In the winter of 2006, our
Augustana Choir did our Christmas Vespers on the theme of the O Antiphons.
An antiphon is a musical response by
a choir or congregation, and the “O Antiphons” are the responses attributed to
the last seven days before Christmas—called “O” Antiphons because they all
begin with the word/letter “O.” Anyway, I think you’ve probably heard of these
before even if you’re thinking that you haven’t. In fact, I can almost
guarantee you have.
So, I realize this is a blog, and audience participation is limited, but here's what I want you to do: I want you to think about the Advent season (not Christmas,
Advent)—and I want you to think of any piece of music that represents this
season to you. Now, I want to be clear again: we’re looking for a piece that
represents Advent, not Christmas, so if you’re thinking of Rudolph the
Red-Nosed Reindeer you might want to think of another one—in fact, if you’re
thinking of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer you might want to think of a better
Christmas song, too, but that’s another matter.
This might actually be difficult for you, because there actually aren’t a ton of classic Advent
songs. Most of our hymns for this season are actually not very well-known, or
they are just lumped into the genre of “Christmas songs” even though they’re
really not. And anyway, I kind of suggested the answer in talking about the “O
Antiphons” since there’s really only one song for the Advent season that the
word/letter “O” suggests.
O Come, O Come
Emmanuel.
You know this hymn, I bet. It’s probably the most important hymn of the Advent season. I want you to check out the lyrics. I'll post them here:
O come, O come, Emmanuel,
and ransom captive Israel,
that mourns in lonely exile here
until the Son of God appear.
Refrain:
Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.
O come, thou Wisdom from on high,
who orderest all things mightily;
to us the path of knowledge show,
and teach us in her ways to go. Refrain
O come, thou Rod of Jesse, free
thine own from Satan's tyranny;
from depths of hell thy people save,
and give them victory over the grave. Refrain
O come, thou Dayspring, come and cheer
our spirits by thine advent here;
disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
and death's dark shadows put to flight. Refrain
O come, thou Key of David, come,
and open wide our heavenly home;
make safe the way that leads on high,
and close the path to misery. Refrain
O come, O come, great Lord of might,
who to thy tribes on Sinai's height
in ancient times once gave the law
in cloud and majesty and awe. Refrain
O come, thou Root of Jesse's tree,
an ensign of thy people be;
before thee rulers silent fall;
all peoples on thy mercy call. Refrain
O come, Desire of nations, bind
in one the hearts of all mankind;
bid thou our sad divisions cease,
and be thyself our King of Peace. Refrain
O come, O come, Emmanuel,
and ransom captive Israel,
that mourns in lonely exile here
until the Son of God appear. Refrain
In each verse after the initial “O Come” there is a follow-up “O something or other." Those are the "O Antiphons--seven of them concluding with "O Emmanuel." So
you may be wondering why I bring this up today, December 8, when the O Antiphons
aren’t really to begin for over a week. Well, I want you to look especially at
the first and last verses of this hymn—they’re exactly the same, so don’t
stress your eyes moving back and forth. “Oh come, oh come,
Emmanuel, / and ransom captive Israel,
/ that mourns in lowly exile here, / until the
Son of God appear.” You’ve probably sung those words 25-30-50 times. If you’re
like me and you’ve been in choirs and been to Advent Vespers at colleges or at
churches you’ve maybe sung this song one hundred times. I don’t know.
But, like most hymns, we mostly just sing and don’t think, and for this
particular hymn that’s a downright shame, because in this Advent season we are
dwelling with Israel,
captive and in exile. “Oh come, oh come, Emmanuel, / and
ransom captive Israel,
/ that mourns in lowly exile here…”
Ezekiel’s famous story of the dry
bones is not a story without a time and place. I realize because we mostly pick
up our Bibles and read little parts here and there it seems like everything in
this book is without context, but that’s mostly not true. In fact, in Ezekiel’s
case we know a lot about his context.
