God in the darkness

Who here has a favorite holiday movie? Is it Elf? Miracle on 34th Street? It’s a Wonderful Life? Home Alone? Love Actually? Or any one of the multiple Hallmark holiday movies on offer throughout the year – you know, like Cowboy Christmas or Three Wise Men and a Baby or best of all, Hot Frosty?

The Year Without a Santa Claus? Anybody vote for that one, with Mr Heat Miser?

So they all have something of a theme in common, of course. Colorful characters, gorgeous Christmas trees, a high value placed on snow, and most of all, happy endings. Even when there are complications along the way – someone gets lost, someone gets upset, there’s a bad guy out to get them – it all works out fine in the end. Because who wants to watch anything else at Christmas? This is not the time of year for hard-hitting tearjerkers. We know what we want.

Let’s be honest: Christmas is the ultimate comfort food. Familiar Christmas carols help with homesickness, even in July. Christmas treats pile up in the one season of the year when it’s absolutely legitimate to eat dessert after every meal (including breakfast), and for snacks. Christmas lights brighten the scene when the nights get especially dark and cold. And at the heart of it all, the sweet, sweet story of this scene, the Holy Family and the baby in the manger and all of the animals and angels gathered around.

And we get to celebrate it together here this afternoon in this pretty little church in the beautiful valley with the rain coming down, all cozy together. And before we go out into the rain again we’ll sing Silent Night and light our candles, and we’ll have hot cider. It’s all too perfect.

All of this is why this is the most wonderful time of the year. And why it can also be the hardest time. Christmas with an empty place at the table; Christmas in a broken family or all alone; Christmas waiting on the diagnosis; Christmas without money or a home; things that are hard other times can be excruciating at Christmas. Because the sweet picture isn’t always the reality we’re living with. Maybe even most of the time the sweet picture is nothing like the reality – and we don’t always know what to do with that. So we add on more to fill the gap, and then we’re strung out, broke and a few pounds heavier by January. But if we’re honest, we can see that even as an escape, sweetness doesn’t always satisfy.

So as antidote, here’s a reminder of the actual story we’re centered around tonight. This woman has just given birth, in a stable, after traveling 70 miles on a donkey. None of her relatives were there to help her with this birth, just her husband, who is not the father of this child. This is a marriage under stress. And they are poor. This shepherd is one of many who have crowded into the stable to visit – ragged men more than a little rough around the edges. The whole place smells like animals. Outside this scene, there is a king (not the magi but another king), a puppet of the Roman emperor, who wants this child dead. The emperor, and the empire, don’t care about this child at all – he’s just another poor baby born out of wedlock in a backwater town in one of their least favorite colonies. But once he grows up and starts preaching and healing and causing trouble, they will crucify him on a cross.

No decorations; no romance; no snow. No happy ending.

That’s a grim telling of it, I know. But it’s all right there in the scripture account, if you read it without all the Christmas carols and Christmas imagery playing in your head. The Nativity story is not without sweetness – it’s just not quite as pretty as we sometimes make it out to be. It’s more darkness and fear than soft blankets and candlelight.

And remembering that is actually the good news God wants us to hear.

Now, it’s not a wrong thing to pretty it up – that’s what we do with things we see as special, things we venerate as holy. We smooth off the edges with our devotion, we bring the best of what we have to layer on top, we elevate the poor and mean to sumptuous and glittering and fragrant. We bring beautiful things to make more beauty. And God loves beauty. There wouldn’t be so many different colors and flowers in the world if not. Beauty is a way we see God, a way our hearts can open to receive God’s love in our lives.

But sometimes our devotion can distract us from the message. Sometimes we need to be reminded: God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world to reduce to nothing things that are (1 Cor 1:27-28). Not on accident, but on purpose, God came to be one of us as a fragile child in a dark, scary place. Not as a plan B, but as the plan all along. That ought to tell us something.

Because every one of us has that within us: the weak and vulnerable, the broken and grieving, the lost and fearful. Every one of us lives a life that is not the pretty picture we long for. We know what isn’t right in our lives. We’re all good at eating the bread of anxiety, as one old prayer puts it. We’re also good at distracting ourselves, but even so it doesn’t take much to start worrying, longing, anguishing over the suffering in our lives. We’re all still waiting for the happy ending.

And here is the good news of this story: God is right there in that, in what is not right – not despite all of that, but because of it. God is in the darkness and the fear and the weakness, the least and the lowest, because that’s where God can best be seen. We’d rather God just took away all the hard stuff, but that’s not how God works. As one writer put it, ‘God often shows up not in the removal of the pain but in the place where the pain refuses to let us pretend everything is fine.’ God isn’t there to join us in pretending it’s all fine – as if it’s ok that we’re grieving and lonely, it’s good that we’re scared, it’s right that the world is so hard-hearted that that poor young couple had nowhere else to stay. No, God doesn’t think the world should be like this. But God wants us to be honest about what is – so that we can fully claim what it should be. Honest about the darkness so that we can see God’s light, and reach toward it in hope. To be people of real faith so that we can work to help transform the world. 

The story of Christmas is, remember, only the beginning of the story. The Incarnation is one part of God’s gift to the world; Jesus’ ministry, death and resurrection are the rest of it. This story we start tonight reminds us that God is always there in the places we think are most hopeless, bringing us hope, what Dr Martin Luther King called making a way out of no way and turning dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. God comes to be one of us in the darkest and hardest places of our lives, the places where our hearts are crying out, and leads us toward the promise of the ultimate healing and redemption of all that we suffer. That is the good and glorious news of this night; that is the real joy of Christmas. So may we say Merry Christmas, and Amen.