We are at the Blue Holiday Service because we have had a loss. We are here because we have had an event that has struck us with such force of impact that we are now reeling in the aftershocks of anguish and grief. The pain is real. Yet, we also stand here, in the beginning of December, just weeks away from Christmas, in one of the most joyous and celebrated months of the year – both inside and outside the Church. The sweetness abounds from the joy conveyed in the celebrations of the season. Yet, death still leaves its bite and sometimes we need a service like this to articulate the dissonance of emotions that life leaves in our mouths.
I was in a grocery store recently when a product on the shelf caught my eye and seemed the perfect analogy of these conflicting emotions. It was a Bacon Chocolate Bar. Initially it seemed completely odd, but the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I became. You have this sweet and smooth chocolate bar and inside it are pieces of hard and salty bacon. Christmas is like that to me sometimes. I’m swept up into the sweetness of the holiday memories, yet the salty hard loss is new and somewhat overpowering to me. Truly this is a hard time of year for those with a heavy heart. It’s hard to be heard and find outlets for our struggles. It’s like we want to talk about the bacon and everyone else wants to talk about the chocolate!
And I started thinking of the salty and sweet story of Christmas. God announces to shepherds that a special baby will be born. This baby will be the promised messiah who will save his people. From the day of this baby’s conception, he grew as both God and man. Fully God and fully man as one of our Creed says. This baby is Jesus. And Jesus steps down from the sweet Throne of heaven to be born of a virgin into a world scarred by the curses of sin and riddled with death, sickness, brokenness, hurts, pain, loss, and rebellion. When Jesus becomes Emmanuel, which means “God with us” he is becoming one with us in our experience of the curses of sin and the ramifications of this curse on our existence. Jesus is born into a life that is unlike life in heaven. His life is heavy with suffering - from the death of a close friend, a midlife change of careers from carpenter to Messiah, the betrayal of a disciple, to the injustice of a mistrial. Jesus was tested by defeat, tempted by sin, and grieved by suffering. But because he is the holy one, the spotless Lamb of God, he endured righteously until he died on that cross on Good Friday. He absorbs the wrath of God on our behalf so that we might taste his resurrection on Easter morning. Jesus died as a substitute for rebels like us. The debt that we owed God, Jesus paid by dying in our place. He took the full force of God’s justice on himself, so that forgiveness and pardon might be available to us for all time.
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