The Promise Of Sight
Sermon
The Presence In The Promise
First Lesson Sermons For Advent/Christmas/Epiphany Cycle C
The Epiphany of our Lord never fails to arouse fascination for the story of the Visit of the Magi. The number, the identification, the homelands, and the occupations of the men from the East are not cited in the biblical account. That has allowed for all kinds of speculation as to who and what the Magi may have been. Some of that has been scholarly, some playful, some artful, some of it educational, and some worshipful. Carlos Menotti relates how fortunate it was for him that he could fall back on the traditional lore of his native Italy when he was called upon to produce the first opera created for national television, Amahl and the Night Visitors. He remembers the pressures he felt for making deadlines for the performance of the opera. He would have been in difficult straits were it not for the fact that his mind filled up with fond remembrance of the names and characterizations of three regal figures whom he made come alive for his operatic production.
One could add to Mr. Menotti's experience the numberless short stories, tales, novels, and art which have been created about the Magi in much the same way. Much of what has been created or written about the legendary figures has been full of charm and warmth, but the larger portion of what has been piled up has cast little light on the revelation of the Holy Child to the foreigners from alien countries. However, the text chosen from the Prophet Isaiah for the observance of this important day in the liturgical calendar offers much for understanding Epiphany. Doubtlessly, the reading was chosen because of its inclusion of people and camels who came from afar with gold and frankincense representing foreign nations. However, the text also has a great deal to say about the light that was shed on the world by the Epiphany, or the Manifestation, of our Lord.
The Context
One cannot say enough about the courage and conviction of the Prophet Isaiah, who penned the words of our text. This Isaiah was the prophet who ministered to the people of Israel while they lingered in captivity in Babylon. This ministry probably took place about 550-540 B.C. and broke through the gloom that had settled upon the previous generation of Hebrews. Israelites realized for a long time that they were a banished nation which had lost its identity as a people of God. Their capital city, Jerusalem, lay in ruins. Their national shrine, the Temple, had been desecrated and destroyed. They had lost their place under the sun and in the family of nations. That was humiliation enough. What was more frustrating was that their own history had been so bumpy and disappointing.
If the Israelites knew their own traditions, they knew their forefathers had been delivered from slavery before in the land of Egypt. Their tradition was filled with stories of how they conquered a land they assumed had been given them by divine promise. The breakup of their own nation had occurred once before when they had been conquered and taken into exile. The captivity of the Northern Kingdom had taken place a whole century before. The whole history of this people extended backward 1,300 years. How much the average Hebrew exile may have known about Hebrew history is difficult to say. We can imagine their sense of history was just as dim as what the average Christians know about their tradition of two thousand years. That is what the prophet had to overcome. The people had to be reminded of what God had done for them throughout their history to understand that God could again save them.
The Light
In order to inspire his people with the hope that was theirs in the gracious God who had not abandoned them in the exile, Isaiah composed effective poems about the favored position of God's people. He begins the poem before us, "Arise, shine; for your light has come and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you." When the prophet speaks about the light, he refers to that light which the Scriptures consistently identify with the presence of God. The prophet does not mean that the people should bask in the sunshine of the creation and glory in what the creation itself reveals about the providential Creator God. This light is the light that emanated from God at the creation before God created the luminaries of the creation. This light is the light that God shines into the hearts of people for them to see everything in a different light.
The prophet can say that darkness covers the earth "and thick darkness the peoples." The people of the world who do not know the God of the prophet are in darkness no matter how much they know and how much they have perceived about the world. The prophet says that this light dawns on people as the Lord "rises" upon them and God's glory appears over them. That is the light of which we speak in the Epiphany of our Lord. As a unique light led the Magi to find the Holy Child, so God enlightens us so that we can embrace the Child as the Son of God and Savior of the world. The faith that makes such identity possible is a gift from the light which God sheds upon our minds and hearts as we are captivated by the story of the Almighty God revealing the divine presence in the birth of an infant Boy.
