He was born in Portland, Maine in 1807 and many of his lines are as familiar to us as rhymes from Mother Goose; lines like . . .
"... like Ships that pass in the night"
"It takes less time to do a thing right than explain why you did it wrong."
"A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child."
"Give what you have to somebody, it may be better than you think."
He also translated Dante’s “The Divine Comedy” into English and wrote the immortal lines “Listen, my children, and you shall hear Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” Though my public-school days are long behind me, I still remember some of the words from his best-known narrative poem – “The Song of Hiawatha.”
By the shores of Gitche Gumee,By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Regrettably, when we read of his personal tragedies, they are heartbreaking.
In 1835 while on a trip to Europe, his wife Mary Storer Potter, died from a miscarriage. She was only 22.
In 1843 he remarried. Her name was Frances “Fanny” Appleton, the daughter of a wealthy Boston industrialist. Sadly, on a hot July day in 1861, while sealing her daughter's curls in an envelope filled with wax, Fanny's summer dress caught fire. She died the next day! His burns were so bad from trying to help, he could not attend her funeral. Deeply affected, he would write: "One thought occupies me night and day ... She is dead – She is dead.”
He also lost a child in infancy ... and his son Charles, a Lieutenant, was seriously wounded as a soldier in the Union Army.
The emotional toll it took on him was huge – and most would say that he never recovered. He seems to have buried his grief in his writing. It shows! For example, from his sonnet, "The Cross of Snow" (1879) ...
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.
Some say God is dead! Actually - Bethlehem reminds us
that he is very much alive and has not abandoned us.
With a Moses like profile, today, if you were to go to London, you can find his marble image in the Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, alongside notables like Robert Browning, Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol) and Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book, Gunga Din)
Among Christians he might best be known for a poem he wrote in 1864 during the Civil War. The United States was still months away from Lee’s surrender to General Grant at the Appomattox Court House on April 9th 1865. There in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 25, 1864, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ... reflecting on the day and Christmas’ past ... picked up his pen and wrote the words of what would later become a particularly favorite hymn of mine, sung during the Christmas season. This is the way he began:
“I hear the bells on Christmas day
Their old familiar carols play
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, goodwill to men.”
Longfellow paints for us a picture in stanzas one and two of the magic often associated with Christmas – the “the wild and sweet ... unbroken song” of “the belfries of all Christendom.” The refrain brings to mind an Old Testament class I took at Princeton Theological Seminary. Each morning there was the daily morning ritual of hearing the Grand Organ, with its majestic, towering pipes, calling worshippers to the Chapel. Still, nothing really parallels the ringing of church bells, chiming eerie but beautiful hymns that taunt our ears.
Let us not get so carried away by the
comfortable cadences of the Christmas carols
that we neglect the miracle of which they speak.
If we were not familiar with Longfellow’s words ... we might conclude – “What a lovely, enchanting, delightful Christmas song.” Not so – for the accumulated burden of personal losses and loneliness loomed large upon him. That, plus the ever-present, cruel Civil War which threatened to end the great experiment in liberty envisioned by its founders in 1776 – led Longfellow’s Ode to Christmas joy to take a downward spiral in verse three. It captures the dissonance in his own heart; those church bells ringing that Christmas Day in Cambridge.
“And in despair I bowed my head
There is no peace on earth, I said
For hate is strong, and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, goodwill to men.”
Interestingly, verses four and five of the hymn specifically spoke of the horrors of the Civil War and were deleted when the poem became a Christmas carol. Here are those deleted verses:
“Then from each black, accursed mouth; The cannon thundered in the South.
And with the sound the carols drowned; Of peace on earth, good will to men.”
“It was as if an earthquake rent; The hearth-stones of a continent.
And made forlorn, the households born’ Of peace on earth, good will to men.
I wonder if hate was mocking the song even on that wonderful night when the angels were proclaiming the arrival of the Prince of Peace? After all Emperor Caesar Augustus, Herod the King of Judea and Cyrenius the governor of Syria were hardly ‘Sunday School teachers,’ which leads me to disagree with the 3rd. stanza of “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear”. After all, the refrain is not entirely accurate:
But with the woes of war and strife the world has suffered long; Beneath the angel strain have rolled two thousand years of wrong.
Actually - it is more like 3000 years of wrong.
