Reflections from the Minister’s Study – Dec 21th, 2011

Christmas?! Bah, Humbug!

Ezekiel 37:1-14
Romans 8:24-27
Luke 2:8-20

Let us pray…God of mystery and new life, in this season of awaiting your light in the world, help us to stay strong. May your promises of newness and love sustain us now and throughout the year. May we never lose hope in the promise of the resurrection. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

This is the time of year when everyone seems to be celebrating. The malls have been celebrating since Back to School in September and kicked it up to ludicrous just after Halloween. For the last four weeks churches have been proclaiming: peace, hope, love and joy. The hymns even get in on the festivities with tunes like “Hark the Herald, Go Tell it on the Mountain” and “Joy to the World.”

But as many of us know, Christmas is not all those things for everyone. For some this time of year has them feeling more like, “Christmas? Bah humbug!”

There are all sorts of things that seem to weight heavier on us at Christmas. Things like divorce, loss of a joy, loss of independence, moving into a long-term care home or losing a loved one can leave us feeling anything but festive. The joy of the season seems like it has been drained away, syphoned off especially if the loss is new and the hurt is still raw. You might not even want to just skip putting up the lights this year or feel compelled to go about the motions of the season because that is what is expected or because the kids would want it that way.

Indeed the symbols of Advent may seem very far off at this time of year. Joy may be in competition with tears and thoughts of what could have been. Feelings of peace may seem like an impossibility, love too may seem thin and non-existent. But maybe just maybe, hope can make its way in.

Hope is something so very different than any other emotion.
Hope is expectation, longing, looking forward.
Hope is longing for something new, because things will never be the same.
Hope for a new way of living.
Hope for something good to come of what has been.

It is probably no coincidence that throughout the Bible God offered more hope than anything else. We just heard in Ezekiel the cry to God of whether these dry bones will live again.

The text is talking about a new way of living: the old will be reborn, the dead will experience resurrection. The past has occurred but something new and different will happen in the future. This passage could also refer to the hearts that are dry from so many tears being shed. God promises that those grieving hearts will feel again in time. Hurting hearts will trust in time. With time, in time, things will look and feel different.

This morning I used symbols to talk about the new life than comes from that which was thought dead and beyond hope and one of those symbols was a little green plant. The plant that I used is a piece of ivy that I took out of a flower arrangement from a funeral that occurred in this church a few months back. When you think about it, the little shoot must have been from a big healthy ivy plant, it was cut and removed from the main plant, arranged in a beautiful way and then left to wither and die. But instead, I took it, placed it in water till it sprouted its own roots, planted it in new soil, and then gave it all the water and sunlight it wanted. Then slowly, over the months it has begun to grow, bit by bit, growing toward the light.

Who knows how big it will grow. Maybe next year it will put out shoots and will crawl all over the choir room but for now it is growing one leaf at a time.

Maybe that is what Ezekiel was trying to say. Life is full of all sorts of roadblocks and dead-ends but the light of God, with the care of God, with time; things can and will turn around, take root and grow in new and perhaps unexpected ways .

For me, that is Christmas hope. Even with joy there can come the tears. New birth is happy and sad, and life keeps on going around us. Peace, love, and joy may be hard sometimes to see when the glitter of Christmas cheer is around us, but I hope that when the season brings you down, you will never let go of the true gift of the season: hope.

May we keep the light of Christ burning in our hearts and may God’s love give us the strength to go on.

May it be so.