Cake or No Cake (Longest Night 2025)
December 21, 2025
A Service of Grief and Hope for the Longest Night
Preached at Decatur First United Methodist Church
Ecclesiastes 3: 1 - 15
For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven:
2 a time to be born and a time to die;
a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted;
3 a time to kill and a time to heal;
a time to break down and a time to build up;
4 a time to weep and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn and a time to dance;
5 a time to throw away stones and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing;
6 a time to seek and a time to lose;
a time to keep and a time to throw away;
7 a time to tear and a time to sew;
a time to keep silent and a time to speak;
8 a time to love and a time to hate;
a time for war and a time for peace.
9 What gain have the workers from their toil? 10 I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. 11 He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover, he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. 12 I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; 13 moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil. 14 I know that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it nor anything taken from it; God has done this so that all should stand in awe before him. 15 That which is already has been, that which is to be already is, and God seeks out what has gone by.
The only way to begin is with the truth. It is, in fact, dark. You are not imagining it. Furthermore, you did not cause the darkness of this night, and you cannot control it. Science tells us that this is the longest night of the year and from now until summer it only gets lighter. Thank you, science, that’s good to know. But for tonight, it is still dark.
Whatever brings you out tonight, you’re in good company. We will not tell each other to cheer up. We won’t apologize for being angry, sad, or disappointed when life has broken our heart, or just not turned out as we had hoped.
The hope of the incarnation - the mystery of Christmas - begins in the honesty and reality of life - it is dark, life is hard, God is here. God loves us and wants nothing less than our whole selves. It is right, and a good and holy thing, to feel the whole depth and breadth of our feelings, even when we wish we didn’t. We could remember that by ourselves, but I’m so glad we are remembering together.
I need to confess though, that I have a complicated relationship with the dark, and with the longest night. My daughter was born on the winter solstice. I have wonderful memories of that longest of nights.
Not only that, but the older I get, the more I need darkness to sleep. I have both light-blocking blinds and black-out curtains on the windows in my bedroom. I’ve carefully curated my sleeping space so that no lights are on once I go to bed, no alarm clocks, no watches or phones, not even the tiny little light on the tv that never goes off. I covered that with duct tape.
It turns out that non-stop light, even a tiny bit of it, isn’t good for me. I’m built for darkness as much as I’m built for light.
This reminds me of a poem by Wendell Berry, called “To Know the Dark,”
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
Of course, what I’m describing is chosen darkness. And many of us have had to go into the dark in ways we did not choose. There is a warmth and comfort in chosen darkness that brings rest. When darkness is forced upon us, it is uncomfortable, frightening and lonely.
We honor both kinds of darkness tonight, and to some extent, the hope is the same. Afterall, Jesus was born on a dark night into the warmth of his mother’s arms, and was welcomed by angels singing, stars shining and mysterious prophetic visitors. But he was also born in a cold barn. His bed was a food trough. And his parents would shortly have to run for their lives. We can be both comforted in the darkness, and tired of it. Two things can be true at the same time.
My sister-in-law, Kelly, was a scientist by training and profession. But somehow she was also a gifted baker, with a talent for cake decorating. My nephews had the kind of birthday cakes you would see on pinterest, or on the cover of a magazine, and they were all lovingly homemade by their mom.
This is the cake she made for a fourth birthday party -
Yes, that’s a cake. What looks like fur is actually icing. The dog food bowl is also cake. I don’t know what that dog food is, but I am sure she made it, and it was edible. That gold surface it’s sitting on came from a special cake-making store, as did the candles in that particular shade of blue. The boys loved these special cakes, and their mom loved making them.
When Kelly died suddenly in 2016, birthday cakes were not top of mind. We were plunged into the darkness, and just covering the basics felt like an unmanageable task.
