ADVENT, CHRISTMAS & EPIPHANY 2011–2012
Year “B”
“Real Darkness—Real Light”
General Theme
This Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany, provide opportunities for us to reflect about darkness and light, to notice the places in our lives of darkness, and to wait for Jesus to be born in our hearts anew and to fill us with light.
There are so many kinds of darkness. Darkness can be warm and friendly or it can be powerful and awe-inspiring. Sometimes it is bleak and long and lonely, and sometimes it is a welcome rest at the end of the day. Darkness can be scary, it can be intimate, it can be the place where we feel God most strongly or it can be the place where we most feel the absence of God.
Light, on the other hand, overcomes the darkness. But it also exposes what the darkness hides and opens the possibility that even those things hidden in the darkness can and will be overcome in the light of Jesus.
The season of Advent re-introduces us to a world of wonder. If Christ can be born—a baby in a stable—then, truly, anything can happen—even hope, even real live hope, shining like a light in the darkness. If Christ can come in vulnerable grace, then anything is possible—anything at all. Our lives can be changed. Our world can be changed. We come to see that no place is absolutely pitch dark. No matter what, still the light of God’s hope is shining.