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Against the Encroaching Darkness Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis December 8, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
Isaiah 59:1-4; 9-21 If you would like to hear the sermon, please mail
The year 530 B.C. was a bleak year in Jerusalem. Only eight years earlier, current events pointed to the fact that the cries of God's people had been heard by God and heeded. Cyrus, the gentile King of Persia and a surprisingly major player in salvation history, had ordered the return of exiles from Babylon and decreed that the temple in Jerusalem be rebuilt. Now, in eight short years, things had become so uncertain, circumstances so [flat], and economic troubles so severe, according to one commentator, that all work was halted on the reconstruction of the temple. The common life appeared to be in total disarray. In response to the situation, the Word of the Lord came first through the prophet Haggai saying, "You have sown much, and harvested little; you eat, but you never have enough; you drink, but you never have your fill; you clothe yourselves, but no one is warm; and you that earn wages earn wages to put them into a bag with holes." We can relate, oh how we can relate! But it is the prophet Isaiah-or more accurately Trito-Isaiah (the third of the prophets included in the Book we call Isaiah)-whose words hold in solution the pathos of the year 530 B.C., even as they hold in solution the pathos of this Advent's early and bleak mid-winter. As if from the heights of heaven looking down, Isaiah sees God's people waiting for light, "and lo! there is darkness; for brightness, but [they] walk in gloom." Including himself in that number, the prophet beholds his community "groping like the blind along a wall, groping like those who have no eyes…stumbling at noon as in twilight, among the vigorous as though we were dead." Including myself in that number, I seem to wake these winter mornings with a start in the darkness. Perhaps that is why the prophet's words sounded so prescient in my post-modern ears this last week and continued to echo in my mind, as down the stairs I stumbled to greet the headlines. From the war on terrorism which has the world's only superpower still stalking middle-eastern caves for a single madman…to a movement of madmen bombing nightclubs, taking aim at airplanes from the fields as if picking off wild geese, blowing children on buses and random hotel patrons to pieces…to tanks again occupying the place of Christ's birth just in time for the holidays, because the hopes and fears of all the years still meet in the dark streets of that little town…to inspectors staving off war by way of a package tour of Iraq and simply delaying, weather permitting, the inevitable…to a business community riddled with deceit, an economy tanking, and a rising unemployment number which has begun to take its toll on this congregation…to a continent of people dying by the thousands each and every day of AIDS, with little notice in a nation still partial to the notion that those thus diseased deserve to die: all this I read each morning before groping the wall to the shower that the day may begin. These, of course, are the public, observable signs that we walk in darkness. All the while, around the fire, we privately tend our dear ones' wounds as we always have: wounds inflicted by disease, by divorce, by age, by economic uncertainty. We grope as a nation, as a world, as individuals, we grope like those who have no eyes; we stumble at noon as in the twilight. According to the congregation gathered in 530 B.C., whose liturgy is echoed in these verses of Isaiah, the problem is God: God's hand is too short to save; God's ear is too dull to hear, they complain. It is what we silently say as we wait for light and lo! there is darkness. "Has God a hand in this?" asks the poet. "Then it is a good hand. But has [God] a hand at all? Or is [God] a holy fire burning self-contained for power's sake alone? Then [God] knows himself blissfully as flame unconsuming, as all brilliance and beauty and power, and the rest of us can go hang. Then the accidental universe spins mute, obedient only to its own gross terms, meaningless, out of mind, and alone." But according to the prophet and contrary to the poet's take on our silent nights, the problem lies not with God but with us. "See," Isaiah retorts, "the Lord's hand is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear. Rather, your iniquities have been barriers between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear." The critique is hard for religious people of any age to grasp, but must have been especially difficult for a people who had been exiled from God's presence, from God's destroyed dwelling place, for generations. Now, finally back where they belonged, they had set out to be more religious, more observant, more law-abiding than ever! Irrelevant, cries Isaiah, who finds no evidence of a common life ordered and lived in relation to the living God, who sees no hint of a people marked by the story of their deliverance, who beholds a people walking in the darkness of a Temple left half in shambles by a social order gone awry. A list of consequences follows: