Midweek Advent Sermon: It Came Upon the Midnight Clear

No video or audio recording, but here’s my message from the first of our four midweek Advent worship services for 2021. Our ecumenical Wednesday Advent series this year is Songs of the Season, and I and Pastor Joan Thomas, who serves First Presbyterian Church in Greene as well as the Greene United Methodist & Brethren Yoke, are alternating weeks. 

In addition to the links below, you can learn about Edmund H. Sears from Wikipedia, both his entry and the entry for the hymn. Scripture readings from Lamentations and John are included within the message.

For the next four weeks, Pastor Joan and I will be taking turns looking at some songs of the season, and for this first week, I’ve picked It Came Upon the Midnight Clear. 

How many of you know this one? Is this anyone’s favorite? It’s a fascinating Christmas carol, because it’s only barely about Christmas.

Lots of Christmas carols tell the Christmas story, right? We have songs like Away in a Manger about Jesus’ actual birth, The First Noel and Go Tell It on the Mountain about the shepherds, Angels We Have Heard on High and Hark the Herald Angels Sing about the angels, but It Came Upon the Midnight Clear doesn’t really focus on Christmas.

The words in the first verse are from the angel’s song about goodwill and peace on earth, but the point of the carol isn’t about retelling the story of what happened one night in Bethlehem. Instead, this is a song about the present, about God coming near to us here and now, especially in hard times.

It helps to know a little bit about the author, Edmund Hamilton Sears. He was born in Massachusetts in 1810, and served as a frontier missionary in Toledo, Ohio, which I’ve never thought of as frontier, but it was at that time.

He got married in 1839, and served as pastor back in Massachusetts, in the small town of Wayland. His time in Wayland was brief, as apparently the parish didn’t pay well enough to support his family, so once he had some experience, he moved to a much larger, more prosperous congregation in Lancaster.

But after 7 years there, he got sick and lost his voice, which was obviously a big problem for a preacher in a large church before microphones. Losing his voice led him to a breakdown from depression, and after a year off, he went back to the small Wayland congregation in 1848.

Shortly after his return to his little small-town congregation, he wrote It Came Upon the Midnight Clear and you can tell when you read the words, this is not your typical cheerful Christmas carol.

I’m quoting from an article about him, “Writing during a period of personal melancholy, and with news of revolution in Europe and the United States’ war with Mexico fresh in his mind, Sears portrayed the world as dark, full of ‘sin and strife,’ and not hearing the Christmas message.”

One of our readings on Sunday talked about “distress among nations” and people fainting “from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world.” (Luke 21:25-26) In another reading a couple weeks ago, we heard Jesus talking about nation rising up against nation and kingdom against kingdom, earthquakes and famines. (Mark 13:8)

This is the Christmas carol for that kind of setting. It’s a lament; it’s honest about how broken the world is. Not just Sears’ world with the Mexican-American war and a divided nation which would shortly break into civil war, but our own world as well.

Our nation is divided right now. We’re not technically at war at the moment, but we’ve just had a frustrating conclusion to a 20-year-long war. We’re living through a pandemic. There’s inflation, new variants. There’s plenty of reason to be gloomy and worried about the future.

We’re going to sing the version in the hymnal, but the Methodist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran hymnals all omit the original verse three Sears wrote. Listen to the words (source):

“But with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song, which they bring:
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing!”

So the message of the hymn, the message of advent, the message of Christmas is that even in the worst times, even in the darkest times of suffering, there is hope. God’s angels proclaim good news of peace and goodwill to a broken world. God enters into a world of sin and death, a world of war and violence, bringing peace and hope.

I want to share with you a reading from Lamentations 3:19-26.

I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall.
I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me.
Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope:
Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.”
The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him;
it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.

The key, I think, is verse 21 of that reading: “Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope.”

Hope comes from remembering God’s goodness, remembering who God is and what God has done. God has come into our world. God is still proclaiming good news to us today, still forgiving, still working, here, now, in the midst of everything going on.

Sometimes I think people treat Christmas as if it solves everything, as if Christmas has to be perfect because it’s the happiest time of the year. But in this carol, the good news of Christmas comes at midnight, to you, beneath life’s crushing load, toiling with painful slow steps. Jesus is born into a backwater village under the thumb of an oppressive empire.

We have hope because we know this world is not all that there is. This world is not as it should be, but God is at work. We have hope because God hasn’t given up on the world. When the world is not in good shape, the angels proclaim God’s peace is coming. God’s light enters into a dark world.

I’ll end with a reading from John’s Gospel (John 16:25-33), and listen particularly to the last few sentences Jesus says.

“I have said these things to you in figures of speech. The hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures, but will tell you plainly of the Father. On that day you will ask in my name.

I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on your behalf; for the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God. I came from the Father and have come into the world; again, I am leaving the world and am going to the Father.”

His disciples said, “Yes, now you are speaking plainly, not in any figure of speech! Now we know that you know all things, and do not need to have anyone question you; by this we believe that you came from God.”

Jesus answered them, “Do you now believe? The hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each one to his home, and you will leave me alone. Yet I am not alone because the Father is with me. I have said this to you, so that in me you may have peace. In the world you face persecution. But take courage; I have conquered the world!”

Let’s sing, It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.