Sermon for December 21, 2011 - Longest Night

The carols are being played, the stores are bursting at the seams with product on display.  Lights are up around town, and everyone is talking about their Christmas plans.  Though this can be a joyful season, it can also be an isolating one, a season that makes us feel left out because there are times when we just can’t wear that same saccharine smile that is on everybody else’s face.  It might be because we have lost someone near and dear to us, and the holidays are flooded with painful memories or just a sense of something missing; it might be because the season overwhelms us with ever growing to-do lists and we long for some moment of peace and pause that we just cannot find; or it might be because our hearts are just heavy and we feel like crying, and there is just no place to share that, to let it go.

And so we come to the longest night.  Only eight hours of light boxed between sunrise, sunset, and the long dark.  And even when the sun is out, it is so low in the sky as to create the feeling of eternal dusk.  It can weigh heavily on us at times.  This year especially, not only the cold and the dark, but the damp makes a potent mix that can chill us to our very core.

And in the midst of this natural movement of the seasons, we have Christmas.  It is funny how the Holy Spirit works.  The past couple of days I have been wondering about the relationship between Christmas and the Longest night of the year, in preparation for tonight’s service.  This morning I received an email from the Center for Action and Contemplation written by Richard Rohr.  In his brief message he describes the historical view of the Winter Solstice, not as a day that embodies the death of the sun as we might think about it, but rather as the day which marks its rebirth.  For early Christians, who lived in the Northern Hemisphere, this was significant and could not be overlooked.  Christmas and the Winter Solstice used the symbol of the rebirth of the sun in the sky, as a sign of the birth of light on earth.

When it comes down to it, Christmas is about one simple story.  A story so precious and gentle, so beautiful and meaningful that it has carried on for two thousand of years.  It was not on a bright sunshiney morning that God came into the world, but rather on a dark cold night.  That is where we meet God.  On those dark cold nights, when we feel like the light of the world is barely creeping over the horizon, if at all.  In Christ, born in a stable, living with the lonely and the isolated, mourning the death of a friend and weeping in the Garden of Gethsemane, we see God’s promise being fulfilled.  We have become engraved on the divine palms, as nails driven into the cross.  God does not abandon us to the darkness alone though at times we may feel it.  God walks with us through those darkest times, carrying whatever burden we carry, weeping whenever we weep.

All the while whispering into our ears, “Oh my precious Child, wherever you walk, I will walk with you.”  Speaking to all of creation, “Oh my love, my love, wherever you go, I will go.”  Sighing with a weeping heart, “You are mine.  I am with you in all things.  You are not alone.  I am there, and my heart is breaking with your.”