"Can You See Clearly?"
When the light of Christ breaks in
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Text: Matthew 8:5-13
This name will hardly ring a bell for you, as he isn't a celebrity, but there was a man called Willard “Kitchener” MacDonald who lived on a hill in a remote area of Nova Scotia, between the villages of Earltown and Tatamagouche in Colchester County. What made MacDonald notable, even though we may not know of him, is that he had lived as a hermit in the woods for 60 years. Rarely, if ever, did he come out. Rarely, if ever did he visit friends or speak with people or do any shopping. Rather, he lived on nuts and berries, caught fish in nearby Gully Lake and played his guitar. Before becoming a hermit, he was an excellent guitarist. Unfortunately, on one wintry day, his guitar snapped in two, and so he made another one from the trunk of a tree and used the guts of the animals that he had caught to make some strings. MacDonald was an unusual and an exceptional man.
I heard the myths and legends about the Hermit of Gully Lake when I was ministering in that area. Everyone wanted to know if I had ever gotten a peek at the hermit. If I had, I, too, would have been a celebrity in the community! Anyone who had a story about the hermit could gather a crowd to listen to the tale. There were as many tales about MacDonald as there were the people to tell them. This man was fascinating, and very recently, there was a book written about him. It is the sad story of a man who in 1943 jumped off a troop train as he was going to sign up, and ran into the woods. So frightened was he of ever being caught that he decided to hunker down until such time as it was safe and he would not be arrested. The book clearly points out the mystery of this man. What drove him, what maintained him, what kept him frightened and away from other human beings, we really don't know, but there is an incredible conclusion. The conclusion is that when Willard “Kitchener” MacDonald finally saw people after 60 years, he realized what he had missed: He enjoyed playing cards; he enjoyed a drink; he enjoyed the conversation; he enjoyed the prayers; he enjoyed all the things he had deprived himself of for 60 years because of his fears. He realized what he had missed and what he had lost and what he hadn't experienced - love.
I believe that many of us are spiritual hermits. We do not know that we live in the darkness. We do not know what we are missing. We do not realize the power that love can bring. We have not experienced the love of God. We have not seen with our own eyes, through faith, the power of Christ. Rather, we have lived in darkness. We have lived unto ourselves, never having the privilege or the joy of worship; never knowing the bond or the fellowship of communion of the saints; never knowing the pleasure and the wonder of the true meaning of Christmas. Many people are spiritual hermits, but then, like MacDonald, when finally they come out of the darkness, when finally they see the power of what they have missed, they raise their arms in wonder. They couldn't have imagined what they had not seen. To come out of such darkness is so wonderful, so glorious, so splendid that it is worth rejoicing with your whole being.
John's Gospel describes people who he says have lived in darkness. They have not been aware of the glorious revelation of God; they have not seen the wonder and the peace that God brings. But, John says, these people who have lived in darkness now, through the coming of the Son, have seen the great light, and this light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot extinguish it. It is too glorious, too marvellous to explain, so mysterious, and yet revealed in glory and in wonder and in awe. For John, there is no question that the people who lived in darkness saw something that transformed their whole lives.
When you look at all the gospel narratives, these are only little snapshots, signs, of the coming of the Son, this Light, into the darkness, and yet each captures for a moment, through the eyes of the person who was writing it, the glory and the wonder of the coming of the Son. Wouldn't it be wonderful, for example, if we could hear more from Zacchaeus, who himself was small in stature, and a social outcast, but who, when he encountered Jesus, was like light. He had lived in the darkness of his isolation, but now Jesus of Nazareth said, “I will have dinner with you tonight, Zacchaeus.” Can you imagine the wedding at Cana, when all that they were left to drink was water? What a dull wedding that would have been! But Jesus came into the midst of the wedding and changed water into wine, and the best wine was poured, and all of the people at the wedding celebrated and rejoiced: Jesus, the light, had come into the darkness and had transformed it, like water into wine.
All the lepers, all the outcasts, all the people who are kept at an arm's length, the unclean, they meet the Light in person, and they are healed. When they are healed, they are transformed, and they can go and present themselves in the temple as free people, loved by God: The people who had lived in darkness had seen a great light. Mary and Elizabeth were women whose lives were transformed by the arrival of the Son. Elizabeth would give birth to the one who would prepare the way; Mary would give birth to the Son of God himself. People who had lived in darkness had seen a great light, and they believed that the world would be transformed by his coming. Or, think of the blind man, who had to beg for alms just to maintain an existence. Jesus came into his world, a world of physical darkness, and gave him sight that he might know and appreciate the love of God.
