Dawn on the Horizon
Commentary
In Morris West’s novel The Clowns of God, there’s a powerful scene where a father and his daughter are having an argument. She tells him that she’s going to go to Paris to live with her boyfriend. He won’t let her. Why would she want to do something like that?
“Because I’m afraid,” she says.
“Afraid? Whatever are you afraid of?”
She says: I’m “afraid of getting married and having children and trying to make a home, while the whole world could tumble round our ears in a day.” She goes on: “You older ones don’t understand. You’ve survived a war. You’ve built things. You’ve raised families. . . . But look at the world you’ve left to us! You’ve given us everything except tomorrow.”
“Everything except tomorrow.” And tomorrow is the one thing that we need the most.
There are dark nights in each of our lectionary readings for today. Jacob is in flight as the sightlessness of midnight seizes his body and soul. Pastor Paul sits at our frightened bedsides as darkness settles in, holding our hands of anxiousness. Jesus tells a story of bad things that happen in the night, things that even the best of his disciples cannot fix in any lifetime here.
Yet dawn also invades each scene. Heaven breaks into Jacob’s midnight as “Bethel” (“house of God”) invades planet earth. Paul squeezes our trembling hands, assuring us of eternity’s grip on our souls. And Jesus tells us that the grays of these seemingly inconsequential times will one day give way to divine resolution that makes sense of everything.
Genesis 28:10-19a
There were no horizons that night. But then, Jacob seems to be a creature of the dark. He was a conniver from birth (Genesis 25:21—34) who cheated every member of his family (father Isaac—27:1—39; brother Esau—25:29—34, 27:1—39; uncle Laban—30:25—43; daughter Dinah—34:1—31). The terrifying blackness of this night on the run was exactly where he should be, if poetic justice had any sway.
And we, too often, join him there. One newspaper carried this ad in its classified section: Hope chest—brand-new. Half price. Long story.
We have had so many long stories in our lives. And we have had so many broken promises. And we have had so many shattered dreams. We are too often ready to give up. No more promises. No more commitments. Everything except tomorrow.
That is the situation with Jacob on the road from “kicked out of home” to uncertainty. He is a conniving person with limited horizons. The light of definition is gone. Within his head, the world and the universe function perfectly, but extending these into daily life is difficult because of his inability to see others and things around him.
Though most of us have the capability of physical sight, we are too often limited with him. We live in a trembling world. We face an uncertain future. We are surrounded by a host of plagues and troubles. We cannot see the way ahead.
Still, in the middle of it all, for Jacob, heaven opens, and the glory of God turns the dark night of the soul into “Bethel”, the “house of God.” The old hymn puts it this way:
Thou didst reach forth thy hand and mine enfold;
I walked and sank not on the storm-vexed sea!
‘Twas not so much that I on thee took hold,
As thou, dear Lord, on me, on me.
Donna Hoffman, a young Christian mother who battled cancer for a number of years, wrote this little poem in her journal. She was in the hospital at the time. The cancer seemed so strong, and tomorrow seemed like an uncertain dream or a tragic nightmare. She called her poem “Journey”:
My soul runs arms outstretched down the corridor to you.
Ah, my feet may stumble but how my heart can stride!
That is the testimony of Jacob when he sees the angels. It is our cry as well. Only God’s grace can sustain us in a world turned upside down, even when our feet stumble, even when the journey seems too long, too troublesome, even when we cannot see the way ahead. “My soul runs. How my heart can stride!”
Suddenly, wherever we find ourselves, it is Bethel.
Romans 8:12-25
In his most famous letter, Paul reminds us that our inner conflicts tear at us until we are paralyzed with frustration and failure (Romans 6-7). Sometimes we deny these struggles (6:1-14). Sometimes we ignore these tensions (6:15-7:6). Sometimes we grow bitter in the quagmire of it all (7:7-12). And sometimes we even throw up our hands in despair (7:13-24).
Precisely then, says Paul, the power of the righteousness of God as our bodyguard is most clearly revealed. Thankfully, God’s righteousness grabs us and holds us, so that through Jesus and the Holy Spirit we are never separated from divine love (Romans 7:25-8:39). Hope floods through us because we know Jesus and what he has done for us (8:1-11). Hope whispers inside of us as the Holy Spirit reminds us of who we truly are and whose we will always be (8:12-27). Hope thunders around us as God’s faithfulness is shouted from the heavens right through the pages of history.
