At the start of each December, I sincerely aspire to slow down. Every year I hope that I will be overwhelmed by restful reflection during this Advent season. But somehow, after I’ve been filled with turkey and pumpkin flavored everything and once all the shops have set up their holiday displays, I’m lured into the bustle of the Christmas season. Instead of being overcome by awe and wonder, I’m stirring about stamping Christmas cards, searching for holiday recipes, sending ribbon-wrapped packages, and standing in retail lines trying to complete my seemingly endless shopping list.
Admittedly, even tonight, I won’t be one of the people donning a sparkly dress and headed out to a holiday party or singing hymns and holding a candle at a Christmas Eve service. I’ll be busy at work. There will be a whole slew of us folks (including church workers), like me, working hard serving others instead of celebrating for ourselves. But this isn’t a recent phenomenon, as we like to believe and then blame on greedy modern businesses. There have always been men and women spending the evening at work instead of at home with their loved ones.
In 1906, a group of these hardworking men was spending the holiday aboard a ship just off the New England coast. On Christmas Eve that year, the radio operators on board would have their work put on hold for just a moment as the story of Christmas intruded upon their tasks. During a typical evening, those men would have donned their headphones, fully attentive to the dots and dashes they heard through the radio waves and interpreted the meaning of these Morse code messages. I envision them in a small, quiet room, taking a drag from a cigarette in one hand as they attended to the reports and scribbled down their meanings with a pen in the other. That holiday night, however, struck by something they had never heard before, I bet they sat with mouths agape.
Nearby to these ships, in Brant Rock, Massachusetts, Reginald Fessenden provided this divine interruption on the radio. Never before had a human voice been transmitted over radio waves, until Fessenden began, “In those days, Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world,” and he continued to recount the story of the birth of Christ from the gospel of Luke.
This account tells us that the Prince of Peace was born into the same kind of busyness we get caught up in. Judea was swamped with census taking. Bethlehem was overwhelmed with its visitors. King Herod was scrambling to retain possession of his power. Even amongst a people who had eagerly awaited the arrival of their Redeemer for thousands of years, they were so wrapped up in the mundanities of this world to behold the arrival of its King.
We also find shepherds at work on what would become the first Christmas. I like to think, when Fessenden read this aloud from the story, this fact gave the radio operators a little hope that night. If there had had cigarettes back then, the shepherds would have been the kind of men to smoke them on the job, too. My husband recently referred to them as, “the cowboys of the east.” Especially after being out with their livestock, they wouldn’t have been your preferred holiday guests. But they didn’t receive the honor of attending the first moments of Jesus’ life on earth because they had waited in line or were well prepared for the event. They too were caught off guard by the declaration of this holy night by the angels.
Despite their surprise, these lowly laborers departed from their work and “went with haste” to find what the angels had announced to them. They received the privilege of becoming a part of the first Christmas and the nativity scene in your living room because they were willing to depart from their work for this sacred disruption. Eventually, Luke writes, the shepherds returned to their work, but they left “glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen.”
Once Fessenden concluded the narrative retelling to his radio listeners, he set down his Bible and picked up his violin. Appropriately, he began to play a song whose lyrics describe a night that was interrupted. With his bow gliding across the strings, he played the first song to be played on the radio, the Christmas classic, “O Holy Night.” I wonder if the operators began singing along, declaring, “Long lay the world in sin and error pining until He appeared and the soul felt its worth. A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.”
Above all other Christmas carols, this song always arrests my preoccupied heart. Amidst the merriment and the monotony, I hope we’re all so fortunate to have our Christmas interrupted this year. It likely won’t happen during those prescribed holiday moments; not while you sip eggnog at the holiday office party or rush past the bell ringer at the mall. But, in the still and the quiet, maybe as you watch your children sleep in their Christmas pajamas or when you finally have ears to hear the staggering lyrics of “O Holy Night,” I hope He redeems our distracted holiday, our distracted lives, with a holy intrusion. When it does arrive, I pray we will make haste to come in awe before a God who is eager to visit even the weariest of workers this holiday.
