In the Bleak Midwinter

The Bleak Midwinter carol has been recorded by many choirs, including the Robert Shaw Chorale and the choir of St. John's College, Cambridge, as well as many recording artists, including Julie Andrews, Cyndi Lauper, The Moody Blues, Celtic Woman, James Taylor, Jars of Clay, Sarah Brightman, Loreena McKennitt, and Annie Lennox.

I particularly like Sarah McLachlan's rendition of Bleak Midwinter (Wintersong CD, 2006), because she knows how to do melancholy, and I'm at home with melancholy. Bleak Midwinter calls to mind this time of year in the north, where sunlight is a rarity, and melancholy a staple. Robert Service (1874-1958) wrote about the land of the "midnight sun," but I don't remember a lot of sunshine when I worked in a northern Manitoba nickle mine. It was dark when I went underground in the morning, and it was dark when I emerged from the mine in late afternoon. A sure recipe for melancholy and then some.

A Bleak and Dark Prophet

The bleak and dark midwinter seems a perfect time of year for John the Baptist to emerge on the scene. Actually, he didn't so much emerge as crash upon the scene. He shattered five centuries of prophetic silence. A softer entry would not have escaped notice, but John was a strange and dramatic character. This was a guy who ate grasshoppers and wild honey, and wore something patched together from animal skins. John hung out around the river Jordan; it seemed to be about as far as he would come from his usual haunt in the wilderness.

A woman who received a creche as a gift describes the characters that populated this manger scene as soft and squishy, but for some reason the Joseph character looked wild – red yarn spiking out from his head, giving him an odd and somewhat demented look. In fact, she renamed this character John the Baptist, and substituted one of the innocuous shepherds for the more staid and solid Joseph. She liked the idea of having the disconcerting presence of John the Baptist lurking in the shadows of our manger scenes.

John the Baptist is one of the first characters in the Gospel to announce the good news, but he's not the most attractive or endearing character. He's brash. He's loud. He's insulting. He had the audacity to point out people's bad choices, and rub their faces in it. While munching loudly on his grasshopper-honey-and-assorted-vermin trail mix, John preached repentance. When some newcomers approached, he yelled, "You vipers' brood!" (Matthew 3:7, NEB) "Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" (3:7, NRSV)

John preached about getting right with God, and when for whatever reason a bunch of people responded to him, welcoming his message, and repented and were baptized, you might think John would feel gratified. Uh-uh. Our charming little prophet points out that he could get better spiritual responses from the stones under his feet than he could from the people to whom he was talking! You may be proud of your ethnic and spiritual background, he said, but if you can't produce results, you're deadwood! Into the fire you go! (Matthew 3:9-10) Whereas Jesus used the gentler metaphor of fishing to describe his call to faith, John used the metaphors of an axe and a winnowing fork. (3:10, 12) A harsh and bleak midwinter prophet!

I don't think John the Baptist would last long in most churches. If all you serve up is wrath and condemnation – really – how long can that go on? A friend of mine once attended a church where the entire worship service had a heaviness to it. The preacher, in particular, conveyed no sense of hope, or if he did, he warned them it was many generations away. My friend said he left each worship service feeling worse than when he first entered the service. The Christian life was portrayed as nothing but drudgery, and gathering as a congregation became a dreary and discouraging exercise.

A Bleak, Dark and Violent Biblical Setting

If you're not discouraged yet, let me tell you about the bleak, dark and violent settings in which our Scripture readings are situated. Our lesson from Isaiah was addressed to Israel at a bleak time in its existence. The Israelites, first under the oppressive control of Assyria, were eventually taken into captivity by them. The chronicle of those years, as passed down to us in the stories of 2 Kings, describes their distressing experience as overwhelming and demoralizing. They gave up. Their leaders did what was evil in God's sight. (2 Kings 3:2; 8:18; 13:2; 14:24; etc) Israel is described as a "...sinful nation, people laden with iniquity, ...who have forsaken the Lord, ... (and) who are utterly estranged!" (Isaiah 1:4) And Jerusalem, Isaiah writes, "...has become a whore! She that was full of justice (is) ...now (full of) murderers! Your silver has become dross, your wine ...mixed with water. Your princes are ...companions of thieves ...(who) do not defend the orphan, (or) the widow's cause...." (1:21-23)

Isaiah, indisputably one of the more hopeful books of the Bible, is also full of vivid descriptions of Israel's pathology. Isaiah compares Israel to "...an oak whose leaf withers...." (Isaiah 1:30) Well, we expect leaves to wither, but we also know that while trees with withered leaves appear to be dead, they are simply in a state of dormancy. Come the spring, we expect leaves to reappear. The withering-leaf image is rather optimistic compared to the image Isaiah uses in our reading from chapter 11, where he compares Israel to a stump! A lifeless stump! And stumps are a nuisance, if not a danger, as anyone with farming experience knows.

