Don Friesen
This is a darkening time of year. As Christians in the northern hemisphere wait for the birth of the Light of the World, we are moving inexorably into darkness. We are in a season of darkness. The daylight hours are growing shorter and shorter, and many of the days are so gray they seem little more than a lighter shade of darkness.
Years ago I worked underground in a northern mine and during much of the winter I could not escape the darkness. The mine itself was darker than any darkness I've ever known. Even on a moonless night one can make out shapes outdoors, and in time our eyes adapt to the relative darkness. An underground mine, however, is darker than dark. And I entered the mine in the morning before the sun was up, and I emerged from underground in late afternoon, when the northern sun had already set. I did not see the sun for weeks! It was almost like living in Ottawa!
We need light. Like plants on a windowsill with their leaves leaning toward the outdoor light, we too need light for our well-being. Indeed, the absence of light affects some of us deeply. People will do strange things to escape this dark season some winter in Arizona; some are even prepared to winter in Winnipeg!
Oh, to Escape a Frenzied and Bizarre Christmas!
This darkening time of year could drive one to despair, and many aspects of our frenzied Christmas festivity simply accelerate the process. Shopping malls blind us with the glare of neon lights and overwhelm us with noise incessant circus-like noise! In a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon strip, Calvin reminds his tiger friend, "Yep, Christmas is just around the corner. And what better way to celebrate a religious holiday than with a month of frenzied consumerism!" The sardonic Hobbes responds, "I'm surprised other religions haven't picked up on that."
Sometimes churches drive us crazy. There is a large church in California that has sculptures of Jesus strewn across its campus. This is a church that stresses only positive thinking Jesus' beatitudes are known as the "be-happy-attitudes" so most of the sculptures feature smiling Jesus-es, even giddy Jesus-es, including a life-sized sculpture of Jesus merrily strolling on water! No sign of the furious storm or terrified disciples featured in the actual Gospel account! Well, if a balmy, giddy Jesus, why not a twisted Jesus who laughs at his disciples' fear! (Daniel Harrell)
Another sculpture at this church features the baby Jesus in his mother's arms in one of the most frightening episodes of the Christmas story the Holy Family's flight into Egypt. The actual story, as you know, is filled with murderous intrigue, but at this church the sculpture in question portrays a cheerful Mary, complete with Southern California tan, and the baby Jesus is made of shiny metal, such that you can see your own face reflected in the baby Jesus, to remind you that Jesus loves you just as you are!
Then there's the family that put up a big plastic nativity scene featuring a bright plastic baby Jesus. Only the family lit up the baby Jesus with a blinking bulb. One moment Jesus is the light of the world, the next moment he is not!
The Lure of Escape Appeals to us
The lure of escape seems very attractive at times. Escape from the darkening season. Escape from bizarre twists on the Christmas story. Escape from the commercialization and from all the other negative aspects of this season. Perhaps, as someone reminded me this week, my sabbatical cannot come too soon!
The idea of escape is attractive to us. We like to hear stories of escape. Who can forget the Iran hostage crisis of 1979 when students took over the American embassy in Tehran and held sixty-some Americans hostage for 444 days! Six diplomats evaded capture by hiding in the Swedish and Canadian embassies, and Parliament held a secret session for the first time since World War II in order to pass special legislation allowing Canadian passports to be issued to the six Americans so that they could escape from Iran. And on January 28, 1980 six American diplomats boarded a flight to Zurich, their escape arranged by Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor and which became known as the "Canadian Caper".
Perhaps we like stories of escape because no one cares to be confined. Stories of people who escape locked doors, high prison walls, or any other confining situation appeal to us. And when the confinement is considered extraordinarily secure, as was Alcatraz Prison, any escape or attempts at escape make for rivetting reading. Alcatraz was a federal prison from 1934 to 1969 and during that time thirty-six prisoners tried to escape; seven of them were shot and killed; two drowned; five remained unaccounted for; the rest were recaptured. Only two prisoners made it off the island but they too were captured and returned.
