Christmas is my favorite time of year and it always has been. I am one of those uncrackable nuts who starts listening to Christmas music as early as September and I’m not sorry. To me, the end of summer and the first whiff I have of the air getting cooler is my cue to start listening to Christmas music. To me, that just makes everything better in the fall. Some might say that it’s prematurely spoiling Christmas before its time, but for me it’s like what happens when you’re in a house and someone is cooking.
And I don’t mean TV-dinners that you pop in the microwave.
I mean when someone is making an effort and you smell the food simmering, sizzling & baking for hours before you can finally put it in your mouth and taste it and sink your teeth into its textures and really enjoy it. And when that happens, you enjoy that food so much more when the time comes to actually partake because of all the smelling and waiting before it was actually time to eat.
If your Christmas is about Santa, elves & reindeer then by all means save the music until the last possible moment, but if your Christmas is about the heart of God, then I honestly think there’s no bad time of year to listen to Christmas music and be spiritually blessed by it.
In my life, I have found that longing for Christmas before it’s actually here enriches my life experiences in the fall before the Christmas season actually arrives.
In the earliest seasons of my experience, I couldn’t explain the longing and glee that I had for Christmas even when it seemed “out of season.” It was mysterious, but I knew that I felt it. And when I was a child, the longing and aching I felt lit me up with anticipation of something coming soon that was powerfully good, beautiful, captivating and poignant. And even now, my heart is more pierced and softened by everything to do with Christmas than at any other time of year.
There was so much that I didn’t understand about why I loved Christmas when I was a child, but I knew without a doubt that I was always drawn and I never wanted to fight it. I wished it could stay and never leave - that life could always be like it was at Christmas.
As I got older, I started to have Christmases where “the magic” felt further away or that there was less of it or it took longer to get to it and then it was over too soon. This would be really depressing for me because I so looked forward to the inspiration I felt so much more easily as a child.
Around this time I started racking up my worst memories and most painful experiences, which all seemed to cluster in the fall - mostly in September and October, and a few of them in August and November. Bottom line is that more & more often I’d find myself stumbling into Christmas out of an autumn full of pain and emptiness.
Towards the end of the year 2013, which was actually right when I first started visiting this church, I’d had a painful autumn that had really laid me open. Some of it was very dark, but a lot of it was remedial pain. God had been using new wounds to reopen older wounds that hadn’t healed correctly. And out of that remedial pain, He brought me into a season of repentance, restoration and reunion with Him. I collapsed into that Christmas exhausted, sore, grateful and just done. I had the keen sensation of having come to the end of myself and to the end of my resources. I was not energetic and I was not merry. I was so tired I didn’t even have the will to complain. I was just ready to rest and ready for God to lead.
And that was one of the nicest Christmases I’d had in years.
My sensitivity from recent wounds gave me a heightened sense of God’s light settling around me and entering my soul, a sense of being drawn out of darkness as He was leading me deeper into repentance and deeper into His embrace.
Now I know that this is all story, sensation and experience. Where’s the Scripture? Where’s the sermon? My message today is a blend of testimony and sermon.
And it’s at this point that I want to give credit to my husband Russell for much of what I’m about to share. When Russell came into my life, we had a lot of arguments about Christmas because he’s really not a Christmas bunny like I am. The way I was raised, I knew Santa wasn’t real and I wasn’t offended by secular Christmas music. My attitude was and still kind of is, “Live and let live.” But Russell challenged me to heighten my focus on the spiritual substance of Christmas to a degree I never had, previously. And for that I will be forever grateful. Russell has been a crucial catalyst for deepening and clarifying the spiritual riches of Christmas for me.
Christmas is a treasure trove of spiritual riches, which is another reason why I am blessed by Christmas music and the Christmas story pretty much anytime during the year.
And as a Seventh-day Adventists, I believe that the Season of Advent at Christmastime should be of special significance to us. Some Adventists skip Christmas entirely and call it a pagan holiday. Some celebrate it but get into debates about Christmas trees and what music we should & shouldn’t listen to. But the bottom line is that Seventh-day Adventists should be the best at celebrating Christmas. We really should. It should mean the most to us because of all it reminds us of from he past and all it symbolizes for the present and future. Christmas should be the most meaningful and magical time of year amongst Advent people during the Advent season.
