A Light in the Darkness (Isaiah 60:1-6)

Epiphany Sunday - A
Isaiah 60:1-6
January 2, 2011

A Light in the Darkness

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

It’s been a week since Christmas. And some of you are experiencing a well-known syndrome: a young person yearned loudly and lobbied repeatedly for the latest toy, doll, gadget, or game. Parents or someone in the family braved cold weather, long lines, pushy fellow customers and not-so-bargain prices to buy the thing. On Christmas morning said young person was ecstatic. By now, however, interest has waned. We are wondering what all the dramatics were about. The gift failed to live up to its hype.

In spite of years of our own experience and of watching each other, we still seem to fall for the same story line time after time. We just can’t leave behind the hope that if only we could have that toy, doll, gadget, game, car, house, job, or spouse, our lives would finally be completed, fulfilled and meaningful.

No, as I think about it more carefully, I begin to suspect that the dream of fulfillment, completion and meaning has less to do with the thing being bought than it has to do with the mere act of buying. It doesn’t matter much what is being bought. Advertisers seldom advertise the product; they advertise an experience. Folgers, for example, the coffee brand of the J.M. Smucker Company, hasn’t advertised coffee for years: they advertise family reunions.

My experience suggests that most of our actions as consumers have to do with the buying and selling of hopes, dreams, and yearnings that, as often as not have little to do with the actual products we end up with. Is it any wonder that we find our experience as consumers unsatisfying? Is it any wonder that our kids find the toys we bought less interesting than the boxes that they came in?

Dreams, it turns out, are tricky. Dreams exert a powerful pull on us; they resource our imaginations; they are the foundations of many of our plans. Dreams can carry us through some very hard times and give us strength to face each new day of struggle.

Not many dreams, though, can stand being turned into reality. Something gets lost in the translation. The people of Judah were finding this out the hard way when the words of our Hebrew Bible lesson were first spoken.

We have a hard time reading the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament. Our books are usually written by one person in what is basically a single point in history. Different times have different moods and they face different questions and issues. We can tell the difference between something written in the sixties and something written yesterday.

But the Bible was written over a very long period of time. Many of its books took centuries to reach the form that we have now. Isaiah is one of those books. Isaiah and much of the Hebrew Bible gained its final shape in the years after the Babylonian exile. In the early part of the sixth century BC (that is the high 500s), the Kingdom of Judah was conquered by the Babylonian Empire, Jerusalem was captured and partly destroyed, and the leadership of the people were taken to Babylon and not allowed to return to their home.

During the time of exile they were sustained by their dream of returning to their home. The dream became bigger than life. It wouldn’t be a simple matter of things going back to the way they had been. God had been the final author of their exile and God would have to be the one who brought them home. When God did this it would be part of a package that would transform the world into an almost recognizably good place for them to live.

But we know how that goes. Some of Barack Obama’s supporters believed that his election and inauguration would mean the beginning of a very different and very much better national history. They—well, let’s be honest: I—hoped for a new spirit, certainly in the White House, but also in the capital and across the nation. I voted for a dream. What I got was a president who had to deal with politics on the ground in the real world. Whether Obama has done this well or not is probably a matter for the historians, although I have my own opinion. Doubtless you have yours. We could have some fun arguing about it, if you’d like, but my point is that my own disillusionment runs parallel to the experience of returning exiles in the late sixth century BC.

A regime change in Babylon brought the Persians—or Iranians, if you’d like—to power. Their emperor, Cyrus the Great, announced a change in policy that allowed the Judean exiles to go home. They were beside themselves with joy. Well, some of them were. These got themselves ready and they went back to Jerusalem. Others decided to stay in Babylon where there continued to be a thriving Jewish community for several centuries.

The ones who returned to Jerusalem experienced a major letdown. A new day did not dawn just because God had brought them home. The desert was not covered with flowers, just the brush and scrub that grows in deserted places. No roads magically appeared to lead them home, just the same dusty, rocky paths their great grandparents had walked on their way into exile. Jerusalem was a mess. It was what real estate agents call a fixer-upper. The walls of Jerusalem were toppled in several places. The Temple was burned to the ground. The gates of the city were gone. The public utilities had fallen into disrepair. And the locals—descendants of the Judeans who had remained behind—wanted nothing to do with them.

