Blue Christmas/Feast of St. Thomas 2020-Rev Melanie Lemburg

Blue Christmas/Feast of St. Thomas 2020

December 21, 2020

        I had been a priest for less than a year when Katrina hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast and New Orleans, which was only about 90 miles from the church David and I were serving. A tree had fallen on the rectory where we lived, and Mary Margaret, who was only a year old at the time, had her bedroom that had been so lovingly decorated and painted destroyed.  Thankfully, we were not at home when Katrina hit, but we had come back to the need to be relocated to a cabin on a parishioner’s farm while the rectory was being repaired. 

        In that season, 7 churches on the MS Gulf Coast were dealing with catastrophic loss.  I can remember talking to the bishop, who was shepherding the whole diocese through this unprecedented season of loss, and feeling almost embarrassed to be taking up time because my loss was so small in the face of such utter devastation of lost homes and devastated churches. 

        The October after that August, we gathered for our annual clergy conference.  After the opening dinner, we went outside in the dark, and my friend Jen Deaton, who has a lovely alto voice, sang a song that was the setting of Psalm 137 that we read tonight:  “By the waters, the waters of Babylon.  We sat down and wept and wept for thee Zion.  We remember thee, remember thee, remember thee Zion” 

Over and over, she sang it as a mantra, a refrain, as we stood outside in the dark, slightly chilly night.

“By the waters, the waters of Babylon.  We sat down and wept and wept for thee Zion.  We remember thee, remember thee, remember thee Zion” 

And I looked around and every one of us was weeping.  I was weeping for my own loss.  My fellow clergy on the Coast were weeping for their loss.  And the rest of the clergy were weeping with us, acknowledging the pain and the suffering we know and feel when those we love are suffering and grieving. I realized the power in that moment of communal lament, which is a way of being in prayer, in relationship with God and each other.  Lament is our saying to God that things are not as they should be, and we long for God to break in and restore us, to remember us, to comfort us. 

This has been an especially hard year for all of us. We have experienced loss. Many we know and love have experienced grievous loss. We have all suffered and continued to suffer.  This service tonight is for all of us.  It’s a way to name our sadness and our sorrow and to be present fully with each other in that, and it is a way to offer that lament to God, asking God to give us what we need—whether it is comfort, restoration, or like our patron saint Thomas, reassurance that resurrection is real and that death is not the end. 

No matter what sort of suffering and loss 2020 has brought you, know that you are not alone. 

“By the waters, the waters of Babylon.  We sat down and wept and wept for thee Zion.  We remember thee, remember thee, remember thee Zion”