Faith: December 2020 Archives
Edited from the version originally published on December 25, 2012
Merry Christmas to anyone who happens by BatesLine today.
As a Holland Hall high school student, I attended and sang in the annual service of Christmas lessons and carols at Trinity Episcopal Church, modeled after the annual Christmas Eve service from the chapel of King's College, Cambridge.
At the beginning of Trinity's service, after the processional, Father Ralph Urmson-Taylor, who served as Holland Hall's Lower School chaplain, would read the bidding prayer. Confessing Evangelical has it as I remember it. It's worth a moment of your time to ponder.
Beloved in Christ, be it this Christmastide our care and delight to hear again the message of the angels, and in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, and the Babe lying in a manger.Therefore let us read and mark in Holy Scripture the tale of the loving purposes of God from the first days of our disobedience unto the glorious Redemption brought us by this Holy Child.
But first, let us pray for the needs of the whole world; for peace on earth and goodwill among all his people; for unity and brotherhood within the Church he came to build, and especially in this our diocese.
And because this of all things would rejoice his heart, let us remember, in his name, the poor and helpless, the cold, the hungry, and the oppressed; the sick and them that mourn, the lonely and the unloved, the aged and the little children; all those who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love.
Lastly, let us remember before God all those who rejoice with us, but upon another shore, and in a greater light, that multitude which no man can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh, and with whom in the Lord Jesus we are one forevermore.
These prayers and praises let us humbly offer up to the Throne of Heaven, in the words which Christ himself hath taught us: Our Father, which art in heaven...
The bidding prayer was written by Eric Milner-White, dean of the chapel of King's College, who introduced the Lessons and Carols service there on Christmas Eve 1918. Jeremy Summerly describes the prayer as "the greatest addition to the Church of England's liturgy since the Book of Common Prayer."
In some versions, the prayer for "all those who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love" is dropped, perhaps because of political correctness and religious timidity, but they seem to have been restored in recent years. Who needs prayer more than those who reject the Way, the Truth, and the Life?
The phrase "upon another shore, and in a greater light" always gives me goosebumps as I think about friends and family who are no longer with us, but who are now free from pain and delighting in the presence of the Savior they loved so dearly in this life. As he wrote those words, Milner-White, who had served as an army chaplain in the Great War before his return to King's College, must have had in mind the 199 men of King's and the hundreds of thousands of his countrymen who never returned home from the trenches of Europe.
Which brings us to the final verses of the Epiphany hymn, "As with Gladness, Men of Old", which describes "another shore" as "the heavenly country bright":
Holy Jesus, every day
Keep us in the narrow way;
And, when earthly things are past,
Bring our ransomed souls at last
Where they need no star to guide,
Where no clouds Thy glory hide.In the heavenly country bright,
Need they no created light;
Thou its Light, its Joy, its Crown,
Thou its Sun which goes not down;
There forever may we sing
Alleluias to our King!
MORE:
This year's broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College Cambridge marked its 102nd anniversary in this year of Covidtide by recording the service in advance. You can listen to the service for the next four weeks on the BBC Sounds website. King's College is allowing worldwide download of this year's edition of "Carols from Kings," a video-recorded program from the chapel which includes some elements of the Lessons and Carols service but is not identical to it. A cappella classical sextet the King's Singers pinch hit this year for adult members of the chapel choir who were exposed to the CCP Bat Virus.
You can download the booklet for the service here. (Direct link to PDF.)
