The Light Has Come: Glory!

1st Sunday of Advent

A funny story related by a Sunday School teacher speaks of the mindset we sometimes have at church. The Sunday School teacher—playing a game with the kids before the lesson started—asked, “What is brown and furry, sits in a tree, and eats nuts?” One of the children frowned and said, “It sounds like a squirrel, but it has to be Jesus!”

During Advent, our usual temptation is to take all of the usual Advent verses and prophecies and see Jesus as the answer in all of them. However, prophecy (like the hymn says) is supposed to be “strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow.” Let us not overlook the meaning the prophecies had at the time the prophecies were first uttered; therein lies strength for today.

Isaiah 60:1-3

Commentary

The NIV heading for this chapter is “The Glory of Zion,” which is slightly incorrect. Glory is the thing in which one revels and places one’s trust. The light, the glory, is God—God at work in such an utterly profound way that even pagans take note and draw near. On the other hand, the NIV heading is ironic, for it is the bane of humans to take the work of God in the world and revel in the work (and the way in which they perceive to have wrought the work by their own hands) and forget about the real glory.

Application

Glory! Frederick Buechner in The Magnificent Defeat describes it in part:

"Once upon a time." How many fantastic tales start with the words, "Once upon a time!” Maybe my story should have begun, "Once upon a time, in the town of Nazareth, an angel came to earth to speak to a virgin; and the virgin's name was Mary."

Like all stories, there is a time when the action begins, and therefore a time before the action begins, when it is coming but not yet here. There is a time of staid sameness—and after the action begins, a moment in which that sameness is about to disappear forever. For me and my story, the moment was when the Gabriel came to me. He said to me, "Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you!" But I was greatly troubled at his speech, at what this greeting might portend.

It was a moment frozen in time. I stopped dead in my tracks, and the whole world seemed to hold its breath . . . But that is only part of the truth, because when angels draw near, as they do, the earth begins to shake under our feet, as it began to shake under mine. Instead of everything standing still and sure, suddenly nothing was standing still and everything was unsure. Something new and shattering was breaking through into the old. Something was trying to be born. And the old was going to have to give way to the new, and there is agony in the process as well as joy, just as there is agony in the womb as it labors and contracts to bring forth the new life.

There is a moment in our lives, a moment when we see something, something that has never existed anywhere in the world. A world where, " 'The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox, and dust shall be the serpent's food. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain,' says the Lord." Those are Isaiah's words for it. Words of poetry. There is a moment in our lives, when we see the world we were created to live in standing in stark contrast to the world we do live in. Two worlds, two possibilities, side by side, two worlds that contradict each other and are always at war. One world tries to take the vision for what has never existed, and bring it to life! The price we must pay to bring it to life, is death; but even death does not seem too high a price to pay for life, new life. And yet at the same time, the other world entices us to settle for just a smidge less, where the serpent gets a little more than dust to eat, and the lion is allowed an occasional taste of blood. We fend off the perfect and settle for the imperfect, because in each of us there is that which wants to live for our self and not for our brother. We fend off the perfect, because we know in our terrible wisdom that the price we must pay for perfection is death, the death of self and all the values of self, the death that must take place before new life can come.

This is what Gabriel had come to announce, and I stood there as still as life, as still as a painting, even as the my world trembled and quaked and fell apart even as he said, "Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you!" I was deathly still even as I heard him say, "Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name ..."

But I already knew his name before Gabriel said it, just as we knew his name, and you know his name now, because the child who was going to be born is whom all the world's history and all of our own histories have been laboring to bring forth. And I knew it would be no ordinary birth. For this imperfect world could not give birth to him—only God. Only God could bring the other world into ours, and that is why the angel said, "The child to be born will be called the Son of God."

Here at the end, let me give you the parable for your time. It is a peculiar parable—almost too awful to tell, about a teenage boy who, in a fit of crazy rage, killed his father. When he was taken to court, they asked him why he killed his father, and he said he did it because he could not stand his father, because his father demanded too much of him, because his father was always after him, because he hated his father. Then later, when he was put in jail, the jailer heard sounds from the boy's cell late one night. In the dark, the boy was sobbing, "I want my father! I want my father!"

Our Father. We have killed him, and we will kill him again, and our world will kill him. And yet he is here. He is coming: not for revenge; not for justice; simply because we are crying out in the dark. He is coming. Our Father is the one about to be born, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Glory is best seen where God breaks into the imperfect and we realize that we cannot go back to the way life used to be. Poetry breaks into the pedestrian; the extraordinary breaks into the ordinary; the sacred breaks into the mundane.

We work on self-improvement; we try makeovers, diets, the latest fads; we say that we will do anything to get a better life. However, on our own, we settle for a new & improved model of the imperfect. Only God can bring the perfect—on our on we cannot give birth to it. However, we can make room for the perfect to appear. Will you make room for Jesus this season?

Points to Ponder

We try to manufacture a great holiday season, but as Buechner says, “in each of us there is that which wants to live for our self and not for our brother.” What baggage do we carry with us into each Advent season that we would be better off to jettison?