"God is not dead, nor doth he sleep"

Advent as an anthem of hope throughout the ages

Dec 05, 2024

I don’t know how it’s possible to move forward without hope.

Of course, I’m talking existential, big-picture Hope here…but I think this is true on a much smaller scale, as well. Just this week, within a couple hours of pulling myself out of my Thanksgiving break stupor and logging into my work computer for what felt like the first time in six months (it had been four days, but you understand the feeling), I had already opened my month-at-a-glance calendar to count just how many days of work stand between me and my long-awaited Christmas holiday.

The emails hadn’t started piling up yet. I already knew, more or less, what would be on my plate this week. I just needed something concrete to look forward to, a reprieve to aim for while I push through the cold days and early sunsets ahead.

Christmas is always long-awaited. That’s what the season of Advent is about: paying attention to what it means to wait on the Lord, in all senses of the phrase.

It’s easy to lump Advent in with the celebratory aspects of Christmas, to skip ahead to the fun part and start talking about mangers, stables, and stars before last week’s leftover turkey has even been finished.

That’s not a bad thing, inherently, but it does skip over part of what makes this season of waiting in hope so special and so sweet.

Maybe it’s a problem unique to modernity; after all, we hardly wait for anything anymore. Maybe in our instant gratification culture, our growth has been stunted when it comes to patience and anticipation.

But waiting—looking forward in hope, despite circumstances—has always been part of the story for followers of Yahweh. First, they waited for a son. Then a nation. Then a king. Then a Messiah who would save them from their plight once and for all.

We know that Messiah was Jesus. We have the writings of generations of his followers to help us understand what that means. We revel in the story of his birth, his life, his death, his resurrection, and his coming return.

But we still know that everything isn’t quite right…not yet.

The season of Advent is about living in that tension. Balancing the “already, but not yet.” Embracing the hope of a Savior while recognizing that the work of redemption is still very much in progress.

For the first post of the Advent season, I want to take a look at a hymn and a poem that mirrors that tension and reminds us that hope exists, despite the real and heavy weight of evil we feel day by day.

“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day”

I heard the bells on Christmas day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
I thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along th'unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
And in despair I bowed my head:
"There is no peace on earth," I said,
"For hate is strong, and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men."
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men."
Till, ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime,
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow first penned “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” on Christmas in 1863.

America in 1863 was not the paradigm of peace on earth. “America,” as such, wasn’t even really a thing, but was instead divided into warring nations, the Union and the Confederacy. By December 25, 1863, the American Civil War had been raging for more than two and a half years.

President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, given just over a month before Christmas, gives insight into the uncertainty that pervaded the era:

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

Longfellow had felt the pain of the war, too. His oldest son, Charles, had joined the Union Army in early 1863 without his father’s blessing and had been severely wounded, ending his military service, in November of the same year.

“No peace on earth,” indeed.

The persistent bells

I’ve never lived in a place where church bells rang regularly…which sort of makes me sad. But we did have a huge bell tower on campus at the University of Alabama that reliably rang out every 15 minutes. Regardless of weather, season, or day, I knew Denny Chimes would be singing, four times an hour, encouraging me to walk a little bit faster if I wanted to make it to class on time.

Longfellow gives voice to the Christmas Day bells in the final line of each stanza: “Peace on earth, good will to men.”

The interesting thing about bells—perhaps part of the reason we’ve set them aside in the postmodern West—is that they’re not interested in conversation. There’s no call-and-response, no opportunity to disagree. Their message, whatever it may be, simply reverberates until the sound waves spread out too far to be perceived any longer.

As such, “peace on earth” and “good will to men” aren’t just nice things to say on Christmas; they’re edicts, official statements brooking no argument and allowing no dissent.

The antidote for despair

It’s easy to understand why the narrator begins to despair in the third stanza. You may be feeling a bit of it now.

How can we go on and on about edicts demanding peace and good will when we know good and well that’s simply not the case? It wasn’t in 1863, and it’s not today, either.

Even so…the bells keep ringing. In their “unbroken song,” our narrator finds his answer:

“Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
God is not dead, nor doth He sleep…”

Perhaps the consistency of those bells in some way mirrors God himself—constant in his goodness, reliable in his maintenance of the created world and all its inhabitants, persistent in his pursuit of his children, active in the affairs of everyday life.

Detractors may claim otherwise, but the bells are still ringing.

The refrain through all the ages

The fifth and final stanza (in this iteration of the poem) zooms back out, considering the impact of the narrator’s epiphany on the world at large. In AD 33, in 1863, in 2024, in 3055, hope reigns. The bells will not be stopped; their song will not be made untrue.

Peace and good will may be hard to find, but Advent is a reminder that God is not dead. His glory, his victory, his love, are the songs reverberating over all creation, at all times, forever.