Category: Advent

Without a doubt, my favorite carol is “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.”

The carol is unique among Christmas songs. It obviously stands apart from the shallow Christmas songs like “All I Want for Christmas Is You” or “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer.” However, where it really stands apart is among the carols. While the other carols are statements of proclamation—“Joy to the World, the Lord has come” or “Hark! The herald angels sing, glory to the newborn king”—the “O Come Emmanual” is a prayer of desperation.

This carol is a haunting plea, sung by a world lost in darkness. It is a cry for rescue by the almighty God. It is arguably the most representative song of the Advent season.

The carol is possibly one of the oldest, dating back to as early as the eighth or ninth century. It contained seven verses called the “O Antiphons” also known as the “Great O’s.”

You can clearly see why:

O come, O come, Emmanuel,
and ransom captive Israel
that mourns in lonely exile here
until the Son of God appear

Refrain:
Rejoice! Rejoice! Immanuel
shall come to you, O Israel

O come, O Wisdom from on high,
who ordered all things mightily;
to us the path of knowledge show
and teach us in its ways to go.

O come, O come, great Lord of might,
who to your tribes on Sinai’s height
in ancient times did give the law
in cloud and majesty and awe.

O come, O Branch of Jesse’s stem,
unto your own and rescue them!
From depths of hell your people save,
and give them victory o’er the grave.

O come, O Key of David, come
and open wide our heavenly home.
Make safe for us the heavenward road
and bar the way to death’s abode

O come, O Bright and Morning Star,
and bring us comfort from afar!
Dispel the shadows of the night
and turn our darkness into light

O come, O King of nations, bind
in one the hearts of all mankind.
Bid all our sad divisions cease
and be yourself our King of Peace.

The carol was first chanted in monasteries, in Latin, the seven days before Christmas, the darkest days of the year. The monks would chant only first verse at the start of the one-week countdown. With each new day, another verse would be added—the second antiphon on the second day, the third on the third, and so on.

On Christmas Eve, all seven antiphons would be chanted. In and of itself, the lyrics resonate in a world gone mad. We plead for intervention from the only one who could save the world.

However, there is another message in this song.

A message from God to humanity.

It’s message spoken without us even knowing it.

As previously mentioned, the song is made up of seven “O Antiphons”, each a title given to Jesus: O Emmanuel; O Wisdom from on High; O great Lord of might; O Branch of Jesse’s Stem; O Key of David; O Bright and Morning Star; and finally O King of Nations

The chant was originally written and sung in Latin. Since it was sung as a countdown to Christmas, it is sung in reverse order from how it is sung now. The “O Antiphons” are listed thusly: O Emmanel; O Rex Gentium; O Oriens; O Clavis David; O Radix Jesse; O Adonai; and finally, O Sapientia.

The first letter of each of these Antiphons form an acronym: ERO CRAS.

Having chanted through the week prior to Christmas, adding a verse each week, when the song reaches Christmas Eve, the acronym forms a message of hope and anticipation: ERO CRAS.

ERO CRAS is Latin meaning “Tomorrow I come.”

Hidden in a chant crying out for divine salvation from the darkness is simultaneously issuing a proclamation: “Tomorrow I Come.”

It’s December 24, as I write this. Prior to this day, the sun appeared to sink lower and lower on the horizon as though the sun going away. Now daylight grows longer by roughly a minute. Light is coming in to the world.

A lot of us are living in darkness. There is no human solution. Contrary to popular opinion, government can’t provide it. Neither can science, nor education, nor a political candidate.

We suffer from depression, loneliness, nihilism, hopelessness, uncertainty, fear, anxiety, and suicide now more than ever. We put on a brave, stoic face, but it is hard to hide it.

2023 was a hard year. Given an upcoming election, 2024 likely isn’t going to be much different. So we cry out for a Savior: “O come, o come, Emmanuel.” As the days countdown to December 25, they get more and more desperate.

But in the midst of our suffering, God is proclaiming: “Tomorrow I come.”

