For those of you who are participating in REJOICE! REFLECTIONS ON FOUR SEASONAL HYMNS,read the article below. If you don’t have a chance to read it, come and share with us anyway. We’ll also spend a few moments with SILENT NIGHT since that didn’t “fly” on Funday Sunday.
Bill Kemp
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Permission given to the purchaser to copy this page for use in class.
Rejoice!: Reflections on Four Seasonal Hymns
Session 3: "O Little Town of Bethlehem"
Rev. Phillips Brooks was so moved by a trip to Palestine that he penned the lyrics to this hymn around 1868. His Philadelphia church’s music director, Lewis Redner, wrote the music.
O little town of Bethlehem,
How still we see thee lie!
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by.
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting light;
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.
For Christ is born of Mary;
And gathered all above,
While mortals sleep, the angels keep
Their watch of wondering love.
O morning stars, together
Proclaim the holy birth!
And praises sing to God the King,
And peace to all on earth.
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.
O holy Child of Bethlehem,
Descend to us, we pray;
Cast out our sin and enter in,
Be born in us today.
We hear the Christmas angels
The great glad tidings tell;
O come to us, abide with us,
Our Lord Emmanuel!
Ode to a City
How unusual for the subject of a hymn to be a small town
as opposed to a grand idea, but such is the case with this
nineteenth-century favorite penned by Phillips Brooks,
Episcopal minister of Holy Trinity Church in Philadelphia.
So moved was Brooks by a trip to Palestine and
a brief sojourn in Bethlehem that he penned the lyrics
some time around 1868. It was his church’s music director,
Lewis Redner, who added the music, as legend has
it, just in time for that year’s Sunday school Christmas
service. It is debatable as to whether the hymn would
have become so popular if not for Redner’s contribution
of the unrushed, irregular, almost dirge-like melody, rising
ever so slightly mid-stanza before slipping back into
a quieter mood that forces us to feel the weight of the
words and the depth of their meaning.
Biblical Wisps
Brooks’s paean to this little town that so enchanted
him does not bludgeon us with biblical imagery, but
as we listen to the words the text is never far away. In
fact, Brooks goes so far as to put us in Bethlehem, in
the present tense, the biblical moment, as the evening’s
wonders are unfolding (“O little town of Bethlehem,
how still we see thee lie”) as suggested in Matthew 2:1.
He then reminds us that it is nighttime (“Above thy
deep and dreamless sleep / The silent stars go by”),
which is an easy assumption for him to make, based on
the fact that it was nighttime when the angels appeared
to the shepherds to announce the coming of the child
(Luke 2:8). In subsequent stanzas we sense the undercurrent
of Luke’s angels (“While mortals sleep, the
angels keep / Their watch of wondering love”), Paul’s
assertion in 2 Corinthians 9:15 that the birth of Christ
is a gift from God (“How silently, how silently, / The
wondrous gift is given”), and the assertion from the
Gospel of John (3:3–5) that through the Christ we can
be born again (“Cast out our sin and enter in, / Be born
in us today”).
With Scripture as his foundation, Brooks’s lyrics take
on a sharp theological hue, as he offers us fi ve specifi c
dichotomies that point to this night in Bethlehem as
profoundly life altering—both for the listener and for
the world.
Light and Dark
In the first stanza, when we sing “Yet in thy dark streets
shineth / The everlasting light,” we are underscoring
the old theological verity that light is preferable to
darkness, a symbolic contrast intended to remind us
that wisdom is preferable to folly, awareness is preferable
to ignorance, compassion is preferable to hardness
of heart. It was God who created light and saw that
it was good (Gen. 1:14–15). It was Isaiah (9:1–2), later
echoed by Matthew (4:16), who called attention to people’s
growing awareness of God’s love for them with
the words “The people who sat in darkness have seen
a great light.” And it is in the First Letter of John where
we are reminded that “Whoever says, ‘I am in the light,’
while hating a brother or sister, is still in the darkness”
(1 John 2:9). In Bethlehem this fortuitous evening,
Brooks is telling us, the wisdom and compassion of
Almighty God will be brought into the world for all who
are open to receive it. Or, in the words of Robert Browning,
“Through such souls alone / God stooping shows
suffi cient of His light / For us i’ the darkness to rise by.
