Dear ,                                                                    

    Festival of Carols
A Christmas Cantata by Joseph M. Martin
        Chancel Choir     
Readers, Soloists, and Orchestra
This Sunday the Chancel Choir will help lead our worship through the singing of traditional carols and newly composed songs, and the reading of scriptures which foretell the birth of Christ and celebrate his birth.
 
Each year we look forward to the sights and sounds of Christmas, especially the carols that have meant so much to us since childhood.  Our hymnal is filled with these carols, some of whose origins are so obscure that their composers cannot even be identified.  Certainly there is a story behind each one, and many of the ones we do know attest to God's handiwork.
 
Take for example the carol Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.  Our hymnal identifies Charles Wesley, prolific hymn writer and brother of John, as the author in 1734.  This hymn quickly caught on with congregations of the new Methodist movement, but they sang it to a different melody than the one we now use.  In 1753, George Whitefield, an old college friend of Charles turned fiery Calvinist preacher, published the carol but with slight alterations.  Charles had originally written, "Hark! how all the welkin rings, . . ."  ("welkin" meaning "the vault of heaven")  Although Charles objected to the changes, it is Whitefield's version we now sing.
 
But what about the melody we now sing?  Our hymnal lists Felix Mendelssohn as the composer in 1840, but he himself never set these words to music.  In 1847 a sixteen-year-old tenor named William Cummings was one of the lead singers in a performance of Felix Mendelssohn's oratorio Elijah.  Mendelssohn himself conducted the performance, just one year before his death.  Impressed by Mendelssohn and his music, Cummings in 1855 decided to publish a version of Hark! the Herald Angels Sing set to one of Mendelssohn's melodies.  The melody he chose was taken from Mendelssohn's secular composition "Festgesang an die Knustler," which was actually a tribute to Johannes Gutenberg, 15th century German creator of movable type printing and first printer of the Bible.
 
So the carol we now sing is a disapproved alteration of a poem by Charles Wesley, set to music that Mendelssohn wrote to celebrate the first printer of the Bible, but not until after both Charles Wesley and Felix Mendelssohn had died!
 
As I ponder this story, two profound truths emerge.  First, that God works through people and circumstances in ways that we cannot fathom, and second, that the traditions of our faith live on not just because they are familiar, but because God has been inside them since their inception.
 
Please worship with us this Sunday as we celebrate our living traditions!
 
                                                                                          Kevin Vogelsang