Christmas Eve 2023

“Sleep in Heavenly Peace”

Broadway Christian Church

Don’t worry, I won’t be long.  Not tonight anyway.  Not on Christmas Eve.  You see, I’m mindful of something a wise colleague told me years ago when as a young pastor I was anxiously preparing for my first Christmas Eve service.  I say anxiously preparing because aside from Easter Sunday I count Christmas Eve as one of the High Holy Days of the church year and I wanted to say just the right thing and couldn’t think of anything and I was beginning to panic. 

So, I called an older, trusted colleague and shared my plight. I asked him, “Do you have any advice on what I should say on Christmas Eve?”  And without hesitation he responded with four words that have stuck with me now for almost four decades: “Don’t say. Just sing.” Wise advice. It’s true:  music takes us places mere words cannot.  When it comes to making the journey to Bethlehem, speaking can only get us so far.  There comes a point at which singing needs to take over if we’re going to make to the manger. 

I’m trying to imagine Christmas Eve without music, without singing, without instruments, without special music, without carols.  And needless to say, I can’t.  Come Christmas, most everybody has some sort of song they are either singing or listening to.             

The other day I was in traffic on Stadium down near the Mall when I looked over and saw a guy in the lane next to me, about my age, singing to his heart’s content.  He looked over and saw me, looked a bit sheepish at first, and then just shrugged his shoulders with a great big smile on his face. I gave him the thumbs up.     

Neuroscientists tell us we have two hemispheres in our brain – the left is our logical hemisphere and the right is our creative hemisphere.  That’s where music resides. Music taps into the power of the right hemisphere of our brains and then makes its way into our hearts and souls... burrows deep down into the marrow where it sticks with us even when we’ve long forgotten most everything else. Someone called certain pieces of favorite music “a tattoo on the subconscious.[1]” Another person wrote, “Deep within [our spirits], well below the frost line of illness and loss, the hymns survive.[2]” It’s true!  Thank God, it’s true! My wife Jennie used to go out to an assisted living center on Thursday afternoons, the wing for men and women with dementia.  She didn’t try to say, she sang. She played old favorite tunes from movies, Broadway, and sanctuary is what she did and it never failed to happen – those dear folks, some of whom couldn’t call their loved ones by name any longer, would sing along word for word. When we reach the point we’re no longer able to take another step or another breath, music-- singing-- can carry us onward, take us to the very throne of God.

And when it comes to hymns that burrow deep down within us, Silent Night tops the list.  What would Christmas Eve be without candlelight, communion, and Silent Night? This Christmas Eve marks the 205th anniversary of the first singing of Silent Night. In 1816, an Austrian priest named Joseph Mohr penned the lyrics. Tradition has it that two years later, 1818, Franz Gruber composed the music for Mohr’s lyrics in time for the hymn to be sung at the Christmas Eve Mass in Oberndorf.  So it is that today is the 205th anniversary of the singing of Silent Night on Christmas Eve. 

On a Christmas Eve twenty-five years ago today, I had come home from the 11 o’clock Candlelight Communion Service, taken off my suit and tie, and was getting ready for bed when the phone rang. It was a woman in my church, one of our elders. Joan was a volunteer lay chaplain at the local hospital. She had apparently drawn the short straw to be on call on Christmas Eve and had been called in.

A woman was keeping vigil with her elderly mother who had been comatose for some time and appeared to be in her final hours.  She asked for a chaplain.   

“David,” my church member Joan said, “I don’t think I can do this. I don’t know what to say. It’s Christmas Eve. Could you come over, please, and go in with me?”

I said, “Joan, it’s actually Christmas Day now. 12:45 a.m. I’ll be right over.”

Joan and I met at the nursing station down the hall from the room. We prayed and pondered what we would do when we went in. When we made our decision, we walked down to the room, my lay chaplain elder and me. We walked in. A middle-aged woman was sitting next to her aged mother’s bed, gently stroking her hand. We introduced ourselves. 

“She’s not responding,” she said. “The doctors say it’s only a matter of time. Mother may not know you’re here, but I do. Thank you for coming.”

We talked for a bit as the woman told us about her mother who lay silently before us, breathing slowly, shallowly.   

Then Joan looked toward me and nodded.  I said, “Let’s pray together.” And with that, I knelt at the elderly woman’s bedside, placed my hand gently on her shoulder, invited the daughter to place her hand on her mother, and I sang:

Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright. 

            Her daughter joined in and Joan, my elder, joined in.

Round yon virgin Mother and Child.  Holy infant so tender and mild.

And then it happened: the woman’s mother began to move her lips to form the words I was singing. No sound came out, just the whispered shape of the words on her lips:

Sleep in heavenly peace.  Sleep in heavenly peace.

In the first hours of Christmas, she took her last breaths with her daughter at her side and slept in heavenly peace. 

Hear me when I say Love waits for us tonight. God’s love.  The love of Jesus Christ our Lord. 

May the heavenly peace of Christ be with you, in you, above you, before you, beneath you this holy night and forevermore.

Don’t say anything.  Let’s just sing “Silent Night.” Amen?

[1] Quoted in a 1986 Newsweek review of a newly released hymnal.  Author unknown.

[2] Sarah S. Miller. “Below the Frost Line:  Hymns of Faith.” The Christian Century, 12 December 1990.