And I rise.”1
Hope and Fear
Later in the same stanza Brooks proclaims the full burden
that will be borne by what happens in Bethlehem
this night when he proclaims that “the hopes and fears
of all the years / Are met in thee tonight.” What two
more fundamental, more potent emotions stir in competition
for the human heart than hope and fear?
An old Swedish proverb proclaims, “Fear less, hope
more”; Brooks is not downplaying the tension between
the two when he includes his line. He is not only anticipating
that the birth of Christ will give us hope, he is
acknowledging as well that fear is nevertheless a constant
companion. By this time in the Christmas story
Mary has already sung her Magnificat in Luke 1:46
(“My soul magnifies the Lord”), but we can have no
doubt that as a young woman of simple means she was
also terribly afraid of what the future held. Likewise the
shepherds to whom the angel appeared (“and the glory
of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified”
[Luke 2:9]), who, by evening’s end, would experience
something too wondrous to have ever been considered
in their humble existence as tenders of sheep.
That Christ was to be born would of course be a symbol
of hope, an attestation that God was coming into a
broken and bleeding people. But his birth would soon
be followed by fl ight to Egypt because his life was in
danger. Years later, the ruling elite would be fearful of
his ministry and would arrest him because of it. Peter’s
fear for his own safety would lead him to deny his association
with Jesus. The point Phillips is driving home
in this verse is that since fear will always push against
hope, it is up to the believer to trust that despite any
immediate evidence to the contrary, the latter can prevail
over the former.
Sleeping and Waking
The second stanza brings us this assurance: “While
mortals sleep, the angels keep / Their watch of wondering
love.” What is important here is to understand
the focus of the angels’ attention. They are not watching
over us, they are keeping vigil over the child. The Prince
of Peace, God incarnate, is a fragile idea in a boisterous
world. It must be nurtured and cared for because that
which it offers is easily missed or passed over. We who
are observing the little town in the present, pre-birth
moment do not yet understand the signifi cance of what
is going to happen to us. For this reason it falls upon the
angels to safeguard the promise.
It is all right for us to be at rest as the Son of God is
about to come to us, but after that it will be our time
to waken, to receive the gift of love but also to protect
it from all of the mortal influences that will want to
corrupt it, or dishonor it, or ignore it. As Jesus would
one day preach, “Do not give what is holy to dogs; and
do not throw your pearls before swine” (Matt. 7:6), by
which he means divine love cannot be laid before those
who would abuse it to sanctify unholy actions.
Sin and Forgiveness
As the hymn progresses toward its conclusion, Phillips
shifts his focus from Bethlehem to the Christ child (“Cast
out our sin and enter in, / Be born in us today”) so that
with his birth we are “born” also. We have moved from
anticipation to supplication; from awaiting God’s love
to humbly bowing before the manger and receiving it.
Here the purpose is revealed to us. By receiving God,
our sin will be cast out and we will be new beings.
This isn’t to say we will no longer sin. Rather, it is to
remind us that God’s love overcomes our sin, that we are
loved despite our sin, and that this love will never leave
us. Nor does it mean that God’s love for us has somehow
qualitatively changed. It has always been unconditional,
always been immutable, always been eternal. However,
in the life, death, and resurrection of this child now
before us we will come to know three things about that
love. In his life—his teachings and his healings—we will
learn about its content and texture. In his death—willfully
chosen to exemplify the ends to which God will go
for our benefi t—we will see exhibited its unconditional
nature. And in his resurrection—the victory of life over
death—we will be reminded that this love is more powerful
than even those forces we most fear. Through this
we are made wiser, more compassionate, and less fearful
of our fates, and these are the contours of the new being.