The history of the Lessons and Carols service was presented in this 15-minute BBC program, Episode 8 of the series "A Cause for Caroling." (Unfortunately, it was not repeated this year, so you can't listen online at the moment, but it's available through Audible and as an audio CD.) Edward White Benson, first Bishop of Truro, originated the service of Nine Lessons and Carols in 1880. It was published in 1884 and began to be used more widely. From the 2018 service booklet:
The 1918 service was, in fact, adapted from an order drawn up by E. W. Benson, later Archbishop of Canterbury, for use in the large wooden shed which then served as his cathedral in Truro at 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve, 1880.A. C. Benson recalled: 'My father arranged from ancient sources a little service for Christmas Eve - nine carols and nine tiny lessons, which were read by various officers of the Church, beginning with a chorister, and ending, through the different grades, with the Bishop'. The idea had come from G. H. S. Walpole, later Bishop of Edinburgh.Very soon other churches adapted the service for their own use. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Milner-White decided that A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols would be a more uplifting occasion at King's than Evensong on Christmas Eve. He used Benson's plan, but wrote the now-classic Bidding Prayer to set the tone at the beginning. Since then the spoken parts, which provide the backbone of the service, have only occasionally changed.
MORE: John Piper explains what Christmas is all about in 115 words:
Christmas means that a king has been born, conceived in the womb of a virgin. And this king will reign over an everlasting kingdom that will be made up of millions and millions of saved sinners. The reason that this everlasting, virgin-born king can reign over a kingdom of sinners is because he was born precisely to die. And he did die. He died in our place and bore our sin and provided our righteousness and took away the wrath of God and defeated the evil one so that anyone, anywhere, of any kind can turn from the treason of sin to the true king, and put their faith in him, and have everlasting joy.
STILL MORE:
At her blog, A Clerk of Oxford, Eleanor Parker has written a great many articles about the Anglo-Saxon commemoration of the Christian year. This Twitter thread and this blog entry will lead you to a series of articles on the "O Antiphons," the Latin poems of praise to Christ that are read at vespers over the week prior to Christmas day, each one naming a title of Christ reflecting a different aspect of His glory -- Wisdom, Lord, Root of Jesse, Key of David, Dayspring (Morning Star), King of Nations, and Emmanuel (God with us).
Her essay from 1st Sunday in Advent reflects on Advent, Christmas, and time, on this year's lack of holidays, the impossibility of "pressing pause" on life, the origins of Christmas and claims of cultural appropriation, the emotional impact of the season. A worthwhile ramble on a gray day. It's all worth reading, but this passage stood out to me, and it cites that wonderful phrase from the bidding prayer that undoes me every year:
The British festival year used to involve numerous seasons and holidays when people could gather together, in extended families and in local communities; now for many people in that 90% it's almost all concentrated on Christmas, and that's a lot of pressure. Of course advertisers exploit that pressure for their own ends, so many of us have a vision in our heads of the 'perfect family Christmas' which may bear little or no relation to how we have actually experienced the season. (I'm sure the journalists are attacking the imaginary advertisers' Christmas more than anything they've seen in real life.)It's typical of the modern Christmas, most of all in its focus on family and childhood, that it leads people to places of strong emotion, both good and bad. Whether your memories of childhood Christmas are happy or unhappy ones, when Christmas comes round there's no escaping them. Whatever your family is or isn't, or whatever you want it to be, this is the time when you are insistently pushed to think about it and to compare yourself to others. Any sense of loss or deficiency in the family is made worse by the contrast with images of other apparently perfect families, or by remembering past happiness, or imagining what could or should be. Grief is harder. Absences are more keenly felt. It's a season when one phrase or one note of a song can open floodgates of emotion, calling forth profound fears, griefs, and longings which in ordinary time we might manage to contain. Christmas used to be a season of ghost stories, and it's certainly a time when it's hard not to be haunted by memories - even happy memories, of 'those who rejoice with us, but on another shore and in a greater light'.
You can call that sentimental, or irrational, but it's very powerful all the same. And it's no coincidence - of course it isn't - that this is all intensified because it takes place at midwinter, when the days are very short and the nights very long; when the weather is cold and hostile; when light is lowest, and the shadows longest. There's a reason we call this season 'the dead of winter', with all the sterility and hopelessness that implies. That makes the Christmas brightness all the brighter, or the darkness all the darker - the lights and the warmth and the company all the more welcome, or their absence all the more painful.
