Christmas Eve (Luke 2:1-20)  12/24/2012

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After living for several years in the Chicago suburbs, my family and I moved to the Washington D.C. area as I became a student at Virginia Seminary. Moving from one place to another is never easy; moving is hard work for many reasons: packing countless boxes, wondering if something will get broken (yes, something always gets broken), and saying goodbye to good friends. Leaving a community of people is perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of moving. Among the many friends we said goodbye to as we left Chicago, I found it especially difficult to say goodbye to a good friend and colleague of mine; someone who shared similar family and work experiences with me for years. I kept in touch with my friend and nearly two years after we had moved he informed me that they too were leaving Chicago and moving to CT. He had taken a job in Middlebury and they were moving to a little town named Sandy Hook. My friend and his family have lived in CT for nearly six years and I rarely heard the name of his new town during that time, but a week ago this past Friday things became very different; Sandy Hook was known around the globe and the world changed. As reports came in from the media that morning, Carol and I became very worried for our friends. The rational part of my brain understood that their girls were certainly in high school, but we sat down and counted the years just to be sure (there didn’t seem to be too many rational things happening on that day). In the midst of incredible difficulty and unexplainable sorrow I wanted to be sure that those closest to me were OK. I was searching and hoping for some distance from this unbelievable story so I might be comforted in some small way. Often times we search for places of comfort, places of safety to weather the storms of life. My friend and his family were safe on that horrible morning, but even this comfort was not enough. The reality of that morning brought sorrow so great that it seemed there was no escape, regardless of how much distance you seemed to have from Sandy Hook. The opening words of our first reading from the prophet Isaiah ring in my ears, “The people walked in darkness.” (Isaiah 9:2) The sorrow of these past 10 days has felt pretty dark indeed. And for those of us who live in this “land of deep darkness,” we wonder, “where are we to go?” Continue reading →