Christmas is not a pagan holiday, Christmas is the most Christian time of year there is - even more than Easter when we celebrate the Death & Resurrection. There would have been no Resurrection without the Incarnation & Birth, and while churches have special services and advertisers sell lots of eggs, chocolate and rabbit-themed items right before Easter, nothing impacts the earth on such a global scale like Christmas does. Christmas is both an echoing and a beckoning. It echoes the glory of the past and it beckons us to the glory of the future. It makes our hearts burn in the present as we live in the tension between what did happen and what is going to happen in the near future when Jesus returns again.
I know, I know people say Jesus wasn’t born in December so it’s the wrong time of year but here’s the thing: I think it’s totally appropriate to end every year with the focus that Christmas gives us on the ending of all these fallen years we’re slogging through right now. Christmas right before New Year’s goes so perfectly with The Second Christmas of the Second Coming right before God makes all things new!
So just hold onto that as we continue.
I already told you about 2013. Well, 3 years later in 2016 Russell and I experienced a lot of trauma together as a newlywed pastoral couple. It was unforeseen, unwelcome and overwhelming. I’m still not done healing from it and as you can imagine it impacted our marriage. All that happened over 3 years ago from where we all currently stand now, just to give you an idea of the gravity. None of the pain felt remedial. None of it felt redemptive. What happened to us was sinful, abusive, & wrong and it didn’t take me long to realize that I was experiencing the ordeal that was going to make me or break me for life.
Before this happened to us, I had recently identified that I live with chronic mild depression in general. And after these offenses happened, my depression was intensified along with other symptoms. Depression feels like a heavy blanket holding you down. It makes the simplest tasks feel impossible or at least way too hard. It feels like the skies are always cloudy, like catching a patch of blue sky is incredibly hard, so that when you do catch some blue sky - oh the joy and euphoria you feel!
As I approached Christmas in 2016, I was meeting all my responsibilities and clinging to my faith, but my skies were completely cloudy. Gentle instrumental Christmas music brought a soothing balm to my burned and broken heart during my private devotions, and then as we got closer to December I did what I do every year: I browsed iTunes for new Christmas music to add to my playlists. And somehow I stumbled on several songs that were themed on light. The musical arrangements and lyrics hooked me and I had them on repeat like a thirsty person guzzling water. I couldn’t explain it yet but it helped.
Fast forward to summer of 2017 and we decided to lead our church in Logan, WV through a conversational Bible study of the book of 1 John. Right in the very first chapter, the verse hit me as if I’d never seen it before in my life: God is light. In Him is no darkness at all.
I had already been begging my mom to let me do the Christmas Eve program at her church in California and when I read that verse, I instantly knew what its title would be. But that’s not all. Reading that verse opened up a huge door for me. I had always grown up hearing “God is Love” repeated endlessly. But somehow I never even knew this verse existed even though I’d read 1 John when I was younger. I guess it just didn’t stick at the time. But in the same book of the Bible where we have the verse that defines God as love, we also have a verse that states just as explicitly that God is light.
Suddenly all these experiences that I just shared with you - and more - came into focus in a spiritually confirmed way. I knew more than ever that it was God’s Presence that had been working on me and ministering to me. Those experiences of light in my soul and of being drawn to Christmas music themed on light — all of that was God wooing my heart for a greater purpose, to prepare me for the vision He gave me in the Christmas concert next Sabbath.
Scripture is clear that darkness and light have no harmony.
Evil is darkness, goodness is light.
Hearing “God is Light” (and not just “God is a God of light”) just like we hear “God is Love” should give us something to grapple with. What does it mean that God is Light just like He is Love itself? And how have we missed 1 John 1:5 all this time when it has always been right there? When it actually precludes the definition of God as being love?
Ellen White’s Conflict of the Ages series begins and ends with “God is Love” at the very beginning of Patriarchs & Prophets and at the very end of The Great Controversy. And while I utterly affirm that bookending, I also really believe we need to look at the fact that before God was defined as love in the book of 1 John, He was first defined as light. And think about this: when Jesus comes back to take us Home there will be no more night and we won’t need planets to give us light because God IS light. What was the first thing God spoke into existence when He created the world? Was it relationships? No…!