Don Francisco summarized these themes well in his song “I’ll Never Let Go of Your Hand:”
I know what you've been hearing
I've seen you hide your fear
Embarrased by your weaknesses
Afraid to let me near
I wish you knew how much I long
For you to understand
No matter what may happen, child
I'll never let go of your hand
I know you've been forsaken
By all you've known before
When you've failed their expectations
They frown and close the door
But even though your heart itself
Should lose the will to stand
No matter what may happen, child
I'll never let go of your hand
The life that I have given you
No one can take away
I've sealed it with my Spirit, blood and word
The everlasting Father has made his covenant with you
And he's stronger than the world you've seen and heard
So don't you fear to show them
All the love I have for you
I'll be with you everywhere
In everything you do
And even if you do it wrong
And miss the joy I planned
I'll never, never let go of your hand
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
Jesus’ “kingdom parables” in Matthew 13 explore a variety of dimensions of God’s investments and reinvestments in planet earth. Certainly, our world belongs to God. But it also seems to belong to nasty things that go bump in the night. This parable of Jesus faces our confusion head on. We think, perhaps, that evil does not exist. Or we pretend that this is the way things are supposed to be. Or we believe that God will “rapture” us out of this world before the conflicts become overwhelming.
Throughout history, people have tried to run ahead of patience by pretending it wasn’t needed, that the world would end before they did. The Millerites and the Seventh Day Adventists announced Judgment Day watches several times over. People climbed trees and sat on rooftops in all-night vigils. But starry skies never split with angelic celebration and the dreams died with graying dawn. So too did the patience.
A neighboring farmer in my boyhood community was captured by one of these millennial preachers. He sold his farm, bought a motor home, and traveled with his family in caravan with a dozen others chasing the preacher on a whirlwind tour of North America, spreading the news of kingdom come. Six months later, they circled the motor homes in Texas and waited. And waited. And waited.
When Jesus refused to do a command curtain call on their schedule, the motor homes began to drift away. The prophetic band broke up, disillusioned with a near-sighted preacher, and our neighbor sneaked back to Minnesota in shame. He died a short while later, tired of patience that gave out before promise.
This is the religious dimension of waiting and watching and hope that Jesus urges and we find hard to manage. Our world is imperfect, with corners that bump knees and scorpions that poison hands. We get lonely, we get pained; we struggle to survive and are old in body before our youthful ideals get a chance to catch up. We try to find a little comfort and come away addicted to work or booze or drugs or sex always far short of heaven.
The patience of waiting is tied to our understanding of how time will get resolved into eternity. If there is no God outside the system, we are stuck with cycles of repetition, crushed beneath recurring tasks and tedium that never ends. But if there is a God who has promised to interrupt history with healing and hope and harmony, we wait with expectation.
Application
Generations ago, young William Borden went to Yale University. He was the wealthy son of a powerful family. He could do anything in life that he chose. And when he graduated, he chose to become a missionary of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
His friends thought he was crazy. “Why throw your life away like that?” they said. “You’ve got so much to live for here.”
But Borden knew who held his tomorrows. He made his choices. And God gave him the inner strength to live his convictions.
He set out on a long journey to China. It took months in those days. And by the time he got to Egypt, some disease managed to make him sick. He was placed in a hospital. And soon it became obvious that he wouldn’t recover. William Borden would die a foreigner in Egypt. He never reached his goal. He never went back home.
He could have been troubled by the tragedy of it all. But his last conscious act was to write a little note. Seven words. Seven words that they spoke at his funeral. Seven words that summarized his life, his identity: “No reserve, no retreat, and no regrets!”
Can you say that? Those who spend time on the road with Jacob, those who see with the eyes of faith, those who travel with Jesus even through mixed fields of uncertainty can.
Alternative Application (Romans 8:12-25)
Famous psychiatrist Viktor Frankl remembers powerfully a day of despair turned to hope during World War II. Frankl was on a work gang, just outside the fences that hid the horrors of Hitler’s infamous death camp at Dachau. “We were at work in a trench,” writes Frankl. “The dawn was gray around us; gray was the sky above; gray the snow in the pale light of dawn; gray rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and gray their faces.”
