How I love the music of Christmas! The carols and hymns bring me joy. Some of my favorites are, unfortunately, rarely sung. Even when I served a church, I couldn’t slip them in without someone grumbling about how their Christmas Eve service was spoiled “by that awful, unfamiliar hymn we TRIED to sing.” I learned that if I wanted to sing “Once in Royal David’s City” with a congregation, I had to go to the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Luke in Orlando.

Once in royal David’s city
stood a lowly cattle shed,
where a mother laid her baby
in a manger for his bed:
Mary was that mother mild,
Jesus Christ, her little child.

This was originally written as a poem for children by Cecil Frances Alexander. It was first published in 1848 in “Hymns for Little Children.” A year later, the English organist Henry John Gauntlett discovered the poem and set it to music. Since 1919 it has been sung as the first carol of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols now broadcast every year from King’s College Cambridge.*

It’s the fourth stanza that always grabs me.

And our eyes at last shall see him,
thro’ his own redeeming love;
for that child so dear and gentle
is our Lord in heav’n above:
and he leads his children on
to the place where he is gone.

Like the last verse of “Away in a Manger,” there is a hint of our mortality and our ultimate destiny with Christ in heaven. May those words give you hope and peace.

Read Luke 2:19 and remember: God loves YOU unconditionally.

Wayne