Christmas Eve Musings, December 24, 2013. From Lake Bunyoni, Uganda

Christmas Eve Day, December 24

In the US, Christmas music plays. In shopping malls and grocery stores popular “holiday music” tempts patrons to continue their spending. The BBC and public radio stations broadcast the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols from Kings College. If I were at my home in Ohio, I would be tearing up at the last two  stanzas of Once inRoyal David’s City, singing the familiar alto part to Adam Lay  Ybounden, and soaking in the familiar scriptures and relishing the carols familiar and not.

But here at Lake Bunyoni, the music is the birds. The birds sing for Christmas.

Once in Royal David's City, vs. 5 and 6:

And our eyes at last shall see him,

Through his own redeeming love,

For that child so dear and gentle

Is our Lord in heaven above;

And he leads his children on

To the place where he is gone.

Not in that poor lowly stable,

With the oxen standing by,

We shall see him; but in heaven,

Set at Gods right hand on high;

When like stars his children drowned

All in white shall wait around.

Christmas Eve

Sitting here on the dock. Wooden, dug-out canoes rest and bob against each other, slender bodies at rest. A bird whistles above—a trilling and whirring song. Another bird calls a high come here. In the rushes, there is a chuck-a-chuck-a, like a bow dancing on the violin strings. A drum beats in the distance. Christmas adagios.

As I listen, I think that perhaps the sounds of that first Christmas Eve were not too different. There would have been sheep bleating and the soft rustle of hay as cows, and oxen, and donkeys settled for the night. Nature’s adagios.

"Thanks be to God."

The congregation responds to each of the nine scripture readings during the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols with, “Thanks be to God.” It’s the familiar refrain following scripture readings at other Anglican and Episcopal services.  This year, as I listened to a recording of Lessons and Carols, the words “Thanks be to God” startled me at the end of the sixth lesson. That lesson, Luke 2:1-7, tells of Jesus’ birth. It ends with the line, “…for there was no room for them in the inn.”

Reader: “…for there was no room for them in the inn.”

Congregation: “Thanks be to God.”

How startling. We give thanks that there was no room in the inn. We give thanks that God came to us in a stable. Yes. That is something for which to give thanks.

Had Jesus been born in the inn, the weary shepherds would have been barred from the event. It’s doubtful an innkeeper would allow a band of sweaty, smelly shepherds to crowd the hallway. No animals would have snuffled and cooed, and breathed the air where the young family sheltered. God came to us in humble dwellings, “in that poor and lowly stable.” God with us in our sweat and dirt and smells. God with us on and in the earth. 

Thanks be to God.