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.

Hope - stars in the darkness

A reflection on Jeremiah 33:14-16; Luke 21:25-36: Sunday, 3 December 2006

Yesterday, I was reading the letters to the editor in The Weekend Australian magazine. A number of people had written responding to an article the previous week about global warming. I’ll share some of those responses with you in a moment, but first I want to point to a reality: the world is no longer the way it used to be. Global warming or climate change can no longer be denied. After years of fruitless attempts to share the bad news with us, the environmental scientists have finally been listened to. Is it too late? I don’t know; but I do know that things are looking pretty black for us, and things are looking pretty black for the world.

There is an ancient Persian saying: “When it is dark enough you can see the stars.” “When it is dark enough you can see the stars!”

Today is the first Sunday in Advent. Even though the shops have been telling us for weeks that Christmas is coming, today is the first Sunday that the church turns its eyes towards 25th December and begins to prepare for the coming of a baby.

But this morning’s readings are not about the coming baby. This morning’s readings are about the coming darkness. Our readings from Jeremiah and Luke are quite dark. And it isn’t just the readings that are dark. When we look at our world we also see much darkness.

Twenty centuries after Christ we still have wars, poverty and injustice. The world is still racked with violence, yet not destroyed. It is filled with destruction, yet not overcome. We live amidst injustice, poverty and prejudice, yet still there are signs of God’s kingdom, signs of hope.

And just as in the time of Jeremiah and in the time of Luke, we wait and we watch and we hope - for the light which Jesus will bring. For when it is dark enough we can see the stars - those little specks of light that bring hope. This first Sunday in Advent is the Sunday of hope. As Christians we are called to be people filled with hope.

Walter Brueggemann, the biblical scholar, tells us that Jeremiah was written while the Israelites lived in exile. He tells us that in exile they learnt some important things: They learnt how to express sadness, rage and loss. They learnt how to complain - not in a way which left them overwhelmed by the darkness. No. Their complaining was so that they could search for stars in the darkness. In exile they learnt how to face the darkness of their lives so that they could live in hope.

Sometimes it feels like we live in exile too. Family life, society, and the church are no longer what they used to be. The old ways are being dismantled and we are still waiting for the new ways to be birthed. At times like this we have three choices just as the Israelites of Jeremiah’s time had choices:

First, we can pretend it isn’t dark; we can go on pretending nothing has changed. But if we do this we will be left behind. The hope we have for the future will become less and less real and will no longer sustain us. Interestingly, there were letters yesterday crying out, “There’s nothing really wrong with the environment. We’ve got nothing to worry about.” It’s extraordinary the lengths people will go to, to pretend that the darkness is not real.

Second choice, we can focus on the darkness. Many people focus on the darkness of life. They keep picking at all the things that are wrong. They worry, they complain, they are negative, they become depressed and in the end they have no hope. They refuse to see the stars until, in the end, they are unable to see the stars. Again, yesterday’s letters illustrated this stance too: all is doom and gloom, global warming means the death of us and the death of the world. Darkness obscures the possibility of stars.

But there is a third choice: we can acknowledge the darkness and put our energy into searching for the stars. If we are willing to see the darkness in our lives and in the world then we can look for the stars. The stars are those points in our lives where we meet God. Those people and places that remind us that God is with us; that God will never leave us alone; that God’s ways of justice and faithfulness will come when we live lives of justice and faithfulness.

Last week, Joan was telling me about just such an event in her life and in the lives of some young refugees from Afghanistan. After a long period of time, two of their brothers arrived in Australia. After all of the struggles to convince the Australian government that their situation is one of genuine need, after all of the paperwork, all of the waiting, after many disappointments, light has shone in their darkness. There still is darkness, not just for this family with parents and a brother still in Afghanistan, still in great danger but also darkness for the millions of refugees around the world. But there are still stars that shine, to give hope to all those who wait in darkness.

As we prepare for Christmas we remember that each Advent, each coming, is a reminder to us of the hope we have because God chose to become human and live among us. Even in the darkness, or perhaps, because of the darkness, God chose to become one of us. God continues to choose today to love us, to forgive us, to invite us to journey into God’s future looking always for the stars – those signs of God’s presence with us.

Each Advent we are reminded of how God wants us to respond to the darkness within the world. We are to be the people who seek out the tiny lights of justice, and kindness, and loving, which are a part of life. We are to live in ways which make many more of these tiny lights until the darkness of our world is illuminated with the light of Christ.