But, eventually, we were faced with a birthday, and the idea of NOT having one of Kelly’s amazing cakes felt like a gut punch to me. It was like the absence of her cake would be a new and painful reminder of her absence. Not that we needed a reminder. We felt the loss everyday, cake or no cake. But in an effort to literally take something off my brother’s plate I offered to bring the cake for the next birthday, with no idea what I would do.
I overthought this, but in my defense, it was not supposed to be this way. None of it. Those boys were supposed to have a mom, who was way better at this than me. I wanted to pull the covers over my head and skip the whole thing. But I’ve never been good at telling those boys “no” and this did not seem like the time to start.
So there would be cake. But what kind? I could find a professional to make an amazing cake like Kelly would have made, but I thought having a fake kelly cake might actually make us feel worse. I considered a store bought sheet cake, but that seemed like it would be a real letdown. I considered not doing cake at all, but instead doing some other dessert - brownies or a pie, maybe. But for little guys the cake and the candles seemed important. I’ll cut to the chase here… this is what happened.
“I’ve never seen a cake like this.”
That is a store bought cake, surrounded by store bought cupcakes, with store-bought crumbled oreos on top. Those candles came from the same grocery store where I bought the cake. You’ll notice it is sitting on top of a plate, just a regular plate from my parents’ house. The birthday boy smiled and said, “I’ve never seen a cake like this.” And I said, “I don’t think there’s ever been one.”
Once I accepted the reality that I was not going to make or buy a cake like Kelly would, and that it would actually be better not to, I decided to make the weirdest, most unprofessional looking cake possible. The boys thought it was funny and weird, which it was.
I wish I could claim this as an intentional and wise decision, but it was neither. I believe the Holy Spirit was working through my grief and exhaustion. I had not heard Wendell Berry’s poem at this time, but I was heeding his advice. To go into the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark.
It was not possible to restore the light that had gone out for us, and no amount of effort on my part was going to change that. We were going to be in the dark on this birthday no matter what. So, I went dark. This began several years of Aunt Janice bringing weird “cakes” to birthday parties, a job that made me laugh and cry every time.
One way to get through darkness is to endure until it’s over. Just wait for the light to come back so life can go on. Sometimes that is the best hope we can have.
My experience with the darkness is that there is another hope. Whether we have chosen the warmth and comfort of the dark, or we have been forced into it against our will, God does not waste the darkness. It blooms and sings and is travelled by dark feet and dark wings.
One of the ways that I know this to be true comes from, of all places, the church library. I used to include the books on grief and loss in the Spiritual Growth section. But I made a new dedicated shelf for those books this year, because people kept recommending books on this topic to me.
To be clear, I get recommendations for the church library all the time. That’s not unusual. But not just anyone reads a book like….
A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis. That is not a light read.
You are unlikely to pick up Kate Bowler’s Everything Happens for a Reason (and other lies I’ve loved) if you haven’t been through something that there’s no good reason for.
And people aren’t pulling books like Welcome to the Grief Club by Janine Kwoh out of their beach bag for a fun summer read, just in case something bad happens one day.
You don’t even know about books like these in the light.
These books were recommended by people who have been reading in the dark.
Once you have learned to bloom and sing in the dark, you begin to see and sense fellow travellers. This is why people were recommending these books. Whoever they were when they went into the darkness, now they are witnesses. Their testimony sounds like this - I found something that helped me. I think it might be helpful to someone else. Let’s put it on the shelf. And we did.
My friends, I hope the dawn comes soon, but I’m also expecting the darkness to be good for something. What it will be good for is up to God.
However heavy your heart is right now, I won’t be surprised if sometime over the next year you find yourself a witness. You’ll reach out to someone new to the dark and offer some helpful navigation - maybe it will be a conversation over a cup of coffee, maybe you’ll offer a book suggestion, maybe you’ll invite them to come to this service with you next year.
Even on the Longest Night of the year, darkness is not wasted. May we be honest with God, with ourselves, and with each other. And may we be open to blooming and singing when the time comes.
