Welcome to our Advent Hymn-sing! We look forward this month to featuring various carols as well as a weekly story behind one of the carols. Keep hoping and keep singing this Advent!

Isaiah 9:6 – “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government will be upon His shoulders. And He will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

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For “littles” and “young at heart”

Prayer of Service:

(Feel free to say each line and have your child repeat what you say or say it as you pray together.)

Dear God,
Thank You for another beautiful day.
Please help me to be Your hands, feet, eyes, ears and voice today.
And to show love and happiness to all I meet.
Amen.

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Away in the Manger

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It Came Upon the Midnight Clear
1849

Hymn Background:

“And suddenly there appeared with the angel a great multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom His favor rests!”
Luke 2:13-14

Edmund Hamilton Sears is the author of two Christmas carols that are mirror images of each other, written 15 year apart.

He was born in Massachusetts in 1819 and attended the Harvard Divinity School. As an ordained pastor in the Unitarian ministry he chose to devote himself to small town ministry where he had time to study, think and write.

At 24, he wrote “Calm on the Listening Ear,” a Christmas carol based on the song of the angels in Luke 2. It proved very similar to the more-famous carol he would later write. Having similar musical attributes and theme, it can be sung to the same tune as “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear”.

Calm on the listening ear of night / Come heaven’s melodious strains,
Where wild Judaea stretches far / Her silver-mantled plains.
Celestial choirs, from courts above, / Shed sacred glories there,
And angels with their sparkling lyres, / Make music on the air.

15 years later he wrote its more famous twin. Our featured carol this week is an unusual carol in that there is no mention of Christ, of the newborn Babe, or of the Savior’s purpose for coming to earth. Sears, after all, was Unitarian. The author’s only focus is the angelic request for peace on earth.

This carol was written as the clouds of civil strife were darkening the United States, setting the stage for the War Between the States. His concern for his country is evident in a stanza that is usually omitted from most hymn books:

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!

Rev. Sears became well-known because of his hymns and books. He was awarded a Doctor of Divinity degree in 1871 and took a preaching tour of England where he was met by large congregations. He died in his home state on January 16, 1876.

LYRICS

1. It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old,
From angels bending near the earth to touch their harps of gold.
“Peace on the earth good will to men, from heaven’s all gracious King!”
The world in solemn stillness lay to hear the angels sing.

2. Still thro’ the cloven skies they come, with peaceful wings unfurled;
And still their heavenly music floats, O’er all the weary world.
Above its sad and lowly plains, they bend on hovering wing,
And ever o’er its Babel sounds the blessed angels sing.

3. For lo, the days are hastening on, by prophet bards foretold;
When with the ever circling years, comes round the age of gold.
When peace shall over all the earth, its ancient splendors fling;
And the whole world give back the song which now the angels sing.

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Like a Child