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Text: Isaiah 9:1-7 ● If you are able to listen to the Christmas message year after year and not hear in it something that might strike many as sheer fantasy, then, you haven’t heard the message for what it really is: Emmanuel, “God with us”. God- the supreme ‘other’, became ‘like one of us’ (anyone would have recognized him as Mary and Joseph’s boy); God- the ‘timeless one’, entered time; God- the ‘self-sufficient one’, accepted the limitations of humanity (crying out to be nursed; diaper changes; the one who spoke the worlds into existence, forming his first syllables, taking his first steps, etc. God- the ‘all powerful one’, making himself vulnerable. At best, it’s ‘fantastic’, at worst, it’s ‘absurd’. Paul says, this kind of ‘God smarts’ (wisdom) makes us all look like ‘fools’! ● But, it’s just like God to refuse to be cornered; to remain beyond explanation; to force us to accept what can’t be proven, to require us to see what’s not visible to the naked eye, to trust what we can’t control. ● Christianity’s claim is that he was God and that it did happen, which forces us to reconsider what’s possible, what’s real! But, we must all decide. If you choose not to believe, trust me, it won’t be hard to find reasons for doing so. If you choose to believe, you will have to do so based on incomplete evidence; you’ll have to push through the doubt; you’ll have to accept that there might be another means of knowing that knowledge itself. It will force you to listen again, not with an analytical mind, but with the wide-eyed wonderment of a child; to not just ‘choose the story’ but to allow the story to ‘choose you’. ● During this season, your best explanations won’t suffice; your equations won’t add up; your assumptions will be frustrated… but, your imagination will run wild; your hopes will soar. Because we all hope it’s true; we all need it to be true. ● We enter, today, the season identified in the Christian calendar as “Advent”. Advent is from a Latin word meaning ‘coming’ and refers to the coming of Jesus into the world. The mood of advent is best described as ‘expectation’; the longings of people whose stories include extended bouts with oppression and domination- people in hopeful anticipation of a better future, one which would include a divine, yet mysterious ‘rescuer’. They called him “Messiah”. The Greek equivalent of that word, “Christ”, is used of Jesus over 500 times in the NT (anointed one: marked out as one approved by God to fulfill his mission in the world). ● It’s undoubtedly a story of mythical proportion; a story of one would come and overthrow the harsh and oppressive rulers, one who would reverse their fortunes. But, they were not naïve. They knew that much of what they were experiencing and feeling was a result of their own stubbornness and rebellion. ● Nonetheless, their story would be one of eventual triumph and deliverance: the hero would come. But, as with any story which leaves us without all the details, the expectations of the people were not always consistent and certainly not always accurate. But one theme was pervasive throughout… HOPE. Eugene Peterson, in his introduction to Matthew in “The Message” writes,… ‘Every day we wake up in the middle of something that’s already going on, that has been going on for a long time.’ ● The gospels seem to invite us into the story that is already in progress, not as if we’ve just stumbled in, but almost as though the story has been expecting us- inviting us: a story that will somehow not be complete without us. Here we are, another year later, rehearsing the same story; but, not as those who simply read, but as those who are called to ‘enter’ the story- to ‘embody’ the storyline. ● Prophets were always standing in the present and asking us to see what was yet to appear; to live in the present with a view toward the future: to live in the present as if the future had already arrived. ● Isaiah utters his prophecies some 700 years prior to the birth of Jesus. A time when the major military power of the day, Assyria, had conquered the northern part of Israel and the southern part, Judah, lived under constant threat. It was a time of crisis… a time best described as “darkness”. “O Little Town of Bethlehem”… (lyric) ‘The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight’. Hopes and fears: the dynamic tension in which we are called to live. ● Hope always seems to be attached to something we have yet to experience; something that hasn’t happened yet. Paul says in Romans 8, “Who hopes for what he already has?” But, that which we hope to experience is always inextricably linked to our greatest fears- that it never will. ● I think we are often left wondering if our hope is just some sentimental or romantic form of ‘escapism’; that we so desire for things to be different that we create our own mental ‘happy place’! ►Sometimes our biggest fears in life are not about what will happen, but that nothing will happen- things will always remain the same; nothing will change. It becomes increasingly difficult to capture the essence of Christmas because of the way that it’s been packaged for us. It’s hard to comprehend the enormity of the implications of such an event because it’s been so reduced to getting in the “Christmas Spirit” or over-indulging ourselves with stuff we neither need nor usually like. It seems to have very little to do with ‘hope’. ● Our Christmas doesn’t seem to resemble the chaos or confusion or paranoia of the first Christmas. Fears: For Mary and Joseph of rumor and innuendo amidst talk of ‘miracle conception’. For the shepherds, of reputation and being further ostracized because of their fabulous fabrications. For Herod, the fear of a new king threatening his control and privileged position. For the people, that this might still not be the anticipated one. ● What makes it so hard to hope is that we live in a world that’s notorious for ‘dashing our hopes’; for serving up massive helpings of disappointment and discouragement. DARKNESS… ►For people in darkness, talk of ‘light’ dominated their imagination. When it’s dark, it’s hard to believe you’ll ever see the light again. ►The darkness doesn’t create a different reality, it just seems to hide all that’s real; all that’s there. It creates for us a false reality. ►It’s hard to get perspective in the dark. You can’t gauge your surroundings; you can’t see what’s beyond the reach of the light. ►The darkness plays on our fears; it makes us ‘irrational’. ►What’s even worse… the darkness all around you sometimes seems to be getting in you. Dark is not just the absence of light, it’s a condition, a feeling; it’s but the overwhelming hopelessness of being ‘left in the dark’. LIGHT… ►But, often, the darkness causes you to search for light… ‘groping’ (as Paul describes it in Acts 17). And although your movements are more cautious than confident, you reach, you hope. In the dark, every glimpse of light- though momentary and fading, brings hope. Because only those who have known (experienced) darkness can appreciate the light. ►In the light, I see what I’ve been missing. I see all that my mind has been imagining; the light sometimes confirms the images I’ve created (ah, it’s just as I pictured it) and sometimes demonstrates them to be incredibly inaccurate (wow, that’s not what I envisioned at all!) I see myself; I see you! ►Hope always ‘dawns’. Like the first light in the morning, it gradually rises to overtake the darkness. Here’s the real paradox… If you can already see it, you don’t need hope! But, without hope, you’ll never see it! ● What becomes apparent is that what we need is A WAY OUT OF DARKNESS; LIGHT; A RESCUER.
When it finally comes, when you
finally experience the light, you feel it lift from within. When you’ve been in
the darkness, the light is as much felt as it is seen. |
