Longest Night
Job 7:1, 4-18
Psalm 88
Excerpt of "Revelations of Divine Love," by St. Julian of Norwich
John 1:1-14
Today, the sun set at 4:48 PM. It will not rise again until 7:20 tomorrow morning. In that space in between, we are in 872 minutes of darkness. Today is the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. Today is also the last Sunday of Advent, a season that always seems to slip by in a blur as we prepare for the frenetic pace of Christmas. But we still have some Advent left, one last long night of it, one more opportunity to live into its stillness, to truly feel the silence, the longing, the fragile hope. When Christmas Eve comes, the refrain will loudly shout, “Joy to the World!” “Gloria in Excelsis Deo!” “Go Tell it on the Mountain!” The story will be the placid scene Luke describes with Jesus in a manger, surrounded by his loving mother, his earthly father, and the shepherds summoned by angels to witness God coming to earth.
As familiarly comforting as that story can be, we can sometimes forget that there’s more to it than that. We hear the all-important context the Sunday after Christmas, the Sunday we tend to want to skip to recover from the holidays; the Sunday we’re traveling back home from celebrating with loved ones. Luke does an excellent job of telling us the story of what happened in Bethlehem. But on the Sunday after Christmas, John tells us what Christ’s birth truly meant, and what it means for us still.
“What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
“He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.”
“And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”
Jesus met us in the dark of night, in the cold, starless void of yearning and grief. He was born into the tapestry of hope and loss that we read through the voices of the prophets. He became incarnate as one who shared a cultural history of war, occupation, wandering, exile, and death. He was born in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome him. His light is life because when everything else we cling to falters, he remains. There is no grief so great, so transgressive, or so burdensome that it can weigh down Christ or dim that light. The true miracle of Christmas is not just that we have a Messiah to be the object of our joy, but that we have a Savior who gently holds our pain. But in order for Christ to hold this pain for us, we have to give it him, and the way we give it to him is through lament. Psalm 88, perhaps the darkest and most desperate lament in Scripture, can be our guide for how to do this.
Lament begins simply by addressing God: “O Lord, my God, my Savior, by day and night I cry to you.” God is named and invoked, and even called Savior. Our prayers may be anger or protest or accusation, but when we cry out this way in prayer, naming God implicitly acknowledges our faith that God is listening. “O God, I’m so angry at you,” “O God, how could you let this happen?” “O God, I don’t know if I believe in you.” All of those prayers begin in faith, whether faith that is felt or faith that is sought.
Lament includes complaint. “For I am full of trouble; my life is at the brink of the grave.” “You have laid me in the depths of the Pit, in dark places, in the abyss.” “You have put my friends far from me…” “I am in prison and cannot get free.” “My sight has failed me because of trouble.” This psalm is deeply accusatory. It names God as the source of the Psalmist’s suffering. When we name our troubles before God, God invites honesty, even when that honesty is raw and deeply painful.
Lament includes petition, asking for something. Sometimes that petition can be for healing, or rescue, or some specific outcome. But then there are times where we are so overwhelmed we cannot even conceive of an outcome. There are times when our grief or fear or anger is so intense we have no idea what to ask for. Sometimes we just need to be heard. “Let my prayer enter your presence; incline your ear to my lamentation.” “Please God, just listen to me.” “Please God, just see what is happening.” “Please God, just remember what I’m going through.” Petition is important not just because it articulates our experiences, but because it affirms our belief that God has the power to do something about them.
Some laments also include a turn towards trust and a promise of praise near the end. In Psalm 13, the Psalmist sings, “But I will trust in your mercy; my heart is joyful because of your saving help.” Psalm 42 ends with “Put your trust in God; for I will yet give thanks to him, who is the help of my countenance, and my God.” The lament of Psalm 88 doesn’t end this way, though. It speaks to a lifetime of suffering from which the Psalmist cannot imagine any relief, or hope, or rescue. The Psalmist is on the brink of death, so how can there be any hope for the future? “My friend and neighbor you have put away from me, and darkness is my only companion.”
Lament doesn’t have to end in hope. It doesn’t have to end in faith that things will change. It doesn’t have to end in praise. Sometimes lament simply hangs, seemingly unresolved. Sometimes it ends in darkness.
But light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it. Even when we cannot see it, it’s there. When hope is broken in us, it lives in God. And sometimes, our most faithful prayer is simply the refusal to stop crying out to him.
In The Message translation of our Scriptures, Psalm 77 begins this way: “I yell out to my God, I yell with all my might, I yell at the top of my lungs. He listens.”
Amen.