It's a bleak and lonely and isolating time of year, at the best of times; and these aren't the best of times. How much more endless the empty evenings seem now in November than they did in April, now they begin at four o'clock in the afternoon! The 'it's just one day' people can go on saying that as much as they like, but this particular day, after nine months of isolation or separation from family, is going to be hard for a lot of people.
Just remember: If you didn't fulfill every Christmas tradition you wanted to honor, give every gift you wanted to give, sing every carol on or before December 25, there are still eleven days of Christmas remaining!
RELATED: Tom Holland writing in Unherd on The Myth of Pagan Christmas. Holland takes us back to the Christmas feast at the court of King Athelstan in Amesbury in 932, and looks back from there to the idea of measuring time from the birth of Christ:
Bede, more clearly than any Christian scholar before him, had recognised that there was only the one fixed point amid the great sweep of the aeons, only the single pivot. Drawing on calendrical tables compiled some two centuries earlier, he had fixed on the Incarnation, the entry of the divine into the womb of the Virgin Mary, as the moment on which all of history turned. Years, by Bede's reckoning, were properly measured according to whether they were before Christ or anno Domini: in the year of the Lord. The effect was to render the calendar itself as Christian. The great drama of Christ's incarnation and birth stood at the very centre of both the turning of the year and the passage of the millennia. The fact that pagans too had staged midwinter festivities presented no threat to this conceptualisation, but quite the opposite. Dimly, inadequately, gropingly, they had anticipated the supreme miracle: the coming into darkness of the true Light, by which every man who comes into the world is lit.
He concludes with this:
This year of all years -- with a clarity denied us in happier times -- it is possible to recognise in Christmas its fundamentally Christian character. The light shining in the darkness proclaimed by the festival is a very theological light, one that promises redemption from the miseries of a fallen world. In a time of pandemic, when the festive season is haunted by the shadows of sickness and bereavement, of loneliness and disappointment, of poverty and dread, the power of this theology, one that has fuelled the celebration of Christmas for century after century, becomes easier, perhaps, to recognise than in a time of prosperity. The similarities shared by the feast day of Christ's birth with other celebrations that, over the course of history, have been held in the dead of winter should not delude us into denying a truth so evident as to verge on the tautologous: Christmas is a thoroughly Christian festival.
Recently I've returned to the habit of reading a book before bedtime and when eating on my own, leaving aside the digital device and focusing my attention on the printed page. In the past few weeks I've finished Calvin Coolidge's autobiography, Arnold Dallimore's biography of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, a short book collecting Spurgeon's controversial writings calling attention to theological liberalism among British Baptists and Congregationalists (known as the "Down-Grade Controversy"), and started into The Federalist Papers, with an introductory essay by Garry Wills.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon in his study, 1882, age 48Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892) might be considered the first of the megachurch pastors. A Baptist of Calvinist convictions, he was gifted with a prodigious memory, a quick verbal wit, and, most importantly, a godly heritage by way of his grandfather and father, both Independent (Congregational) ministers of the Puritan persuasion. He began at age 16 as preacher and pastor of a Baptist chapel in Waterbeach, Cambridgeshire, then was called to serve as pastor of the historic New Park Street Chapel in Southwark, in greater London, at age 20. His congregation quickly grew to thousands, overflowing the building, requiring a move first to Exeter Hall in the Strand while the church was being enlarged, then to the Surrey Gardens Music Hall, and ultimately to a new facility, the 6,000-seat Metropolitan Tabernacle near Elephant and Castle in Newington, now in the London Borough of Southwark. In addition to preaching twice on Sunday and on other occasions through the week, Spurgeon edited and wrote essays and book reviews for a monthly magazine, The Sword and Trowel, founded an orphanage, founded and taught at a pastor's college, and initiated many other missions and ministries under the auspices of the church.
