Sermon for December 29, 2024 - The First Sunday of Christmas
The Huron Carol
Merry Christmas everyone! And as you are aware, we are very much in Christmastide from now through to the Feast of the Epiphany; today is the 5th day of Christmas, so we’re not even halfway through the season.
Interestingly, though, the Book of Alternative Services seems to make an error about this season, and one that is actually repeated on our leaflet this morning. The BAS calls today the “First Sunday after Christmas,” whereas it is in fact the first Sunday after Christmas Day. That is in fact what the Book of Common Prayer calls today, “The Sunday after Christmas Day,” so how the architects of the BAS got it wrong rather evades me. What is even odder in the BAS, though, is that it calls next Sunday the “Second Sunday of Christmas.” It gets it right after first getting it wrong, in other words. You can look at this on pages 276 and 278 of the BAS ... or you can just take my word on this, and leave the priest to his vague compulsions about Christmastide! On to more important things.
I’ve been thinking a good deal this week about a carol known as “twas in the moon of wintertime” or the Huron Carol. It is in our hymn book, hymn number 146, and in at least some parishes it is generally sung during Christmastide. I don’t know if it is sung here at All Saints, but I’m sure you are familiar with it. I remember when I was about 10 years old, my family receiving a Christmas card that included the English text of the carol in its fullness, complete with a picture portraying the nativity scene just as it is imagined in the carol. I think at the time it appeared very homey and even rather progressive to picture the nativity in this manner, but then in the early 1990s when I was still quite young in ministry, Bruce Cockburn released an album of songs and carols for Christmas, which included the Huron Carol, but his version was actually in Huron.
Well that was intriguing, and because at the time I was serving as chaplain to Marymound, a treatment centre with lots of kids of Indigenous heritage in residence, I jumped to find out more. I actually heard a radio piece in which he talked about the song, and how utterly different the Huron text is from the English version we generally know. I wrote to Cockburn’s record company in Toronto, explained who I was and that I was looking for a copy of the English translation he had read on the radio. And what do you know? Within a week or two a letter arrived from his record label, including the translation he had shared.
Since then I’ve been able to track down a transcript from that 1993 radio show, so let me share just a bit of that with you. The host - on a National Public Radio show from the states - asks Cockburn if this was the first Canadian Christmas hymn, and he replies,
That’s right, that song was written in the early 1600s by Jean de Brebeuf, who was one of the original Jesuit priests to be sent over here ... And he wrote that song in the Huron language, [though] subsequently the Huron culture was obliterated by the Iroquois Confederacy, and by historical currents that all native people were forced to confront ...
He then explains that there are two small villages in Quebec where the people claim Huron heritage, and that they pointed him to a scholar named John Steckley at the University of Sudbury who is a linguist and a student of Huron culture and history, who was, as Cockburn says, “kind enough to provide me with a tape of him reading the lyrics in the original Huron so I was able to get out the original pronunciation.”
Jean de Brébeuf
By Thwaites, Reuben Gold, 1853-1913 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Brébuef-jesuits04jesuuoft.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5035841
John provided me with a translation, and [the words are] actually really good. They talk about the birth of Christ as a liberation from the thrall of evil, and they use the image of the star of Bethlehem but they name a particular star [from Huron culture] The lyrics talk about the three wise men coming, but they refer to them as three men of great influence who, when they came to where the baby Jesus was, anointed his scalp with sunflower seed oil many times as a sign of respect, and this sort of thing. It’s the story retold in that certain Native American context, but retold without any patronizing or of talking down to the people. It’s just put in terms that are sort of cross-cultural.
And isn’t that something? That a Jesuit missionary from the 1600s could see that the true path of our faith was not to make people behave like Europeans, but rather to retell the Christian faith - which is not in fact European but rather originally Middle Eastern - in the cultural and linguistic terms of those Huron people. There is no “ragged robe of rabbit skin” or “gifts of fox and beaver pelt” - those lines are the invention of Jesse Edgar Middleton, whose 1926 version has little to do with the dignity of Jean de Brebeuf’s Huron original.
So let me read to you John Steckley’s English translation of the original Huron, as my gift to you this Christmastide:
Have courage, you who are human beings: Jesus, he is born
The spirit who enslaved us has fled
And let me just stop there for a second. Jean de Brebeuf was not saying that these Huron folk were enslaved by their traditional religion, but rather that all of us - Jew, Gentile, male, female, slave, free, European or Huron - all of us need to be freed by Jesus, to be truly his people, “adopted into his family”, as the carol will conclude. Okay, I will start again!
Have courage, you who are human beings: Jesus, he is born
The spirit who enslaved us has fled
Don’t listen to him for he corrupts the spirits of our thoughts
Jesus, he is born
The spirits who live in the sky are coming with a message
They’re coming to say, Rejoice!
Mary has given birth. Rejoice!”
Jesus, he is born
Three men of great authority have left for the place of his birth
Tiscient, the star appearing over the horizon leads them there
That star will walk first on the path to guide them
Jesus, he is born
The star stopped not far from where Jesus was born
Having found the place it said,
“Come this way”
Jesus, he is born
As they entered and saw Jesus they praised his name
They oiled his scalp many times, anointing his head
with the oil of the sunflower
Jesus, he is born
They say, “Let us place his name in a position of honour
Let us act reverently towards him for he comes to show us mercy
It is the will of the spirits that you love us, Jesus,
and we wish that we may be adopted into your family”
Jesus, he is born
Jesus, he is born. Have a happy blessed Christmastide. Amen.
