The Breaking Dawn

As I (along with everyone else) prepare for Christmas, and the services that come with it at church, I thought I'd post this brief sermon from Christmas Eve 2008:


The Breaking Dawn

Christmas Eve, 2008

Our daughter Emily wakes up early each day, and I have the morning shift with her. She wakes up sometime just before six most days – this time of the year, for all practical purposes, the middle of the night. And the darkness in the morning can be oppressive, can hang like a curtain over us. But for the past ten days or so, when she and I get downstairs to the living room, the first thing I do is walk over to the corner and plug in the tree. Suddenly the room sparkles, Emily’s face lights up, her eyes brighten and her mouth widens into a smile. It’s Christmastime.

This is the time of year when we celebrate the coming in a manger of the one called in Scripture the Light of the World. But this is the time of year when it’s darkest. The winter solstice was just a few days ago, the shortest day of the year. These winter months take their toll on many people. We find the darkness suffocating and lonely, empty and tiring. Seasonal depression plagues many people.

We anticipate the first fall of snow, dream of a white Christmas, enjoy the opportunity to go skating or spend a week at a ski lodge, or just tear around the woods on a snowmobile. But by January and February most of us are ready for the darkness to lift, for the light to break a little earlier and last a little longer. You get tired of driving to work in the morning before the sun rises and coming home for supper when it’s already dark.

In many ways the world is a dark place. There is suffering, there is pain. There is inexplicable evil. We can’t avoid sickness, can’t dodge death. We are unable to ensure that our lives are going to turn out the way we’d like, with fulfilling jobs, loving marriages, healthy children, strong communities. People are often deliberately unkind to one another. Sometimes, maybe even worse, people are simply callous and uncaring toward their neighbours. Then there are the extreme situations: natural disasters and life-changing tragedies, wars and outbreaks of unexpected violence. In more places than we can imagine there are people willing to give up their own lives in order to take the lives of others. Meanwhile Scripture shows us one who gave up his life in order to save others – the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth.

It’s his birth that we celebrate this evening. We recall that dark night in the middle eastern country of Israel and in the midst of that dark night a star shining, guiding wise men from the east to the little boy and his family. We commemorate the one who himself said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” Along with those wise men, we worship the one of whom it is said in the gospel of John, “In him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Those of you who spend time at camps in the summer or any who have ever slept outdoors know that when summer sunshine breaks in the morning it pretty much starts your day for you. With the sun in your eyes it’s hard to pretend it’s still time to sleep. A few years ago I stopped and stayed in a friend’s house while on a road trip. The room I was given was comfortable and made up nicely for me, but it had no curtains and was on the east side of the house. It was early June. By 4:30 the sun was shining brightly and straight into my window. I couldn’t sleep anymore – the dawn had arrived and I couldn’t convince myself it was night no matter what my watch told me.

Now some people are able to turn over, to ignore the light and fall back to sleep even though everything is illuminated. Others sleep with blindfolds to keep away this troublesome light breaking in on the darkness. And if we have darkening curtains we won’t see the light until someone opens them upon us. There are many ways to miss the light but still the darkness can’t win a battle with the light. As a friend of mine mentioned once, you can’t flash darkness into a room and have the light disappear, but as soon as you shine a flashlight in a room darkness loses its power.

The world we live in, the one we all experience, from our daily aches and pains to our marriage difficulties, from disputes with family members to tragic loss, is a world in need of the light. We see glimpses of light all around us, moments when kindness and sacrificial love show themselves, when people seem to have a great capacity to care for one another. But still the darkness nags at us – motives are questionable, true feelings are often hidden. We live undercover, holding ourselves back from others. We are afraid to open ourselves up to others, for fear of how we may be treated. We have trouble trusting. Darkness appears to be more powerful than light.

But the light is there. The light has broken in on this world of darkness and has changed our outlook on the landscape around us. Like the sun coming into that east window at an hour that seemed like the middle of the night, Jesus’ birth, and his life, death and resurrection that followed it, is the decisive light breaking into our world. We may not always be able to see it clearly, we may be able to go on our way in spite of it, we may be able to deliberately ignore it, but things are not the same now that he has come.

