A Sad Season
December 19, 2024 | Jim Angehr
Among other things, Christmas is a season of accumulation, and every year another Christmas adds one more ring to our accumulation tree.
It’s not all bad. Over time, our list of warm Christmas memories, or embarrassing office party moments, or killer gifts (whether received or, even better, given) will grow.
On the other hand, we likewise accumulate some not so great stuff as the years tick by. More pounds, for example, or more debt, or more ill health.
It’s a fallen world out there, which means that one of the primary feelings that build up Christmas after Christmas is sadness. Sadness increases annually around this time, and tell me if this isn’t true: hardship just hits different in December. If you’re an adult, I’d guess that at some point this Christmas season, you’ll stumble upon a painful memory somehow tied to the holiday. Maybe you’ll come upon a favorite present sent to you years ago by someone who’s no longer alive, or perhaps a family recipe from an older, and now deceased, relative. Or a friend that you used to call over Christmas but don’t seem to anymore.
Especially since it’s unavoidable that Christmas, to one extent or another, is often a sad season, it’s probably best to let it in––and it’s the Christian story, the gospel of Jesus, that enables me to sit with sadness better than any alternative. From the perspective of God’s good creation, it will always strike us as properly unnatural that pain, sorrow, tears, and death have entered our world, precisely because that’s what they are, namely intruders. But then according to the fallen horizon, we’re kept from freaking out if we feel that things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be, because this is, after all, a fallen universe. Finally, however, the redemption wrought by Jesus Christ in his crucifixion and resurrection assures us that pain, sorrow, tears, and death will never be our world’s last word. Instead, as Jesus’ last word on the cross was, “It is finished” (John 19:30), in him and by his grace has dawned a new and glorious day that will stretch into eternity. In the words of that old Puritan title, we see in the death of Christ the death of death itself. In the meantime, each December we’ll again bring the hopes and fears of all our years to the manger, and to the cross.
Here’s a sadness I’m remembering this year. It was on December 1 of last year that I received a terse text from my dad that read, “Emergency. Please call back.” A Friday morning, and I called my dad right back. I was told, “Your sister called, and Kate was found dead this morning.”
Kate, my niece, had lived almost all of her 33 years in New Orleans, where she was discovered without a pulse on 12/1/23. Kate had lived a troubled life but in the fall of last year was doing, finally, really well. It was only natural causes that took her life.
Kate’s funeral occurred a couple weeks later. In my over twenty years of pastoral ministry, I don’t think that I’ve ever missed an Advent Sunday at my church––except for the one last December when I was back in NOLA at Kate’s memorial service.
This year as Thanksgiving rolled quickly into Advent, I found myself missing my niece, and I realized that from here on out, I’ll feel this way at the beginning of every December. Kate’s death will be a permanent ring on my Advent tree.
Still, if something like Kate’s death would have necessarily come to pass, I think I’m glad that it happened during the Christmas season. It’s now, more than any other time of year, that in the words of Matthew’s reference to Isaiah, we remember that in Christ, “The people dwelling in darkness have seen a great light, and for those dwelling in the region and shadow of death, on them a light has dawned” (4:16). The darkness hews close to us, to me, but it’s not pitch black, because Jesus on the cross stared death in the eye and in effect proclaimed, “You lose.”
I’m living in Advent hope this season, including as I think of Kate. I miss you, kiddo, although I hear that the food is pretty good up there. Catch up with you soon.