Weekly Sermons

“In that day,” declares the Sovereign LORD, “I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight….. The days are coming,” declares the Sovereign LORD, “when I will send a famine through the land—not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the LORD.”       Amos 8: 9,11

 

[As Jesus hung dying on the cross,] it was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two.    Luke 23:44,45

 

There will be no more gloom for those who were in distress.  In the past he humbled the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the future he will honor Galilee of the nations, by the Way of the Sea, beyond the Jordan.  The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness, a light has dawned.  You have enlarged the nation and increased their joy; they rejoice before you as people rejoice at the harvest….For to us a child is born, to us a son is given…..   Isaiah 9:1-3,6

 

The true Light that gives light to every person was coming into the world.      John 1:9

 

 

In 1650 — right about the time George Fox was gathering people convinced by his message into the Society of Friends – an English Christian/historian/preacher named Thomas Fuller wrote a poem which included a line saying “the night is always darkest just before dawn.”  He is credited with many other Proverb-like observations, including “one who would have the fruit must climb the tree;” “health is not valued until sickness comes;” “we never know the worth of water ‘til the well is dry;” and “he who cannot forgive others breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself.”  Ever since he wrote the line about the darkness before dawn, scientists have gone out of their way to refute his assertion.  Degrees of darkness are, after all, a result of many factors, not only its proximity to sunrise.  Fuller might have done better if he’d written “it always seems darkest just before dawn” – but he didn’t.  What he did write probably stimulated far more discussion.

 

You hopefully will recall that those mid-17th century years in England were rocked by a long, bloody civil war.  It was being fought primarily between Protestant supporters of a parliamentary form of government and Catholic advocates of the royal monarchy related to the other governments of Europe at that time.  Through other “lenses,” it was a time of conflict between tradition and new innovation, and between long-held superstition and enlightened scientific discovery.  For the poor and working classes, it was probably mostly a time of spiritual and social darkness, decades of upheaval, uncertainty, exhaustion, and frustration.  As a minister, Thomas Fuller would have had a good sense of the people’s mood.  I can imagine that his poem was meant to offer them some encouragement that “this too shall pass,” that brighter days would come. 

 

The Bible’s Intertestamental Period, the roughly 400 years between Malachi’s prophetic ministry during Nehemiah’s work to restore Jerusalem (approximately 430 BC) and the birth of Jesus in 6-5 BC, was a similar time of instability, conflict and conquest, of spiritual and social darkness on a global scale.  The Hebrew people had been allowed to return to Palestine after a century of Babylonian and Persian captivity.  Even though they were able to rebuild the Temple and other infrastructure in Jerusalem, and to reinstate at least some of the religious institutions called for in their Law, they never achieved the recovery for which they had hoped.  They did not become a truly self-governing people again before greater powers from the north, south, and west pushed into Palestine to rule the Mediterranean coastline which linked the West to the East. 
           The Greeks came, pushed out the Persians, and brought philosophy and scholarship, but not independence, to the Israelites.  Later, Israelite rebels who resented the Greek influence on Hebrew culture mounted a revolt which led to years of relative chaos and government by Palestinian politicians willing to collaborate with a steadily weakening Greek empire.  Then came the Roman army which took over and occupied Judea in 63 BC and instituted the system of the Herods.  They were Palestinians descended from Esau who were not interested in the Hebrews’ religion but were willing to collaborate with the Roman occupiers as local governors and do their bidding.  It was that system, still in place when Jesus was born, which required Joseph and Mary to make the long trek from their home in Galilee to the town of Bethlehem in Judea.  They were required to return to their ancestral province to be registered in a census used to compile tax rolls for funding their Roman occupiers and the emperor who sent them.  What spells out social and spiritual darkness better than threats of violence, occupation by foreign soldiers, and the forced handover of personal property and freedom for their benefit?

 

Lots of Religion, but No Prophets      Scholars point out that the prophecy of Amos (8:11) regarding “a famine of hearing the words of the Lord” proved true during those four centuries of the intertestamental period.  They stress that no new prophets appeared to the Hebrews during those years.   They also note that there is no historical record of God interacting with the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to move them in new ways towards fulfilling their covenant of enabling the Lord to bless all the peoples of the earth through them (Genesis 12:3).  It was as if God had gone silent.  That is not to say that the Israelites had no religion.  By the time Jesus appeared on the scene, there were synagogues in many places around Palestine.  Those facilities and the temple in Jerusalem were staffed with rabbis, and with priests and scribes drawn from the tribe of Levi.  Jesus frequently mentioned his encounters and challenges with “the teachers of the Law” wherever he went.  Those religious officials had sophisticated political parties which participated vigorously in enforcing the Law (and their numerous rules and enhancements of it), and in governing Israel alongside the Herods, the kings allowed by the Roman governors.  One gets the impression from reading the Gospels, however, that much of their religion generated social heat but no spiritual light for making God and his redeeming, transforming love accurately known and joyfully experienced by the people.  In Isaiah’s words (9:2), they continued “walking in darkness,” separated from God.

