This the Second Sunday of advent. Now I confess I am always
confused about which Sunday is which in Lent except the third Sunday is always
joy. I went with the UCC format for this year which Started Last week with
Hope, this week is Peace, next Sunday is Joy and the last Sunday of Lent is
Love.
As I reflect on Peace, I can’t help but state the obvious, that
we are about to celebrate and honor the peace that comes in the form of a small
child.
I remember when I was young, Christmas held so much magic
for me and truly it still does just in a different way. The story goes that my
father never really had a Christmas as a young man. His step father was rather
strict and thought it frivolous to spend money on such things. So, when he
married my Mother his first experience of a family Christmas was with my
Grandparents.
Making Christmas good for us kids became very important to
him. The Christmas tree would be delivered by Santa and we would wake up to the
tree all decorated with a train running around it, and Gifts underneath. Christmas
morning we were allowed one toy from our stocking before getting dressed for
morning mass. We would come home to a big breakfast and it wasn’t until the
dishes were done that, we were allowed to open our gifts.
Well life goes on, kids get older and traditions change.
Eventually Santa decided he could not afford the time to bring us our tree
anymore and, so we got to buy the tree and decorate it ourselves which was
always fun. First, we had to get the tree straight, which consisted of Mother
directing dad, he was so patient, it wasn’t until the third or fourth full
circle of moving front to back left to right that he would decide they were
done and it was straight enough.
Then dad had to fight with the lights. It seemed like a
constant battle that he would never win. Mother cherished her memories and
almost every ornament had a story and the story had to be shared and the
ornament admired. It took some time to get the tree together. After the angel
was placed neatly on the top of the tree, we would carefully unwrap the tissue
around nativity set and its creche. It had shepherds and sheep there was a cow
and a donkey. Of course, there was Mary and Joseph and an angel hung upon the
pinnacle.
The three kings were often set off in the distance because
they do not arrive until epiphany. During the 40 days of lent we would place a
piece of straw in the manger and Jesus would be laid in the straw on Christmas
eve. Oh, and the creche had a music box on the side. Once wound it played
silent night. Often in the evening I would get under the tree looking up from
below and play that music box. It was such a peace filled sound to hear silent
night plucked out on the metal spines of the little music box. Sometimes I
would fall asleep under the tree as silent night played.
The silent night story is one of my favorites at Christmas.
Not far from where I grew up is a silent night chapel an exact copy of the
chapel that stands in the town of Oberndorf. “In 1818, a roving band of actors
was performing in towns throughout the Austrian Alps. On December 23 they
arrived at Oberndorf, a village near Salzburg where they were to re-enact the
story of Christ's birth in the small Church of St. Nicholas. Unfortunately, the
St. Nicholas' church organ wasn't working and would not be repaired before
Christmas. (Note: some versions of the story point to mice as the problem;
others say rust was the culprit) Because the church organ was out of
commission, the actors presented their Christmas drama in a private home. That
Christmas presentation of the events in the first chapters of Matthew and Luke
put assistant pastor Josef Mohr in a meditative mood.
Instead of walking straight to his house that night, Mohr
took a longer way home. The longer path took him up over a hill overlooking the
village. From that hilltop, Mohr looked down on the peaceful snow-covered
village. Reveling in majestic silence of the wintry night, Mohr gazed down at
the glowing Christmas-card like scene. His thoughts about the Christmas play he
had just seen made him remember a poem he had written a couple of years before.
That poem was about the night when angels announced the birth of the
long-awaited Messiah to shepherds on a hillside. Mohr decided those words might
make a good carol for his congregation the following evening at their Christmas
eve service.
The one problem was that he didn't have any music to which
that poem could be sung. So, the next day Mohr went to see the church organist,
Franz Xavier Gruber. Gruber only had a few hours to come up with a melody which
could be sung with a guitar. However, by that evening, Gruber had managed to
compose a musical setting for the poem. It no longer mattered to Mohr and
Gruber that their church organ was inoperable. They now had a Christmas carol
that could be sung without that organ. On Christmas Eve, the little Oberndorf
congregation heard Gruber and Mohr sing their new composition to the
accompaniment of Gruber's guitar.
Weeks later, well-known organ builder Karl Mauracher arrived
in Oberndorf to fix the organ in St. Nicholas church. When Mauracher finished,
he stepped back to let Gruber test the instrument. When Gruber sat down, his
fingers began playing the simple melody he had written for Mohr's Christmas
poem. Deeply impressed, Mauracher took copies of the music and words of
"Silent Night" back to his own Alpine village, Kapfing. There, two
well-known families of singers — the Rainers and the Strassers — heard it.
Captivated by "Silent Night," both groups put the new song into their
Christmas season repertoire.
Silent night! holy night! All is calm, all is bright, 'Round
yon virgin mother and Child! Holy Infant, so tender and mild, Sleep in heavenly
peace, Sleep in heavenly peace. The Strasser sisters spread the carol across northern
Europe. In 1834, they performed "Silent Night" for King Frederick
William IV of Prussia, and he then ordered his cathedral choir to sing it every
Christmas eve. Twenty years after "Silent Night" was written, the
Rainers brought the song to the United States, singing it (in German) at the
Alexander Hamilton Monument located outside New York City's Trinity Church. In
1863, nearly fifty years after being first sung in German, "Silent
Night" was translated into English (by either Jane Campbell or John Young).
