Blue Christmas
December 21, 2021
William G. Carter
Then his father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit
and spoke this prophecy:
‘Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,
for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them.
He has raised up a mighty savior for us
in the house of his servant David,
as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old,
that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of
all who hate us.
Thus he has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors,
and has remembered his holy covenant,
the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham,
to grant us that we, being rescued from the hands of our
enemies,
might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness
before him all our days.
And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High;
for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,
to give knowledge of salvation to his people
by the forgiveness of their sins.
By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.’
One of my friends recently announced he has a perfect Christmas tree. Is it real or artificial? He didn't say. Is it perfectly shaped? He hasn't told us that either. "It's a perfect tree," he says, "as all of my trees are perfect?" What is his criteria? "It lights up when I plug it in."
"At this busy, frantic, demanding time of year," he says, "I like to conclude my day by sitting in my darkened living room and looking at the well-lit tree."
It's a wonderful image on this darkest night of the year, and one that many of us can immediately understand.
We know how it feels to sit in the darkness. If we lose a loved one and the sun goes out for a while. Lose a job and the stars disappear from the sky. If your marriage concludes, or your child does something destructive in an attention-getting way, or you get really sick, the "gloomy clouds of night" may descend. And it's multiplied by all the demands that this season puts on our souls - or the demands that we put on ourselves.
A blue Christmas is often a dark Christmas. Around us, there are amplified invitations to spend more or to decorate like the neighbors do. The most sinister invitation of all is to "get busy" or to stay busy. The well-meaning friends of Job circle around to tell us to "snap out of it." Some of them point fingers in blame or shame. Yet if we have any experience in grief, we know blame and shame are dead-ends, a forced smile is not helpful, and busyness is merely a postponement. We cannot outrun our sadness; it waits for us.
And it comes with life. This is why the venerable Charlie Brown Christmas is so poignant with so many of us. As Charlie Brown said famously in the opening lines of the show, "I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus. Christmas is coming, but I'm not happy. I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel." A lot of TV producer-types were nervous about those words. They thought they were too honest.
Well, there's nothing wrong with honesty. Darkness is real. If you're feeling it, you are not alone, and that is the first gift of a Blue Christmas. We are in this together. And together, we are not abandoned. There's a striking text from the prophet Isaiah, written during a gloomy season in his nation's history. In the 45th chapter, he hears God say, "I am the Lord, and there is no other. I form light and create darkness." (45:6-7) God is in the darkness because God made it - just as God made the light.
Tonight we hear the Song of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist. As he gets back his voice after a nine-month spell of muteness, he recalls the faithfulness of God that has gotten him - and his people - through a lot of bumpy days and nights. He looks forward to the coming Messiah, and praises God that his own little boy will point the way and prepare the way.
Then comes the concluding promise:
By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.
In the middle of the darkness, there is light. It comes, also, as a gift from God. We receive just enough light to keep from stumbling. It provides necessary illumination for the shadows of all the losses we have known. And one thing more: Zechariah uses a most unusual verb to speak of this illumination: he calls it an "epiphany." It's not merely a visual gift -- it's a gift of insight. An awakening - or better, a re-awakening. We are reminded that we will get through the darkness - because we have gotten through it before. The darkness must be respected. It must be honored.
But the epiphany is remembering that light and darkness coexist. They balance one another. That's why my buddy sits in front of the lit-up Christmas tree in a darkened room. As he puts it, "It's my reminder that there's more to my life than darkness. The light is there, too. When darkness falls, it feels inescapable. But the longer that I befriend it, the more I notice the light." He didn't use the word, but it sounds to me like an epiphany.
The late Ann Weems was the closest we ever had to a Presbyterian poet laureate. She wrote a lot of cheerful poems, about balloons on Pentecost and children with chocolate-covered fingers. One of her final books was her most personal. She wrote it as a way of working through the loss of her son Todd, who was killed on the evening of his 21st birthday.
With the encouragement of a Bible scholar, she started composing some psalms of lament. That's the biblical form of a complaint, naming the pain and trouble, and lifting it into the face of God. These were unfinished prayers, she admits, some of them yet unanswered. She endured long silences in her soul, and then perhaps in a burst of energy, she would scribble on down and then put it in a drawer.
It was hard work. Grief always is. As she described it, "Anger and alleluia careen around within me, sometimes colliding. Lamenting and laughter sit side by side in a heart that yearns for the peace that passes understanding. Those who believe in the midst of their weeping will know where I stand."[1]
In her darkness, the light that crept in came in the form of a
promise from Jesus, "Blessed are those who weep, for they shall be
comforted." And then one more prayer found its way onto her page. Goes
like this:
In
the godforsaken, obscene quicksand of life,
there
is a deafening alleluia
rising
from the souls
of
those who weep,
and
of those who weep with those who weep.
If
you watch, you will see
the
hand of God
putting
the stars back in their skies
one by one.
The darkness is real. But so is the Light.
[1] Ann Weems, Psalms of Lament (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995) xvi
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