{"id":6577,"date":"2023-12-20T09:48:25","date_gmt":"2023-12-20T14:48:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.durhamfriendsmeeting.org\/?p=6577"},"modified":"2023-12-20T09:48:28","modified_gmt":"2023-12-20T14:48:28","slug":"joy-and-love-from-maine-council-of-churches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.durhamfriendsmeeting.org\/?p=6577","title":{"rendered":"Joy and Love, from Maine Council of Churches"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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For five weeks every year, songs about the incarnation of Christ can be heard playing everywhere\u2014on your radio and TV, at the car wash, in the grocery store.  And just about everybody knows the words.  They might not be able to tell you what the first book of the New Testament is (just for the record, it\u2019s Matthew), but they can tell you that all is calm, all is bright on a silent, holy night in the little town of Bethlehem where away in a manger the little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head while certain poor shepherds lay in fields listening to angels on high singing \u201cGloria in excelsis deo,\u201d and three kings of the orient bearing gifts traverse afar.   Christmas carols are, after all, the best known of all religious music, and these days, most people get the only theology they have from the carols that they sing.  This year our Advent blog series will explore a favorite carol each week, listening to familiar words with fresh ears and learning the story of when, where, and why they were written. (We also have an Advent message for December\u2019s National Gun Violence Prevention Sabbath available <\/em>at this link<\/em><\/a><\/strong>.)<\/em><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
O Holy Night<\/strong>
O holy night! the stars are brightly shining. It is the night of the dear Savior\u2019s birth.
Long lay the world in sin and error pining, till He appeared and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope- the weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!
Fall on your knees! O hear the angel voices! O night divine, O night when Christ was born!
O night, O holy night, O night divine!

Truly He taught us to love one another. His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother, and in His name all oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we. Let all within us praise His holy name.
Christ is the Lord! O praise His name forever! His pow\u2019r and glory evermore proclaim!\u00a0
Christmas Eve\u00a01906. The clock on Reginald Fessenden\u2019s workbench in Brant Rock, Massachusetts, struck nine.\u00a0 He carefully set the needle of his Victrola down on a spinning record and pointed a homemade microphone into the gramophone horn.\u00a0 When a short aria by Handel finished playing, he stopped the record, and moved the microphone over to his wife, Helen.\u00a0 He motioned to her to begin reciting the words from the second chapter of Luke\u2019s gospel, the story of Jesus\u2019 birth, but she froze in fear and couldn\u2019t speak.\u00a0 Flustered, Reginald brought the microphone up to his own mouth and blurted out, \u201cGlory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace\u2026to men of good will.\u201d\u00a0 (It should have been \u201cpeace, good will toward men,\u201d but close enough!)\u00a0 Then Reginald handed the microphone to Helen, picked up his violin, leaned in as close as he could and played the French carol \u201cO Holy Night.\u201d\u00a0 He sang the final refrain before switching off the transmitter.
\u00a0
Somewhere out in the cold, dark, Atlantic Ocean, miles to the east of where Reginald and Helen\u00a0sat\u00a0wondering if their experiment had worked, wireless operators on several U.S. Navy and United Fruit Company ships\u00a0sat\u00a0in amazement.\u00a0 Before that moment, the only sound they had ever heard coming through their radio headsets were the dits, dots and dashes of Morse code. But on that\u00a0Christmas Eve, they heard music and the sound of a man\u2019s voice saying, \u201cGlory to God in the highest.\u201d\u00a0 It must have seemed like a miracle!