Isaiah likened Israel to a stump, which was pretty much how they felt. At one time they may have believed they were simply in a state of dormancy, but that time had passed. With no leadership, and intolerable circumstances at the hands of their oppressors, the future of Israel looked as bleak as an old decaying stump.

Our readings from the Gospel of Matthew and Paul's letter to the church in Rome were also written in a bleak and dark time, the Gospel of Matthew written when Israel was under Roman occupation, with a deranged figurehead in charge. The first Gospel itself was written by a fellow who used to profit from the occupation. The setting in our reading from Romans is one of conflict between Jews and Gentiles, an albatross that Jewish and Gentile converts brought into the Church, making life miserable for everyone.

In The Midst of the Bleak and Dark, a Hopeful Sign!

If John the Baptist had the audacity to call a spade a spade, and then some, Isaiah has the audacity to give voice to hope in the bleakest and darkest and most oppressive of times! Israel felt like an old decaying stump, fit for nothing, but Isaiah chose this very image to convey a message of hope to the community of faith. Out of this stump, says Isaiah, out of this symbol of death and decay, will come new life! "A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots." (Isaiah 11:1) And then describing a future Davidic king, and a style of leadership people could only imagine in their wildest dreams, Isaiah describes the Promised One: One on whom the spirit of the Lord will rest, who will have a spirit of wisdom and understanding, and counsel and might, and who with righteousness (will) judge the poor, and with equity the meek of the earth. (11:2-5)

If those who heard Isaiah were incredulous about this promise, they found equally unbelievable Isaiah's portrait of a peaceable kingdom, in which all assortment of beasts and humans, the fierce and the vulnerable, co-exist in harmony! New life is going to appear in unexpected places, and out of situations which are normally recipes for death, destruction, and chaos – like wolves and lambs put in the same pen – new modes of cooperation will be born! Situations normally full of tension and violence will see the birth of new expressions of peace! It's a wonderful vision. A wonderful and compelling promise, that out of the bleak midwinter of human experience new life will emerge.

The Apostle Paul was not hesitant to wade into the morass of Jewish-Gentile relations because he had read Isaiah, and he wrote, "Whatever was written in former days was written ...so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope" (Romans 15:4), which then inspires him to trust that "the God of steadfastness and encouragement (will allow us) to live in harmony with one another...." (15:5) He goes on to encourage believers in Rome to "welcome one another," and by "one another" he's not referring to those we find it easy to welcome. He ends our reading with a benediction: "May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit." (15:13)

Hope in the Midst of a Bleak Spiritual Landscape

These passages are immensely encouraging, especially to those who find themselves in the midst of a bleak spiritual landscape. Some of us know what it means to "sit in darkness". (Luke 1:79) We have lost loved ones. We struggle with cancer. Accidents leave us with no opportunity to say goodbye. Our homes are familiar with family conflict, which can escalate, as we saw this week when a young man shot his father in a public library! An economic slump is discouraging, especially if it means loss of employment for us. It's unsettling when our police force beats up people for no reason at all, and it's even more discouraging when the police association makes no effort at all to distance itself from these occurrences.

We long for light in this bleak and barren spiritual landscape, but perhaps we're too discouraged to put much effort into improving things. Martin Marty (1928- ), a former columnist in The Christian Century, tells the story of a man who had attended one too many churches where he heard the preacher say, "Don't try to impress God with your works," or "Don't attempt to please God with your merits," or "Don't try to keep the rules and regulations and thus win your way." When he visited churches like that, he looked around at slumbering and casual Christians and asked himself, "Who's trying?" Whatever our state of lassitude, the Scriptures speak to our condition, and fortify us with the qualities necessary for perseverance, even in the bleakest and darkest of times.

There is a painting by George Frederick Watts (1817-1904), a nineteenth-century English painter, entitled "Hope" (1886). His painting portrays a battered and bowed woman sitting on a globe, blindfolded, and clutching a wooden lyre with only one string left intact. She sits in a hunched position, with her head next to the instrument, perhaps so she can hear the faint music she is making with the sole remaining string.

Watts' melancholy depiction of hope was criticised, G.K. Chesterton suggesting that a better title would be "Despair". With all due respect to Mr. Chesterton, whose turn of phrase I much admire, I think Watts' depiction is right on the mark. Watts' painting, by the way, was done after the death of his adopted daughter. Christian hope has seen everything and endured everything, but it stubbornly refuses to despair. We believe in the power of God to transform even evil into good. It was with this deep-seated conviction, and with the conviction that Isaiah's prophecy will one day come to pass, that Paul concludes our passage from Romans with the words: "May the God of hope bring you such joy and peace in your faith that the power of the Holy Spirit will remove all bounds to hope." (Romans 15:13, PHL) May it be so. AMEN