Christmas Eve: From the Darkness into the Light

Christmas Eve Message 2022

Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Imagine you are in your mother’s womb – embraced by her warm body, swimming in a warm bathtub. It is dark. You can hear her heartbeat, like the ticking of a clock. The clock strikes midnight, and it is the hour of your birth.

With anticipation and bubbly excitement, you begin your journey to the light. You are ready to leave the sanctuary of your mother’s all enveloping love.

But now – it hurts! Wow, it hurts more than anything, this experience of being born. You need to squeeze yourself into a small ball to be able to emerge on the other side. You can feel yourself squirm, you are uncomfortable to the point of wondering if you can survive.

Then suddenly, the squeezing stops, your body, which up until now, was cradled by your mother’s gentle warm womb, is now cold, is having trouble getting it’s bearings, open and floppy arms and legs. The lights are too bright, the sounds are too loud, and for the first time in your life – but not the last – you WAIL!

You may open your eyes now.

This experience occurs many, many times in our lives. Just when we are settling down to a comfortable routine, something new happens, like getting used to a new school, a new job, a new marriage, a new divorce; retirement, basically a new life – that is when we are slammed. We must go through a new birth canal. We must become so uncomfortable it hurts. But we adjust, we are comforted, we move on.

Jesus was born into this human life in much the same way as any of us were. Unremarkable, yet also a miracle – this is the miracle of birth, and the miracle of Christmas. As each of us are also a miracle. Impossible odds yet possible because our uniqueness is here now.

Our messiah, God incarnate, was born. He suffered the moment he was born, as we did. And he teaches us how to live, how to walk toward our own birth and rebirth, walk into the light.

In many traditions, there is the common metaphor of light. We see it here tonight with our candlelight service. This is also the time of Hannukah, the festival of lights, a miracle when only enough oil for one day lasted 8.

This past Tuesday marked the winter solstice, in which we experienced the longest night. The celebration surrounding this is the anticipation of the birth of the next annual cycle, with the returning of the light, the days getting longer and longer each day. History.com suggests that humans may have been celebrating the winter solstice for as long as 12,000 years.

The Tao Te Ching was written about 400 years before the birth of Christ. In Chapter 1 it is said, “The unnamable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things… Mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. The source is called darkness. Darkness within darkness, the gateway to all understanding.” What I see from this is that the understanding of the mystery of life comes from the emergence from darkness; comes from birth, into light.

And don’t we use that word light many times to mean understanding? Like a birth? A birth of ideas, ideas formed using words and language. Words are imprecise. Translating from language to language can cause misunderstandings. When preaching, I try to do my best to be clear, and for these ideas to be able to be seen and heard. Here I try to shed light on the birth of Jesus, and how that translates to our birth, and our rebirth each Christmas and New Year.

Jesus the Christ is many times referred to as the Light. He himself declared “I am the Light of the world”. By reading and doing our best to understand his words and how they relate to our lives, our pathway forward along our spiritual path is lit by the example of his life. His teachings show us the way; the way out of darkness, the way out of fear, the way into light, love and acceptance, the way of forgiveness, the way to be reborn.

Next week is New Year’s and the birth of 2023. Many people make resolutions for the coming year. Let us resolve to emerge from this Christmas birth and grow: to grow individually, to grow our community at this church, to grow our own light of Christ within, and to share that light beyond ourselves through Christ-like actions. Let us resolve to move from the darkness into the light. May it be so. Amen.