“I bring you good news of great joy that will be
for all the people. Today in the town of David
a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ
the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find
a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”
The Gospel of Luke 2:10-12
Longfellow ends each refrain with “Peace on earth, good will to men.” That must be the correct version because the King James Version of Luke 2:14-15 has the angels singing, “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will towards men.” Hey, even Linus recites that same line every year on the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, so that seals the deal for me!
If we assumed there would be no more conflict or combat after the birth of Jesus, then clearly we have been listening to the wrong angels – for peace still remains elusive in our day. The word “peace” appears over 277 times in the Old Testament and over 100 times in the New – yet it has done nothing to change the current behavior of people in our world. Peace still escapes us -- the fighting in Ukraine, the Rohingya conflict, the war in the Middle East, the Myanmar civil war and the always present Mexican drug wars, to name but a few. Next year it will be somewhere else ... but for sure, it will be somewhere else.
So, were the angels really making some sort of prediction in connection with the birth of Christ when they announced to the shepherds “Peace on earth, good will to men?” (Luke 2) – for obviously it has not yet come to pass? Shall we throw away our Bibles? I would answer ‘No’! The reason why we could be confused has to do with the problem of translations and in my view, the translation of Luke 2:14 in the KJV conveys a wrong message. Let me illustrate:
The King James Version (KJV) was translated into English from a Greek text called the Textus Receptus, or the ‘Received text.’ The Received Text was based on the first printed Greek New Testament, written by Erasmus in 1516. Unfortunately, in his rush to be the first to have the Greek text published, Erasmus referred to only six Greek Manuscripts and ... they were late texts from the 12th. 13th. 15th. centuries. Furthermore, not a single one of these six Greek texts had the entire New Testament. To put this in perspective, the English translations of the Bible more recently are from a Greek text that is based on 100’s of Manuscripts (not 6) and they are considerably earlier than the ones Erasmus used.
My point in all of this? In the ‘Received Test,’ “good will” may be taken as a parallel to peace - “peace, good will to men.” But in the better Mss, “good will” is an adjective that qualifies “men,” (or “people”) – “peace among men of good will” or “peace to men on whom His favor rests” (NIV). That is why today, virtually all of the recent translations of Luke 2:14 capture the sense of the last phrase more accurately:
NAS - On earth, peace among men with whom he is pleased
NIV - On earth, peace to men on whom his favor rests
NRSV - On earth, peace among those who he favors
REB - On earth, peace to all in whom he delights
NJB - On earth, peace for those he favors
NLT - Peace on earth to all whom God favors
So contrary to the impression created by the KJV ... and Mr. Longfellow ... the focus of the angel’s song is not about peace on earth following the birth of Jesus and it is not about goodwill for everyone. Rather, Luke 2:14 is speaking about a peace that can ONLY be experienced by people with whom He is pleased.
The danger in singing Christmas carols incredibly
rich in theological truths, is to be so familiar
with them that we lose sight of what they
mean and what they are saying to us.
This perspective therefore raises 2 important thoughts for us this Christmas season:
(1) Christmas Begins with Peace with God
A man involved in an accident was hovering near death. A minister came to him and asked, “Have you made your peace with God?” to which the man replied, “I didn’t know He and I had quarreled.” While the incident is likely apocryphal, the truth in it is not. We have swallowed hook, line and sinker T.A. Harris’ popular, pop-psychology “I’m OK ... You’re OK.” so thoroughly that we have come to believe that no one is not OK. This inherent belief in the universal OK-ness of society is one of the reasons for all the apparent good-cheer that floats around at Christmas time.
Remember that Christmas classic - “It’s a wonderful Life”? Set into the backdrop of the Christmas season, it is the story of a man named George Bailey who dreams of leaving his hometown and the Buildings and Loan bank his father runs. Unfortunately, Henry F. Potter, a notoriously sour-faced, greedy scrooge confined to a wheelchair, preys on the town’s folks of Bedford. With the death of Mr. Bailey Sr., Potter seizes the opportunity to gain control of the bank and only George and a rookie angel named Clarence, trying to earn his wings by helping, appear able to save the day.
OK, so the story is corny by today’s standards: two-parent families, banks lending money without trying to make any, and caring folk rushing to the need of others. Really? But where the story does mirror our Christmas culture so well – is in the belief that miracles happen without God ... that Canadians can have a “Wonderful Life” without any explicit reference to Christ.