Frankl tells how he was ready to die. It was as if the gray bleakness had claws, and each moment they dug deeper and colder into his soul. Why go on? What could be the purpose in “living” if, indeed, he was even still alive at this moment? There was no heaven, no hell, no future, no past. Only the clutching grayness of this miserable moment. He was at one with hopeless depressed.
Suddenly, to his surprise, Frankl felt “a last violent protest” surging within himself. He sensed that even though his body had given up and his mind had accepted defeat, his inner spirit was taking flight. It was searching. It was looking. It was scanning the eternal horizons for the faintest glimmer that said his fleeting life had some divine purpose. It was looking for God.
In a single instant two things happened, says Frankl, that simply could not be mere coincidence. Within, he heard a powerful cry, piercing the gloom and tearing at the icy claws of death. The voice shouted “yes!” against the “no” of defeat and the gray “I don’t know” of the moment.
At that exact second, “a light was lit in a distant farmhouse.” Like a beacon it called attention to itself. It spoke of life and warmth and family and love. Frankl said that in that moment he began to believe. And in that moment, he began to live again.
We often have the same need. The grayness of bleak days is stifling. The loneliness of the moment overwhelms. The blindness of our limitations and uncertainties keeps us frozen and falling. Is there a reason to carry on? Is there meaning beyond the drudgery of today’s repetitive struggles? Is there hope and is there God?
“Send forth your light and your truth,” we shout with the p;salmist (43:3). Don’t leave me alone! Give me some sign! Light a candle in the window and take me home!
John Greenleaf Whittier puts it this way:
A tender child of summers three,
Seeking her little bed at night,
Paused on the dark stair timidly,
“O Mother! take my hand,” said she,
“And then the dark will all be light.”
We older children grope our way,
From dark behind to dark before:
And only when our hands we lay,
Dear Lord, in thine, the night is day,
And there is darkness nevermore.
Reach downward to the sunless days,
Wherein our guides are blind as we,
And faith is small and hope delays:
Take Thou the hands of prayer we raise,
And let us feel the light of thee.
Paul’s testimony mixes despair with hope, for God never denies us the light we need. As Joyce Kilmer wrote:
Because the way was steep and long, and through a strange and lonely land,
God placed upon my lips a song and put a lantern in my hand.
And suddenly we know the way home.
“Because I’m afraid,” she says.
“Afraid? Whatever are you afraid of?”
She says: I’m “afraid of getting married and having children and trying to make a home, while the whole world could tumble round our ears in a day.” She goes on: “You older ones don’t understand. You’ve survived a war. You’ve built things. You’ve raised families. . . . But look at the world you’ve left to us! You’ve given us everything except tomorrow.”
“Everything except tomorrow.” And tomorrow is the one thing that we need the most.
There are dark nights in each of our lectionary readings for today. Jacob is in flight as the sightlessness of midnight seizes his body and soul. Pastor Paul sits at our frightened bedsides as darkness settles in, holding our hands of anxiousness. Jesus tells a story of bad things that happen in the night, things that even the best of his disciples cannot fix in any lifetime here.
Yet dawn also invades each scene. Heaven breaks into Jacob’s midnight as “Bethel” (“house of God”) invades planet earth. Paul squeezes our trembling hands, assuring us of eternity’s grip on our souls. And Jesus tells us that the grays of these seemingly inconsequential times will one day give way to divine resolution that makes sense of everything.
Genesis 28:10-19a
There were no horizons that night. But then, Jacob seems to be a creature of the dark. He was a conniver from birth (Genesis 25:21—34) who cheated every member of his family (father Isaac—27:1—39; brother Esau—25:29—34, 27:1—39; uncle Laban—30:25—43; daughter Dinah—34:1—31). The terrifying blackness of this night on the run was exactly where he should be, if poetic justice had any sway.
And we, too often, join him there. One newspaper carried this ad in its classified section: Hope chest—brand-new. Half price. Long story.
We have had so many long stories in our lives. And we have had so many broken promises. And we have had so many shattered dreams. We are too often ready to give up. No more promises. No more commitments. Everything except tomorrow.
That is the situation with Jacob on the road from “kicked out of home” to uncertainty. He is a conniving person with limited horizons. The light of definition is gone. Within his head, the world and the universe function perfectly, but extending these into daily life is difficult because of his inability to see others and things around him.