\u00a0
Three days earlier, Fessenden had transmitted a message in Morse code to ships at sea telling them to have their wireless transmitters turned on at 9:00pm on\u00a0Christmas Eve.\u00a0 He was going to test out his theory that if he combined two frequencies together he would be able to transmit more than just Morse code over radio airwaves\u2014he would be able to transmit music and the spoken word.\u00a0 This theory had gotten him nothing but ridicule\u2014in the press, in the business world, even in scientific circles.\u00a0 He was seen as a crackpot outsider with hare-brained schemes.\u00a0 But on\u00a0Christmas Eve\u00a01906, it was\u00a0his<\/u><\/em>\u00a0voice reciting the gospel of Luke,\u00a0his<\/u><\/em>\u00a0violin playing \u201cO Holy Night,\u201d that were heard for the first time over the radio.\u00a0 After his death in 1932, a stone memorial was erected over his grave bearing these words: \u201cBy his genius distant lands converse and men sail unafraid upon the deep.\u201d
\u00a0
Fifty-nine years before that first radio broadcast, another pair of oddball misfits who lived in France had composed \u201cO Holy Night.\u201d\u00a0 Placide Cappeau, misfit number\u00a0un<\/em>, was the wine commissioner of Roquemaure, a small town in the south of France where Monsieur Cappeau didn\u2019t quite fit in. For starters, he only had one hand (his right hand had been amputated when he was 8 years old after a playmate accidentally shot him); then there was the fact that, unlike his devout Catholic neighbors, Placide Cappeau didn\u2019t attend church; and finally, the icing on the\u00a0g\u00e2teau<\/em>\u2014he was a political radical, affiliated with the socialist movement.\u00a0 But he was known in his village as someone who had a way with words\u2014he enjoyed writing poetry as a hobby.\u00a0 So, when the town church\u2019s organ was renovated and plans were made to include a rededication ceremony during\u00a0Christmas Eve\u00a0services in 1847, the local priest asked Monsieur Cappeau if he would write a special poem for the occasion.\u00a0 Cappeau wrote the poem, \u201cCantique de Noel,\u201d and then, realizing his words really should be set to music for maximum effect, asked his friend Adolphe Adam to compose a song to go with it.\u00a0
\u00a0
Enter misfit number\u00a0deux<\/em>: Adolphe Adam, a Jewish musical composer who worked in vaudeville, opera and ballet with a notoriously bad temper and a permanently empty bank account.\u00a0 He had his fifteen minutes of fame as composer of the music for the ballets \u201cGiselle\u201d and \u201cLe Corsaire,\u201d but then a tantrum put him on the outs with the movers and shakers of the Paris opera world, and he spent the rest of his life in bankruptcy.\u00a0 That day in 1847, he accepted his friend Placide\u2019s request and wrote the soaring score we now know as the tune to \u201cO Holy Night.\u201d\u00a0 The combination of music and poem made the carol instantly popular, and soon it was being sung in churches and homes all over France.
\u00a0
That is, until French religious authorities got wind of the fact that the carol\u2019s composers were a non-believing socialist and a red-light-district musician with Jewish ancestry.\u00a0 Immediately the carol was banned from churches throughout France.\u00a0 For more than two decades it would not be heard in worship services there, though it continued to be sung in homes and loved by many.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t until\u00a0Christmas Eve\u00a01871, during the Franco-Prussian War, when a French soldier laid down his weapon, faced the enemies\u2019 guns and sang \u201cO Holy Night,\u201d the Germans responded by singing a carol by Martin Luther, and a\u00a0Christmas\u00a0truce began, that the French Catholic church relented and once again allowed \u201cO Holy Night\u201d to be sung in worship.
\u00a0
Despite its twenty-year ban in the churches of France, the carol had grown in popularity across Europe and even in America, where a young Unitarian minister who believed deeply in the movement to abolish slavery, was so inspired by the words of the third verse that he felt compelled to translate the entire carol into English.\u00a0 It was an instant hit, particularly in the North, during the Civil War.\u00a0\u00a0
\u00a0
You may not be surprised to learn that this American, Rev. John Sullivan Dwight, was\u2026you guessed it, a bit of a misfit, an outsider!\u00a0 \u00a0Extremely intelligent, John Dwight had attended Harvard Divinity School and then took his first call.\u00a0 But after only one year, he had to resign because he suffered from what we now know as agoraphobia. After leaving the ministry, he tried living in communes associated with the Transcendentalist movement (think Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson), but eventually found his calling as a writer and music critic, and the founder of an influential music journal.
