Sunday, December 25
“He Shall Reign Forevermore”
Last year I stumbled across this new Christmas hymn and fell instantly in love with it because to me it perfectly expresses the vitality and transcendence of Christmas. It accomplishes such a gigantic charge by first capturing what truly happened in Bethlehem so long ago, a baby was born. I think sometimes we overlook the miracle that this baby and really all babies represent. A baby in the strictest sense is a combination of two lives into one. We express this sentiment when we hold a newborn and comment on how the child may have their father’s eyes and their mother’s nose. Bethlehem’s babe represented this on a far larger scale for He represented the joining of the divine and humanity as Jesus was fully human and fully divine, the perfect expression of two lives becoming one. Our hymn today captures that as it borrows from Christina Rossetti’s poem “In the Bleak Midwinter,” which has been turned into a hymn, and two excerpts from Handel’s “Messiah,” “The Hallelujah Chorus” and “For Unto Us Child Is Born,” as it seamlessly weaves these well known pieces into a new life for modern hearers in clearly recognizable ways from the start.
Now, as a child grows up the physical similarities that were clear at birth are often joined by emotional and dispositional aspects of the extended family. For example, a lifelong friend recently commented to Eliza that I shared a lot of my grandmother’s disposition. Such aspects can only be discerned over time and with careful study. The writer of today’s hymn achieves this in the third verse as he rearranges lines from the 19th Century hymn “See Amid the Winter’s Snow” by Edward Caswall. It took some research as I knew that “Here within a manger lies/The One who made the starry skies” was too poetic to be attributable to modernity, but I ultimately found it. How wonderful that a forgotten hymn of long ago is reborn for modernity to enjoy and be edified by!
What does any of this have to do with the hymn expressing the vitality and transcendence of Christmas? Beloved, each day you and I are invited to find new life by allowing the divine to enter into our lives in a fresh way than it did the day before. By doing so, we not only grow more and more in the image of Bethlehem’s babe, but we also express to modernity that God still changes lives. Hence, the vitality of Christmas is seen. Furthermore, as we grow more in the image of Christ, we exhibit to a new generation Jesus’s values and attributes to declare anew that they have not been forgotten. We remind the world that God still loves sinners, finds inherent worth in everyone, is on the side of the disenfranchised, remains continuously at work to bring justice to the earth, and yes, reigns. These are values that humanity desperately needs a reminder concerning and are accomplished if everyday we allow Christmas to be transcendent rather than simply 24 hours in our annual trek around the Sun. May we continuously seek to carry the vitality and transcendence of Christmas into each new day.
Happy Christmas,
Marc
Marc
Musicians — Choir