Deep Blue

With this being the last week of Advent and with us here at Holy Trinity playing with the idea of an extended Advent, we’ve now been in blue vestments for seven weeks. And we didn’t even break up the blue with a pink Gaudete Saturday like our Episcopal siblings have a tendency to do in order to lighten it up and infuse a week of joy into what is often a blue, heavy, penitential season of Advent.

And for the first time here at HTLoop the final day of Advent perfectly aligns with the Winter Solstice. Tonight is the longest one of the year, a night where our Northern Hemisphere pole has its maximum tilt away from the Sun. I love that we get to be together in this shroud of darkness tonight some of us in our cozy pj’s and we get to celebrate after worship with a warm cup of hot chocolate or glug and even sing some of our favorite carols. When we’re together, the darkness is transformed like a warm blanket that covers us and invites us closer together.

But even as we pull together here, there are powers and forces attempting to divide us and rip us apart. This week that dividing force was at an all-time high with the vote that was taken to impeach President Trump. Now I don’t know about you, but anywhere I go in the car, NPR is on the radio, but the impeachment hearings in our House of Representatives this week broke me. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t continue to subject myself to the divisive rhetoric that was going back and forth and ever intensifying.

And while this impeachment ended up being blue with the Democratic vote prevailing, the result had me feeling blue because it felt to me like everyone lost. With our heels dug in, no one budged an inch and that feels like defeat. How can we draw closer? Where can common ground be found? What can our collective dream be in a world so divided?

I confess that my dreams of a better future, of a better world are often dashed. And that’s the trouble with our dreams. They can be shattered or forgotten. They can fade or get deferred. Even dreams like the nighttime message Joseph receives from the angel of the Lord revealing to him that the baby in Mary’s womb was from the Holy Spirit, that he shall be named Jesus, and that he will save his people from their sins. In the situation Joseph and Mary found themselves in, I can’t even imagine how elusive that dream would have seemed.

And that makes our Gospel story today quite remarkable. Because despite all the odds, Joseph trusts his dream. In this Gospel narrative of Jesus’s birth from Matthew, Joseph’s experience gets the spotlight, unlike in Luke where we hear much more about Mary. And if we understand the context of today’s Gospel story, Joseph was probably ten to fifteen years older than Mary, and in this context, the engagement of Mary and Joseph was a binding agreement, annullable only by legal divorce. That means that when Mary was discovered to be pregnant, Joseph’s intentions to “dismiss” her are more specifically intentions to divorce her. And this is all due to the social shame that surrounded premarital pregnancy. Especially if the pregnancy was due to adultery, it was grounds for not only divorce, but execution. So, the fact that Joseph wants to dismiss Mary “quietly” makes him quite gracious in this honor and shame society, since societal conventional would have Joseph shame Mary publicly to preserve his family’s honor.

The pain of such a decision must have been so intense, but in the deepest darkness of night, the angel of the Lord appears to Joseph, and upon awaking Joseph does as the angel instructs, defying social convention rejecting the shame of a premarital pregnancy and marries Mary and she gives birth to a son they obediently name Jesus.

In the midst of our deepest darkest blues like Joseph found himself, I’m willing to bet that we have at one time or another we have felt hopeless, believing that our dreams will never be fulfilled, that our future has been lost, but on this longest, darkest night of the year I wonder if this story can be a beacon for us, reviving our hope in our own wildest dreams.

But maybe on the other hand this story leaves us longing even more, longing for such a clear dream like Joseph had. If only we could be as blessed as Joseph was, to have such a clear dream, and to get such a clear sense of direction from his dream. Joseph in the midst of his blues is visited in his dream by a blue angel. If only we were so lucky to be visited in the midst of our own blues by a blue angel.

Longing for a visitation or sign like Joseph experienced especially in the longest, darkest, deepest, bluest, places of our lives and not experiencing one might convince us to simply pray for release by taking us from this place to a more heavenly realm. But the good news on this longest, darkest night, is that Jesus doesn’t promise to remove us from our blues, but Jesus redeems our blues by being born in the midst of them. We aren’t going anywhere, but Jesus is coming to us in the perfect union of heaven and earth.

And that’s why we call him Emmanuel, God with us, because Jesus is with us born in the bluest of circumstances, to be with us in the midst of our moments of deep blue. And because of that, blue is not just the color of sadness, but of resistant hope that our wildest dreams do come true, and that even in the deepest dark of night, the treasure of God’s presence with us can be found. Blue after all is the color of the sky just before the dawn.

In our Gospel of Matthew we are given the beginning of the story where God is made manifest into the bluest of nights for Joseph and Mary, and in the last verse of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus’ last words to his disciples are “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

So, as we draw near to one another on this darkest bluest night of the year let the name Emmanuel echo deep within your heart reviving your hope that your dreams are not dashed but restored in the presence of Christ who is with us always. This birth, against all odds, is the hope we’ve been waiting for, the one who makes us one, the Emmanuel, God with us, who will be with us always. The darkness has been redeemed, and on this night our collective dreams and restored faith can shine bright like a beacon in the night for all the world to see. Amen.