(Sermon only) THE LONGEST NIGHT AND THE IRRESISTIBLE DAWN UU Church of Berkeley December 21, 2025

Has

anybody else felt like maybe cancelling

Christmas?

Oh, good. It's not just a minister

thing.

There's at least one

bahham bug.

It's that feeling George Bailey has

when he finds Zuzu sitting on her bed

holding a rose she's brought home crest

fallen that some of the petals have

fallen off. He's been snapping at people

all day long.

And in the midst of the worst day of

George Bailey's life, he turns and

pretends to repair the flower.

Cuz she says, "Look, Daddy, paste it."

So he he pretends to repair the flower

and tucks the petals in his pocket.

In the midst of his dark night of the

soul, when George Bailey is snapping and

feeling like it would have been better

if he had never been born at all, he

manages somehow to speak tenderly to his

daughter

to offer her on a night when clearly

she's she's feeling there's something in

the air

a glimpse of the irresistible dawn.

Put your perfect flower in the glass of

water by the bedside table. He says,

"Get some sleep and you can dream about

it and it will be a whole garden."

"It will," she asks with amazement.

"Uh-huh."

he manages to get out.

Look well to the growing edge, wrote the

20th century grand theologian,

leader of the fellowship for all peoples

in San Francisco, mentor of Martin

Luther King Jr., Howard Thurman. Look

well to the growing edge. 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 a 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 the child, life's most

dramatic answer to death. This is the

growing edge incarnate.

Look well to the growing edge.

You know, like Thurman, I believe in a

God that is always beckoning us, always

inviting us and accompanying us along

that growing edge.

And I know this time of year, especially

if I say that word God, it might make

you think of like a Santa Claus kind of

God who's out there somewhere far away

judging the naughty and the nice

deciding where to bestow the gifts.

But this

God of the irresistible dawn, this God

of invitation and accompaniment, this

God I'm talking about is more like the

spirits from uh Dickens A Christmas

Carol,

bearing intimate witness

through every longest night, offering

some glimpse of what it would mean to

awaken to a new dawn.

Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol uh just

a little while after starting to attend

a Unitarian church.

Uh and because it was so formative

uh in creating the way we celebrate

Christmas today, a Christmas carol and

and the Christmas spirit and the the way

that Dickens apparently 17 years he

spent touring the world performing his

nolla.

this this formative work of modern

Christmas. Unitarians sometimes like to

take take credit for the invention of

Christmas

and you can feel it in in the Christmas

Carol and I know you must have

experienced it in one way or another. It

has such a solid central place in the

culture. You hopefully have seen what I

for me is the definitive version which

is A Muppets Christmas Carol.

uh but it's taken many many forms.

It has throughout it that joy of the

social gospel.

The Unitarians of Dickens day these

wellto-do wealthy folks welleducated

preaching to use their place in society

to help those who were not as

advantaged.

It contains within it another hallmark

of that era of Unitarianism, a a

religious epiphany that requires

no Jesus.

This moment of awakening to a holy

message without a singular savior.

I do think it's an interesting question

that it asks. How is someone who has

been so thoroughly corrupted, so

shaped throughout their whole life

by greed?

How are they to be saved

from the longest night?

The first spirit, of course, the ghost

of Christmas past, takes us on a

whirlwind tour of Scroo's life.

Do you remember the feezywig scene?

He's celebrating at the party. Scrooge

is so happy, so enamored with his boss

Fezywig, who has with his large decided

to offer joy at this time of year to all

who work for him.

Scrooge the apprentice, is in awe. We we

catch a glimpse of Scroo's

desire

to have that capacity to be that that

one who could bestow this kind of

generosity

on those who depend on him.

But the next scene something must have

happened because now his fiance Belle is

leaving him.

Belle has noticed that Scroo's love of

money is eclipsing his love of her, his

love of the people in his life.

So I I got to wondering

what happened

in that span of years from that grateful

apprentice so enamored with feeziwig's

large s to become the miser so smitten

with gain he loses the woman he loves.

Maybe it's because this is the time of

life I'm I'm living through right now.

But I wonder what what could happen if

we could see one more scene. He's he's

grown now. Not the apprentice at the

party, but a man whose shoulders are

heavy with the burden of adult

responsibility. He stays late

in my imagining while others go home.

He tells himself this is diligence.

He tells himself

love will understand. He tells himself

the world is hard

and he is learning how not to be broken

by it.

When his beloved comes to visit, he

listens with half an ear. His eyes keep

drifting to the unreconciled ledger.

Maybe she watches him count. Not money

exactly, but some kind of idea of

safety. Enough saved, enough secured,

enough armored against the future.

Perhaps she gently asks the kind of

question she must have tried before

delivering the news that it was over.

The moment when the growing edge, that

hint of dawn, that enunciation

beckons. Ebenezer, when did you believe

begin to believe? When did you begin to

believe you were alone in this,

but that holy invitation is not a

command.

And Scroo's story inside is too

powerful. I'm doing this for us,

perhaps, he says

in a distracted tone.

The stories we tell ourselves,

longest night stories, stories that keep

us stuck.

And then those stories that give us a

glimpse, irresistible dawn stories,

stories that set us free. Do you know

these stories that I'm talking about

that they live in you?

the stories and the rituals of this time

of year of so many ways of trying to

embody in our own small human lives

this truth of the cosmic dance of the

solstice.

Our attempt to put in human terms

this great order that we find as the sun

returns year after year. And these

stories, they have power, right? They

shape our lives.

