Christmas Eve ~ Hope is Here
Has your soul caught up with you? I hope that, by pausing amid the clamor and turmoil of pre-holiday demands, you are able to grasp more fully the mystery we enter into this evening. Dropping out of the race, sitting by the sidelines, savoring God’s word awaiting fresh insight—all are forms of protest. We are protesting the darkness in this world and carving out a place whereto light can find us.
Before Christmas in 1943, a German Lutheran pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from a Nazi prison to his parents. Safe in a New York professorship, he had sailed home to Germany to take a stand against the darkness. Sitting still waiting for his fate to be revealed, he savored Christmas as never before. He said that Christmas would be observed in his prison with more meaning and sincerity than in those many places where all that survives of the Christmas feast is its name. He said that God’s being born in a stable, God embracing a life containing misery, suffering, poverty and loneliness, makes more sense from prison. For the prisoner, he said, Christmas is glad tidings in a very real sense.
How do you explain the hope that lives within your heart as Advent ends? This feast of Christmas is not merely God’ birthday, not at all. It is, as the theologian Nathan Mitchell says so well, “the beginning of a decisive new phase in the tempestuous history of God’s hunger for human companions.” Companions is a felicitous word, since it means,”those who eat bread together.” So we rise from our resting places like the tribesmen pausing to wait for their souls, and we join a procession to the Lord’s Table that encircles the earth today. We are not expected to pretend we are back in Bethlehem, but rather to see ourselves nourished, prepared, and propelled into God’s future.
by Reverend James A. Field