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Hey, guess what's got two thumbs, male pattern baldness, and doesn't speak French very well. This guy. I really don't speak French very well. I tried a while back. I took a whole semester. I worked on it every day. Then it wasn't like a formal class or anything. I just wanted to learn it and it didn't stick. That's a hard language. Maybe it's not a hard language. Maybe it doesn't mingle well with the Spanish and the Italian, which I'm not very good at either. But I don't know. I've just resigned myself. When I talk about French things, I'm just gonna say it like an American from the mountain west with a beard and a flannel that chops down trees and fends off bears while I chop down trees. And then if I get hungry while I'm in the wilderness chopping down trees, maybe I could get out a fly rod and get a fish and cook it with some garlic and butter over my campfire. And then my flannel would smell like campfire and trout and dead bear and success for like a whole week after that. Yeah, that's how I'm gonna say my French. Like that guy. There's an old hymn called Kentique de Noel. It is a French hymn. I'm sure that is not how you actually say it. The guy who wrote it wasn't even really like much of a Christian or anything. As the story goes, he was a guy who I guess sort of believed in God. But when you go and you look at how good these lyrics are, even if you go with a very clumsy literal translation from the French to English, like, dang, that I mean, that's pretty good. Christianity must have just really been in the ether back then in the mid-1800s when this was written. It was written in 1847. The guy's name was Placide Capot. Wait, let me say it more like a lumberjack. Placide Capot. That sounded like Brad Pitt's character in English. That's funny. Okay, well, yeah, I don't know. I'm trying. This guy was a poet, and I don't know, I think his reputation was not even really that great as a poet. And my understanding is that he was not particularly well versed in theology things. But for whatever reason, you know, maybe he knew somebody's uncle or cousin or something. He got commissioned to write a poem for a service where they were gonna uh dedicate a pipe organ at some church in France that got renovated or I don't know, something like that. And in doing so, he produced this poem, Cantique des Noel. And what he looked at was Luke 2 to pull all of this together. But when you go and you actually look at the lyrics of this poem, you figure out that he didn't go for like so much the basic Advent story stuff from Luke 2. He really fixated on what the arrival of the Messiah would mean based on the Bible and particularly a lot of those themes of just what the savior is and the idea that this savior was gonna straighten out a whole lot of messed up things, which is a very biblical idea. Now, as I may have alluded to earlier in our conversation, I am not qualified to evaluate how good a job he did at writing this poem in 19th century French. I am told by people who are smarter than me and who study French history that there are a bunch of little flourishes in the way this poem is written that would differ from the way a lot of theology, poetry, or hymn writing in France in the 1840s would have normally worked, and that this felt kind of progressive and modern, that it had a lot of youthful flourishes from the romantic era of art. And of course, when we say romantic era, you know, the most natural thing to picture is like a rom-com or something, like people falling in love. But when you're talking about romantic literature, music or painting in the 19th century, what you're talking about is adventure, wonder, being swept away with emotion, giving oneself over to the ecstatic feeling that one gets, the enrapturing that can happen when you encounter a beautiful story or your heart breaks over what happens to a beloved character. So, you know, think big sweeping 19th century epic storytelling, think Count of Monte Cristo, think Beethoven, think later Wagner, think Edvard Grieg and things like that. I mean, we're talking big, lamboyant, messed up hair composers kind of stuff. My understanding is that if you're super nuanced and all of that, that you you catch that kind of tone on this old poem, Cantique de Noel. If you're wondering, what the heck does this have to do with anything? Well, hopefully I've earned enough of your trust that you'll just stick with me, because it does have something to do with anything. Now, for that reason, the fact that it was maybe a little bit steeped in very current, very trendy, very faddish French romanticism. Initially the church kind of poo-pooed it. I don't know, just the theology's there, but the undertones we don't like. Well, I mean, just quick side note, one of the things that can happen is that over time, undertones go away. Sometimes, yeah, there are things that get written historically that have the feel of a moment where I'm not sure, I'm not sure I do care for those undertones, but eventually the world changes and evolves, and a lot of the things that maybe you didn't like so much from that little moment or what that fad or trend meant, they kind of get sifted out, and what is left behind is the timeless stuff, the good stuff. And that seems to be what happened with this Cantique de Noël poem that he wrote. Not too much later, this poem got set to music by another French dude, Adolphe Adam. You know what? I don't know if that's a French dude. I think he is. I don't his name sounds like maybe he's not. I guess I didn't really look that up. I just assumed that the dude was French. Okay, well, I don't know. Maybe you know. What I did