendelssohn didn’t think it was possible, Cummings accomplished this by joining it with a decidedly sacred poem

As they say, the rest is history.

O Little Town of Bethlehem

Words written by Phillips Brooks

Phillips Brooks’ life got off to a promising start.

He graduated Harvard at the age of 20 and was immediately hired at the prestigious school he had attended as a teenager.

After a very short tenure, Brooks was fired and felt like a failure.

He wrote the following, "I do not know what will become of me and I do not care much.… I wish I were fifteen years old again. I believed I might become a stunning man: but somehow or other I do not seem in the way to come to much now."

Brooks was an imposing figure.

He stood between 6’4” and 6’6”.

At times, he weighed over 300 pounds.

At a young age, though, he felt like his life wouldn’t amount to much.

Brooks went back to school and began studying to be a preacher.

He graduated in 1859 and soon became one of the leading Christian intellectuals of his time.

He ministered in the city of Philadelphia and became known for his oration and his strong support for the abolitionist movement.

Many people in the North were against slavery for economic reasons, however they viewed abolitionists and people who believed in racial equality as religious fanatics.

Even Brooks own denomination, the Episcopal church, refused to consider the moral ramifications of slavery and considered it to be a purely political matter.

Brooks became an ardent supporter of the Union during the Civil War because of his belief that abolishing slavery was a religious issue.

Brooks became very well-known in Philadelphia and this presented him with a unique opportunity.

For those who don’t remember, after Lincoln’s assassination, in 1865, his body was placed on a funeral train and 444 communities with several stops on it’s way back to Illinois.

When the train stopped in Philadelphia, Brooks, then just a 30 year old man, was asked to speak the eulogy for President Lincoln.

No doubt, Phillips assumed that the words he would speak would be the most memorable words of his life.

I doubt whether any of us can quote a single line.

I read his sermon from that day and it is powerful.

“Is there the man alive who thinks that Abraham Lincoln was shot just for himself…? It was not he, but what he stood for. It was Law and Liberty, it was Government and Freedom, against which the hate gathered and the treacherous shot was fired.”

Shortly after Lincoln’s funeral, Brooks took a Sabbatical.

After years of war and fighting,Phillips decided to travel to the Holy Land where he hoped to find rest and refocus his life.

On Christmas Eve, he left Jerusalem and traveled to Bethlehem on horseback.

Upon arriving, he attended a 5-hour Christmas Eve service.

Brooks was deeply moved and said of the service...

I remember standing in the old church in Bethlehem, close to the spot where Jesus was born. The whole church was ringing hour after hour with splendid hymns of praise to God, how again and again it seemed as if I could hear voices I knew well, telling each other of the wonderful night of the Savior’s birth.

That night as he looked out over the city, he penned the words, “O Little Town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie. Above thy deep and dreamless sleep, a silent star goes by.”

Several years later, Brooks wanted to write an original hymn for his church’s children’s Christmas program.

His mind went back to that special Christmas eve night he had spent in Bethlehem.

He pulled out the little poem that he had started and finished 5 short stanzas.

He gave the words to the church organist Lewis Redner and asked him to come up with a tune for the poem.

Lewis struggled with coming up for a tune.

It wasn’t until the night before the performance that he was able to finally come up with something to match the words of the poem.

“On the Saturday night previous my brain was all confused about the tune. I thought more about my Sunday-school lesson than I did about the music. But I was roused from sleep late in the night hearing an angel-strain whispering in my ear, and seizing a piece of music paper I jotted down the treble of the tune as we now have it, and on Sunday morning before going to church I filled in the harmony. Neither Mr. Brooks nor I ever thought the carol or the music to it would live beyond that Christmas of 1868.”

The next day 6 SS teachers and 36 children sang O Little Town of Bethlehem for the first time.

There is one more part to this story that you need to know.

It was children that first sang this song, but there was another child that was not yet born who would find personal connection with the third verse of the song.

How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given!

So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of His heaven.

No ear may hear His coming, but in this world of sin,

Where meek souls will receive him still, the dear Christ enters in.

The words that Brooks had written many years earlier held special significance to a young girl named Helen Keller.

Based on this song, Helen, with the help her teacher Anne Sullivan, was able to make contact with Phillips.

Phillips was then able to lead both Helen and Anne to Christ.

After his death, in 1893, Keller wrote this about Phillips Brooks.

“I have lost my loving friend, Bishop Brooks. Oh, it is very hard to bear this great sorrow; hard to believe that I shall never more hold his gentle hand while he tells me about love and God and goodness! Oh, his beautiful words! they come back to me with sweet, new meanings. He once said to me, ‘Helen, dear child,’ that is what he always called me, ‘we must trust our Heavenly Father always and look beyond our present pain and disappointment with a hopeful smile.’ And in the midst of my sorrow I seem to hear his glad voice say, ‘Helen, you shall see me again in that beautiful world we used to talk about in my study. Let not your heart be troubled.’ Then Heaven seems very near since a tender, loving friend awaits us there.”