Though most of us have the capability of physical sight, we are too often limited with him. We live in a trembling world. We face an uncertain future. We are surrounded by a host of plagues and troubles. We cannot see the way ahead.
Still, in the middle of it all, for Jacob, heaven opens, and the glory of God turns the dark night of the soul into “Bethel”, the “house of God.” The old hymn puts it this way:
Thou didst reach forth thy hand and mine enfold;
I walked and sank not on the storm-vexed sea!
‘Twas not so much that I on thee took hold,
As thou, dear Lord, on me, on me.
Donna Hoffman, a young Christian mother who battled cancer for a number of years, wrote this little poem in her journal. She was in the hospital at the time. The cancer seemed so strong, and tomorrow seemed like an uncertain dream or a tragic nightmare. She called her poem “Journey”:
My soul runs arms outstretched down the corridor to you.
Ah, my feet may stumble but how my heart can stride!
That is the testimony of Jacob when he sees the angels. It is our cry as well. Only God’s grace can sustain us in a world turned upside down, even when our feet stumble, even when the journey seems too long, too troublesome, even when we cannot see the way ahead. “My soul runs. How my heart can stride!”
Suddenly, wherever we find ourselves, it is Bethel.
Romans 8:12-25
In his most famous letter, Paul reminds us that our inner conflicts tear at us until we are paralyzed with frustration and failure (Romans 6-7). Sometimes we deny these struggles (6:1-14). Sometimes we ignore these tensions (6:15-7:6). Sometimes we grow bitter in the quagmire of it all (7:7-12). And sometimes we even throw up our hands in despair (7:13-24).
Precisely then, says Paul, the power of the righteousness of God as our bodyguard is most clearly revealed. Thankfully, God’s righteousness grabs us and holds us, so that through Jesus and the Holy Spirit we are never separated from divine love (Romans 7:25-8:39). Hope floods through us because we know Jesus and what he has done for us (8:1-11). Hope whispers inside of us as the Holy Spirit reminds us of who we truly are and whose we will always be (8:12-27). Hope thunders around us as God’s faithfulness is shouted from the heavens right through the pages of history.
Don Francisco summarized these themes well in his song “I’ll Never Let Go of Your Hand:”
I know what you've been hearing
I've seen you hide your fear
Embarrased by your weaknesses
Afraid to let me near
I wish you knew how much I long
For you to understand
No matter what may happen, child
I'll never let go of your hand
I know you've been forsaken
By all you've known before
When you've failed their expectations
They frown and close the door
But even though your heart itself
Should lose the will to stand
No matter what may happen, child
I'll never let go of your hand
The life that I have given you
No one can take away
I've sealed it with my Spirit, blood and word
The everlasting Father has made his covenant with you
And he's stronger than the world you've seen and heard
So don't you fear to show them
All the love I have for you
I'll be with you everywhere
In everything you do
And even if you do it wrong
And miss the joy I planned
I'll never, never let go of your hand
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
Jesus’ “kingdom parables” in Matthew 13 explore a variety of dimensions of God’s investments and reinvestments in planet earth. Certainly, our world belongs to God. But it also seems to belong to nasty things that go bump in the night. This parable of Jesus faces our confusion head on. We think, perhaps, that evil does not exist. Or we pretend that this is the way things are supposed to be. Or we believe that God will “rapture” us out of this world before the conflicts become overwhelming.
Throughout history, people have tried to run ahead of patience by pretending it wasn’t needed, that the world would end before they did. The Millerites and the Seventh Day Adventists announced Judgment Day watches several times over. People climbed trees and sat on rooftops in all-night vigils. But starry skies never split with angelic celebration and the dreams died with graying dawn. So too did the patience.
A neighboring farmer in my boyhood community was captured by one of these millennial preachers. He sold his farm, bought a motor home, and traveled with his family in caravan with a dozen others chasing the preacher on a whirlwind tour of North America, spreading the news of kingdom come. Six months later, they circled the motor homes in Texas and waited. And waited. And waited.
When Jesus refused to do a command curtain call on their schedule, the motor homes began to drift away. The prophetic band broke up, disillusioned with a near-sighted preacher, and our neighbor sneaked back to Minnesota in shame. He died a short while later, tired of patience that gave out before promise.
