Blue Christmas 2019

Blue Christmas 2019 The Feast of St. Thomas December 21, 2019 One of my friends shared a lovely story on social media this past week about the German writer Franz Kafka. “When he was 40, the renowned Bohemian novelist and short story writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924), who never married and had no children, was strolling through Steglitz Park in Berlin, when he chanced upon a young girl crying her eyes out because she had lost her favorite doll. She and Kafka looked for the doll without success. Kafka told her to meet him there the next day and they would look again. The next day, when they still had not found the doll, Kafka gave the girl a letter "written" by the doll that said, ‘Please do not cry. I have gone on a trip to see the world. I'm going to write to you about my adventures.’ Thus began a story that continued to the end of Kafka’s life. When they would meet, Kafka read aloud his carefully composed letters of adventures and conversations about the beloved doll, which the girl found enchanting. Finally, Kafka read her a letter of the story that brought the doll back to Berlin, and he then gave her a doll he had purchased. ‘This does not look like my doll at all,’ she said. Kafka handed her another letter that explained, ‘My trips, they have changed me.’ The girl hugged the new doll and took it home with her. A year later, Kafka died. Many years later, the now grown-up girl found a letter tucked into an unnoticed crevice in the doll. The tiny letter, signed by Kafka, said, ‘Everything you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.’ It may seem strange to combine this Blue Christmas service with the Feast Day of St. Thomas, which is today and from which our readings come, but that story about Kafka, I think, gets to the heart of both. In the gospel reading, we see Thomas, who was away when the rest of the disciples had a visit from the resurrected Jesus. They all were huddled together in a locked room, afraid and grief-striken. We don’t know what Thomas was doing to not be there, but the very fact that he wasn’t there suggests that he wasn’t so afraid to be out and about. Perhaps he was doing what many of us have done in times of grief—he was trying to keep calm and carry on. Like Kafka’s doll, both Jesus and Thomas have been changed by Jesus’s death, by the love and the loss that came with that. But fearless Thomas is not afraid to ask Jesus for what he needs to be on the same page with the other disciples as a full participant in the astonishing event that is Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. On this night, may we be like Thomas, not afraid to ask God for what we need—to live our lives faithfully, to fully participate in the astonishing event that is Jesus’ resurrection from the dead—the ultimate result of what it means for us in the birth of Emmanuel: God with us. May we who have tasted heartbreak remember the truth of Jesus’s nativity which can never escape the shadow of the cross: ‘Everything you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.’