Look to the first Christmas to get through the COVID holidays. Find joy in the darkness.

Last December as we gathered around our Christmas tables, we couldn’t have imagined the year to come. It will be remembered as a tumultuous year,  bookmarked in American history classes for future generations. A raging pandemic. Natural disasters in the heartland and on the coasts. Racial tension. And a divisive presidential election we’d just as soon forget. 

As we move toward Christmas our hearts are heavier, weighed down with the collective grief of burying over 310,000 fellow Americans felled by COVID, our walk a bit less of a swagger and more of a limp. For many, this has been an unusual advent season, stripped bare of the usual marks of the season: holiday office parties, neighborhood gatherings and church pageants. In the place of these mediocre but meaningful Christmas gatherings are screens, these dreaded glass and metal boxes that stand in for but can never replace the embodied presence of those we love. Some won’t even see the generations of family pile into their home, hostage as we are to this temporary but tragic digital diaspora.  

Lament and longing as well as joy

Christmas can seem a bit off message in this moment, an unwanted carousel of fake happiness while the world is so uncertain. As for 2020, it seems more Merle Haggard’s making it through December than Andy Williams’ most wonderful time of the year. The holly is not making us jolly.  

And yet if you look beneath the cellophane packaging of Christmas, you’ll find in this holiday the themes that we need in this moment. The first Christmas didn’t come to people sipping hot chocolate at Macy’s, but to a dispirited, oppressed, and cynical people. The promises of God seemed so distant, stuck as they were on dusty scrolls. Then, as now, powerless people longed for renewal and restoration and hope. Tired of waiting, they wondered, How long? Sound familiar? 

Advent is about waiting and longing. It’s about lamenting the darkness that has marbled its way into every part of our existence. Advent is about seeing the pinpricks of light, first dawned on that first cold and dark night in Bethlehem. Advent is about a new way, a new kingdom, and the hope that one day all things will be made new.  

It can seem far-fetched to those who, in this season, are tired of religion and worn out by sappy cliches that only compound our pain. But you must see the real story of this season. The story Christianity tells is that God has visited us in our pain and longing. The Creator visited his creation, not by making an appearance before Caesar with a splashy launch in Herod’s palace. Instead, Jesus was born, both divine and human, in a rented cave in a forgotten town to an unmarried peasant couple. Christmas is as much about lament and longing as it is about joy.  

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Today, in 2020, we seem to be waiting and waiting and waiting. A week of COVID disruption turned into a month and has now nearly stretched into a year. The uncertainty of what is ahead is paralyzing. And yet we see on the horizon the faint hope of vaccines and, dare we say, a return to normalcy?  

Longing amid corruption and disease

The people of Jesus’ day were fatigued as we are, waiting for whispered promises of hope and renewal. Christians believe this fragile and tender newborn, hailing from an impoverished family, is God’s first sign of hope. The gospel writer John makes an astonishing claim about Jesus. In this Son of David “was life, and that life was the light of men.” A “light shines in the darkness, and yet the darkness did not overcome it.” 

Yes the answer to the world’s deep problems lay in a makeshift nursery, surrounded by farm animals.  

Here we are, 2,000 years later, and that scene dominates our living rooms and Christmas cards and church stages. We sing the songs of that silent night and echo words first harked by those heralds of heaven. Still, though, the mess — corruption and despair, futility and famine, disease and death — still encroaches like an unwanted guest. If Jesus came that first Christmas, why are we still waiting and longing and hoping?  

Doctor's orders: We failed Thanksgiving and COVID is surging. For Christmas, let's stay home and stay safe.

Advent teaches us to both find a reason for joy — joy in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus — and yet ache with longing for the consummation of that promise, a kingdom of peace and justice this Son of David promises to bring when he returns again. In that first century, it was outlandish, almost foolish to believe that the baby in the manger was the son of God and today it is just as bizarre to believe that he will return to make all things new.  

Yet this is where followers of Jesus find their joy. Not an ebullient euphoria that papers over pain, but a deep seated and fixed anchor for the soul. Christmas — the real version — comes to us not as an alternative to our sorrow but in the midst of it and gives permission to spend this season in authentic and desperate longing for the better world to come.  

Daniel Darling is senior vice president of communications at National Religious Broadcasters and the author of several books, including "The Characters of Christmas." Follow him on Twitter: @dandarling