Tomorrow is a reminder that salvation isn’t coming, it is here.

Jesus came.

The Son of God will take human form and suffer with us.

This Messiah will live as a human.

Roughly tree decades later, this Messiah will die a most brutal death, uttering the words, “Father, forgive them. For they don’t know what they are doing.”

For now, we celebrate. In our suffering, in our darkness, in our pleas, we get the answer to it all.

Tomorrow he comes.

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In 2014, I wrote about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Christmas Bells” in the context of an active shooter situation at a mall near my home in Portland, Oregon. The day after the shooting, I drove down to the mall, watching the police activity, the media frenzy, and the stunned onlookers standing in small groups still trying to grasp what had just happened.

As I drove around the mall, the carol “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” came over the radio.

That song has stuck with me ever since.

The thought of church bells piercing the grit, darkness, and violence of the times and proclaiming the arrival of a promised Messiah is burned into my mind.

Especially at the conclusion of each of the every subsequent year since.

Since 2014, there have been multiple mass shootings or murders via other means which now only hardens our hearts because we are so quick to take advantage of it politically. We have also  experienced two presidential elections, which have done little more than erode our trust and respect of the office. We have experienced a pandemic which locked us into mind-numbing solitude, turned each other into enemies, and decimated our trust in public health and education.

This last year, America entered into recession. Inflation is at a decades-high level, and at one point, gas prices hit an all-time high. The powers-that-be responded not by acknowledging or  owning the recession, but by changing the definition of the word.

Life has been hard since the 2020 pandemic. And every year, when December arrives, I find myself wanting  to allow the darkness of the prior year to engulf me.

The last several months have been fairly difficult and overwhelming for me personally. There was no life-changing catastrophe. Instead, it has felt more like death by a thousand paper cuts.

The inflation-that-supposedly-isn’t has depleted our savings account and left us carrying a credit card balance for the first time in our 25-year marriage. Our house had a power surge during a summer thunderstorm, resulting in a fried underground cable and requiring an overhead replacement.  Our refrigerator, washing machine, and laptop computer all went out. Both of us needed long-delayed replacements for our eyeglasses, and we were informed our dangerously bald tires, which we’d hoped to use through the winter, could easily blow out before Thanksgiving.

Then, we were told that one of our trees, the one closest to the house and garage, had developed serious cracks in the trunk and has officially become what the expert called a “liability.” Finally, our two senior dachshunds both developed incontinence (one from old age, the other due to Cushing’s disease). We spend much of our waking time chasing them around the house, cleaning up dribbles and mopping the floor.

All this unfolded in just six weeks.

As December arrived, it became very tempting to just ignore Advent altogether. My life felt like total chaos, and I was too exhausted to think about the meaning of the season. Hiding out in my room and binging TV shows became my refuge. I just wanted to focus on my own woes.

But Emmanuel won’t let that happen.

When light steps into the darkness, the darkness goes away. Darkness cannot win in a battle with light.

Likewise, light does not remove the person from the darkness, but removes the darkness from the person.

Therein lies the peace promised by Emmanuel, the God With Us.

We are not rescued from the darkness. We still have to work our way out of the mess. But Advent reminds us that God himself stepped into the chaos loosed by the serpent.

In Genesis 3, the serpent sets out to undo the order and beauty of creation, described just two chapters earlier. At first, his plan appears to work when Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

However, when God confronts the three players in the Garden, he slips in one promise of hope. To the serpent, he says that the woman’s offspring “will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”

The Christmas story still speaks the angels’ message of “peace on earth.”

We have the peace of knowing that God’s got this, that he sees the mess we’ve made of his creation and has made it right.

He sees that my death-by-a-thousand paper-cuts will ultimately glorify him.

My duty is to release my stresses to him—daily, continually. It’s not easy, but it is necessary.

During this second week of Advent, acknowledge the darkness around you. Think of the chaos in your life. Reflect on the arrival of the Prince of Peace—the infant who entered our world, our stories, calming the storms in our hearts and souls by commanding, “Peace, be still.”

