All that Glitters: Romans 8:22-27
Blue Christmas/Longest Night (last week of Advent)
We
know that the whole creation is groaning together and suffering labor pains up
until now. And it’s not only the creation. We ourselves who have
the Spirit as the first crop of the harvest also groan inside as we wait to be
adopted and for our bodies to be set free. We were saved in hope.
If we see what we hope for, that isn’t hope. Who hopes for what they already
see? But if we hope for what we don’t see, we wait for it with
patience.
In
the same way, the Spirit comes to help our weakness. We don’t know what we
should pray, but the Spirit himself pleads our case with unexpressed groans. The
one who searches hearts knows how the Spirit thinks, because he pleads for the
saints, consistent with God’s will. (CEB)
One of my favorite
book series is The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper. It’s been on my mind this week because the
BBC is doing a radio theatre adaptation of the first book of the same name,
releasing one chapter a day to match the timing in the book. The main character, Will Stanton, is the seventh
son of a seventh son whose birthday falls on the winter solstice, 21
December. In The Dark Is Rising,
his eleventh birthday is thrown off course by the realization that he is
actually one of the Old Ones, a group of near-immortal beings who keep the
balance of power between Dark and Light and are wrapped in with Celtic
mythology. The whole series deals with
that question of who is good and what does that look like, and whether evil is
as obvious as we’d like to think it is.
Our Scripture is
filled with imagery of dark and light and sometimes our use of that gets a
little out of hand; like eleven-year-old Will, we may think that all that is
light is good and all that is shadowed is bad.
Yet this is not true; as the fable from Aesop says, all that glitters
is not gold. Sometimes, shiny
things, bright things, light things are far more dangerous than their shaded
counterparts.
We gather here in
the days before Christmas in a shaded room where we have admitted that,
perhaps, we seek a little less glitter. The
marathon of cheerful Christmas movies has been in full swing on the main TV
channels; the popstar music has been playing the grocery stores long enough for
us to have heard both about Mariah Carey’s wish list and Wham’s last Christmas
breakup. The tree lots are fairly
picked-over and the major companies have issued their shipping ultimatums for
when orders are due if they are to arrive by Christmas Day. It is a holly, jolly, most wonderful time of
year, and it can be utterly exhausting.
“We know that the
whole creation is groaning together,” Paul writes in his letter to the Romans,
“and it’s not only the creation.” We
gather here, in the deep darkness of a night that is 15 hours long,[1] and
groan together. There are people who
should be here with us but aren’t; there are things we wanted to do but
couldn’t; there are more COVID cases and wars and injustices and corruptions
and all we want for Christmas is actual hope, actual peace, actual joy, actual
love.
We light the Advent
wreath each year, one week and one candle at a time, not because we like buying
purple candles in bulk but because we have Scriptures full of light that shines
brightly, and darkness that soothes gently.
The Spirit herself “pleads our case with unexpressed groans,” holding
our pain with us, watching the dark rise and knowing that there are still nine
hours of daylight and, one day, there will be 15 again. Take heart, Paul says; there will be better
days than this, there will be a time when the dark is settled back into
balance, because there is a whole history of God’s faithfulness promising
that. At the first separation of light
and dark, God was there; in the moments of torn families, God was there; in
birth, and death, and cultural grief, and individual pain, God was there,
reminding the people that they did not walk the path alone.
That may not be
enough. Whatever brought you to this
service, it may be laced with hours of demanding, pleading, hoping God would
make any kind of sign of being there; it may be too raw yet to even acknowledge
the God Who lets such things happen. In
all of the readings we just heard, the reassurance of God’s presence may ring
hollow against the warped tin of a Christmas like this, may feel like you
reached out for gold and came away with palms full of scratching glitter.
That’s okay. It is okay to be angry, or sad, or empty, or
wildly frustrated with this world God made of light and dark. It is okay to say that the Spirit’s groans
are not enough, that they couldn’t possibly be louder than your own in the
secret places where you do not have to thank everyone who says they are sorry
this is happening. God can handle anger;
God can handle sorrow; God can handle emptiness.
The readings of
today are to show the arc of God’s presence in the Scripture we call holy, but
they’re also to show that we are human, anyway.
Naomi had Ruth as an unexpected gift from God, but her husband and sons
died, anyway. The people of Israel had a
God Who did not leave them but they were in exile in Babylon, anyway. The son of Elizabeth preached the good news
he had been given of his cousin the savior and then he died anyway. Paul was converted to a faith that completely
changed his life and then he was in pain enough to compare it to labor, anyway. These are our holy stories not because
everything wraps up tidily but because they are stories full of people wrestling
with what it means to have faith when faith doesn’t make sense, when we want to
see what we hope for but have to allow for the reality that we cannot.
Morgan Harper
Nichols, a musician and writer who works with the idea of connection as a Black
woman in a predominately white, male system, wrote, “There is a reason the sky
gets dark at night—we were not meant to see everything all the time. We were meant to rest, and trust even in the
darkness.”[2] The dark still rises; some things that
glitter are only fools’ gold; the night is still 15 hours long.
And. And the light rises to meet it, true
gold sits heavy in the candlelight, and the day stretches her arms wide to grow
once more. The Spirit joins us in
groaning hope because the end of the story is not yet written; these things are
trustworthy and true, there shall be a day with no more sorrow, no more grief,
no more loss. I don’t know what that
will look like; I don’t know that I will live to see it. But in the same chapter that Paul reassures
the Romans about the Spirit’s recognition of their pain, he says that nothing,
nothing, nothing separates us from God’s love.
God loves us when we are angry and raging; God loves us when we are
sobbing and broken; God loves us when we are the ones who feel glittery and
unreal; God loves us in the light that reassures, and the dark that soothes. God loves as One Who has experienced loss,
and grief, and anger, and pain, and betrayal, and worry, and hope that doesn’t
make any sense.
Let that be enough. Let the rock-solid fact that you are loved,
loved beyond measure, loved from the first dawning of the first day until the
open gates of the new Jerusalem, loved for all of the anger and joy and hope
and grief and absolute humanness of you settle into your bones.
As you leave today,
there will be handwarmers in baskets.
You are invited to take one; part of that is out of knowing that a
winter storm is coming—be careful, stay warm.
But most of it is as an encouragement to let that warmth, whenever you
use it, sink into you as a reminder that God is here. God is here when the night is long. God is here when the darkness rises. God is here when the glitter fades. God is here when the cold fingers of grief
grip tight. God is here, loving you,
groaning with you, letting you know that the candles still shine, the night
will turn back, and there is warmth enough pooling in your hands.
May we trust in the
light, and the dark, and the God Who made them both. Amen.
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