While We’re Waiting – Hold On To Hope

Blue Christmas Service

Lessons: Isaiah 40:1-5; Luke 2:1-20

My family watched the old movie, “White Christmas” the other night. It was the first time my ten-year-old son had seen it. If it’s been awhile since you’ve watched it, it begins with the characters played by Bing Crosby and Danny Kay as soldiers on the front lines in Europe, on Christmas Eve, 1944. Bing Crosby sings the song, “White Christmas” for the troops. The young soldiers, who had been rowdy and cheering a moment before, grow quiet, their eyes sparkling with tears. My son asked what was happening. I said, “Can you imagine being away from everything and everyone you love at Christmas, and on top of that, worried about whether you’re safe?” “They want to go home,” my son said. They want to go home. Centuries before Christ, God’s people were defeated in a war against the superpower in the region, Babylon. The walls of Jerusalem were breached, the city overrun, and the Temple destroyed. Then the Babylonians assembled all the leaders – the people with power and influence – and marched them across the desert to Babylon, where they were kept in captivity for seventy years. It’s called “The Exile.” A whole generation died and another came of age. The people longed for home, told the children every night at bedtime about how it used to be. All the while wondering: Had God forgotten them? Had God abandoned them? Would God act to bring them home? But for seventy years there was a great silence and loneliness. And then a prophet, a poet, really, writes a letter from back home to the exiles in Babylon. “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God, speak tenderly to Jerusalem. . . . Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” It’s like “White Christmas” to the soldiers in the movie. They dream about their land, their homes, “just like the ones they used to know.” It is homecoming music. God has not forgotten them. God knows exactly where they are, and remembers each of their names. They are going home. It was a lovely vision for the exiles. It gave them hope. And hope is what gave them – gives us – the strength and courage to persevere. Hope is our lifeline to the future. Hope is why we are here tonight. John Buchanan writes, “We are, all of us, in some kind of exile.”1 To be an exile is to be homesick; to hope that we can go home. Not necessarily the home in which we grew up, though, right? Sometimes that’s the last place we need to be. When I say we’re homesick, what I mean is that we long to feel at home somewhere. We long to feel safe, and welcome. We long for the way it used to be, before we lost our health, our loved one, our relationship, our job; before life became so complicated, so messy, so painful. Where can we find hope during the holidays? All of the rushing around, the pressure to have fun, to spend, to make merry – sometimes it numbs the pain but it does not usually offer us the genuine hope we need. 2 But the Christmas story, the reason we celebrate Christmas in the first place, does. Many of us are too busy “Fa-la-la-la-la-ing” to notice that there are more tears in the Christmas story than angels singing “Glory to God!” It’s not all happily ever after or easy endings, but what it is – in the wider picture – is a story that announces the triumph of life and hope in spite of everything. It confirms that God does not leave people without lifelines of hope. There is always something eternal to grab onto in the present. Although in the moment, that lifeline may appear very ordinary. Take Mary for example. When Mary learned she was pregnant, it couldn’t have been terrific news, even with that angel. She was young, unmarried, with only an implausible story to tell her fiancé. She took off to see her cousin Elizabeth, who gave her encouragement and a place to try to absorb the news. The lifeline of hope she grabbed was the support of family and friends. And then there’s Joseph. When he heard that Mary was pregnant, he planned to divorce her quietly. Then he had a dream in which an angel told him it would be okay, and gave him a new plan, a plan that opened up a world of possibilities even in the face of this unexpected turn of events. The lifeline he found was paying attention to his dreams. Your dreams are telling you something important. And try to figure out which of the people around you are your angels, and listen to them. Together, Joseph and Mary’s lives were turned upside down, and yet when it was time to show up for the census in Bethlehem, they made the trip. Sometimes doing the routine things you need to do is what gets you through the night, or the day – even Christmas Day. Putting one foot in front of the other, and doing what you need to do, can be a lifeline of hope. . Magi, wise men from afar followed the Christmas star to reach the family and give them extravagant gifts. Joseph and Mary must have been pretty surprised to see them standing at the door. Sometimes our lifeline of hope comes from unexpected people and places, and in surprising shapes. Sometimes our sorrow itself is a gift, as odd as that sounds. It is in our deepest longing that we are more likely to turn to God, and to each other. Don’t be afraid to open the door. And when the angels and shepherds had left, Mary pondered all these things in her heart. It can be a lifeline of hope to reflect on what has happened to you. Reflection is one of the strange and surprising gifts of grief and loss. Allow yourself the time and the space to ponder what you’re experiencing. There is always something eternal to grab onto in the present. Although in the moment, it may appear very ordinary. The surprising hope of the Christmas story is that God is at work in ordinary places and even in the least likely places, and that we can live now in the bright future of God’s promises. But our greatest hope in the Christmas story is, of course, who this baby is. Martin Niemöller described it this way in a sermon he gave on Christmas Eve in Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp: “[I]f we look deeper and ask what the human helplessness and earthly homelessness of the infant Jesus can tell us, then the tidings of great joy begin precisely here: God, the eternally wealthy and mighty God, enters into the most extreme human poverty imaginable. No [one] is so weak that God does not come to him in Jesus Christ, right in the midst of our human need; and no [one] is so forsaken and homeless in this world that God does not seek him, in the midst of our human distress. … You need not 3 go in search for God; you should not imagine that [God] is far from you and is not concerned with what crushes you! [God] is here and is close to you in the man who, as a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, was lying in a manger.”2 Jesus Christ, was born for this very moment, for your situation, here tonight – for the pain, the darkness, the homesickness. While we are waiting, hold onto hope. Copyright © Joanne Whitt 2011 1 John M. Buchanan, December 8, 2002, http://www.fourthchurch.org/120802sermon.html. 2 Martin Niemöller, “Christmas Eve, 1944,” in The Dachau Sermons, translated by Robert H. Pfeiffer (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1946), pp. 6-7.