He said, “Let there be __________ (light)."
And after He created light for us to see by, He then created everything else and all their complex interrelationships with each other.
Real love is impossible without truth.
Love cannot last when it’s based on a lie.
Creation was an act of love, and God wanted His very essence to christen Creation.
God is Light. In Him is no darkness at all.
And Light is a symbol of truth.
And that makes sense because we know God is the Way, the _________ (Truth) and the Life.
When people look for clarity (which is truth), they are looking for illumination. When someone is operating under a misconception and you want to help them know the truth, you shed light on the topic.
In the Old Testament there are lots of verses describing God as love.
In Jeremiah 31:3, God said to us “I have loved you with an everlasting love. I have drawn you with lovingkindness.”
In Psalm 136, the line about God, “His love endures forever” is repeated 26 times.
Lamentations 3:22 says, “Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.”
Those are just 3 verses, but what’s in each of them and what’s in all verses about God’s love is the implicit meaning that God’s love is true and reliable and trustworthy. That God’s heart can be trusted. His love is not fickle, it’s everlasting. His love is not temporary, it endures forever. His love is not a small scrap, it is great, it is huge, and it saves us. His love is unfailing, which the New Testament echoes in the famous line, “Love never fails.” The fact that God is Light, that God is Truth, that God can be Trusted is implicit in what these verses say about His love.
And yes, there are verses that touch on God being light like Psalm 119:105 that says, “Your Word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.”
But there’s something about the New Testament that, while continuing to define God as love, really intensifies in describing Him as light.
Desire of Ages helps us understand why. In it, she wrote:
“The earth was dark through misapprehension of God. That the gloomy shadows might be lightened, that the world might be brought back to God, Satan’s deceptive power was to be broken. This could not be done by force. The exercise of force is contrary to the principles of God’s government; He desires only the service of love; and love cannot be commanded; it cannot be won by force or authority. Only by love is love awakened. To know God is to love Him; His character must be manifested in contrast to the character of Satan. This work only one Being in all the universe could do. Only He who knew the height and depth of the love of God could make it known. Upon the world’s dark night the Sun of Righteousness must rise, ‘with healing in His wings.’” (DA 22.1)
God’s love had always been there. Always. But Satan had made the earth dark through misrepresenting God, deceiving humanity and instigating humans to wander from God and abuse each other which drove them even further away from being able to connect with a good God. Satan had darkened everyone’s understanding of what love really meant. And that’s a lot like our world today. People’s concepts of love are more diverse and confused than they’ve ever been because their definition of what love is, is polluted and clouded by darkness.
I think it’s no coincidence that in the beginnings of the Old and New Testaments where God first started and then started over, we see God and we see Light. If you’ll allow me a combination, it goes like this:
“In the beginning was God. God created the heavens and the earth. Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made. The earth before He created was formless and empty, and darkness was over the surface of the deep. But in God was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
The Holy Word of God begins with Light.
Both Testaments of the Word begin with Light.
The Gospel story begins with the dawn of redeeming grace when the Sun of Righteousness and Light of the World came down to lighten our night.
At the moment of every human being’s conception in their mother’s womb when the sperm meets the egg, there is a tiny flash of light called a “zinc spark.”
Every single one of us here - our lives began with light.
And every individual person’s spiritual story of conversion begins with that moment of illumination when they begin to see the light, when they begin to see the truth.
Everything lifegiving begins with truth - with light.
Everything that kills begins with a lie - with darkness.
So how does all this talk of love, light and truth relate to Christmas?
I believe Christmas is telling us what is most true about life and eternity, because Christmas shines a huge, animating light on God’s goodness, beauty, grace, redemption, and His defiant creativity on behalf of being close to us. And because of all the darkness in this world, we need to be anchored for dear life in what is true. We need candles lit in our souls that can’t be blown out, because the darkness hasn’t even reached full max yet. But it it on its way. Jesus said that in end times, the love of many would grow cold - that the love of many would lose light and burn out, that the love of many would lose truth and become a source of death rather than a source of life.
