December 21, 2025
• Rev. Dr. Rob Fuquay
St. Luke’s UMC
December 15, 2024
Fourth Sunday of Advent
Where Are You Christmas
“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day”
Luke 2: 8-15
Dramatic Monologue
Narrator:
Our scripture this morning is Luke 2:8-15:
Now there were in the same country shepherds living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. And behold, an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were greatly afraid. Then the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be the sign to you: You will find a Babe wrapped in swaddling cloths, lying in a manger.”
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying:
“Glory to God in the highest,
And on earth peace, goodwill toward (all)!”
Peace and goodwill. They seem to be in short supply. Our nation seems irreparably divided. Families torn apart by politics. People’s mental health is fragile at best. And while Christians call on God to support their side, for others, and perhaps the majority, faith has become difficult, if not impossible.
I’m talking, of course, about the year 1863 when our country was locked in the middle of a civil war, uncertain which side would prevail.
Imagine if we could hear from someone who lived at that time. What might we learn? Could our past hold the secret to our future?
What if we could hear from someone like the author of the poem written that year, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” and understand why he wrote it and what he might say to us now?
Sounds of cannons then church bells ringing as Longfellow enters carrying pan of bloody cloths. Sets them on table and rubs eyes as if weary.
My son is in the back room. He was injured fighting in the 1st Massachusetts Calvary near New Hope Church, Virginia. Doctors say he will survive, but his bandages have to be changed every two hours. I feel like I haven’t slept in months. But, honestly, my weariness isn’t just physical. My soul is tired. Have you ever had a tired soul?
If she were here my beloved Francis would be helping me. With her I always knew I could get through anything. But two years ago she was writing letters and must have brushed the sleeve of her dress too close to the flame of a candle and her dress caught fire. By the time I found her she was engulfed in flames. I couldn’t save her. She died the next day. My face was burned and scarred from the experience. I grew a beard to hide the scars, but some scars you just can’t hide.
I feel like I haven’t been fully alive since she died. I’m not even sure how alive I was when we married. We were married for 18 years. A few I met her following the death of my first wife who passed away because of complications from a miscarriage. I tried the best I could to keep going. I continued to write, but as I said, you can’t hide the scars. I have poem here somewhere that I wrote during that time. Ah, yes, here it is,
The Rainy Day
The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.
My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
My thoughts still cling to the mouldering past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.
Be still, sad heart, and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.
Do you hear my struggle? Desperately wanting to believe something I did not have.
Shortly after I was offered a position at Harvard that began with an assignment abroad. Which was great relief to me. I needed an escape from my sorrows. It would be good to have a change of scenery. I threw myself into learning the languages. I learned French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Dutch. You’re supposed to be impressed by that.
It was while living in Switzerland that I met Francis Appleton. I took an immediate liking to her. I fell in love with her. It was clear she was to become my wife. Only one problem. She didn’t know it. I figured she just needed some time. After a year she broke off the relationship, so I decided to give her more time. And it worked out. Three years later she agreed to marry me.
We fell hopelessly in love. We had six children. Life was beatific. It was hypnotic. Then she had her accident, and all the world went gray again.
And then this God-forsaken war started. And over slavery? Can you believe that? We are ready to end the greatest experiment of democracy in the history of the world, over whether or not human beings should have the right to enslave other human beings. And of all people, this promulgation has been promoted by Christians!
There’s a preacher in New York who loves to take these so-called Christians to task. His name is Henry Ward Beecher. His father was president of Yale. Henry is a brilliant scholar, but most people don’t know how he learned to preach so effectively? It was from the influence of uneducated Methodist circuit riders in some cow town called Indianapolis. He likes to say that calling people sinners isn’t really as offensive as we think. People get used to it and Christians get so comfortable with their own sinfulness they lose sight of the fact that they are meant to stay that way. We are to become better. But we get comfortable with sin, because a sin has its benefits. And the beneficiaries are not so ready to change. So as long we recognize our sin without changing anything, we have done our part. So when the preacher stands in the pulpit and calls the congregation sinners, they all say “amen.” But when he says, “And slavery is a sin,” they say, “throw him out!” We can despise sin yet be comfortable with its institutions.
I never met Henry but I met his sister Harriet one time. She wrote this little book you may have heard called Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It exposed slavery for all its realness and evil. My only problem with it, is that it also exposed our desire to point fingers. Some used to respond in high ground moralizing and pointing fingers at who was wrong, meaning the south, as if racism stops at some geographic border. This shouting back and forth and pointing fingers and declaring who was really right and who was really wrong has led us into this war.
