A Light for Our Darkness

 (Lectionary for Christmas Day, 2016)

I wonder how many of you preachers pray, silently, I presume, that Christmas this year will not fall on a Sunday? For if it does, as well you know, the crowds will be sparse, your preparation not as careful as it could be, and your children still at home cry for one day, finally, that Mom/Dad will stay in the house for the stockings, the presents, and leisurely brunch. Christmas on a Sunday decidedly dims the glow of the season, for preacher and congregation. One can only hope that the Christmas Eve service(s) go some distance to make up for the one (!), too small, service in the morning.

Well, here we go again. 2016 brings a Sunday morning Christmas, and I, I must confess, have no plans to go to church. Yes, even my ordination as a clergyperson, now 46 years ago, will not stop me from playing church hooky this year. After all, both of my children, their spouses, and our grandchildren, will be in town from their usual Los Angeles abodes, and my clergy wife and I have no intention of missing any time of their brief visits. It will be far too precious to watch the enraptured faces of our granddaughters as they reflect the lights of the tree and express the chaotic fun of the morning. If you do not have to preach, as neither of us has to do this year, the lure of the warm and wonderful home full of family easily outdoes the trek to the church and its small group of parishioners.

But I well remember another Sunday morning Christmas church experience where I definitely had to preach—twice.The year was 1994, and I was on that Christmas Sunday concluding a 4-month interim minister stint at a church in a nearby city. It had been no ordinary church experience. The previous pastor, one of that city’s most notable and revered ministers, had in August been accused of sexual misconduct and had been removed very quickly from his 18-year pastorate at that huge downtown church. One Sunday, he was there, and the next he was gone, and I stood in that pulpit in his place. Very few members of the congregation, save those too intimately aware of his behavior, believed that this man could ever have shattered his ministerial office in the appalling ways of which he was accused.

Unfortunately, over the first two months of my time as pastor, I discovered from first-hand testimony that he had indeed acted in ways too repulsive to be imagined, had in fact done things with numerous women that are usually connected with lurid television soap operas. Because during those initial months litigation hung over the entire affair, those of us who knew anything were effectively gagged from speaking about it. High tension ran through the congregation, and each Sunday the church was filled with drama. One of those Sundays, three hundred people staged a walk-out of the service, having earlier alerted the local news media that they intended to do so, and appeared on camera, demanding that their beloved pastor, who they felt had been accused illegally and undeservedly, be returned to his pulpit.

Finally on the first Sunday in November an initial legal settlement was reached, and we as a staff were somewhat freer to speak and to answer questions. It partially relieved the astonishing tension, but many members remained unconvinced that the pastor they thought they knew could ever in their wildest nightmares act in ways they were now hearing about. As Advent began, and the gothic church was beautifully festooned with wreaths and lights for the season, supplied as always by a prominent and wealthy family, the congregation prepared for the coming of the child. Yet, it was hardly business as usual. Not all were convinced of what the pastor had done, and even those who were convinced were saddened and shocked by his behavior.

And so Christmas Sunday arrived as scheduled. The night before on Christmas Eve, we had lead six identical Christmas Eve services, each of them topped with a celebration of communion. I cannot exactly remember how many people came to those services, but it was surely at least 3,000. It was the custom in the church to serve communion in the pews, but I had decided that we would invite the congregation to come to the altar table in groups of 20 or so, to receive the elements, and then to be dismissed by the presiding pastor. That pastor was I, and it became an inside joke among the staff serving whether or not I would be able to offer different table dismissals for every group that came forward. Since the number of those different groups was perhaps 150, I racked my brain to pull out from my Bible store different words of dismissal for each group. I remember, though my colleagues may remember quite differently, that I was able to vary every dismissal and to keep them relatively biblically-based. I on occasion have nightmares of having said something like the following to the last of the 11:00PM tables: “Go in peace, and return to your beds” or something equally unscriptual!

The text for me that Christmas Sunday was this one for today: Isaiah 9:2-7. I am, as any of you who have ever read my blogs, primarily a preacher of the Hebrew Bible, so it was not peculiar for me or for the congregation to hear me open the most ancient text for my biblical source. As I gazed at my congregation that Sunday—no, it was hardly full, though respectable for a Christmas Sunday morning—and reflected during the prelude and even during the opening hymn, on the journey we had all taken as a church during the past four months, the words of Isaiah fairly leapt off the page.

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—
on them has light shined.

It was a fairly gloomy morning, as I remember; at the 8:30 service the sun refused to shine. But by 11:00, the sun had come out, and though it was December cold, the lights of the trees in the sanctuary, the glowing candles in the wall sconces illuminating the numerous wreaths, and most of all the hopeful faces of the assembled members, were all living testimony to the ancient words. On us, light had shined indeed, a light that all of us needed with a desperation that most Christmas times for us privileged and comfortable folk did not yield.

I knew that this was my last Sunday as interim minister, and I faced the congregation with an equal mixture of sorrow and relief. It had been the most challenging, frightening, and rewarding four months of my ministry, and I was both anxious to return to my full time job as a teacher of preachers and sad to leave these mostly lovely people who had endured so much and had in the end seen the light of God in fresh and powerful ways. “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us. Authority rests on his shoulders…His authority shall grow continually, and there shall be endless peace.” Well, of course, there is not yet endless peace. Far from it. Our world majors in conflict, and each day parades a new one before our weary eyes. But that Sunday, now 22 years ago, presented a sliver of light to me and to at least some of those who joined me that Sunday morning on Christmas Day. “He (the son) will establish it (that peace) and will uphold it with justice and with righteousness, from this time forth and forever more. The zeal of YHWH of the armies will do this!”

I am deeply grateful for time as interim minister at that church. It molded me as a person and as a teacher and preacher in ways that I continue to discover. But most of all I am grateful for that promised light in darkness that I saw those years ago, and that I continue to see this Advent season and in the coming season of Christmas. So, a Merry Christmas to those of you who will be in Church this Sunday and for those of us who will sit this one out. I confirm that God’s light will come for us all wherever we may be.

(Images from Wikimedia Commons)