A light shines in the darkness

A reflection on John 1: 1-5, 10-18, Jeremiah 31: 7-14 and Ephesians 1: 3-14, preached Sunday, 4 January 2009

I’ve been rereading some of my recent sermons. “Why on earth would he do that?” you’re thinking. Well, I wanted to check just what it is I’ve been saying to you in the last few weeks. We had four weeks of Advent – the Sundays of Hope, Peace, Joy and Love – and then Christmas Day and last Sunday, the first Sunday of the Christmas season. All of those opportunities for excitement and rejoicing in anticipation of the coming Good News. But after revisiting those sermons, I’m starting to think I may be a miserable sort of person.

It’s been good news and bad news, with plenty of opportunity to think about the bad news: there’s been wandering in the wilderness and AIDS and war and poverty and injustice and loneliness and sadness, and a church in decline in Australia, and even on Christmas Day I managed to talk about the Millennium Goals and the millions of people dying unnecessarily each year, deaths which we have the resources and the ability to prevent.

Cheerful soul, aren’t I? It seems I’m not so much a glass half-empty person, as a “someone took my glass and drank it, and even when I did have a glass, it wasn’t as big as everyone else’s” kind of person.

In my defence, however, I want to say that from the very beginning I have been putting the bad news together with the good. My starting point was to suggest that good news only makes sense in the presence of those things which are not good news. I’m not talking about bad news because there is nothing else. I’m talking about bad news and the Good News which breaks into that and transforms it, removes it, converts it.

There is a light which shines in the darkness.

In the beginning, all was darkness, and God said, “Let there be light”! John tells us the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.

There is bad news, but the Good News is greater.

By way of illustration, my sermon on this Sunday six years ago (yes, I even read sermons from other times and places) my sermon was all about Australia’s refugee detention centres, and it was about the prevailing attitude in some circles which seemed to suggest that refugees somehow brought their bad news upon themselves. Six years later, detention centres are no longer headline news in our country. Somehow, good news has replaced the bad; a light has come into that particular darkness.

Of course, that is not to suggest that we no longer have refugees in our country or that we no longer have detention centres, or that there is not still much work to do. Terrible damage has been done to an unconscionable number of people, some of which will never be healed. But there has been and continues to be a move towards the light of reason and compassion. A light shines in the darkness.

And those who believe in the light have been a major part of the change which has taken place. Christians have proclaimed the necessity of good news for those living in darkness.

It’s not often that I use three readings from Scripture on a Sunday morning. In part, it’s a time thing; it’s also a “how on earth can these readings go together?” kind of thing.

But this morning we have heard from Jeremiah and Paul and John, and all three of them are about how good news overcomes bad, about God’s great desire for hope, peace, joy and love in our world, in this time and in this place.

Jeremiah proclaims, “Sing! Exile will not last forever.”

Paul says, “Rejoice and give thanks. There is forgiveness for sin, and adoption for orphans.”

And John pronounces, “There is grace upon grace.”

Grace – that extraordinary love which imposes no conditions, no limits, no exceptions. In the face of all that would deny it, there is grace.

So, what will 2009 be like for us?

For the world at large, I’m imagining that it will be more of the same: more economic crises, more job losses, more natural disasters, more unnecessary sickness and death, more ills for the health of the planet; but there will also be more acts of random kindness, more cures developed, more children raised in healthy families, more expressions of love and compassion, more efforts to heal our fragile earth, more good news even as there is more bad news.

And for the church? What lies ahead in 2009? I’m imagining that Christianity will also experience both good and bad news. It’s likely that, in the developed nations, people will continue to turn away from traditional expressions of the faith in search of a different spirituality which they feel speaks more directly into their lives; and it’s likely that in many other parts of the world – Asia, South America, Africa – that Christianity will continue to grow as more and more people see how the Good News of Jesus Christ is extraordinarily applicable to their everyday lives.

And for us? The fact remains that we live with the former reality rather than the latter. That is the bald bad news. But the Good News is that there is a light which shines in the darkness. And the darker things appear, the more clearly the light shines.

The spirituality which people in our culture so desperately seek at this time is still the spirituality of grace, of love, of compassion, of relationship, of all those things which lie at the heart of our faith, that have always lain at the heart of Christianity, and will always remain at the heart of Christianity. The Good News is still good!

One extraordinary part of the grace of God is that we are invited, indeed commanded, to work with God in bringing Good News. We need to remember that it is God who is at work – each of our readings makes that abundantly clear; Paul says, “With all wisdom and insight God has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to God’s good pleasure” – it is God who is at work and we are asked to join in with whatever it is that God is doing.

What will God do with us in this place in 2009? I don’t know. But I do know that, whatever it is, whatever it looks and sounds and feels like, it will be Good News.

The celebration of the meal we share each Sunday morning reminds us that the central metaphor of our faith is that of death and resurrection. We believe that God brings new life out of death. And we are called to hear and to speak words of hope, new life, new possibilities in a future with God.

