Bishop Andrew Asbil has shared a video message for Christmas. You can find the full text below.
In December, the days get darker. As the cold creeps in and the last stubborn leaves are finally blown to the gutter, the nights grow long and the wind blows more sharply. The earth freezes, and we know we’re on the cusp of many cold winter nights.
And a different kind of darkness weighs on our hearts, too. We see grief and pain around us, everywhere we look. In people forced to seek shelter in tents. In the threat of shuttered overdose prevention sites. In political extremism on the rise and the voices of hatred emboldened. In children buried in the rubble in Gaza. The brokenness of our world is all too plain, and we cannot look away.
But even so, as the darkness looms and things feel their bleakest, twinkling lights pierce through the twilight and “Merry Christmases” begin to fill the air. Joy creeps in. When we least expect it, a Word comes. The true light, which enlightens everyone, is coming into the world.
The story of the birth of Jesus comes not in comfort but in discomfort, in a moment of frantic political change. A humble couple, a long journey, a precarious beginning. And yet – joy, joy that cannot be contained. An angelic chorus fills the night air, and shepherds run through the streets telling everyone what they have witnessed.
Joy cannot be suppressed. Joy is richer than happiness and deeper than optimism, rooted in the promise of God’s love for us. It transforms grief into hope – a song that rises above sorrow, a strength that carries us through despair.
And we are called to that joy even in the midst of anguish. As theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in 1942, the joy of God “does not deny the anguish, when it is there, but finds God in the midst of it, in fact precisely there.”
The Word becomes flesh. God pitches a tent with us in the midst of our brokenness, our pain, our uncertainty. And nothing – not things present nor things to come, nor anything else in all creation – can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
We are called to be a people renewed and transformed, to bring that joy into the brokenness of our world, to shine a light in the darkest places. To let joy overflow into our lives and our neighbourhoods. To proclaim our joy as Christ’s own children.
We yearn for a time and a day when all things will be made new in joy and light and life. When our world, broken as it is, will be healed, and every tear wiped away. And we know that day is coming.
What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it.
