A bidding prayer for Christmas A. D. 2025

Edited and updated from the version originally published on December 25, 2012 Merry Christmas to anyone who happens by BatesLine today. My Christmas Eve was spent doing a little bit of last-minute shopping, including a visit to the Nut House for some pecans and to Persnickety Consignments in Catoosa for one of their hand-painted, glow-in-the-dark Christmas ornaments celebrating the Blue Whale and the Route 66 Centennial. I picked up some barbecue from Rib Crib just an hour before they closed at 5 (out of ribs, of course) for an early dinner. My wife and I and our two local children attended our church's Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols candlelight service, which once again featured a Nativity-themed poetical homily written and recited by our pastor. I wore a green sweater over a red shirt for a family photo after the service, but it was only for appearance's sake; it was warm and muggy as we left the building, reminding us of our Christmas 2013 in Sarasota, Florida. I drove home through several midtown neighborhoods to look at lights. A favorite extravagant display on 30th Place east of Utica is missing this year, replaced by a For Sale sign, a sign with a sad story behind it. Christmas day will be quiet, and just the four of us. We'll make phone calls to connect with far-flung family. With such a small group, we've decided on dinner out, although we'll make our traditional breakfast casserole for the morning. At some point, we will listen to this year's Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College, Cambridge, and enjoy the solo chorister sing the opening verse of "Once in Royal David's City," the Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah, and the bidding prayer that opens the service. While Lessons and Carols is an Anglican tradition, it is encouraging to see how it has escaped its cradle and found a home in Bible-believing churches of many different denominations. As a Holland Hall high school student, I attended and sang in the annual service of Christmas lessons and carols at Trinity Episcopal Church, modeled after the annual Christmas Eve service from the chapel of King's College, Cambridge. My 8th grade year was the first year I was required to attend, and I expected to be bored. Instead, I was entranced. My last two years in high school, I was a member of the Concert Chorus and was privileged to join in the singing of Tomas Luis de Victoria's setting of O Magnum Mysterium, an ancient poem about the wonder that "animals should see the newborn Lord lying in a manger." As a senior, I was one of the 12 Madrigal Singers. The six ladies sang the plainsong setting of Hodie Christus Natus Est (Today Christ Is Born), repeating it as the students processed into their places. Then all 12 of us sang Peter J. Wilhousky's arrangement of Carol of the Bells, with the 3 basses landing on the final satisfying "Bom!" on that low G. At the beginning of Trinity's service, after the processional, Father Ralph Urmson-Taylor, who served as Holland Hall's Lower School chaplain, would read the bidding prayer. Confessing Evangelical has it as I remember it. It's worth a moment of your time to ponder.

Beloved in Christ, be it this Christmastide our care and delight to hear again the message of the angels, and in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, and the Babe lying in a manger. Therefore let us read and mark in Holy Scripture the tale of the loving purposes of God from the first days of our disobedience unto the glorious Redemption brought us by this Holy Child. But first, let us pray for the needs of the whole world; for peace on earth and goodwill among all his people; for unity and brotherhood within the Church he came to build, and especially in this our diocese. And because this of all things would rejoice his heart, let us remember, in his name, the poor and helpless, the cold, the hungry, and the oppressed; the sick and them that mourn, the lonely and the unloved, the aged and the little children; all those who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love. Lastly, let us remember before God all those who rejoice with us, but upon another shore, and in a greater light, that multitude which no man can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh, and with whom in the Lord Jesus we are one forevermore. These prayers and praises let us humbly offer up to the Throne of Heaven, in the words which Christ himself hath taught us: Our Father, which art in heaven...

