For more than two decades now, I have sought to learn something new every Christmas season. A wise former missionary, now with the Lord, made that challenge during a Christmas Eve service in 1999 and I have learned so much by praying that this familiar season will be fresh to me annually. Sometimes, the "new" has been a reminder. Other times, it has brought about a major shift in how I approach the season. Many times, a song or phrase becomes the catalyst for that year's "new" thing.
This year, listening to a Christmas worship playlist, I kept hearing a lyric in an old hymn that jumped out to me as if I'd never heard it:
Yet with the woes of sin and strife,
The world hath suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled,
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not,
The love song which they bring:
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing.
"And man, at war with man, hears not/The love song which they bring."
Am I the only one who is tired of man being at war with man? Whether wars fought with weapons or with words, whether the battleground is a war zone or a website - I'm just tired of the conflict. Sadly, Christians are not exempt. Ask any pastor how united his or her church was this year, and you will quickly get an earful. Divisions and even judging another's salvation on secondary or tertiary (or even lesser) issues has become increasingly common.
The question that must be asked is - why? Why, in a world that has "suffered long" beneath the angel-borne Gospel cry of the Good News, does man continue to be at war with man? Edmund Sears captured the theological reason profoundly in his hymn, "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear": Because we don't hear the love song the angels bring. As Augustine write, we have "disordered loves". We worship the wrong things.
Church, we have the most amazing story ever told. For those of us in Christ, we hold the treasure of the Gospel in these jars of clay - these imperfect and yet fully redeemed earthen vessels of our bodies. When we accept the call to salvation, we are given a call to mission, to proclaim this message. In the stations where God has us live out our lives, and in the fields of service where He asks us to meet the practical needs of others with help in one hand and hope in the other, we are to live Gospel-saturated lives.
And yet we settle for so much less. Too often, we drown out the beautiful music of "angels, bending near the earth, to touch their harps of gold" with the noise of the world. We elevate the "good" to be the ultimate. We celebrate short-term gains at the expense of the Gospel. We face legitimate problems with natural, human solutions instead of spiritual, biblical ones. And before we know it, we find ourselves "at war with man" - sometimes even other believers, often within our own churches or our own homes.
So this Christmas season, let's just STOP. Let's listen not to the noise of the news media or social media or people with agendas - let's listen to the voice of the angels proclaiming Emmanuel, God with us. The song singing of a King who left His throne, whose birth was heralded by lowly shepherds and wise men. The One who came to tear down dividing walls to allow us to listen, really listen, to each other.
Let's "hush the noise, and cease the strife, and hear the angels sing" - as if for the very first time.