A Reunion
For the prophet the presence of the Light which emanates from God would enable the exiled Israelites to be reestablished as a people of honor among the family of nations. He envisioned, "Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn." Once more the people could think of themselves as that nation in whom other nations of the earth would be blessed. The other nations would be blessed, because Israel would once again be the depository of that revelation in which God would offer demonstrations of how God could and does work history. Other peoples could learn how God does love, redeem, and save those who would trust God's willingness to help them. All this would be obvious in the manner in which God would bring home the exiles from Babylon and restore them again with those people who had been left behind in Jerusalem and also with the many who had been scattered around the world. The prophet writes, "Lift up your eyes and look around; they all gather together, they come to you, your sons and your daughters shall be carried on their nurses' arms."
The many Jews who had been dispersed throughout the Mediterranean world would be able to return to the Holy City of Jerusalem to celebrate the great festivals which honored the mighty acts God had performed in the history of this people -- a people that had not only been demoralized but had also been decimated and separated by the world powers that had run over them, because they were a weak and vassal state. Weak administrations in Judah had made compromises with growing world powers, and had made unholy treaties and pacts, but failed in both their diplomatic efforts as well as their attempts at military alliances. Now, however, God would make them a people again with no military hero, no great political figure, no creative governmental enterprise of their doing. In spite of their ineptness at the conference table or on the battlefield, God would raise them up to be God's people again.
The Prophetic Task
In order to appreciate the task that Isaiah had in rousing the exiles to trust that God was still in their history, imagine what the rabbis have to do for the Jewish people today after the holocaust. It is one thing to know that generally people should be horrified at the inhumanity that took place with the slaughter of six million Jews. All people should be revolted at that horrible moment of history. Certainly there are segments of the Hebrew population who react to the holocaust only on its humanitarian and political levels. However, the rabbis have to interpret this dreadful catastrophe in the light of their own tradition. A remarkable collection of what some rabbis did teach in response to the Holocaust has been published under the title I Will be Sanctified. One rabbi noted that the question, "Where was God during the Holocaust?" is the question of those who would justify giving up on the faith of their tradition. Some would ask the question in pain, some ask out of sincere doubt, and still others ask insolently and skeptically. However, the one who questions out of faith is like the one who asked his young nephew, a survivor of the Holocaust, if he had seen the smoke coming from the chimneys. But then he also asked, "And did you see God there next to the chimneys?"
Faith not only recognizes the judgment of God upon the world, but also recognizes the willingness of God to save and redeem out of the worst of circumstances. That is what the Prophet Isaiah was able to see and what he was able to share with his people in exile. He could tell them that they would be restored as a people and that other nations would recognize them. The prophet could picture this in the most assuring ways. Not only would they be reestablished as a people, but also they would find a prominent and enviable place among the family of nations.
How It Happened
The prophet's prediction rang true. Cyrus, the King of Persia, conquered Babylon and became God's instrument for restoring the people of Judah to their homeland. Unfortunately, the rebuilding of the people of God as a formidable nation among others took considerable urging at the behest of later prophets. Also Israel never regained the prestige and respect the nation had once known under David. However, the hopes and dreams of the people of God for a messianic age, when a Second David would come, New Testament writers saw fulfilled in the birth of Jesus of Bethlehem. One can appreciate then why the church has chosen to take the word from the Prophet Isaiah to complement the story of the Magi. The poetic imagery employed by the prophet is to suggest that not only would the people be restored and comforted, but also that the creation itself would be nourished by this event. Then, of course, "the wealth of the Nations" shall also be brought to acknowledge what God had done for God's people. That was to be symbolized by the presence of young camels from Midian and Ephah and the presence of gold and frankincense.
We recognize all of that language as testimony that God has fulfilled in the life of the Infant Jesus what God had done earlier in the history of the people of Israel. We affirm this in what God was able to accomplish in the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. We affirm also that God continues to live and move in history to accomplish the same for those who would recognize that God continues to shine the light of his grace in their lives no matter what comes to threaten, intimidate, or destroy them. As the prophet had to awaken his people to what God was doing for them, so we must continue to witness to the presence of the compassionate God who seeks to deliver us from the darkness of this world.
The Captivity Of The Church
The Feast of the Epiphany of our Lord is an important tie for us to remember that as the people of God today we should recognize how easily and how readily we can live in the darkness of this world rather than in the light of God's grace in Christ. We recall how Dr. Martin Luther wrote in 1520 The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. Luther found it necessary to address the Church of his day with the fact that the Church was using the sacramental system of the Church itself to keep the people from understanding the freedom that was theirs under the gospel. From age to age the Church has suffered through many different approaches to its own faith that have robbed it of its evangelical character. Pietism in the seventeenth century made its efforts to strengthen the faith of the Church by emphasizing its feelings.