I find it strange that folks celebrate Christmas,
but not the Christ who is the main attraction.
Sorry, but Christmas is much deeper than
a month of jolly festivities.
That kind of wishful thinking ignores both the Immanence and Holiness of God. God is not ‘out there’ somewhere. He is here – ‘NOW’ – that’s Immanence. And because of His Holiness, He is offended by our sin. Truth be known, we have had a long-standing quarrel with God! The language of the Bible is even stronger, for when we reject the sacrifice of His Son, we are at war with God. Romans 5:11 reminds us that:
“When we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to Him through the death of His Son.”
Listen to the way Ephesians 2 puts it (vv. 12-14a)
“You were ... separated from Christ, excluded from the commonwealth ... strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.”
This Christmas season - the only way that we can be at peace with Him, is to accept the gift offered us at Bethlehem. This is what the angels were talking about that night. Christmas peace begins with peace with God and that peace is the result of becoming a disciple of His. In the words of Jesus to His disciples: “My peace I give to you, not as the world gives, do I give to you.” (John 14:27) The peace of which the angels sing, begins with Peace with God.
(2) Christmas Begins with Peace within Yourself.
If any people in the world could be accused of having it all, it would be North Americans.
RV, MTV, BLT, DVD, HDTV BMW
Miller Lite, Ultra Brite
Washers, Dryers, Disneyworld, Diet Coke, Dr. Pepper
Disposable income as well as diapers
Taylor Swift, Beyonce and those refuse to die Seniors – the Rolling Stones
Cable, Cellphones, Satellite phones, and Sirius Radio
5 for 5 at Arby’s, 2 for 1 at Dominos
Discounts, Rebates, Sales through the mails
Grandpa Burgers, Big Macs, Whoppers and all you can eat
Play Station 5, X-Box Series X …we’ve got it all
But we do not seem to know what to do with it. I mean if you read the news from our national broadcaster, the CBC ... Canadians are chilled out, psyched out, stressed out, burned out, bummed out and dropped out ... and frankly, Canadian Weed is not the answer that will fundamentally solve their malady’s.
“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”
The Gospel of John 1:14
People are in turmoil; turmoil over past failures ... unfulfilled expectations … declining relationships … financial problems and over everything from career boredom to flabby thighs. A lot of people are not at peace with themselves.
Precisely what caused Longfellow to shake off his dark tones, his dark lament, his turmoil, I cannot say. Still, truer words were never written, when he wrote:
“Then peeled the bells more loud and deep
God is not dead: nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth good will to men.
It could be that you are not at peace, as you read this, because all you seem to be able to think about are your problems. Let me suggest an eye adjustment of about 45 degrees. Instead of staring horizontally at your problem and only glancing at God ... I encourage you to raise your plane of vision and stare at God and only glance at your problem.
Isaiah 26:3 “You will keep in perfect peace all who trust in you, whose thoughts are fixed on you!”
Ephesians 2:14 “For He Himself is our peace.”
Colossians 3:15 “Let the peace of Christ rule in your heart.”
This is what the angels were talking about! Christmas peace begins with peace with God, and from that flows ... the peace of God. In my mind, what Longfellow comes to see is that wherever there is suffering, hurting or despair – that is where Immanuel (God with us”) can be found. The promise of Christmas is that he can also be “within us.” I trust you hear the song this Christmas season: “Peace among men with whom He is pleased.”\
In 1861, months after Fanny’s death, Longfellow wrote: "How inexpressibly sad are all holidays."
On the first anniversary of Fanny’s death, he wrote: "I can make no record of these days. Better leave them wrapped in silence. Perhaps someday God will give me peace."
His journal entry for December 25, 1862, reads: "'A merry Christmas' say the children, but that is no more for me."
And, then came the Christmas of 1863 – Silence in Longfellow’s journal. Not a word!
But in 1864 something wonderful happens - Longfellow again picks up his pen ... and the plain, direct wording of his last 2 stanzas gives us a clear message — that God is still in command and in His own time will cause the right to triumph and bring peace and goodwill. And what will; reassure us of this important truth? The beautiful chiming bells of Christmas.
Till ringing, singing on its way, The world revolved from night to day
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime, Of peace on earth, goodwill to men.”
Such powerful theology in such a grand Christmas hymn. “OnlySaying ...”
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