A popular game at this year’s Christmas gatherings has been a little mind-twister called “Name That Christmas Song!” Somewhere a vocabulary genius has taken the titles of well-known Christmas tunes and reinvented them, using rather pretentious language, and the object of the game is to guess the real title after hearing the fake one. Let’s see how sharp this crowd is. I’ll repeat one of them and you guess the answer. We’ll start with an easy one. The quadruped with the vermilion proboscis is…Rudolph, the Red-nosed Reindeer. Righteous darkness is…O Holy Night. Move hitherward the entire assembly of those who are loyal in their belief is…O Come, All Ye Faithful. Diminutive masculine master of skin-covered percussionistic cylinders is…The Little Drummer Boy.

No matter what name you use for them, songs are one of the most important and beloved elements of our modern celebrations of Christmas. Along with Christmas parties, Christmas cards, and Christmas decorations, and Christmas presents, the songs of the season—especially Christmas carols—are vital to the spirit and joy of the holiday. But it hasn’t always been that way. For starters, Christians didn’t really start celebrating Christmas until the fourth century, and it was not until the eighth century after Jesus that a Christian composer in Jerusalem named Comas wrote a Christmas hymn for a Greek church service. In medieval Europe several centuries later, people began to write Christmas-themed words to go along with popular folk and drinking songs, and that is when the idea of Christmas carols really took off. The popular songs that you and I know were written mostly after the Civil War in this country, and of course, more are written every year. A quarter of a century ago, it was very popular for groups of people to gather in a home or a neighborhood and just sing carols, and most of us here can probably remember going caroling door-to-door, but that custom is quickly fading, sadly enough. Today, of course, everywhere you go you can hear carols and Christmas songs of many varieties being played, and some radio stations even dedicate their entire format to such songs during the month of December. I am one of those people who listens!

It shouldn’t surprise us that Christmas carols are so important. Music is a vital aspect of every human culture, and the more important the occasion, the more likely it is to have music associated with it. This is largely because music itself has a way of expressing something from out of the human soul that words alone are unable to convey. As an art form, music is a language unto itself. A great painting, a beautiful sculpture, even a powerful dance, can all say things that spoken and written words cannot. Music—after physical gestures—is probably the most widely-used form of non-verbal expression. The event of Christ’s birth into the world is most surely one of those happenings that requires every form of human expression to describe. Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome that sometimes the Holy Spirit actually intercedes on our behalf and prays for us, in Paul’s terms, “with sighs too deep for words.” Because there are matters of the soul that go beyond our vocabulary, and because the union of God with humanity in the mystery of the Incarnation is beyond expression itself, we must use music to celebrate it. Whether it’s the majesty of O Holy Night or the vitality of Joy to the World or the reverence of Silent Night, music helps us say what needs to be said when saying it isn’t enough.

Not all music, of course, is particularly helpful when we are trying to speak from the depths of the soul, and not all lyrics are helpful, either. Serious Christians have always worried that some of the silliness that creeps in to the season may distract and detract from the meaning of the season itself, and the songs associated with Christmas are no exception. In the middle ages, church leaders tried to ban Christmas music because so much of it was associated with common drinking songs, or because some of it was written by people uneducated in theology and Bible and so was grossly inaccurate or misleading about the true Christmas story. Some Christmas music is nothing more than junk food when it comes to feeding the soul, or background static when it comes to expressing the high ideas of Christmas itself. And some of the most popular seasonal music really has nothing to do with Christmas at all. For instance, Frosty the Snowman nowhere mentions anything about Christmas, but we think of it as a Christmas song. That is true of another venerable favorite. In 1857, James Pierpont wrote a song for Thanksgiving. He titled it One-horse Open Sleigh. But for some reason, people started singing it at Christmastime, and it came to be known as Jingle Bells. But—as with Frosty—nowhere in the lyrics does the song mention anything at all about Christmas. Frosty should be called a “winter carol” I suppose, and Jingle Bells should be called a “Thanksgiving carol.” And so maybe the ancient fathers of the church were on to something. The message of Christmas can become dangerously distorted and diluted into meaninglessness if we are not careful to separate out that which truly glorifies God from that which merely makes for mindless fun. If the only thing you sing at Christmastime is Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer, you are in serious need of some serious Christian music or you’ll miss the message the angels sang.

The best Christmas music is that which combines expressive music with meaningful words into a blended whole that speaks for and speaks to the human soul. Such a balance is not always easy to find. For many centuries, the language of the church was Latin, and it stayed that way even when almost no one spoke or understood Latin any more. And for many centuries, much of the music of the church was reserved only for church use and did not relate in any way to the music of the common people. One of the reasons for the invention of carols was to allow the common people to express in their own languages and in their own musical forms the great truths of Christmas. Many of the church’s hymns and carols take their tunes from popular folk songs, and many of the lyrics have been written not by the clergy but by so-called “regular” folks who were just trying to put the faith into the context of the people. The music of Go, Tell It on the Mountain was originally created and sung by black African slaves in America. The music of What Child is This is a traditional English melody from the sixteenth century. No matter from what era they come, Christmas carols have always been by the people and of the people and for the people, which is quite fitting, when you realize that this is part of what Christmas itself is all about. When God came down from his heaven to be born into the common world of everyday people, it was all about accessibility. No longer was God the Unapproachable One Up There. When he came to a stable, to working-class parents, to an occupied and third-rate country, it was all about God coming to us. Theologians call that condescension, God descending to our level, to be with us.

And that brings us to the very first Christmas carol. It may have taken the church a few centuries to catch on, but music was part of the very first Christmas. To be honest, it is hard to say if the heavenly host who appeared with the angel that night to share the news of Jesus’ birth with the shepherds was singing or speaking or exactly what. The Greek form is poetry, which makes us think that song also was involved, perhaps. Certainly, Christians through the ages have thought of song when they have remembered the angel, and they have thought in the Latin form of the church of Rome, Gloria in excelsis Deo, glory to God in the highest heaven. God in the highest heaven, there’s the rub. If God is up there in the highest heaven, then how in the world are we ever going to hear from him, or get to know him, or experience anything of him in our own pitiful little lives, down here in the dust and grime of earth? If God is up there in the highest heaven, then maybe he doesn’t care about us way down here, or maybe he’s not really up there at all and we just want to think he is, or maybe we are just stuck here and there is simply no hope that anything of glory or heaven or eternity will ever enter our lives.

The other night I recorded my favorite Christmas television show: the original Charlie Brown Christmas special, which first came out in 1965. You know the story. Charlie is trying to direct a Christmas pageant, but he is getting precious little cooperation from the other kids. In a desperate attempt to inject some Christmas mood into his juvenile cast, he goes and buys a Christmas tree, but they all laugh at the pathetic excuse for a tree that it is. Finally, in total frustration, he stands in the middle of the chaotic crowd and shouts, “Can’t anyone tell me what Christmas is all about?” Linus comes to his rescue. In one of the most dramatic moments of cinematic cartoon history, Linus walks to the middle of the stage, a spotlight comes on, and he recites the story of Christmas as told by Luke. “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased!” In the background, all the kids are humming Hark, the Herald Angels Sing, and then they break out into song, as they decorate the little tree and transform it into a beautiful vision of all things Christmas.

Christmas isn’t Christmas without the first Christmas carol, the song the angels sang, about God from highest heaven who came to earth to declare peace with you and me. In a way, that’s the only song we ever need to sing. God does care. God is here. “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, goodwill to men, from heaven’s all gracious King:’ the world in solemn stillness lay to hear the angels sing.”

Amen.