Biblical Stories of Escape
The Bible has a few dramatic escape stories of its own. Moses began his escape escapades as an infant, when his people were slaves in Egypt. (Exodus 2) Their enslavement was compounded by the Pharaoh's command that every new-born Hebrew boy was to be thrown into the Nile. Moses' mother hid him for three months, placing him in a basket made of bulrushes, floating along the very river that was to be the place of his death! Moses escaped death, thanks to the tender response of the Pharaoh's daughter, who adopted him.
One could read the story of Jonah as a story of escape, for who would want to be confined in the belly of a fish, large or small? It's a story with a cute lesson for Jonah's people, who preferred their enemies to be confined to eternal damnation!
Jeremiah is another biblical escape artist. He would have loved to escape God's call, but found the Divine call inescapable! Indeed, it led to other confinements. Jeremiah was locked up on occasion (Jeremiah 37), and his enemies once dropped him into a wet and muddy cistern (Jeremiah 38) from which he escaped with the help of some make-shift ropes fashioned by sympathetic friends.
The Apostle Paul had a few escape adventures of his own. His ministry in Damascus was fiercely opposed, such that his enemies, determined to capture and kill him, were watching all escape routes out of the city! One night, however, his new Christian friends lowered him in a basket through an opening in the city wall and he was able to flee. (Acts 9)
On another occasion Paul was on a ship with a load of prisoners, but they encountered a fierce storm at sea. All the people on board, including Paul, escaped the shipwreck by swimming ashore or holding on to broken pieces of the ship and drifting to shore. (Acts 27)
The Shadows of Darkness Surround the Christmas Story
Stories of escape are not foreign to us. Some of you, or your forebears, escaped from Russia. Some of you escaped from El Salvador, or from Congo, or from other places that proved too repressive to remain there. Stories of oppression and escape from oppression are also not foreign to the biblical story. Christmas, for all its vaunted merriness and happiness, was anything but in the biblical narrative. The Christmas story is filled with darkness and shadows, and shadows within shadows.
Today's first Gospel reading (John 3:1-6) introduces us to an eccentric figure with an eccentric message! To get to the cute baby in the manger, we first have to get by the figure of John, a locust-munching wilderness hermit dressed in animal clothing, his fingers dirty and sticky from his daily diet of wild honey! And what is his message? It's not about be-happy-attitudes! It's a message of repentance! A message not welcomed by some, to whom the Baptist said, "Who warned you, you serpent's brood, to escape from the wrath to come?" (Luke 3:7, PHL) A vivid picture of a nest of snakes slithering furiously to escape danger.
Canadian jazz singer Diana Krall gave birth to twins this week and the three-word public announcement she and her husband, Elvis Costello, made, was: "We are ecstatic!" (Ottawa Citizen, December 9, 2006, page A11) Zechariah's announcement of John's birth is longer, but then, for a priest, he'd been unnaturally silent for a time. (Luke 1:20)
Zechariah too was ecstatic after a fashion but his announcement has shadows in it. In among acclamations of God's favour is talk of "enemies" (Luke 1:71, 74) and those "who hate us" (1:71) and "fear" (1:74) and sin (1:77) and "darkness" (1:79) and the shadow of death". (1:79) In among the bright lights of blessing and salvation and mercy are dark shadows of death!
Mary, the mother of Jesus, provides her own unsettling birth announcement. Things are simple today; when your child is born, all you have to provide is the child's name and his or her weight, and even if you give the weight in both metric and imperial measurements and add a gratuitous line that mother and child are doing splendidly, it's a relatively short announcement and in most cases, a happy one! But Mary she's displeased with her pregnancy, initially, and then she starts ranting about bringing down the proud and the powerful and lifting up the lowly and starting a food programme and thumbing her nose at the rich! (Luke 1:51-53) Some people can make even a birth announcement sound political!
