I Need a Silent Night

As we enter this holy week of our Christian year, I am reminded of the frantic pace at which many of us enter Christmas.  This has been very real for me as this is my first Christmas without a Christmas break in addition to my first Christmas as a pastor.  It has been hectic, buying and wrapping gifts, sending cards out to friends and family, trying to prepare for our annual Christmas Eve service to be followed the next morning by Sunday worship on Christmas Day.

In my conversations with many of our congregants, however, this frenetic pace is common to many of us in this season.  Teachers and students talk about the stress of final exams, parents comment on the need to get presents wrapped but also make sure their kids get to various Christmas parties.  Many members have shared with me about the upcoming travel plans that will take them hundreds of miles away, or they talk about the need to clean the house and finish the preparations to welcome children and grandchildren into their homes.  Others are coping with illness and grief. 

I've been reminded in this season of a song by Amy Grant appropriately titled, "I Need A Silent Night."  In the song she laments the traffic, rushing around, short tempers, and crying children that often accompany our preparation of the season, and in the chorus she sings out:

I need a silent night, a holy night

to hear an angel voice

through the chaos and the noise.

I need a midnight clear

a little peace right here,

to end this crazy day with a silent night.

A silent night is often a hard thing to come by in this time of year, but that is exactly how our Lord comes to us.  Luke speaks about the census in the Roman Empire that takes the holy couple from their home in Nazareth and forces them to travel to David's ancestral home of Bethlehem, a distance of about eighty miles.  Bethlehem was a small town, probably without the appropriate accomodations for all the travlers, so the town must have been chaotic, a little like wandering through the halls of a local shopping mall for us these days.  Mary and Joseph are housed in a barn in someone's backyard, and then, in the silence of the night, into the chaos of the world around them, the Savior of the nations comes.

Our lives are busy in these days, and many of us are travelers, finding ourselves in foreign places with strange companions in the stable.  And we are in need of a silent night, a time to pause, to sit by the candle light, and to listen for the voices of angels around us.  The messiah arrives in the silence, not with parades and fireworks, so let us find some silence in these days to meet him once again.