Blue Christmas: Joy Comes in the Morning

Here is my sermon for our Blue Christmas service. The text was Isaiah 40:1-11 and Luke 1:67-79:

This is a picture of a painting that hangs in my office and I really like it. It was painted by Irma Fath, who was a member of the last church I served, and she was largely self-taught. We have two other of her paintings of New Mexico landscapes that hang in our dining room. But when Irma was 94, I believe, she was diagnosed with cancer, and she decided she had had a good life and didn’t seek any treatment. In a memorial service here earlier this fall I talked about that there used to be a Christian concept called the art of dying. It encouraged people to think about their mortality, not as an act of morbidity, but to think about it as an act of faithful living, to plan how they wanted to die in order to be an example of the Christian faith and the promise of eternal life. It’s not really practiced or talked about today because as a culture we want to ignore the whole idea of death and grief and push them to the side. But as deaths go, Irma had a good death’s journey and a good death. And in one of the last times I saw her she said she wanted me to pick out one painting that I liked and take it, and this is the one I chose.

And what I really like about this painting, first is that it looks cold, and I love cold weather, but it’s also because of the question this painting poses to me. I don’t know if it’s already winter and this woman is stopping to pause and look at these beautiful flowers outside of this shop, sort of being reminded of the beauty of the flowers and the promise they remind her of a spring to come. Or is it already spring, and thus appropriate to have flowers sitting out, and she is out in one of those cold snaps we always get that reminds us that winter is not done with us yet. And so there is this tension of the cold and dark of winter and the life and beauty and warmth of spring all sort of tied up together here in this moment. It’s that tension that’s tied up in this night.

Tonight is the longest night of the year. Starting tomorrow morning the days will grow a little longer and the nights will grow a little shorter until we reach the summer solstice in June. It might not seem like it, it might seem as Bill Murray says in Groundhog Day that the winter is going to be cold, it’s going to be grey and it’s going to last you for the rest of your life. Maybe that’s where many of you sit on this longest of nights, and the reason you are here. Maybe it’s the loss of health or a job or the loss of a loved one, whatever it might be, this is not the easiest season in which to mourn, in which to experience loss, in which to be blue, because the world tells us that it’s the most wonderful time of the year, that everything is holly and jolly and merry, and when you don’t feel that, and when we’re told to feel that, to just let go of all that other stuff that’s keeping us down and just get into the season, it’s hard and it’s lonely, and we think “if only it could be that easy.” Mourning is hard at Christmas.

As many of you know, I love to decorate my house at Christmas, with literally thousands of lights all over, and I do that for several reasons, but the most important is that I can remember how much other’s decorations brought me joy growing up, sometimes in down years, and so I want to do the same for others. But several years ago I didn’t put up a single light on the house. I had had two church staff members die very suddenly that year, and this was in a staff of six, and then our third, and surprise daughter was born and spent the first five days in the NICU followed by nearly daily visits to the doctor or nurse visits in the house, and all with the implication implied that the health problems she was having were our fault. The fact that she wasn’t gaining weight or eating right was obviously because we weren’t doing the right things. And it was just all too much. We did get a tree that year, but that was the extent of our decorations and honestly if we didn’t have our two older daughters I doubt we would have even have done that. Christmas as a celebration would have just passed us by, and that would have been just fine. It was one more thing in an already one more thing too many year, and it all just needed to go away. We were not going to have a holly, jolly Christmas, and it was not the best time of the year. And so are we in the midst of winter and we wonder if the flowers show us that we have a long time yet to endure, or are we at the end at there’s one more chilly blast to get through? That’s the eternal question isn’t it, and the answer, usually, is that we have no idea.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the premiere of It’s a Wonderful Life. Now a beloved film, and perhaps seen as the greatest Christmas movie of all time, it was not a success when it debuted. In fact, it was a box office flop, which I guess could sort of remind us that most decisions and happenings are not permanent. As I am sure the vast majority of you are aware, it tells the story of George Bailey, played by the irreplaceable Jimmy Stewart, who is shown what the world would be like if he hadn’t ever been born, which is what he had wished for. And it turns out it would have been much worse, and he realized how many lives were changed because he was in it. And when he is brought back to life, as it were, the proof that he is really back is that he finds some flower petals in his pocket from his daughter Zuzu. Zuzu had gotten the flower from her teacher and in trying to keep the flower alive in the winter she hadn’t buttoned her coat and ended up getting sick, which was sort of the last straw for George in a very bad day. But what that flower represented to Zuzu, and then to George at the end of the film, was sort of a proof of life, a sign of something different and more.

