Too Big a Promise

Sermon for Epiphany (A): Isaiah 60:1–6 and Matthew 2:1–12

Proclaimed at St John’s Lutheran Church in Sinking Spring, PA

It was a dark time in Israel when the prophet of the third part of Isaiah spoke. His words acknowledge that there will come a day when “Darkness shall cover the whole earth, and thick darkness the peoples.” This worldwide darkness was a larger reflection of the darkness that already hovered over God’s people. Certainly, things were a little better than they had been. A hundred years earlier, Israel was captured by the Babylonians, who took the wealthy, powerful people away into exile, and left the poor and destitute in the land to become more poor and destitute. By the time the prophet speaks, the people have returned home and begun to rebuild. But they are still under the oppression of the Persians. The community is constantly in conflict—the elites who returned opposed the farmers who stayed. And the ruins of the old civilization are a constant source of despair. Remember the great nation that God once built here? How can we ever be like that again?

I suppose we have some of that too. Remember the great Church we once had, when Sunday worship was crowded, when our Sunday school had how many different classes, when generations of families sat together? Now our children have forgotten the value of church, and we struggle to keep up our old ministries, and we look at dying churches nearby and pray we don’t become like them. And life among God’s people seems dark.

Remember the life we once had in this country, where people were able to raise families in safety and where values were much stronger than now? When whole communities worked together, when you could go to your neighbor for a cup of sugar and get lost in conversation for two hours? Now we barely know the people living next to us, and there’s no sense of community, and even our families are spread out so much that we can’t share our lives like we used to. The darkness spreads over our homes and communities, and weighs heavy on our hearts.

Remember when the world seemed—well, not at peace, but at least a little more calm? The Cold War with Russia was over, and the mess of the Middle East seemed far away? Now our news stories talk about rockets and terrorism every day, North Korea and Iran and China and Ukraine and RUSSIA AGAIN? Really? The people of Brazil, and of California, and now Australia, look up into the sky, and the smoke and ash shows with absolute certainty that darkness has covered the earth, and thick darkness the peoples.

A prophet like Isaiah sees God’s kingdom, but that doesn’t hide reality. The misery in Israel was real, and not just in Israel, but the whole world. Seems like he was right. Twenty-four hundred years later, the story is still the same. We live in the darkness of injustice and fear and anger and hate.

But the prophet of Isaiah is not a prophet of disaster. He’s one of hope. Of a great hope that is almost too much to believe in. Yes, darkness will come, but God won’t ignore it. “The Lord shall arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you, and the gentiles shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.”

This is a strange promise for this little Israelite community beginning to rebuild. It would have made sense to just say, “Look. See the rubble from the destroyed temple? The great palace that once stood here? The City of David, a beacon for all of Israel? God will rebuild us, strong as we were generations ago.” That would be realistic hope.

But Isaiah’s vision is bigger, far too great to imagine. Isaiah says that Jerusalem will in factbe a beacon for the whole world. The light shining from this little city on a tiny hill will illuminate every corner of this globe, and throngs of people from everywhere will come to see it. Not just God’s people, but all gentiles, will run to this light, and worship God on the slopes of Mount Zion. And they will bring gold and frankincense, the wealth of the nations, to honor God and help rebuild Jerusalem.

Perhaps it is too big a vision, too much for a small, hopeless people governed by a cruel, powerful empire to really buy into. So they rebuilt their society, and hoped for light, but were stuck in the world’s dark reality. Stuck in abject poverty, and the promised wealth never came. Stuck under the thumb of empires, the Persians replaced by the Selucids and Greeks and Romans, oppressors and destroyers all. Stuck fighting for their lives, as disease and despair were met with an inability to crawl out of the dust and just survive.

As Christians, we believe that God responds to this desperate darkness by giving us an infant lying in the food trough of farm animals, born to an unwed teenage mother and her doubtful-but-faithful husband-to-be, in a forgotten corner of a vast empire. This hardly seems to be the powerful beacon of light that Isaiah calls for. And yet in this tiny, almost impossible to notice sort of way, God shows that, as always, God does fulfill his promises, and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it.