read about is that the rumor is that this Adam fellow didn't throw a lot of energy or thought at how he was going to compose this thing, but he banged it out relatively quickly. And he wrote it, he put the poem, Cantique de Noel, to a style of music that again was pretty modern. This would be like somebody writing a poem that is just beautiful with timeless theology about Jesus, but maybe it has some undertones of the tension between Trump and Biden's supporters, and it's in the style of something by Sabrina Carpenter. You know, you can understand how a lot of people who really like theology, if such a thing were written and then set to music right now, might turn their nose up at that and be like, I just don't like all of the undertones. But you can also imagine how once enough time passes, nobody cares about Biden or Trump or any of the dumb politics of the 20 teens or 2020s anymore, and all of the dust is kind of settled on that, and people don't even really remember which side was which because the sides have flipped five or six times over. Then Sabrina Carpenter is some old lady that nobody cares about anymore, and she's played at like Home Depot and stuff while you shop to make people in their 40s and early 50s feel reminiscent about when they were in middle school. You know, when we get to that point, those things aren't going to matter anymore. And if this hypothetical song that we imagine was written this year, that actually has a bunch of Bible stuff in it, if this happened, you know, maybe 30 or 40 years from now, people would look at that song and not remember all the baggage and just see all the Bible in there, and they may come to like it. It might see a revival, a resurrection, and people could come to really dig it. Well, that is what happens with this Cantique de Noel song. It's not exactly a real big hit early on. The church doesn't jive with it, they're not sure about the quality of the people or the commitment level of the people who wrote the song. And it just feels too romantic. It too feels too in the moment. But gradually over time, because the source material is from Luke 2, which originally it looks like the thinking there was to kind of tap into a social justice theme, not so much a birth of Christ theme, but eventually, because it was drawn from Luke 2, that birth of Christ theme seems to make a stand out and it starts to become associated with Christmas time. And then about 10-ish years after it was written and set to music, a Unitarian minister. Now, Unitarianism is not at this point the same thing as historic creedal biblical Christianity. Unitarian Universalism, this isn't me speaking from ignorance. I've sat at great length and chatted with somebody who's an expert in this. Unitarian Universalism is a different religion than Christianity, but it has some common roots, and it sounded a lot more like Christianity 175 years ago than it does at this point if you were to sit with somebody who espouses Unitarianism or Unitarian Universalism at this point. So this guy, this American, his name is John Sullivan Dwight, he latches on to this song and he sees the opportunity here to grab on to the social justice language and some of the sentimental feeling that is starting to emerge around it as it's associated with the tenderness of the Christmas season and all of that. And this Dwight fellow decides that he's going to translate it into English and make the lyrics even more pointed regarding the abolitionist cause in the United States. Now, remember, I said that he wrote this or translated this in 1855. And of course, our Civil War is roughly the first half of the 1860s. So that's when the slavery issue boiled over and went from being a cold political war to being a hot war with bullets that took the lives of north of 600,000 Americans. That's when all of this is percolating. So, in a way, this Cantique de Noel, as it was translated by Dwight, I mean, you could argue that it kind of maybe even played a role in our American Civil War and maybe even the abolition of slavery. Now, this is where things are going to start to sound a little familiar. Let me give you the uh American West lumberjack version of the French original lyrics. Menuit Jardien's sieste la hour selenele. Oh La Hame du descend it jacano. I'm not gonna keep doing that. I I respect France too much. I have to stop. If you take that and you translate it very, very literally into the English, line front line, with no artistry or attempt to rhyme. This is what I came up with after running those original French lyrics of Cantique de Noel through a couple of different translators. This seems to be the best. Ready? Here we go. Midnight, Christians, it is the solemn hour when the God man descended among us to erase the original stain and to halt the wrath of his father. The whole world trembles with hope on this night that gives it a savior. People on your knees await your deliverance. Christmas, Christmas, here is the Redeemer. Christmas, Christmas, here is the Redeemer. Alright, do you have it yet? Do you know the song? Because you do know the song. You you know this one pretty much by heart. It sounds pretty awful when you just translate it very literally and word for word. And boy, does it not rhyme or work. Midnight Christians, it is the solemn hour when the God man descended among us to erase the original stain and to halt the wrath of his father. The whole world trembles with hope on this night that gives it a savior. People on your knees await your deliverance. Christmas, Christmas. Here's a Redeamer. Christmas, Christmas. Here's the Redeemer. I guess you just repeat it again. Yeah, this is just a wonderful side bonus of the conversation