What we do this night is to do what people have always done at the turning of the season. Ancient ancestors – people of every tribe, language, culture and nation - gathered on the darkest night of the year. Gathered in fear at the death of the sun and held vigil throughout the night. Gathered to do the appointed rites and ceremonies, to perform the dance and sing the songs, as they awaited the dawn and the rebirth of the sun. They gathered around a campfire for warmth and light and told the old stories, the great myths that communicate nothing so unimaginative as mere facts, but rather profound truth that can only be communicated in story.

We come with a different fear at the turning of the year.

Someone here – I don’t know but I suspect – has come tonight bearing a profound emptiness. It’s not an absence of material things. You possess an often meaningful job and a caring family. To the casual observer, you have it all together. But you know how diligently you need to hold a part of yourself safely hidden away, lest you run screaming into the night.

Someone here – I don’t know but I suspect – is living with a numbing grief. Someone – or something – has been lost and the world feels drained of color and the days empty of music. When that someone – or something – died, a part of you died, didn’t it?

Someone here – I don’t know but I suspect – has been diagnosed: the words the doctor spoke into the air have a life of their own; and the future has filled with anxiety. Life itself has shifted on its axis and, for you, tomorrow is unknown.

Someone here – I don’t know but I suspect – is living with an addiction to despair. For you, the glass is not just half empty; it has a slow leak as well. Does anyone care anymore about your sadness, your depression? And someone here – and this I do know – is bound like Lazarus was bound in his death. For you, it is the disease of these modern times: cynicism. The winding death cloths of cynicism have you and like Brother Lazarus, only a community of care can reach out and lose your bonds and set you free.

For all of us, the old strategies for coping with our demons aren’t working anymore. Conspicuous consumption as a distraction no longer works. When, indeed, is enough, enough? Self-medication no longer works. I have a colleague who says that addictions are desires gone to seed. Alcoholism is the desire for spirit gone bad. Food addiction is the desire for comfort gone awry. Sexual addiction is the desire for intimacy misdirected. Even the existence of denial can no longer be denied. And so, tonight, we have come.

Gathered around the campfire to hear the stories of our spiritual ancestors, the people Israel. A special people – a chosen people – who at the end of an age hungered to hear God’s voice again in the land. Despised, oppressed, a subjugated people; they longed for God to send the promised one – an anointed one – to do for them what they could not do for themselves. A Messiah to bring deliverance, restore justice and establish an acceptable year of the Lord’s favor. A people glanced down the long, dark tunnel of human history and hungered for light. Into that hunger, Jesus was born. His journey is foretold in the story of his birth. A child untimely conceived, of questionable birth, his parents driven from their home and hearth by power – or was it simply to escape the gossip and ridicule in the small village of Nazareth as Mary’s time grew near? The family will become, in time, aliens in a foreign land in Egypt. How abandoned and fearful they must have felt. How vulnerable and at risk. A story both tender and terrifying.

And yet from this inauspicious beginning – a birth in a stable cave, an animal feeding bin as a cradle, outlaw shepherds as birth attendants – nevertheless, from that pathetic beginning, would come a voice and a presence in the world that some- certainly not all – would see as an answer to the hunger. For many – certainly not all – would come to see him as Emmanuel – God with us – and to know that in being in his company was to be in the company of God. John, in his gospel, called Jesus a light that shines in the darkness that the darkness can not overcome.

And if Jesus’ life reveals to us that God is with us and for us – in our emptiness, our grief, our anxiety and fear, our despair and cynicism – then maybe, just maybe, we can have hope again. Hope that you and I can be healed and made whole again. Nicodemus, a cynical disciple of Jesus’, would come to call it being “born again.” But the word “restored” will do, as will a “fresh start.”

So now it’s time for a new story (at least, a story probably new to you.)

Many years ago, I saw a short film about another family. In the film, the teenage son and his father are bitterly arguing. The father says, heatedly, “as long as you’re living in my house, you live by my rules.” The son runs away from home and goes to live in a big city. We next see him in a flop house hotel on skid row. His eyes fill with fear as he hears through the too thin walls a man striking a woman as she screams and cries. Down the hallway, another man is yelling into the public phone in a language the boy does not know. Outside, there are gun shots in the night and police sirens. The boy double locks the flimsy door and hides under the filthy blankets. The next day, he writes a short letter home, which he hesitates to mail but finally does. It reads: “Dear Dad, next week Tuesday, I’ll be coming through town. If it’s o.k. for me to come home, leave a candle burning in a window and I’ll know it’s alright. If not, I’ll just keep going.” The boy hitchhikes and a kindly old man picks him up. The old man asks him why he’s out on the road. When the boys does not answer directly, the older man guesses his story and then tells the boy his own of striking out early from home after a break with his father, of his time in the military and finding a career and the rest. “Did you ever make up with your Dad?” “No,” comes the answer, “he died while I was overseas.” As they come to the boy’s street, the boy gets down in the seat and buries his head in his coat. He says – “it’s the 5th house on the left, set back from the road. Tell me if you see a candle burning in a window. If not, just keep driving.” The old man says – “hmmm, I can’t see it...” then he slows the car and finally stops and he tells the terrified young man “I think you’d better take a look.” He reluctantly sits up and gazes out the window. And what he sees is a house ablaze with candlelight. Every window lit like a bonfire and his Dad gazing with hope at a car idling in their driveway.

The light blazing in the deep night signaling “welcome home.”

You are not alone in the journey of life. We are all - as broken and as damaged as we are, how ever wounded or frightened – each of us – we are sojourners and aliens in this foreign land. You are blessed tonight with this good company of fellow pilgrims to share the road with you.

Many of us – more than you would expect – have found both hope and healing in seeking to follow the one whose birth we commemorate tonight. Most of us - more than you would expect – have found the Church to be a place of welcome home. And some of us – more than you’d expect – are seeking to walk by grace – that strange gift that says God is with us and loves us, especially in our brokenness, and yearns for us to be whole.