WRITES OF PASSAGE: Believe and hear the angels sing

In Chris Van Allsburg’s marvelous children’s book The Polar Express, an unnamed boy ends up taking a magical journey on a train to the North Pole where he is eventually given a silver bell from Santa’s sleigh.

But interestingly, after returning home only the boy and his young sister can hear the bell when shaken. The boy’s parents, unable to hear its magical ringing, just assume the bell is broken: “Oh, that’s too bad,” says the mother to the young boy. “Yes,” says his father, “it’s broken.”

The story eventually concludes with the young boy, now an adult, saying: “At one time most of my friends could hear the bell, but as the years past it fell silent for all of them. Even [my sister] found one Christmas that she could no longer hear its sweet sound. Though I’ve grown old, the bell still rings for me as it does for all who truly believe.” 

Well, as people of faith we can relate, can’t we? After all, the story of God coming into the world to make it a better place often gets harder and harder to believe the older we get.  Just like the boy’s parents who can’t hear the ringing of the bell from Santa’s sleigh, we sometimes lose the ability to hear and believe the good news of Christmas — the good news about the Prince of Peace and a world filled with stillness, calm, and love.

After all, life just sort of has a way of slowly tempering our hopes and dreams, doesn’t it? Look, it’s no secret. Live long enough and it doesn’t take too much time to realize that life, while surely a good and beautiful thing, can also sometimes be a bumpy and hard course to row. 

What’s that famous line from Winston Churchill about growing old? “If you’re not a liberal at twenty,” said Churchill, “you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative at forty you have no brain.” Well broadly speaking we understand what he means, don’t we? For when we’re young, it’s so easy to be idealistic and romantic about life. It is indeed easy to be full of heart and passion as well as those majestic dreams and cosmic longings for a better world.

But day-by-day, as we get older and older, those dreams and longings … well they just naturally get a little harder to hold on to, don’t they? Life starts pushing back against the dreams and longings of our hearts and before long we realize, rightly so, that a little common sense and pragmatism is also in order. So understandably, it can be hard for us to hear and believe in the good news of Christmas.

And yet even with all our rightly acquired pragmatism, the good news of Christmas is never fully drowned out, is it? For if the good news of Christmas was to ever be truly drowned out by our sober realism, we’d be reading about it in the history books as some kind of bygone custom that the people of old used to practice. But that’s hardly what we do is it?

Instead, every year we still pull out those Christmas trees and light our yards, we still decorate our churches with those Advent wreaths and greenery, and we still engage in all those acts of kindness and generosity. So even now the good news of Christmas lives on, if only softly.

Back in 1849 a Unitarian minister named Edmund Sears was having a hard time writing his Christmas Eve message for his congregation. The nation, embroiled in controversy over the issue of slavery, was slowly headed for war while Sears, likewise, was also both physically and emotionally drained from working in the poverty stricken slums that surrounded his congregation.

But then while thumbing through his Bible, Sears eyes fell on chapter two of Luke’s Gospel and that story about those shepherds being visited by that angel with the good news of a Savior born in Bethlehem. And as Sears pondered that angelic event, he suddenly found himself unexpectedly jotting down a poem. And after incorporating his new poem with an older one he had written years earlier, Sears soon realized he had stumbled upon the closing lines for his Christmas Eve message.

His poem, which he titled “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear”, would of course go on to become a Christmas classic. And while the carol as a whole is surely worthy of consideration, it is the third verse that is the most fitting:

“And ye, beneath life’s crushing load

Whose forms are bending low,

Who toil along the climbing way

With painful steps and slow,

Look now! for glad and golden hours

Come swiftly on the wing:

O rest beside the weary road

And hear the angels sing” 

For the days are coming, claims the 4th and final verse of the song, when the new heaven and the new earth shall finally reign and what’s more, the Prince of Peace, that child born in a manger, will be serving as King and ruler over it all.

Well, what was true for Sears is also true for us. Despite our well-earned pragmatism and sober view about what’s possible in life, the good news of Christmas simply refuses to be drowned out. So believe, my friends! Believe and rest yourselves beside that weary road so you too might hear the angels sing.

The Rev. Stephen Yates is pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Destin.