This is the religious dimension of waiting and watching and hope that Jesus urges and we find hard to manage. Our world is imperfect, with corners that bump knees and scorpions that poison hands. We get lonely, we get pained; we struggle to survive and are old in body before our youthful ideals get a chance to catch up. We try to find a little comfort and come away addicted to work or booze or drugs or sex always far short of heaven.
The patience of waiting is tied to our understanding of how time will get resolved into eternity. If there is no God outside the system, we are stuck with cycles of repetition, crushed beneath recurring tasks and tedium that never ends. But if there is a God who has promised to interrupt history with healing and hope and harmony, we wait with expectation.
Application
Generations ago, young William Borden went to Yale University. He was the wealthy son of a powerful family. He could do anything in life that he chose. And when he graduated, he chose to become a missionary of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
His friends thought he was crazy. “Why throw your life away like that?” they said. “You’ve got so much to live for here.”
But Borden knew who held his tomorrows. He made his choices. And God gave him the inner strength to live his convictions.
He set out on a long journey to China. It took months in those days. And by the time he got to Egypt, some disease managed to make him sick. He was placed in a hospital. And soon it became obvious that he wouldn’t recover. William Borden would die a foreigner in Egypt. He never reached his goal. He never went back home.
He could have been troubled by the tragedy of it all. But his last conscious act was to write a little note. Seven words. Seven words that they spoke at his funeral. Seven words that summarized his life, his identity: “No reserve, no retreat, and no regrets!”
Can you say that? Those who spend time on the road with Jacob, those who see with the eyes of faith, those who travel with Jesus even through mixed fields of uncertainty can.
Alternative Application (Romans 8:12-25)
Famous psychiatrist Viktor Frankl remembers powerfully a day of despair turned to hope during World War II. Frankl was on a work gang, just outside the fences that hid the horrors of Hitler’s infamous death camp at Dachau. “We were at work in a trench,” writes Frankl. “The dawn was gray around us; gray was the sky above; gray the snow in the pale light of dawn; gray rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and gray their faces.”
Frankl tells how he was ready to die. It was as if the gray bleakness had claws, and each moment they dug deeper and colder into his soul. Why go on? What could be the purpose in “living” if, indeed, he was even still alive at this moment? There was no heaven, no hell, no future, no past. Only the clutching grayness of this miserable moment. He was at one with hopeless depressed.
Suddenly, to his surprise, Frankl felt “a last violent protest” surging within himself. He sensed that even though his body had given up and his mind had accepted defeat, his inner spirit was taking flight. It was searching. It was looking. It was scanning the eternal horizons for the faintest glimmer that said his fleeting life had some divine purpose. It was looking for God.
In a single instant two things happened, says Frankl, that simply could not be mere coincidence. Within, he heard a powerful cry, piercing the gloom and tearing at the icy claws of death. The voice shouted “yes!” against the “no” of defeat and the gray “I don’t know” of the moment.
At that exact second, “a light was lit in a distant farmhouse.” Like a beacon it called attention to itself. It spoke of life and warmth and family and love. Frankl said that in that moment he began to believe. And in that moment, he began to live again.
We often have the same need. The grayness of bleak days is stifling. The loneliness of the moment overwhelms. The blindness of our limitations and uncertainties keeps us frozen and falling. Is there a reason to carry on? Is there meaning beyond the drudgery of today’s repetitive struggles? Is there hope and is there God?
“Send forth your light and your truth,” we shout with the p;salmist (43:3). Don’t leave me alone! Give me some sign! Light a candle in the window and take me home!
John Greenleaf Whittier puts it this way:
A tender child of summers three,
Seeking her little bed at night,
Paused on the dark stair timidly,
“O Mother! take my hand,” said she,
“And then the dark will all be light.”
We older children grope our way,
From dark behind to dark before:
And only when our hands we lay,
Dear Lord, in thine, the night is day,
And there is darkness nevermore.
Reach downward to the sunless days,
Wherein our guides are blind as we,
And faith is small and hope delays:
Take Thou the hands of prayer we raise,
And let us feel the light of thee.
Paul’s testimony mixes despair with hope, for God never denies us the light we need. As Joyce Kilmer wrote:
Because the way was steep and long, and through a strange and lonely land,
God placed upon my lips a song and put a lantern in my hand.
And suddenly we know the way home.
