As Christmas hymns would go, “O Little Town of Bethlehem” is one that, to me, best evokes childlike peace and beautifully paints the scene of the night Jesus was born. Perhaps this is because the song’s writer, Episcopal priest Phillips Brooks, was inspired by a peace he experienced after a time of turmoil and this contrast contributed to the gravity of his message. Let’s take a closer look at the historical context in which this hymn found it’s genesis.
Phillips Brooks was an imposing man standing at 6′ 6″ and weighing nearly 300 pounds, but he was tender in his nature. As one of the foremost American religious leaders of his day, he was known for dynamic preaching and was committed to bettering the country. During the Civil War, Brooks was adamantly opposed to slavery and fought for the right of freed slaves to vote.
Shortly after the end of the Civil War on April 23, 1865, Phillips Brooks preached an especially riveting sermon at his church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania just 13 blocks from Independence Hall where the fallen body of President Abraham Lincoln was placed for the day as part of a funeral route to Springfield, Illinois. This stop allowed Philadelphians to mourn the loss of the beloved president who had been assassinated just 9 days prior. Around half a million people gathered outside the hall and in surrounding streets to pay their final respects to the beloved president. In fact, the crowds were so jam-packed that some people fainted from the pressure.
On that Sunday morning at the Church of the Holy Trinity, it was only appropriate that Phillips Brooks’ sermon, titled “The Life and Death of Abraham Lincoln,” paid homage to Lincoln in a most sincere and eloquent manner. Brooks likens Lincoln’s character to freedom itself. The entire sermon is well worth taking the time to read and you may do so here, but for our purpose, I want to highlight this one excerpt:
“This union of the mental and moral into a life of admirable simplicity is what we most admire in children, but in them it is unsettled and unpractical. But when it is preserved into a manhood, deepened into reliability and maturity, it is that glorified childlikeness, that high and reverend simplicity which shames and baffles the most accomplished astuteness, and is chosen by God to fill his purposes when he needs a ruler for his people of faithful and true heart, such as he had who was our President.”
This “glorified childlikeness” that Brooks praises is a quality that he too had attained and it can be felt in the lyrics of “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”
Later that year, Phillips Brooks toured the Holy Land. On Christmas Eve, he worshipped at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, built, according to tradition, on the site where Jesus was born. The amazing peace he felt that night was much-needed as he had been worn down from the horrors of the war and the tragic loss of President Abraham Lincoln. This experience stuck with him and three years later, he put his revelation from that night to words in “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”
So, as you listen to your favorite version of the song (mine can be found here), allow yourself to be moved by a peace that surpasses even the darkest of worldly circumstances.
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