Those are John’s words, but Matthew’s Gospel has the same image. He speaks of wise men who come because they have, indeed, seen a light. A star appeared in the sky, and these scholars have seen it. No doubt they come from Babylon, that old enemy city where God’s people once were taken, because the Babylonians loved to study the stars. The appearance of a new one is surprising, even among the five thousand others visible to the human eye. There was something special about this star, special enough to send these seekers of knowledge hundreds of miles from home, hoping to learn its meaning and, as Matthew tells us, pay homage to the powerful king it reveals.

Naturally, they go to the palace, which is where a new king should be found. But Herod and the wise men of Jerusalem who study the prophets inform these wise men of Babylon that the king should be found in Bethlehem, unlikely as that is after all these centuries. The light of Israel directs the wisdom of Babylon to an unimportant family, a helpless infant. And the wealth of the nations and gold and frankincense come with them—and myrrh too, the perfume used to anoint the dead, pointing toward the true glory of the light that has—and is to—come.

The prophet’s words are fulfilled. God’s promises come. The light shines, and kings and peoples do see it, and they come, and they praise God for it. It is not the million-watt spotlight we expect. It is something more radiant, a tiny beam, but one that pierces the heart of those who see it. It is a small light, but it shines in the darkness, and it illuminates lives.

The Church on earth is—not the light (that is Christ) but the way the world can see the light. Do we do that well? Do we even see it ourselves? It’s very easy to experience the world’s true darkness. It’s a lot harder to notice the light when it shines. But it is there, whether we see it or not.

My friend Becky is a music teacher, still new at the job. A few weeks ago, her sixth period second graders filed into the classroom, except for one boy, who put his head against the wall and refused to come in. She of course had no idea what to do. Does she stay outside in the hall with him, or go in with the twenty-four other students, now starting to get out of control?

So Becky stood in the doorway, and she talked and cajoled and demanded this kid come into the room, and he refused to move. She began to panic. And it was in that moment that she heard a little voice say, “Look at him. Just REALLY look at him.”

So Becky knelt down and did what it said. She looked at him and said out loud what she saw. “It looks like you’re really upset about something. You’re angry, and you’re hurt, and it’s not fair that you feel this way.” And out of his mouth, suddenly, comes spilling this story about something that happened not ten minutes earlier, a story that she of course can’t manage to follow because it’s the kind of story a seven-year old tells, and it’s being told between sobs, and you know how it goes. But that’s all it took. “I want to hear all about what happened,” Becky said, “but first I need you to come into the room and sit down. Once I get the class started on their activity, I’ll sit with you and you can tell me all about it.”

Facing behavioral problems every single day, Becky says it’s really easy to forget that the children are not themselves problems, but that they are actually people, created in the Image of God. People whose growth and learning and love got her into this job in the first place. She was reminded that day to look and see the light of Christ in this boy and remember why she started doing this in the first place. And I imagine the light of Christ shined out of her onto him as well, as he explained his 7-year old kind of problem and felt, maybe for the first time that day, that some adult cared and actually heard what he had to say.

This is what we are called to be as God’s Church. To look for the light, even and especially when we are least likely to find it. And to help others see the light, so they can know the incredible Good News that God is in this world of darkness, physically, tangibly, Jesus who is the Light and the Life and the Word made Flesh, here, for us and for them, the beloved people of God.

Will that break through the darkness? Will it stop rockets and terrorism? Will it heal separation and prejudice and fear? Will it renew our Church and our communities and our world? Impossible. This kind of light is too small to do such wonders. Which is why, of course, it is only a living God who can make such things possible. And that loving God in Jesus Christ is exactly why it will do the impossible, will break through the darkness and succeed.

I would challenge you this week to look for, not the big spotlight of God’s love, but the tiny ways God’s glory breaks into the unexpected places in your life. And then, when you see them, wonder how you might shine the same light onto others, so that they, too, have a chance to see it, and know that they are loved.

“Arise, shine, for your light has come,” the prophet says. “You shall see and be radiant; your heart shall thrill and rejoice, the abundance of the sea shall be brought to you… And the nations shall proclaim the praise of the Lord.”