In the bleak midwinter lies the seed that becomes the rose

“In the bleak midwinter

lies the seed that becomes the rose”

The Rev. Canon Patricia M. Grace

Advent IV Year B

Church of the Ascension                            December 24, 2017

Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything; hold fast to what is good; abstain from every form of evil.

May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.        1 Thessalonians 5:16-24

December 17, 1979. Nearly forty years go, but I remember it well. It was a Monday, it was snowing. I awoke with the painful awareness that it had been nearly three months since my father had died…suddenly, at only 51 years of age …and I was definitely my daddy’s girl.

Oh, things had gotten back to normal – as nearly as possible. My mother and my two sisters and I were all back at work, taking care of all the many small but essential things of daily living – sometimes even forgetting, for a bliss-filled moment, our pangs of grief and loss.

But that day would be one of the hard ones for me. I drove to work, which took me past the Cathedral in town, where my dad and I had met occasionally for mass on holy days of obligation (we were Roman Catholics then) – then we’d share a quick breakfast or lunch together, depending on the service time. As I made my way through the slushy morning traffic, just as I passed the Cathedral, a song came on the radio – I’d tuned into one of the 24/7 Christmas music stations.

Lovely voices sang,

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long, long ago.

Before I was even conscious of it happening, tears began to stream down my cheeks… I began to sob in earnest – crying so hard, I had to pull over – find a spot to stop…as waves of my heretofore conscientiously controlled grief and loss washed over me, beyond my ability to stop it.

Maybe it was that last phrase – snow on snow on snow that got to me…that sucker punched me out of my Spartan practices of keeping my chins up, always looking on the bright side, making lemonade out of the lemons of life. Because as I sat in my car, windshield wipers tapping out a desolate rhythm, all I felt was despair…I was 24, facing a whole life without my father – who’d been my anchor, my teacher, my friend – an ever present comfort and support in good times and bad. How could I live, I thought, without him?

I stayed that way for some time, mired in sorrow, oblivious to the hour, and what was going on around me…alone in a moment of truly bleak midwinter, loss upon loss, grief upon grief, tears upon tears, upon tears, snow on snow on snow. At some point, another song on the radio pierced my sad reverie…I was startled by a thought – “this has to be a mistake!” – the song was the latest hit by Bette Midler – “The Rose” – the theme song for a new movie about the tragic life of the singer, Janis Joplin.

I remember my irrationally irritable reaction: “This is not a Christmas song” – I thought – and maybe even said it out loud in the now, steamy interior of my car. But even at the time, I recognized that perhaps, this was one of those unexpected breaking-ins of the Holy Spirit – what the secular world would call coincidence – but what those of us who watch for the reign of God would describe as providence: because the words of that song conveyed something very important for me to hear.

The song begins with a rather negative meditation on love and what some people say it is – a river that drowns tender reeds, a razor that leaves the soul to bleed…a hunger that produces an endless aching need. Merry Christmas, indeed! But no, the singer counters, love is like a flower that begins in a hidden seed; and those that would enter into love and abide there, must always harken back to this:

When the night has been too lonely and the road has been too long
And you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong
Just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snows
Lies the seed, that with the sun's love in the spring becomes the rose.

I’d love to tell you that with that song, all my sorrow turned to joy, that day; that I experienced no further bouts of despair and loss. Well, I’d love to tell you that, but it would be a lie. What did happen to me in that moment, was that I received a divine gift – Oh, yeah, a mystical revelation from the Holy Spirit sent through the airwaves of a top 40 radio station…and a reminder of what we, as followers of Jesus, have been told again and again, and sometimes have actually heard and remembered.

This is a divine truth that has accompanied all these years…an ever present source of comfort in the bleak ties that inevitably come in a human life time: that God is with us, even if sometimes God seems hidden, or   obscured. That God is always working for us and for our good, like a seed, hidden deep in the earth, that’s struggling into new life…

struggling sometimes under earth as hard as iron, under snow on snow on snow, but, even so, is sprouting, growing, making its way into the open, into new life when the time is right.

I received that divine truth that God is always behind the scenes – moving, inspiring, inviting, creating, something that will turn our tears into dancing. And nowhere can we see that more clearly than in a contemplation of the incarnation of Jesus – the grounding of our faith in the story that our God cared enough about human life and its future, to not only take on human flesh, but the whole kit and caboodle of human life as well – to live among us and to be equally at home in fleeting days of sunlight and lengthy seasons of darkness.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Jesus chose to be born in the bleak midwinter – in the time of greater darkness when we are all looking for the return of the light.

And chose us he did – the Welsh poet and Anglican priest, RS Thomas, puts it like this in his poem, The Coming:

And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look, he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows; a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.

                On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.

Let me go there, he said. The Son of God said, let me be part of that world, in all its imperfection, with all of its times of loss upon loss, grief upon grief, evil upon evil upon evil. Let me go there, said Jesus.  And go there, he did. And is with us there, still – here, he still abides. Some of us in this place may find ourselves feeling beleaguered and bereft these days….feeling that we’re in the bleakest of midwinters.

For some of us, the uneasy peace and portents of life-threatening conflict all over the world keep us up at night. What will become of us and our children, our grandchildren, we worry, if nuclear war becomes a reality?

For most of us, I believe, regardless of where we find ourselves on specific issues, the situation in our own country is deeply troubling and disquieting: the profound polarization that has arisen, even among family, neighbors and friends, the harsh and vulgar rhetoric that now counts as acceptable forms of communication, the seeming abandonment of any consideration of the common good.

And, of course, we all struggle with those personal daily challenges, the sorrows and sad times that individually affect us and those we hold dear. All these things and others have negatively impacted the way we see ourselves and those around us, especially those who are different from us, those whom we do not understand, those who are the stranger to us. How will we live up to the promise of our founding mothers and fathers that we be one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all?

And for many of us, the sudden departure of Rob Gieselmann has unsettled, confused and angered us, and we sense that same feeling of loss on loss on loss that we have known before in this place. How will we move forward together, we wonder, resolving the conflict that exists between our walls and move along a road toward reconciliation? How will we relearn the many lessons of our past - remembering our story of both trial and triumph? How will we keep in mind our journey which has included plenty of troubling times, but also, most recently, years of renewal and abundant life?

How will we move forward together, toward a more peace-filled future? I would love to be able to give you all the answers and a tight timetable that would respond to these and other important questions–but I don’t have them.

I have only one thing to rely on, only one thing to offer you, in these bleak midwinter times…that God will never leave us orphans, that God chooses, again and again to be with us, to be our Emmanuel. And that beneath, beyond, above, and around what we can now see and know, God is at work, planting seeds that, in the forthcoming sunlight, will issue forth, like a spring or summer rose, or better yet, like tulips, planted as bulbs in nearly frozen ground…yet becomes magnificent fruit.

And so shall we, my beloved. So shall we yet again, yield magnificent fruit. The God who chose to come here, with no illusions about the perfection of the world, is with us still…like a rose ever blooming on a tender stem, even in the coldest part of winter, even when half spent was the night.

So we resonate with Paul’s words to us today, we hang on them for dear life, and pray that we might live into them:

Rejoice then always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything; hold fast to what is good; abstain from every form of evil.

May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.

The One who comes to us and abides with us is faithful.  And in him, we will be all that we can be.