It’s dark. It’s glam. It’s sad.
It’s Christmas.
I have remembered this line from a television sitcom for twenty-three years. It was spoken by the actor Parker Posey, guest starring on “Will and Grace,” a show about a gay guy living with his straight woman friend. Back then, it was a major step forward for gay characters simply to appear on prime-time television, so progressive fans of the show put up with the fact that the queer characters never so much as held hands. They were the most chaste gay New Yorkers imaginable. And of course transgender identity – even the existence of transgender persons – was barely mentioned, let alone explored.
But “Will and Grace” had this terrific line, and they gave it to the dry, droll Parker Posey. She played a tough, uncompromising manager at Barney’s department store, and she was reviewing a store window that Grace had decorated for the holiday season. Grace’s window featured crimson trees, sad people in festive masks, and images of haunting characters from some of the darker Christmas stories and films. And this was the hard manager’s take on Grace’s work: “It’s dark. It’s glam. It’s sad. It’s Christmas.”
And Christmas is dark. The twinkly lights only accentuate the darkness. They would not twinkle without it. Barbara Brown Taylor, the Episcopal priest and spiritual writer, devotes a whole book to the spirituality of darkness, a book called Learning to Walk in the Dark. She confronts one of the great but terrible experiences we have in the darkness, both literal and spiritual darkness: in the anxious world of a dark night, we often fail to discern the presence of God. In the depths of night, we can sometimes only sense a great absence, a void. If anything is present, it is something (or someone) that terrifies us. If God is present in the night, God is utterly, forbiddingly mute and invisible. Even Jesus cries out in the night of his painful death, a cry of dereliction thrown at a silent God: “Why have you forsaken me?”
Taylor does not shrink from this nocturnal human experience. But neither does she allow God’s perceived absence to plunge her into nihilistic despair. She closes her book about spiritual (and literal) darkness with an essay about her choice to go for at least one day and night without electricity or human connection, in a twelve-by-twelve cabin in the woods.
Taylor knows that before light bulbs, humans had as much as fourteen hours to sleep, stir to half wakefulness, sleep again, half-wake again, and so on, back and forth, riding the different states of consciousness that our species has evolved to survive on this spinning planet. Taylor says, “In prehistoric times, this rest state may have provided a channel of communication between dreams and waking life, supplying rich resources for myth and fantasy. It may also explain why so many biblical stories are powered by big dreams… [Today,] the long hours of rest before, during, and after sleep are gone, along with the state of consciousness that went with them – the collateral damage of a world in love with light.”
Spending a night in that lonely cabin, Taylor confronts terrible – and terrifying – inner demons, and she bursts into tears of relief and wonder when the pre-dawn skies begin to brighten. Her night is terrible, but it is not bereft of holiness, purpose, or hope.
Surely the Bethlehem birth of Jesus is a story written down by a community that knows about long nights, literal and otherwise. The skies are torn open in the middle of the night, and the light shining at the wrong time terrifies night-shift field workers who had been tending their livestock, mucking out stalls, just going about their hard work. And a woman gives birth – without a doula, without clean water, without a spinal block – inside what was probably a shallow cave, much like Taylor’s cabin in the woods. When it’s dark in a cave at nighttime, it is really and truly dark.
The darkness of human despair, the darkness of a human womb, the darkness of a graveyard shift for people almost out of hope: here is where, finally, a supernova – a great, new thing – explodes with blinding light. Right here, right now, in the wee hours, where God’s perceived absence is most devastating, heart-breaking, and soul-crushing: this is where the light shines.
But God appears as an infant screaming in the night. This is not a pleasant sound, though it may at first be a relief to hear because the baby’s yell confirms that he is healthy, he is alive. God appears first to us as a newborn in the nighttime: not a wise, wizened wizard; not an enlightened and serene sage; not a wily, wonder-working witch. No, in the dead of night, God appears as a senseless, needy infant. In the darkness of our night, God is clothed in – God is found in – a profoundly vulnerable, unnervingly weak, impossibly tiny person.
God is found, then, in the most vulnerable humans in our arms, in streetside tents, in the emergency room, at the graveside of someone they love. And God is found in the tiny child inside you, too. We are taught rightly to search for the adult Christ at Christmas, and to be sure, we will meet him soon: in a couple of weeks Jesus will appear at the river Jordan, for his baptism and the beginning of his ministry. But the first piercing burst of light, the first dawning of God’s presence and power in the dead of night – we may not discern it until we turn quietly, in the shadows, toward the youngest, most frightened, least verbal parts of ourselves. The scared child inside you: God is found there.
Behind the workaday, frantic, light-drenched world of bustle and business, of strain and stress, my inner child longs for God. Does yours? My youngest and most vulnerable part wants to be held, held tight, loved, cared for, kissed gently on the forehead.
