By Rankin Wilbourne, Lead Pastor

During this Advent season we remember that the world, for all of its beauty, is still stained with sorrow and that we need God to come and “be our light.” It is a hopeful season but a mournful one too – a season of darkness. In time it gives way to Christmas, the season in which Christians celebrate that God has come and will come again – a season of light. For our Christmas to be genuinely “merry,” for the light to break in, we must confront this present darkness.

Here are two reflections: the first is a poem by Thomas Hardy that I think of each Christmas. Essayist Joseph Epstein concluded his short book Envy admitting that what he envied are people who possess faith, an envy shared by Hardy’s narrator, lamenting the lost faith of his childhood. The poem is based on the story that, at the birth of Christ, not just the shepherds and wise men, but that all the animals knelt in homage to baby Jesus. The second reflection is written by Robert Lupton and reminds us that Christmas is a difficult time for many in our city.

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock,
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years!  Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come; see the oxen kneel

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

Thomas Hardy, “The Oxen”

“Christmas again. Damn!” His words are barely audible but his wife knows his feelings well. She sees the hurt come into his eyes when the kids come home from school talking about what they want for Christmas. It is the same expression she sees on the faces of the other unemployed fathers around the housing project.

She knows this year will be no different from the last. All her husband’s hustle, his day-labor jobs, his pickup work will not be enough to put presents under a tree. They will do well to keep the heat on. His confident, promising deceptions allow the children the luxury of their dreams a while longer. She will cover for him again because she knows he is a good man. His lies are his wishes, his flawed attempts to let his children know what the older ones know but never admit: the gifts are not from Daddy.

He will not go with her to stand in the “free toy” lines with all the others. He cannot bring himself to do it. It is too stark a reminder of his own impotence. And if their home is blessed again this year with a visit from a Christian family bearing food and beautifully wrapped presents for the kids, he will stay in the bedroom until they are gone. He will leave the smiling and the graciousness to his wife. His joy for the children will be genuine. But so is the heavy ache in his stomach as his image of himself as a provider is dealt another blow.

Christmas. That wonderful, awful time when giving hearts glow warm and bright while fading embers of a poor man’s pride are doused black.

Robert D. Lupton, “Christmas Again”