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<\/a>When I read the Christmas stories in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, I\u2019m often struck by the paradoxes. That is to say, two things that seem like they shouldn\u2019t be joined come together around the birth of Jesus. Advent and Christmas are seasons full of both\/and, of now and not yet. The liturgy of the season challenges us to both remember the events surrounding Christ\u2019s birth in the past and anticipate Christ\u2019s coming again in the future. The past and the future come together in the present. I\u2019m sure there\u2019s a whole list of both\/ands we could come up with as we read the Christmas stories.\u00a0 Here\u2019s my top three:<\/p>\n1. Christmas is a season of both light and dark.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n The Scriptures proclaim that God\u2019s Light shines in the darkness of our lives, and that it is a Light that no darkness overcome (John 1:1-5). But that doesn\u2019t negate the reality of darkness in our world. The world Jesus enters isn\u2019t the world depicted on a Hallmark card. He was born during the Pax Romana, when Caesar Augustus was viewed as Lord and Savior of the World by citizens of Rome because of his military conquests. But to average residents of territories Rome occupied, like Mary and Joseph, it must have felt anything but peaceful. Rome\u2019s peace was built on the backs of lower-class people. They were taxed heavily and exploited by the Empire. They knew resistance to Rome was futile; it would be crushed violently. Yes, there was a form of peace, but it was fear that kept the citizens in line.<\/p>\n Likewise, we hear today how \u201cgreat\u201d our country is\u2014and to be clear it has much that is good and worth celebrating.\u00a0 But there is also a darker side that isn\u2019t as comfortable to talk about. You get branded ungrateful\u2014or even unpatriotic\u2014if you dare to bring it up. As it was during the Pax Romana of Jesus\u2019s day, it seems like the average citizen often doesn\u2019t share in the prosperity and good feelings. (The stock market is booming. Great\u2026 I guess. But there\u2019s too much month at the end of my money. How will I make ends meet?)<\/p>\n The fact is, even when on the surface of things, it seems like \u201call is calm and all is bright,\u201d sometimes our interior world can seem pretty dark. There\u2019s a variety of reasons that cause people to feel that way, but what\u2019s always true is it\u2019s not easy to talk about with others.\u00a0 Sometimes it\u2019s just downright hard to put into words.\u00a0 The malaise is just part of who we are.<\/p>\n There can be feelings of shame associated with feeling blue at a time when we\u2019re supposed to be happy.\u00a0 That\u2019s especially true in a season when we tend to focus so much on upbeat emotions like hope, joy, peace, and love, and get caught up in the made-for-television images of what the season is supposed to look like. The reality is that, in the sanctuary of our soul, the light is flickering and joy can seem like an elusive dream. While it doesn\u2019t stop us from celebrating the season, no matter how many lights we hang up in our house, still the darkness inside us lingers.<\/p>\n When we find ourselves in places where despair threatens to envelop us, when we struggle to find any light, we might remember words from an old Jewish prayer that was found, among other places, inscribed of the walls of one of the hellish places human minds have ever conceived, the concentration camp at Auschwitz<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I believe in the Sun, even when it\u2019s not shining.<\/p>\n I believe in Love, even when I don\u2019t feel it.<\/p>\n I believe in God, even when God is silent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 2. Christmas is a season of both goodness and evil.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n We usually end the Christmas story at the manger\u2014a scene that amalgamates Luke 2:1-20 with Matthew 1:18\u20132:11. We have the classic image of Joseph and Mary, new parents, young and unmarried, and yet somehow they smile. Shepherds and wise men crowd in to see the newborn baby\u2014and yet he sleeps! Barn animals, normally skittish, are seemingly at ease in the presence of the Holy Family and all those interlopers at the manger, drawn by the proclamations of angels and the star above the stable. While we might debate how \u201crealistic\u201d the picture is, it\u2019s certainly a beautiful image for Christmas\u2014and a great yearly photo-op for parents to get their kids in bathrobes and fabric angel wings., and holding shepherd crooks and fake gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And it\u2019s not without precedent theologically; it matches Isaiah\u2019s vision of the peaceable kingdom\u2014Isaiah 11. It gives a glimpse how things will be \u201con that day\u201d when God\u2019s Kingdom comes in its fullness.\u00a0 But we recognize it is not this day. The world is not as it will one day be.<\/p>\n This day often seems more in line with what comes in Luke 2:13-18, what we know as the Massacre of the Infants or the \u201cHoly Innocents.\u201d For obvious reasons, this is not typically included as part of the kids Christmas Eve pageant, and honestly you don\u2019t even hear the passage read all that often (outside of the feast day in the Catholic Church, December 26).\u00a0 (which also tends to be one of the lightest attendance days of the year for most churches.)\u00a0 In the span of a few verses of Scripture, the rating suddenly turns from G to R. The serene peace of the manger is shattered by the realities that a peasant couple like Mary and Joseph could face in that time at the whim of a paranoid despot like Herod. (As if Augustus had not caused enough headaches with his census proclamation.)