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Sermon 11/28/2004
Let Us Walk in the Light
~ by Tom Kinder
November 28, 2004, First Sunday of Advent
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont,
UCC
Isaiah 2 : 2 - 5 ; Matthew 24 : 36 - 44
One of the terrible facts that overshadow America
today is how many children live in poverty. We
are the richest nation in the world. In recent
years our rich have gotten richer. At the same
time the number of children without enough food
to eat or adequate housing or health care has
increased.
A friend of ours has spent his adult life working
to reverse this trend. He is now the director
of a national organization seeking to end childhood
poverty. Like most people working on child issues,
he feels that the current Administration has made
matters much worse. Like most, he was hoping,
praying and working to get a new Administration
elected that would do positive things for poor
children.
We talked to him last week, and he told us that
the hardest thing for him is that instead of working
to do good things as he had hoped, now he feels
that he will be working to prevent bad things.
The same could be said by those who devote themselves
to the poor and working poor adults, or to the
health of our environment, or to the cause of
peace. For a while these people had hoped that
they might spend the next four years working to
do good things, but now they see it will be another
four years of trying to prevent bad things.
The loss of hope in our hearts is perhaps more
dangerous than anything any administration can
do to the world. The loss of hope is deadly. With
hope, we might emerge from global climate change
or nuclear war and be able to rebuild civilization
over the millennia. Without hope, destruction
would be complete.
v The psychologist Viktor Frankl survived imprisonment
in Nazi death camps during World War II. He witnessed
the devastating effect rumors of liberation had
on some people. One year the word spread that
the Americans would reach their camp by New Years.
Some allowed themselves to hope. That hope made
them strong. They were able to endure what crushed
others. But when New Years came with no liberation,
those who had seemed the strongest died within
days.
Hope is something we need to be very careful with—both
what we hope for and how we hope. The best kind
of hope does not depend on outcomes. The best
kind of hope gives us a strength that disappointment
will not crush or erode. The best kind of hope
is based not on rumor or wishful thinking. The
most stable hope rests on a tripod of first, a
realistic assessment of the way things are; second,
the vision of a better way that things might be;
and third, the belief that some force exists in
the universe that has the power to help the good
vision come to pass, and that by our aligning
ourselves with that force, we will do the best
we can. This is the hope Paul expressed when he
wrote, “All things work together for the
good for those who love God.”
Anyone familiar with 12 Step groups will recognize
what I am saying. Alcoholics working the 12 Steps
in Alcoholics Anonymous rest their hope on this
same tripod. First they begin with a realistic
assessment—they face the awful truth that
their lives have become unmanageable and that
they are powerless by themselves to overcome their
addiction. Second, they have a vision of a life
that is liberated from what oppresses them, a
life that has its sanity restored. And third,
they come to believe that a higher power can help
them make that vision come true, and they turn
their life and their will over to that power’s
care.
This hope is more about a process or program,
more about a way of being than about the specific
outcome. The best kind of hope focuses us on a
way of being and trusts that the outcomes will
take care of themselves—or that a higher
power will take care of them.
That is why I said before the election that we
should not fret, because whoever got elected,
our task would be the same. We need to work hard
for the outcome that we believe best, but we need
to trust that whether our side wins or loses,
whether our luck looks good or bad, our way of
being and the higher power we serve will be able
to carry us through. That is why we do not need
to be divided by the candidate we voted for, President
Bush or Senator Kerry. Our hope is based on seeing
the truth of our society in relation to the teachings
of Jesus Christ, seeing the better way he taught,
and placing ourselves on his side, trusting that
if we do the kinds of things he did, he will take
care of the outcomes. There is no Jew or Greek,
male or female, Democrat or Republican when we
share this kind of hope.
Of course it is discouraging to our friend and
to everyone else who worked so hard for positive
change. It is a very different thing, as he pointed
out, to do the exact same activities knowing that
the Administration’s power is working with
you or knowing that it is working against you.
But it does not need to be a crushing or even
defeating setback.
As a community in the tradition of the prophet
Isaiah and Jesus Christ, our hope is clear. In
today’s passage, Isaiah described the vision
of how the realm of earth might one day become
like the realm of God, a world of people walking
in God’s way, a world where differences among
nations will be settled by arbitration and not
by weapons, a world where “nation shall not
lift up sword against nation, neither shall they
learn war any more.”
Implicit in this vision and explicit elsewhere
in Isaiah is a realistic assessment of the truth.
This earthly realm is nowhere near the ideals
of God’s realm. It is addicted to its ways
of pleasure and power. It is drunk with lust,
greed and pride. “In the days to come,”
Isaiah says, “The mountain of the Lord’s
house shall be established as the highest of mountains.”
At the time Isaiah wrote it looked more like the
valley of the shadow of death.
Yet even though things looked so bleak, Isaiah
could say, “O house of Jacob, come, let us
walk in the light of the Lord.” There was
no light anyone could see. The light was only
a prophet’s dream, and yet somehow it was
a light the people could walk in now, even without
seeing it.
Jesus said in today’s gospel passage that
we cannot possibly know when the final victory
will come. We cannot know when the beautiful vision
of Isaiah will come to pass. Jesus’ conclusion
is that we need to be ready at all times. We need
to live as if we could enter God’s realm
and meet God face to face at any moment. Jesus
imagined two people working side by side and one
would enter God’s realm and the other not.
Looking at those two people you might not see
any difference. The difference would be that one
was living awake, watchful, waiting for the light
to come, and the other was asleep. The difference
would be that one was walking in the light of
the Lord now, even not seeing it, and the other
was lost in the shadow.
We have a hope, but it is not the kind of hope
so many Christians have of a specific time that
is coming soon when the rapture and last days
will unfold. Unlike that, our hope cannot be crushed
by the long delay of our vision being fulfilled.
Our hope does not invest itself in rumors or speculations,
and so its strength is not crushed or distracted
from its important work when disappointments come.
Our hope is that we may walk together in the light
doing the work of the light even if we see nothing
but darkness all around. Our hope is that if we
remain faithful to the way of Jesus Christ as
we understand it, the outcomes will take care
of themselves—or his higher power will take
care of them for us.
We may lose the struggles we engage in passionately
to establish justice and peace for all children
and our children’s children’s children.
We may lose one struggle after another but still
find that all things work together for the good
for those who walk together in the light.
It is Advent, the season of darkness. Come, let
us walk in the light. Now more than ever, we need
to show the world our hope by our way of being
and our steadfast, unfailing dedication to the
causes Christ calls us to serve.
Let us pray in silence…
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