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Welcome back to Advent of Carols from VerseNotes. I’m Jerry Towler, and today we’re talking about “O Little Town of Bethlehem”.

If you want to listen to the song before we dive in, you’ll find some links in the show notes.

The first thing that you notice about this hymn is that it is soft and quiet. It’s still and gentle.

But for me, it doesn’t really matter who sings it. All I can hear is Elvis Presley’s rendition, which I promise not to try to perform for you. We’re just going to dive right into the song.

The scene is Bethlehem, a deep and dreamless sleep. The quietness here is the point,
because God loves choosing the small, the overlooked, the tiny little out-of-the-way towns and backwards, nowhere Galilee.

See, anyone can make Rome look glorious. It takes God to make Bethlehem cool.

That said, the prophet Micah called it centuries earlier in Micah 5.

This is so amazing, I’m just going to read it to you:

But you, he writes, Bethlehem Ephrata,
who are too little to be among the clans of Judah.
From you shall come forth for me
one who is to be ruler in Israel,
whose coming forth is from of old,
from ancient days.

What an epic prophecy. It even sounds like an epic prophecy! And it’s centuries early.

And this song immediately brings that prophecy to life: darkness, silence, and then light that nobody expects.

Here’s a line that I’ve never understood, and I still don’t, actually:

The hopes and fears of all the years.

Hopes, I get. I love talking about the hope and expectation of Advent. But fears?

It doesn’t sound like fear of God. It sounds like more normal human fears, like being scared.

But I don’t really understand that, unless it means maybe the fears of the powerful?

It actually kind of reminds me of King Herod killing all those little boys because he was terrified of what Jesus would mean.

Rome, you see, is terrified of what would happen if the Jews got a real leader.

The darkness, the demons, the prince of the power of the air—those guys might also be panicking this night.

And they should.

Bethlehem is the focal point where both longing and opposition meet the newborn king.

And then this song drops us right into Luke 2, right?

The angels are watching, the morning stars are singing. And what’s interesting is that that puts us in the fields.

Because in the last verse, we hear the Christmas angels, the ones who were singing to the shepherds—those gross, dirty, smelly, outcast shepherds who were sleeping in the field because nobody would let them inside.

That’s us.

Once again, we hear Advent. God reveals himself not to the mighty. He didn’t go proclaim to Caesar, but instead to the meek, to the ones who had no home.

Now this hymn is full of verbs of movement.

Christ enters in.
He descends to us.
He comes to us.
He abides with us.

Advent is about God moving into our darkness.

In this world of sin,
still the dear Christ enters in.

That’s Romans 5 language:

This proves God’s love for us, that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

So the whole hymn here is built on the movements of God into this world of darkness that is our world. And we see this tiny little hint of the second coming.

The song writes,

No ear may hear his coming.

But that’s not just Bethlehem’s stillness. That’s the New Testament talking about the return of Christ coming like a thief in the night, where no man knows the day or the hour.

The author here is blending first coming and second coming imagery, and it’s awesome.

The first time, Jesus arrives quietly, to no fanfare. I mean, except the legions of angels singing to the shepherds, but otherwise, no fanfare.

And then one day, he’s going to come again suddenly, like lightning in the sky, and no one will be able to miss it.

And Advent is here too, because Advent always has kind of, you know, one eye on Bethlehem and one eye on Revelation.

Advent is about looking back and reflecting and also looking forward to the light that’s coming. And this song does that for us perfectly.

And then finally, this nice pastoral image ends not with more imagery, but with a prayer:

Cast out our sin and enter in.
Be born in us today.

This is the longing, the desire of Advent. Not just Jesus in history, but Jesus in us. Jesus with us.

Abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel.

We are separated by 2,000 years from those angels singing in the fields, but we are not separated from the Christ who was born of flesh and blood, the baby in the manger, one of us.

Man, this hymn is awesome.

Now that we’ve talked about all that beautiful quietude, let’s talk about where this thing came from in the first place.

It’s not actually all that old. It was written in 1868 by a man named Phillips Brooks, an Episcopal priest who lived in Philadelphia and then in Boston. He was 33 at the time, which means I’m six years too old to write a hymn that will last 150 years. He was apparently inspired by visiting Bethlehem itself.

This song is also sung to two different tunes.

In the United States, it’s sung to a tune called St. Louis, written by a man named Louis Redner, who was one of Brooks’ friends. Brooks asked him to write a tune for this poem he’d written to play for a Christmas Sunday sermon.

And basically, the guy procrastinated. He didn’t do his homework until Saturday night. And suddenly, he woke up and he had the melody just in his head and he wrote it down. And then the next morning, he finished out the harmonies before church.

Which is kind of unbelievable, because that’s the song that Elvis sang, that Nat King Cole sang, that we’re still singing—this thing that just randomly popped into his head in 1868.

But on the other side of the Atlantic, folks from the UK and Ireland know this to an old folk melody called The Ploughboy’s Dream, which in 1906 was rearranged into a more famous tune called Forest Green.

And I would have said that I didn’t know this tune, but it turns out I actually do. I just think it’s the hymn I Sing the Almighty Power of God. A little bit more anthemic, a little bit less quiet, but nonetheless beautiful.

So here’s this song.

Advent hope for the lowly.
The lowly city of Bethlehem.
The lowly child in the manger.
The lowly us out in the fields
with the shepherds.

A Savior who chooses the small. A King who quietly enters in.

That’s why we sing.

Thanks for joining me today for Advent of Carols. If you’d like to help make more projects like this possible, check out Advent Commons at versenotes.org/commons. And we’ll be back tomorrow with another carol of Christmas.

If you’ve got thoughts about today’s carol, I’d love to hear them. You can always reach me at [email protected].

And if you enjoyed the episode, the best gift you can give me is to pass it along to someone else who would enjoy it too.

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