Tuesday, December 31, 2024
Seventh Day of Christmas
New Year’s Eve
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
I heard the bells
Children, it is the last hour.
I can’t get Longfellow’s Christmas carol out of my thoughts. And today I notice the lectionary reprises the first verses of the Gospel of John.
I heard the bells on Christmas Day.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.
Their old, familiar carols play. And wild and sweet, the words repeat …
And the word was God. He was in the beginning with God.
… of peace on earth, good will to men.
All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life.
In this video the Civil War sets the stage for Longfellow’s poem, which he wrote on Christmas Day 1863 sitting at his kitchen table, wondering whether his son Lieutenant Charles Longfellow would survive the severe wound he sustained at the Battle of Mine Run a month earlier. Charles’ father and brother Ernest had brought him home from a hospital in Washington DC 17 days earlier.
Generals George Meade and Robert E. Lee were both dissastisfied with the battle’s results. Charles survived, though he no longer could participate in the war. Longfellow’s poem became far more memorable than the battle itself.
Here is more of the song with John’s words from chapter one:
Then from each black, accursed mouth the cannon thundered in the South.
This life was the light of the human race.
And with the sound the carols drowned
The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it!
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
A second video remarking on World War I’s unscheduled Christmas Eve truce highlights this song, sung by “Casting Crowns.”
Peace on earth, like a choir singing, does anybody hear them?
The true light, which enlightens everyone, is coming into the world. The world came to be through him, but the world did not know him.
Then I rang the bells more loud and deep – God is not dead, nor doth he sleep.
But to those who did accept him he gave power to become children of God.
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail with peace on earth, good will to men.
The battles have not ceased. The poor we will always have with us. In the most important ways, we are all poor. On the second Friday of January there is truly a thing called “Quitter’s Day,” so our resolutions do not become loose nooses on our necks, waiting to be pulled a little tighter.
In all of that, Jesus has come, Jesus is singing, our God reigns.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory, the only begotten son, full of grace and truth.
 (1 John 2, Psalm 96, John 1)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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