The bidding prayer was written by Eric Milner-White, dean of the chapel of King's College, who introduced the Lessons and Carols service there on Christmas Eve 1918. Jeremy Summerly describes the prayer as "the greatest addition to the Church of England's liturgy since the Book of Common Prayer." In some versions, the prayer for "all those who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love" is dropped, perhaps because of political correctness and religious timidity, but they seem to have been restored in recent years. Who needs prayer more than those who reject the Way, the Truth, and the Life? The phrase "upon another shore, and in a greater light" always gives me goosebumps as I think about friends and family who are no longer with us, but who are now free from pain and delighting in the presence of the Savior they loved so dearly in this life. As he wrote those words, Milner-White, who had served as an army chaplain in the Great War before his return to King's College, must have had in mind the 199 men of King's and the hundreds of thousands of his countrymen who never returned home from the trenches of Europe. This year that number includes my father, who was Christmas cheer personified for our family and for many Tulsans for the last two decades. The staff at Philbrook Museum, where he held court every year since 2005 that they'd had a Santa, very kindly invited my sister and I and our families to one night of the Festival and presented us with Christmas ornaments honoring his memory. His successor at Philbrook is a fine gentleman and was a good friend and colleague to Dad, and it was nice to Dad's custom-built throne still in good use. Added this year to the number of those who rejoice on another shore and in a greater light are several other men who were fathers in the faith: Brother Gerald E. Dyer, the pastor at First Baptist Church of Rolling Hills who baptized me in 1972 and who went on to serve pastorates in Baxter Springs, Kansas, and Miami, Oklahoma; Dr. Donald R. Vance, a world-renowned expert in Hebrew and Semitic languages, co-editor of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia: A Reader's Edition, a former professor at ORU and teacher at ACA, and a faithful friend; and Ray Rose, who was my boss at Burtek back in the late 1980s, and who set an example of living out his Christian faith both in and out of the workplace. On the very same day that my dad left this life, my Aunt Gerry, my mother's youngest surviving sister, left us, too. Aunt Gerry was a voracious reader. When I was young she would lend me her favorite sci-fi novels, and she gave me albums that introduced me to Monty Python and Willie Nelson (and Willie Nelson introduced me to the Great American Songbook). She spent several years as a reporter and editor at small-town newspapers in southeastern Oklahoma and was a skilled grant writer. Remembering those who have gone on before leads us to the final verses of the Epiphany hymn, "As with Gladness, Men of Old", which describes "another shore" as "the heavenly country bright":

Holy Jesus, every day Keep us in the narrow way; And, when earthly things are past, Bring our ransomed souls at last Where they need no star to guide, Where no clouds Thy glory hide. In the heavenly country bright, Need they no created light; Thou its Light, its Joy, its Crown, Thou its Sun which goes not down; There forever may we sing Alleluias to our King!

The final verses of the processional hymn also speak to that blessed hope:

And our eyes at last shall see Him, Through His own redeeming love, For that Child so dear and gentle Is our Lord in Heaven above; And He leads His children on To the place where He is gone. Not in that poor lowly stable, With the oxen standing by, We shall see Him; but in Heaven, Set at God's right Hand on high ; When like stars His children crowned, All in white shall wait around.

MORE: "Once in Royal David's City," the processional hymn from King's College Lessons and Carols, was Christmas 2023 Hymn of the Week at Word and Song by Debra and Anthony Esolen. This year's broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College Cambridge marked its 107th anniversary. You might be able listen to the service for the next four weeks on the BBC Sounds website, but this year, because of changes in BBC policy, you might need to use a VPN and a private browser tab and an account registered to a UK address to listen. A pre-recorded video of the service, called Carols from King's, is available internationally for download at a price of £8.33 (about $10 US). You can view the booklet for the service and an article on the history of the service here. (Direct link to service booklet PDF. Direct link to history booklet PDF.) The history of the Lessons and Carols service was presented in this 15-minute BBC program, Episode 8 of the series "A Cause for Caroling." Alas, it was not repeated this year, so it is not available through the BBC, but it is available through Audible and as an audio CD.) Edward White Benson, first Bishop of Truro, originated the service of Nine Lessons and Carols in 1880. It was published in 1884 and began to be used more widely. From the 2018 service booklet:

The 1918 service was, in fact, adapted from an order drawn up by E. W. Benson, later Archbishop of Canterbury, for use in the large wooden shed which then served as his cathedral in Truro at 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve, 1880. A. C. Benson recalled: 'My father arranged from ancient sources a little service for Christmas Eve - nine carols and nine tiny lessons, which were read by various officers of the Church, beginning with a chorister, and ending, through the different grades, with the Bishop'. The idea had come from G. H. S. Walpole, later Bishop of Edinburgh.Very soon other churches adapted the service for their own use. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Milner-White decided that A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols would be a more uplifting occasion at King's than Evensong on Christmas Eve. He used Benson's plan, but wrote the now-classic Bidding Prayer to set the tone at the beginning. Since then the spoken parts, which provide the backbone of the service, have only occasionally changed.

MORE: John Piper explains what Christmas is all about in 115 words:

Christmas means that a king has been born, conceived in the womb of a virgin. And this king will reign over an everlasting kingdom that will be made up of millions and millions of saved sinners. The reason that this everlasting, virgin-born king can reign over a kingdom of sinners is because he was born precisely to die. And he did die. He died in our place and bore our sin and provided our righteousness and took away the wrath of God and defeated the evil one so that anyone, anywhere, of any kind can turn from the treason of sin to the true king, and put their faith in him, and have everlasting joy.