Those stories are there all right! The good news is there! The people who encountered Jesus, the Son, were transformed, and their lives were forever changed. He was the good news. They had been living in darkness and now saw a great light. However, there were some who were practising deeds of darkness, whom Jesus revealed for what they were. Herod and all his political machinations were brought to light when Jesus arrived, a light was shone upon him, and all the deeds that he did of darkness. Pilate, who wanted to sit on the sidelines of history and pretend through ennui that he didn't care, was exposed for what he was: someone with no spine and no courage. The executioners who nailed Jesus to the cross and played games at the foot of it and sold his clothing were revealed by Jesus, who forgave them and said, “They know not what they do.” In their darkness, the light of God was revealed. Jesus was to most good news; to some challenging news; the light that shone in the darkness. John recorded this and said something wonderful had happened.
But, let us not think that the gospel story is just a theoretical missive on light and darkness. No, it is real! Real people's lives were changed. Real transformation took place. The breaking in of God into human history was an encounter with the Light, the likes of which the world had never seen.
Sometimes, however, we misunderstand the story. Sometimes, we debauch the meaning and the message. We turn the story of the Light breaking into the darkness into a cosmic struggle between light and dark, between good and evil, as if somehow they are two equal forces within the universe. Our ideas are crafted and formed more by the movie Star Wars than they are by the biblical narrative.
In Star Wars, there is the Force, and within the force there is light and there is dark, there is good and there is evil; those who submit to evil will become part of the evil empire and will live in darkness. For Star Wars, it is a cosmic struggle between the two great forces of good and evil. This has more in common with Gnostic thought than it does with our faith, for indeed, the Bible makes it abundantly clear that when God created the world, he named both light and darkness. It is not that there are two competing forces of equal power playing a game around us, but that there is God, in all God's sovereignty, and when God breaks into the world, he comes as light, not in conflict with the darkness, but to transform and change and to reveal.
If you take the cosmic struggle too far, the danger is that in the end you divide the world very neatly into those who are good and those who are evil. We see a cosmic struggle and we name people as being on one side of it or on the other. When we do that, the most heinous crimes in the world are committed, because more often than not, when we decide who is light and who is darkness, we always put ourselves on the side of light, and others with a different view will always be on the side of darkness. Is that not what the Nazis portrayed in World War II? Did their sense of a cosmic struggle not cast the Jews as the darkness, to be extinguished by the light of a higher civilization? Was that not behind Stalin when he decided to send people to the gulags? Was there not a conflict in his mind between good and evil, and he knew who was who? Is that not at the centre of what is now known as “the clash of civilizations,” where we think we know who is good and who is evil?
Oh, that may sound like Star Wars, but it is not the Bible! For when we try to categorize people, and decide that they are evil, that is when we cause the most terrible devastation. We see that around us all the time. When we name people, we label them, and we can then dismiss them out of hand. It is all about this sense of a cosmic struggle, but in the Bible, lightness and darkness co-exist.
I think of Helen Keller, that great and inspirational woman, who was blind and deaf, having had the senses we love so much taken away from her. For her, as she said, “The darkness is still the darkness.” Yet, in the midst of this darkness, she was an example of light and of courage. So often, my friends, even in the midst of light and dark, God still reveals himself. God still comes, as God came in Jesus, and broke forth into the darkness.
What does this say to you and me? What do we, this Advent, take with us? The Gospel of John makes it abundantly clear that we need to have our eyes opened in order that we can see the light - the eyes of faith. It is when the eyes of faith see the Son, the Light of God's countenance, grace and mercy is revealed. Sometimes, our eyes are in all the wrong places. They are focused on all the wrong things, and we do not see his coming with faith.
This reminds me of a story of my very good friend Gerald, who now ministers in England, but was a theological student with me in South Africa. Gerald loved to play the bagpipes. He belonged to a bagpipe marching band. One day, he was marching in a town called Bloemfontein, but he was having a problem tuning his bagpipes properly. If you have never tried to tune a bagpipe, let me tell you that if it is not absolutely right, it is awful. So, he was struggling to get his bagpipes in tune, while in the meantime, the band had already started to march. The word had already been sent forth that there was a procession down the road, and so as Gerald quickly tried to get his bagpipe up to speed and tried to catch up with the band, he suddenly disappeared. Gerald had not realized that there was an open manhole right in front of him, and with bagpipes in hand and kilt on, he went straight down, 15 feet into the sewers. He was left wish the most terrible scar on his head, and every now and again, when Gerald would get cocky, I would just point to it, and remind him of his misadventure. He had been marching along gladly, but he hadn't been looking where he was going, and all of a sudden, down he went, shocked and surprised.