You will make it simply because he is with you.

And that is the promise of peace in the Advent season.

 

 

 

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It’s no secret that Christmas falls during the month of December.

What isn’t as clear is the reason why.

“That’s easy,” one might reply. “It’s when Jesus was born.”

Actually, it wasn’t.

Most biblical historians place Jesus’s birth around either October(ish) or April(ish). They argue that shepherds would not have been out in the fields with their sheep in the dead of winter. It would have been far too cold, especially at night. (Fun fact: Christ likely wasn’t born in the year 0 AD either. Because of some miscalculations in the Gregorian calendar, he was probably born sometime between 3 to 5 BC.)

Secularists–and particularly militant atheists–enjoy rubbing that little detail into the face of unsuspecting Christians before adding, with gleeful snark, that the whole Christmas holiday is based on a pagan holiday filled with drunken debauchery, which is true.

To a point.

But the deconstruction of the Christmas narrative into a bunch of uncomfortable half-truths in no way minimizes the power of the Incarnation.

The decision by the early church to set the celebration of Jesus’s birth on December 25 was intentional.

Celebrating his birth on this date is not an attempt to deceive the masses about the actual date it happened, any more than is celebating his resurrection on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the Spring Equinox. It’s merely a date for global body of Christ to celebrate as one.

And–gasp!—Resurrection Sunday was also around the time of pagan holidays.

So why did the early church set the celebration of Jesus’s birth on December 25th? The answer is quite enlightening (pun very much intended).

With the shortest days of the year, December is shrouded in darkness more than any other month (at least in the northern hemisphere–the early church’s known world at the time). December can seem downright depressing. Further, the month also contains a solitary annual event: the winter solstice.

The winter solstice is the day the earth’s northern hemisphere is tilted furthest away from the sun, marking the official first day of winter. It is also the day considered the shortest of the year, with the northern-tier states of the US getting only about eight to nine hours of daylight, decreasing as one goes further north. People in northern Canada and Alaska receive only a few hours of light a day, and must hunker in for the cold, depressing darkness of winter.

However, though that solstice marks the shortest, darkest day of the year, it also marks the point after which the days begin to grow longer.

In other words, light is entering into the world.

Following the winter solstice by only a few days, December 25 marks both the coming of more daylight to dispel our physical darkness, and the coming of the Light of the World who dispels our spiritual darkness.

It feels like the two years following the whole COVID mess have been spiritually dark. It’s like our nation–in fact, the whole world–has been stumbling along, trying to regain our sense of equilibrium. We’re assessing the damage of lockdowns, individually and relationally. We suffered through another election which grows uglier by the year. We now accept lies as truth for no other reason than it’s “our guy” telling them.

Students are woefully behind on their level of studies from where they should be. Many of us who have been able to get by are now living paycheck to paycheck, draining our savings and running credit card balances in order to stay afloat while being told by the highest authorities that everything is peachy. Just this month, there have been mass shootings in both a gay club and a Walmart as well as a brutal quadruple homicide of four college kids while they slept.

We no longer believe anything from our media, government, and academic institutions. And every day, that level of mistrust grows progressively worse. Institutions we normally trust to fix things are themselves broken.

Nothing makes sense. When institutions we should trust are telling us things totally out of line with the reality around us, uncertainty prevails. And with no truth to stabilize, darkness saturates.

There is no solution.

Save one.

The dark reality Jesus entered into the first time is the same reality now.

We don’t need Christmas in spring or summer, when all is warm and bright. But we do need it in the darkest time of the year. Why do you think the most dominant decoration is the light?

As we enter into the Christmas 2022 season, don’t wait to start the season until you feel “festive.” That is the way the world does it, trying to drum up emotions and then falling even deeper into depression and darkness.

That is also putting the cart before the horse.

Acknowledge the Christmas season from within the darkness around you. Let the brilliance of Christmas trees and lights remind you that the true Light of the world has come and will come again.

Yes, it’s dark. But Christmas is the reminder that Emmanuel has come.

And the days will start growing longer.

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