December 21, 2025
• Rev. Mindie Moore
Advent Week 4: Where Are You Christmas?
“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day”
Luke 2:8-14
9am Service Pep Talk:
· Show slide from last week
· Try it out for a few months
· TODAY:
o Jim Ramsey is going to be leading prayer after service for the next few weeks as we prepare to grow to two services. Anyone can join!
o Matt Brown is going to be at the table in the Gathering Area after to answer questions and help you sign up to be part of it
PRAY
It’s our fourth week of our Advent series, “Where are You Christmas?” where we are looking at the stories behind the songs of the season. And today is our LAST Sunday before Christmas Eve! And this Sunday is always a really special one because it’s a Sunday where I attempt to talk less (you can let me know how I did after the service) and we try to create more space to experience God’s Spirit. We know that this month can be so hectic. It can be so joyful. It can be so heavy...it can just be all the things.
And so today I’m only going to talk for about 15 more minutes, and then we will have an extended response time at the end. You’ll get to move around the room a bit, there will be some extra music, and I just encourage you to take that extra time to let yourself be fully present. We had a gift exchange on the St. Luke’s staff this past week and Leslie Robbins, whose one of our Youth Ministry team members, she encouraged all of us to just be fully in that room. To laugh, to let our shoulders sort of lower out of our ears, to just be here.
That’s my invitation to you today. To just be here. And let yourself encounter the love and hope that Jesus brings us.
The song we’re looking at today is called “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” And it’s a song that very much invites us into that encounter with Jesus’ love and hope. It’s a song that tells the journey of what it’s like to look pain and disillusionment in the face...to acknowledge the brokenness of the world around us...and to still let ourselves believe that God is very much at work.
It was written by the famous poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as a response to the different tragedies he had witnessed, both on a large scale and in his personal life. First came the death of wife in a fire. It was a horrible, tragic accident that left him reeling. In the immediate days after her death he was consumed with grief and wrote in his journal: (SLIDE) “I can make no record of these days. Better leave them wrapped in silence. Perhaps someday God will give me peace.””
Beyond his personal heartbreak, the Civil War was going on at the time and he was watching his country tear itself in two. As the conflict escalated, his oldest son left home to enlist in the Union Army, where he ended up suffering a battlefield injury that almost paralyzed him and took him six months to recover from.
All of this left Longfellow bitter and disillusioned. His grief was deep and his country was falling apart. In his poem, he wrote of the cynicism he was feeling and how he felt this sort of terrible irony as he heard the church bells in his town ring. It felt ridiculous to have this celebration of Christmas while his country and his personal life were in shambles.
But
But the thing that makes this song so powerful...is that this bitterness and despair begins to shift into something else. It begins to turn into hope. He has this realization that YES, things ARE so broken...but God is done.
Listen to a couple of stanzas from the poem, where you can hear the shift that takes place (SLIDE):
And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said;
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”
That line in the poem “peace on earth, good will towards men,” comes from the Scripture we read today out of Luke 2. And in that Scripture, we see this group of people, the shepherds, in a position to make their own sort of shift. For them, it isn’t despair to hope, but it’s from fear to rejoicing.
I want you to imagine what it would have been like to be the shepherds on that first Christmas night. We have to remember that they were just out there, doing their thing, and then this really jarring thing happens to them. As I read through this passage again this year, I found myself wondering what they were carrying with them into their work that night. This isn’t in the Bible reading, but it is a bit of a glimpse into their context. I just wonder if they were living with a heightened state of anxiety because of the circumstances of their world.
After all, they were living in an occupied land. The Romans were in charge, they were ruthless, and whether or not those governmental systems DIRECTLY impacted people like shepherds...it was in the climate. It would have been in the background, shaping their wider world.
And so I just wonder, when the angel appeared, when the sky filled with all these other angels...what was going through the shepherds’ minds in that moment? Did they think something bad was happening? With the loud noises and the lights, did they were under attack and that it was the end for them? Whatever they were thinking, fear was their first response. And it’s their fear that the angels speak their message of “Peace on earth, good will to men” into.
What despair or fear are we holding that we need God to speak this sort of message into right now? What kinds of shifts do we need to be open to making?
You might remember that back in January of this year, devastating fires tore through Southern California. If you were around this community then, you probably heard me talk about them, because one of the communities that was impacted by the fires, Altadena, is very near to our family’s heart. Altadena is the next community north of Pasadena, where we used to live, and many of our friends had homes there. We knew several families who lost their homes in the January fires, and the grief of all that loss was bigger than I can really have words for.
The other day I saw a Pasadena Now news clip pop up. It was a story about Christmas Tree Lane, a street in Altadena where every year, these giant cedar trees that were planted in 1885 are decorated by the residents to create a mile-long display of Christmas lights. It’s absolutely magical. In the past, the houses around that area would go all out with their decorations and traveling up Christmas Tree Lane felt like something from a movie.
None of those houses are there anymore. And the assumption was that Christmas Tree Lane couldn’t happen this year, less than a year after so much destruction. Despair and fear...very much some of the loudest feelings in this story.
But they aren’t the WHOLE story. Here’s the video I watched:
CHRISTMAS TREE LANE VIDEO (1:08)
The ability to name the grief, the fear, the pain we feel but then at the same time being able to embrace the hope, the joy, the possibility for something new and good...that’s what it looks like to have faith in this world. Sometimes having that faith means believing in possibilities that seems impossible and that
have a way of turning our despair into hope and our fear into peace in ways that are beyond us...in ways that only God can do.
I don’t know about you, but I can do a great job making my faith pretty academic. I love to study and learn all this stuff. But then I’m also confronted with the fact that our whole faith story is built upon this completely surprising and unexpected act of God. I can’t really explain it to you...I can learn and read and preach, but there are ways that God works that are truly beyond my understanding.
