I was standing in the foyer of the church office just before the five thirty Christmas Eve service when the bottom dropped out. The front line of severe weather had arrived as predicted… as if on cue. Frenzied sheets of rain hurried through the already flooding parking lot; umbrellas were turned inside out by the wind; people bent under coats were scrambling for shelter, soaked in just seconds….and then it happened…BAM….a bright apocalyptic flash…and then darkness….for a moment the lights flickered in a paltry last gasp…and in a shower of sparks the transformer affixed to the pole in the parking lot gave up its ghost; and all manner of thing was dark….. and what made it worse was that all the surrounding buildings in our neighborhood had power…. a good sign or a bad one, I wondered.
I didn’t have time for an argument with God, and as we all scrambled for candles, it crossed my mind that for almost two thousand years the church survived without electricity… so we would make do….and we did…We prayed, we sang a cappella….we greeted each other in the name of the one born among us…and together we ate and drank of a holy meal… And as people were leaving the church, phantoms in the wavering candlelight, a parishioner’s face appeared floating in front of me, and he said, “Christmas comes anyway.” Indeed it does I thought. This birth comes with all inevitability despite all that would prevent it…despite the windswept dark of chaos…This new life insists and persists, so that light will forever come again to inform the unruly dark.
We can trust such a birth…that amid every dark night, the light breaks upon it…at every moment of despair and trouble in our lives, amid the crisis moments which inevitably find us, the truth of the matter is that light comes surely and decisively…that we will never be left without hope. The dark is not the enemy…it is our fear of it that is…The dark is gracious contrast to the truth of the human condition, the light-truth, that we are never left to languish in the dark of nothingness…that the light insists and persists, as does each and every birth….God’s Spirit moves as light once more over the face of the deep, graciously and generously ordering and creating the world entire…as certain as the dawn follows the dark of night…So fear not and celebrate this light-truth… this marvelous birth…the light birth…the love birth…For this is all we know of God for sure…and all we need to know.
