Fron Darkness to Light

“From Darkness to Light”
John 1:6-8, 19-28
Advent III December 11, 2005
Rev Carolyn Waters CCUM

I confess to being a bit of a “sentimentalists” when it comes to Christmas lights. For me the main reason to have a Christmas tree is in order to put lights on it and then take a good portion of the evening to sit in an otherwise dark room and just stare at the tree. Even goofy looking trees are beautiful when you put a few lights on them.

I’ll even admit to having oddly strung lights on trees in my front yard, one of those reindeer that has a head that moves, and a specially designed swirl tree from Target.

I don’t have a train with moving light wheels, or a blown up anything. That just doesn’t seem natural to me, but I suppose if there were little people living in my house I might succumb to almost anything to brighten their imagination or tweak their curiosity about the magic and the mystery of Christmas.

The presence of light coming into our darkness is much of that magic. The wonder of hope being born in the midst of despair is much of the mystery.
The shadows of the not-so-late afternoon are cutting down on the warmth and the strength of the sun. We know from last weeks record low temperatures that we don’t have to wait for the winter solstice to have winter……and cold……….bitter cold temperatures that chill to the bone
Maybe I harbor secret desires that the lights of trees, outdoor displays will do away with the darkness that surrounds us. It seems for a while to cause us to want to be helpful to those who are hurting, the present-less, the homeless. More than coins hit the kettles of the Salvation Army collection tripods. Yet we know that next year the same problems, well, you don't have to wait until next year at Christmas, by January the old, the homeless, the hungry, the needy, the present-less will still be there.
So let’s just turn up the volume and put a few more strings of lights in our little corner of the world so there is a place that shines a little brighter in the beginning days of a cold, dark, and lonely world.
John knew about darkness and despair. John was a nobody in a land of political oppression with a people who had little to expect let alone hope for.

John spoke of the light coming into the darkness of the lives of the people then and his words still speak of light coming into our darkness.

The darkness for us is not as obvious, not as visible as the darkness of the street person, or the unemployed single parent, or the family that has just received news of tragic loss.

Our darkness, while not as visible, is still darkness. That’s why it’s not visible! I don’t know the dark corners of your world, and unless I am willing to share them, you don’t know mine. My guess would be that even if we had the courage to speak of our dark corners, that there are still places so dark that even though they are our corners, we still cannot see into them.

Despair and depression grow from such places. Loneliness and heartache feed such places. Spiritual wastelands lead us to such places of darkness and desert highways that we may be left to wonder if life will ever be different, if the light of day will ever come over the wasteland of despair.

I have known several people who have chosen to end their life by suicide.
I cannot imagine a place of more darkness than the corner from which you cannot escape, the corner of darkness from which you can see no light or hope.

I have watch families bear the shock of unthinkable news of tragic death. It takes years and then sometimes never to recover from the words of a coroner at your door or the voice of a Chaplin on the phone, or the military officers words.

Or there is the slow suffering that comes from illness, disease, depression, and oppression leaving one to plead with God; “Would somebody please turn the light on.”

Bishop Will Willimon tells the story of Rabbi Hugo Grynn who was sent to Auschwitz as a little boy. In the midst of the concentration camp, the death and horror many Jews held onto whatever shreds of their religious observance they could. One cold winter's night Hugo's father gathered the family in the barracks. It was the first night of Chanukah...the feast of Lights. The young child watched in horror as his father took the family's last pad of butter and made a makeshift candle using a string from his ragged clothes. He then took a match and lit the "candle". "Father, no!" Hugo cried. "That butter is our last bit of food! How shall we live?" "We can live for many days without food! We cannot live for single minute without hope. This is the fire of hope. Never let it go out. Not here. Not anywhere."
http://home.twcny.rr.com/lyndale/Advent%203B.htm

John the Baptist acting like a fool in the wild places says the light will come, the light will be turned on, the trees will be lit, there will be a path that you can see to take and know where to go.

Someone will come and show us the way about how to live this life. Someone will come and show us the way about how to get through those days that seem as if they will never end and tomorrow will never come.
Someone will come and show us the way that leads to a place in our soul that will give us the spiritual depth to believe that even when our world is dark, even when we are enveloped in darkness…………light will come. Light will come because nothing remains the same, change is only one breath away, the energy of the universe is focused on life, not death.

Maybe I like the lights on the trees and the buildings and in the yards because they makes me notice things I don’t usually notice. They help me to see things I haven’t seen. They show me the obvious in a new way.

The light that is offered to us in the coming of a “savior”………..is a light that shows us the obvious in a new way. The light of “life” that we call the Christ Child is the birth of human possibility, a gift of God to God’s children to show us what we had not realized about our own lives.

And that is, that in the dark places, a light can shine that gets us through the wilderness. The coming of a “child”; the light of “life” brightens those places we think impossible, and they are impossible if we attempt to survive them on our own.

In an Advent book of readings John Heagle is quoted as saying: “ In an age which offers a variety of escapes from the human condition, Christians are more than ever a sign of contradiction. They continue to believe that the search for God must begin with the acceptance of the human. They believe this because it is in the stable of humanity that God has come in search of us.

In the human experience of Jesus, Heagle says, God became available to us as the depth of human life. Thus, a Christian believes that the experience of ultimate meaning comes not from a leap out of the human condition, but a journey through its dark waters.” (p. 66 Advent)

The light comes and shows us what we had not seen. The light shines and reveals what we have turned away from. During a time of the longest days of darkness, there is a word slowly appearing, seeping into our darkness to say “yes.”

“Yes” there is hope.

“Yes” there is light in the midst of darkness.

“Yes” no matter how dark it gets or how impossible it feels, there is reason to go on. There is reason to look ahead; there is reason to believe.