Jeremiah, Paul and John tell us that God breaks into the world, for all those who are in need, in need of love and in need of hope. We are called to live hope-filled lives, proclaiming that God is with us, and praising God for God’s blessings.

A light shines in the darkness! Amen.

It's a miracle

A reflection for Christmas Day 2008

It’s a miracle! It is, isn’t it? That helpless infant lying in the manger is God come to earth, God born as one of us, Love made flesh. The tiny squalling child, entirely dependent upon his mother, is the Creator of all things, the Alpha and the Omega, the Lord of all, yet somehow one of us, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone?

 

It’s a miracle, but I’m not quite sure what to do with it.

 

I read somewhere that miracles are never answers to our questions; they are, at best, questions. Miracles are questions that set us seeking answers, in much the same way that the miraculous star sends the magi, the wise ones, far off into foreign lands in search of an answer. What does this mean? We must search for an answer.

 

The birth of the Christ child is a question: a “ Why?”; a “What is the point?”, a “What is the purpose?” inbreaking of the Divine into our human existence. And seeking the answer is our life work.

 

A week or so ago, I stumbled quite by chance upon a movie on TV. It was called “The girl in the café”. And I found the movie to be a kind of miracle; it was a question popped unsuspectingly into my life when I least expected it. (And isn’t that also one of the main criteria for miracles? We don’t expect them.)

 

The movie’s premise is quite an intriguing one: an aging career civil servant falls for a young girl he meets in a café. And he then takes her with him on his next trip, which just happens to be advising the British Chancellor of the Exchequer at the 2005 G8 Summit.

 

I don’t know how good your memories are, but the 2005 G8 Summit had on its agenda the Millennium Goals, the bold declaration made at the turn of the century to Make Poverty History. Now, the young woman turns out to be a bit of a problem for the civil servant because she keeps asking questions and she won’t stop asking questions, even when she’s in the presence of the Chancellor or the Prime Minister or even the heads of the other nations at the summit.

 

She asks, Why do 30,000 children die every day from preventable diseases?

 

Why are the major powers of this world spending obscene amounts of money each day on armaments and warfare when children are dying?

 

Why isn’t anyone doing anything when, for the first time in human history, we actually have the resources to halt poverty, to eradicate diseases like AIDS and cholera, and to provide education for all?

 

She even interrupts the Prime Minister’s speech at a special dinner, and this is what she says:

I don't know how much the rest of you … know about what's going on but my friend … tells me that while we are eating a hundred million children are nearly starving. There's just millions of kids who'd kill for the amount of food that fat old me left on the side of my plate, children who are then so weak they'll die if a mosquito bites them. And so they do die. One every three seconds.

[snaps fingers]

There they go.

[pauses, snap fingers again]

And another one. Anyone who has kids knows that every mother and father in Africa must love their children as much as they do, and to watch your kids die, to watch them die and then to die yourself in trying to protect them, that's not right. And tomorrow eight of the men sitting 'round this table actually have the ability to sort this out by making a few great decisions. And if they don't, some day someone else will. And they'll look back on us lot and say - people were actually dying in their millions unnecessarily, in front of you, on your TV screens. What were you thinking? You knew what to do to stop it happening and you didn't do those things. Shame on you. So that's what you have to do tomorrow. Be great instead of being ashamed. It can't be impossible. It must be possible.

 

The girl from the café keeps asking, “Why?”

 

“The girl from the café” is a miracle movie because it asks us questions just when we least expect it.

 

And the birth of the Christ child is a miracle for the same sort of reasons.

 

Why? Why does God bother entering into human existence? Why does the Almighty put on human flesh, identify with us? What is the purpose? What is the point?

 

And we cannot celebrate Christmas, truly celebrate Christ-mas, unless we are looking for answers, unless we are searching the Scriptures trying to work out why we have to have an incarnate God, why we have to have a baby for a Saviour, why can’t things just go along as they always have gone along without God having to get in the middle of it all. Why?

 

It’s a miracle all right – but it isn’t comfortable; it isn’t just a sweet story of a young mum and a beautiful infant and angels and wise men – always three, always men – and simple shepherds with woolly lambs.

 

It’s a miracle! The helpless infant lying in the manger: God come to earth, God born as one of us, Love made flesh, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone.

 

It’s a miracle and it’s a question. It’s any number of questions.

 

How about, What does God coming mean for those millions of children who are hungry today? How about, Why do we need more presents when some folk don’t even have a roof over their heads? How about, If God thought the world was a good enough place to be, then why are we destroying it with our green house gases and our fossil fuels and our carbon emissions?

 

In just a moment we’re going to sing again. “Infant holy” is, I think, one of the sweetest and most poignant of the carols, but I wonder how we’re meant to respond to the last line. “Christ the babe was born for you.”

 

If Christ was born for me, then surely Christ was born for each one of those children the girl in the café was talking about too.

 

Christ the babe was born for you. (Click *)

 

Christ the babe was born for you. (Click *)

 

May this be a blessed Christmas for you all: one full of little miracles in the shape of questions, and full of searching. And may we be great in 2009. Amen.