Christmas Is About the Future
And why you're going to kick the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
Cassidy Steele Dale writes to equip you with the forecasts, foresight skills and perspectives, and tools you may need to create a better, kinder world.
And one of those ways is to talk about why Christmas is about the future rather than about the past.
For most of us Christmas is the end of the psychic year. We flurry to get gifts for our loved ones, wrap them, travel, turn off the news, and hunker down against the cold with the people we love the most. And we should.
But for Christians it’s actually the beginning of, well, everything. And whether you’re a person of faith or not, the Christmas story is only and entirely about the future. And about hope. Even in the face of deep, deep darkness.
The beginning of the church year isn’t New Year’s Day, it’s near the beginning of December: the first of the four Sundays before Christmas — the season of Advent.
Advent means help is coming. It means help is on the way. Have faith. Hold fast. It won’t be long now.
This year our children’s pastor asked my 9-almost-10-year-old daughter to preach the children’s sermon for the first Sunday of Advent. She asked me to help my daughter prepare. She said the first Sunday of Advent is hope. I thought hope? Help with hope? Have you met me? I am the grandmaster futurist of unreasonable hope. Ohhhhhh, I got this.
What did I tell my daughter to preach? I’m paraphrasing here but she said Just before Jesus was born God’s people were sad. They were being treated very badly by powerful people. By scary people. And they had no help. Nothing was helping. Nothing anybody tried. They were on the verge of giving up. They feared that nothing good could ever happen to them again. They feared that God had given up on them and decided to side with the powerful, the respectable, the rich, the mean, and the societally correct.
And then angels appear to a teenage girl and some shepherds and the first thing those people thought was OH NO, GOD HAS FINALLY FULLY ABANDONED US AND SIDED WITH THE CRUEL AND HAS COME TO KILL US ALL IN THE DARK and the first thing those angels say instead is FEAR NOT. GOD IS WITH YOU. AND GOOD THINGS ARE ABOUT TO HAPPEN.
But here’s the twist: No hero shows up. No great champion arrives to overthrow the cruel and set everyone free. Instead a baby is born to some nobodies who grows up to become a halfhearted carpenter and a preacher of nonsense. One who keeps saying: Virtue is not what you think it is. Power is not what you think it is. Wisdom is not what you think it is. Love is not what you think it is. Who God loves is not who you think they are. NOTHING IS WHAT YOU THINK IT IS BECAUSE GOD IS NOT WHAT OR WHO YOU HAVE BEEN LED TO BELIEVE.
The future you fear is going to crush you — even if it does — is not the end of your story. God has already built a better future for us in heaven and wants us to build a better future in the here and now. A world and a future that doesn’t crush. On Earth as it is in heaven. And God sends help. This week we celebrate the arrival of the biggest help God sent — and of that good news. Welcome to Christmas.
Christmas isn’t about a happy little snowy whatever. Christmas has always been about that holding-onto-hope-by-your-mere-fingernails-when-you-thought-you-were-the-last-one-and-when-you-let-go-we’ll-all-go-down but that was never nowhere near the case. And that your hope and your faith will be rewarded. Soon.
So if today you’re holding onto hope by your fingernails, then hold on and don’t let go. Good news is coming. Help is coming.
But if you need a different analogy and a different understanding:
I’ve seen a story online repeatedly over the years about an employee at a LGBLTQ+ bookstore who took a phone call from someone who was in crisis about their sexuality and couldn’t reconcile it with what they’d been told God wants and what their family wants and they had the means to end it all and were about to. And that employee turned his face to the wall and went full-bore into DO NOT DO IT THINGS WILL GET BETTER and kept talking to keep that person from pulling the trigger and got more and more nervous about the people lining up at the register and did not realize until the first customer laid her hand upon his shoulder that the line wasn’t for the register it was for the phone. The first person said MY TURN. AND THEN IT’S THEIRS.
Christmas is about saying very good news is here. Help has arrived. Now things will start getting better. You’ve held on for long enough for it to get here. Christmas is about saying God is better than who you have been led to believe. Christmas is saying It’s my turn on the phone.
But if you can’t believe in Christmas for religious reasons, I understand. I really do.
If so, then maybe celebrate it as The Day What You Hoped for and Needed Finally At Long Last Came Through.
So. A bit of music and a word about you and next year.
If you need a good Christmas song, one you maybe haven’t heard before, here’s U2 covering Greg Lake:
But if instead you just need a song to help you shake off all the crap of this year, here’s Florence + The Machine, the masters of dancing-while-crying:
And if you’re dancing and crying by the end of that — even if only just on the inside — then your soul hasn’t died and you’re still on the side of the good. The deep good.
Next year we’ll all need to act like it. Get some sleep in the meantime. We have a few nights in the clear for the moment. We’re OK for now. Go to bed. We’ll need your strength in the morning.
In the New Year we’ll all get up and kick the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
And I’ve seen us. I know what we can do. The dark should be afraid.
A year from now — by next Advent — we’ll look back on 2024 and no matter how it turned out we won’t be saying help is coming. Next Advent we’ll be saying I was the help that came. And I brought my friends. And we’re not done.
We are the hope we’ve been waiting for.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
I’m not crying! You’re crying. Love you, Cass, and this is the sermon I needed this morning. Merry Christmas!
This non-believer appreciates your nuanced faith based take. For me, what is uplifting this time of the year is knowing that the days will grow reliably longer and I’ll probably live to see the loveliest of trees the cherry another year