STILL MORE: Author William Federer, on the Eric Metaxas Show, explains the evidence that establishes December 25 as the date of Christ's birth. At her blog, A Clerk of Oxford, Eleanor Parker has written a great many articles about the Anglo-Saxon commemoration of the Christian year. This Twitter thread and this blog entry will lead you to a series of articles on the "O Antiphons," the Latin poems of praise to Christ that are read at vespers over the week prior to Christmas day, each one naming a title of Christ reflecting a different aspect of His glory -- Wisdom, Lord, Root of Jesse, Key of David, Dayspring (Morning Star), King of Nations, and Emmanuel (God with us). Her essay from 1st Sunday in Advent 2020 reflects on Advent, Christmas, and time, on 2020's lack of holidays, the impossibility of "pressing pause" on life, the origins of Christmas and claims of cultural appropriation, the emotional impact of the season. A worthwhile ramble on a gray day. It's all worth reading, but this passage stood out to me, and it cites that wonderful phrase from the bidding prayer that undoes me every year:

The British festival year used to involve numerous seasons and holidays when people could gather together, in extended families and in local communities; now for many people in that 90% it's almost all concentrated on Christmas, and that's a lot of pressure. Of course advertisers exploit that pressure for their own ends, so many of us have a vision in our heads of the 'perfect family Christmas' which may bear little or no relation to how we have actually experienced the season. (I'm sure the journalists are attacking the imaginary advertisers' Christmas more than anything they've seen in real life.) It's typical of the modern Christmas, most of all in its focus on family and childhood, that it leads people to places of strong emotion, both good and bad. Whether your memories of childhood Christmas are happy or unhappy ones, when Christmas comes round there's no escaping them. Whatever your family is or isn't, or whatever you want it to be, this is the time when you are insistently pushed to think about it and to compare yourself to others. Any sense of loss or deficiency in the family is made worse by the contrast with images of other apparently perfect families, or by remembering past happiness, or imagining what could or should be. Grief is harder. Absences are more keenly felt. It's a season when one phrase or one note of a song can open floodgates of emotion, calling forth profound fears, griefs, and longings which in ordinary time we might manage to contain. Christmas used to be a season of ghost stories, and it's certainly a time when it's hard not to be haunted by memories - even happy memories, of 'those who rejoice with us, but on another shore and in a greater light'. You can call that sentimental, or irrational, but it's very powerful all the same. And it's no coincidence - of course it isn't - that this is all intensified because it takes place at midwinter, when the days are very short and the nights very long; when the weather is cold and hostile; when light is lowest, and the shadows longest. There's a reason we call this season 'the dead of winter', with all the sterility and hopelessness that implies. That makes the Christmas brightness all the brighter, or the darkness all the darker - the lights and the warmth and the company all the more welcome, or their absence all the more painful. It's a bleak and lonely and isolating time of year, at the best of times; and these aren't the best of times. How much more endless the empty evenings seem now in November than they did in April, now they begin at four o'clock in the afternoon! The 'it's just one day' people can go on saying that as much as they like, but this particular day, after nine months of isolation or separation from family, is going to be hard for a lot of people.

Just remember: If you didn't fulfill every Christmas tradition you wanted to honor, give every gift you wanted to give, sing every carol on or before December 25, there are still eleven days of Christmas remaining! RELATED: Tom Holland writing in Unherd in December 2020 on The Myth of Pagan Christmas. Holland takes us back to the Christmas feast at the court of King Athelstan in Amesbury in 932, and looks back from there to the idea of measuring time from the birth of Christ:

Bede, more clearly than any Christian scholar before him, had recognised that there was only the one fixed point amid the great sweep of the aeons, only the single pivot. Drawing on calendrical tables compiled some two centuries earlier, he had fixed on the Incarnation, the entry of the divine into the womb of the Virgin Mary, as the moment on which all of history turned. Years, by Bede's reckoning, were properly measured according to whether they were before Christ or anno Domini: in the year of the Lord. The effect was to render the calendar itself as Christian. The great drama of Christ's incarnation and birth stood at the very centre of both the turning of the year and the passage of the millennia. The fact that pagans too had staged midwinter festivities presented no threat to this conceptualisation, but quite the opposite. Dimly, inadequately, gropingly, they had anticipated the supreme miracle: the coming into darkness of the true Light, by which every man who comes into the world is lit.

He concludes with this:

This year of all years [2020] -- with a clarity denied us in happier times -- it is possible to recognise in Christmas its fundamentally Christian character. The light shining in the darkness proclaimed by the festival is a very theological light, one that promises redemption from the miseries of a fallen world. In a time of pandemic, when the festive season is haunted by the shadows of sickness and bereavement, of loneliness and disappointment, of poverty and dread, the power of this theology, one that has fuelled the celebration of Christmas for century after century, becomes easier, perhaps, to recognise than in a time of prosperity. The similarities shared by the feast day of Christ's birth with other celebrations that, over the course of history, have been held in the dead of winter should not delude us into denying a truth so evident as to verge on the tautologous: Christmas is a thoroughly Christian festival.

- December 25, 2025 at 03:09AM
A bidding prayer for Christmas, A. D. 2025
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