In the Fullness of Time

Here is my message for Blue Christmas. The text was Galatians 4:4-7:

When I lived in Santa Fe, this is pre-ministry years, one of the houses I lived in was on the southside of the city, with windows that covered the entire southside of the house, which meant it had fantastic views, but it was hard to heat in the winter and the birds hated it because they kept running into the windows. One time a bird hit the window so hard, I thought for sure he had broken his neck, but when I went out later to collect him, he wasn’t there. Turns out he wasn’t dead, just stunned. But, if you’ve ever seen a bird recover from hitting a window, there is a certain ritual that they all go through. First is they sort of fluff out their feathers and sit for a while a little drooped over. Then they’ll start to walk around, and shake out a foot, and then a wing, and then another foot, and then the other wing, and fluff up their feathers, and they keep doing that for a while. It sort of reconnects their mind with their bodies, and reminds them that they are a bird, and how to work everything, and how to be normal again. They don’t just get right up and fly again, it takes a while. They have to return to a new sense a normal. In fact, birding groups recommend that if you find a bird that’s been stunned and is not in a safe area to recover, to place it in a container where it can do this process, in a dark, warm space, which will help calm it down, and then leave it alone for two hours before checking on them again.

Sometimes life is just like that. Sometimes, to push this analogy just a little further, we see what’s coming and can brace ourselves, but often the things that bring us to our knees, the things that bring us here tonight, are those things that surprise us, the windows that we slam into dropping us to the ground. The windows that perhaps we might even just wish would have killed us to rather than to allow us to stay here, or that leave us just unsure what’s happening. And so, when I counsel people who are grieving on what to do, my best advice is to simply be present. Feel what you are feeling and stay in the moment. After losing his mother, the author Sherman Alexie said he was talking with his sister and he asked how she was doing and she said, “It hurts to breathe, but I’m doing all right.” And he said he thought that was the best definition of grief he had heard. “It hurts to breathe, but I’m doing all right.” In those moments, explanations for our grief, defenses of God of why this is all part of some grand design, even if we don’t understand, are not helpful, and that is not my purpose for tonight, or really for any Blue Christmas service that I’ve done. Instead it’s to give us space to give voice, and I know for some of you just showing up here was a major step, and also to hear that’s okay to feel what we’re feeling, and as a minister to remind us that we are not alone, that God is with us, and that God cares what happens to us. And it’s just to be present here and for each other, because some here tonight are in that place that St. John of the Cross called the dark night of the soul, and others are here because they’ve been there and want to support those who are there now. And that includes me.

Last year I mentioned the fact that I normally put up thousands of Christmas lights on our house, but one year I didn’t put up a single one because I just couldn’t do it. I had had two staff members at the church I served die very suddenly that year, and then our infant daughter spent the first week of her life in the NICU, and was closely monitored for the next month and a half, and I just couldn’t do it. If we didn’t have other children I’m not sure we would have celebrated Christmas at all that year. And when I told that to someone else, he told me that he had just put up lights on his house for the first time in ten years since the death of his daughter. He had spent that time fluffing his feathers, and shaking out his feet, trying to reconnect his mind and soul to his body to be able to fly again. Or perhaps you continue to decorate only because you don’t want to have to answer the questions about why you didn’t decorate, because the answers are too painful to give. And so, my purpose is not to justify, or explain away, but to allow us to name it, and also to give a message of hope, to allow some to fluff their feathers a little, and to be present in this moment. But here’s the crux of the matter…

Has anyone here ever been in total darkness? I’m not talking about a starless night, but I mean put your hand in front of your face and not be able to see your hand darkness. I’ve been there a couple of times in some deep caves that we’ve gone into. But how much light does it take to brighten up that darkness? Only a pin prick makes a huge difference. Without that light, the darkness can actually feel oppressive. You can feel the weight of it, which might be a good title for a book, the weight of darkness. But a small light shatters that darkness. That’s what Christmas is about. We don’t have Christmas because everything is great, we have Christmas because, as Isaiah said in that passage we heard, that the people have lived in a land of darkness. If life were holy, jolly and merry all the time, it’d be great, but Christmas would be meaningless. We have Christmas because we slam into windows every now and then, and we love people who slam into windows, and we need to know that our falling is not in vain (Psalm 22 – my God my God why have you forsaken me, Bulls of Bashan encircle me – poured out like water and my heart is like wax --- but then it shifts to praise – God did not hide his face, he heard when I cried to him – future generations will hear of this deliverance – a story told looking backward). We need to know that our falling is not in vain, and we need to know that we will learn to fluff our feathers again and even fly again, but it might take time. We need to know that it’s okay that it hurts to breath, but hope is there and light is there and new life is there, even if we cannot imagine it or see it in the moment, or perhaps we can’t even imagine a time that it won’t hurt as much as it does right now.

But Christmas is that moment, that light entering into the world to tell us that we are not alone, that God is here to walk this journey with us. That God becomes flesh and dwells among us. That the Spirit will give us the power to move, when our whole body aches and we can’t even think about getting out of bed. We need to know of God’s hope in that moment, and to know that there is something more, and so we hear the story of Mary giving birth, knowing that she too will lose her child, and that God too knows the pain of losing a child, but that God also offers the light of a new day and the power of resurrection. That’s what that bird who hit my window experience. A resurrection. I don’t know how long it took her to get everything working again, and I don’t know how long her headache lasted, but she was able to fly again, although I can imagine that when it first happened she never imagined that as a possibility, but she took the time to do what she needed to be and just simply was for a while.

After I read what birds do when hitting windows, not only did I think that was a great metaphor for dealing with traumatic events in our lives, but I also instantly thought of the passage we heard from Galatians, that Jesus came in the fullness of time. That phrase is one of my favorite passages of scripture. In the fullness of time. I don’t really know what it means, but it implies that Jesus came when it was time, not too soon, but not too late.  And Jesus came not because everything was going good, but because things were broken, that we needed peace and hope and joy and love, that we needed to be redeemed, and we needed to be adopted as children. And since we have been adopted, we know that God loves us just as a parent does, even more than a parent does, and cares for us, and cares what’s happening in our lives. God does not abandon us in times of need. God comes to us in the fullness of time to be with us in our triumphs and tragedies, to be with us even in the valley of the shadow of death. To provide the light that shines for us in our darkness, to provide us with the hope we need in order to remember and to find a new normal. A new way of moving forward in the fullness of time. A new way of moving forward in the power of the Holy Spirit. A new way of moving forward with God.          

Our losses don’t go away, but they get easier to deal with, especially when we turn them over to God. God didn’t cause them to happen, but God can redeem them, because God too knows loss, because God gave us Jesus, the light of the world. And although the world tried to defeat that light, tried to destroy that light, it failed, because the light overcomes the darkness. And so, on this longest night of the year, we remember that from now on the days get a little longer, a little brighter, and while it may be imperceptible while it’s happening, we know that it is the same way that God is doing with our lives. So, remember, it’s okay to grieve, it’s okay to take time to recover and recuperate, we can’t just get right back up after trauma, we have to take the time to fluff our feathers and rest, so that God can lift us up, and set us free to fly in God’s care, for as Isaiah says, God will mount us up with wings like eagles, when we are ready. I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.