\u00a0
And so, the story of \u201cO Holy Night\u201d is a story of outsiders, outcasts, misfits and broken people: a disabled socialist poet, a bankrupt Jewish vaudevillian, an agoraphobic abolitionist, and a ridiculed crackpot inventor playing his violin into a microphone that might\u2014or might not\u2014be transmitting his song to anyone.\u00a0
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That sounds like a story that\u2019s got God\u2019s fingerprints all over it!
\u00a0
Outsiders, outcasts, the ridiculed.\u00a0 It\u2019s the story of\u00a0Christmas, too.\u00a0 Mary: the unwed pregnant teenager.\u00a0 Joseph: the man facing the prospect of raising someone else\u2019s child.\u00a0 Together: part of a community oppressed by the occupying forces of the Roman empire, forced to deliver a baby in a stable and lay him in a feed trough.\u00a0 Then there\u2019s the shepherds: people not welcome in polite company\u2014dirty and smelly, they slept outdoors, were often suspected of being thieves, their testimony wasn\u2019t acceptable in a court of law.\u00a0 What about the magi?\u00a0 Strangers, foreigners from the East, who practiced a mysterious religion and had unfamiliar clothes and customs.\u00a0 The oppressed, the poor, the hurting, the outsiders.\u00a0 That is who comes to the manger.\u00a0
\u00a0
Even as an infant, Jesus was already turning the world upside down.\u00a0 Dirty, smelly shepherds are serenaded by angels from heaven; foreigners who practice a different religion are among the first to be invited to meet the Christ child; and an unwed, pregnant teenager becomes the mother of God.\u00a0 Once again, God chooses the foolish and the weak to transform the world; God stands with the poor, the outsider, the last and the least that they might be first in the kin-dom, that their souls, in the words of the carol, might feel their worth, that their weary hearts might feel the thrill of hope.
\u00a0
But God doesn\u2019t stop there.\u00a0 As the final verse of \u201cO Holy Night\u201d expresses so beautifully, God is clear about how we are each called to respond to that thrill of hope, to that great good news that our souls\u00a0do<\/em>\u00a0have worth in the eyes of the Creator.\u00a0\u00a0We are to love one another<\/u><\/em>, to abide by God\u2019s law of love and to preach Christ\u2019s gospel of peace.\u00a0 We are called to recognize every enslaved person as our brother, our sister, and to work to break the chains of oppression in all its many forms: poverty, hunger, addiction, racism, loneliness, greed.\u00a0 When we hear the\u00a0Christmas\u00a0story, when we listen to the beautiful words and music of Placide Cappeau, Adolphe Adam, and John Sullivan Dwight, we should ask ourselves, \u201cWhat am\u00a0I<\/u><\/em><\/strong>\u00a0doing to give others the thrill of hope?\u00a0 What can\u00a0I<\/u><\/em><\/strong>\u00a0do to break the chains of oppression?\u00a0 How can\u00a0I<\/u><\/em><\/strong>\u00a0show others the worth of their soul?\u201d\u00a0 There is a weary world out there in need of hope.\u00a0 There are people in need of love and peace and justice.\u00a0 Do we have a song to sing to them, a story to tell them of a new and glorious morn?\u00a0
\u00a0
I believe that we do.\u00a0 I believe that we, like Reginald Fessenden, are meant to sing that song out into the night sky, even though we\u2019re not sure anyone will hear it.\u00a0 We sing because we have faith, trusting that someone is listening, and maybe, just maybe, because they hear us, will no longer be afraid to sail upon the deep.\u00a0
\u00a0
May it be so.
\u00a0
All of us here at the Maine Council of Churches wish you the blessings of hope, peace, love and joy this\u00a0Christmas\u00a0and in the New Year,
\u00a0

Rev. Jane Field, Executive Director
Maine Council of Churches
202 Woodford Street\u00a0 | \u00a0Portland, ME 04103
www.mainecouncilofchurches.org<\/a><\/strong>

Click here to read the whole Advent Blog series.\u00a0<\/a><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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