A movie entitled "The Nativity" is now playing in the theatres. Hollywood has discovered the Bible and in order to appeal to families the movie is rated PG. If the movie was faithful to Scripture, however, it would not be rated PG! The nativity story is a dark story. It's filled with shadows, not least of which is the Slaughter of the Innocents (Matthew 2:16-18), an infanticide programme awaiting the Holy Child.
There is a large church in Northern Spain that, like many old churches, is rather dark and grim, but this church also features a huge mural vividly depicting the massacre of the innocents. (Martin Jackson) Can you imagine people coming to this church weekly, if not daily, and being greeted by this gruesome sight? We prefer pleasant pastoral scenes, but it's a harsh reality of this world that evil exists. Cruelty, violence, and the wholesale slaughter of defenceless people are not the purview of Pharaoh and Herod alone! More recent genocides come to mind, whether in Germany, Iraq, Bosnia or Rwanda. Many babies today are born, as Jesus was, into a world of trouble, violence, darkness and fear. These are the ones, as Zechariah describes them, who "sit in darkness and in the shadow of death...." (Luke 1:79) And in such abject darkness a blinking Jesus just won't cut it!
No Bright Light Intrudes ahead of Cue ...
We are surrounded by the shadows of death. The shadows of war. The shadows of corruption. The shadows of murder, violence, abuse. The shadows of rage. The shadow of sorrow. The shadow of poverty. The shadow of infidelity. To escape from these shadows is very appealing, but just as the sun's trajectory cannot be rushed, so too one's spirit cannot take a shortcut to the light of God's glory. As someone (Francis Anderson) has written:
Dark times can be fruitful times. In one of his short stories William Faulkner (1897-1962) makes the arresting comment, "(We) can see so much further when (we) stand in the darkness than (we) do when, standing in the light, we try to probe the darkness." It's a paradoxical wisdom caught by the nineteenth-century artist, Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), who said, "I close my eyes in order to see."
"Why must holy places be dark places?" asked C. S. Lewis. (Till We Have Faces) Why must holy places be dark places? Dark places are not necessarily holy places, but even darkness is not free of God's presence. The OT psalmist, contemplating where he might flee to escape God's presence, wrote, "If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,' even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you." (Psalm 139:11-12)
... but Death's Dark Shadow Will Be Put to Flight!
The dark shadows of death did not deter Zechariah from rejoicing and living in hope. He perceived the birth of his son as an assurance that God will conquer darkness, saying, "By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace." (Luke 1:78-79) It is the same promise articulated in another Gospel: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." (John 1:5) It's a variation of the promise rendered so poetically by the prophet Isaiah: "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined." (Isaiah 9:2)
Thus assured by biblical prophecies and promises, God's people have dared over and over again to celebrate the light of God's incarnation, even in the very midst of darkness! It's the story of Christmas, of Bethlehem: "In thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light." Advent calls us and dares us to expect and to prepare for the in-breaking of God's glory into the darkness of the human heart and the shadows of a broken world. May God give us the grace to see in all experiences, however dark, glimpses of God's glory and light! AMEN
"It is a lonely road to Bethlehem
And truth be told, shadows are familiar territory to God's Spirit! It's where God does some of His best work. It doesn't mean that dark times automatically morph into an impeccable character and other signs of maturity and wisdom. Not every dark and shadowed experience leads to something new and deep. Unless we are willing to engage the darkness, to do the inner work required to reach the light, the darkness may yield nothing! Rather than see these dark experiences as enemies, however, they may be opportunities to grow, opportunities to follow the Spirit into the darkness and there find what is holy and eternal within ourselves. (Larry Bunnell) These dark seasons can act as the "refiner's fire"of which Malachi speaks (Malachi:3:2-3), clarifying our thinking, and re-directing our lives.
That must be walked slowly...
Where no bright light or angel song
Intrudes ahead of cue...."
All quotations of Scripture, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version.