Sunday, December 29, 2024, First Sunday after Christmas

“Our Hope for Years to Come”

Psalm 90:1-12; Isaiah 30:8-17; Romans 8:31b-39; Luke 12:35-40

A Christmas Setting for Holy Matins

Hymns: #362 “O Sing of Christ”; #358 “From Heaven Above to Earth I Come”; #733 “Our God, Our Help in Ages Past”; #390 “Let Us All with Gladsome Voice”; #366 “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear”

Dear Friends in Christ: Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

I happened across a new word this week; you all know how I love new words! My new word is the wonderful German word dunkelflaute. The word is a combination of dunkel, which means “dark” (you may have had a Dunkel, a German dark beer), and flaute, which means a calm or slack period, or a period of inactivity or depression. A dunkelflaute, in Germany and Europe, is a meteorological word, a weather word. In Europe, especially in wintertime, there are occasional long stretches where the skies are cloudy and overcast, and where the winds are completely calm; thus the dunkelflaute, a “dark calm.” The article I was reading was about how Germany and most of Europe have gone really big into solar and wind power as a source of energy; so a dunkelflaute for them is a really bad thing. No shining sun or blowing wind means no solar energy or wind power to turn the turbines. If the dunkelflaute lasts more than a few days – as it oftentimes does – it can lead to power shortages and rolling blackouts and such.

Now the way my little mind works, reading about dunkelflaute brought to mind what we sometimes call “light deprivation syndrome.” This time of year, when the days are short, people tend to get sad, gloomy, and depressed from lack of sunshine. (Don’t forget to take your vitamin D!) And that got me thinking how this time of year – when Christmas is over, and we’re staring down January and February and all the ice, cold, and snow, and springtime seems so far away, we can slip into an emotional and spiritual dunkelflaute. If that’s ever happened to you, you know what I’m talking about. It happens to me, too, sometimes. Pastors aren’t immune to an occasional bout of post-Christmas blah’s or an after-Christmas dunkelflaute. With pastors especially, but also with all of us who know the Lord, we can’t afford to walk around looking downhearted and sad. A joyful attitude is contagious, but so is a gloomy one. If you happen to be a leader in God’s Church, that’s especially true.

Jesus tells us in Luke’s Gospel, “Be dressed ready for service and keep your lamps burning.” To “keep your lamp burning” means to keep your spirit bright. It means to

keep your eyes open, and to keep on doing the Lord’s work, and to keep on being a good and faithful servant – even if what you really feel like doing is closing your eyes and going back to sleep. The devil loves to do this to us. He loves to get us thinking about the winter and the cold, and about what went wrong this year and not what went right; and he wants to have us looking at the year ahead with dread instead of with anticipation and joy. He wants us focused on our problems, and not on our prayers. He wants us focused on ourselves instead of on what the Lord has put us here for. He wants us sinking so deep in our dunkelflaute that we miss the good things the Lord has for us – especially those moments of joy that tend to come along when we were least expecting them.

“You must also be ready,” Jesus says; but, Lord, it’s so hard sometimes. St. Paul tells us in Philippians 4, “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy-think about such things.” But the world, the devil, and our own sinful souls keep doing their best to try to bog us down in things that aren’t so excellent or praiseworthy at all. A spiritual dunkelflaute, when you get right down to it, is a bit of a selfish thing.

So what’s the answer for it? Where do we go for a little sunlight for our souls that will keep those turbines turning? Where do we go for a spiritual wind to revive us, a breath of spring from the Holy Spirt to lift our spirits again? St. Paul writes in Romans 8 about the “present sufferings” we have in this world, and about how the whole world is in bondage to decay, and about how we have to hope against hope through it all, and try to keep our hopes up - even though sometimes we feel so weak we don’t even know what to pray for. (Looks like old Paul had his moments of dunkelflaute, too!)

The answer, Paul says, is to go back to the Sunday school basics of our faith. Back to God’s Word, back to the simple Creeds and the Lord’s Prayer and those good old Christian hymns. The answer is to stop hanging our heads and looking down at our feet, and to look up at the cross instead. The answer it to remember who your God is, and who you are to Him. The answer is to remember, always, how much God loves you, and what He did to show how much He loves you.

