Christmas Eve 2006

The Why Should Men on Earth Be So Sad?

The Rev. Gerald W. Keucher

In a few minutes you’re going to hear the choir sing one of my favorite Christmas carols. When I asked our organist if he would mind using it tonight because it’s one of my favorites, he told me that he also liked it very much. The world is a very happy place when priest and organist get along so well. It’s the Sussex Carol, and it begins, “On Christmas night all Christians sing to hear the news the angels bring.”

In the second stanza it poses a question that always catches my attention. In very simple old language it asks: Then why should men on earth be so sad, since our Redeemer made us glad?

Why are we so sad? Why do we make ourselves and one another so unhappy? I think that it’s not the frazzle of preparations and decorating and shopping and cooking that sometimes makes us dread the holidays; I think that it’s sometimes our perception of how the deep sadness of our lives is out of sync with the joy we think we’re supposed to feel at Christmastime.

We are often sad. Friendships and marriages break up; loved ones die; we are lonely; we can be frustrated in our jobs. Our bodies may have failed us, and we suffer from pain, ill health and too many doctors. Maybe there are things about ourselves we’ve never been able to accept, so we make ourselves and others miserable with the fruit of our self-loathing.

Yes, we’re often sad. And sometimes we’re anxious or angry or depressed or frustrated or resentful or suspicious. “Then why should men on earth be so sad, since our Redeemer made us glad?”

How does our Redeemer make us glad? It’s an important question, because some people feel that God is not keeping His part of the bargain they thought they’d made with Him. In my observation and experience our Redeemer doesn’t make us glad by taking away all the things that make us sad. Those things are still with us, and that’s why some people think God is failing in His part of the bargain.

So how does our Redeemer make us glad if we still experience what another carol calls “the woes of sin and strife”? How does that happen?

Think about this. When something important — exciting or terrible, good or bad — happens to you, who do you want to talk to? You want to talk to somebody who has been through the same thing. If you’re applying to college, or getting married, having a baby, or moving, you want to talk about your experience with somebody who’s been there, done that. If you’ve lost your job, or you’re undergoing treatments for breast or prostate cancer, or if you’ve lost your husband, or if you are experiencing domestic violence, you want to talk to people who have been through that — people who can give you hope because they’ve lived through it. That terrible experience was not the last word.

It’s just not enough to talk to somebody who hasn’t experienced what you’re going through. Sure, it’s nice that other people care, but you don’t want advice; you don’t want platitudes, you want people who can really say, “I know what that feels like,” and you know that they really do know how it feels.

Our Redeemer doesn’t make us glad by removing all the causes of our sadness; we still bear those things. But our Redeemer never leaves our side. He knows what we’re going through. He knows our loneliness, our frustration at being misunderstood. He knows the pain of bereavement, and He knows our fear of death. He knows how much we want to love Him. He knows all this. And He never abandons us.

Jesus went to the Cross, but death was not the last word. We have our own crosses to bear, but we bear them with Him and with one another. And we know that death is not the last word for us either.

And Jesus does more than to be with us in our suffering. God doesn’t will the woes of sin and strife that beset us; God doesn’t inflict illnesses on us. Suffering and hardships come to us all in different ways in different amounts. Some we bring on ourselves; some come from the systems of oppression and violence that we’re part of; some just come from the nature of living in bodies that are going to die.

God doesn’t will the suffering that causes our sadness. And yet suffering plays an essential role in our being converted into the life of Christ. The Epiphany hymn says that God is “manifest in gracious will, ever bringing good from ill.” Christ’s example of suffering is as important as His presence with us in our suffering. When suffering comes, I think it is God’s hope that we will allow a transformation to occur in us. We can learn from the difficult things that befall us, and we can grow and we can be changed.

Suffering, and how it can change us, are so important in our growth as disciples of Christ that many of our forebears in the faith have seen the suffering itself as a gift from a loving God because of how the experience deepened and enriched their relationship with Christ and made them into people they never would have become otherwise.

St. Paul, after his life of hardship, wrote to the Romans, “We rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.”

Now suffering doesn’t always produce endurance. Suffering can produce bitterness, self-pity, and chronic feelings of victimhood. Some people get stuck here, but as so many of you know, we don’t have to get stuck. When God’s faithfulness in our suffering meets a faithful response from us, we don’t get stuck.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor and theologian who chose to stay in Germany to take part in the resistance to Hitler’s regime. He wrote and preached in constant danger of arrest. In April 1943 Bonhoeffer was imprisoned by the Nazis. He spent nearly two years in a Nazi prison and was executed in February 1945, just weeks before the Allies liberated Berlin.

At the end of 1944, after more than a year and a half in harsh prison conditions, knowing the likelihood that he would not leave prison alive, he addressed God in a poem for the New Year. Here’s part of it:

With every power for good to stay and guide me,
comforted and inspired beyond all fear,
I’ll live these days with thee in thought beside me,
and pass, with thee, into the coming year…

Should it be ours to drain the cup of grieving
even to the dregs of pain, at thy command,
we will not falter, thankfully receiving
all that is given by thy loving hand.

But should it be thy will once more to free us
to life’s enjoyment and its good sunshine,
all that we’ve learned from sorrow shall increase us,
and all our life be dedicate as thine.

“More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings...” “thankfully receiving all that is given by thy loving hand...” “All that we’ve learned from sorrow…” — this is not pious claptrap; this is the rich, aged wine that pours from the hearts of those who have suffered with Christ and who, like Mary, have pondered these things in their hearts.

We’re in waters here that are really too deep for words, so I count on you to recognize the truth of what I’m saying in your own experiences of faithful suffering. This is the lasting way in which our Redeemer makes us glad.

Suffering, endurance, character, hope; the trust that Jesus is always with us; the knowledge that all things can be transformed at the loving hand of a loving Father — all these things are ways that our Redeemer makes us glad in the midst of our sadness. Just as the dazzling body of the resurrected Jesus still bears the wounds of the crucifixion, so our gladness bears the marks of our sadness. But the God of our weary years and of our silent tears, who has brought this far on the way, will see us safely home.

The Sussex Carol ends, “All out of darkness we have light, which made the angels sing this night.” There is still much darkness around us and within us. But the light of God’s love, the glow of God’s presence, and the beacon of God’s transforming power have broken into our darkness, and the darkness can never overcome them.

May the Sun of righteousness shine upon you and scatter the darkness from before your path. May God bless and gladden your hearts. Merry Christmas.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters & Papers from Prison (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 400.