| DAY 19 - ANGELS WE HAVE HEARD ON HIGH |
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This song was written in 1739
by Charles Wesley, brother to
John Wesley, who founded the
Methodist Church. Here it's
sung by the St. Paul's Cathedral
Choir of London, accompanied
by the English Chamber Orchestra,
John Scott director. It's on the
London label, released in '96 -
THE CHOIRBOY'S CHRISTMAS.
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This is an instrumental, with
hammered dulcimer, guitar,
string quartet and oboe.
It's a traditional French carol
that was translated to English
in 1855 by Bishop James Chadwick,
from a Cumberland Records CD
titled ON CHRISTMAS DAY.
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This is basically the same
song, but with a different
title and some difference in
the words, which are attributed
here to a J. Montgomery, also
from the 19th century.
No matter, the King's College
Choir of Cambridge does it fine.
It's on the EMI label from a '79 CD:
A FESTIVAL OF LESSONS &
CAROLS FROM KINGS.
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The article below is interesting for a number of reasons,
not the least of which is that this comes from a website for pastors -
reformedworship.org sponsored by the Christian Reformed Church. Here's
resources for planning and leading worship. It's ideas about how to get
your message across. In this case it's how to get mileage out of angels.
Very interesting.
Have You Seen the Angels?
by Kenneth D Coeman
Pastor, Sonlight Community Christian Reformed Church
Lynden, Washington
It's fall. You are already noticing the Christmas catalogues showing up in your mailbox.
Though school has barely begun, your calendar tells you it is time to plan for Advent and Christmas.
And the very thought of it makes you tremble just a little.
You are a conscientious pastor or worship leader involved in planning worship in your church.
You know how easily the meaning and magnificence of the incarnation of our Lord can be trivialized.
You know how slowly your own heart warms up to its radiance, how dull your own mind
can be to its meaning. But still, each year that holy jealousy
for the glory of Christmas is stirred within you.
The hope begins to build again within your heart that once more this year no one in your congregation
will leave the manger unclear about what happened, unmoved by its magnitude,
or unchanged by its message. You want so much more for them than mere amazement
or a touch of "the Christmas spirit," meaningful as such emotions may be.
You want them to experience what people under Nazi occupation and oppression during
World War II felt when they heard the news that D-Day had come: a sudden and solid hope
that liberation is imminent, hope that quickly crescen-doed into inextinguishable joy.
One doorway into such a vision of Christmas is opened for us by, of all creatures, the angels.
Angels are everywhere during the advent of Christ. The largest concentration of angels anywhere
in the Bible occurs right here—rebuking, informing, encouraging, guiding, protecting, advising,
and most of all, worshiping. Moreover, their presence and message did precisely then what
we desire now for ourselves and our people: they transformed the vision of ordinary folks
going about their ordinary routines by revealing to them that the living God
was in fact entering their world—that he was, as in the case of the shepherds,
right in the neighborhood. A rigid priest, a baffled young virgin, a strict fiance,
common shepherds—all were met with messages by angels.
The impact on each of them was profoundly life-changing.
If our people can be led to see the incarnation through angels' eyes, should we expect anything less?
Moreover, if ever people were open to messages from angels, they are open now.
Angels have been making quite a stir in the popular imagination.
In fact, in the last two years there has been a tidal wave of fascination with angels.
Harvard Divinity School now offers a course on angels. Boston College offers two.
The most celebrated play on Broadway recently was Tony Kushner's
Pulitzer Prize-winning Angels in America, the story of a divine messenger
who ministers to a man with AIDS.
There are angels-only boutiques, angel newsletters, angel seminars, angels on Sonja Live.
Especially at Christmas there are angels everywhere. We make them in snowdrifts, hang them on trees,
bake them in cookies, play them in pageants.
• Billy Graham's book on angels has been republished. The first edition sold over 3 million copies.
• Hillary Clinton wears a gold pin on days she needs special help. "Angel's wings," she explains.
• Time magazine devoted its 1993 Christmas issue cover story to angels.
Angels are in the media and cultural air. You can even buy books on angels
at the local warehouse supermarket outlet!
Given these realities, we are presenting the themes and formats of the following five services
[not included here] in the hope that the angelic light once shed upon the birth of Christ
will illuminate minds and brighten hearts still today.
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More From An Essay by Philip Yancey
There is one more view of Christmas I have never seen
on a Christmas card, probably because no artist, not even William Blake,
could do it justice. Revelation 12 pulls back the curtain
to give us a glimpse of Christmas as it must have looked
from somewhere far beyond Andromeda:
Christmas from the angels' viewpoint.
The account differs radically from the birth stories in the Gospels.
