Sing Because We Cannot Stop: The Rev. Canon Dana Colley Corsello

I ask your prayers tonight in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen. Be seated.

Good evening. We gather tonight to celebrate and revel in one of the most beautiful gifts of our Anglican tradition, the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols. Although this service is associated with the famous post World War I broadcast from King’s College, Cambridge, the credit for its inception belongs to Bishop Edward White Benson of Truro Cathedral in Cornwall, England. He held the first candlelit service of Lessons and Carols at 10:00 PM on Christmas Eve in the year 1880. Bishop Vincent had an ulterior motive. He was distressed by the copious amounts of alcohol consumed in Cornish pubs during the festive season of Christmas. His scheme was to attract revelers out of the pubs and into church. It worked. The first service attracted 400 worshipers, and the rest, as they say, is history.

You see, up until the late 19th century, Christmas carols were performed solely by singers visiting parishioners’ homes. The particular carols they sang were excluded from worship because they were secular folk songs. And as you might imagine, a few originated from the corner pub.  James Koester, a brother of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Boston, recently posted this sentiment that I believe captures why you are here tonight. He writes, “It seems to me that we have a choice at Christmas. We can either wrap our Christmas in feeble and sentimental words, trying to achieve that Hallmark moment for ourselves and our world. Or we can sing. We can sing not in denial of the world as it is, but in hope of a world that could be. A world of mercy, justice and peace. A Magnificat world”.

One of the finest Anglican Episcopal church choirmasters, Mark Whitmire, was once asked, “Why does the human animal sing in the first place?” His response, “Because it can’t stop.”  I too believe that we sing simply because we have breath. Because God breathed life into God’s creation, and in astonishment at, and thanksgiving for, our very existence we use breath to sing. Paul tells us in Ephesians that, “We should be speaking to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual psalms.”  Singing is a form of communion. We sing with one another to celebrate. We sing with one another to grieve. We sing to praise the Lord. It has been said that one’s theology is no deeper than the hymns one sings. And in the historic dialogue between lex orandi, the law of praying, and lex credendi, the law of believing, there is ample precedent for saying not only that belief and prayer are related, but also that sung prayer shapes belief. In other words, singing is believing.  The Scottish minister and hymn writer, John Bell, sums it up this way, “What we sing informs and indeed shapes what we believe. Singing is not a neutral exercise. It should carry a government health warning that it can affect minds.”

What we sing molds who we are as a people. It brings strangers together and cements community with common purpose and bond. It can heal the world. When we attend a rock concert or a sporting event, we don’t ask the person next to us who they voted for in the last election. No, we cheer, we cry. We celebrate as one body. Were you, like me, chanting “Messi, Messi” on Sunday after the World Cup final? Come on people. Let’s hear it for Argentina. There you go.

Singing your heart out tonight, and during all of Advent and Christmas, is no different. These hymns and carols help us find and share our identity. In this way, like the season of Christmas itself, congregational singing is incarnational. In singing, we embody the sacred hymn. In what we sing, we create the body of Christ. We sing not just because we are commanded to, we sing because it’s our way of articulating the omnipotence of God. Because thinking will not suffice. There must be deep feeling.  And talking will not suffice. There must be singing. We sing because we cannot stop.

I also believe you are here tonight because church is the only place where time honored nostalgic carols can transport us into a liminal space of peace and quiet and escape. Much of the beauty of this service lies in its balance of movement and stillness. Public pageantry and private devotion, light and darkness. The music carries deep emotional weight for us. It evokes memory of what was and the eternal hope that with God nothing is impossible. These sturdy old hymns steady us when we’re weary and worn. They are shafts of brilliant sunlight through the clouds.  They unfold God’s earthbound church in heavenly harmony. Our blended voices are the sound of the redeemed, an auditory foretaste of heaven.

Singing these hymns and carols is also the mystical connection to our ancestors and generations now gone. Each Advent and Christmas, we joined with millions of Christians around the world singing the same music that was composed by believers from every era and branch of Christendom.  The melodies transport us into the barn where our nostrils are assailed by the smell of the musty hay and animals chewing their cud. Our ears pricked by their brays and bells that break the lonely silence of the night. And our eyes stunned by a newborn in a feed trough.  Year after year these sights and sounds unlock the mystery of God toward whom we journey. They break our guard. It’s only in our vulnerability that we can prepare a place in our hearts for the Christ child to be reborn.

This liturgical journey toward Bethlehem begins with a young treble voice crying out as from the wilderness. “Once in Royal David City stood a lowly cattle shed.” We are being summoned and claimed as God’s people. And from this lowly child lying in the manger, we learn why God gifted his only begotten son.  “This day is born a savior, of pure virgin bright, to free all those who trust in him, from Satan’s power and might.  O tidings of comfort and joy”. The Ave Maria assures us that the Theotokos, the God bearer, is worthy to be the mother of God. “Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb”. We get lost in the “Amen” of Parsons mesmerizing arrangement. It is ethereal, and heaven gazing, the architecture of the music, matching the vaulted splendor of this building.

What follows is a joyful chorus song by angels, “Shepherds, why this jubilee? Come to Bethlehem on bended knee. Gloria in Excelsis Deo.” Oh, and then we too are asked to celebrate. Christmas has finally arrived. “Joy to the world, the Lord has come, let earth receive her king.”  The last verse of this carol is the gospel in miniature, “He rules the world with truth and grace and makes the nations prove, the glories of his righteousness and wonders of his love”.  But that’s not the end. Generations later, as we retell and relive the story, a lullaby sung to candlelight brings the world to its knees. “Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright. Sleep in heavenly peace.”

And finally, my friends, our journey to Christmas culminates in a hymn written by Charles Wesley more than 265 years ago, “Hark the Herald Angel sings, Glory to the Newborn King.”  What else can I tell you? That sentiment speaks for itself. So let us sing. Let us remind one another why God created us, redeemed us, and sanctified us. It’s so that our voices and word and song testify to the only reason word became flesh and lived among us. Love.  Love that heals. Love that forgives.  Love that celebrates. Love that binds us together in perfect harmony. Let us love and sing because we can. Let us love and sing because we cannot stop. Amen.