It is not until you are able to be free from the city, free from the suburban sprawl, free from the highways and the shopping malls and the gas stations, that you are able once again to experience the wonder of a dark night, and the sky with its dome of stars. We don't see a night sky here in Cedar Rapids which is not tainted with the orange glow of street lights and neon store signs and the flood lights which declare free parking outside countless strip malls and the like, so we have to make do with such images burned into our brains. As we imagine shepherds on a Palestinian Hillside on the night of Christmas Eve according to the traditions handed down in the Gospel of Luke, I am sure that it is a lush and vivid sky, overflowing with star-light under which we see them huddled there in our mind's eye.
It is an irony, this relationship between darkness and light; one cannot really appreciate the glory of the latter until one has also traveled into the midst of the former. You cannot see the light of the star until first experiencing the darkness of the void. In our world where artificial lights pollute the night with a glare that is almost shrill, it is hard to understand the drama and the quiet and the power of the real darkness. It is hard to catch the sense of salvation which comes from the ignition of a light. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light, those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has the light shined.
These are such familiar words to most of us who have grown up in the church, read at least once or twice in the context of Advent and Christmas each year. They are the words of the prophet Isaiah in about 700 B.C. when the Assyrian armies had conquered the Kingdom of Israel and were laying siege to Jerusalem. I am referring to this history not only because we hear the Isaiah passage so often this time of year, but also for the purpose of establishing the Biblical meaning of the darkness. A metaphor which has meaning in just about every age, in the darkness – in the absence of light, there is also an absence of hope.
It was the midst of the Second World War and the thickest part of the fighting when the tide had not yet turned, in 1942, when Harry Emerson Fosdick, pastor of Riverside Church in New York City, preached a sermon called, This is a great year for Christmas. He understood and tried to convey to his congregation that in the darkest hours, God's good news is often heard in the most memorable and meaningful of ways.
There are of course, many kinds of darkness with which people must contend. Ely Wiesel, the Nobel Prize winning novelist titles the first of his autobiographical novels, Night, or a better translation apparently would be, "The Kingdom of Night," speak of the Holocaust into which as a young child, Wiesel was forced to mature from child into young man while witnessing the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. While Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Protestant scholar and also chronicler of the same period of history, does not use the imagery of night, at least in this context, in Letters and Papers from Prison which he wrote while confined by Hitler's government, he describes totalitarianism as an evil so profound that it subverts all systems of ethics and morality. It extinguishes the light.
Darkness can be personal as well as social, as individuals struggle with institutions -- those that either do or do not educate them, those that hire them and fire them, protect or do not protect them. Other persons can be a source of darkness when there has been a disintegration of relationships, with employer or spouse; between parents and children. And then darkness can be understood as something internal, personal, mental and spiritual illness, guilt, fear of meaninglessness. Darkness can be grief or longing. Perhaps darkness can even describe ones relationship with God (what the mystics call the "dark night of the soul"). Christian faith is incomplete if it speaks only to the summers of the spirit and ignores what Paul calls power made perfect in weakness.
The shepherds on their darkened hillside felt the light, were awakened by the light, they knew what it means to be in the darkness, to hear a wolf howl or some other predator in the darkness threaten their flock. They knew about darkness and suddenly they were overcome with the light. Let us get up and see what it is that this message is telling us, said the shepherds. It is not that the reality of their lives has changed, but the light has pierced their darkness and created a new spirit of hope in a moment and a promise worth following. It is only though this message, this human connection with the divine, which comes in the darkness of our need and our empty places and because it fills touches us and fills us, takes on the property of light. That light has the power to transform, to change people.
The truth is we have been through a lot of darkness in the first decade of the 21st Century. It began with a scare about the Millennium Bug which, it was projected, was going to destroy all our computer data. Next came a contested election and a great deal of acrimony and in quick succession the horror or September 11, the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the declaration of “Mission Accomplished” and a protracted, military engagement still continuing in both countries with the threat of nuclear arms arising now in Iran, the country geographically in between. The housing bubble burst along with the float of billions of dollars of derivatives that suddenly sank underwater and we were trust into a deep recession. Cedar Rapids was inundated with flood waters in 2008 and as the decade ends the rebuilding has only just barely begun…much of our city center is still boarded up and lots of commerce has gone elsewhere.
Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light, the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight…
We all came through our own darkened places this morning - we all approach the New Year and decade waiting and watching for the light in our own way, with our own special needs and our own special hopes and dreams.
In a similar time – the prophet Isaiah records another message which we read this morning. “Have you not known, have you not heard, the Lord your God is an everlasting God – who does not faith or grow weary, whose understanding is unsearchable….”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, again, wrote from prison of being at a turning point of history in which something new seemed to be emerging and yet not being able to discern how that something new is to be seen in any of the present alternatives. He wrote, that "optimism that is a will for the future should never be despised, even if it is proved wrong a hundred times; it is health and vitality," That optimism is the light which dawned in the minds of shepherds on the hillside, that is the light which begins to glimmer and grow in the heart of even the most disaffected or disillusioned of us on a Christmas Eve night. That is the true light which was coming into the world, as John's Gospel says, and the darkness could not overcome it.
This season of Christmas, as we celebrate the coming of the light still one more time in our world, as we have for two thousand years, we are reminded again that we do not need to fear the dark. Our problems and our fears – the troubles of the world are profound. Will this light be illumining somehow in a more distinct and special way than it has before? Well, we might ask, and although we do not know; what we do know, is that image of the light penetrating the darkness of Bethlehem – and the testimony of the shepherds.
Shepherds are the simple folk, the folk who are you and me. They are not prophets or teachers or scholars or kings – they are not in control, but live their lives as most of us do at the whim of the elements and dependent upon the turn of events at every moment of their lives.
The only certainty is that if the shepherd had ignored the light, turned over and pulled up their cloaks and gone back to sleep, their lives would have been unaffected. If they had not left their sheep and taken the journey – if they had not gotten up and engaged in the message of the angels, they would not have found the source of the light.
It seems to me very special that the carol “Rise up Shepherds and Follow” comes out of a tradition of slavery – it is a 19th Century call to a people, who like the shepherds, were just about powerless to affect much in their lives. Yet the call is to get up. The message is to follow the way of the light even in the darkest of times and places…imagine the light as it hovers on the dawn horizon – the bright growing edge of a new day.
Howard Thurman, African American Preacher, Chaplain at Boston University and mentor to a young man named Martin Luther King, Jr. – wrote many wonderful books of theology and religious criticism. He also wrote a book called The Mood of Christmas
The Growing Edge
All around us worlds are dying and new worlds are being born;
All around us life is dying and life is being born.
The fruit ripens on the tree;
The roots are silently at work in the darkness of the earth
Against the time when there shall be new leaves, fresh blossoms,
Green fruit.
Such is the growing edge!
It is the extra breath from the exhausted lung,
The one more thing to try when all else has failed,
The upward reach of life when weariness closes in upon all endeavor.
This is the basis of hope in moments of despair,
The incentive to carry on when times are out of joint
And men have lost their reason; the source of confidence
When worlds crash and dreams whiten into ash,
The birth of a child – life’s most dramatic answer to death -
This is the Growing Edge incarnate,
Look well to the growing edge!
The Work of Christmas
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers,
To make music in the heart.
AMEN.
