Christmas Eve Meditation
John 1:1-14
Click here to view the full sermon video for Christmas Eve, December 24, 2021.
Tonight’s lessons could best be described as a set of bookends that hold within them the familiar story of Jesus’ birth as told by the Gospel writer Luke. At the front of that bookend, we hear the prophet Isaiah describe the people walking in darkness who have seen a great light. And at the back of that bookend, we get a different kind of origin story as told by the gospel writer John.
The manger and shepherds and angels are noticeably absent from the way John opens his account of the good news. Instead, he talks about a Word that is from the beginning, a Word by which life itself is brought into being. But it is more than life, it is the light of all people.
This life, this light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. In the middle of these bookends we witnessed the picture Luke paints of a dark night that is pierced by heavenly light announcing the arrival of a savior who will change everything. But as a general rule, we prefer to traffic in the more luminous half of that equation between darkness and light.
We delight in displays like the River of Lights, or rows upon rows of houses decorated with lights for Christmas. We set out luminaria or farolito. Clearly, our way of dealing with any kind of darkness is to turn on some kind of light.
In these lessons, however, the light in question doesn’t come from the people walking in darkness, or the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks at night. Even John’s metaphysical poetry suggests that this light that shines in the darkness comes from beyond us.
So, of course, one of the risks of taking matters into our own hands, one of the risks of reaching for whatever light we might try to generate when we find ourselves in the dark is that in doing so we may miss the light of the world, the light that is not overcome, when it arrives. It’s a tricky thing to balance on Christmas Eve.
I grew up going to church with my family every year on Christmas Eve. And I remember one year in particular when the service felt particularly dark. Everyone in my family commented on what a downer it had been to hear the litany of pain and darkness present in the world. We wanted light. We wanted tidings of comfort and Joy to the World. We didn’t want to be reminded of all that terrible stuff. After all, it was Christmas.
By trying to make everything merry and bright, though, we tend to forget the whole point of this story in the first place. The source of our joy, the source of our hope, is an announcement that comes not in the well-lit places of this world. Not to the people sheltered by the warmth of the Bethlehem inn, or in the streets of Jerusalem, or in the halls of power to people like Quirinius the governor of Syria or even Caesar Augustus himself.
No, the source of all that we seek this night is an announcement that comes to people who have no choice but to navigate the dark. Those people that the prophet is talking about, they were the people who had been living under the threat posed by the Assyrian army on the march. The first to hear the good news of great joy for all the people, they were shepherds doing their best to ward off the danger that lurked in the dark.
For almost two years now we have been doing the same. Only for us it hasn’t been the Assyrian army threatening our lives, but the Coronavirus and all the attending shutdowns, distance, restrictions and isolation this deadly threat and its variants have generated. We too have been trying to ward off dangers like racism, division and falsehood that lurk all around us.
We don’t need to dwell on the darkness, but neither should we deny that we dwell in it either. Just this week in our community there are people with a family member who has received a terminal diagnosis, a family that has spent the week in the hospital with a baby who can’t get enough oxygen while fighting off RSV. A father lost his son, another prays that his son can recover from a severe COVID infection that hospitalized him for over a month. A mother worries about her son whose home in the Philippines was just struck by a typhoon. I got a call from a complete stranger from out of state concerned about their elderly mother living here in town and caught in the darkness of grief and depression. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
We don’t always tell each other these stories. We don’t talk about our struggles in the dark. But my guess is that each one of us is dealing with something that threatens to overcome the light that is within them. The real joy of Christmas will never come from our feeble attempts to turn on some kind of light. It won’t come from whatever is or isn’t wrapped with a bow and waiting under the tree. It won’t come from the perfect place setting, or the flawless meal.
Which also means that the real joy of Christmas will not be denied if plans get cancelled by COVID, or the gifts get delayed by a glitch in the supply chain. Because the real joy of Christmas is the promise that God’s light comes to us and finds us when we are in the dark, in the messy, broken and fearful parts of our lives that aren’t always easy to talk about, the parts we’d rather keep hidden. It comes to us when we are scared and far from home to announce, “Do not be afraid, for see - I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people.”
It comes as something as small and unexpected as a baby born in the wrong place at the wrong time for all the right reasons. It comes and transforms the darkness, lighting up the night and returning us to our lives glorifying and praising God for all we have heard and seen, just as it has been told to us.