Sermon: Nine Lessons and Carols CCSL#10 Sunday 18/12/22
Theme: What is at the core of our message this time of year
There is comfort to be had in attending to the traditions we erect in our lives. Participating in rituals time after time brings order in chaos and comfort when distressed. Take for example this service of Nine Lessons and Carols. While not the oldest Anglican liturgy by any stretch of the imagination, being just over a hundred years old, it has been a touchstone of many Christmas traditions for a lot of people, myself included. The form and structure of our service is the same as that conducted at Kings College, Cambridge. The nine lessons proclaimed from Scripture tonight are the exact same nine lessons that will be proclaimed, albeit in the Kings James version, at Kings College on Christmas Eve, a tradition dating back to Christmas 1918. I have many memories of watching this service on Christmas Eve and I don’t think I can get across in words how joyful it is for me to conduct this liturgy tonight. For me, to come to this service is to say, that no matter how difficult or painful or challenging the last year has been, there is order to be found, beauty to be expressed, music to be savoured and solace to be had in the world; if for but one brief shinning moment. The reality is that we know this service so well that it wraps itself around us and brings us peace and calm and joy. The irony is that its creator was endeavouring to find something new to face the terrors of his day because there wasn’t anything so beautiful that he could wrap around his people in 1918. The truth is that this service was constructed in the face of the grief and horror of the First World War, which had ended only 6 weeks before.
The author of what we know as the traditional ‘Nine Lessons and Carols Service’ was The Rev. Eric Milner-White, a graduate of King’s College who had been appointed chaplain at the college in 1912, four years after his ordination as a priest.
When the war broke out in 1914, he volunteered as a military chaplain, and witnessed the horrors of trench warfare on the Western front. “Most of life is at night,” he wrote in a letter back home,
“and the nights are filled with prolonged terror—a horrid, weird, furtive existence. . .. Battle is indescribable, unimaginable. A continuous firework of light balls goes up from the German trenches. But most awesome is the noise. We feel powerless against those splitting cracks and roars, and dream of the metal tearing its way into the bodies of poor men.”
Decorated for courage under fire in combat, he was released after what he called “a battle of special horror” in early 1918 and returned to King’s College, where he was appointed Dean.
After the end of the war on November 11, Milner-White set out to create a special Christmastide service “as a gift to the city of Cambridge” that would serve two purposes.
First, he wanted to grieve the loss of young men from the city, and especially from his own college. Once all were accounted for, one hundred and ninety-nine men or more than one-in- five of the members of King’s College had died during the war, including Milner-White’s close friend and roommate. Eric wanted something that would speak into this horror.
Second, Milner-White wanted to reform liturgical practices of his day so that the simple beauty of Christian worship would shine through and attract those who had lost their faith in the horrors of the war, whether serving in it or watching it take place. So, while we take joy and comfort in what has become a tradition and a service we are so familiar with, my challenge to us all is to take to heart the intent of the Dean of King’s College and find once again the simple beauty of the Christian message expressed in Scripture and Carol. While we may look upon the service with sentimental eyes can I suggest for us all that there is intellectual depth to the service. In Milner-White’s own words, “the main theme is the development of the loving purposes of God” as viewed “through the windows and the words of the Bible.” Yet he aimed at simplicity rather than complex explication of God’s purposes in human history. Rather than a lecture, he designed the service to focus on “colour, warmth, and delight.” An added irony is that Milner-White’s original service didn’t have space for a sermon but rather wanted the Scriptures to speak for themselves. And so while I am preaching; it is more a reflection upon the service as a whole rather than the message of the Scriptures which I do hope speak for themselves.
This service was not the first lessons and carols service ever produced. The liturgy was originally devised by the first Bishop of Truro, Bishop Edward White Benson in 1880. As an interesting aside, it is said that the reason behind Bishop Benson’s service was that he was concerned at the excessive consumption of alcohol in Cornish pubs during the festive season, and thus sought a means of attracting revellers out of the pubs and into church by offering a religious celebration of Christmas. That being said, Milner-White established the tradition of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College on Christmas Eve in 1918. It has been celebrated ever since, and was first broadcast on radio in 1928 and TV in 1954. While he may have borrowed the structure of lessons and carols from the Bishop of Truro, Milner-White did create the original and what is a particularly beautiful and fitting bidding prayer which begins the service.
It’s called a “bidding prayer” because it’s bidding us, inviting us, to enter into this special time with all our hearts. It invites us to “let it be our care and delight” to step out of the frantic pace of this world and to hear again the message of the Angels, that a Saviour had been born to us which is Christ the Lord. Here’s the first part of the Bidding Prayer:
Beloved in Christ, be it this Christmastide our care and delight to prepare ourselves to hear again the message of the Angels, in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, and the Babe lying in a manger. Let us read and mark in Holy Scripture the tale of the loving purposes of God from the first days of our disobedience unto the glorious Redemption brought us by this holy Child, and let us make this Church, dedicated to his holy Name, glad with our carols of praise.
Though it begins by remembering Christ, the Bidding Prayer does not retreat from the world. Its second section invites us to remember in our prayers “the needs of the whole world:”
let us pray for the needs of his whole world; for peace and goodwill over all the earth; for unity and fellowship within the Church he came to build, and especially in this our land. And because this of all things would rejoice his heart, let us at this time remember in his name the poor and the helpless; the cold, the hungry and the oppressed; the sick in body and in mind, and those who mourn; the lonely and the unloved; the aged and the little children; all who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love.
One hundred and ninety-nine men from King’s College alone died in the war, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Milner-White’s countrymen, and the millions world-wide. It is remarkable to think that having just returned from the war, with all its senseless death and trauma, Milner-White could call both to pray for the world’s pain, and also to delight again in Christ. If Eric Milner-White could delight in Christ at the end of a World War, each of us can find hope in Christ in the midst of our struggles. As we more deeply enter the season of Advent, maybe we feel overwhelmed, tired, or just distracted and anxious by all that needs to be done. Maybe what is happening in the world around us, with a war in Europe threatening to escalate, and economic pressures building and the ever-more threat of climate change, is bringing a sense of doom and despair. Maybe, we all need to hear this bidding prayer – this invitation once again to let it be our care and delight in this holy season to prepare our hearts and homes for the coming of our Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. The Lord be with you.