Eight years later, that English version made its way into print in Charles
Hutchins' Sunday School Hymnal. Today the words of "Silent Night" are
sung in more than 300 different languages around the world.” By the time the
song had become famous throughout Europe, its writer Joseph Mohr had died and
its composer was unknown.
Although Franz Gruber wrote to music authorities in Berlin
stating that he was the composer, the melody had been assumed to be the work of
Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven at various times and these thoughts persisted even
into the twentieth century. The controversy was put to rest in 1994 when a
long-lost arrangement of "Stille Nacht" in the hand of Joseph Mohr
was authenticated. In the upper right-hand corner of the arrangement, Mohr
wrote, "Melodie von Fr. Xav. Gruber."… Father Joseph Mohr's final
resting place is a tiny Alpine ski resort, Wagrain.
He was born into poverty in Salzburg in 1792 and died
penniless in Wagrain in 1848, where he had been assigned as pastor of the
church. He had donated all his earnings to be used for eldercare and the
education of the children in the area. His memorial from the townspeople is the
Joseph Mohr School located a dozen yards from his grave. The overseer of St.
Johann's, in a report to the bishop, described Mohr as "a reliable friend
of mankind, toward the poor, a gentle, helping father."
I share this story because this song blesses so many, as we contemplate
peace, I pray that each may experience a silent night. We watch and wait with
so many. We walk besides people,
literally and figuratively, who are watching for and hoping for a night when
there is no war, when there are no fights or hate crimes on our streets, when
the world can be still and rest in a peace filled silence.
There was a night like that once, a Christmas miracle if you
will, a miracle of a silent night. This Christmas Miracle has been shared over
and over again. The truce of 1914. It is said that on Christmas eve during
world war I the troops in the trenches were so close to one another that they
could hear each other talking. They could smell the aroma from each other’s
food. You see; “Pope Benedict XV, who took office that September, had
originally called for a Christmas truce, an idea that was officially rejected.
Yet it seems the sheer misery of daily life in the cold, wet, dull trenches was
enough to motivate troops to initiate the truce on their own — which means that
it’s hard to pin down exactly what happened.
There is a range of differing oral accounts, diary entries
and letters home from those who took part, which makes it virtually impossible
to speak of a “typical” Christmas truce as it took place across the Western
front. To this day historians continue to disagree over the specifics: no one
knows where it began or how it spread, or if, by some curious festive magic, it
broke out simultaneously across the trenches.
Nevertheless, some two-thirds of troops — about 100,000
people — are believed to have participated in the legendary truce. Most
accounts suggest the truce began with carol singing from the trenches on
Christmas Eve, “a beautiful moonlit night, frost on the ground, white almost
everywhere”, as Pvt. Albert Moren of the Second Queens Regiment recalled, in a
document later rounded up by the New York Times. Graham Williams of the Fifth
London Rifle Brigade described it in even greater detail: “First the Germans would
sing one of their carols and then we would sing one of ours, until when we
started up ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’ the Germans immediately joined in singing
the same hymn to the Latin words Adeste Fideles. And I thought, well, this is
really a most extraordinary thing – two nations both singing the same carol in
the middle of a war.”
The stories go on saying some kicked a make shift soccer
ball around…others shared gifts of cigarettes and a drink. For some the truce
lasted only a few hours for some the fighting did not resume till after new years.
It doesn’t matter how long the Christmas truce lasted, what it says about human
nature is amazing. Left to their own devices with no interference from
politically motivated ranking officers Peace found a way.
Peace found a way in
spite of all that was happening around them. Peace found a way in the midst of
a battle to enter into the hearts of two armies. Though it was the hymn of oh
come all ye faithful. It could have just as easily been silent night. The point
is on that night in the midst of hatred and war people experienced peace, the
peace of Christmas.
So, I pray that we may put this year behind us, as a people,
as a community and as a nation and we can start to watch for peace. You see
during the Lenten season when we watch for hope we become the hope, when we
watch for love we become that love and when we watch for joy, we become joy. So,
if we choose to watch for peace, we will see Peace, we will be peace, and we
will be a way for peace to be manifest in our world.
Christmas eve and Christmas day are when we celebrate God
breaking into the world as a gentle, helpless baby. As Isaiah 9:6 says “for
unto us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on
his shoulders. And he will be called wonderful counselor, Mighty God,
everlasting Father, Prince of peace” May the prince of peace reign in our
hearts and guide us to find a better way that we may begin to bring peace to
the world. That we may begin to bring peace to our community.
What does it mean to work for peace and to seek peace? It
means doing the small things like collecting toys for Christmas or feeding our
neighbors. It means finding ways to help us better serve each other through
partnering with other organizations. Perhaps we may want to look at a mission
trip or partner with another congregation or two to make a mission trip. Maybe
it means working with the recreation department to celebrate our senior
citizens and the work many do for our community.
Perhaps it means finding better ways to eat responsibly and continuing
to get nutrition to those in need. We may find new ways of bringing peace
through opportunities offered by the United Church of Christ by attending the
annual gathering, by participating in the called to serve day.
I pray we can watch for peace as a congregation as we
continue to work, to play, and to dream of new possibilities. I pray we can
watch for peace as we seek out better ways to work for a just world for all and
how that will continue to manifest for us as a congregation as well as on the
state and national levels. But more immediately I pray we can watch for peace each
day one during this Lenten season. I pray we see the gift of peace in those around
us. As we share Christmas in our own way, I pray that the peace we are watching
for arrives and stays in each one’s hearts and carries us through the year to come.
Amen.