Standing on the Promises Advent 2

“Standing on the Promises”
Isaiah 40:1-11
Rev Carolyn Waters
CCUM December 4, 2005 ADVENT I

The words of Isaiah ring familiar beauty to our ears. I would assume that most of you are reminded of the beautiful selection from Handel’s Messiah………….Comfort Ye. Words written in 1741 and first performed in 1742, during a time of Handel’s life that one would have thought his career to be over, ending pretty much as a failure. And as so often happens in the world of the artist, his best and most famous work came toward the end of his life. Perhaps that is why Handle understood the words so well and could give them voice through his music.

This passage from Isaiah couldn’t be more perfect as we prepare for the “savior” of the world. As we anticipate that God will come and be with us in the midst of all the craziness of life, in the midst of war and pain, brokenness and separation…in the midst of poverty and oppression, these words of comfort come once again as they have for generation after generation to promise the presence of God in the wild places of the world.

Ralph Klein of the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago says that in this passage God is speaking to the divine council or angelic attendants “telling them to reassure Jerusalem that her hitch in captivity is over, that she has already suffered twice as much as she deserved.” The voice is crying, in the wilderness……….to get ready for God’s presence, to prepare a highway for God. To Preach it! To believe that God will come and care for God’s people, that God will come and comfort the afflicted, the broken, the lost, the hurt, the lonely.

Klein says that the important message of this passage is to remember, “While everything in the world is transient and fickle, God’s word of promise is always sure.”
http://www.textweek.com/prophets/isaiah40a.htm

Our world and our lives are transient and fickle…God’s word of promise is sure.
We do a little grumping now and then about the meaning of Christmas, or the lost meaning of Christmas…I participate in it as well. But I’m aware in the light of this reading from Isaiah that the intention of Christmas may even be lost on we Christians who grump about the secular celebrations.

My stance this year on the secular celebrations, is that at least there is a time in the year that some attention is brought to the Christ story, no matter how commercial or artificial………..at least it’s an opportunity for some child to innocently ask “Who is Jesus?”

But deeper than that, hear again the words I used in speaking of who God is in this passage from Isaiah, as we anticipate that God will come and be with us in the midst of all the craziness of life, in the midst of war and pain, brokenness and separation…in the midst of poverty and oppression, these words of comfort come once again as they have for generation after generation to promise the presence of God in the wild places of the world.

To believe that God will come and care for God’s people, that God will come and comfort the afflicted, the broken, the lost, the hurt, and the lonely.

From time to time that may include us. At some point in our life it will include us. Most likely it will be in those moments of touching our mortality, or walking the journey of death with those we love. Most of the world lives in emotional and physical places of brokenness and oppression day after day.

And we say, in our rehearsal of the story of a savior being born, that God will come and give comfort to our hurting world.

We believe that. We believe it and have stood on that promise year after year all of our lives in the same way that Comfort Ye has been sung year after year since 1742, in the same way that the birth narrative of Jesus has been told year after year for at least 1900 years……….We believe the promise of God to be with us.

Paul Tillich, from The Shaking of the Foundations: 1955
“The words of this great chapter sound like the rising and falling waves in a turbulent ocean. Darkness and light follow each other; after the depth of sin and punishment, the prophet announces forgiveness and liberation. But the wave falls, and the prophet asks himself how he could have made such an announcement, when all the goodness of mortal men is as the flower of the field, which fades because the breath of God blows upon it. But he does not remain in the depths of his melancholy: Over against human mortality the word of God shall stand forever. There is something eternal to which we can cling: Be not afraid, the Lord God shall come with strong hand. So the wave rises, and then again it falls: The nations are as a drop of water and a piece of dust; all the nations are as nothing before Him, they are counted as less than nothing. Again the wave rises: God stands above the circle of the earth, above all created things, above the highest and the lowest! And when once more the wave falls and the servant of God complains that he does not receive justice from God, the answer is that God acts beyond human expectation. (God) He gives power to the faint and to (the one) him that hath no might (God) He increaseth strength. (God) He acts paradoxically; (God) He acts beyond human understanding.”

Tillich goes on to say that it is our human situation that we suffer. But that the prophet knew the meaning of our suffering beyond the moment, beyond the history, looking to the ultimate power and meaning and majesty of being.

Tillich said: “He knew two orders of being: the human, political, historical order, and the divine, eternal order. Because he knew these two orders, he could speak as he did, moving continually between the depth of human nothingness and the great height of divine creativity.”

“The human order, the order of history, is primarily the order of growing and dying.”

“The order beyond the order of history is the divine order. And it is paradoxical: men are like grass, but the word of God spoken to them shall stand forever. Men stand under the law of sin and punishment, but the divine order breaks through it and brings forgiveness. Men faint, falling from the height of their moral goodness and youthful power, and just when they have fallen and are weakest, they run without weariness and rise up with wings as eagles.”

“God acts beyond all human assumptions and valuations. He acts surprisingly, unexpectedly, paradoxically.”

Wow! Wow! God acts beyond anything we can imagine!

We have trouble imagining a virgin birth! God acts beyond anything we can imagine!
We have trouble accepting the contradictions of holiday celebrations and the Gospel story. God acts beyond anything we can imagine!

We wonder where the cold will sleep and the hungry will eat. God acts beyond anything we can imagine!

We question war and injustice and political oppression. God acts beyond anything we can imagine!

And even though we sometimes forget that promise, when we remember the promise of God being with us, we stand there. We stand on that promise with hope and trust that it is true. We stand on the promise of God with us because if we were to try to stand alone, our lives would be futile, empty, barren and without hope.

So whatever it takes, for the world to remember that God is with us, and God will continue to come and make a place in this world to be known, whatever it takes for people to hear the story and remember the promise……….bring it on. Let the story be told from generation to generation that God is about to do a marvelous thing.