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In This Weak Unarmed Wise
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis December 10, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill I Samuel 2:1-10 Luke 1:46-56
On this second Sunday in Advent, there can be no doubt that the backdrop of Christmas is neither the quiet of new-fallen snow upon the hillside nor the festive warmth of well-wishers and wassail nor the misheard and so sentimentalized story of cattle lowing as the poor baby wakes. Rather the backdrop of Christmas is and ever has been war. The Bible tells us so not simply because of Herod’s murderous decree at Christ’s birth (that the innocents be slaughtered in the same land presently strewn with human carnage), but says Scripture: from the beginning--in Adam’s Fall and Cain’s murderous jealously and Abel’s blood crying out to God from the ground--the cacophony of war has rivaled the Word which was with God and was God, making human sin and death the inevitable backdrop of Christmas. This is so in two senses. Against a world continually at war with itself, no matter whether Quirinius is governor of Syria or Bashar Assad is, Christmas declares that the One for whom we wait, the one coming again to reign, is literally the Prince of Peace. He is the Word spoken against the wars we wage in His name! He is the Word made flesh and so subjected to our murderous jealousies. He is the Word that is the power of God revealed, once for all, in this weak unarmed wise. So given Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, Burma, Burundi and Darfur, this surely is the first sense, the sense closest to our lives in which war is the backdrop of Christmas. As to the second and very much related sense, Christmas marks the battle pitched by God against all that God has not willed in creation: despots and ruthless dictators; devastating disease and the disasters of so-called biblical proportions; poverty and hunger; injustice and wickedness. This is the battle of which Hannah sings; this is the victory proclaimed in the future perfects of Mary’s Magnificat. Israel’s consolation and Christ’s birth represent God’s wrath against evil personified: this little babe so few days old has come to rifle Satan’s fold. Both senses surely were in the imagination of Benjamin Britten as he composed the Ceremony of Carols on a ship bound from America to England in 1942. Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer three years earlier, he could not stay away. For Bonhoeffer the impetus was his need to be a part of the resistance if he were to have a voice in the rebuilding of society after Hitler’s demise. For Britten the reason must be read through the texts he chose and set for children’s voices on that long voyage home. “If there is one quality which sets the music of Britten apart from that of his contemporaries,” observed Martin Neary, “it is surely his unerring response to the theme of innocence,” a response no doubt heightened as news of the Nazi’s Blitzkrieg reached him from across the sea. “…the innocent children,” W.H. Auden had written just months before he sailed, “who whispered so excitedly/Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be/Grew up when it opened,” when it opened onto a world that still preferred the darkness. For innocents caught in the Time Being which was the “most trying time of all”, Britten composed a ceremony of carols to be sung against the backdrop of a war necessarily joined to defeat the nadir of darkness itself. “I believe in the artist being a part of society,” Britten said in a BBC interview on the occasion of his 50th year. A pacifist and, in his words, a dedicated Christian, influenced by the Bishop of Woolwich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he offered his art as an act of resistance no less urgent though at a remove from the threat Dietrich faced. Doubtless Britten must have found it anything but coincidental that, upon his arrival at the dock in England, the draft of both Ceremony of Carols and Ode to St. Cecelia were confiscated by the authorities. Unable to decipher musical notation, they feared that his strange markings were a novel attempt at espionage. In truth, they were so much more subversive—and still are--for those with ears tutored to hear the gospel hidden in these ancient words and masterfully wrought cadences! So let us lean in to listen. In the first place, “Welcom Yole” calls upon the saints, the martyrs and the innocents to proclaim the New Year, the New Time inaugurated by Christ’s birth and insinuated against the backdrop of war and battle and torture. The feasts of Steven, John and Thomas as well as Holy Innocents Day, recalling Herod’s massacre, mark in song the liturgical season of Christ’s nativity and call to mind the dead and the disappeared in every land and every time. From the beginning, the biblical narrative has transformed victims into martyrs, the murdered into saints, the tortured into inheritors of the promises of God, setting the power of their sacrifice within the larger story of God’s redeeming purposes. Note how radically different this reading is from the reading that sends children into malls with bombs strapped to their backs or that enlists the young in the state-sanctioned violence of their elders who have not first counted