“What, then, shall we say in response to this?” Paul asks. What shall we say in response to God’s love for us? The answer certainly isn’t, “I can’t do this” or “I quit” or “I give up” or “I’m going back to bed.” If God is for us (and He is, all the time, every day!), then who can be against us, or stand against us, or keep us down? Even if the sun

won’t shine and the wind won’t blow and the world goes dark, He’ll never forsake us or abandon us or leave us alone.

“God didn’t spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all,” Paul says. That’s the definitive statement of God’s love for us. That’s your value to God, His assessment of your true worth. Our self-esteem is grounded not in how much we think of ourselves, but in how much God loves and esteems us – and His love for us was defined forever at the cross.

“So how will He not also, along with Him, graciously give us all things?” says Paul. Because of what Jesus has done for us, we’re living today in God’s amazing grace. We get to worrying about what’s going to happen tomorrow, or next week, or next year, and it’s off into the dunkelflaute we go – but why do we do that to ourselves, when God already knows what we need, and has promised to provide it for us?

Why do we worry about past sins? Why do get to thinking we’ve somehow out-sinned the love of God, or that “forgiveness if for everyone else, but not for me?” That’s a really dark place to be. But folks, let the sun shine on your life! All your sins have been paid for; they’ve already been paid for. Jesus paid for every sin there was to be paid for when He died on the cross. That’s my sins, and your sins, too, forever. As St. Paul puts it, “Now therefore there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Believe God for His promise and you’ll live – what Jesus called “the life that is truly life”- and you’ll never have to worry again about anything. Not what’s going to happen tomorrow, not about what’s going to happen when you die. “Cast all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you,” is a real and holy promise.

“Christ Jesus, who died, has been raised to life,” Paul says. If you want a real answer for gloom or your sadness or your Christmas blues, let me ask you – where is Jesus now? He’s risen, and ascended, and now He’s interceding at the right hand of God for you. While you’re pouring out your prayers to God - afraid for what’s going to happen, or out of energy, or at the end of your spiritual rope – Jesus is sitting at God’s right hand in heaven, putting your particular needs into the Father’s ears. While you’re feeling down, the God who loves you is working always to lift you up again, no matter what your circumstances may be.

Now, there’s something I have to be sure to make clear about all this. I’m not saying, and I’d never claim, that depression isn’t a real thing. I’m never going to tell someone, “Shake it off,” or “It’s all in your head.” There are milder forms of depression, to be sure;

Christmas blah’s and light deprivation syndrome among them. There’s help for those, just ask me. Then there are serious, more clinical forms of depression that require professional help; there’s no shame in asking for help.

And then there are things that go on in this world that happen to us all, things that would make anyone sad, at least for a little while. Being a Christian in this world, while trying to keep an upbeat, positive, joyful faith, can be a really tall order. Things are always happening that threaten to “separate us from the love of Christ.” We all have troubles and hardships to face, at one time or another. We’ve been blessed here in America, so far, but many of our brothers and sisters around the world are facing “persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, and sword” on a daily basis, “facing death all day long, considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” Please keep them in your prayers.

But whatever may be troubling you on this day – whether your problems are big and heavy or few and small - whatever may be dunkelflaut-ing you, whatever you’re facing that seems daunting or hopeless or too big to overcome – St. Paul says here that in all these things – ALL these things, large or small – we are (not we will be, but we already are) more than conquerors through Him who loved us and who loves us still. To go to another German word, a good rendering of “more than conquerors” is “uber-conquerors.” It’s not just that we’re going to squeak through by the skin of our teeth if we follow Christ – it’s that the love of Christ is going to bring us an overwhelming, overcoming, no-doubt-about-it, absolute victory, over everything that troubles us today. The reason we can hang on to our joy in what can be a very unjoyful world, is that we know we’re headed for a place with more joy in it than we could ever possibly hope for or believe or imagine.

So life in this crazy world can’t take away the joy we have in Christ, and death can’t separate us from the love of Christ; in fact, death will only bring us closer to Him. Nothing the devil or his unholy angels can do can keep us from getting where we’re going. Nothing that happens today, or anything that happens tomorrow, neither height nor depth, neither the highest of highs nor the lowest of dunkelflaute, can separate us from the love of God or from the grace we have in Christ. Keep your lamps burning, folks. Keep your eyes in God’s Word, and your heart in prayer, as we welcome another New Year. Bless us all, Lord, in the days and years to come. In Jesus’ name; Amen.