A light in Bethlehem

 There shall be no harm or ruin on all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:9)

Ancient voices console me this Christmas Day. Their hearts reach across many centuries to find my heart, even as Bach’s celebration of ecstatic joy dances from the radio and lifts my heart from the sadness of these times. Thanks, Johann, I needed that.

Or maybe I shouldn’t thank you at all.

Perhaps this is just one more way, one moment in a lifetime of moments when the Word who is God becomes flesh … or at least waves of sound … to lift me out of myself. But it’s more. Out of myself, I enter the joy of communing with the Love ‘who comes from the great and everlasting day of eternity into our little moment of time.’ Thanks to St. Augustine for that phrase.

But much more, I give thanks for the One whose coming we celebrate this holy day. For, the Mystery he is comes in every moment, marrying divine love with created matter that we might see and feel and fall in love with the light and love he is.

‘Those who see light are in the light sharing its brilliance,’ according to Irenaeus, another ancient voice echoing in me 18 centuries after he left the scene.

Just so, our Christmas endeavor must be to see light in these sad times. Seeing saves us from ourselves when the worries and wars of the world make it nigh unto impossible to sing Joy to the World with the energy it deserves, to say nothing of the vigor our hearts desperately need.

If we can just see, we may yet become words of divine light and beauty ourselves, just as God intended. It’s difficult most days, but then ....

Well, then I see a Palestinian pastor lighting a candle beside a Jesus doll nestled among broken, jagged pieces of concrete in the chancel of Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem. That’s where we see Christ this Christmas, he says, buried in the rubble waiting for us to see and love him there.

Yes, but he might also look in a mirror, although I suspect he does little of that because his eyes are fixed on the sorrows of his place and time and people. But if he did, he might see himself aglimmer with the light of Christ’s own sorrow, born of the Love of whom Jesus is the face.

He says this time has challenged his faith like no other he has known. How, after all, can one sing, ‘glory to God in the highest,’ when your soul bears the weight of war and the deaths of children?

Yet, he fans my hope as he lights a votive in his little church in Bethlehem where Christ, the light of the world, first drew breath. For I feel his love, and the love I feel is not just his but the love of the One who is Love, and it fills the heart with joy and ecstasy, and sorrow and longing, and all the other emotions Christ yet feels for our lives and troubled orb.

And with this comes an ancient longing. ‘There shall be no harm or ruin on all my holy mountain,’ God promised in Isaiah’s prophecy, ‘for the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.’

I long for that day. It’s certainly not here yet. We’re still a long way off. But sometimes, in ancient voices and lit candles, glorious music and loving souls, I feel its beauty and taste its goodness and know: I am not alone.

David L. Miller