This Sunday, we move into the season of Advent — and with it, a new year in the Christian liturgical calendar. It is thus fitting that the Song of the Season with which we begin our worship each week likewise changes. And the song selected for this season is a new song (lyrics composed this year!) with a very old tune.
The tune we know as “Scarborough Fair” goes back hundreds of years. While the song itself is an old English ballad, the tune actually predates it and seems originally to have accompanied a folk of Scottish origin named “The Elfin Knight,” which dates to at least 1670. Both songs lyrically have some similarities, but since “Scarborough Fair” is more familiar to us (thanks especially to Simon and Garfunkel), I thought I’d explore that version a bit.
If you didn’t know, the Scarborough Fair was an actual thing — a six-week trading festival begun in 1253 and continuing for over 500 years. It became a huge annual event with music, food, and games, and it attracted merchants from all over Europe. With this cosmopolitan influx of people, it is little surprise that a folk song about love — and more to the point, impossible love — came to be written.
Like most folk songs, there are countless versions of the lyrics, but most of the time “Scarborough Fair” is written as a duet with male and female voices — representing two people who were, or would be “true lovers.” The male voice begins, singing to tell the woman in Scarborough Fair what she must do if she is to be his “true lover,” delegating to her a series of impossible tasks: making a shirt without seams or stitches, washing it in a well without water, etc. The female voice responds, issuing her own impossible tasks (buy an acre “betwixt the salt water and the sea sand,” plough it with a ram’s horn, sow it with a single peppercorn, shear it with a sickle of leather, etc.), and she insists that he complete his tasks before she completes hers.
Undergirded by this haunting melody, the lyrics and context of “Scarborough Fair” communicates this sense of longing. We never get a real glimpse of how these two connected earlier in life, but doing so again seems impossible — and is impossible — because of the obstacles they put before the other and the expectations the demand the other meet. We know in the song that they will never reconnect again, and we are saddened by this. We feel their loss. And maybe, we hope for ourselves for more.
This is part of what makes “Scarborough Fair” such a brilliant choice for a new Advent song, such as Kristin Munchenberg has written this year. The lyrics she has composed speak of “waiting… longing… stirring…” And in Advent, we wait on the birth of Jesus. We long for his coming. We are stirred by the prophets to see the injustice and brokenness of the world and the need for Christ to set things right.
Perhaps similar to the fiction of the lyrics of “Scarborough Fair”, it seems that what often keeps Christ from being fully present with us are the impossible obstacles we set before our “true Lover”…… the deep limitations we place on Jesus’s presence and action in our lives and our world.
But unlike that old ballad, these Advent lyrics exude hope: “Come, Light of Christ, our hearts renew; shine in the world, your promise is true.” Our love is not unrequited; nor is it a frivolous “Ren-Faire fling.” Rather: “Love [is] made flesh… birthed in our midst… Light of Love, we welcome you.”
Come, Lord Jesus.
Pastor Michael
Here is a link to the song if you wish to listen to it.