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.
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.
posted by Rev Waters | 8:40 AM
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