“My peace I give
unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be
troubled, neither let it be afraid” (John 14:27; KJV).
Myers Park Baptist Church
Charlotte, NC
It will be an
unfamiliar Christmas in the northern Polish city of Olsztyn for the Syrian refugees
who have been taken in by a 70-member Baptist church there. The family of four Assyrian
Christians, a branch of the Christian faith that is old enough to be mentioned
in 1 Peter 5:13 as “your sister church in Babylon,” will be hearing the music
and words of unfamiliar carols in an unfamiliar language.
In that regard, they
are not so different from most of us here this morning as we listen to Benjamin
Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols. Unless
you grew up singing in an elite children’s choir, or you are a maven of Middle
English poetry, or you are an aficionado of 20th-century choral music, you too
are hearing unfamiliar carols in an unfamiliar language. There
is much to be said for the comfort and ease of the familiar at this time of
year: “Comfort ye my people,” comfort food, Southern Comfort. Easter has eggs, but Christmas has eggnog; it is indeed the most
wonderful time of the year. But this morning, instead of wishing you the
comfort and ease of a merry little Christmas, I am wishing you an unfamiliar
Christmas. I am wishing you at the very least a glimpse or a glimmer, an
instant or an insight in which you encounter the surprise, the power, the life-changing
and world-changing gift of “This Little Babe,” as the choir will sing next.
It’s a simple title,
“This Little Babe.” And the music to which the text is set exhibits a simple
compositional technique. It is a round, a canon, a simple form in which
successive voices take up the melody echoing each other, as in “1. Row, row,
row your boat/ 2. gently down the stream,/ 3. merrily, merrily, merrily,
merrily,/ 4. life is but a dream.” That’s pretty familiar, isn’t it?
Ah, but the boat on
which Benjamin Britten was sailing when he set “This Little Babe” to music was
a cargo ship headed from the U.S. to England in April of 1942 while German
submarines prowled the Atlantic. The month-long ocean passage on which A Ceremony of Carols was composed is a
striking metaphor for our own time. The threat of the known—a world at war—and
the threat of the unknown—undetectable, lethal assailants lurking just out of
sight—are frighteningly familiar to us right now. And the round or canon in
“This Little Babe” is a similarly striking metaphor. Britten set the voices in stretto, in close succession, so that
the second and third voices enter only one beat after the previous voice. Instead of the familiar, easy pace, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” would go like this: Row/Row/Row/Row.
That’s in stretto, and it wouldn’t sound
so “merrily down the stream” at all. Nor does Britten’s setting of this “This
Little Babe” sound at all like a merry little Christmas. And the
words of “This Little Babe” don’t either.
They were penned in
the 1500s by a Jesuit priest named Robert Southwell. Southwell was ordained as
a Roman Catholic priest in France in 1584, and in 1586 he returned to his
native England as an underground missionary. Six years later, he was arrested
by British authorities, imprisoned, and tortured. In 1595, Southwell was publicly
executed by hanging, drawing and quartering. Those words fall antiseptically on
our ears: hanged, drawn, and quartered. They mean that as he hung from the
noose, still alive, he was emasculated, then disemboweled, then beheaded, and his
body cut into four pieces. His crime? He was a Roman Catholic priest when being
a Roman Catholic priest was against the law in England. If you know much at all
about the history of Christianity, you know that today’s Islamic extremists look
like relative amateurs at atrocity compared to the historic atrocities of us Christians
of Anglo-Saxon and Aryan descent. Don’t fall into the popular trap of comparing
the worst of them to the best of us and the best of us to the worst of them and
then erroneously concluding that we are any better than they are.
Written in a world
in which professing Christians in a Christian nation dismembered and disemboweled dissenters, “This Little
Babe” is no “Away in the Manger.” Southwell’s poem depicts a surprise attack on
the gates of hell mounted not by an army but by an infant. The battle is fought
and won not with arms but with tears and cries and arrows of weeping eyes. The
fortress in which safety is found is a cattle stall, a broken wall, a crib, and
haystacks. Foes are foiled not by domination or annihilation but by joy. What Robert
Southwell understood and wrote of Christmas in “This Little Babe” and what he
lived and died of the gospel are entirely unfamiliar to you and me.
They are as unfamiliar
as the gift-giving of which Jesus spoke in the gospel of John when he said, “My
peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your
heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid” (14:27; KJV). Gift-giving as the
world giveth is what is familiar to us at Christmas. But this morning, I’m
wishing you an unfamiliar Christmas, a Christmas in which the gift you give or
receive is not as the world giveth but is as the gift being given this
Christmas in that 70-member Baptist church in Olsztyn, Poland, and in other
places around the world to persons who have been driven from home and family
and country by war and terror and atrocity: it is the gift of the peace of God
which passes all understanding (Philippians 4:7); it is the gift of the peace
of Christ that hearts may not be troubled and neither may they be afraid.
Choir, it’s all
yours: Sing us the gift of “This Little Babe” and an unfamiliar Christmas.
Copyrighted © 2015 by Jeffrey
S. Rogers. This material may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use,
provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jrogers3@gardner-webb.edu.
(With gratitude to friends to whom this sermon is indebted: Charles Kimball, When Religion Becomes Evil and When Religion Becomes Lethal, and Marc and Kim Wyatt, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship field personnel)
This little Babe so few days old,
Is come to rifle Satan’s fold;
All hell doth at his presence quake,
Though he himself for cold do shake;
For in this weak unarmèd wise
The gates of hell he will surprise.
With tears he fights and wins the
field,
His naked breast stands for a shield;
His battering shot are babish cries,
His arrows looks of weeping eyes,
His martial ensigns Cold and Need,
And feeble Flesh his warrior’s steed.
His camp is pitchèd in a stall,
His bulwark but a broken wall;
The crib his trench, haystalks his
stakes;
Of shepherds he his muster makes;
And thus, as sure his foe to wound,
The angels’ trumps alarum sound.
My soul, with Christ join thou in
fight;
Stick to the tents that he hath pight.
Within his crib is surest ward:
This little Babe will be thy guard.
If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy,
Then flit not from this heavenly Boy.
--Robert Southwell
