Dark and Cold: Warmth and Light, A Christmas Message

It is two days before Christmas and the days are getting longer. That's a bit of a big deal for us who live north of 60 degrees latitude. We watched with interest and excitement a few days ago as the earth's shadow passed across the moon on the evening of the solstice, turning the moon a rusty red. It was a crisp clear night and we and our vehicles were parked all along the ice road which runs across Yellowknife Bay from Yellowknife to the community of Dettah.

The next morning I had the honour and privilege of travelling north of the Arctic Circle to the community of Fort McPherson to take part in a commemoration of the 100^th Anniversary of the “Lost Patrol” - a tragic story in the annals of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police – which later became the Royal Canadian Mounted Police – when four members of the RNWMP set out on a regular winter patrol to Dawson City. Unfortunately through a combination of never having done the patrol in that direction, terrible weather with the temperature plunging to the minus 60's Fahrenheit and of course the limited light at this time of year, they never made it. All of them perished in the frozen land, but only after a terrible forty seven days of trying to find the route and running out of provisions.

Cold and dark are a fact of life for us who live in the north. Many of the Christmas carols we sing at this time of year make mention of the cold – perhaps more fitting to our Canadian climate than to that of the first-century Middle East, and the dark, as the shepherds beheld the choir of angels.

But the birth of a child in a stable, in a place that was not home for Mary or Joseph, reminds us that so often the gospel is an upside down story – a story of the surprise of God's presence in unexpected ways, a story of the last being first, a story of the last and the least being first at the feast. And so, I look to the cold and the dark for the lessons they can teach me about God's presence, and I think of the resourcefulness and courage of people who face hardship and trouble with faith in the power and presence of God to sustain them.

We talk of light – and light is wonderful, and revelatory, and for people who live north of the Arctic Circle – like the people of Fort McPherson and other communities, there is a big celebration when the sun returns on or about January 6 (how wonderful is that little connection between Epiphany and the return of the sun!), but I invite you to think of how many good ideas, how many inventions, how many lives were transformed in the dark of night – in dreams that became fulfilled, in bedtime meditations, in the ideas that popped into active minds, and in that birth which we celebrate at Christmas – in the darkness of a Bethlehem night.

May your Christmas celebrations – in worship, in the gathering of family in whatever forms they take, in communities across our wonderful and diverse church in this conference, be ones which bring out the value and support of tradition, but may they also be ones which are open to insight and wisdom in the unexpected, in the upside down way that God has always spoken.

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