December 1, 2013
Advent 1
Romans 13:11-14
Isaiah 2:1-5
(prayer)
Every day at this time of the year, in our part of the world, it gets darker a little earlier in the afternoon and the sun rises a bit later each morning. It’s been going on for more than five months, but it’s really noticeable at this time of year.
This dance of light and dark will continue until the earth’s orbit moves past the point where the North Pole is furthest away from the sun. Then, after December 21st, for the next six months, we will see ever increasing light until the cycle goes around again.
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For us in the north, the season of Advent comes as the days grow shorter and shorter. Christmas arrives on December 25th, just as the light begins to return. It is a nice coinciding of theology and cosmology.
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Although the Bible offers us many hints as to the time of Jesus’ death - on a Friday during the Passover festival, which places it in late March or early April, the truth is that the Bible gives us almost no information as to when Jesus was born.
The closest we get is a passage in Luke, where Mary is visited by the Angel Gabriel and told that she will give birth to Jesus. That passage says it was the ‘sixth month’. Now, does that mean the sixth month of the year (around August or September in our modern calendars), or the sixth month of Mary’s cousin Elizabeth’s pregnancy?
Irenaeus, was a second century Bishop in Lyon. He proposed that Mary must have become pregnant on the same date of the year that Jesus would have eventually died. He came up with March 25th as the date of the Angel Gabriel’s visit to Mary. Add nine months and you get a December 25th birth-date.
However, December 25th wasn’t chosen as the date for the Christ Mass in western Christianity until the mid-4th century. Perhaps the earliest reference to a celebration of the Nativity on December 25th is found in a roman manuscript called the ‘Chronology of 354’.
Other’s have speculated that a date near the winter solstice provided cultural cover for the early Christians who could celebrate the birth of Jesus within wider celebrations over the beginning of the end of winter.
We just don’t know when Jesus was born.
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Don’t get distracted by this fact that we don’t know. We, as followers of Jesus, celebrate that Christ came into the world, not when Christ came into the world.
As a matter of long-standing tradition, we will celebrate the coming of Christ into our experience on December 25th, again this year - twenty-four days (a little more than three weeks) from now.
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And so our annual pilgrimage to Bethlehem begins.
In this dark time of year, we are guided by four special lights. Today, the first light is... hope.
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It is said that no space is truly dark as long as a single candle burns. That’s true. We may not be a very resilient species when it comes to our nocturnal abilities, but our eyes are able to adjust to small amounts of light to bring some order to the chaos of the dark. Just a hint of the interaction of light and shadow can help us find our way in a dark place.
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I credit one of my best friends for giving me two pieces of wisdom about light and darkness. One came from his first year college roommate, who opined (after his screaming woke up my friend up): “Toes are God’s invention for finding furniture in the dark.”
The other wise teaching was a practical one as we were driving down a lonely country road on a moonless night. He said to me: “Do you want to see something really scary?” Before I could answer, he turned off the headlights and the world disappeared into the darkest dark I ever experienced. He kept them off just long enough for me to begin to freak out and for him to begin to laugh hysterically.
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Some level of ach’-luo-pho-bia is a common condition for most people. It is based on a common truth - we can be worried about what we don’t know or understand. Darkness is the very essence of the unknown.
Inserting light into an unknown dark is an injection of hope.
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For the Apostle Paul, as he wrote to the Christians in Rome, he also contrasted the day and the night. He spoke about how darkness could serve as a cover for ‘less than desirable’, hypocritical living. He wanted the believers to live an honest faith, one that could be easily seen in the light of the day. “lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light”, Paul wrote.
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The world known by the prophet Isaiah and the people of ancient Israel was one where they were either involved in a war or they were preparing for war. Israel was a small parcel of land surrounded on all sides, by other nations who would like to annex it for their own.
So imagine how counter-cultural the prophet’s message was in today’s reading. To speak of a time of peace was to hold strong to a remarkably hopeful faith.
In the second chapter of Isaiah, the prophet points to this hopeful future, when all the world would recognize God’s authority and come streaming to Jerusalem to worship at the Tabernacle of the LORD on mount Zion. They will seek the wisdom of God - instruction for good and right living. Isaiah see this coming together as an act of international peace. The swords and spears would no longer be needed - they could be reformed into the tools of daily living - farm tools; fabric tools - ploughshares and pruning hooks.
The final instruction from the prophet in today’s reading was to “walk in the light of the LORD”. There is no longer any need to fear war and suffering; God’s path is one of a hoped-for peace.
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The first layers of fear can begin to fade away as the light of hope enters our experience.
Sometimes that fear is a worry that we can’t make any difference in the way things are - that we should just accept what is wrong with the world. We can be afraid that all we can do is carve out a little corner of safety for ourselves that might last for a while at least.
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In his lifetime, Jesus challenged that notion over and over again. His opponents would mock his sense of reality as he refused to leave people on the margins, as he broke social taboos with his radical compassion and welcome.
A message of Christmas is that, with God, things are possible. That was one of the messages Gabriel had for young Mary - nothing is impossible for God.
As I have mentioned before, Jim Wallis’ modern definition of hope is one of my favorite quotes: “Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, then watching the evidence change.” It’s not all that different from the author of the New Testament letter to the Hebrews: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Heb 11:1)
Hope is a matter of faith - not in what is seen, but in what God can do.
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We begin a journey of faith again today. We shine a thin sliver of light of hope on to a path that leads us to God’s interaction with the human experience.
Over these next few weeks, we will speak about this in other ways - we will shine even more light on the subject. Our goal will be to counter fear and distraction with the promise of God’s love and grace in our lives.
May it be so. Amen.
***offering***
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