This year, Winter 2020-2021, has filled people with dread. As predicted months ago, the pandemic’s toll has indeed become exacting and grim in these weeks of spending more time indoors. Some are speaking of a surge on top of a surge, as the numbers of Covid-19 cases skyrocket in state after state. I am presently more aware of people who have become infected with and have died from the coronavirus. This was not true in my experience during the first surges last spring and in early summer. Coronavirus creeps ever closer.

On top of these grave and grim realities, we have entered into a season, which for many is already a time of sadness, even when the Christmas holidays are times of gladness for many others. In recent years, there has been more and more talk of “Blue Christmas,” occasions when churches, for example, convene people for whom Christmas is not a happy time. These churches host observances that are more subdued and which honestly acknowledge that the holidays can be quite difficult for people. Except that for Christmas 2020, we cannot even convene people in person, which perhaps only heightens and deepens the social isolation and sadness of these days.

So, let’s be honest with ourselves that a pandemic Christmas, a set of holidays perhaps like no others in our lifetimes, is uniquely challenging. The pandemic and its related effects, for example, on the economy, have upended our lives, even if our privileged routines may not seem so bad. For those who have lost most in terms of lives, loved ones and livelihood, Christmas 2020 is devastating indeed.

Gone this year are the office parties, family gatherings, crowded churches for Christmas Eve services. Gone are the packed shopping centers and city streets and restaurants where you have to wait seemingly forever for a table. Holidays are known for gatherings of lots of people. So even for those of us for whom the holidays are happy times, 2020 does present itself as a time for greater social isolation even for those who are well-connected with family, friends and co-workers.

In 2020, therefore, Christmas, the Nativity of our Lord, the festival of the Incarnation, is perhaps seen in new light, or nuanced light, clarifying maybe, more distinctive, more penetrating of the dark, hidden corners of our psyches, which often our busy holiday gatherings and customs serve to mask.

For it is in this season of particularly and poignantly painful shadows and hidden places that the light of Christ shines. This light finds its way to us in Christian word and deed. That’s what light does – light makes itself known in the deepest nights of shadows to transform the darkness into splendor. It doesn’t take much light to make a huge difference in revealing what is hidden, in showing us the ways we need to go.

Then there’s the word of God made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, whom we confess as the Christ, the anointed one. The point of the Incarnation of God in the flesh of the little child, Jesus, is that divinity condescends to join us, to dwell with us, among us, in us, to tabernacle with us on our sojourns of life – even in the meanest of places, like a cattle stall and an animal feeding trough, for that’s what the manger is. God takes human flesh to seek us out and find us even during, perhaps especially during, our darkest days, these days of pandemic tragedy. God is Emmanuel, God with us, even in these days of deep darkness. Christ pursues us, finds us in our circumstances of our deepest isolation, alienation and estrangement from each other and from God.

How so? How now? Let me count the ways…. In the beloved seasonal stories from the Gospels, and how these stories have been proclaimed to us throughout our lives in the “scandal of particularity,” that the Christian message is inevitably communicated to us amidst particular cultural and ethnic traditions and realities. In the songs of Christmas, for Luther hymns being second to preaching for their power of communicating the good news, the gospel. In the gifts of presence (not presents!) that we are to each other, when we become, again as Luther suggests, “little Christs” for each other in our acts of lovingkindness to our neighbors. Then there’s the Eucharist, which we dearly miss this year, where we eat and drink God’s Word, Christ’s real presence, made known in bread and wine over which blessing has been prayed. In these ways and more the word of God is again made flesh in our lives, the light of Christ illuminating the shadows of our midnight hours.

Thanks be to God! Even when all else may seem to be lost in the night.

May you all have a blessed Christmas, the festival of Incarnation on the Nativity of our Lord. For even when our pandemic days are lonely and filled with shadows, we celebrate Emmanuel, for God in Christ is indeed with us no matter what.

With prayerful best wishes in Jesus’ name with thanksgiving for our life together, even when apart,

Pastor Jonathan Linman