<\/p>\n Suddenly the Holy Family become refugees forced to flee to another country to escape an impossible situation in their homeland.\u00a0 Does this have any parallels to the today\u2019s world? Did Egypt welcome them with open arms? Scripture is silent on that subject, but history shows we aren\u2019t always the most welcoming toward immigrants, especially when they come from the lower socioeconomic strata. What is clear\u2014when you read the whole story in Luke 1\u20132\u2014is that Christmas was a time when God\u2019s great goodness met the realities of human evil and sin, when idealized images of peace contrasted sharply with the hardscrabble existence of oppressed minorities on the run.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 3. Christmas is a season of both presence and absence.<\/strong><\/p>\n Maybe the best way to say this in the context of the Christmas story was that acute absence was filled by God\u2019s Presence.\u00a0 The Jewish people had waited for centuries for the Messiah to come.\u00a0 When John the Baptist came on the scene, telling the people to prepare the way for Jesus (Luke 3, after the birth narrative), it had been 400 years since the last Prophet had spoken.\u00a0 In fact, it seems the people waited so long that they may have forgotten exactly for whom they had been waited.\u00a0 When Jesus presented himself as the one that had been promised for centuries, those on the fringes welcomed him happily and recognized him as Savior, but those in power (both religious and political) wanted no part of him; in fact, they wanted him dead.\u00a0 But, of course, that\u2019s the story of another liturgical season.<\/p>\n I had a moment at the Blue Christmas service we held at our church this year when this paradox of Christmas reality hit me personally.\u00a0 We were reading a liturgy where we recognized the reality that while this is the season that we celebrate God\u2019s Presence coming to be with us, for a variety of reasons, some feel absence or loss.\u00a0 We came to the moment when the liturgy said:<\/p>\n We pause now for you to tell the God who longs to take you by the hand and says to you, do not fear, I will help you, about some areas where you need help in finding courage.\u00a0 (Pause)<\/p>\n Right around the time we were reading about the God who longs to take us by the hand, I felt a presence.\u00a0 It was my daughter Rebecca\u2014age 10.\u00a0 She had come into the sanctuary and scrambled over top of me to sit on the pew next to me and put her arm around me like she will still do at times.\u00a0 (I\u2019m sure I\u2019ll miss it when she stops.)<\/p>\n It struck me that as I felt her presence on one side of me I could feel absence on the other\u2014not the first time I\u2019ve experienced the sensation with Becca.\u00a0 And in that moment, I remembered that as I prepare to celebrate another Christmas with my daughter, there is a daughter who is acutely absent\u2014Becca\u2019s twin Hope (aptly named, don\u2019t you think?) who lived only two days before she passed from life support to life eternal.\u00a0 I never got to spend a Christmas with Hope and although I can go for stretches without thinking of her, there are moments that grab me and remind me of the absence of her presence in my life.<\/p>\n Finding Peace in the Midst of Paradox<\/strong><\/p>\n Being the father of identical twins, only one of whom is now a healthy ten-year-old, means that I live a sort of daily paradox.\u00a0 The name Rebecca means \u201cto bind\u201d, and it seems fitting because there is a sense that Rebecca forever binds me to Hope.\u00a0 If ever I don\u2019t think of Hope for a day, seeing Rebecca\u2014her identical twin\u2014brings me straight back to Hope.\u00a0 Through her, I get a daily reminder what Hope would have looked like (though her personality surely would have been different, and I would give anything to know that part of her).\u00a0 But it\u2019s also bittersweet, because, as it did during the Blue Christmas Service, Becca\u2019s intimate presence can also remind me of the acute absence of Hope.<\/p>\n The good news is, although I never can spend Christmas with Hope, because Christ lives in me (Galatians 2:19-20), I always have HOPE at Christmas.<\/p>\n In Christ, God came to be with us in all of life\u2019s paradoxes: birth and death, joy and sorrow, celebrations and suffering, times of thriving and times of barely surviving. I know all too well that all of these can exist side-by-side.<\/p>\n Alan Ward <\/strong>is a NASA Science Writer married to a United Methodist pastor. His marriage is living proof \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I read the Christmas stories in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, I\u2019m often struck by the paradoxes. That is to say, two things that seem like they shouldn\u2019t be joined come together around the birth of Jesus. Advent and Christmas are seasons full of both\/and, of now and not yet. The liturgy of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7978,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1626],"tags":[3202,3208,1649,3205,157,1695,1791,1896],"class_list":["post-7966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-advent","tag-alan-ward","tag-blue-christmas","tag-christmas","tag-death-of-a-child","tag-grief","tag-holy-innocents","tag-hope","tag-paradox"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nscience and faith can and do exist in harmony. He and his wife Laurie live in Waldorf. Maryland, where they
\nare raising their two children this side of eternity: Brady (almost 13) and Becca (10). Alan loves telling
\nstories of all sorts and believes that One Story weaves together all the other stories we tell. His blog,
\n\u201cThreads of Glory,\u201d explores these connections\u2014http:\/\/bigalscorner.blogspot.com.<\/p>\n