There’s an old Merle Haggard song entitled If We Make It Through December. It tells the story of a man who has hit hard times after he has been laid off at the factory, but who is hoping for the best, and for better times. He says, “Now, I don’t mean to hate December, it’s meant to be the happy time of year, and why my little girl don’t understand why daddy can’t afford no Christmas here.” And so, he says, if only they can make it through December, everything will be alright. Occasionally you will actually hear that during this season being played along the other songs of the season, but it’s pretty rare, because it doesn’t really capture the feeling of the season that people think you’re supposed to have. It’s not holly, jolly and certainly not merry, and so I suspect if they played it too often people would start complaining. And yet, for many people it sums up their feelings a little too well, and I’m assuming for most of you as well, that you think, “If we can just make it through to the New Year, then things will get better. It won’t hurt as much.”
I’ve said this in year’s past, but I think this is the most important worship service we do every year, and yet it is the one I struggle with the most, because it’s the hardest one to sort of encapsulate what might need to be said, because that need is different for everyone of you, and I feel the need to try and say something, to try and give some level of comfort even in my inadequacies in doing so. I know some of you might think it’s because us preachers just can’t be quiet and if given the chance to talk, we have to fill up the space, even if just to hear ourselves talk. But honestly, it’s more out of fear. One year I am going to be strong enough to just come here and let us sit in silence for 10 minutes, but I’m not ready to do that yet, and maybe you’re not ready either. Sometimes we need to hear some words of comfort, some words of promise some words of hope in this time, in this moment, that at some point everything might be alright and so I hope that they are more than the words offered by the friends to Job in the midst of his suffering, because as long as they were silent, everything was okay. It’s once they began to speak that they got themselves into trouble, and perhaps that was because they then tried to give justification for why Job was suffering, rather than simply being present for him.
So, let me assure you that this service is not to justify or give reasons for why we go through what we go through. God did not cause whatever it is that brought you here tonight. It didn’t happen because it’s part of a plan we don’t understand, or because God thought we would be big enough to be able to handle it, or any of the other things we hear, meant as words of comfort, and usually with the best of intentions, but all too often words that bring even more pain and sorrow. Additionally, most of those things are not scriptural. And yet, in the midst of the valley of the shadow of death or in the midst in the dark night of the soul, in the midst of loss and pain and suffering, we wonder where is God, and perhaps we even cry out, just as Jesus did in his moment of despair, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
For the four Sundays leading up to Christmas, we light a candle each week for a different theme of Advent, which is a time of preparation. The themes of those candles are not, holly, jolly, merry and mistletoe, which they might be if the secular world was in charge of naming them, but instead, they are hope, peace, joy and love. You’ll notice that three of the candles are purple, which has multiple meanings. One of them is for royalty, but another is for suffering. The three purple candles represent hope, peace and love, things we need desperately in the darkest moments of our lives. In her masterpiece on suffering, the theologian dorothee Solee, said that one of the things that makes suffering so difficult is that it isolates us from others, we lose a sense of community of belonging, even when people try and comfort us and be present for us, there is still something that keeps them at a distance from us because they are not going through what we are going through, and so we feel alone, and thus need that notion of hope and peace and love. And then there is the third candle, which is the candle of joy, and it is pink. It breaks up the season, and serves to remind us that even in the midst of suffering that joy is not only possible, but that joy is present because of God, just as hope and peace and joy are also possible. And so we gather here on this longest night to remember that, and to hear of God’s promises once again.
Has anyone here ever been in total darkness, and I’m not talking psychologically, although I know that is also true, but in a space. I’m talking darkness where you can’t even see your hand even if you put it right in front of your face. A darkness that just envelopes you, where you can feel it. How much light does it take to break that darkness? The truth is it doesn’t take much. You don’t need a flood light, all you need is a single prick of light and the darkness is shattered, it is overcome. The darkness is still there, but it doesn’t win, the light wins. That’s what tonight reminds us is that those who have walked in the land of darkness, on them a light has shined, that even the smallest sliver of light changes everything and helps us to remember that the darkness cannot and does not win, that hope is there. That’s what Paul also tells us in that passage we heard from Romans this evening.
When then Senator Barak Obama wrote the Audacity of Hope, I remember leading a Bible study and we ended up talking about the idea that hope could be audacious, and when it is that you needed and felt hope. You can certainly feel hopeful during good times, even if it’s just the hope that the good times will continue, but that’s more like Paul’s statement that we don’t hope for that which we can see, for who hopes for what is already there. Instead we hope for what we don’t see, and unfortunately, although Paul doesn’t say that word, we wait for it with patience. But, perhaps patience isn’t actually the right word. We wait for the fulfillment of our hope with patience, but we can see that hope is possible because of the light overcoming the darkness, because we know that we are not alone. That God is with us, and that we are here for each other. This gathering here tonight tells us that we are not alone, that people, like us, are going through their own issues, and that they care, that others care, that the world cares, that God cares, we are not alone, and because God so loved the world that God gave us his only son, the word made flesh, sent to dwell amongst us, and he was born humbly and laid in a manger.
And then, Paul continues, that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with God in the midst of our suffering, with sighs too deep for words, an experience which many of us have faced, and then concludes by saying “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” Notice that Paul does not say that everything happens for a reason, or that God causes everything, but that God makes things work together for good, that God can redeem all situations. We recently had the daughter of some of the members of the church die of cancer. She had been estranged from much of her family for awhile, but in her sickness was able to reconnect with them, to see some of them for the first time in many years, and she told me just a few days before she died that she never knew how loved she was until she got sick. God was able to redeem this situation, to bring goodness out of a terrible circumstance, to provide light out of the darkness and hope out of despair.
Although our society goes a little hog wild about Christmas, the truth is, we are not a Christmas people. We are an Easter people, but Easter doesn’t begin on Sunday morning, it begins with the darkness of Jesus last night, which we remember at this table, and the suffering on the cross and the darkness of the tomb. Easter is not just a celebration of hope, it is the columniation that hope was possible, hope is possible, even in the darkest moments of our lives, that the light overcomes the darkness. Christmas too reminds us of that same thing and as the light of the world comes into the world, it points us to the way of the tomb and to the celebration of Easter, because love wins, and peace wins, and joy wins and hope wins. Hope wins because the light always overcomes the darkness. And so as we move out of this longest night of the year, and every day gets a little bit longer we remember the light of Christ and the power of hope, we learn that we can indeed make it through December because of the light of Christ and the hope of God’s promises, and to remember that sometimes the tears we shed wash our eyes to be open to see new possibilities.
And so as we prepare to gather at the table to remember Christ’s mighty acts on our behalf, and to be re-membered as one body in Christ, to gather with all the saints who have gone before us, to know that we are never alone, in your bulletin you will find a card that says hope on one side, and what I am going to ask is that you fill our what your hope is, or where you find hope, or maybe even, if you don’t have any at the moment, what you want your hope to be, and to fill that out and as we receive communion to bring it forward and to place it on the table as your offering to God, for the Spirit to intercede for us. You will also find a yes/no question there, and one of the projects I am going to do this next year is to be asking people what their hope is, and then share them on a yet to be developed website. They will be shared anonymously or with only a first name, but you can say whether you would like it to be shared or not. Either way, I will pray over these cards and ask for God’s hope to be manifest in all of our lives this Christmas and for years to come, for those who have walked in the land of darkness, on them darkness has shined. Amen.
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