we're having here today. It's just a live, real-time, unplanned demonstration of why you can't just literally translate from one language to the other. It's not that neat and tidy. Okay, you know the song. It's O Holy Night. And of course, the way Dwight rendered it was, O holy night, the stars are brightly shining. It is the night of our dear Savior's birth. Long lay the world in sin and error pining till he appeared and the soul felt its worth. A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn. Fall on your knees, O hear the angel voices, O night divine, O night when Christ was born. O night divine, O night, O night divine. Now, one of the funny things about Christmas in general and most of the things that you associate with Christmas traditions and all of that is that it's all way more recent than would be fun. I would like it if all of these songs and all of these traditions went back to like four BC. That would be way better. Or maybe 40 AD, or if maybe they were just ordered in a book of the Bible and was like, and you shall do this, kind of like the way Purim was established in Esther. I mean, that would be a blast. But the truth is, uh, Christians have honored the Advent season, and Advent has been one of the seasons, part of the cycle of the year for Christians, going back to forever. But a lot of the traditions that you and I think of are pretty recently. Obviously, the secular ones are pretty recent. Saint Nicholas is a very old character. He was at the Council of Nicaea in the fourth century, but he's rebranded and repackaged as jolly old Saint Nick as Santa Claus. That gets legs in the 19th century, but really gets legs in the 20th century as a byproduct of branding and marketing, Coca-Cola and all of that. And you know, that's kind of a bummer, but pretty much all the shared stories we have have some marketing bit involved somewhere. But a lot of the Christmas tree mistletoe presents, sleigh bells, English Coventry Carol Christmas, German Christmas, Scandinavian Christmas, and especially the Russian Christmas stuff that really is a part of how we conceive of Christmas. Yeah, all of that stuff is kind of 19th century and into the early 20th. And I love it. The Nutcracker happened. I mean, when was the nutcracker? That was like 125 years ago and change. That's kind of the Russian framing of Christmas that we picture. A lot of our decor is from, oh, a couple of Russian monarchs in the late 1700s and on into the 1800s who were like, we want to be more like the West. What do you do? And they went and checked out the West and they kind of picked up Christmas. And so, you know, you get the mingling of German Christmas and Eastern European Christmas and Russian Christmas to make it what we think of. And, you know, those are very snowy places, so that fits great as well. A few of these traditions are super old. A lot of them, as they are packaged now, are much more recent. And O Holy Night is one of those more recent traditions, but in terms of electronic media, there is no Christian tradition, none whatsoever, that is older than the Christian tradition that is O Holy Night. There was a Canadian dude named Reginald Fessenden, and he's the guy who's credited with doing the first ever radio broadcast. He did so on December 24th, 1906, at Brant Rock, Massachusetts. And what was the first musical and human voice broadcast ever? It was Ohy Night. And then that was succeeded. I think the story goes by a selection by handle. I don't think it was the Hallelujah chorus, but something else by handle. Don't know exactly what it was. Is this true? Is this apocryphal? I I don't know. I wasn't there, but you can verify it in a whole lot of places. And so it's kind of fun to think that Oh Holy Night is the first thing that ever got broadcast, of how much has been broadcast, how many minutes or hours of material gets uploaded to YouTube every single day, how much radio gets broadcast around the world every single day. And the first thing ever, Oh Holy Night. Another reason that I think it's pretty cool that Oh Holy Night was a part of that is because of the themes that are present in the song. Now you remember earlier when I was talking about a hypothetical song that's kind of loaded with a lot of political messaging and feels very mid-2020s. It might not say the names of prominent politicians or issues of the day, but you're not stupid. You could tell it's a nod to this, it's a nod to that, it's a needling of this position. You know, as we were imagining that, it wasn't hard to imagine time passing and all of the political baggage and the social stuff that would get people's hackles up, it just goes away, it gets forgotten, it becomes low stakes. But the stuff that was Bible in this hypothetical song from the mid-2020s is still there. And so people just see the Bible in it later and it takes on a whole new meaning. Well, slavery as an institution is defeated. I mean, it didn't solve all of the social justice issues. That happens in the 1860s. Give it another generation or two, people are going to hear O Holy Night with fresh ears in France, in the United States, everywhere. And it becomes cherished as a song that just tells the theological story that accompanies all of the Advent stuff. The themes that are in there are not hard to catch. I mean, it kind of sounds like the material from Isaiah that Jesus grabs, literally grabs a scroll in Luke chapter 4, and he reads this the Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. That's from Isaiah 61, but there's a bunch of stuff in Isaiah. Seems like every time we're talking about the Messiah, there's this reference to people who are suffering and in oppression and