CHRISTMAS LIGHTS AND THE FEAR OF DEATH
December arrives as the beginning of a season of death. We know this instinctively. Creation lowers its voice. The trees release their final leaves and stand like ancient headstones over a buried world. The fields that once teemed with life now sleep under winter’s solemn pall, their fruitfulness sealed away as creation undergoes its annual burial. During these days, the air itself carries a kind of sacred heaviness, as though the world itself feels the weight of its futility. The sun withdraws earlier each day, tracing a shorter arc across the heavens and singing its funeral song with every setting. This is the burial portion of creation—a death, burial, and resurrection written into the world since the third day—and December is the long, cold descent into its rhythmic grave.
And it is here—precisely here—that the Christian liturgical calendar dares to begin. Not in bloom, but in barrenness. Not in warmth, but in winter. Not in rising light, but in the slow extinguishing of it. Advent calls the church to begin where nature itself is groaning: in the shadows. In the ache. In the long, dark stretch between promise and fulfillment. Advent trains us to remember what the world was before the Light of the world appeared—a world shrouded in unbroken darkness, a world moaning beneath Adam’s exile, a human race wandering east of Eden without a single ray of salvific dawn.
Before Bethlehem flickered beneath a blazing star, before Gabriel’s announcement, before the shepherds saw the sky explode in glorious song, the world lay in a midnight that had no hint of morning. No Messiah. No manger. No incarnation. Only the cold, the silence, the waiting. Advent, therefore, makes us return to that world so we can feel in our bones what our forefathers felt—that desperate, trembling longing for God to speak, to act, to send the Child who would undo the ruin Adam unleashed. Advent is the yearly descent into the world as it truly was without Christ, so that Christmas can be celebrated as the arrival of what it never could produce on its own: Light.
And yet, in a telling reversal, the season that should teach us to sit with the dark is the very season we drown in artificial light. In the season when nature is most honest about death, our culture becomes most dishonest about it. December, the bleakest month of the year, has become America’s brightest spectacle. No season glows with more bulbs, more wattage, more engineered veneers of cheer. Houses erupt in synthetic brilliance. Streets blaze with synchronized displays of electric optimism. Storefronts glitter with factory-made constellations. Neighborhoods drown the night in neon defiance. And yet, for all this light, none of it illumines the darkened soul of man. It is brightness without any revelation. It is a glow without any glory. It is a thousand little artificial stars that cannot expose sin, cannot comfort sorrow, cannot pierce despair, and cannot resurrect the dead.
If you doubt this, simply look at what December compels us to do as a culture. Every year, when the days grow shortest and the darkness deepest, Americans respond with an almost instinctive frenzy of illumination. We do not drape June in lights, nor flood September with such intense glows; we reserve this dazzling eruption for the month when nature itself is declaring death. The timing is the argument. When creation goes dim, we grow desperate to make it shine. And we ought to grapple with the reasons for why we do this. Why else would a nation pour its brightest lights into its darkest month? What are we afraid will happen if we simply let December be dark? What is it in us that cannot sit with the shadows without reaching for a switch? At bottom, this is not festivity. It is fear.
We string a million bulbs along every street not because the month is especially merry, but because its darkness unsettles us. It tells us we are mortal. It whispers that we cannot sustain our own warmth or light. And because we cannot bear what the season is saying, we drown it in distractions, ambiance, and sentimental glitter. We smother December’s honesty with twinkle lights, tinsel, scented candles, and the therapeutic hope that if we brighten the darkness loudly enough, perhaps we will not have to admit that it is real.
But perhaps the season of Advent sees through these cultural delusions more clearly than we do. Instead of yielding to the cheap lights that try to hide the truth, Advent seems to invite us to notice what they are masking. Instead of matching the frantic pacing of a culture terrified of silence, Advent gently calls us to slow down enough to hear what the quiet has been saying all along. Perhaps it is even reminding us that the world cannot be healed by ambiance, no matter how brightly we decorate it. Advent leads us back into the cold, the barrenness, the lengthening shadows, as if to whisper with ancient certainty: This is what the world was without Christ—and this is why His coming is joy beyond all reckoning.
And in this way, Advent is not an escape from the darkness but a deliberate, covenant-shaped return to it. It is the church choosing to sit in the shadows long enough to remember what the world was without Christ. God’s people enter the winter of creation so they may savor the rising of the Sun of righteousness. They linger in the ancient ache of pre-Bethlehem longing so they may feel, with unfeigned depth, the triumph of Christmas morning. Advent does not pretend the darkness has vanished; it quietly announces that the Light has already invaded it—and will one day drive it out completely in the fullness of time.
This is why Advent never settles for sentimentality. It calls us into something far deeper—something sacramental. It offers more than decoration; it invites discipleship. It is not a countdown to presents but a preparation for presence—the presence of the God who once entered our ruin in swaddling cloths and who will one day return in blazing glory. In this season, longing ripens into worship, waiting matures into obedience, and darkness becomes the very canvas upon which the brilliance of Christ is revealed.
And this is the contrast, the tension, the holy intrigue that Advent unfolds before us. In the month when the world is most dead, the church remembers the birth of the One who brings creation back to life. In the season when the world is most dark, the church remembers the Light that shattered the night. In the time when culture is most frantic with artificial glow, the church quiets itself to wait for the true Light.
Advent begins in the dark because wisdom begins with honesty. Only those who have stood inside winter’s ache can recognize the miracle of spring. Only those who have felt the long night can truly rejoice when the morning breaks. And only those who have tasted the world’s deep shadows can grasp the wonder that the Light of the world has come—and will come again. Advent draws us into the darkness so that when the dawn arrives, we do not miss it. It trains our hearts to hunger for the Child who ends our exile, conquers our night, and leads us into the everlasting day.
