Winter Solstice: The Longest Night
December 21, 2021 the point on our calendar when the sun in the sky is farthest south, travels the shortest path, and, therefore, provides the least sunlight. Winter Solstice concurrently marks the shortest day and the longest night.
The “longest night” feels apropos for 2021.
For me, this year has been laced with push and pull—pushed into a dreary melancholy and then pulled into a rising anticipation, plunged into fatigued weariness and then embraced by an inexplicable peace and joy, weighed down by sameness and shades of grey and then surprised by an otherworldly confidence.
In tandem with these seemingly incongruent feelings, early in the month I joined a Day of Prayer with my friends at Kirby Laing Center for Public Theology (KLC). KLC set aside a day to anticipate and celebrate the advent of Jesus in community with other believers. Each of us was assigned a Psalm on which to meditate throughout the day—I was given Psalm 94, a fiery call for vengeance. I was surprised, and kind of disappointed. I expected something Christmassy—happy and joyful and hopeful. By the end of the day, after reading and rereading the psalm, I was surprised again. What appeared at the outset as a fiery call for God’s judgment, was, in a much deeper way, a psalm about God’s ultimate triumph over evil and God’s help along the treacherous and slippery path of life in a fallen world.
A psalm surely penned on the longest night.
The Psalms teach us how to express our sometimes-bottled-up emotions to God. Some provide language for lament and outright anger, others supply us with words to express hatred toward the wicked or rapturous love for God. Most of all, the psalmists themselves teach us about God and how to hang-on-tight through the longest night. Psalm 94 begins with a guttural cry.
“O Lord, God of vengeance, O God of vengeance, shine forth.
Rise up, O judge of the earth;
repay to the proud what they deserve!
O Lord, how long shall the wicked,
how long shall the wicked exult?
They pour out their arrogant words;
all the evildoers boast.
They crush your people, O Lord,
and afflict your heritage.
They kill the widow and the sojourner,
and murder the fatherless;
and they say, “The Lord does not see;
the God of Jacob does not perceive.”
The wicked in the world–the proud, violent, suffocating wicked–boast in evil, crush the weak, kill and murder the fatherless and marginalized and spread the lie that God is unaware, unconcerned, and absent. But, the psalmist, despite these circumstances, calls out the wicked (and us) with the truth about God:
Understand, O dullest of the people!
Fools, when will you be wise?
He who planted the ear, does he not hear?
He who formed the eye, does he not see?
He who disciplines the nations, does he not rebuke?
He who teaches man knowledge—
the Lord—knows the thoughts of man,
that they are but a breath.
I often write about the importance of understanding the true story of the whole world, of recognizing with humble hearts that God is the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer of all things. So, I appreciate how the psalmist draws our attention to the fact that God—who created humankind with the ability to see and hear, to perceive and to learn—knows every thought, every wicked idea that surfaces, every evil plot concocted by the arrogant. The Message puts it another way, “God knows your stupidity and sees your shallowness” (The Message).
Blessed is the man whom you discipline, O Lord,
and whom you teach out of your law,
to give him rest from days of trouble,
until a pit is dug for the wicked.
For the Lord will not forsake his people;
he will not abandon his heritage;
for justice will return to the righteous,
and all the upright in heart will follow it.
The psalmist underscores the fact that God does not and will not forsake or abandon his people. One day everyone will face his justice. In the meantime, we are called to welcome God’s discipline, to learn from his law, to follow his righteous ways, and to find our peace and rest in him. Faith is required to apprehend the truth of God—the truth of these words about God—in the face of rampant unrest, of wars and rumors of wars, in famine, increasing crime, unending threats to our health and well-being.
Who rises up for me against the wicked?
Who stands up for me against evildoers?
If the Lord had not been my help,
my soul would soon have lived in the land of silence.
When I thought, “My foot slips,”
your steadfast love, O Lord, held me up.
When the cares of my heart are many,
your consolations cheer my soul.
Can wicked rulers be allied with you,
those who frame injustice by statute?
They band together against the life of the righteous
and condemn the innocent to death.
I regularly ask these questions and sometimes despair over the worsening conditions in the world, the increasing violence, the uncertainty. I am tempted to believe that “the Lord does not see, he does not perceive,” he really is absent, he has forgotten. This psalm reminds me otherwise, but not in the happily-ever-after way we might expect. The psalmist leaves us suspended in the chaos of a broken world clinging to our Stronghold, hiding in faith behind the Rock of Refuge.
But the Lord has become my stronghold,
and my God the rock of my refuge.
He will bring back on them their iniquity
and wipe them out for their wickedness;
the Lord our God will wipe them out.
I find myself weirdly refocused and refreshed after spending time wading through this psalm. I am reminded that the longest day is almost over—thankfully, it will not stay dark forever. The words of the prophet Zephaniah comforted me as I wrapped up my study of this psalm.
“Sing aloud, O daughter of Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter of Jerusalem. The Lord has taken away the judgments against you; he has cleared away your enemies.
The King of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst; you shall never again fear evil. On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem: ‘Fear not, O Zion; let not your hands grow weak.
The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.
I will gather those of you who mourn for the festival, so that you will no longer suffer reproach. Behold, at that time I will deal with all your oppressors. And I will save the lame and gather the outcast, and I will change their shame into praise and renown in all the earth” (Zephaniah 3:14–19).
