Sermon for Sunday, December 4, 2005Waiting for the LightbyRev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz Second Sunday In Advent |
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Isaiah 9:2
The call to worship this morning is one that I have used several times over the years and it has retained its power each year. We are still feeling the darkness, Lord-are you still coming as the light of the world? We are feeling the darkness of a controversial war that, after we leave Iraq, no matter whose timetable we use to leave, may still result in a civil war among bitterly divided factions. We are feeling the darkness of a world AIDs epidemic where five people die of AIDs every minute and one of those five is a child under the age of fifteen. We are feeling the darkness of hundreds of thousands of victims of Hurricane Katrina still displaced and homeless and some feeling abandoned, thinking that our nation has moved on and forgotten them. And those of us in this congregation are feeling the personal darkness of being involved in three funerals here in the past nine days, tragic losses where one young woman about to give birth died suddenly of an aneurysm, another funeral where a well loved member, after battling with depression and alcohol dependence, took his own life, and another long time St Andrew member, after battling with prostate cancer 14 years ago and then with lymphoma the past several years died of an infection after his latest round of chemotherapy. We are feeling the darkness, and some would say it is not possible or realistic to talk about birth and Christmas and light when this darkness is so real and oppressive. Our faith says that it is precisely when we feel the darkness of life so strongly that we need to look to the light and the hope of Christ and of the birth of Christ. The passage from the prophet Isaiah can help us. Written 700 years before Jesus the author is telling about a new king who will be born who will be called wonderful counselor, everlasting father, prince of peace. That is the reason Isaiah says that God’s light is shining on the people who have been surrounded by darkness. That was the same for the people who were awaiting the birth of the messiah at the time Jesus was born. The Jews of the first century were suffering greatly under the oppression of the Roman occupiers. The burden of taxes by Rome was very heavy. Most people were poor and when Jesus told people in the Lord’s Prayer that it was OK to pray for our daily bread, that was a serious prayer for almost all who heard it. There was not much of a middle class in first century Judaism. People deeply resented the Roman soldiers whom they met at every turn. There was great longing for liberation and deliverance from the occupiers and there were some revolutionary movements that began to organize to throw off the Romans. One of those groups was called the Zealots and there was later on among Jesus’ twelve disciples, one called Simon the Zealot. All of those attempts to revolt against Rome were quickly crushed and the leaders were executed in the cruelest and most violent public way possible-by crucifixion. Hundreds of people had been crucified by Rome before Jesus’ birth. The Romans did that to intimidate any who had ideas about revolution. This was a dark and oppressive and fearful time, and this does not even mention the story in the Gospel of Matthew that tells us that after Jesus was born and the report came to Herod that a possible future king had been born, he sent his soldiers to Bethlehem to -what? Slaughter any male child under two years old so that any possible threat to his power would be wiped out. This was the setting that Jesus was born in and it makes the song Mary sings when she learns she is pregnant-the Magnificat-even more disturbing because she tells in her song about the powerful being brought down and the poor being lifted up and the rich being sent away empty. It is a scary song for those who were in power and who controlled everything. Think about the hopelessness and the gloom that pervaded the time when the Christ child was born. Anne Lamotte in her splendid book “Plan B” (a marvelous Christmas book suggestion if you don’t mind her rough language) tells about the writer who said, “It got darker and darker and darker and then Jesus was born.” That’s the message for your life also. We don’t know exactly what time of year Jesus was born. It may not have been in December. Some scholars think that the time we celebrate Jesus birth was set to coincide with a secular celebration of the winter solstice when earth was at its darkest and then the light begins to take over and turn the earth toward spring. I like that message because it tells us that in our darkest experience of life, God is at work to bring light and hope and promise and new birth. This month of December as we move toward Christmas is a tough month for many people. We think that we should feel happy and joyful and when we don’t, it may just make us feel worse. If we have experienced grief and loss, the holiday times can be very tough for us. And that is not even to mention the stress that most of us feel at trying to cram so much into the weeks before Christmas that we think December is just something to just try and get through again. Some people have begun to call it Merry Stressmas season. Let me give you some ideas for the next three weeks that might help us. First of all listen for these biblical themes of light and dark in your experiences between now and Christmas. They may appear more than you realize. They are the themes from the Hebrew Bible and they are the messages that the Bible writers used to say why Jesus is important. We will quote one of those writers on Christmas Eve when we light our candles. “The light still shines in the darkness and the darkness has not been able to overcome that light.” Secondly, remember what Sue Monk Kidd says on your bulletin: the dark can be a holy dark and the idea is to surrender to it and to journey through it to the real light. Every life is and will be a mixture of dark and light. That is inevitable. It may even be desirable for it is in those dark times that our faith is fully formed and nurtured and that we are able to empathize with others and are able to learn to trust in God and not just in ourselves. I read a review of one of the movies we are trying to see this month, the new film about Johnny Cash. The reviewer said that the reason Johnny Cash’s music spoke to so many people is that he was open about the mixture in his own life of darkness and life, faith and failure, sinner and saved person. “In a world increasingly reduced to good and evil, us versus them, Johnny Cash was a man unafraid to admit that he was both… Johnny Cash was a deeply flawed Christian man who could look at criminals and see a part of himself in them.” He knew what life was like for “the poor and beaten down, livin’ on the hopeless, hungry side of town” because he had been there himself. The dark times have come and will come to every one of us-we should not be surprised. We quoted Jesus at Jack Hardwick’s funeral Thursday: In this world you will have trouble. And if we journey through the dark times by staying close to Christ, they can be a holy dark. Close to Christ, close to the light of Christ. That is the final suggestion about moving from stressmas to Christmas. Stay close to the light these next few weeks. Be in church regularly. Read the scripture passages ahead for each Sunday. Be with us for the music celebrations and the advent recitals. Listen to your CD of Handel’s Messiah where that musical genius takes the words of scripture-mostly from the prophet Isaiah!- and grounds us in the promise of light and birth and hope. And bring a friend with you to these events and to one of our seven inspirational Christmas Eve services to hold a candle and sing Silent Night, Holy Night, wondrous star lend thy light. There is that word again. I close with Christopher Fry’s poem about dark and light and hope and promise.
Amen. |
