On Friday night, my boys and I gathered around the scratched and worn dining room table.
We wiped off crumbs from the meal before, and laid down holiday placemats made of red and green, pink and gold. We lit candles at both ends of the table: one, an orange harvest-scented candle leftover from Thanksgiving, and two, a couple of votives in the Advent wreath, along with the center candle because we don’t always play by Advent-lighting rules.
As the boys and I waited for my husband to return with Thai food pick-up, we read the story of Jesus’ birth – of a pregnant fiancé named Mary and of shepherds who were camping in the neighborhood; of an angel who told the sheepherders not to be afraid, and of how Eugene Peterson writes that “seeing was believing” after the shepherds ran over to see the baby for themselves.
We let the words sift into the cracks of the table and maybe even into our hearts as well. The air lay still around us; for just a few minutes, quietness became our companion. We stared at the candles and listened to a text that isn’t technically supposed to be read for another week.
It was one of those moments you don’t try and capture with a camera, because you can’talways capture the perfection and simplicity of a single moment in time. You can’t always capture something that is more easily felt than seen.
When my husband returned a few minutes later, sticky rice and drunken noodles, conversation and laughter and maybe even a Whoopee cushion, courtesy of the resident nine-year-old, soon filled the space.
And as we passed around takeout containers and dipped egg rolls into sweet pepper sauce, the candles at both ends of the table continued to burn – present to our time together and to what it means to gather around the table on a random Friday night.
It was a moment of paying attention to the light, of witnessing light that shows up in darkness …and I don’t think it was all that different for a man named John, a man sent by God to testify to the light.
In this week’s gospel reading, John the writer uses the words “testify” or “testimony” two times in the first set of verses and then again in verse 19 to describe John the Baptist.
“He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. This is the testimony given by John when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?”
When these men ask John who he is, at first, he answers in the negative: “I am not the Messiah,” he says to their first question. “I am not,” he says to their second, and then responds a simple “no” to the third. When they demand an answer from him and ask a fourth time, “Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” John finally says, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.’”
John is the one who testifies to the light, who points toward the one who is Light, Christ himself. But it’s this phrase, “testify to the light,” that I find myself curious about, that I wonder might be for us this morning too.
John’s whole role was to witness, speak of, and pay attention to the light – and to the one who is Light, with a capital “L,” which is to say, Christ. Is it all that different for us, during the season of Advent? Advent is a time of waiting, a time of waiting for the one who is to come. It’s a time looking and searching for light, even in the darkness. It’s a time of seeing candles alight at both ends of the table and noticing those moments of light. It’s a time of being invited to testify to the light.
But isn’t it interesting that sometimes, in order to testify to the light, we first have to become acquainted with darkness?
Darkness is not something we humans are good at. As children, many of us were scared of the dark – scared of the things we couldn’t see and didn’t therefore know, scared of what might happen when light wasn’t present. Some of us still are. Of course, it’s not all that different for grownups either: whether metaphorical or literal, darkness isn’t always something we want to embrace. Darkness isn’t something we want to cozy up to and get to know on a personal basis.
When hard things happen, which is to say, when darkness creeps into our lives, it’s easy to look for solutions to the darkness. Flip on the light switch! Look for cracks of light! Because if we can make the darkness go away, just a teeny, tiny little bit, then we won’t have to feel the pain that comes with becoming acquainted with the dark.
As a Seven on the Enneagram, darkness, or more plainly stated, pain, isn’t something I want to experience. When hard things happen, the last thing I want is to feel how much that hard thing, that bit of sadness, that piece of darkness hurts me.
But sometimes darkness is inevitable. Darkness shows up in unexpected phone calls or in a loved one’s fall; it pays us a visit, often when we are most unaware, with doctor’s diagnoses and job loss, when violence and civil unrest and hardship overwhelm. It covers us, like a blanket, when wars break out halfway around the world and none remain unaffected. What are we to do with darkness, then, when none of the usual tricks seem to, well, do the trick?
Maybe that’s when we’re invited to get to know darkness.
Over the last several years, some faith communities have begun to hold Blue Christmas and Longest Night services. These services are often held on the longest night of the year, on or around winter solstice, which is actually this coming Thursday, December 21st. “Such observances, which acknowledge sadness, provide much-needed respite,” one writer says. “What a relief to make collective room for grief, if just for an hour or so, when it seems as if, everywhere else, there’s mandatory merriment and inflicted cheer.” Here, folks gather together around an emotion that is not always recognized or readily accepted, let alone cheered on or encouraged to embody around the holiday season. A tradition that started within Canadian hospices in the 1980s, as another writer states, “the idea of Blue Christmas is to acknowledge the darkness, and let it be dark. That is a quietly revolutionary act in an optimism-obsessed culture that would pressure even the Little Match Girl to look on the bright side.”
Perhaps like you, I’m not always good at darkness, but I wonder if we’re invited into darkness now so we can testify to the light then.
I realize, even as I write this, that I am Little Match Girling myself to an extent here: I am almost tying a shiny red ribbon on darkness by not letting it fully be dark and by instead hinting at light.
But that’s the paradox we wrestle with in the Advent season: darkness is here, yes, and also, so is light.
Is darkness present? Yes. Is light coming? Yes. Can both exist at the same time? Yes.
So, can we, and can we, in the end, testify to the light? With God’s help, yes.
Amen.
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This sermon was offered to the good people of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in San Rafael, California on December 17, 2023. If you liked it, you might also like “How Does Curiosity Play a Role in the Life of Faith?” Otherwise, here’s to embracing both light and darkness.
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