Our 15th Annual Festival of Lessons and Carols

All are invited to join us
for our 15th annual Lessons and Carols service
on Sunday, December 12, at 5:00 pm
at the Capitol Hill Adventist Church, where we hold our Sunday Services.

Since our founding in 2007, Christ Reformed Church has celebrated the Advent season with a traditional “Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols,” which is patterned very closely on the annual service held at King’s College Chapel in Cambridge since 1918. We read the same nine texts, but substitute congregational singing instead of choral performance.

Over the course of the next five Sundays, we will be preaching through the nine traditional scripture readings from this service in a series called “Why Lessons and Carols”? In this series we’ll explore not only the rich pattern of promise and fulfillment that these Old and New Testament lessons illustrate, but also consider how the Reformed tradition exhibits a unique grasp of the unity of the scriptures around the covenantal promises fulfilled in the birth of Christ. We’ll also spend a bit of time considering the unique view of the church calendar held by the continental Reformed tradition, and defend it as a via media between the extremes of Puritanism and superstition.

A number of years ago I wrote an article at The Federalist in which I described this service in greater detail and explained its value called, “Keeping Christmas in Christianity: A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols”:

The Lessons and Carols service reminds us of a basic interpretive key: Jesus is the center of the whole Bible, and that truth should guide how we read and apply these texts. Promise and fulfillment is the basic pattern of the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible. Jesus and his apostles viewed his coming as the fulfillment of centuries of promises delivered to the people of God, and the New Testament was written in support of this case. In an age of biblical illiteracy, we mustn’t underestimate the value of this simple lesson.

Lessons and Carols is a service of nine scripture readings, or “lessons,” interspersed with the singing of Christmas carols. (You can get more background and examples here). The carols typically vary each year, but the nine readings are fairly well fixed, with some small variety. The first four are drawn from the Old Testament, the last five from the New.

Each reading is prefaced with a brief explanatory rubric, something which we desperately need in our current dark age of Bible reading. Thus we begin by reading Genesis 3, with this introduction: “God tells sinful Adam that he has lost the life of Paradise and that his seed [offspring] will bruise the serpent’s head.” The lessons proceed to speak of this promise of a coming “Seed” as it was extended to Abraham in Genesis 22, with the expansion that “in this Seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.”

In the final two Old Testament readings, we are reminded that the basic outlines of the Christmas story derive in the Old Testament prophecies of Isaiah (drawn from chapters 7, 9, or 11), that a coming Savior would be born of a virgin, in the town of Bethlehem, and would bring in his train a universal peace not just for the people of Israel, but for all the earth.

New Testament lessons focus on how these Old Testament promises of a coming redeemer are fulfilled in the birth narratives of Christ, with readings drawn from Luke 1 and 2 and Matthew 2. Mary, Joseph, angels, shepherds, and wise men, all of these are not merely random characters in the Christmas play. They each are instrumental to teaching us that in the birth of this human child, Jesus, God has fulfilled his promise of the ages and “saved his people from their sins.”

Finally, the closing reading is always drawn from John 1, reflecting on the theological significance of the eternal Word becoming flesh. The famous prologue makes explicit the deep theological truth implicit through the prophecies: This is no ordinary child, this is the divine Word made flesh. (read more)

The reception after our Lessons and Carols service has always been something of our annual Christmas party and celebration, and we have welcomed may wonderful visitors and guests over the years. We hope you will join us on December 12th. Click here for more information.