Merry Christmas! For Christmas Day 2024, we had a joint worship service at Christ the King. It was mostly a hymn-sing, but I also shared this brief message about the song I Wonder as I Wander, partially inspired by Cameron Howard’s GodPause devotional for December 18, 2024. I’ve also previously talked about The Infancy Gospel of Thomas in a sermon from December 26, 2021, from which I borrowed a couple of lines.
No audio or video of this service, but here’s the text of the sermon:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our newborn King, Jesus Christ. Amen
We tried something new this year—that’s a dangerous thing to say in a church, isn’t it?—we tried something new this year and had two midweek Advent worship services. With the Holden Evening Prayer service, I don’t really know if a sermon was necessary, but I had to have something to do in the services, so I recycled two previous Advent messages focusing on hymns, and we talked about It Came Upon the Midnight Clear and Of the Father’s Love Begotten.
I’m not sure how important a sermon is on Christmas morning either, so I’ll be brief, but I’m going to continue this Christmas carol theme and talk about I Wonder as I Wander. Somehow this song didn’t make it into the current hymnal, so the words from With One Voice are printed in the service order.
The story behind this song is John Jacob Niles was an American composer, singer, and collector of traditional folksong ballads. He wrote songs recorded in the 50’s and 60’s by artists like Peter, Paul and Mary, Burl Ives, and Bob Dylan. The story is that on July 16—my birthday—in 1933, Niles was at an evangelical revival meeting in Murphy, North Carolina, in Appalachia, and heard an impoverished young girl named Annie Morgan singing just a line or two of a song.
He took what he heard her singing, extended the melody, and added three more verses to get the carol we’re about to sing. Living Hope’s been doing the first verse as the gospel acclamation for Lent. We’ll come back to that one.
The second verse of the song is pretty straightforward, just summarizing the Christmas story we heard last night from Luke. Mary gives birth to her son Jesus, not in a comfortable house but in an animal stall, and all sorts of people come to worship. God’s promise to send a messiah—a redeemer—is fulfilled.
The third verse is more interesting, partly because it’s always fun to think of Jesus as a little kid. The Gospels don’t say much about Jesus growing up. We get his birth at Christmas, he and his parents flee as refugees to Egypt, then there’s a little story in Luke about 12-year-old Jesus ditching his parents at the temple in Jerusalem, then his next scene is as an adult about age 30 coming to be baptized in the Jordan River by his cousin John.
But Jesus had an entire childhood. That’s the point of the story, right? Jesus is fully God with us, and he is also fully human. He’s not pretending to be a human, going through the motions of growing up; he’s actually a real person. He needed diaper changes. If we’re going to talk about Christmas carol lyrics, “No crying he made” is a lie. He cried. He fell and skinned his knees. He lost his baby teeth. He outgrew his clothes.
And remember, his parents knew he was the Son of God. Mary, did you know? Yes! The angel told her. So imagine the pressure of raising the Son of God! We’re not the first people to wonder what that would be been like.
There’s a book from probably the mid-to-late second century called The Infancy Gospel of Thomas that’s basically Biblical fan fiction about Jesus as a boy from age 5-12. It has him doing all sorts of random little miracles like healing his brother James from a poisonous snakebite, miraculously striking blind some grumbling neighbors, that sort of thing. My favorite is a story about one time his dad Joseph the carpenter accidentally cut a piece of wood too short, so Jesus miraculously stretched it out to fit.
And one of the miracles Jesus does in that fictional version of his life is making a bird out of clay, then bringing it to life, which is actually referenced in the song. If he’d wanted a bird on the wing, surely he could have had it, ’cause he was the king.
But of course, Jesus doesn’t take advantage of his abilities to do miracles. One of the earliest hymns in the church in Philippians 2 talks about how Jesus did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but instead he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.
It might seem disconcerting to jump so quickly from the baby Jesus in a manger to the adult Jesus dying on a cross. But as the Hebrews reading says, Jesus came to do God’s will. Jesus came to reveal God to us.
And remember, death is not the end of the story. As Cameron Howard writes, “When the shadows of death creep up around Christmas, remember and rejoice: Jesus’s birth points toward his death, and his death points us toward his—and our—resurrection.”
The point of Christmas is God’s humility, God’s willingness to leave heaven and come into our world, which is what the first verse points to. And the fourth verse, which is just a repeat of verse one.
As we consider the story of Christmas, the miracle of God entering the world, we can’t help but wonder. We can’t help but wonder at the kind of love that would inspire an all-powerful God to enter the world and come for to die. For Jesus to lay down his life.
And not just for people who deserve it, as if anyone could. Not just for the wealthy, or the powerful, or the faithful, or for those few who show up to every Advent service and even Christmas morning and the Sunday afterwards. Not just for priests or monks or missionaries or philanthropists, but for poor ord’n’ry people like you and like I.
Merry Christmas. Let’s sing, I Wonder as I Wander.