Scripture and Spirit of Prophecy have told us that in the Time of Trouble, the state of the world will be worse than any of its previous chapters. Worse than the antediluvians. Worse than the ancient persecution of the early Church. Worse than the Crusades. Worse than the Dark Ages. Worse than the Inquisition. Worse than the Civil War. Worse than World War I. Worse than the Holocaust. Worse than 9/11. We’re not there yet, but we know that we’re living in extraordinary, triggering and deeply troubling times.
Natural disasters are happening more often and are getting worse each time they happen. Wars and rumors of wars are going on. Some of you might have loved ones serving in the US Army, Navy or Air Force. And right now I have a loved one living in the war zone of what’s going on in Hong Kong. And of course there are more wars right here in our homeland in the forms of pornography, rape, incest, childhood sexual abuse, verbal abuse, psychological abuse, spiritual abuse, substance abuse, addictions of all kinds, domestic violence, self-harm, eating disorders, hatred, crime, witchcraft, demon possession, racism, political corruption, financial fraud, slander, betrayal, trauma, senseless loss, car accidents, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, suicide and disease — to give you a sampling. And to really drive it home in one area, the statistics on domestic abuse are about the same inside the Adventist Church as they are outside the church.
We are not okay.
With all that’s going on in the world it’s easy to understand why people who haven’t met God personally yet, who haven’t experienced His love yet struggle to believe that He is good. It’s easy to understand why people who don’t yet know His heart, who don’t yet know the Bigger Story we’re all living in have a hard time believing that He’s not a dark God because of all the evil that He has mysteriously allowed. And let’s be honest: even for those of us like me who were raised in the church and grew up actually liking church and loving God — when we get clobbered hard enough we are not immune to calling God’s character into question. We are not immune to experiencing estrangement in our relationships with God when Satan slaps us down hard enough.
And so all of us from one angle or another, need to absorb and be reminded over and over again - because we forget! - that God is Light. That His heart is True and that He can be trusted. We need to absorb and be reminded over and over again that goodness - not evil - is what is truest and strongest in the universe.
All is not well, but all will be well one day. And even while our world seems to be going to hell in a hand basket, God can make it well with our souls. God has the ability to make life bearable amidst all the wretchedness that we can’t control while we wait for His coming. And God being able to do that is true power. And that is what the Christmas concert next Sabbath is about. That is the message God gave me to flesh out in songs and readings.
The wages of sin are death, and they traumatize us and they have certainly traumatized me. And I read somewhere that the spiritual birthright of trauma is isolation. Isolation means being separated and alienated. Isolation means being alone. Isolation means not belonging. Isolation means not having a home. But God had a solution for our separation and His name is Emmanuel, God with us, the High Priest who has gone through what we go through. He is Christ in us, our hope of glory. The Man of Sorrows in us, our hope of glory.
We are not alone in this. Separation cannot rule over us because Jesus came to ruin the devil’s work by reuniting us with God. Jesus came to create union. Jesus came and opened the way for us to be intimate with the Greatest Being in all the Cosmos. At the end of His prayer in John 17, Jesus said to the Father: “I have made You known to them and will continue to make You known in order that the love You have for Me may be in them and that I Myself may be in them.”
We don’t have to face life alone. We have help and we have hope. We have a love that is true and can never be torn away from us. We have a home in the heart of God that we can never be ripped out of. Nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus. We have solidarity in the suffering that makes us feel isolated because God climbed into our pain with us rather than live without us. The Trinity surrendered to being traumatized rather than just start over with a new planet and a fresh species. The Trinity is one-third human now and that Human will be scarred forever. That is how much we are loved. That is how true His heart is. And as David Asscherick recently put it, “A God who is willing to suffer is a God who can be trusted.”
And He was willing.
And so we can trust Him.
We can believe in Him.
Ellen White wrote that meditating on what is the true meaning of Christmas would heal our trust issues with God’s heart. Her literal quote reads: “The eternal Word became flesh and dwelt among us. This theme will quench unbelief...” (VSS 315.2)
And that is what the Christmas concert next Sabbath is about.
You can thank my mom that it’s a short concert. If it had been up to me alone, it would have been a doozy extravaganza but she put her foot down that it be no longer than an hour. I did my best and she let me pass with the full length being just 1 hour and 6 minutes. But I really think God used my mom to constrain my creativity and put together what the concert needed to be. I can’t imagine it being different now.
