An Unfamiliar Christmas

“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