Advent Festival of Lessons & Carols
This Sunday, the clergy, choir and guest musicians, and the Red Door Ringers will offer a service of Advent Lessons and Carols. Embracing a tradition that dates to 19th-century England, the festival combines hymns with nine readings from Scripture to tell the anticipated story of salvation, beginning with Creation in the Book of Genesis, working through Messianic readings from the Old Testament, and then concluding with a passage from the Gospel according to Luke 1:26-56. In that passage, we learn of the angel Gabriel’s visit to Mary, more formally known as the Annunciation. In this passage is also the text for Mary’s Magnificat, which became an important canticle of the church, and one of the key elements of Anglican Choral Evensong.
The Festival of Advent Lessons & Carols originated in Cornwall, England. The Bishop of Truro, seeking to draw people out of the pubs and to refocus their attention on the true meaning of the season, came up with the idea of combining Christmas music with Scripture readings. The first “Nine Lessons and Carols” was held on Christmas Eve 1880 in a temporary wooden structure because the cathedral was still under construction.
It was nearly four decades later though, in the wake of the first World War, that the popularity of the service spread throughout the Church of England. Just months before the end of the war, it was King’s College, Cambridge, dean Eric Milner-White who faced the daunting task of planning a Christmas Eve service. In the safety of Cambridge, the echoes of war still rung in his own memory.
Erin Jones writes in a December 18, 2023, article from “Christianity Today”:
When the war broke out, the 30-year-old left his position at the school to serve, trading “the stillness and beauty of King’s Chapel for the noise, brutality and squalor of the French front line—the life of an army chaplain,” writes author Alexandra Coghlan in Carols from King’s.
Along with a generation of young men, Milner-White witnessed horrors in battle. Coghlan quotes the chaplain writing about the fireworks and noise from the German trenches: “We felt so powerless against those splitting cracks and roars, and dreamt of the metal tearing its way into the bodies of poor men.”
Milner-White returned to King’s College as dean in 1918 and had to consider how to tend to the emotional and spiritual wounds soldiers brought home. He began to formulate a service with the suffering and trauma of the last four years in mind, a service marked by beauty, simplicity, and truth.
“He didn’t doubt, I don’t think, the love of God or the presence of God. What he wanted to know was how to communicate it to people who had been brutalized and traumatized by this kind of experience,” said chapel dean Stephen Cherry in the BBC documentary 100 Years of King’s Carols.
Since then, the popularity of a service of Lessons and Carol has grown across the globe and through the last century. Its form can be found in Anglican, Catholic, and Protestant traditions. Some parishes strictly follow the original tradition from King’s, while others use the structure to build a service appropriate to particular needs. Within The Episcopal Church, two forms are in general use, an Advent Festival of Lessons and Carols, offered during the season of Advent, and the traditional King’s College formula, offered on Christmas Eve or Day.
Sunday’s Advent Festival of Lessons and Carols will provide those in attendance an opportunity to set aside the secular hustle and bustle of the season and instead focus on preparation.
Whether offered in its Advent of Christmas forms, author Erin Jones offers this insightful view into the popularity and impact of this tradition:
Why does this service hold up so well in times of grief? Rather than leading with the holly-jolly razzle-dazzle that can crush a bruised spirit during this season, it tenderly invites the congregant into stillness. Consider Psalm 46 with its descriptions of mountains falling into the heart of the sea, an image that resonates with anyone who has faced tragedy. The conclusion to this is “Be still, and know that I am God.”
The stillness of Nine Lessons and Carols brings with it a meticulous and systematic meditation on the ultimate source of hope. Familiar Advent passages take on fresh meaning when we’re given the chance to respond in singing or find ourselves transported in the beauty of a choral anthem.
When set in the context of the entire biblical narrative, they become even more poignant. Rather than skip to the “glad tidings of great joy,” we are forced to behold the tragedy of the Fall, the glimmers of hope in the promises of God, the majesty of the Incarnation, and the miracle of the Christmas story.
The Christmas story is not merely the stuff of Christmas pageants. Linger in its pages, and the hurting soul will find the agony of mothers who have lost children, the pain of barrenness, the shame of false accusation, the oppression of a people group, the plight of the refugee.
Linger further and discover, lying in a dusty manger, the incarnate God, who has taken on human flesh and human sorrow. Linger further still and behold him as he is now, “risen with healing in his wings.”
Emmanuel’s Festival of Advent Lessons and Carols will be offered at 5 P.M., this Sunday, December 7th. A sherry reception will follow in the Parish Hall foyer. All are welcome.