Rationalism in the eighteenth century was a movement to make the faith of the Church perfectly reasonable. Similarly, orthodoxy in the nineteenth the century was the attempt to guarantee the absolute rightness of the faith. Signs of all these movements are ever present temptations of the Church to improve the nature of believing. The difficulty is that each such movement has tended to cast darkness on the purity of the gospel itself. The additions to the gospel, let alone, the subtractions from the gospel, keep us from seeing the light of God's grace as it really is. Those are the problems from within the Church. Then, of course, there are always the threats to the faith from outside the Church. We know that there always will be those who will cast the blanket of darkness on the scene by insisting that the faith is truly folly in the face of the problems that we must face. To celebrate the Epiphany of our Lord is to glory in the fact that God always shines into our hearts to give us the light of faith.
The Sight
Walter Cronkite titled his memoirs A Reporter's Life. A full life it has been. One can appreciate the fact that his career made him an important witness to so many important events in the latter part of the last century. However, one of his associates, Dick Savant hated Cronkite's signature line, "And that's the way it is" on such and such a date. Mr. Savant argued that the line implied an accuracy of which the reporter was not capable. Mr. Savant was very insightful on that point. Yet when Mr. Cronkite retired, one missed the accuracy of which he was capable. Mr. Cronkite missed it too. A stickler for accuracy, Mr. Cronkite did the very best he could to maintain a standard of integrity and honesty in reporting. Mr. Cronkite became very critical of what happened to the media in general. The growth of the media made them highly competitive, and Mr. Cronkite dubbed their new kind of reporting as "infotainment." The emphasis is more on winning an audience than on reporting the news as it is. Mr. Cronkite's concern was, and ours should be, that we be an informed people who know how it really is. That is very important to people who are free and want to remain free.
As Christians who live in the light of the gospel which God has shined in our hearts that should be even more so. It is not simply in the hearing of the news accurately that we come to understand "the way it is." It is in the light of God's revelation that we come to understand how we are to interpret how things really are. By God"s grace through faith we can interpret what is under the judgment of God and what is under grace. We can identify sin for what it is, and we can identify what is faithful and what is not. That is the call of the Prophet Isaiah on this Epiphany. By faith we are to know that, however it is personally for us this day, we are to rise and shine for our light has come and the glory of the Lord has risen on us.
One could add to Mr. Menotti's experience the numberless short stories, tales, novels, and art which have been created about the Magi in much the same way. Much of what has been created or written about the legendary figures has been full of charm and warmth, but the larger portion of what has been piled up has cast little light on the revelation of the Holy Child to the foreigners from alien countries. However, the text chosen from the Prophet Isaiah for the observance of this important day in the liturgical calendar offers much for understanding Epiphany. Doubtlessly, the reading was chosen because of its inclusion of people and camels who came from afar with gold and frankincense representing foreign nations. However, the text also has a great deal to say about the light that was shed on the world by the Epiphany, or the Manifestation, of our Lord.
The Context
One cannot say enough about the courage and conviction of the Prophet Isaiah, who penned the words of our text. This Isaiah was the prophet who ministered to the people of Israel while they lingered in captivity in Babylon. This ministry probably took place about 550-540 B.C. and broke through the gloom that had settled upon the previous generation of Hebrews. Israelites realized for a long time that they were a banished nation which had lost its identity as a people of God. Their capital city, Jerusalem, lay in ruins. Their national shrine, the Temple, had been desecrated and destroyed. They had lost their place under the sun and in the family of nations. That was humiliation enough. What was more frustrating was that their own history had been so bumpy and disappointing.
If the Israelites knew their own traditions, they knew their forefathers had been delivered from slavery before in the land of Egypt. Their tradition was filled with stories of how they conquered a land they assumed had been given them by divine promise. The breakup of their own nation had occurred once before when they had been conquered and taken into exile. The captivity of the Northern Kingdom had taken place a whole century before. The whole history of this people extended backward 1,300 years. How much the average Hebrew exile may have known about Hebrew history is difficult to say. We can imagine their sense of history was just as dim as what the average Christians know about their tradition of two thousand years. That is what the prophet had to overcome. The people had to be reminded of what God had done for them throughout their history to understand that God could again save them.