in darkness, but then this light comes along and all of the stuff that was uneven, it's all flattened out and it's all fixed, and there's this hope for the future. And the one who's gonna do all this will be called wonderful counselor and mighty God and everlasting father and prince of peace, and of the increase of his government and peace, there's gonna be no end, and he's gonna reign on David's throne and over his kingdom, and he's gonna uphold justice and righteousness from that time until forevermore. That stuff is all over the Old Testament, that stuff is all paid off in the early going of Matthew and in the early going of Luke. And of course, we get that. I mean, it's just even if you're not somebody who's super familiar with the Bible, it's all, I mean, it's absolutely thick in the lyrics of O Holy Night as we sing them now in English. But in keeping with those themes, and this is where it ties into what we've been working on in this season, in keeping with those themes, there is a reference to Philemon. And as best as I can tell, this may very well be the only overt reference to Philemon. Well, at least that I can think of. And I was raised around hymns. I don't know all of them. Nobody probably knows all of them inside and out. Maybe you can think of some nods to Philemon somewhere else in the history of Christian music or beloved Christian hymns. But for me, O holy night, as some people render it the third verse, is the only overt nod to Philemon. Here it is. This is Philemon 15 and 16. We'll do this first, then we'll do the O Holy Night line. Perhaps the reason he, Onesimus, was separated from you, Philemon, for a little while, was that you might have him back for good, no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother. Now here's this stanza from O Holy Knight. Truly he taught us to love one another. His law is love, and his gospel is peace. Chains he shall break for the slave is our brother. And in his name all oppression shall cease. For me, that was the big aha fun moment of this. Now you know the rest of the story style bonus episode here in the middle of our season on Philemon. But as I got into this and was thinking more and reading more about Old Holy Night, and some of this stuff I remember just because I heard it a bunch. Some of this I didn't know or I forgot it. But as I was going through that, I was like, oh, there's actually a lot of really cool layers to this story, including the persistence of the truth of the Bible and how Bible stuff, just scripture, it doesn't return void. It outlives attempts to co-opt it for this or that political purpose. Some political purposes we might really like and think are moral. Other times it's co-opted for stuff we don't like very much and that we don't think is very moral. But you can't beat it. It doesn't return void. It's living and active, it's sharper than any double-edged sword. It will outlast your thing. It will outlast your little cause. It will outlast your college freshman enthusiasm for how things ought to be in the world. And that college freshman enthusiasm might be well placed. It might be stupid. The word of the Lord will outlast both. It is bigger than that. Don't be deceived. God cannot be mocked. Scripture is ultimately timeless and ultimately uncooptable. And it's the only document ever that comes with a promise, a promise backed by the miraculous, that God can open the eyes of those who open the book to understand it and to see what's going on. So look, my understanding is that the dude who wrote O Holy Night in the first place was at best nominally Christian. At worst, but maybe not even that, but just kind of aware of the Bible. The guy who said it to music was ethnically and religiously Jewish. Some people who are ethnically Jewish very much believe in Jesus. But I I think that as I understand it, the guy who said it to music was ethnically and religiously Jewish. So he's going to be seeing the text much differently that he's writing music for. And the dude who translated it into English, the words that you know, is a Unitarian. He thinks very, very differently about the Bible and about Christian faith and what we see in the text and then historic orthodoxy thinks. And yet, no matter who you are, and no matter what you believe, you certainly have things in common with all three of the people who had custody of this song at one point or another. Ultimately, time and Bible will out, and with O holy night, they very much will out. And when everything else is sifted away, what are we left with? A beautiful proclamation of the Isaiah justice language, the Isaiah picture of what the kingdom of God will look like, of God's eye toward justice and his tenderness toward the poor, and his concern for the people who are nameless and forgotten and on the fringes, and how all of the things that are jagged and weird and broken and out of whack about society will get figured out and straightened out forever when the rule of the one who's qualified to do that kind of thing is finally realized. Yeah, that outlasted all the opinions, it outlasted all the personalities, all the trends, all the fads, and O Holy Night is going to continue to outlast those things as a cherished hymn that teaches, that catechizes proper biblical theology about Jesus and his kingdom and will continue to do so for generations to come. And baked right into it is one little nod to one little passage in at least for this season, our favorite book, the one we've been paying attention to, that being Philemon. Pretty cool. Thanks for bonus episoding with me. We'll get back to regular Philemon stuff next time around. I'm Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.