And maybe that’s how it's supposed to be. Maybe it’s supposed to make us a little bit terrified, a little bit out of our element. Maybe we’re supposed to see the work of God with wide eyes and open hearts and the nervous expectation that something could be happening that is beyond us, but that is exactly what this weary world needs.
And as we see the work of God unfolding, we get to be part of it. That’s the beauty in the shepherds’ story. Not only do they have this unexplainable encounter with angels, not only do they move from fear to peace, but THEN they become these messengers who tell all these people about what God has done! It’s a huge shift.
And I just wonder for us, how WE are being invited into this kind of presence in the world. We SEE what’s dark, we WITNESS the pain and grief among us. And as God’s people, we’re called to also see hope in the middle of it all.
And maybe we’re supposed to not only SEE, but BE a living act of hope in this world. Maybe our lives can do the work of the shepherds, the work of the Christmas bells and ring out something that has the power to change whatever seems hopeless in our world.
So we want to invite you into some reflection and response with that in mind. In just a moment, we’re going to play a version of the song “I Head the Bells On Christmas Day.” And while that song plays, you can come up to the front and receive a piece of paper and a bell. When you receive the paper, you’ll hear these words (SLIDE):
Your song matters.
And when you receive the bell, you’ll hear (SLIDE):
Ring it out.
At the end, people are invited to come up and receive paper “your song matters” and bell “ring it out” (Bells by Audrey Assad plays during this moment)
Once people return to their seats:
Have you ever thought about how bells work? Like the mechanics of the whole thing? It’s admittedly not something I spend a lot of time thinking about, but the way it works is really a perfect illustration of what we’re talking about today. With a bell, you’ve got this sort of hollow container, and in the container is this little hammer-type thing inside that when it pushes against the walls of the container...it makes a sound. Longfellow described that song as being “wild and sweet” in his poem.
What if we thought about our lives like this “wild and sweet” sound? What if we used our lives to act like bells...to push against the walls of darkness that we encounter in the world?
I’m going to read some different types of darkness that exist in our world right now, and as you hear something that you would like your life to push back against, go ahead and ring your bell. Don’t be shy...you can ring it with enthusiasm! Pay attention to the things that grab your heart and let yourself respond:
· Climate change
· War abroad
· Violence in our neighborhoods
· Political unrest
· Immigration raids
· Antisemitism
· Racial injustice
· Broken education systems
· Religion used as a weapon
· LGBTQIA discrimination
· Lack of affordable housing
I’m aware that this exercise is both kind of touching and also a bummer. Because we hear all of these things...and it can be overwhelming. We wonder where God is in all of this...and that’s the RIGHT thing to wonder. It’s a good question to ask.
And maybe...God is working in us. Maybe the peace on earth we long for, the hope we want to find, begins with us. Maybe we get to have our own pivot moments where we see and name the despair, and we also see and name the wild and sweet song that can be played through our lives.
RING BELL by myself...notice how quiet it is....it does make a sound, it’s worth doing. If I stop ringing it, it’s quiet. Nothing is pushing back, no sound is being made. Even if I’m the ONLY ONE ringing...it matters.
NOW, ring all together. Notice what THAT does.
During this next song, you can write what your song is, the way that you want to live to push back on the darkness that breaks your heart, on that piece of paper you were given and bring it up to hang it on these bells. As these fill with our responses, remember the power of these bells ringing all together. Remember the noise that can make, the sound that can fill the air with, the impact it can have.
Sing Is He Worthy as a response...during that song write on piece of paper the thing that is “their song” and can bring it up and put on the display
KIDS RETURN DURING THIS SONG.
Once song is done, kids return and come up front. Mindie reads poem once they are in place:
The Growing Edge (Howard Thurman)
All around us worlds are dying and new worlds are being born;
All around us life is dying and life is being born:
The fruit ripens on the tree;
The roots are silently at work in the darkness of the earth
Against the time when there shall be new leaves, fresh blossoms, green fruit.
Such is the growing edge!
It is the extra breath from the exhausted lung,
The one more thing to try when all else has failed,
The upward reach of life when weariness closes in upon all endeavor.
This is the basis of hope in moments of despair,
The incentive to carry on when times are out of joint
And men have lost their reason; the source of confidence
When worlds crash and dreams whiten into ash.
The birth of a child - life's most dramatic answer to death -
This is the Growing Edge incarnate,
Look well to the growing edge!
The words on these papers, the kids before us, the people that fill this room...this is where we look to find the growing edge. This is where we make those shifts that we so desperately need to make. This is where we listen for the sound of hope and life and goodness. This is where we SEE and JOIN in the work God is doing.
I was reflecting on the last year with Zack the other night...and it’s been a hard one. I don’t need to pretend, you lived it too. And some of that hard stuff, we shared together, some of that hard stuff was deeply personal for each of us. But as I reflect on some of the things I’ve seen that could easily send me into despair or fear and that could tempt me to stay there...I want to remember THIS. I want to remember US. I want to remember the work of God’s Spirit in and through God’s people. Because THAT is a wild and sweet song, and it’s one that I always need to be open to hearing.
We’re going to end our time together this morning with...maybe a DIFFERENT kind of wild and sweet song. As we close today, I’m aware that for some of us, we will be back here on Wednesday for Christmas Eve services and for others, we will be somewhere else that night. And so I wanted to ask the kids to help send us off into whatever this week of Christmas looks like, to help sing us out today.
Sing “We Wish You A Merry Christmas”
Merry Christmas, stop by the table, go in peace. AMEN!