Sunday Sermon: Rise and Shine
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Text: Isaiah 60:1-2
Series: Glad Bethlehem's Living Light
Fourth Sunday of Advent: LOVE
When you’re young and energetic, you tend to be on high alert every waking moment. Your ability to move about is never in question as long as you are “up and at ‘em,” as they say. It’s the waking part that tends to present us with the greater challenge. That is to say, even if you consider yourself, as I do, an “early riser,” you like to get up on your own. You don’t want anybody pressuring you to jump out of bed, at least not before you’re ready. Indeed, for most of us, the hardest words for any of us to hear are those three that too often come to us in our moments of greatest slumber: “Rise and shine!” “Rise and shine!” Especially is that the case that when the morning light that comes your way doesn’t find you particularly excited about whatever you have before you.
But if there’s anything worse than having somebody else rouse you before you’re ready to get up, it’s being in a position where you have to convince somebody else to do so.
That’s the position in which the prophet Isaiah found himself in this passage before us this morning. The 60th chapter of Isaiah comes at a point in his prophecy when Isaiah found himself facing the challenge of encouraging the returning exiles that God had not given up on His promise to make them a “light to the nations.” God had roused them from their seven-decade sentence in Babylon, and though they had returned to Jerusalem excited about their future, the dark reality of beholding a city in ruins, a city that bore no resemblance to its former glory, a city that was nothing more than a shell of its former self, the reality of that bitter sight and what would be required to rebuild it was more than they could stand. They had come to a place where they just wanted to pull the covers back over their heads and go back to sleep. But God had told Isaiah in no uncertain times that He was not going to allow that to happen.
Thus Isaiah speaks out those three words that a sleepy, slumbering people never want to hear: “Rise and shine! For your light has come, and the glory of the LORD rises upon you. Behold, darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the peoples, but the LORD rises upon you and His glory appears over you.”
What Isaiah is telling the people is that in spite of the fact that nothing to these returning exiles looked as if they had thought it would be and there didn’t seem to be any chance of anything changing for the better in the near future, God was about to draw near to them to do in their midst what only God could do – to bring to bear His light and salvation upon their gloom and darkness and to restore them to a place where they might bear witness to the nations the difference that trusting in God always makes.
I read this passage of Scripture and I ask myself the question, “Why would God promise to do such a thing? Why wouldn’t God just let the people of Jerusalem stay mired in their spiritual slumber and find another people to spread His light in the world? What was so special about this people? Why were they the ones God had chosen to show the nations His glory?”
To know the answer to those questions you have to try to wrap your mind and your heart around God’s essential attribute, which is the attribute of love. While there are many ways by which we try to comprehend the God in whom we live and move and have our being, the best way for us to do so is to start out by beholding him as a God who loves and who does so not because of who we are and what we have to offer him but as a God who loves precisely because of who He is and what He has to offer us. As into the darkness of Isaiah’s day did God promise to draw near to restore His discouraged people simply because He loved them, so in lowly Bethlehem did God draw near to our darkness and discouragement in Christ Jesus for the same reason, which is because He loves us. For God so loved the world that He gave His Only Begotten Son.
To be totally honest, I can’t think of anything our world needs more today than the light of God’s love in Jesus Christ. Take a good look around. People are not just divided; they are polarized. COVID cases are rising through the roof with the Christmas season likely to challenge the capacity of our nation’s health care system even more. Many have lost their way to make a living and their unemployment benefits are about to expire. I could go on and on, but the point is that there are far too many today who are of the opinion that there is no hope and therefore no reason to be excited about the future. What they must see and what they must hear is the good news of the Gospel – that God has drawn near in the person of Jesus to redeem the world, to release those paralyzed by their circumstances and to give aid to those who are weighed down by their heavy burdens. The whole message of Christmas is that the darkness that hovers over us – the darkness that causes us to stumble and keeps us from seeing the opportunities all around – that darkness will not last forever, simply because of how in His great love for this world God will shine His light upon it and will do so through a people willing to reflect it to others through their faith in Jesus Christ.
The only question is, “Will you that be such a person?” “Will you be someone who bears witness to God’s love in Christ because of how you dare to love them in the same way? Will you work for their good? Will you shine the light of Christ into their darkness?” After all, the real test of a person’s faith is whether he or she truly has enough of it to be able to share it with another person.
Some years ago, in a former church, as we were gearing up for Christmas Eve, we received a letter from the local fire marshal, informing us that the city was disallowing candlelight services because of the fire hazard those services posed. Well, you can imagine the consternation that decision created in our church. How can you have a candlelight Christmas Eve service without the candlelight? We looked at our options. We could ignore the prohibition and if cited, ask for forgiveness, though doing so would most likely come with a fine. We could act like we never got the notice, but that would be duplicitous, not exactly an appropriate thing for a church to do. Or we could not do the candlelight, which would come as a great disappointment to the membership, given how that service had meant so much over the years to that church, as our Candlelight Christmas Eve Service means to this one.
So, what did we decide to do? We decided to have the candle lighting, but instead of keeping it inside the church, we decided to have people take the light outside into the community. We explained the symbolism of doing so and how it might spur us to go thinking of other ways we might could bear witness to Jesus, the Light of Life.
At first, I could tell that people were uncertain about the change in that tradition. And I could also tell that as with most attempts at doing something more creative, it never goes entirely according to plan. In this case, people struggled to balance their light along with everything else they had brought with them to the service. And as people moved out from the Sanctuary into the windy night, it took something of an effort to keep their light from going out. And I’m sure that some people were dealing with the discomfort and perhaps embarrassment over “going public” with their light instead of keeping it under the bushel of a safe Sanctuary. But to their credit, the vast majority of the congregation understood the message, did their best to manage the challenge, overcame their discomfort and any shame such a public witness might have caused, and from every exit of the church, you could look out into the community and see the light of Christmas shining in the darkness and the glory of the LORD being dispersed into the city.
The light of God’s glory always shines best in the darkest of places, but it may be that today it won’t be seen as God wills it to be seen unless someone is willing to reflect it. Might that someone be you?
One church I read about had a different Christmas Eve tradition, a tradition that involved members in a Christmas play. At the climax of the performance, the person in charge of the lighting was to dim all the stage lights except the light over the manger. But when it came time for him to dim the lights, he accidently turned them all off, including the light over the manger. To which one of the shepherds barked out in the darkness, “Hey, you just switched off Jesus!”
Now, I don’t expect anything like that to happen this evening in our Living Nativity. And I pray with all my heart that it doesn’t happen at any point or in any way in any of our church’s efforts to show the light of Jesus to our community. I pray that in the midst of whatever stupor and spiritual slumber this season of COVID may have caused us to know, that in this most holy season we will rise and we will shine so that everyone might be awakened to the possibilities of the salvation that in His love God has extended to the whole world through His Son, our Savior, Jesus, the Light of Life