the cost. Here is a counter-story sung against the cadences of war, against the pretension of human power, igniting our imaginations for the peace Christ will bring. In the second place we hear that “There is no rose of such vertu” as Mary, whose womb contained heaven and earth. Res Miranda (Thing of wonder) the choir chants. By this rose we may well see the Trinity. Pares forma (made incarnate). Gaudeamus (We rejoice). And so like the shepherds we leave our worldly mirth to follow this joyful birth until: Transeamus (We are changed.) The Latin phrases--from the liturgy that hold in solution the church’s time, God’s time, the Advent of Christ’s birth--are placed in tension, musically, with the “time being” of our sin and death. Contrasting the human word and the word of God’s address, Britten uses a technique known to musicians since the Middle Ages. It is based, according to one commentator, on the following logic: “‘God is Perfection; God is Triune; therefore Perfection is Triple; Humankind is Imperfect; Humankind is Duple (male/female, arms, eyes, ears, legs); therefore, Duple is Imperfection.’ The movement is set in ‘imperfect’ human time [2/2] and the harp insistently maintains that duple pulse throughout; but the Latin phrases [the phrases from the liturgy, the church’s time, God’s time] are set as triplets, as ‘perfections’ against the imperfect accompaniment.” Once again, the background of Christmas can only be our duplicitous human words at war with one another, words now countered by God’s Triple Word, God’s Triune Being, God’s eternity in which we “wonder” and “rejoice” and by which “we are changed.” Then finally, following the falling melodic lines that make God’s becoming human to seem “As Dew in Aprille”, it is “This Little Babe”, driving every line upward, who brings us to the heart of the gospel. The text is a poem written by the Jesuit martyr Robert Southwell. Judged a traitor for his refusal to recant the faith of Rome, he was hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, England in 1595 by Elizabeth’s vicars. Not yet forty at his death, Southwell complied with his captors, believing the battle to be not his but God’s. His poem thereby proclaims the second sense in which war is the backdrop for Christmas: Christmas as the battle pitched by God in this weak unarmed wise against all that God has not willed in creation. Hence “This Little Babe” is set in the point and counterpoint of a canon, each verse adding voice upon voice until the notes are compressed into a “stretto” whose speed suggests the cacophony of battle: God’s battle waged not as an other-worldly myth but with real flesh and blood, God’s own flesh and blood. In echoes of Hannah and Mary’s song, the carol invites us to imagine the inverse of the wars we wage: “With tears he fights and wins the field,/His naked breast stands for a shield;/His battering shot are babish cries,/His arrows looks of weeping eyes,/His martial ensigns Cold and Need,/And feeble flesh his warrior’s steed.” That is to say, the power God wields against all that God has not willed bears no resemblance to the legitimated violence of nation-states, including ours! And though “human thought ascribes to God superlatives of power, wisdom and goodness,” we soon will confess that, “God reveals God’s love in Jesus Christ by showing power in the form of a servant, wisdom in the folly of the cross, and goodness in receiving sinful men and women.” Yet I think this canon suggests something even more profound theologically and musically. At the start, the voices in unison announce the purpose of the incarnation—to rifle Satan’s fold, to rob the flock that has been left to wander in darkness—and also announce a strategy of engagement—a weak and unarmed child will take evil by surprise. But what more I hear and viscerally feel in the two verse canon that is this carol’s centerpiece, hear in the overlapping and echoing passages that speed toward their triumphal end, is the assumption in quick succession, voice on voice, of our vulnerable human parts—tears, a naked breast, babish cries, weeping eyes, cold and need, feeble flesh—as well as our vulnerable worldly estate—a stall, a broken wall, the crib our trench and haystalks our stakes—all assumed in the weak unarmed wise of this little babe. I hear in Britten’s music the counterpoint of birth, the birth pangs of Mary’s rapid labor, reversing the backdrop of battle as she bears to us the child born to die, that death shall have no dominion. The canon ends and we are counseled by the unified voice of innocence to “flit not” from this heavenly Boy. “The point of identity,” writes theologian Robert Jenson, “infinitely approachable and infinitely to be approached, is perfect harmony between the conversation of the redeemed and the conversation that is God. In the conversation God is, meaning and melody are one.” The cacophony of war is heard no more. “Deo Gracias” the innocents therefore sing in the end, giving thanks for Adam’s Fall. Had he not taken the apple, say the old theologians, Mary would not be called blessed who bore to us God’s Son. “Deo Gracias” rises again in a stretto, this time gathering the voices of all creation, redeemed and finally singing together, meaning and melody one: “Hodie Christus” Christ is born! Gloria in excelsis Deo! Alleluia! |