In closing, I leave you with a small preview of the message of the concert:
We all long for things to be better. That longing is a holy longing for as Ecclesiastes 3:11 puts it, “God has put eternity in the human heart.” We know we were made for more than this. Like I mentioned in the beginning about longing for Christmas in the fall enriches my experience of Christmas itself like smelling food for hours before I can eat it, longing for the Second Coming enriches life before Jesus actually returns if we will embrace it and not try to stifle it with distractions.
And we have this holy longing mostly because of suffering, because suffering shoves us against our limits, makes us afraid to hope for good things and confused about the meaning of life. It makes us desperate for help beyond ourselves, calling for angels to help us. We cry out, “God, walk me through this one. Don’t leave me alone.”
Suffering ragingly highlights our need for light, our need to make sense of the way life keeps robbing us, seemingly without rhyme or reason. For those who’ve suffered an extra amount, this need is highlighted at Christmastime when all the merriment feels like a mockery.
But when we let God lead, He shifts us from focusing on the deathly wages of sin to the birth of the Christmas Rose - to how Jesus is born in the mangers of our empty and grieving hearts. God redirects us to how Jesus, the King of Angels provides rescue from darkness because He can make dark spirits flee and calm raging seas, because He is mindful of the anxious thoughts that find us, surround us, and bind us.
And even more than rescue from darkness in our individual circumstances, there is a broader sphere of promised light. Light was promised to God’s people then and it is promised to us now in the First Advent and the Second Advent. In the First Christmas of ancient times and in the Second Christmas of the future when Jesus comes to take us Home, both of which are fulfillments of prophecy.
When that promised light came true in ancient times, the angels who proclaimed Christ’s birth sang with what Ellen White calls “the joy that thrilled all heaven”! Most humans back then didn’t totally get it. Only a few of them felt joy and only a few had an inkling of the meaning of that joy. But we can now start to shake off the spell Satan cast to make that joy boring to us so that we can be thrilled too! Christ’s birth was so thrilling because it was the beginning of the end of evil, the beginning of a restoration that can’t be stolen.
The beginning of the end of evil, the installment of our wholeness that can’t be stolen happened through the sacred mystery of the incarnation. Colossians 1:26-27 says that this sacred mystery was kept hidden for ages and generations, but now it is ours. God chose to make known among us the glorious riches of the sacred mystery, which is Christ in us, our hope of glory, of the Father’s love begotten. It is the sacred mystery of how the Light of lights descended from the realms of endless day that the powers of hell would be made to vanish. It’s the sacred mystery of how God emptied Himself to become everything we’d ever need.
When this sacred mystery dawns on us, we experience the greatest epiphany: we lock eyes with God’s heart and see that He is good. We call Him Light, not darkness. We call Him good. We see Him as the light that seeks us through pain and will not let us go, we see that His Love will save us from our sin. We see that His Love is greater than our pain. We see that His love is faithful and pursues us. We finally see His heart and we worship Him.
Seeing God’s heart gives us the answer to our need for reassurance that evil does not really have the upper hand, that evil is not the end of the story. And our answer for that need is Jesus, because as 1 John 5:12 says, “Whoever has the Son has life.” Our answer is to intimately partake of His life, to know Him in His power and to share in His suffering. Our answer is to overcome our own suffering by co-suffering with Christ. Our answer is that pain does not need to separate us from God because He can transform our grieving souls into places of beauty where He lives in us as He walks with us through our lives. Our suffering is not meaningless and we do not suffer alone, and we will not suffer forever.
And now that we finally have our answer we can come Home. We can experience homecoming for our homeless, aching, lonely souls by being reunited with God’s heart of light. This homecoming is the feeling of His love inside us and His light shining on us. When Jesus’ love finds us, we have Christmas. When His love shines in us it makes our world brand new. First part of us and then finally all of us at last finds our Home in Him. We let ourselves be found. Love’s Pure Light shines within us so we’re never quite alone ever again.
When all this has happened, we can finally be still and know that He is God. Even though the world is still in its night and the night is getting darker just before the dawn, there is silence in our souls. In our souls, all is bright because God came down to lighten our night. In our souls, all is calm because all the wrongs will soon be made right and oh what a heavenly peace it is - the peace of Love’s Pure Light with us on earth.
