Glory to God in the Highest
Luke 2: 13-14
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”

No Silent Night
by Debbie Wallis

It was not a silent night
Men were questioning
What this strange starlight meant.
Others, roused in midst of their watch,
No longer questioned.
For their night was split
with the shock of a choir of angels
Shouting, “Glory to God,
The Christ child comes.”

It was not a silent night.
It was a noisy confusing night.
The city was congested,
Tempers were short,
The inns were crowded--all of them.
And Mary and Joseph--
What did their hearts cry
When they saw the lowly birth bed?

It was not a silent night.
His coming tore a woman’s body.
His coming was hard--
Dreadfully hard
for everyone involved.
His coming was not a mythical
anesthetized 20th century dream.
It was hard and cold.
It was heavy.

But it was not silent.
He forever split our darkness
with the proclamation of angels
that the Light of the world was shining.
That for all ages to come
We would know
That heaven is not silent.
For God has spoken.
He has come.

GOD’S DELIGHT
Between the events of Malachi and Matthew lie over 400 years of divine silence.  By the time Gabriel appears to Mary, God’s revelation seems more myth than memory.  Were I alive then, I might have been tempted to wonder (as I sometimes do now) if God’s silence testified to an ultimate despair over his creation; that He’d perhaps thrown up his hands in disgust, leaving us to our own devices.

But then, in the fullness of time, He sent his son.  Luke reports the angelic fanfare that accompanies the birth of Jesus: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased.”  Reading this line, I’m often surprised by the reminder that God takes pleasure in his people; that as individuals and as a community we can—and do—delight him.  The Olympic sprinter Eric Liddell once told his sister: “God made me fast.  And when I run, I feel his pleasure.”  I need reminding that God delights in his people.  It’s so easy for me to fall into habits of faith characterized too much by lamentation—over my own sin; over the state of the world.  Flannery O’Connor writes, “At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.”

Gennady Spirin’s painting Christmas Angels presents this dichotomy between God’s good will and our despair as the elemental divide between light and darkness.  He represents this opposition with the bold, almost architectural stacking of heavenly light on top of terrestrial shadow.  Closer examination, however, reveals angels descending to attend on the holy family.  Entering our night, their haloes are dim and distant, but not extinguished.  Spirin depicts the world as we so often feel it to be; fundamentally separated from God.  Wallis’ poem echoes the interruption of this feeling: “But it was not silent. / He forever split our darkness / with the proclamation of angels / that the Light of the world was shining.”          

God comes to break into our silence and through our lamentation.  But for those of us who grew up in the church, it is easy to become numb to John’s declaration: “For God so loved the world that He gave his one and only Son.”  Is God’s love active in your faith?  Oswald Chambers states, “The greatest need we have is not to do things, but to believe things.”  The Gospel I live out will not be regarded as good news if I do not believe that he comes to bring peace among those with whom he is pleased. It is this belief that separates two lines in “Oh Holy Night.” “Long lay the world, in sin and error pining / til He appeared and the soul felt its worth.”

This Advent, God again invites you to feel your worth; to know yourself as a subject of his delight.

Prayer
Most loving Father, who wills us to give thanks for all things, to dread nothing but your loss, and to cast all our care on You, who cares for us; preserve us from faithless fears and worldly anxieties, and grant that no clouds of this mortal life may hide from us the light of that love which is immortal, and which You have manifested to us in your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
(From the 1928 Book of Common Prayer)

Phillip Aijian
PhD Candidate
Department, English, UC Irvine