A Thrill of Hope. The Weary World Rejoices!

Rev. Jason D. Thompson, Ph.D., Contributing Writer

Whether you learned it as a child while reciting your part in the Christmas play, through a sermon, or even from Linus and the Peanuts gang in A Charlie Brown Christmas, you know the story about the day we call Christmas, the day we celebrate the birth of a savior.

The challenge of this story is that it may have become so familiar to us that we might carelessly gloss over the beauty, truth, and reason for celebration that the story demands. Perhaps, instead, we can accept the challenge to avoid the mistake that Frederick Buechner warns of when he suggests that “it’s so easy to look and see what we pass through in the world, but we don’t. If you’re like me, you see so little. You see what you expect to see rather than what’s there” (The Remarkable Ordinary, p. 25). And the very often sad truth is that we do, in fact, see what we expect regardless of the reality. So depending on our outlook, we look for fights that may not be necessary, we expect to find agonies that may not be present, and we discover miseries that are sometimes the makings of our own malfunctions.

William Willimon makes an editorial point that “we don’t deal well with messy,” so any discussion of how “messy” God (through Jesus) had to be or get in order to save us is probably lost on us. “The life and death of Christ were not neat and clean,” Willimon says. “Life is messy. Birth, illness, death, and all parts in between are messy. And God is involved in every one of them” (Will Willimons Lectionary Sermon Resource: Year A, Part 1).

So, as we enter into Christmas, I hope we pay particular attention to the pleasant surprise that awaits each of us with the arrival of Jesus. I confess, I almost missed it but was reminded of the significance of this moment through a very familiar Christmas song text: “A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices!”

What happens when God invades every space of our weariness? Something beautiful, yet something so simple! A song of rejoicing breaks forth in a weary world! “Do not be afraid; for see — I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord” (Luke 2:10-11).

The Rev. Jason Thompson is the pastor of the Historic St. Andrews AME Church in Sacramento, CA. Additionally, he is the interim director of Music Education and a visiting professor at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.