A view of the Metropolitan Tabernacle from the pulpit, 1882During my time in the south of England two years ago, I worshipped on a few occasions at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, which is still faithfully proclaiming the same gospel that Spurgeon preached in the same straightforward and unadorned way. Although the auditorium is much smaller than in Spurgeon's time -- it took a direct hit during the Blitz and was rebuilt after the war; the Greek Revival portico survived the attack -- every seat was filled, and the congregation was diverse in ethnic background and age. There seemed to be far more non-English faces than English faces in the congregation. No fog machines or colored lights. After a few hymns accompanied by organ, the congregation heard an expository sermon from Dr. Peter Masters or one of his associates. Masters marked his golden anniversary as senior pastor this November.
My curiosity about Spurgeon was rekindled by an item recently posted to social media summarizing his busy but productive weekly schedule, a summary of this passage in Volume 2 of the Autobiography. I pulled Arnold Dallimore's 1985 concise biography of Spurgeon off of the shelf and got through it in a few days, which only whetted my appetite to read more of his own work and to learn more of his life and times. As Spurgeon's opus is entirely in the public domain, there is a wealth of his work available online.
Spurgeon is very accessible to modern readers. Although there will be unfamiliar cultural references, and there have been shifts in meaning for some words, these are not barriers. Spurgeon writes with a warmth and wit that reaches the reader even when difficult subjects are in view.
Major repositories of Spurgeon's work:
Spurgeon's Morning and Evening: His daily devotional, presented in blog form.
The Spurgeon Archive: A selection of Spurgeon sermons and essays and essays about Spurgeon, curated by Phil Johnson, associate pastor of Grace Community Church in Los Angeles. There is a large collection of interesting items from Spurgeon's writing in The Sword and the Trowel, many of them reflecting Spurgeon's sense of humor.
- Spurgeon's account of an 1867 visit to Heligoland (then a British possession off the coast of Germany): Johnson calls "surely the best and funniest of Mr. Spurgeon's travelogues."
- A chapter of the Autobiography devoted to fun
- A caricature and sketch of Spurgeon from Vanity Fair
- Spurgeon's frustration with requests from aspiring blank-verse poets to read and find publishers for their work
- Free advice, including Spurgeon's opinion on the proper length of a sermon
- Spurgeon's love of fine cigars, which he "smoked to the glory of God"
Reformed Reader: Spurgeon collection, which includes his monumental multi-volume commentary on the Psalms, The Treasury of David, arranged for web navigation, and The Down-Grade Controversy: All of the essays, notes, and excerpts from The Sword and the Trowel, the Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, and the Autobiography that are contained in Pilgrim Publications' little book of the same title.
The Spurgeon Center for Biblical Preaching at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary: The seminary is home to Spurgeon's personal 6,000 book library (formerly at William Jewell College, acquired for $3,000 in 1905), which is being digitized along with his annotations.
Spurgeon Gems: All 3,563 of Spurgeon's published sermons, with audio recreations of many sermons, books in PDF and plain text format, a collection of prayers by Spurgeon, notable quotes, and materials in Spanish.
Internet Archive collection of works by or about Spurgeon
Spurgeon in print:
Pilgrim Publications, Pasadena, Texas, which reprints facsimile versions of all of Spurgeon's works.
Banner of Truth Trust publishes modern editions and anthologies of Spurgeon's writing, including the Autobiography, a collection of letters, edited with commentary from Iain Murray, and Dallimore's biography.
Susie, The Life and Legacy of Susannah Spurgeon, is due out from Moody Press early next year (2021).
Contemporary biographies of Spurgeon in the public domain:
Shortly after Spurgeon's death, his wife Susannah and his private secretary, J. W. Harrald, assembled a four-volume Autobiography from his diaries, sermons, letters, and notes:
Volume 1, 1834-1854 Reformed Reader: Descriptions of life at Westwood from Susannah Spurgeon's book fund reports from Russell H. Conwell's Life of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The World's Great Preacher. Other items of interest:
Volume 2, 1854-1860
Volume 3, 1860-1878
Volume 4, 1878-1892
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