Hopes and Fears
Litany ~ December 21, 2025
Among the blessings of life are death and other losses, the wise woman told the student.
So it is, in nature’s cycle. The days shorten, the nights lengthen, the cold deepens. Snows fall from leaden skies. Sun shines bright on icy crystals. And the poet says,
It is right; it should be so.
Animals hibernate, forage; birds migrate, abide. Some will starve; some will freeze; some will survive the season.
It is right; it should be so.
Winds drive across open fields, scattering dusty snow, through wooded lands, unsettling bare branch, ever green limb.
It is right; it should be so.
Among the blessings of life are death and other losses, the wise woman told the student.
So it is in our lives, too, as if they can be separated from nature’s cycle.
It is right; it should be so.
The newly born breathe first breath; the dying breathe last. Infant into toddler, toddler into teen, teen into adult – we become ourselves, in a single instant and continually without end.
It is right; it should be so.
Tears at weddings; laughter at funerals; dance, labor, boredom, learning, all in between. Hours into weeks; months into decades, we go on when we can't, we cease before we are finished.
It is right; it should be so.
We rejoice and mourn; wonder and discover. Wounds heal; resentments fester; regrets weigh our spirits down. Love blooms and fades; anger flares and recedes. Forgiveness, estrangement, reconciliation, blessing fail to follow orderly paths through our years.
This too is right; it should be so.
Life lingers past the mind’s knowing, past the body’s obedience. Death stills life hardly yet begun. Accident, war, disaster, injustice collide, interrupt, maim and annihilate the lives we thought were ours for as long as we should walk this earth. We despair; we freeze; we lose all feeling. We rage,
“This is not right; this cannot be so.”
Still, beneath it all we know, (though we would deny it), we are neither God nor machine but merely mortal. And the wise woman speaks the truth. And the poet, too.
It is right; it should be so.
Sermon
"O little town of Bethlehem…the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight."
Like most of us, I suppose, I’ve sung these words, over and over again, nearly every December of my life, without really considering their meaning. When I stopped for reflection, however, I realized hopes and fears is a pretty succinct and dead-on summary of our spirits' condition this time of year.
We hope, year after year, that this season will be magical, that Christmas will arrive, bringing with it joy and delight, color and light, generosity and surprise, love and reconciliation, peace on earth, good will toward all. We long for magic, and fear that instead Christmas will be only human, touched by greed and disappointment, moments of loneliness and isolation, bittersweet memories of holidays and loved ones long past, crowds and debt and impossible expectations. And that's in a good year. This year we can add fear of the arrest and deportation of neighbors, family members and friends, loss of health coverage, laws that interfere with our medical decisions and bodily autonomy, loss of civil liberties and more.
Our fears grow not simply out of the current atmosphere in our country, but also, as Rev. Mauldin wrote, out of our years of experience with this holiday. We’ve seen it all before.
Charlie Brown peers hopefully into a mailbox in search of Christmas cards, only to hear his disappointment echo through the emptiness.
A small girl’s hopes are crushed when the package under the tree is unwrapped to reveal a toy snow shovel instead of the longed-for wagon her family cannot afford to buy for her. And her uncle’s heart breaks right along with hers, because he would have loved nothing better than to give her the wagon.
A teenager watches eagerly each time the cheerleaders come into their class to deliver Christmas candy-grams, but the one they're waiting for never arrives.
A mother wanders ahead on a frosty night, with a visiting (and ill) grandmother, admiring Christmas lights and shop windows, while the father lingers behind, insisting to his cold and tearful children that they really are having fun.
Another father feels torn between his reluctance to teach his child the secular and religious myths of the season, and his desire to share with the child the joy and delight he remembers from childhood Christmases.
A parent wonders what sort of gifts they’ll be able to afford this year, and their children try hard not to wish aloud for anything, because they don’t want their parents to feel bad for disappointing them.
A family wants joy and delight for the children and grandchildren, yet can’t help feeling profoundly the absence of their mother, wife, and grandmother this year for the first time.
A young couple, or not-so-young couple, struggles to recapture the love and devotion and cheer that characterized their early Christmases together, but seem somehow lost this year amidst disappointments, betrayals, and frustrations.
