Longest Night Saint Mark’s Saturday, December 20, 2025, Ezekiel 36:26-28, Romans 8:31-39, Luke 5:17-20, 24-25
During one of our recent storms with high winds, a tree fell on our next-door neighbor’s house, causing a waterfall to flood into her bedroom through a gaping hole in her roof. Soon after that, our neighbors across the street cut down all the trees in their yard, except for one./ Now, I am not certain whether cutting down the green space is the perfect remedy for further roof leaks, but it speaks to the fear and anxiety after a disaster.
If you connect to social media, you will believe that the world is comprised of beautiful people with even more spectacular children who have no troubles. They sail smoothly through life, with only an occasional bump in the road.
But we know in our hearts this is not true.1 We are all humans, wounded, with periods of anxiety, pain, and occasionally sheer terror. Terrible things do happen to all of us: divorce,/ death,/children in trouble,/job loss,/ illness. We sometimes live with anxiety, like a second skin. Fear becomes locked inside our bodies and our daily lives. We cry./ We try to talk./ We try not to talk./ Sometimes, we scream./ We try sleeping./ We take drugs or alcohol./ We eat ourselves sick./ We starve ourselves empty./ Nothing works entirely. /
This Christmas season of love can make our hearts ache even more. We remember when our children were small, all “snuggled in their beds,”/ and our parents and grandparents were alive, helping us out. Sometimes we even forget and put an extra table setting for dinner./ ”Oh,/ they are gone now.”2/
We are told that our fear and sadness will disappear if we have faith. We are not good Christians if we harbor fear or anxiety. This does not help./ We reach out to the gospel of self-help. “Try harder!” “Be positive!” But we feel like floating astronauts untethered. We realize we are no longer drivers of our own destiny. Eventually,/ finally,/ we realize we can no longer play this game of solitaire./ We need other people, a community, to help us through it./
Kate Bowler, an Episcopal priest teaching at Duke who developed stage 4 cancer at age 35, nicknamed her community “The Rowing or Crew Team.” They all take turns pulling on the oars. At times, there is a “man down”/ who needs to be carried. The members take turns/ carrying/ and rowing.
Betsy Singleton Snyder, a local Methodist minister, gave birth to triplets and developed a life-threatening heart condition after delivery. She called her team “The Squad” while her husband traveled to Washington as our congressman.3
Kate and Betsy’s stories relive tonight’s gospel./ Friends of a paralyzed man bring him on a bed to see Jesus. There is such a large crowd that they cannot even reach the door. They think outside the box,/ go up to the roof,/ break through the sycamore beams, clay, and earth plaster,/ and lower the man to Jesus. Jesus heals him./ The man who comes in through the roof/ now walks out through the front door. It is a sacred story of a community bringing to Jesus one of their crew members who is paralyzed.
We, as well, can be brought to a place of love when we become paralyzed with fear and anxiety, when we become ill,/when a loved one dies,/ when we lose our job,/ or when our family system breaks up. Healing is not fixing the situation/ but allowing a community to walk beside us, allowing us to be lowered into the unknown, into a new way of life./ In our grief recovery group, Walking the Mourner’s Path, which will begin in April, the new life is learning in community how to honor the person we loved who died./ In 12-step recovery, we have a moment of clarity/ when we decide we can no longer do this alone and seek out a community to hear stories / from those who walked our path/ and found a new life. These saints who help us/ put their own agenda on pause/ as they decide to remember/ what they sometimes would rather forget. /Our self-sufficiency is a sham. ///////
But, Wait! There is more! This is not the final message of Luke’s story.1 Jesus leaves the house,/ and the crowds follow,/continuously talking about the miracle they witnessed. The fortunate homeowner who entertained Jesus and the large crowds now looks down on his floor littered with broken
timber beams, clay, and dirt. We hope he also has a community that will come to place a tarp over his roof until he can fix it,/ as happened to our next-door neighbor. But then, suddenly, the homeowner looks up through the hole in his ceiling and sees only a beautiful/ dark blue sky/ filled with stars.// This is one more truth. When we can see even the slightest sign of “beauty or light” in these times of darkness,/ just something as simple as a flower, a note, a call, a bird, a song,/ or the blue sky, we can be guided by a north star out of darkness.
A post note to our neighbor, who cut down all his trees but one. Recently, that tree fell on his neighbor’s house! Trees are interconnected, maybe our best example of community. When the tree’s community died, so did its nourishment. /
The gospel homeowner is witnessing a fundamental Christian truth/: that there may be a hole in our roof once/ or several times in our lifetimes. God doesn’t promise us a prosperous, healthy, and happy life that we dream we deserve. But God promises to be present,/ often in the form of a community such as this one here tonight at Saint Mark’s./ God constantly calls us to a community where we find hope,/ and we realize our protection is the arms of our God beside us in the form of our community. Hope comes from releasing all the energy of trying to rearrange the past/ as we learn to forgive. Hope comes as we let go of our panic about the future. All that anxious energy can now be used to walk in the storm in the present moment, and know that our God is walking beside us like the paralytic’s friends. God’s loving arms through our community will never abandon us. This is hope, quaking hope.4 /Emily Dickinson even better describes this hope as “the thing with feathers that perches in the soul-
And sings the tune/ without the cords-
And never/ stops-at all- 5///
“Blessed are we, the anxious,
with eyes wide open to the lovely and the awful.
Blessed are we, the aware,
knowing that the only sane thing to do in such a world
is to admit the fear that sits in our peripheral vision.
Blessed are we, the hopeful,
eyes searching for the horizon,
ready to meet the next miracle,/ the next surprise.
Yes, blessed are we, the grateful/
Awake/ to the terrible,/ beautiful/ star-filled, longest night.” 1
1Kate Bowler, Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day! (Convergent Books 2024) preface.
2 Kate Bowler, “What is Advent,” Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day! (Convergent Books 2024) p. 184.
3Betsy Singleton Snyder, Stepping on Cheerios (Abington Press 2017).
4Sam Wells, interview with Kate Bowler at Duke Divinity’s Convocation and Pastors School
5 Emily Dickson, “’ Hope’ Is The Thing with Feathers,” The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.