Revelation does not mention shepherds and an infanticidal king;
rather, it pictures a dragon leading a ferocious struggle in heaven.
A woman clothed with the sun and wearing a crown of twelve stars
cries out in pain as she is about to give birth.
Suddenly the enormous red dragon enters the picture,
his tail sweeping a third of the stars out of the sky
and flinging them to the earth. He crouches hungrily before the woman,
anxious to devour her child the moment it is born.
At the last second the infant is snatched away to safety,
the woman flees into the desert, and all-out cosmic war begins.
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Revelation is a strange book by any measure,
and readers must understand its style to make sense
of this extraordinary spectacle. In daily life two parallel histories
occur simultaneously, one on earth and one in heaven.
Revelation, however, views them together,
allowing a quick look behind the scenes.
On earth a baby was born, a king caught wind of it,
a chase ensued. In heaven the Great Invasion had begun,
a daring raid by the ruler of the forces of good
into the universe's seat of evil.
John Milton expressed this point of view majestically
in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained,
poems which make heaven and hell the central focus and earth
a mere battleground for their clashes.
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When I read Phillips' fantasy, I thought of the pictures
beamed back to earth from the Apollo astronauts,
who described our planet as "whole and round and beautiful and small,"
a blue-green-and-tan globe suspended in space.
Jim Lovell, reflecting on the scene later, said,
"It was just another body, really, about four times bigger than the moon.
But it held all the hope and all the life and all the things
that the crew of the Apollo 8 knew and loved.
It was the most beautiful thing there was to see in all the heavens."
That was the viewpoint of a human being.
To the little angel, though, earth did not seem so impressive.
He listened in stunned disbelief as the senior angel told him
that this planet, small and insignificant and not overly clean,
was the renowned Visited Planet:
"Do you mean that our great and glorious Prince...
went down in Person to this fifth-rate little ball?
Why should He do a thing like that?"...
The little angel's face wrinkled in disgust.
"Do you mean to tell me," he said,
"that He stooped so low as to become one of those
creeping, crawling creatures of that floating ball?"
"I do, and I don't think He would like you
to call them 'creeping, crawling creatures' in that tone of voice.
For, strange as it may seem to us, He loves them.
He went down to visit them to lift them up to become like Him."
The little angel looked blank.
Such a thought was almost beyond his comprehension.
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Bryan Duncan is really good, so is this song.
It's from his Christmas Is Jesus CD, released in '05 on the Word label.
Below is a duet with country artists Alan Jackson and Alison Krauss.
It's from his Honky Tonk Christmas CD released in '92
on the Arista Nashville label.
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It is almost beyond my comprehension too,
and yet I accept that this notion is the key to
understanding Christmas and is, in fact, the touchstone of my faith.
As a Christian I believe that we live in parallel worlds.
One world consists of hills and lakes and barns and
politicians and shepherds watching their flocks by night.
The other consists of angels and sinister forces and
somewhere out there places called heaven and hell.
One night in the cold, in the dark, among the wrinkled hills of Bethlehem,
those two worlds came together at a dramatic point of intersection.
God, who knows no before or after, entered time and space.
God, who knows no boundaries, took on the shocking confines
of a baby's skin, the ominous restraints of mortality.
"He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation,"
an apostle would later write; "He is before all things,
and in him all things hold together." But the few eyewitnesses
on Christmas night saw none of that.
They saw an infant struggling to work never-before-used lungs.
Could it be true, this Bethlehem story of a
Creator descending to be born on one small planet?
If so, it is a story like no other.
Never again need we wonder whether what happens
on this dirty little tennis ball of a planet matters
to the rest of the universe.
Little wonder a choir of angels broke out in spontaneous song,
disturbing not only a few shepherds but the entire universe.
Philip Yancey
American Evangelical author
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The Waylin' Jennys - no matter what the music, you gotta love the name!
This group got its start in a guitar shop in Winnipeg, Manitoba
seven years ago, and has had a lot of good things happen on their road.
Singer/songwriter Annabelle Chvostek from Montreal, a member of the trio,
wrote this piece. It's off their '06 release Firecracker on Red House records.
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Apocalypse Lullaby
by Annabelle Chvostek
Hurricanes will come
Earthquakes break the walls
Oceans rise
Empires fall
Enter world, light unshown
Follow heart, follow home
Here we are, light unshown
One round heart, one round home
Spin the speed of light
Tetrahedron blue
One last paradise
You can make for you
Enter world, light unshown
Follow heart, follow home
Here we are, light unshown
One round heart, one round home
Faster than a ship
Further than a bomb
See the glowing grid
Send love throughout the throng
Enter world, light unshown
Follow heart, follow home
Here we are, light unshone
One round heart, one round home
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