In his life he showed the power of God over sickness and sin as he healed and forgave people. As he stilled the waters on the sea, he showed that, one day, creation itself, with its wildness and storminess, would be tamed, giving way to calm. In his death he showed his willingness to share our plight, to give himself up freely for those who did not know him or love him. In his resurrection he showed that, one day, death itself, the penalty for sin – the price our sin and evil earns for itself – would be overcome. Through his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus has opened the way for us to enter the light and freedom of God’s new world. All we need to do is follow him who is the light, trusting that in him we are enabled to live in the light.

Those lights on our Christmas trees began as symbols of Jesus as the light of the world, and the evergreen tree was a picture of the eternal life that is found in Jesus. And that is the challenge of Christmas – once the light has come, things are changed in a real and lasting way. Unlike our days, which begin with a sunrise and end with the sun going down again and giving way to darkness, the Bible speaks of the eternal city of God as having no need of the sun or moon because it is lit by God’s glory and by Jesus himself. Many people live their lives apart from God, and then at Christmas time come for a few minutes to recognize that he is the one we celebrate at this festive time. The year is clouded in darkness, with a little light at the holiday season. But if Jesus is the light of the world we’ll want to walk in that light every day, not just at Christmas time, so that we can live for that day when the light is all that we can see, when God makes everything new in eternity. This Christmas let us celebrate the light together, and in gratitude take up the challenge to live in the light all year round.

Advent Sermons

Again I find that I'm not very good at blogging consistently. So I thought I would post my sermons each week for those who are interested. Here is the sermon from Nov. 28, the first Sunday of Advent. It fell on the 85th anniversary weekend of our church, for which we had a pretty big celebration, so that plays into the message as well.

Living in the Future

Texts: Isaiah 2:1-5; Romans 13:11-14

Date: November 28, 2010

I’ve called today’s sermon “Living in the Future.” Coming as it does on the anniversary weekend of the church, it might seem like a hopelessly inappropriate title. Today, as much as ever, after poring over pictures and memories of times long past and people who are no longer among us, we might seem prone to criticism as people who are in fact living in the past.

But Christians are never permitted to live in the past. We get criticized on occasion for being behind the times or being old-fashioned, since we spend so much time with such an old book, and we live with an awareness of a great heritage that has been passed down through the church’s history. But in spite of all that we are not people who consider it a good thing to live in the past.

If we ignore the past we are fools, and we’re bound to make the same mistakes that have been made over and over through history. And if we ignore the past we’re also arrogant, if we think we are the only ones who ever had a thought worth thinking or that our time is the wisest time that has ever been. But we cannot ever live in the past, even as we learn from it and incorporate it into our life by hearing stories and singing songs from long, long ago. We do not live in the past. We as Christians believe that in a certain way what we are called to do is to live into the future.

We believe that in Jesus Christ, God has come into this world and has changed things. The way of the past is death and corruption. The way of the world around us is very much a way of death and corruption. But we believe that Jesus died and rose again. The life of God, eternal life, incorruptible life, has come to take up residence on this earth. And God has made us who believe in him through Jesus Christ alive together with Jesus by his Holy Spirit. One day he will give us the fulfilment of our hopes, but even now we live our lives in expectation, living into that future that always motivates us and strengthens us. We believe that one day every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father, and we live now with him as our Lord. We live now serving him, obeying him, understanding that he is in control and that our trust in him is not misplaced.

We live into the future, but we keep on looking at the past. Last night, we looked at a chunk of our recent local past. But week after week we look even farther into the past, reading ancient words that we believe give us life, and reveal God to us.

But the more we look at these ancient words, the more we see we keep getting urged to look toward the future.

Think of our passage in Isaiah 2. Think about Isaiah the prophet for a minute. Isaiah was a spokesperson for God who lived in Jerusalem nearly three thousand years ago. And he lived in that city in a time that didn’t make him think very positive thoughts about his city. He looked around himself and knew that this city, the so-called “city of God,” the place where God had said, “I want my temple to be there,” – Isaiah knew that this city had gone to pieces. People who claimed to be in with God were in fact living double lives. “When you spread out your hands for prayer,” Isaiah said, “Your hands are full of blood.” Whether he was speaking literally or metaphorically, the point is clear: Jerusalem, the city of God, was a mess.

And yet he looked at the city and prophesied of a coming day that looked very different: He foresaw a day when the swords of war would be traded in for plowshares, when the spears of war would be turned into pruning hooks. He looked at this city of murder and saw the day of peace coming.

