“The time of darkness and despair will not go on forever. There will be a time in the future when Galilee of the Gentiles will be filled with glory. The people who walk in darkness will see a great light. For those who live in a land of deep darkness, a light will shine.” (Isaiah 9:1-2)
We are living in dark times. This last weekend is another reminder of how hate, prejudice, fear, and selfishness cast a pall of darkness over our world. And yet, the light still shines. Although so many forces seek to dehumanize us, our deepest selves know that the darkness does not have to overcome us. Our hearts know that love is stronger than hate, and there is something, or rather Someone, calling to us in the deepest darkness.
I am reminded of the twin metaphors of Light and Life in the Gospel of John. The true Light is the source of true Life, and darkness, hate, greed, fear, and even death cannot, will not, overcome it:
“Life itself was in Him, and this Life gives Light to everyone. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it. The One who is the true Light, who gives Light to everyone, was coming into the world. To all who believed Him and accepted Him, He gave the right to become children of God. They are reborn! This is not a physical birth resulting from human passion or plan—this rebirth comes from God.” (John 1:4, 9, 12-13).
GREAT LAUGHTER
I am also reminded of some words of one of my favorite writers, the late Frederick Buechner. Buechner was born in 1926 and passed away a few years ago in 2022. Buechner knew darkness. At the age of 10, his father committed suicide. He writes about his pain, his childhood memories, and about the healing power of God’s love coming into his life in his book A Crazy, Holy Grace: The Healing Power of Pain and Memory. As he grew into adulthood, he realized he had to open himself up to the Voice calling to him in his pain. As he writes, “the trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from. You can survive on your own. You can grow strong on your own. You can even prevail on your own. But you cannot become human on your own.”[1]
Buechner graduated from Princeton and his first novel, A Long Day’s Dying, was a critical success. He then taught at New York University, and while in New York, he began attending church, listening to the sermons of the pastor George Buttrick. It was here that he heard about Jesus, the great God who came to us in great humility—Jesus the King who served us but who continues to be crowned in the hearts of humans “among confession, and tears, and great laughter.”
THE LIGHT THAT ENLIGHTENS EVERYONE
Buechner went on to write 39 books, and below I would like to intersperse some quotes from Buechner’s writings about Christmas, and about the true Light of Jesus Christ, with words from the Good News according to John:
It was thousands of years ago and thousands of miles away, but it is a visit that for all our madness and cynicism and indifference and despair we have never quite forgotten. The oxen in their stalls. The smell of hay. The shepherds standing around. That child and that place are somehow the closest of all close encounters, the one that brings us closest to something that cannot be told in any other way. This story that faith tells in the fairytale language of faith is not just that God is, which God knows is a lot to swallow in itself much of the time, but that God comes. Comes here. “In great humility”….And to us came. For us came….He visited us. The world has never been quite the same since. It is still a very dark world, in some ways darker than ever before, but the darkness is different because he keeps getting born into it. The threat of holocaust. The threat of poisoning the earth and sea and air. The threat of our own deaths. The broken marriage. The child in pain. The lost chance. Anyone who has ever known him has known him perhaps better in the dark than anywhere else because it is in the dark where he seems to visit most often.[2]
“In the beginning the Word already existed. He was with God, and He was God. He was in the beginning with God. He created everything there is…That same Word became human and ‘pitched His tent’ with us and lived here on earth among us. He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness. And we have seen His glory, the glory of the only Son of the Father.” (John 1:1, 2, 14).
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. That is what incarnation means. It is untheological. It is unsophisticated. It is undignified. But according to Christianity it is the way things are…Incarnation means that all ground is holy ground because God not only made it but walked on it, ate and slept and worked and died on it.[3]
What keeps the wild hope of Christmas alive year after year in a world notorious for dashing all hopes is the haunting dream that the child who was born that day may yet be born again even in us and our own snowbound, snowblind longing for him.[4]
“For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him.” (John 3:16, 17)
When this child was born, the whole course of human history was changed….Art, music, literature, Western culture itself with all its institutions and Western man’s whole understanding of himself and his world—it is impossible to conceive how differently things would have turned out if that birth had not happened whenever, wherever, however it did. And there is a truth beyond that: for millions of people who have lived since, the birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it.[5]
“Whoever believes in me, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water. I am the light of the world. If you follow me, you won’t have to walk in darkness, because you will have the light that leads to life. You are truly my disciples if you remain faithful to my teachings. And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave of sin. A slave is not a permanent member of the family, but a son is part of the family forever. So if the Son sets you free, you are truly free. (John 7:38; 8:12, 31-32, 34-36)
Heaven knows terrible things happen to people in this world. But from deep within whatever the hidden spring is that life wells up from, there wells up into our lives, even at their darkest and maybe especially then, a power to heal, to breathe new life into us….What matters is that we open ourselves to receive it; that we address it and let ourselves be addressed by it; that we move in the direction that it seeks to move us, the direction of fuller communion with itself and with each other. Indeed, I believe that for our sakes this Spirit beneath our spirits will make Christs of us before we are done.[6]
“I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying. Everyone who lives in me and believes in me will never ever die. I have come as a light to shine in this dark world, so that all who put their trust in me will no longer remain in the dark. I have told you all this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world.” (John 11:25, 26; 12:46; 16:33).
How do we find out for ourselves whether in this child born so long ago there really is the power to give us a new kind of life in which both suffering and joy are immeasurably deepened, a new kind of life in which little by little we begin to be able to love even our friends, and at moments even our enemies, maybe at last ourselves, even God? Adeste fidelis (“O Come All Ye Faithful”)….He says to ask and it will be given you, to seek and you will find. In other words, he says that if you pray for him, he will come to you, and as far as I know, there is only one way to find out whether that is true, and that is to try it. Pray for him and see if he comes, in ways that only you will recognize. He says to follow him, to walk as he did into the world’s darkness, to throw yourself away as he threw himself away for the love of the dark world.[7]
“If anyone’s will is to do God’s will, he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own authority. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him. If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” (John 7:17; 14:15, 21, 23).
The final secret, I think, is this: that the words “You shall love the Lord your God” become in the end less a command than a promise. And the promise is that, yes, on the weary feet of faith and the fragile wings of hope, we will come to love him at last, as from the first, he has loved us—loved us even in the wilderness, especially in the wilderness, because he has been in the wilderness with us. He has been in the wilderness for us. He has been acquainted with our grief. And, loving him, we will come at last to love each other too…And rise we shall, out of the wilderness, every last one of us, even as out of the wilderness Christ rose before us. That is the promise, and the greatest of all promises.[8]
“These are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” (John 20:31)
[1] Frederick Buechner, A Crazy, Holy Grace: The Healing Power of Pain and Memory (Zondervan, 2017), 41.
[2] Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry (HarperCollins, 1992), 124-25.
[3] Frederick Buecher, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (Harper & Row, 1973), 43.
[4] Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces (Harper & Row, 1984), 65.
[5] Frederick Buechner, The Faces of Jesus (Harper & Row, 1989), 41-44.
[6] Frederick Buechner, A Crazy, Holy Grace, 137.
[7] Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark (HarperOne, 2006), 54.
[8] Buechner, A Crazy, Holy Grace, 137-138.