Bulletin

Exhortation on the Eve of the Feast of the Nativity:

‘The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.’

Thus it is written in the prophet Isaiah.

‘It’s the most wonderful time of the year.’ ‘Have a holly, jolly Christmas.’ So we hear on repeat in every place of commerce that we visit during this season of Advent.

Christmas is a time when we all collectively focus on the good times we once had when we were young; those days of innocence when we waited with impatience for Santa to come and eat our cookies and leave behind a gift. As adults, we strive to deliver to our children the joy we once experienced in our youth with decorations and songs, Advent calendars filled with candy, ridiculous costumes and pajamas, and so on.

But this betrays a truth that we seek to keep hidden during this season: that our lives now are not so jolly, and not so holly. That they are filled with labor, and worry, and disappointment. Money troubles, lost ambitions, a once bright future never attained, children not half as well behaved as one wants, and not half as promising as they seemed on the day of their birth.

Have a Christmas dinner with your relatives, and it becomes obvious why you have such dinners so rarely. Beneath the surface, we are all broken, flawed, annoying; we are fallen, and that fallenness is not just apparent to ourselves; it is apparent to everyone who has the frail luck of being around us on a regular basis.

We feel nostalgia for a better time during Christmas because we are admitting to ourselves that ‘better times’ are always something that exists in the past. They are never before us. Who would be so naïve as to believe that?

The fact is we, as Christians, generally seek to cultivate a spirit not of happiness, but of contentment. For there is little in the world that would seem to give us true reason to be happy. We have to simply be satisfied with our lot.

Indeed, when we think of all the bright happy memories of Christmas from our childhood, we merely realize that our adulthood seems covered by a pall of gloom.
It is true that there was a happier time, but it was not when you were a kid. It seemed happy because most of our parents did for us then what we seek to do for our children now: to fabricate good memories, good experiences while they are still young enough to not question them.

There has not been a happier time since the days at home in the Garden. Now, we dwell in the land of the shadow of death.

I always find it humorous that we always gather on the night before Christmas for the traditional service of ‘Lessons and Carols.’ In fact, the service is not all that traditional. It is only barely older than a century. It was invented by a certain Anglican priest in order to keep his parishioners off of the streets on Christmas Eve, so that they wouldn’t be hung over when they came to church for Christmas morning.

It seemed even back then, in those ‘better times,’ people had plenty of reasons to drown out their woes, even during ‘the most wonderful time of the year.’

Yet this is exactly why we gather here on the Eve of Christmas, on the night before the darkest day of the year.

‘The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.’

Into the darkness of our lives, a light has come into the world. A light from the Father of Lights, that no darkness can overcome. For on this night, a Virgin, full of grace, shall give birth to the Lord of Glory, that He might be to us the Sun of righteousness.

Let us therefore pray to the Christ child, who this night and forevermore silently prays for us, and greet His coming, in meditation, and in song, that our joy may be full.