Sometimes the night is so long

I preached this sermon at our Longest Night service, which we've been holding each year on the Winter Solstice to acknowledge that for some, the holidays loom. 

I’m a huge fan of the singer Storm Large. (Yes, that’s her real name.) Supremely talented and versatile, she first burst onto the scene as a contestant on the tv show Rock Star Supernova, but now is more likely to be found singing torch songs for Pink Martini. She’s a character—at times, bawdy, brutally honest, always hilarious. She calls her Christmas Show, which I attended last year, “Storm Large’s Holiday Ordeal.” 

That rings true for me.  This season of light which we devoutly need to be a time of beauty and peace, is for as many reasons as there are people gathered here--an ordeal. And on this night, the longest night, we gather to express that, and to look for comfort.

Full disclosure:  This is a longest night for me, as well. Participating in this service is my own act of healing. For on the 8^th day of Christmas many decades ago, I lost my parents and brother in an accident, and mixed in with some of the joy and beauty of this time, is the sadness which for me is now old – a yearning for home as it lived in my heart so many years ago. It is no longer an active grief, but is still a wistful presence of absence that all the distractions and busy-ness of the preparation for Christmas cannot abate.  

And not for lack of trying on my part.

As I go out into the shops to buy gifts for family and friends, I find myself drawn to the beauty of décor, beckoning me to buy. As I drive around and see homes lit for Christmas, I find myself comparing my modest wreath to them. Perhaps better lights, more beautiful decorations, will bring me joy.  The cookies in every kitchen and on every table, here, at William Temple House, where I also work, and every home I visit:  Perhaps their sweetness will melt into me.  The egg nog—its buttery richness cloaking my insides like a down comforter, perhaps it will cushion that small, hard place in me.

We make it work, don’t we?  We grow up, we move on. But we carry the marks of suffering, inwardly and outwardly. And like Harry Potter’s scar, which throbs when the darkness of Lord Voldemort is near, we feel them more acutely during the holidays.

And because we can look out at a world where the headlines seem more chaotic every hour, our bodies having aged another year, the ones we miss no nearer to us than ever -- the darkness seems real. And our pain is objectively true, and valid. There is no health or help in denying that. We may find little cause for optimism in the present moment. For optimism is based on observable facts. I am cautiously optimistic, for instance, that it will not rain on Christmas Day. But the forecast may change, and my optimism will waver.

            Hope is different. Hope endures--because hope is a decision. Our hope is in the light of God. Even when that light is a tiny pinprick, hope pierces the darkness. Hope is an affirmation of something even truer than our present experience. This ultimate truth is not, unfortunately, that we will not suffer. For the light of God became incarnate as a human being, as one who suffered. Yet the reality of Jesus’s suffering exists alongside a greater truth, that he came into the world in power, to shine a light of hope for all eternity, a hope stronger than any circumstance or force of this world. Does this light tell us our pain is an illusion? It does not, for God Godself endured pain. Our God was crucified, and yet triumphed over pain and death, to show us that it is possible. This is our hope and our strength.

Richard Rohr once wrote that there are two great spiritual questions, questions that all of modern psychology and the self-help industrial complex cannot answer. They are:

What do I do with my power?  And… What do I do with my pain?   

What do I do, Lord, with the pain I wish away? The pain that comes from real things that have happened to me, what has been taken from me or lost, the pain of disappointment and sadness from the circumstances of my life. And please, Lord, no gauzy sayings, like: “I don’t give you anything that you can’t handle.” Or, “at least you have your health, or your friends, or your cat,” Don’t tell me, “Everything happens for a reason”?  Tell me what to do, Lord, with this pain?

Come to me, says God. Use my power to carry you. Not the power to bring back someone we love, to go back to our youth, to reverse a car accident. These are the facts of our lives, rooted in our mortality, some of them rooted in human-built systems that are imperfect, or sinful, or unjust. We carry their scars and they cannot be erased. Our power is hope in Christ, the power that allows us to live fully even in the midst of our pain. This is no fix or cover-up—it is coming to know a God who suffered for us and with us. Henri Nouwen, in his book, Turn My Mourning into Dancing, writes about it as a process:

First, we count our losses, and we acknowledge the pain that comes from them. We acknowledge also the ways we have sought to deny our pain and the ways this has limited us from becoming who we truly are in Christ.

Second, we let go of our insistence that things be different, that what happens to us in this world is the summation of our lives and our worth to God. We stop litigating our life’s injustices to God. We accept that stuff happens. (Although God really doesn’t mind if we have to shake our fists at the heavens from time to time. Look at Job!! I think God just says, “Oh, honey. I know.”)

Third, rather than feeling ashamed of our vulnerability, we consider that, in our smallness, like a child, we can accept the hand of Christ to walk with us. Rather than regret our smallness, instead, we glory in the largeness of our God.

Finally, we locate gratitude to God as our center point. We rejoice in the beauty revealed in the world, for all beauty comes from God, and God is at work even amidst our suffering. Our suffering reflects our very humanity. If we did not know loss, we could not know love. If we did not fail, we must never have tried. So we open our eyes to where God reveals beauty to us in spite of it all—even because of it all. Today, I spied an osprey nest atop a billboard along I-205. Thank you, Holy One, for beauty even amidst soul-crushing rush-hour traffic.

I first approached my suffering as a hurdler. For so long, I thought of my pain as something to leap over, to surmount.  I kept striving, looking for an easy victory. No matter how many times I tried, I just crashed into the hurdles. I wasn’t getting anywhere. So one day, I got down on my knees and began to crawl under the hurdles. What I feared was humiliation. What I experienced instead was the sweetness of humility. Here I am, Lord, I said, my knees bloodied from crawling. But crawling moved me forward. From my knees, I could turn my face to God. And, God lifted me up and welcomed me home.

That we are defined by our suffering and that the darkness of the world has the last word, can feel like a present reality. But it is a bad dream, a dream from which we can awake. Being here today is a sign of wakefulness. On this longest night, we look to the light and we take it into ourselves, a flame of hope to warm us and encourage us.

The wonderful Anglican priest and poet Malcolm Guite wrote,          

                                     So every trace of light begins a grace

In me, a beckoning. The smallest gleam
Is somehow a beginning and a calling;
“Sleeper awake, the darkness was a dream

For you will see the Dayspring at your waking,
Beyond your long last line the dawn is breaking”.

There is no need to make joy and suffering opposites: they are not separated from each other. Our capacity to witness to both the darkness and the light, is something we share with God, whose revelation to us in Christ--one who was both crucified and triumphant, killed and yet transcended death--is trying to teach us something. So tonight we stand together in truthful witness to our pain, and still in hope, turning toward the light. And when we seek it, we find it, along with the capacity for our joy and growth, for we have come into the heart of God, into communion with Christ, the wounded healer, and Christ is with us.

Thanks be to God.