Christmas – hymnsandbooks

I saw three ships – a contemporary re-working by Daniel Charles Damon

I am grateful to Daniel Damon, a well known hymn writer, jazz musician and composer from the USA who has offered a new perspective on this text, so fitting, sadly, for our contemporary world:

I saw three ships come sailing in
on Christmas day, on Christmas day;
I saw three ships come sailing in
on Christmas day in the morning.

And what was in those ships all three
on Christmas day, on Christmas day;
and what was in those ships all three
on Christmas day in the morning?

The hungry and the poor were there
on Christmas day, on Christmas day;
the hungry and the poor were there
on Christmas day in the morning.

Those yearning to be free were there
on Christmas day, on Christmas day;
those yearning to live free were there
on Christmas day in the morning.

If we will serve and welcome them
on Christmas day, on Christmas day;
if we will serve and welcome them
on Christmas day in the morning;

Then all the bells on earth shall ring
on Christmas day, on Christmas day;
then all the bells on earth shall ring
on Christmas day in the morning.

Words and Music: English traditional; Music arr. and vss. 3-6 Daniel Charles Damon © 2022 Hope Publishing Company, Carol Stream, IL 60188. All rights reserved. Used with permission. Please report any use of this through your copyright licence, or approach the copyright holder for permission.

Tune: I SAW THREE SHIPS
Metre: Irregular
Topical Index: Christmas, Hospitality, Refugee, Migration, Social Justice
Scripture: Luke 2:1-20, Leviticus 19:33-34; Matthew 2:1-12; 13-23; Hebrews 13:2

Daniel says: I have loved and played this English carol for years but struggled with the ancient text. I wrote some new stanzas that may give this carol new liturgical use. Carl Daw helped me finish this text.

Dan Damon’s recordings can be found here

His printed music is here

Three ships, watercolour copyright Andrew Pratt

A hymn reflecting on Christmas now…Where is Jesus…

A hymn reflecting on Christmas now…

Where is Jesus, where is Mary,
where is Joseph in this crowd,
here where commerce feeds subversion,
elevates the rich and proud.
Mother, father and a baby,
shoved by bureaucratic creeds,
soon to cross a nation’s borders,
crowds will denigrate their needs.

Lasers beaming, neon flashing,
shop fronts pleading, ‘buy me now!’
Wealth and poverty colliding,
life, as then; not different now.
Prejudice just feels expedient,
strangers just a common threat,
is a pang of conscience stinging?
Is God near in our regret?

Here amid the city’s rumble,
God incarnate can be found,
yet our sentiment, this tinsel,
numbs our feeling, muffles sound.
May the Christ be found in Christmas,
here in every act of grace,
here in foreign and familiar,
seen in every human face.
Andrew E. Pratt (born 1948)

Words © 2015 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, England copyright@stainer.co.uk . Please include any reproduction for local church use on your CCL Licence returns. All wider and any commercial use requires prior application to Stainer & Bell Ltd

Metre: 8 7 8 7 DTune: ST WINIFRED (Cradled in a manger meanly)

Beyond where light can image (The God of cosmic question) – in the ‘light’ of the first image from the James Webb telescope

Beyond where light can image,
can infra-red probe truth:
dark matter that might harbour
what set creation loose,

where human senses lead us,
through all they analyse,
from arrogance to wonder,
to spiritual surprise?

But senses have their limits:
unanswered yet there lies
the single, deepest question
our intellect supplies.

Yet faith can proffer insight:
the Christ of time and space
speaks of a God incarnate
born in a squalid place.

Alive within our compass,
upon this ravaged earth,
the God of cosmic question
surprised us once in birth!

Andrew E Pratt (born 1948) (amended 2019 & 2022 by author)

Originally The God of cosmic question
© 1991, alt 2022 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, England, http://www.stainer.co.uk.
Please include any reproduction for local church use on your CCL Licence returns. All wider and any commercial use requires prior application to Stainer & Bell Ltd.

Incarnation and all that…

If we believe the idea of incarnation, if we sense that people saw God, or something of God in Jesus, and I do, we set ourselves a problem. We raise questions.

People want to know how can that be? If we are content with the mystery of not knowing there is no problem. We create the problem by running with the question. The consequences are multitudinous.

Mark just says, in effect, this is the beginning of the good news. My feeling is that, when he was writing the question hadn’t arisen.

John uses logos to get round the problem of God becoming flesh, human. To my mind the most easily acceptable answer in 2022.

Matthew and Luke construct myths. In their time the nature of these accounts would have been seen for what they were I believe, largely fictional, yet true as a novel is true, a sort of, ‘look, it could have happened like this, not saying it did, but’. Then pulling in all the scriptural ‘prophecies’ to justify the assertions. It worked then and becomes less plausible now.

More worrying is that it sets train the whole plethora of myths – Trinity, Fatherhood, divinity over against humanity, virgin birth, Ascension, which become dogma which ‘we must believe’ some would say, in order to be saved.

How much simpler, less arrogant and more exciting to say, IT IS A MYSTERY, I don’t understand it but here in this person called Jesus, I glimpse something of what I think God would BE like as a person. I’m agnostic as to the details but that doesn’t matter one jot! Best of all is God is with us – ‘give me the Good News in the present tense’ – as Sydney Carter put it.

At the census in the city – We welcome Christmas Day

1	At the census in the city, 
	at the crossing place of life, 
	where the homeless and abandoned 
	share the scars of human strife; 
	mid the rubble and the ruins 
	shedding God's prophetic light
	see, a star is softly shining 
	through the horror of the night.

2	In the cross of shifting shadows 
	see a mother and her child, 
	see the wetness of his features, 
	freshly born, so not yet filed. 
	In a world of cold statistics 
	yet another mouth to feed, 
	for the parents' love holds tension 
	with a calling, crying need.

3	So from Bethlehem in history 
	to this present place and time, 
	God has entered human anguish, 
	sung in tune to human rhyme; 
	yes, the baby that we welcome, 
	yes, the Christ of Palestine, 
	are as one, we seal remembrance 
	in a feast of bread and wine. 	
        [signature of love's design.]* 

4	For the ruin of the manger, 
	this prefig'ring of the cross, 
	offers Christ as our relation 
	in our chaos and our loss, 
	puts the Christ into the present, 
	places God in human hands, 
	tests our loving and our living 
	here in this and every land.

*for use when there is no communion

Andrew E Pratt (born 1948)
Words © 2003 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, England copyright@stainer.co.uk . Please include any reproduction for local church use on your CCL Licence returns. All wider and any commercial use requires prior application to Stainer & Bell Ltd
Metre: 8 7 8 7 D
Tunes: BETHANY (Smart); ABBOTS LEIGH