This is the time of year where some of our weakest, most heterodox, and downright strange church songs get lots of attention. It is rather frustrating that these songs tend to be quite popular!
It's likely these songs will be sung in your church this season, despite the fact that they contain some significant flaws. Sentimentality and nostalgia are powerful emotions , but why can they be problematic in Advent?
Because a vital component of the story of Jesus' birth is that it wasn't all warm and fuzzy. It took place in the midst of real life pain, blood, poverty, imperial oppression, and discomfort. Jesus was fully human, and cloying fictional and sanitized stories can obscure or distract from this crucial understanding.
All I want for Christmas is you…to think critically about the songs you sing in church, even during Advent and Christmas.
(5) Do You Hear What I Hear? Here’s a song that is just trying too hard to be profound. Instead of propounding some penetrating spiritual insight, it merely creates a fictional game of telephone taking place on the night that Jesus was born.
(4) Away In A Manger. This song exemplifies one perpetual problem we find plaguing Christmas hymns: sentimental Gnosticism. There is something inside of us that doesn’t want to think of our Lord as being fully human. We want to clean him up. We think it impious and crass to speak of the holy infant as a baby who fills his holy diaper and keeps his parents up at night crying for milk.
(3) We Three Kings of Orient Are. Liturgically, this song doesn’t belong to Christmas either. The magi are men of Epiphany. In light of this, I am recommending that my church do an Epiphany Living Nativity. Only, in this one, instead of everyone standing around, reverently gazing at the baby Jesus doll, we’ll have six or seven overly costumed magicians chasing my two year old around our parking lot while Mary cooks dinner and Joseph has bad dreams.
(2) Little Drummer Boy. The story isn’t true, it's fiction. It also puts forth some works righteousness (do your best and then the baby Jesus will smile at you). But most crucially, it doesn't seem plausible that an exhausted, sore, and still pain-addled mother would let a drummer bang a snare drum for her newborn baby.
(1) Silent Night. The main idea of this song is not…well…true. The night when Jesus was born was not a silent or calm one, just as no human birth has ever been silent. Far from the Gnostic, sentimentalized picture of a baby with glorious beams of light shooting from his face, our Jesus was born into a loud, sinful, messy world in a loud, painful, and messy way. Mary gave birth next to a feeding trough.