When most of us are in the middle of anything bad, we have a hard time seeing anything else. It’s hard to see that there will ever be a day when it won’t be this way. Someone gets mad at us and it seems like the whole world is against us. A deadline is closing in and it seems like the project will never be completed. We get sick and we wonder if we’ll ever know what it is to be healthy again. And on and on.

But Isaiah looked at the city of Jerusalem, so far away from what she once was, and saw that there was a new day coming in the future. What does it take to be able to envision peace in a time of war?

Isaiah the prophet looked at his hometown of Jerusalem and saw that it had gone astray. Not only was it full of violence, but it had failed to be faithful to the Lord. “See how the faithful city has become a harlot! She once was full of justice, righteousness used to dwell in her – but now murderers!”

When Isaiah saw Jerusalem he saw the faithful past, the glory days when God was truly worshiped there, and he knew that it had dissolved into unfaithfulness and lack of interest in really following God.

And yet he looked at the city and prophesied of a coming day that looked very different: “In the last days the mountain of the Lord’s temple” – that was what they called Jerusalem – “will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and all nations will stream to it. Many peoples will come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths.”

Isaiah, this man who lived so long ago, lived with a disastrous present all around him. But he kept his eyes on the future that God had shown him, a future where disorder would become beautiful again, where war would turn to peace, and where faithlessness would give way to the glorious witness of obeying and trusting God.

How hard is it for us to imagine living with that kind of vision?

The world keeps on telling us that we should live in the present – be realistic. If you live in the past you’re old-fashioned. If you live in the future, you’re a dreamer. But if you live in the present you’re a realist.

But what if Isaiah had been a realist? What if Isaiah couldn’t see these things God had shown him? What would have happened then? He wouldn’t have had any hope and he wouldn’t have envisioned any peace. He would have abandoned the people of God as a faithless bunch of rebels.

I wonder for a minute what would have happened if the people who started our church had simply been “realists.” What went through their minds during those months when they started to think about having a Baptist church here? What went through the minds of the Wallaces, the people the Home Mission Board sent out to see if they might start a United Baptist Church here? In the words of our own history books, they were “a group of unorganized Christians, mostly Baptist,” who got together that day in November of 1925. Unorganized. They didn’t really have a plan, didn’t really know what to do. But they had an idea. They had a vision. They believed that God was calling them to do this. The Wallaces believed they saw something here that could be something.

And in those early months, before this church building was here, as they looked at their financial situation, as people brought in their two dollars and three dollars a week for offering, what did it take to envision having a building here that would become a home for their worship and fellowship together?

And forty years later, when the Sunday School was overcrowded, when those curtains downstairs just weren’t doing it for keeping the noise down, when the class in the choir loft had to try to be quiet enough for the classes in that corner (point) and in that corner (point) to hear, when all that was going on what did it take to see the wisdom in buying the house next door and using it for Sunday School classes and church meetings? That’s pretty creative thinking. That’s not being hampered by the circumstances of the present. That’s not hanging on to the past. That’s looking to the future.

And what about ten years ago, when again the church had to look at its facilities? What about then, when the decision to tear down the church house had to be made? Were we then living in the past? Were we then as a church hamstrung by the present? Or were we oriented to the future? Were we looking to what might be rather than what was, because we believed that God still had work for us to do?

Christians are always looking in hope toward the future, because we believe God is there, ahead of us, beckoning us to follow. And thankfully, this little church fellowship has proven that over and over through the years. We’ve learned that lesson again through looking back at the church’s history this weekend.

And when we look deep into our past, even before Jesus came, we see that that is what Isaiah was like. Even though he was surrounded by violence and faithlessness, God had shown him a glorious future when peace would come, and when it come in the house of Israel itself.

The peace that Isaiah envisioned, the hope that Isaiah was filled with, came to life in Jesus of Nazareth, Israel’s Messiah, the representative of all God’s people.

When Jesus was born, peace entered into this world. In fact, the one that Isaiah referred to as the “Prince of Peace” we understand to be Jesus Christ, the one who restores the relationship between God and his fallen creatures, human beings.

Think of the years, the decades, even centuries of expectation between Isaiah’s time and the time when the Son of God came to earth. Think of the expectation, the desperation, the hope, the longing for God to step in and rescue his fallen people and the fallen human race. The words of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” refer to “the hopes and fears of all the years.” And those hopes and fears “are met in thee tonight.”