And while people often find this sort of shocking because it seems so antithetical to what our culture says about Christmas, we don’t have Christmas because everything is great. People are arguing about ridiculous things like whether the grocery store tells you merry Christmas and are the cups at Starbucks religious enough, when grief and pain and mourning surround us, when violence and anger and hostility surround us, when earthquakes and typhoons and famines bring death and destruction, because they miss the very purpose of Christmas, of why we need Christ, of why we need hope. We don’t have Christmas because God saw humanity having a great party and said when we could really use on top of that was a shopping bonanza to bring about gift giving. Instead God saw our pain, God saw our sorrow, God saw our violence, God saw our darkness, and God heard our cries in the midst of that and send us his only son in order to save us, to redeem us, to give us hope. A son, who is the light of the world, to brighten our darkness. That’s what that passage from Isaiah that we heard is about, a cry of comfort coming from God for a people who live in destruction and despair, torn from everything that they knew and counted on. It doesn’t lessen what they had and where going through, but it brings a word of comfort in the midst of that turmoil. And what Isaiah is also saying is that the things they were looking for constancy in were the wrong things. Because even the flowers that the woman sees that bring her hope, even the flower petals that George Bailey has as a proof of life, Isaiah says, will wither and die. But, the word of God will stand forever and God will prepare the way. God prepares the way for restoration, God prepares the way for healing, God prepares the way for forgiveness, God prepares the way for love, and God prepares the way for hope, because God gives us Christ. It doesn’t eliminate pain and suffering, sorrow and grief, but it gives us hope.

In Paul’s letter to the Romans he says that hope that is seen is not hope, because if we can see it, then we no longer need to hold out hope, for it is in hope that we are saved. We don’t need light during the daytime, we don’t turn on flashlights at noon, we need light in the darkness. It is on this night, that we need light. It is in the midst of despair that we need hope. It is during the dark night of the soul that we need the assurance that we are not alone, that we have not been abandoned, that not only is hope not lost, but that we are not lost. We need to be reminded that God’s promises remain. We need to be reminded that God’s light is there to break through. We need to be reminded sometimes all it takes is to strike a match, a small spark, to push back against the darkness that seeks to overcome us. In her seminal work on suffering the theologian and philosopher Dorothee Solle said that one of the things that makes suffering so terrible is that it makes us think that we are alone. That we are the only ones going through this, sometimes that we are the only ones who have ever gone through this.

I have no idea what some of you are going through in this season, of what pain you are encountering tonight, and I cannot even begin to say that I understand it or that I too have suffered it, but what I can tell you is that you are not alone. You are not alone, and it’s okay if you didn’t put up any Christmas decorations this year, or you couldn’t bring yourself to do the things you always do. It’s okay to turn off Christmas music even if it’s ol’ blue eyes himself Frank Sinatra. And it’s okay to hurt. It’s okay to cry. It’s okay to shout out to God, to yell at God. It’s even okay to scream “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” a cry of dereliction from even the mouth of Jesus himself.

While most of us are more familiar with Mary’s song from the gospel of Luke, which has come to be known as the Magnificat, the passage we heard from Luke tonight is also a song, known as the Benedictus, from Zechariah, who is the father of the child who will become John the Baptist, the one who prepares the way. and John does that by pointing to the light of the world, and so Zechariah says, “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.” Or as the Psalmist says, weeping may last for the night, but joy comes in the morning. But even in that night, we are never alone for God is with us, the light of Christ is with us because God is even with us in the darkest shadows, even in the valley of the shadow of death. We don’t have Christmas, we don’t need Christmas because the world is great, we need Christmas exactly because of the reasons that brought us here to this service tonight. We need Christmas because we need hope and we need peace and we need joy and we need love, and we need to know that we are not alone. We need to know that on this longest night of the year that the darkness does not win, the grief and despair and anguish do not win, that violence and hatred and ugliness do not win, that brokenness and even death do not win. We need to know that the light is coming, that the light is here for all of us. We need to know that God is here, for Christmas is not just a reality, Christmas is a promise.

That’s what I see in that woman looking at those flowers, whether it’s the beginning of winter or the last gasp of winter, she sees the promise of something more. I don’t have any idea what she is going through, but to me she is seeing the promise of something more, something different, something better. That grief doesn’t go away, but it changes, it morphs, it gets easier. Those flowers, like Zuzu’s petals, are a proof of life, and so is Christmas. It is the promise of God and the note of hope, for the angels to appear to us and with the proclamation of Good News that a savior has been born, who is the hope of the world, who is the light of the world who pushes back at the darkness for it cannot overcome that light. We have that promise fulfilled and the promises yet to come as we prepare for Christmas knowing that we are not alone, that God hears our cries and offers us Christmas as the hope to overcome our despair, the love to overcome our sorrow and the light to overcome our darkness. On this longest of nights we know that the darkness cannot and will not win that all it takes is one small spark to give us light, to help us to see, to help us to know that the light is coming, the light is here, that the proof of life that we seek is life itself and God’s promises. Life here and life eternal, for that too is the promise of Christmas. And so on this longest of nights we prepare our hearts and minds to see that light, to know that light and to be that light for ourselves and to be that light for the world. I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.