And this is sad. My inner child is often sad. If God is found in the most vulnerable among us, then God is immersed in sadness. Again, quoth Parker Posey: Christmas is sad.
For the last two years I’ve gone to a holiday show at ArtsWest, a playhouse in West Seattle led by one of our own parishioners here. ArtsWest created a new tradition called “Snowed In,” a play about a clutch of friends charged with writing, rehearsing, and performing a Christmas play. “This is pretty meta,” one of them says: it’s a play about people writing a play.
“Snowed In” reliably opens with an upbeat number, lots of dancing, much joy, many smiles. But both times I attended this holiday production, I wasn’t in the mood. I arrived there more than a little drained by all that’s going on in our world, and all that’s going on with me. As delightful as things are here at St. Paul’s (and truly I tell you, there is much cause for rejoicing here), I sometimes feel emotionally exhausted. Now, I don’t expect a playhouse to open their holiday show with a doleful scene of gloomy actors, sulking through their task of creating a cheerful Christmas play. But – let’s just say I feel tremendous relief when they finally get to the part when one of them sings “In the Bleak Midwinter,” that soulful, sad carol we just sang a bit ago, with earth frozen hard as iron, and a new mother quietly kissing her child.
Recently, in a room at Harborview, I visited with one of our unhoused neighbors. (Our own Neighborhood Action ministers secured safe housing and health care for him.) He has lain on his back on this block for a decade and a half, sweltering under the heat in the summer, fighting off frostbite in the winter. (He lost four toes in that battle.) And here we were, chatting in a warm room. He was clean and dry, and in good spirits.
I even had the absurd thought that our newly-housed friend has healthy skin. I almost asked him, “So, what are you using? Just pore strips? Whatever you’re doing, it’s working.” I see Christ in that sad yet cheerful face, that weathered yet surprisingly healthy face, that face of someone profoundly, devastatingly vulnerable, and yet one of the hardiest survivors I’ve ever known. Sometimes the glow of Christ’s presence truly transforms a human face.
It was so good to see him warm, and dry, and nourished. Yet he still faces an uncertain, anxious future, and he still wanders mostly alone in a nocturnal wilderness of dual diagnoses, scarce health care, and an indifferent, often hostile city.
Our friend in Harborview is a biblical lament in human form: he is Lazarus beneath the rich man’s table, the Son of Man with nowhere to lay his head, the wandering people of God in the wilderness. He is our inner child externalized, our shared vulnerability incarnate. He is God’s people wondering how they can sing a song in a foreign land, how they can nurture hope in a night seemingly bereft of God’s presence.
So yes, Christmas is sad. I’ve been your pastor for two years now, and I tell you, there are several sadnesses here. I can feel them. They run in our blood. We carry sadness from forty years ago when we buried so many people who succumbed to complications from AIDS. We carry sadness from the present time as we minister alongside the unhoused, beneath a heaven torn apart not by angels but by atmospheric rivers of rain.
This is my second Christmas with both of my parents dead and buried beneath the iron-hard earth. I’m sad about that, even as I know that it’s not even remotely newsworthy: every single one of us feels the sadness attendant to death, attendant to love. To love is to feel sad, for all whom we love must die.
But all this sadness, all this darkness – in the face of it all, I come back to “Snowed In,” that play about friends and friendship, that fun and funny trifle about the joy and sadness of the holidays. After they sing “In the Bleak Midwinter,” the friends reflect on how sad songs like that make us feel. In their telling, sad songs of the season help us feel “alone but not lonely.” Alone but not lonely. And that is Christmas night. Mary had Joseph and Joseph had Mary, but each was existentially alone in the night, alone with their differing duties and burdens, alone with their fears, bone-deep alone in their perception of God’s absence. Yet they were not – they are not – lonely. We sing our sad songs together, even if the night haunts us one by one.
And so, finally, because it is dark and sad but also bright and hopeful, Christmas is, yes, glam. There is an elegant sheen on everything. We may think of superficial glamour, of course: splendid wine-colored dresses and black-velvet jackets, or a tony holiday cocktail party where you devastate everyone with your sharp silver necklace. (Girl, you’ve got the neck for it.)
But Christmas is glam in a deeper, more useful way. It’s not at all about the holiday parties attended by the one percent, while the world burns. Our mission here, our ministries here, our purpose in this life, our future as God’s people, your individual future as one conscious, anxious human being – they all shine with God’s nighttime presence. By the light of the star that guides ancient sages ever westward, we glimpse the harrowing beauty of God’s birth into the awful vulnerability of human life, God’s birth into each and every one of us – we who are existentially alone.
Each of us is alone this Christmas, in this night. But as we gather at this entrance to the dark, sad cave of God’s birth among us, I pray that you and I, that all of us, will be alone – but not lonely.
***
Preached on the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ (Christmas Eve), December 24, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Isaiah 9:2-7
Psalm 96
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-20