The Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan

Christmas Eve 2022

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness–on them light has shined.” Isaiah 9:2

We are gathered here together on this dark and cold night, to celebrate the coming of light into the world. It is no secret that the date of Christmas was chosen, at least in part, for its proximity to the longest night of the year in the northern hemisphere. No matter our creed, our culture, our age or race or gender, there is something innately human about looking for light in the darkness, and holding on tight when we find it.

Let’s be clear that there is more than one kind of darkness, and not all of it is bad. In the hard and painful awakening to white supremacy that so many of us have been engaged in in the past few years, we have learned belatedly that language that paints everything dark as scary and bad and everything white as pure and good, is harmful language. We need to be careful not to replicate that in church. Language that wounds and kills, language that separates, is not language that draws us closer to the Word made Flesh, Emmanuel, God-with-Us.

Still, it is undeniable that actual literal darkness, the absence of light, is associated with fear, disorientation, and isolation. When you’re walking up to your front door late at night and the porch light is out—the sense that something could grab you from the shadows is what makes you reach for your smart phone to switch on the flashlight. We want to see what’s in front of us, what’s beneath us, what’s ahead of us. We can’t do that without light.

And yet—think of what would happen if we lived in a world of unremitting light—or more to the point, what wouldn’t happen. Babies need the darkness of the womb in order to grow and develop. Seeds need to germinate in the dark loam of rich soil, the blacker the better. Creative thinking often happens after dark, when the hustle of the day subsides and our minds are free to wander. There’s a beauty to certain kinds of darkness, such as when we turn down the lights in the church and sing “Silent Night” together by candlelight.

It was dark out in the fields where the shepherds were keeping watch over their flocks on that first Christmas night. I imagine the shepherds out in the fields on that first Christmas night could have seen stars in a way that many of us have never experienced. The brightest stars I have ever seen were when I was a child on a small cargo ship way out in the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from any inhabited island or land mass. The blackness of the night was so utterly black and the brightness of the stars so perfectly, exquisitely bright. For those shepherds that night, that was just how the sky looked. The stars were their maps and their companions, a consistent presence as they huddled near a small fire, grateful for the light and warmth it provided.

We all need that balance of light and dark, of quiet and sound, of solitude and company, in our lives. It is when things are out of balance, when things are too consistently dark or too glaringly, unceasingly bright, that we need to recalibrate, to find our center again. And when the night goes on too long, when it is longer than the day, that is when we begin searching for reassurance that the light is coming back, that the dawn will come again, that darkness will not eclipse the day forever.

Christmas of 2020 felt especially dark and difficult for many of us. The pandemic that started early in the year was still raging, and more lives had been lost than we could even begin to comprehend. People were sheltering in place, avoiding not just big crowds but even small gatherings of family or friends. Political conflict was tearing communities apart. Division, isolation, fear, and death seemed to be spreading endless gloom.

It was in the midst of that terrible time that a simple gesture of kindness from one neighbor to another came to define a community. According to a Washington Post article, one late November night “Kim Morton was home watching a movie when she received a text from her neighbor who lives directly across the road. He told her to peek outside. Matt Riggs had hung a string of white Christmas lights, stretching from his home to hers. The lights, he told her, were meant to reinforce that they were always connected, despite their pandemic isolation. ‘I was reaching out to Kim to literally brighten her world,’ said Riggs.”[i]

Riggs knew that his neighbor was struggling with depression and panic attacks. He had his own struggles that year, but he decided that he could do this one small thing to show Kim that he cared, that he saw her, and that she wasn’t alone.

As sweet as that gesture was, it isn’t the end of the story. What happened next is that another neighbor noticed the string of lights and decided to add some light herself. And then another neighbor joined in, and then another. Soon the whole neighborhood was strung with lights—not the lights on individual homes that you might see anywhere, but lights that started on one home and then reached out across the street to another home. The two neighbors who started the whole thing said they were “stunned to see neighbors with drills and ladders, up on their rooftops and tangled in trees, doing whatever they had to do to hang the lights horizontally. They were mostly masked and at a distance, but for the first time in a long time, a feeling of togetherness — and light — had returned.”

The lights, they all agreed, were “a physical sign of connection and love.” In fact, one neighbor was so inspired that she maneuvered her lights to spell out the message: Love lives here.

When we tell the story of the Creation to children in Godly Play, we say that God created light—not just the light of a light bulb, or even the light of the sun, but all the light that ever was. That is the light that came into the world on that first Christmas. In bringing light to the world, and then making that light incarnate in Jesus, God invited us to see how light can move from person to person, connecting us all in unbreakable bonds of solidarity and interdependence. We are created to be light to one another, and nothing can ever change that, unless we let it.

Love lives here on Christmas night, here in the manger, and here in each one of us. Love lives wherever someone is willing to reach out a hand across a divide, blessing the space between us. Love lives in our heartache as well as our joy, in our silence as well as our singing, and yes, in our soft, chosen darkness as well as in the beauty of the light. We who have walked in darkness now indeed see a great light, a light that shines out in another’s faces and in the hearts of people everywhere. Amen.

[i] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/12/21/baltimore-rodgers-forge-christmas-lights/