At the season of Advent we look back to the expectation and the longing that yearned for the coming of salvation, the coming of true peace. And we recognize that the one we wait for is Jesus, the Prince of Peace.

Each Sunday of Advent we highlight the expectation of God’s salvation coming into the world in Jesus. We look forward for the peace that God brings in Jesus with an attitude of hope, and we recognize the joy that comes to us in Jesus and in his peace, and we remember the great love that brought Jesus to us, and indeed brought Jesus to the cross. So we light a candle for each of these aspects of God’s salvation, today for peace, next week for hope, the week after for joy, and then the Sunday before Christmas for love. And at Christmas Eve we light the centre candle, the Christ candle, to celebrate that in him all of our longing is fulfilled.

But as we do this during these four weeks before Christmas, we aren’t just playing make believe. We aren’t putting ourselves back into a fantasy land of the past and pretending that we are waiting for Jesus. We celebrate Advent not just to remember Jesus coming into the world, but also to acknowledge that we are still expecting Jesus to come again. The peace, the hope, the joy, and the love that came into the world when Jesus came will still find a greater fulfilment. One day, Jesus will come again and bring our hopes to life. He will “restore all things” to the way God intends them to be. He will bring peace not just in our hearts but in our world, when heaven and earth are renewed, when sin and pain and death are defeated, when God is victorious and all things are made new.

During Advent, then, we find ourselves as people who remember the past. We are people who remember that God came into this world in history, in the chaos and mess of the Roman Empire in the first century, when kings were ruling in violence and oppression, and when God’s people longed for his rescue. We remember the past, because Jesus came in the past.

But during advent we are oriented to the future, knowing that what was begun in Jesus’ first coming will be fulfilled in his second coming.

What that means for us now is that in the present we live with one eye on the past, never forgetting that the foundation of our life is in the past, in a specific place, in Jesus’ coming, his life, his death and his resurrection. But we also live with our shoulders turned toward the future, knowing that because Jesus who died is risen life has come. Death has had its day, and will finally be defeated. Sin has ruled us long enough and will finally be put away for good. Pain has plagued us plenty and will finally be done with.

The world tells us to “live for the moment,” to discover “the power of now,” as one popular spiritual teacher puts it. But we say, “No.” We say, “Remember the past, because that is where Jesus has acted, and look to the future because that is where Jesus is, ready to one day bring it to us in one final victorious event.” And that changes the way we look at everything in the present.

So we find the apostle Paul saying in Romans 13:11-14, “You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light; let us live honourably as in the day.”

I used to listen to a lot of rap music when I was in high school, as my parents would attest for you. And it used to be a common thing to hear rappers shout out the words “What’s the time?” And there was one rapper who used to go around with a giant clock face hanging around his neck on a chain, I guess to remind people that it was time for change or time for a party or whatever the case may be.

Well here, the apostle Paul has got a big clock hanging around his neck and he’s saying, “Christians – you know what time it is. You live between the most important event that has ever happened and the most important future event that ever will happen, the first and second comings of Jesus.” You have been given in Jesus, in the past, a taste of the future, and your life ought right now to have the character of the future.

Your morality, your attitude, your relationships with others: all are to be as if that future is present now. Night is gone, because in Jesus the light has come. Those who have not met Jesus or accepted him may be able to go on living in the night, but we who have seen him have no reason to live in the night. Daylight has come. Live in the light.

For those here who have not accepted the light that God has brought into this world in Jesus and in no other: now is the day for you to leave the night behind and live in the day. Leave aside the old way of living according to the present, the old way of living as a hard-boiled realist: this Advent season we recognize that we can be reconciled to God and live as people of hope.

This weekend we’re remembering the past of our church. As we do so we need to remember that the God who worked then is the God who is working among us now. The God who made those “unorganized Christians” into the family that we call our family is the God who still cares for us and walks with us and leads us into the future he still has for us.

We face live in different circumstances and in many ways live in a different community than those early Baptists in McAdam 85 years ago. We face different challenges than they did. But we serve the same God, and we live with the same hope in Jesus that they did. We have been given the same gift of salvation, the same commission to be a light in this community that they were given. Our ministry will likely look different, but it ought to have the same character of peace, hope, joy, and love in Jesus Christ that has sustained us through the years. The same Holy Spirit brings life to us that brought life to them.

We remember the past because God worked there. But we look to the future because God is there now, and he calls us to follow.