violence, lawlessness, lies, injustice, deception, desolation, and destruction. But wait, we say from the enlightened distance of a millennium or two! These are precisely the sins of the godless, the enemy, the evil empires of the world. This perfectly describes the terrorists of our time, we say, with fingers and triggers righteously pointed toward the undisputed and absolute evil of our enemies! But you see, in so saying, we simply make Isaiah's point: our words betray our blindness to the real situation of our sin; they grope in the darkness we have mistaken for light. "Truth stumbles in the public square," the prophet roars. Surely we must hear the sharp edge of God's judgment in this penitential season when, around our public squares, we are preparing ourselves more for war than for God's coming among us. God sees says Isaiah, whether we do or not, and it displeases God that there is not justice…it appalls God that there is no one to intervene. Therefore, warns the prophet, God will enter the present darkness of 530 B.C. with vengeance and with fury, so that "those in the west shall fear the name of the Lord; and those in the east his glory, for he will come like a pent-up stream that the wind of the Lord drives on. And [adds a later editor] he will come to Zion as Redeemer." What folly, then and now, that we seek to comfort ourselves in these equally dark times with the sweet story of a Redeemer coming meek and mild to the manger in Bethlehem. What blindness to imagine that God beholds us sympathetically from the heavens after having come, once for all, to save with so little effect. What arrogance to think the Lord God Omnipotent content to abide the usual celebrations. We who appear to ready ourselves for his birth with trees up and presents wrapped are readying ourselves the more, in this season of waiting, for war initiated with righteousness against evil, in the name of a God whose Word we barely know anymore? Of course, the insidious thing about darkness is that we simply adjust to it without notice and, before we realize it, we are calling the darkness, in all honesty, "light." Our eyes adjust and our minds and our hearts. God made us perfectly free, in fact, to prefer the darkness. But when we do, how silently the preferred darkness turns out to be light enough. Unaware of our true situation, we righteously choose to live and breathe among the half-truths and become accustomed to the articulate lies uttered in the public square. There is no one, it seems, to intervene, no one to measure the truth claims of our time against the God who did intervene, once for all, in Jesus Christ. Perhaps this is why, more than the tender story of Luke's gospel or even the political telling of Christ's birth in Matthew, I am drawn this Advent to the light and darkness which riddles the Gospel of John. Between the promise in John's first chapter-that the light has come into the world and the darkness has not overcome it, pronounced over our Christmas eve with candles blazing…and the judgment of John's third-that the light has come into the world and we have preferred the darkness-intoned at the end of Maundy Thursday as the night engulfs us and the Christ candle is extinguished: between this light and that darkness we seem destined to dwell until the Kingdom comes. "I am standing," writes former priest turned novelist John Carroll, "I am standing here on the hill overlooking birth and death [overlooking Bethlehem and Jerusalem]. It is Tisha b'Av, the day of mourning for the destructions of the Temple, the first in 586 B.C., over which Jeremiah wept, and the second in A.D. 70 over which Jesus wept in advance. The Temple was the house belief had built, grand and perfect. But it did not stand. Everyone of us whose faith cracks in the night carries the destruction of the Temple in his heart" More than you know, my friends, we come to this Advent carrying the destruction of the Temple in our hearts. Our religion, no matter how perfectly practiced, does not avail. Our times are so uncertain, circumstances so [flat], and economic troubles so severe, we say: God's arm is too short. Faith cracks, we grope in the dark until, by a grace we do not deserve, into the darkness One is born to intervene. He is born neither with garments of vengeance nor wrapped in fury as a mantle. But in swaddling clothes, he is about to be laid in a manger. "The man who is God's own Word," proclaimed Karl Barth over German radio in the aftermath of a war whose unintended consequences ravaged the globe, "does not send for His radiant light from afar, encountering the 'darkness' of other[s] as a king, hero or sage; but the Light that 'shines in the darkness' is an ordinary man and gives light to ordinary people…. He encounters the riddle of our 'darkness' on its own ground." May we who stand our ground amid threats of terror, somewhere between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, between birth and death, faith cracking in the night and carrying the destruction of the Temple in our hearts, may we in this world of sin be found not standing but kneeling on the ground, by God's grace undeserved, where meek souls will receive him still. O come to us, abide with us, Our Lord, Emmanuel. Amen. |