Christmas Eve in the Chapel
Picture, for a moment, your ideal Christmas. The one that checks all the boxes of nostalgia, tradition, and meaning. Perhaps there is a well-trimmed tree, piles of presents for the ones you love, familiar carols filling the air. Perhaps you are surrounded by the important people in your life or reunited on a joyous day with those from whom you have grown apart. Perhaps there is a particular food or smells or places that bring back memories of Christmases of yesteryear when all felt right in the world. Perhaps there is a fresh blanket of snow on the ground on Christmas morning. The ideal Christmas you are imagining might be one of days past. It might be here and now. It might be one you have yet to experience.
I’ll let you in to what my ideal celebration is. Certainly, there is family, joyful kids filled with wonder, music and community, good food shared with loved ones. But there are also fireworks…and lots of them. Before you think I’ve landed on the wrong holiday or judge me as much as my wife does, let me set the scene for you as a way of explanation.
In 2019, my family and I lived in Guatemala. Local markets are the heartbeat of life in Guatemalan communities. Yes, there are grocery and department stores, but the markets are where you can find almost literally anything you need from clothing, to medicines, toys, home goods, and every sort of food that is available in Guatemala. The markets are always busy, but even more so on market days several times each week when additional vendors come to sell their goods.
In the weeks leading up to Christmas, a secondary market is set up adjacent to the main market. This market is as busy as any market day. It doesn’t sell Christmas toys or decorations. It is the firework market. Fireworks are a fixture of Guatemalan life and culture. Firecrackers – cuetes –are used to wake up someone celebrating a birthday. Weddings and parties almost always conclude with a firework show of luces – the bright, colorful, mortars we see here on the 4th of July and New Year’s Eve. And the single biggest user of fireworks…is the church. Catholic churches light bombas to announce the beginning of Mass when feast days are celebrated. Bombas are ridiculously loud 3-inch mortars that don’t have colorful trails of light; they are simply intended to make a bright flash and the loudest noise possible. Given that the calendar of the Roman Catholic Church is full of feasts, we rarely went more than a few days without our house being shaken by a church service. So when I saw the firework market for Christmas, I assumed I understood what we were in for.
When Christmas Eve – the day we were told the fireworks are set off – arrived, I was a bit underwhelmed as the day turned into night and the sky lit up with only the occasional burst of light or the familiar hum of our town was interrupted by the crack of a few firecrackers. What I wasn’t expecting was what happened at midnight. The moment the clock struck 12 and Christmas Eve turned into Christmas day, the whole countryside erupted as churches set off barrages of bombas, every street was filled with cuetes, and the sky was lit for as a far as we could see with luces. The deafening sound of constant firecrackers and house-shaking explosions lasted for 15 minutes. Surprisingly, somehow, my kids slept through the whole thing.
In Guatemala, Christmas unmistakably arrives. The sound and the light that announce Christmas are a public declaration that makes visible – and visceral – that the Light of the World has come into our midst. Christmas is more than the story we tell of shepherds, a manger, and a star that led to the baby Jesus. Christmas is also the story of light bursting forth in the darkness of night. And the thing about light is that it will always cause darkness to flee. For a brief period early each Christmas morning in Guatemala, the darkness stands no chance.
When we talk of “light,” though, we are not simply talking about a generalized concept of goodness or love or hope. We are talking about the Light of the World; the eternal Word of God; Emmanuel, God with us. We are talking about the God of creation, the one from whom all things came into being, transcendent and wholly other, coming to be with us so that we may never be apart from God.
When the sky is lit up with fireworks and the sound echoes off the hilltops, Christmas has, without a doubt arrived. I imagine that is what it was like for the shepherds when the night sky shone with the glory of God and the chorus of angels broke the quiet of the night with praise to God. I imagine the hope that filled their hearts with the announcement that the messiah, the savior, the one who would make right all that had gone wrong had been born. And I think we long for that: certainty, unmistakable blazing light that leaves no room for wondering whether God has truly come among us, that God is with us, that God is at work in our world.
But only the shepherds saw the angels and heard the announcement. What about the rest of Bethlehem, all the others throughout the world that longed for the presence of hope and a light in the darkness? It was a night for many that likely looked and felt like every other night. Christmas arrived and, in many ways arrives today in the still-dark of night with a light that might be a lot fainter than we had hoped. Because darkness is still here. We find it hopelessness felt by too many. In broken relationships and unfulfilled dreams; in fading health and illness. We find it in grief and the loss that are too frequent part of the human experience. In wars and injustice, in families torn apart and living in fear of detention and deportation. In the brokenness of our collective life, in the frequency of violence, in the dehumanization of others. The list could go on.
In your picture of the ideal Christmas, I suspect there isn’t hardship, brokenness, or darkness. And that is the ultimate hope and promise, but not the reality of the first Christmas or the Christmas of the present. Because it is precisely the brokenness that makes Christmas Christmas. It is the mess of our world that led God to come among us in the baby Jesus. It is the brokenness of our world that led God to take on flesh to begin putting it back together. It is in the darkest places, the most hopeless situations, the places where any chance of redemption seems impossible, that God breaks in.
I believe that God came among us – and still is among us – with every fiber of my heart and my mind. And yet, the world doesn’t always look like it. When we long for God to come with undeniable power to make all things right – to stamp out the darkness with overpowering light – we find God come among us in a helpless child. Eternal and truly God, yes; but not the savior, Emmanuel, God-with-us who took on flesh we might have imagined or hoped for. Perhaps the saving of our world, the reforming of us all and all that is, into what God intended from the beginning will take some time. The Light of the World came, lived, died, and rose again 2000 years ago, but his light is still breaking into our world.
And so, when we find the baby Jesus in a manger on an otherwise dark and normal night, it is an invitation to see even the faintest flickers of light and remember that God is with us even when the world is overwhelmingly dark. It is an invitation to find a spark and be a part of fanning it into a flame that chases the darkness away. Because as light spreads, in small ways and big, the darkness is forced to flee more and more.
I’m not ready to give up a candlelit Silent Night, but there is something to be said for announcing that light will win, that God is with us, that God is not done with us yet by lighting up the sky and letting the sound echo off the hilltops. I love the confidence with which fireworks are lit at Christmas in Guatemala. It is not always a statement about the way things are but it certainly is a promise of what will be. Because when the Light of the World, the baby in the manger who will grow and we will come to know as our savior is done with us and our world, there won’t be any darkness left to beat back. The night will be far gone and the eternal light will be here to stay. Perhaps that is the day we’re truly longing for.
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