A community awaits a savior, a prince of peace, and is offered instead a baby born in a stable.
However dissimilar in the particulars, I think the hopes and fears of all the years, which meet on Christmas Eve (and throughout this season), are the same at the core. We hope for love, for connection, for the assurance that someone knows us well enough and cares for us deeply enough to discern our heart’s desire and to try to give it to us–whether we desire a wagon, or a Christmas card with a candy cane attached, or a few hours admiring lighted, decorated windows on a winter’s evening with a parent who may not be alive next Christmas.
And we fear it will not be so. We fear that the caring will not be deep enough to wash away the greed and commercialism and disappointments of the season, that the love will not be strong enough to triumph over separations of distance and estrangement, adolescent moods and dishes that must be washed Christmas or not.
We fear that our own shortcomings as a parent and flaws and failures as a friend, child, and mate stand firmly in the way of our successfully demonstrating our loving and caring to those dear to us, and render us unworthy of receiving any love or caring from them.
We fear that we will be forgotten, that there is no one left anymore to receive and return our love and affection.
Given sweaters that won’t go over the head, model trains that fall off the track and other gifts that don’t quite work out, loved ones who can’t make it home for the holidays, traffic jams and short tempers, the lines at the post office, crafts and decorations and confections that never quite turn out like the pictures on Pintrest, not to mention secret fears of being unloved and unworthy, it is something of a surprise that Christmas maintains its hold as a major holiday and holy day. And no surprise at all that each year I hear more and more folks expressing their disaffection for this season.
I can go right along with the grumblers up to a certain point. I feel as harried and hurried and short of time as the next person, this time of year. Don’t get me started about retailers who put out Christmas displays at Halloween. And, significantly, the pain this season brings is real, deep and heart-rending. I don’t deny it. Yet when Advent arrives, when I’m faced with a column to write for the December newsletter and sermons to plan, when it’s time to tend to our souls in these weeks of short days and long dark nights, I find myself not wanting to ignore Christmas or to condemn it, or even defend it (much). I only want to celebrate this holy time.
In Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Evenezer Scrooge, looking in on Bob Crachit’s family with the Ghost of Christmas Present, doesn’t understand how they can possibly celebrate when they have so little. At that point in the story he has not yet learned that the love and affection and good spirits they do have are more than enough to make up for the food and material goods they lack. It is the same, I think, with the hopes and fears of Christmas.
What is there to celebrate at Christmas? Once we’ve outgrown the childhood legends and no longer accept the religious myth in any literal way, when we’ve lived with the fears for most of our lives, when it seems any sensible, reasonable person would laugh at the idea of trees brought indoors and strung with lights and decorations, when Christmas after Christmas falls short of our plans and dreams, when there no longer seems any option but to believe that Christmas is capitalist plot created and maintained by the toy manufacturers (and historical study reveals some truth to that theory), what then is there to celebrate?
Perhaps only this: the hopes endure.
Despite it all, the fear hasn’t won. We can still envision the world another way and we have the spirit left to hope it will be so, if only for a season. It is no small thing. To live lives which at times, in ways known only to us, are so difficult we barely make it through, and still hope, if just a tiny bit, if only secretly, for magic at Christmas, is a feat worthy of celebrating. To love despite forces in society conspiring against love, and to care for others despite the risk of disappointment, is cause for celebration. And I think we do hope, each one of us, for the magic, for the love and connection. If we didn’t, at least a little, our protests and our bah-humbugging wouldn’t be quite so emphatic.
Within each of us, perhaps hidden deep away, there is a child whose heart skips with delight at the sight of Santa Claus, whose breath catches with wonder as the tree is lit for the first time each year, who sings carols unconcerned with the language and hears the truth behind the theology and mythology of beloved stories, who wants to love with grand, extravagant gestures and does so instead, unknowingly, in simple ways, who is wide enough to see past the glitter and the neon to the beauty of stars in the night sky. Christmas is the celebration of the birth, again and again, of that child, into a world of human imperfection and wonder and love. A holy time, indeed. Amen.