You probably know the story of the

Christmas trenches,

the truce in 1914,

reported by firsthand accounts in the

newspapers

a week after it began.

Here's what Graham Williams of the Fifth

London Rifle Brigade

said. First, the Germans would sing one

of their carols, and we would sing one

of ours until when we started up, "Oh,

come all ye faithful," the Germans

immediately joined in singing the same

hymn with Latin words, Adeste Fidelis.

And I thought, well, this is really a

most extraordinary thing. Two nations,

both singing the same carol in the

middle of a war.

They came out in no man's land between

the trenches and buried their dead. They

exchanged gifts, some of them even. One

soldier wrote of making his sleeping

hole a little more comfortable

with fresh hay.

Amidst a very long night,

dawn came with a surprising glimmer of

shared humanity.

I've had this feeling just a few times

in my life.

Probably never as deeply or profoundly

as when either of my children were born.

The feeling it's a bit hard to describe.

Lightaded

is a good place to start. A struck

gives a better sense of scale. It's the

feeling that comes when your whole being

has just been turned upside down and

your mind and your heart are racing to

catch up. I think it's probably best

captured in that first moment after the

the monumental event has occurred.

Receiving the news you've been longing

to hear, getting engaged, graduating

from school, a book just published, a

dream job just landed, the championship

match won. And then you walk out into

the world,

walking down the same street you've

walked down countless times before along

the same ordinary row of houses on the

same ordinary sidewalk on its familiar

cracked gray ground. And yet nothing is

the same or ever will be again.

And you might be grinning a silly

eartoear grin at the confused strangers

passing by. And you try to forgive them

their confusion because even though it

feels like there should be a bright neon

sign flashing above your head to share

your news with the world, you know that

they have no idea that the world has

forever changed.

No idea that they are passing by one who

has just been anointed by the universe.

One who has been crowned by the

irresistible dawn.

graduate,

new hire, writer, winner, lover, mother,

father, grandparent, one more redeemer.

And you might gushingly tell them the

good news.

Most likely it it it splirts and

splutters out of you like Jimmy Stewart

in well in anything, but

especially

as George Bailey and It's a Wonderful

Life when he just found Zuzu's pedals in

his pocket

and he's racing home

remembering how his life is worth

living. Merry Christmas, movie house.

Merry Christmas Emporium. Merry

Christmas you wonderful old building and

loan.

The word for this feeling in the

Christian vocabulary is salvation.

It's what you see written across Jimmy

Stewart's face when he's hugging his

children close. the whole feeling of the

room as neighbor after neighbor steps

forward and pours cash on the table to

save that wonderful old building and

loan.

Whether you know it through the little

baby born in a manger under an apicious

star or through tending the fire through

the longest night until a light in the

east heralds the birth of a new day.

Whether you found salvation in a handful

of petals or a moment of peace

of rest

amidst the party,

life's growing edge will keep seeking

you out.

Eventually, the top brass put an end to

the Christmas truce.

After the orders had come down, Captain

Charles Stockwell of the Second Royal

Welch Fuselers

wrote this. I fired three shots into the

air

and put up a flag with Merry Christmas

on the parapit.

A German put up a sheet with thank you

on it and the German captain appeared on

the parapit. We both bowed and saluted

and got down in our respective trenches

and he fired two shots in the air

and the war was on again.

Unfortunately, one moment of religious

epiphany

doesn't change everything for good the

way it does for Scrooge.

Scrooge was better than his word,

Dickens tells us, and lived every moment

of the rest of his life according to the

newfound generosity

from his encounter with the spirits

became a second father to Tiny Tim.

If only it were that easy.

Cut to the day when Bob Cratchet

organizes the clerks to form a union in

the picket line outside his office. The

thought must cross Scrooge's mind, even

after all I've done for you and your

family.

And we wait and watch.

How will he square his moral awakening

with the pressures of his fiduciary

responsibility to his shareholders?

How do you

keep your integrity

in the face of a world that wants to

drive you crazy with distraction and

anesthetize you to your own deepest

intuitions?

How do you

summon the courage to put your body on

the line like our church member Jennifer

McDougall did this week along with other

interfaith leaders to shut down Ice

Court in San Francisco?

How do you try yet again to stay

connected to that relative who's so hard

to love but who you don't want to feel

alone at the holidays? How do you speak

your truth to the boss who's forgotten

to hold on to their own moral agency in

the workplace?

How do you keep faith with the

irresistible doll?

I want to leave you with a a last image.

This is what the old universalist

preacher Bucky McKeman would talk about.

He imagined God, the universalist God,

this mysterious God of love, yanking the

last unrepentant sinner into heaven,

kicking and screaming.

This is the salvific message of our

faith. It's the holy truth that our

Unitarian Universalism asks each of us

to proclaim. No matter how much you're

in debt or what trouble you face with

the law, no matter how you've given

yourself away, trying to take care of

others or separated yourself entirely

trying to find safety, no matter if

you've ever been able to make love work

or did everything to your kids that your

mother did to you that you said you

would never do to them.

No matter if you've never made it to a

single protest or got around to sending

a single Christmas card, even if you

think you've never made a difference to

a single other life, and like George

Bailey, you imagine the world would be

better off without you, your worth and

dignity, your redeeming light, the gift

of salvation that is your life.

You were made to live through the

longest night. Yes.

But also within you is the irresistible

dawn. Inviting you again and again,

even in the hardest times, maybe

especially in the hardest times,

to life on the growing edge.

May it be so. And amen.