Ezekiel was a contemporary of Jeremiah, who we read two weeks ago; he was part
of the first deportation from Jerusalem when the
nation of Babylon defeated Israel and removed the people from the Holy City,
destroying the temple in the process. Now, that’s a lot of history, and if you
have no concept of biblical history it probably went way over your head. So,
here’s two things for those of you who don’t know much about biblical history
to remember: 1. This was around six hundred years before Jesus, and 2. Ezekiel
was part of the first group who the nation of Babylon forcibly removed from the
holy city of Jerusalem. He was part of a group of people who were trying to
make sense of why they no longer had possession of the promised land that was
given to them, dating all the way back to Moses and the Exodus from Egypt. This
was a critical time in the history of the Jewish (and what would become the
Christian) faith.
This is the context of the story of
the dry bones, and it’s also the context of the hymn “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.”
The hymn was not written six hundred years before Jesus—it was
written only a few hundred years ago—but rather, the hymn takes us back to that
time when the promises seem to be dead, where hope is lost, and we are left to
make sense of the wreckage in the wake of senseless death and destruction. One
of the reasons it’s hard for us to understand the exile is because you simply
can’t block out the ending of the story, and we, who live two thousand years
after Jesus, think we know the end of the story. So, we take stories like the
dry bones from Ezekiel and we make of them a tale about resurrection. I’m not
saying that’s bad, but resurrection has a different meaning for people who are
pretty well off compared to people who have lost everything.
In order to give Ezekiel its full
power we have to put ourselves in the shoes of one in exile in Babylon, one who says “I
am dead. I have no future.” It’s the same situation in which we had to read
Jeremiah and the “I know the plans I have for you” speech from a couple
weeks ago. If you are sitting comfortably in your homeland this is not the
kind of promise that will knock your socks off. You need to be ripped from your
home and everything that is comfortable in order to understand the power that
this story has. When Ezekiel speaks to the bones and they come to life, he is
preaching to a people who have no future or hope, offering a promise of a more
glorious day.
Even today many people live like
this. It’s estimated that there are 45.2 million refugees in the world today.
That is right around what the world population was in the time of Ezekiel. 45.2
million people who have no place to call home. This is a story for them. But
for the rest of us, the idea of praying “O Come. Come Emmanuel and ransom
captive Israel” seems foreign. And yet, we sing it every year—sometimes more than once--and we still consider it the most important and powerful of Advent hymns,
because, no matter our circumstance, the power of the O Antiphons cuts through
our comfort, speaking a truth we know in our core. It’s why we mourn Nelson Mandela, even if we know nothing about South Africa or its history,
because there is something inside of us that recognizes our need for a savior.
Mandela was just a man, but he pointed to something bigger than himself. We
need a Savior, as surely as Israel did in exile or South Africa in Apartheid,
because the promise that Ezekiel preaches is both for the living and the dead,
so that no matter the life we live here—whether comfortable or terrible,
afflicted or peaceful—we are all united as one in death. So God says in our
reading, “And you shall know that I am the Lord,
when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people.”
Ezekiel
and the dry bones is a story about resurrection, but it resists any attempt at mere spirituality. The language is visceral, talking of sinew and flesh, rattling
bones and the covering of skin. This may be a vision, but even so it is an
incredibly earthy one, which is so important for us who try to spiritualize
everything, because the idea of a spiritual resurrection is, frankly, weak; the
more corporeal the better. Plus, it means that the things that we experience
here—whether it’s an exile in a foreign land or the pain of disease—are birth
pains of a physical reality shepherded over God for all eternity. It means that
we don’t merely escape our bodies into spiritual happiness, but that God is
going to raise us as something new and brilliant.
For
those of us on this side of exile that is a promise worth holding on to, but
for others the promise works two ways. It is a promise of new life in this
world, even as it foreshadows life in the world to come. It is both/and. “O
Come, O Come, Emmanuel to ransom captive Israel” is a political promise, but
its ramifications brought a Savior whose idea of politics was so much better
than ours. All our politics ever did was get us into exile. What we need
is more than that. We need the branch of Jesse, of the 3rd antiphon,
saying, “from depths of hell your people save and give them vict’ry o’er the
grave.” That is the siren song of Advent, a voice in the wilderness crying. It is a voice of hope.
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