Silent Night

Luke 2:1-20

Just about a week ago, a friend announced to the Facebook world: “It’s official. I’m flunking Christmas.” I laughed in painful recognition.

Have you ever felt like that? Felt like you couldn’t get Christmas right?
I know I have.

For some of us, it’s a challenge to live up to the expectations our friends, neighbors, or kids and family have.
Or it’s that pressure to be happy when you don’t want to celebrate.
Or when you want to be happy, but all your attention is taken up with an illness in the family, a crisis at work, so you just don’t have time and it seems like Christmas is passing you by at warp speed.

There are lots of ways to feel like you’re flunking Christmas. Because when you’re preparing for something that’s really important, to you or to people you care about, you want it to go right,
and in life, things go wrong.

There’s a story about that that has been on my mind this year.
A story about a little church in Austria, not quite 200 years ago.

A church where the organ broke on Christmas Eve.
Maybe the mice ate the bellows, maybe the works were rusted; there are several versions of the story, but they agree that it was about to be a Christmas with no music.

So the pastor of that little Austrian church put his head together with the musician, who happened to have a guitar, and with a little poetry, and a little music, they saved the day.
Or at least the candlelight service.
And the world got the carol “Silent Night.”

Now, you can go on the internet and find out that that story may be a bit of a myth. But it still has power, because it’s about a Christmas miracle.
And it’s okay with me if “Silent Night” was written months ahead instead of in a musical emergency.
Because that’s how lots of miracles happen, after all.
Months, years, sometimes centuries of work, some public, some secret. Lots of people contributing a little bit at a time.  Miracles like cancer remission come from years of labor by scientists, hours of care from doctors, techs, and nurses, months of patience on the part of the patient.

Some miracles happen slowly and deliberately. Like the miracle we celebrate tonight.
Pregnancy takes time. It takes cooperation.
God made flesh is a miracle of process, of becoming,
A miracle that we recognize in a moment of revelation, or by living with it, year after year.

And that process of living with it is part of the Silent Night miracle story, too.
Whatever happened with the organ, there’s evidence that people loved the carol from the first time they heard it.
From the village church in Austria, Silent Night began to spread.
It’s been translated into most of the languages on earth, and a few that don’t belong to this world, including Klingon and Elven, so that Star Trek and Tolkien fans can sing a favorite carol in the far reaches of space or Middle Earth.

I imagine it’s so widely sung because this carol does such a good job of bringing peace.
In the middle of Christmas chaos: wonderful presents and epic failures, meal triumphs and disasters, errands and lists and chores and prep, loneliness and pain or enthusiasm and joy,
the tune and the words can create an island of stillness,
a blessing of bright calmness,
where our hearts and bodies sneak a breath of the heavenly peace we long for.

There’s another story about Silent Night.
One I’ve clung to this year, with the shadow of violence and tragedy that’s been in the news and in my heart since the Newtown shooting.


On Christmas Eve, 1914, the trenches of the Western Front were filled with soldiers far from home, in a noisy, messy, violent, hell.
The Pope’s proposal of a Christmas cease-fire had already been rejected by the leaders of both sides, but as the night darkened, German soldiers began to put small Christmas trees, lit with candles, on the edge of their trenches.
A few were met with shots, but as carols began to drift across the battered no-mans land,
something changed.

On the ground that night, the war stopped.

British troops, German troops, French and Belgian troops, in some places, exchanged carols, handshakes, even presents, and the hundred-year-old Austrian carol “Stille Nacht” was sung in German, French and English,
on one precious silent night,
without guns, or enemies, or fear.

As long as I can remember, I have sung Silent Night in church on Christmas Eve, with the lights turned low, the candles glowing,
and felt peace slipping through and around and into me, and us,
as we make a quiet space in the joy or the noise or the chaos of Christmas,
to remember the peace of God sleeping in his mother’s arms, a miracle of life and love.

A week ago, I sang this carol with nearly 300 others gathered on the west side of Chicago to pray for silent nights in our streets, in our everyday world. Nights without gunshots, without the tragedy of lives lost to crossfire, or petty quarrels, or mindless anger. And for a moment, it seemed so possible, so near.

A carol from a little church in Austria, two hundred years ago, is fresh and powerful now in war, in worship, in witness and prayer.
It’s a miracle, again and again.

In a world where noise of every kind – visual, audible, emotional, and especially electronic – surrounds us at work, home, church and in the car,
it reminds me that God appears quietly.

In a world where someone is at war, all the time,
it reminds me that God dreams of peace for all of us, and that’s why we worship a sleeping baby tonight, instead of a warrior king.

And when I feel like I’m flunking Christmas, because the bulletins aren’t done, or the presents aren’t right, and I’m tired or frustrated or grieving instead of merry, Silent Night creeps into my soul,
and reminds me that we can’t flunk Christmas.
That miracles, love and peace don’t depend on getting it right,
but on God slipping in to the world, quietly,
when we need God most.

It’s not the only way to remember that. But Silent Night’s stories remind us that when plans go wrong, a door opens for unexpected beauty.
That peace can break out,
in a busy Bethlehem,
a horrifying battle of nations,
or a tired heart.

You can’t flunk Christmas, after all.
We can fail expectations – our own and others; we can even fail God’s expectations – but we can’t fail Christmas,
because Christmas is all about God slipping into our world when things are going wrong.

The stories of Silent Night, like the story of the baby in Bethlehem,
remind us that Christmas isn’t about what happens when we’re perfect,
but about how God transforms the messes,
the broken parts,
the emptiness or loneliness,
even the hope and the work in our ordinary lives
by coming among us, quietly,
and making peace by falling asleep in our arms.

Shhhhhh. Merry Christmas.