 

Walking in Darkness is Bad For Your Health     When Pam and I first took up residence in Kampala, Uganda, in 1991, the country’s telephone corporation had badly antiquated equipment, probably 1960s vintage.  We had a phone at our MCC office (a rotary dialer, I think), but not in our residence.  A couple of years later, the Japanese government gave a huge gift to Uganda by sending a modern system of phone equipment and the technicians needed to install it.  It was a massive project in a city of 750,000 at that time, so it took quite awhile to complete it.  In the downtown area, new phone lines were buried under the sidewalks instead of hung from poles.  For a few months when walking to businesses downtown, we had to dodge holes the size of a sidewalk slab and three or four feet deep where a slab had been removed and a hole dug to auger in the new cables.  Those holes were all over the area, most of them nowhere near a working streetlight, and none of them marked with barriers or caution tape, just the pile of fill dirt off to one side.  Nearly every day for awhile, we saw articles in the city’s newspaper about people who had been walking at night and broke their leg or suffered other injuries by falling into one of those phone cable holes. 
           It is hard for me not to think about that phone system “upgrade” when I hear about or see all the things people are chasing after in pursuit of success — or pleasure, or relevance, or power, or wealth, or you name it — while walking through their lives in spiritual darkness, and they end up hurt.  Other people who aren’t chasing anything, just trying to get through the day, fall into such holes in part because people who knew of the danger failed to illuminate the hazard or do anything else to warn them.  The “holes” in the 21st century abound – violence, greed, selfishness, economic turmoil, unhealthy entertainments, polarizations of many kinds, toxic relationships, on and on.  Part of receiving the gift of Christ’s light is the responsibility to share it and use it in ways that help protect others from the destructive intentions of God’s enemy.  The Old Testament prophets tried to warn the Israelites of danger and to commend and direct them to God’s light.  We should be doing nothing less.

 

Longing for the Light      In early January 2005, Winchester and many other east-central Indiana communities were hit by an ice storm that did major damage to the main electric supply lines serving this area.  On previous occasions, we had been without power for several hours or maybe even overnight, but the electric company had been pretty good about rectifying such problems quickly.  In the January ’05 outage, we learned by transistor radio that it would be different that time.  Each morning we awakened to a still-cold house.  Pam cooked what she could for us and others atop a kerosene heater.  We spent the daylight hours getting done whatever work we could, then hunkered down under blankets to read by lantern or candlelight and hope the house would be warm the next morning.  We saw linemen and trucks in town from out of state, so we knew they were trying.  After four days without electricity, however,  it got pretty difficult to stay hopeful and not disappointed when the power remained off.  Then suddenly, on the evening of the fourth day, the lights came on and stayed on, and we celebrated. 
           When hearing about the people in Ukraine and Palestine living through the physical darkness of destroyed cities and electrical grids, and through the spiritual darkness of knowing their suffering is being inflicted intentionally by other human beings, that incident in 2005 seems awfully minor.  It sounds more like George Fox’s day.  Their courage and tenacity to keep on living and to remain hopeful of light’s restoration is laudable.  In so many ways at present, the world is in a very dark place spiritually, and weary people everywhere are longing for the light of hope and Truth.  As we enter the season of Advent this week with a focus on Christ as the Light of the World – the Light which darkness cannot overcome – let’s all make a concerted effort to reflect the full-spectrum light of his love and presence into the world that needs and is longing for it, whether they know it yet or not.  Let’s be Friends of his Light.

 

Let us never say hopelessly this is the darkness before a storm.  Rather let us say with faith, this is the darkness before the dawn of the golden age of peace, which we cannot now even imagine.  For this, let us hope and work and pray.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

1)  In your own words and observation, how would you describe a time or condition of social and spiritual darkness?

2)  Describe a time when you looked for spiritual hope, and it felt like God had gone silent.  How did it turn out?

3)  Why does it sometimes seem like our society, like that of Jesus’ day, has lots of religion but very few prophets?

4)  What are the keys to remaining hopeful, even in dark times?  How do we find those keys?