LIGHT THAT WARMS—Isaiah 9:1-7

 

  

The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.

In the darkest days of the year, the world around us is ablaze with decorated trees, strings of lights, and Santa and reindeer and mangers with lightbulbs inside.  I look out my dining room window and see the beautiful decorations on my neighbors’ houses shining in the night, glistening beneath the newly fallen snow.

Our celebration of Christmas is well lit, but those lights will fade as the season passes into the wimter of 2023.

 Isaiah talks of a light that never fades.  He names the light “Everlasting Father,” and says “Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end.”  The prophet has in mind no passing season but an enduring change to the creation and within us.

Isaiah wrote to a people with no electric lights. The lives of Isaiah’s readers were ruled by the sun and the moon.  Their nights were lit by candle and torches, but candles and torches eventually burn out. They were powerless in any lasting way against the darkness that enveloped them each evening.

Our challenge is different; we have too much light.  We are able to generate artificial light to drive back the immediate darkness and ease our anxieties a bit.  In Belgium, the entire highway system is lit by bright lamps.  We have cities that glow in the night; you can see them from an airplane.  Our homes and public places are made bright by ubiquitous lights.

We think we can disarm the darkness through our own efforts.  We are mistaken.

The German poet Johann Wolfgang van Goethe is reported to have cried at the point of death:  More light, more light! Open the window that more light may come in.  Is it more light we need, or do we need a different type of light?

All this light we manufacture does not make our world any warmer.  We live with the illusion that we are conquering the darkness; but without warmth, light cannot sustain and nurture and heal us. 

The 20^th century Spanish write Miguel de Unamuno reflected: It is not more light we need, but more warmth. Warmth, warmth, more warmth!  We die of cold, not darkness.  It is the not the night that kills, but the frost. All the artificial light in which we enrobe ourselves cannot remove the chill from our world.  The cold still numbs us to God’s love and to the needs and dreams of our neighbor.

Indifference and fear and racism and greed and self-interest and jealousy and materialism all chill us to the bone and paralyze us.  Isaiah writes of a light that comes as warmth, a light that disarms the numbness of our world and the chill within us.  This is a light that not only enlightens but also reanimates the creation.  Christians have named that light Jesus.

This time of year we remind one another that Jesus is the light of the world.  It is easy to forget this in the midst of all the frantically self-manufactured artificial brightness around us.  The light that Jesus brings does more than temporarily hold the darkness at a safe distance; it warms us as well.  It enables us and refreshes us and renews us.  It animates us to a new way of living. 

Hopefully it ennobles us to become light to those around us, the kind of light that warms and thaws the lives of others.  This is not the artificial manufactured brightness of our Christmas decorations. This is a light that comes from above and is visited upon us in that child placed in a manger so long ago.

In him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it. (John 1:4—5)

 

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister—American Baptist Churches of New York State

THE INVASION: Luke 2:1—20

 

We Recognize this Place

Luke begins his story of Christmas on a bit of a sour note: taxes.  December is the time of year when we try not to think about the tax returns we all will be filing come 2023.

 In his reference to the revenue census, Luke reminds us that the birth of Jesus is not some tender-hearted Hallmark Christmas special with soft music and a quaint small-town setting. 

 Rather, we get taxes and a heavily pregnant woman traveling from Nazareth to Bethlehem by foot or by donkey, fulfilling an Empire-mandated journey.  This is no trip to grandma’s house in the family minivan. When Joseph and Mary get to Bethlehem, the lodgings are all full and there are no spare beds.  Jesus is born outside and laid in a feed trough.

 This is important to Luke’s telling of the story.  The birth of the Son of God takes place in the real world, among the challenges of daily life. This happens in no fairy tale world; it transpires in the world where we live.  We recognize this place.

 Yet There Are Extraordinary Happenings Here

Nonetheless, angels appear in the story.  And the glory of the Lord shines down from on high.  This is no ordinary night.  The shepherds are given a message from another realm.  They are told that the most ordinary of things—an infant swaddled in cloths lying in a feeding trough—is a sign of something extraordinary. It is a sign that the Messiah, the Lord, has come.  This is no ordinary evening.

 The angels sing:

Glory to God in the highest

heaven,

 and on earth peace among

those whom he favors.

In the birth of this child, heaven and earth embrace one another. 

 Celtic spirituality developed the concept of “thin places.”  A thin place is a physical location where the separation between the divine and the earth is considered to be thin. In other words, the Divine is unusually accessible.  That feed trough was the thinnest of all places.  It is so thin, one could call it an invasion.

 The Invasion

An elderly Dutch woman remembers the dark days before the Christmas of 1944, recalling how each night they sat secretly around the wireless, eagerly hoping to hear some coded message that meant the invasion has begun.  They would scan the skies looking for Allied planes and walk the dykes looking for ships on the horizon, and praying, always praying.  They were starving; the Jews were all gone. They wondered could they endure another year of Nazi occupation. 

 They knew they were powerless to save themselves.  Help must come from somewhere else.

 This is the message the angels bring. The invasion has begun; help is coming from somewhere else. They sing:

Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David a savior, who is Christ the Lord.  And this will be a sign for you, you will find the baby wrapped is swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.

This is something more durable than a visitation.  This is an invasion.  Few people took note night; Only Mary and Joseph and some shepherds marked the event.  Nevertheless, the invasion had begun.

 World Rejecting

This is not a story about fleeing or escaping this world.  Rather, the Creator of the heavens and the earth enters our world and our lives.

 The German sociologist Max Weber observed that Christianity is not a world fleeing faith.  It is a world rejecting faith.  It is a faith that plants itself amid life in this world and says: “I reject what you have done to one another. I reject what you have done to my creation.  I reject the shallow and passing things you have grown to crave.”

God in Christ simply refuses to leave us and our world the way we are.  This child will grow up to comfort and renew and forgive and love.  He will also grow up to challenge and confront and correct. The one thing he will not do is leave us and our world as it is.

 Mary had already warned us as she contemplated what God would do through this child:

He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;
    he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.
He has brought down rulers from their thrones
    but has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things
    but has sent the rich away empty. (1:51-53

 God simply will not leave us alone.

 God Was All In

We who celebrate this child’s birth should be sober about what is really happening in the shadows of that night long ago.  This is no dreamy holiday production.  This is an invasion.

In George MacDonald’s allegorical fairy tale, The Golden Key, a young heroine meets the Old Man of the Earth on her quest for the land from which the shadows fall. The Old Man of the Earth guides her on to the next leg of her journey.

Then the Old Man of the Earth stooped over the floor of the cave, raised a huge stone from it, and left it leaning. It disclosed a great hole that went plumb-down.
"That is the way," he said.
"But there are no stairs."
"You must throw yourself in. There is no other way.”

 God threw Godself into our world that night in that baby; there was no other way.

 Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister—American Baptist Churches of New York State

Art Credit: Adoration of the Child by Gerard van Honthorst, Uffizi, Florence.

 

Art Credit: Adoration of the Child by Gerard van Honthorst, Uffizi, Florence.