A church member called me this morning from the Midwest, where she had gone for Christmas, to report that her nephew was killed yesterday on a highway in Texas. It has abruptly changed her holiday plans as she and her family now drive down to Texas for a funeral the day after Christmas.

Our parish has suffered five deaths in the extended family during this December, beginning with the loss of our pastor emeritus Harry Durkee on December 2, who had served from 1960–1991.

I am mindful that my mother lost her father in December also. Years later her mother succumbed to cancer on Christmas Night. The holiday season seems especially unfair as a time of joy to be taken away by the cruelty of death.  Even as I do my final preparations for [1] Christmas Eve, I cannot shake the sadness of so much death and loss.

We modern people are wimps when it comes to dealing with the reality of death and grief. They are hard, but they are also bracketed by love and grace, and resolved only in a life of faith. I used to think it strange that St. Thomas and St. Stephen were memorialized on the church’s calendar during the days surrounding Christmas. But perhaps it is the wisdom of centuries of faithfulness that Christians offer up to God in prayer. We are certain that God’s gift to us cannot be undone by the meanness or the unfairness of sudden and untimely death.

What better time to remember those we have loved who have lived in faith, than in the very season when we also proclaim a holy birth among us – the coming of Jesus into our world of darkness and sorrow?

Jaroslav Vaja captured the essence of this in his Christmas hymntext, “Before the Marvel of This Night”. In his imaginative poem, the angels before God speak to one another as they prepare to “tear the sky apart with light” and come down to announce the birth of Christ and peace:

The love that we have always known,
our constant joy and endless light,
now to the  oveless world be shown,
now break upon its deathly night.
Into one song compress the love
that rules our universe above:
sing love, sing love, sing God is love.

—Pastor Dan Hooper