The Light
In order to inspire his people with the hope that was theirs in the gracious God who had not abandoned them in the exile, Isaiah composed effective poems about the favored position of God's people. He begins the poem before us, "Arise, shine; for your light has come and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you." When the prophet speaks about the light, he refers to that light which the Scriptures consistently identify with the presence of God. The prophet does not mean that the people should bask in the sunshine of the creation and glory in what the creation itself reveals about the providential Creator God. This light is the light that emanated from God at the creation before God created the luminaries of the creation. This light is the light that God shines into the hearts of people for them to see everything in a different light.
The prophet can say that darkness covers the earth "and thick darkness the peoples." The people of the world who do not know the God of the prophet are in darkness no matter how much they know and how much they have perceived about the world. The prophet says that this light dawns on people as the Lord "rises" upon them and God's glory appears over them. That is the light of which we speak in the Epiphany of our Lord. As a unique light led the Magi to find the Holy Child, so God enlightens us so that we can embrace the Child as the Son of God and Savior of the world. The faith that makes such identity possible is a gift from the light which God sheds upon our minds and hearts as we are captivated by the story of the Almighty God revealing the divine presence in the birth of an infant Boy.
A Reunion
For the prophet the presence of the Light which emanates from God would enable the exiled Israelites to be reestablished as a people of honor among the family of nations. He envisioned, "Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn." Once more the people could think of themselves as that nation in whom other nations of the earth would be blessed. The other nations would be blessed, because Israel would once again be the depository of that revelation in which God would offer demonstrations of how God could and does work history. Other peoples could learn how God does love, redeem, and save those who would trust God's willingness to help them. All this would be obvious in the manner in which God would bring home the exiles from Babylon and restore them again with those people who had been left behind in Jerusalem and also with the many who had been scattered around the world. The prophet writes, "Lift up your eyes and look around; they all gather together, they come to you, your sons and your daughters shall be carried on their nurses' arms."
The many Jews who had been dispersed throughout the Mediterranean world would be able to return to the Holy City of Jerusalem to celebrate the great festivals which honored the mighty acts God had performed in the history of this people -- a people that had not only been demoralized but had also been decimated and separated by the world powers that had run over them, because they were a weak and vassal state. Weak administrations in Judah had made compromises with growing world powers, and had made unholy treaties and pacts, but failed in both their diplomatic efforts as well as their attempts at military alliances. Now, however, God would make them a people again with no military hero, no great political figure, no creative governmental enterprise of their doing. In spite of their ineptness at the conference table or on the battlefield, God would raise them up to be God's people again.
The Prophetic Task
In order to appreciate the task that Isaiah had in rousing the exiles to trust that God was still in their history, imagine what the rabbis have to do for the Jewish people today after the holocaust. It is one thing to know that generally people should be horrified at the inhumanity that took place with the slaughter of six million Jews. All people should be revolted at that horrible moment of history. Certainly there are segments of the Hebrew population who react to the holocaust only on its humanitarian and political levels. However, the rabbis have to interpret this dreadful catastrophe in the light of their own tradition. A remarkable collection of what some rabbis did teach in response to the Holocaust has been published under the title I Will be Sanctified. One rabbi noted that the question, "Where was God during the Holocaust?" is the question of those who would justify giving up on the faith of their tradition. Some would ask the question in pain, some ask out of sincere doubt, and still others ask insolently and skeptically. However, the one who questions out of faith is like the one who asked his young nephew, a survivor of the Holocaust, if he had seen the smoke coming from the chimneys. But then he also asked, "And did you see God there next to the chimneys?"
Faith not only recognizes the judgment of God upon the world, but also recognizes the willingness of God to save and redeem out of the worst of circumstances. That is what the Prophet Isaiah was able to see and what he was able to share with his people in exile. He could tell them that they would be restored as a people and that other nations would recognize them. The prophet could picture this in the most assuring ways. Not only would they be reestablished as a people, but also they would find a prominent and enviable place among the family of nations.