And to be honest with you, I found it easy to join my voice with those in the north who I believed are clearly right, until one day your holding bloody rags of a loved one injured in the fighting and you realize that being right isn’t enough, but you don’t what is.it
So I quit writing. I had nothing to say. Critics gave me up for dead. I read a story in the press not long ago that said Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was once the most acclaimed poet in America and the voice of aspirational hope. I felt like I was reading my own obituary, like I had become a ghost to myself, unable to distinguish the apparitions of my memory and the reality of some new becoming.
I suppose that’s poetic. Maybe I hadn’t lost it.
What I did know I had lost was faith.
Have you wondered where faith comes from?
My faith never came from philosophies or creeds or even religion or ritual. My faith came from living, and what my living taught me is that you come to faith by not having it. I don’t mean unbelief. I mean having faith like its something you can possess. Anything you possess can be lost. Your eyeglasses. Your top coat. Your health. Your loved ones. I experienced all of these.
And I guess I looked at my faith the same way, like it was something I possessed and one day I woke up and couldn’t find it. But that journey was a progressive one.
It probably started when my friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, invited me to his Transcendental Club meetings. I didn’t even know what transcendental meant, but I would nod my head with a serious look on my face like I knew what everyone was talking about. What they were really talking about was what they didn’t like about their religion. They poked holes in everything, in the rituals of their faith, the doctrines, scripture. Nothing was off limits. I found myself starting to feel superior in their company as if I was a little more enlightened than the rest of the world. But what I really found is it doesn’t take a lot of intellect to tear things down. To find fault. To revel in what doesn’t make sense. Honestly, anyone can do that. It takes a bolder, wiser spirit to find what you do believe.
The question I had was what did I believe? Then my first wife died and faith slipped further away. But in Europe I learned about a theologian named Fredrich Schleiermacher. Now that’s a name you don’t say after taking a bite of food. He died just a few years before I arrived, but his influence on European Christianity was still compelling. He talked about what got lost in the Enlightenment, that faith was more than just a mental ascent. It is also the knowledge of the heart, the feeling that these ideas of God are real. His detractors called him a sentimentalist, because they wanted to keep faith in the realm of intellectual debate. But Schleiermacher said we can’t lose the evidence of experience that produces an absolute dependence on God through Jesus. Not the Church. Not dogma, but Christ himself. This is what I had been needing.
I was fascinated by his treatise, Christmas Eve: A Dialogue. It was about a typical German home celebrating Christmas Eve with family and friends. They sing and open gifts and then start discussing the meaning of Christmas. They talk about music and its power to speak to the mystery of faith even better than sermons. But then the men start talking and pushing back on this sentimentality. Its always men isn’t it? They talk about the latest scholars they had read questioning the veracity of scripture and the miracles and how the Christmas story itself was perhaps nothing more than a sweet fairytale.
But then one man speaks up who will not join in the critical discussion. He spoke of Christmas that inspires feelings to believe and do things that no logic could inspire.
I wanted that inspiration for myself. But how? How does one possess such a faith? I guess you could say that a lot of my writings reflected that tension. Hoping but not having. Believing and yet missing something.
And then Francis died, and the war broke out, and my son got injured, and I gave up the search. Until one day…
(the sound of church bells begin very softly in the distance but grow louder)
I had been changing my son’s bandages. It was just about daylight and I heard church bells ringing. I wondered what day is it? It’s Friday! Why are the bells ringing on Friday? Then it occurred to me, its Christmas Day. I had forgotten. Of course, they’re ringing in the morning of Christmas Day. And for the first time in a long time a lyric came to mind and I wrote it down,
I heard the bells on Christmas
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
the words repeat,
Of peace on earth, goodwill to men.”
But no sooner had I written these words than the bells were drowned out…(rising sound of cannons overcoming the bells)
And so I kept writing:
And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
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!
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, good-will to men!”
(Bells ring…)
Then I noticed the bells hadn’t stopped ringing. Why? Had someone forgot what he is doing? Why are the bells still ringing.
And then it came to me, the bells outlasted the bombs. The bells prevailed. The announcement of Christmas morning prevailed. That message could not be drowned out. It can’t be stopped. It can’t be altered by any human action. Our intellects can’t diminish it. Our cannons can’t prevent it. Christmas is here because God will not stop. God will not stop loving, spreading peace.
Those bells were for me. It was God’s way of saying, “Do you hear me? Because I’ve heard you. And I know your pain. I know your discouragement. But I am here.”
And for the first time…in a long time…I felt hope. That’s when I found real faith, not because it’s something I have, but because it has me. It possesses me. I had been wondering how I could believe in God, and here was God telling me, I believe in you.
Faith was something I no longer needed to get. Faith had gotten me. I could look out the window at the flashes of the cannons and see through the smoke Mary and Joseph huddled in the stable. Mary holding her ands tight to the baby’s head to shield his ears. But they don’t look afraid. They look confident. As if they know something I don’t know.
And that’s when I realized, He will have the last word, so I could keep offering my words:
Then pealed 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.”