Silence and Sound
Finally, the wait now over and the burden now lifted, it
is our time to celebrate. We have moved from the hushed
anticipation of stanza 1 (“Above thy deep and dreamless
sleep / The silent stars go by”) to the heraldic song
from above in stanza 4 (“We hear the Christmas angels /
The great glad tidings tell”). Note that it is the Christmas
angels we hear, and that what they are telling us is of
the great glad tidings echoed in Luke 2:8 (“I am bringing
you good news of great joy”). God has come to live
with us, they are telling us. “O come to us, abide with
us, / Our Lord Emmanuel.” We need no longer be silent,
either in anticipation, the way a child has long awaited a
promised gift (that which we have been anticipating has
been realized), or in timidity, the way a religious people
long subjugated to a pagan power fi nd that the voice of
their own faith has been silenced.
The sound is indeed the sound of Immanuel—“God
with us”—and it is to be met with rejoicing.
What’s Different?
It’s a curious moment, both for the audience of the fi rst
Christmas and for those of us who, through this carol,
experience it as if we are there. Materially, nothing has
changed. The mother is slowly closing, healing, enduring
the pain and glory of childbirth and its aftermath as
women had for centuries and would for centuries still.
The child is hungry and helpless, the father elated over
the birth of his son and at the same time heavily weighted
with all of the responsibilities that fatherhood implies.
The shepherds will go back to their sheep, the magi to
the palace, and the animals in the manger will wonder
when their home will be vacated by these interlopers.
Rome still rules with an ironfist, the taxes still must be
paid, the poor are still poor, and outside of this small,
eclectic group, nobody in Israel knows what has transpired
in the little town of Bethlehem. By all appearances
it continues to lie still above the dreamless sleep, and in
a few short hours the people of the town will begin to
rise and go about their daily routines.
Though the coming of God has been experienced as an
interruption by the lucky few, it will be a slow unfolding
for the rest of the world, as it often is for us. God’s love
will be slowly revealed through this child who will grow
to be a man, fi rst at the temple where he will interpret the
words of Isaiah, later at Cana where he will perform his
fi rst miracle, then on the mount where he will deliver a
sermon that will shake his audience to their very bones.
Later still this love will be revealed in Pilate’s court, in
Gethsemane’s garden, and on Golgotha. Finally, it will
receive its culmination not in Christ’s presence but in his
absence, in the tomb that is empty. This is how the story
will unfurl itself, but nobody knows this. All they know
is that a child has been born—one among many—and
there is work to be done.
And so it is for us, of course, that this love does not necessarily
sweep us off our feet but slowly envelops us,
over time and tribulation. We pay our taxes and feed our
children and tend to our sheep without fully appreciating
how God will be made known to us or what difference
it will make in our lives. But as long as we are not
deaf to the story or blind to the beauty, we will see how
God has gently come into our lives and pitched a tent
among us. The boy’s story will speak to us; we will have
our temple moments and our miracle moments and our
moments of doubt and pain and triumph.
When Christ comes into our lives, nothing has changed—
the glories and drudgeries of life are still what they have
always been—but everything has changed, because
we begin to understand life as the ultimate affi rmation
that we are of God, and that this is a God whose love
is greater than the forces of Rome, stronger than death,
more incomprehensible than the “silent stars that shineth”;
it is indeed, as Brooks would put it, an everlasting
light.
Bethlehem Redux
Whatever heartwarming images this carol stirs in us, we
would be remiss if we didn’t take stock of what the little
town of Bethlehem is like today. It is a Palestinian city
that is ever under the watchful eye of the Israeli armed
forces that have invaded the city twice. The traditional
site of the birth of Christ, it is also the birthplace of the
second intifada which, in 2001, destroyed much of the
economy and infrastructure of the town. There is widespread
poverty there, as with much of Palestine, and
movement from the city into Israel and vice versa is
not easy. Indeed, if Mary and Joseph had to make their
pilgrimage today they would pass through ten Israeli
checkpoints. All parties and all nationalities pray for
peace to come to this hallowed place but there are so
many forces at work to stifl e those prayers.
All of this is to remind us that all these years later the
world is still awash in hopes and fears. As evidenced
in Bethlehem as starkly as anywhere else on earth, the
work that Christ came to do is not yet done. So we must
hope. But we also must work. Advent is not a time simply
to sing of hope. It is a time to actualize it.
About the Writer
Erik Kolbell is a United Church of Christ minister and author,
most recently, of The God of Second Chances.
Endnote
1. Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, VII, Pompilia
(Whitefi sh, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004).