My friends, life can bring those shocks and those surprises, and when it does, we are plunged into darkness. I have been thinking of our congregation - of you - this last week. I have been thinking of all those who have lost loved ones in the last few days, for we have had three funerals in six days, the sadness of which has touched every corner of our congregation. You know, you cannot predict or plan what the future is going to bring, and you never know when darkness will descend and difficulties arise. Often, we are ill prepared when they do. However, it is precisely in those moments when God reveals the light of his Son.
I mentioned in the funeral on Friday, these famous words: “When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.” When the world is at its darkest, and when it is at its most painful, its saddest, we see the stars. When the world was in darkness, it saw a great light, and his name was Jesus Christ. When we see darkness, and when we struggle over that darkness, the light of Christ's love breaks forth into it, if we have the eyes of faith to see.
The great Helmut Thielicke suggests that having that vision and faith is like a lens. It is like when you put a wide-angle lens up to a piece of cloth: Only in the middle of the lens do you see what the cloth really looks like up close. The further you go away to the edges of the lens, the more it looks distorted and unclear. For the Gospel of John, Jesus is the centre of the lens. Jesus is what reveals the clarity. He reveals God to us, and allows us to see life and hope and peace, where otherwise we would not.
More than that, though, through the eyes of faith, we have a light that illuminates our path. When I was a boy, I was taken to school for six months on a very special bus for children with physical and mental disabilities. I was picked up every day outside our home and put on the bus, for I was in a wheelchair and could not walk properly. Every day, for six months, we'd get on the bus and children on the streets would point at us, and sometimes make fun of us. Inside the bus, the bus driver played one song on an eight-track that was stuck, and for six months, over the sound system we heard one song! It drove me bonkers! It was:
I can see clearly now the rain has gone.
I can see all obstacles in my way.
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It's gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day.
Oh, yes, yes, yes! After six months, I would have throttled Johnny Nash had I met him in person. But you know, near the end, when I knew I would be getting off the bus, the song took on a different meaning. The “bright, bright, bright sunshiny day” was a day of hope, a day of peace, a day of healing that I knew was coming, and I celebrated it with every mile and every verse, every time the song was sung. Johnny Nash knew that when people know hope is there, when they know the light is there, they can see it. When people have witnessed the power of Christ coming, the song takes on a whole different meaning. The light takes on a whole different meaning. It becomes a bright day.
Not that the darkness is extinguished completely. Not that the darkness is always gone. No! No! But within the darkness, the light shines. I have been thinking about that for the last few days, and particularly for the members of the Christian Peacemakers Teams who are currently hostages in Iraq. What many of you will not know is that the Christian Peacemakers were going to rent our offices here at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church. Six months ago, James Loney, one of the four that is being held, met with me to discuss making this their home. They could not do it because of our construction, and they needed an office and they couldn't wait. I met the Christian peacemakers, and prayed with them, and I admired them, and I phoned them last night to tell them that here this morning I would be praying for them, for it seems to me that, if they are trying to do anything, it is to be a reconciling presence for God in a world that is broken and often dark. In the name of Christ, they want to bring forces that are currently in conflict together. They know that they cannot solve all the world's problems and that they cannot be the arbiters of all peace in the world, but they believe in their hearts that they needed to do something to bring a disparate and divided humanity together.
On his website, James Loney puts it this way: “I believe that our actions are as people of peace, and they must be an expression of hope for everyone. My hope in practicing non-violence is that I can be a conduit for the transformative power of God in Christ's love acting upon me as much as I hope it will act upon others around me.” For James, the light of Christ's path had shone on him to make him a peacemaker. Such is the power of the transformative love of God when the light shines in the darkness. And I ask you now to bow your heads in prayer and let us pray that the light of God's peace will break into their lives, whatever may befall them. Let us pray. Oh, loving and gracious God, who through your son, Jesus Christ, revealed the fullness of your love and the passion of your glory, may you break again into this world as the Son. As the living Christ, may you protect and guard those who in your name seek to bring peace. May you save them from the time of trial, and in their hearts may you give them the assurance that they are yours. And may we not be hermits, but may we open ourselves completely to the eyes of faith, and the power of your light revealed in Jesus, our Lord. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.