Reality intruded into what had been a very nice dream. The dream was lovely, gratifying. In the dream, life was easy and fulfilling. But in reality there were stones to hew and haul to fix the walls. There was a temple to rebuild. There were sewers to repair. Life was hard. Much of the dream was at best unfulfilled, at worst unfulfillable. This was not a preaching context that I would envy.

And yet, in many ways, it is the one that I have. We are disillusioned. Science and technology have not delivered on the promises they made in my youth. Where’s all the leisure time we were supposed to have? Where’s the abundant cheap energy? And most important of all, where’s my jetpack? We are disillusioned consumers and yet we don’t know what else to be.
Our leaders can’t seem to have the important conversations that they need to have about pressing matters. Instead they maneuver for political advantage, but when they get it they can’t seem to get anything done. We are disillusioned citizens.

Our centers of higher education are driven by monetary concerns. There are even for-profit institutions where education is a means to the end of making money. Universities and colleges offer more and more fields of study but increasingly only one major: upward mobility. We are disillusioned learners and teachers.

We have taken apart major powerful institutions in our world for the sake of individual rights and freedoms. Churches, unions, neighborhoods, bowling leagues—all have suffered real reverses. And now we find ourselves exposed to powerful corporations that use international borders as a way to avoid accountability to anyone at all. We are disillusioned individualists.

Perhaps most of all, we are disillusioned dreamers. After so many times that a dream has been used to front a scam, we distrust dreams altogether. And truth to tell, there are parts of today’s reading that prompt me to put my hand on my wallet. I am suspicious of the prophet’s promise that the wealth of that gentiles would come to Jerusalem. It sounds like a revenge fantasy, as if justice could be gained merely by turning victims into oppressors and oppressors into victims. It seems shallow to me. Nor am I particularly attracted to the notion that we would be inundated with caravans of camels. Camels spit. They are not nice animals.

But even so there is a remainder that seems to me to be a dream worth holding onto. It’s this image of light in darkness. Darkness will cover the nations, we are told. But into that darkness God will shine. There’s hope there, isn’t there? There are depths of darkness in our world today, but no matter how deep, God’s light shines deeper still.

But we who have been called to be God’s people, don’t just sit and soak up the sunshine. The prophet goes further than that. The prophet tells us that God’s light will shine and we will be radiant. God’s light shines in the darkness and we become God’s lights. We’re going to hear that over and over again in the next few weeks. Light is a motif that runs through the readings between now and Lent. We’ll have a chance to explore light metaphors.

But for now, let me share what I find striking here. God’s light shines in darkness and we become radiant. What strikes me is that our becoming radiant is how God’s light shines in the darkness. This is how God illuminates dark places: God makes us radiant. We can’t look for God’s light to come breaking in. God’s light isn’t over there; it isn’t somewhere else. It’s right here among us, in the light that we radiate as we do the same thing that the prophet’s community did. We try to figure out how to live in faithful obedience to God’s covenant. We try some things. Sometimes we succeed. More often we fail. When we fail we get back up and try to figure out how to do it a little differently and then we try again.

We disillusioned consumers know that while we need some things to live, we just can’t find fulfillment in buying stuff. We can try to figure out what that means and how to live differently.
We disillusioned citizens know that real solutions to real problems are going to be found in the conversations that we have with people whom we value more than we value winning arguments. Civil conversation is a nearly lost art form, but we can relearn it here.

We disillusioned learners and teachers can relearn the lost art of asking questions about deeper meanings and larger purposes rather than how to be good functionaries in systems that produce a great deal of wealth for a disturbingly few people.

We disillusioned individualists can relearn the art of community, the value of a commons, the strength of congregation. We can relearn working for a commonwealth in which I know that there is no real well-being for me that doesn’t involve well-being for all.

We disillusioned dreamers can discover that the light of God will shine first into the darkness of our own disillusioned hearts. And then we will dare to dream again. When we do that, we will find that we are not alone. Others hunger for these things, too. They will come if their hunger for a good dream can be fed here. We may even find ourselves asking, “Where did all these camels come from?”

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.