Waiting in the Dark Part 5: In the End, Light

It was early in the morning as we waited for the train. The holidays were over and we were headed home. That was always one of the worst times of the year for me as a kid. After all of those weeks of waiting and anticipating, it was over. Time to go home. Time to go back to school. Yuck!

So there we were in the station, looking east down the track at break of dawn, waiting for that westbound train on the Nickel Plate Road which would take us back to Chicago. After a while we saw a tiny light, way off in the distance. Could that be the train? And it got bigger, and bigger. Then a locomotive came into focus. Silently at first, until it got closer and we could hear its throaty rumble. Now the light was big and bright and we could see two massive Alco PA-1’s pulling a long string of passenger cars into the station. With the clanging of the bell and the whoosh of the airbrakes, the train came to a stop, and we climbed aboard. Now this was exciting! Going home wasn’t so bad if it meant riding on this flanged-wheeled beauty! With the bell clanging again and several blasts of the horn – honk, honk – those two big diesel-electrics throttled up and we were on our way into a new day and a new year.

I’m still not real fond of the end of the holidays. In our home, we’ll keep the lights on through Tuesday night – 12th night, if you follow the old 12 days of Christmas routine – and we’re still playing some of our Christmas CD’s, but it really does end on Jan. 6. “Back to reality,” my mother use to say.

But what is reality? What’s really real? Is it the humdrum stuff that we return to after the holidays? Or is it the amazing spirit which filled this place on Christmas Eve, with folks greeting each other and hugging and laughing and perhaps everyone sensing that the Spirit which draws us together is more real than the various issues which sometimes drive us apart?

What’s really real? Is it the silly stories about Dick and Jane that I was returning to that early morning so long ago, or is it a young boy’s excitement about horns and locomotives; about lights and going places and about life itself!?

What’s really real? The question brings to mind the tough issues that MP’s will be wrestling with as they return to Ottawa and get to work on a budget which hopefully will address the problems that we’re facing in Canada as the economy deteriorates and the planet warms up and folks who were already hurting are going to be hurting some more. Not to mention the even tougher issues around the world of wars in the Middle East, and entrepreneurs here and especially in the developing world who have little or no access to capital in this recession, and nations like Iran wanting nuclear weapons and nations like India and Pakistan who have nuclear weapons, and the list of problems just goes on and on. I mean, I’m really glad that Mr. Obama is getting a new job. I’m also glad that he’s the one getting that new job, and not me!

The world can be a dreadful place. War, poverty, greed, injustice, hurricanes, earthquakes, climate change. How can this be? How did a world which God created come to this? If ultimate reality is the love of God, how did this very different reality of a world that’s falling apart at the seams come into being? Is one of these conflicting realities actually an illusion? And if so, which one?

I don’t have a good answer for that question. But I do know this: God is still creating. Reality is something which God is still bringing into being. Remember the scene in the first chapter of Genesis? The Spirit of God moved over the dark, chaotic waters at the beginning of time, and the Spirit began the work of transforming chaos into order and darkness into light. But perhaps those dark, chaotic waters have not yet ceased their tumultuous churning. Maybe the work of creation continues, and the evil and the chaos all around us are the birth pangs of the new creation which God continues to bring into being.

Perhaps Matthew has something like this in mind when he has the wise men following a star to the place where Jesus lay (see Matthew 2:1-12). God’s first act of creation in Genesis is to say, “Let there be light!”, and it is a light in the heavens which the wise men follow until they find the one who will usher in the new creation.

God is still creating. Perhaps this is what Luke has in mind when he follows his account of Jesus’ birth in chapter 2 with his genealogy of Jesus in chapter 3; a genealogy which traces Jesus’ roots all the way back to Adam, the very first man, whom Luke even calls “son of God” (Luke 3:38). As God’s son Adam was present as God began the work of creation, so God’s new Son, Jesus, is born as God’s first act of new creation, of re-creation, of taking the evil chaos that remains and transforming it into a new social order, a new political and economic order, a new ecological order.

God is still creating. Perhaps this is what John has in mind when he begins his gospel with the same three words with which the first creation story in Genesis begins: “In the beginning…” Remember hearing those words when Jackie Brown read them for us on Christmas Eve? “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:1,14). God is still creating. God is creating a new heaven, and a new earth, right here in our midst; and the first act in this new creation drama is the birth of Jesus.

Obviously the problems of the world are in some sense real. Just as the problems and the responsibilities in the work place and the community and the home to which many of us will return tomorrow are in some sense real. But the light that has arisen in the east – the light of the Christ and his way of love and justice and peace and hope – that too is real. And when a new order has been created out of the broken pieces of the present, it is that light of love and hope and life that will remain. Which is to say that in the final analysis, it is the creative light of God, revealed in Jesus the Christ, which is really real. It is the creative light of God, and all of the love and hope which that light brings, which alone is eternal.

So as we move into this new year, with its myriad of problems, my question to you is this: are you going to curse the darkness, or are you going to follow the light? Are you going to bemoan the apparent reality to which you have to return as Christmas ends, or are you going to roll up your sleeves and help to create a new reality? It’s kind of like watching a train pull into the station. As the conductor says near the end of The Polar Express: “Trains go to all sorts of places. The question is, are you going to get on it?” Amen.



Text: Isaiah 60:1
Preached by Bruce D. Ervin
4 January 2009