How It Happened
The prophet's prediction rang true. Cyrus, the King of Persia, conquered Babylon and became God's instrument for restoring the people of Judah to their homeland. Unfortunately, the rebuilding of the people of God as a formidable nation among others took considerable urging at the behest of later prophets. Also Israel never regained the prestige and respect the nation had once known under David. However, the hopes and dreams of the people of God for a messianic age, when a Second David would come, New Testament writers saw fulfilled in the birth of Jesus of Bethlehem. One can appreciate then why the church has chosen to take the word from the Prophet Isaiah to complement the story of the Magi. The poetic imagery employed by the prophet is to suggest that not only would the people be restored and comforted, but also that the creation itself would be nourished by this event. Then, of course, "the wealth of the Nations" shall also be brought to acknowledge what God had done for God's people. That was to be symbolized by the presence of young camels from Midian and Ephah and the presence of gold and frankincense.
We recognize all of that language as testimony that God has fulfilled in the life of the Infant Jesus what God had done earlier in the history of the people of Israel. We affirm this in what God was able to accomplish in the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. We affirm also that God continues to live and move in history to accomplish the same for those who would recognize that God continues to shine the light of his grace in their lives no matter what comes to threaten, intimidate, or destroy them. As the prophet had to awaken his people to what God was doing for them, so we must continue to witness to the presence of the compassionate God who seeks to deliver us from the darkness of this world.
The Captivity Of The Church
The Feast of the Epiphany of our Lord is an important tie for us to remember that as the people of God today we should recognize how easily and how readily we can live in the darkness of this world rather than in the light of God's grace in Christ. We recall how Dr. Martin Luther wrote in 1520 The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. Luther found it necessary to address the Church of his day with the fact that the Church was using the sacramental system of the Church itself to keep the people from understanding the freedom that was theirs under the gospel. From age to age the Church has suffered through many different approaches to its own faith that have robbed it of its evangelical character. Pietism in the seventeenth century made its efforts to strengthen the faith of the Church by emphasizing its feelings.
Rationalism in the eighteenth century was a movement to make the faith of the Church perfectly reasonable. Similarly, orthodoxy in the nineteenth the century was the attempt to guarantee the absolute rightness of the faith. Signs of all these movements are ever present temptations of the Church to improve the nature of believing. The difficulty is that each such movement has tended to cast darkness on the purity of the gospel itself. The additions to the gospel, let alone, the subtractions from the gospel, keep us from seeing the light of God's grace as it really is. Those are the problems from within the Church. Then, of course, there are always the threats to the faith from outside the Church. We know that there always will be those who will cast the blanket of darkness on the scene by insisting that the faith is truly folly in the face of the problems that we must face. To celebrate the Epiphany of our Lord is to glory in the fact that God always shines into our hearts to give us the light of faith.
The Sight
Walter Cronkite titled his memoirs A Reporter's Life. A full life it has been. One can appreciate the fact that his career made him an important witness to so many important events in the latter part of the last century. However, one of his associates, Dick Savant hated Cronkite's signature line, "And that's the way it is" on such and such a date. Mr. Savant argued that the line implied an accuracy of which the reporter was not capable. Mr. Savant was very insightful on that point. Yet when Mr. Cronkite retired, one missed the accuracy of which he was capable. Mr. Cronkite missed it too. A stickler for accuracy, Mr. Cronkite did the very best he could to maintain a standard of integrity and honesty in reporting. Mr. Cronkite became very critical of what happened to the media in general. The growth of the media made them highly competitive, and Mr. Cronkite dubbed their new kind of reporting as "infotainment." The emphasis is more on winning an audience than on reporting the news as it is. Mr. Cronkite's concern was, and ours should be, that we be an informed people who know how it really is. That is very important to people who are free and want to remain free.
As Christians who live in the light of the gospel which God has shined in our hearts that should be even more so. It is not simply in the hearing of the news accurately that we come to understand "the way it is." It is in the light of God's revelation that we come to understand how we are to interpret how things really are. By God"s grace through faith we can interpret what is under the judgment of God and what is under grace. We can identify sin for what it is, and we can identify what is faithful and what is not. That is the call of the Prophet Isaiah on this Epiphany. By faith we are to know that, however it is personally for us this day, we are to rise and shine for our light has come and the glory of the Lord has risen on us.
