Hopes and Fears: Light First Baptist Richmond, January 6, 2019 The Epiphany of the Lord Isaiah 60:1-6 Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you. For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you. Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. You recognize those words, don t you? Sure you do. They re from Lincoln s Gettysburg Address, delivered on the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. Our fathers, Lincoln said (meaning our Founding Fathers), brought forth a new nation, conceived in liberty, dedicated to equality, but now? Now we are engaged in a great civil war, he said, looking out over that blood-soaked battlefield. In that moment Lincoln called the nation to look back to its glorious beginnings and then look at what it had become in the span of eighty-seven years. The contrast was startling. Just last week I called on some of the elders of this church to do a similar thing: to look back to that time just after the end of World War II roughly threescore and thirteen years ago and compare it to the state of the nation now. Again, the contrast was startling. Virginia Darnell, our church historian, said in a way that only she could say it, Things have gone south completely (and she wasn t speaking geographically). Bruce Heilman, who fought in that war, said, I think there is little or no comparison. Things were upbeat in those days. Things were positive. People were enthusiastic about the country. They were enthusiastic about the future. Betty Ann Dillon said, After World 1
War II we felt very united by having gone through a very difficult time together. She said, I m very concerned that we have lost that unity, that we have become a nation of individuals. And Buddy Hamilton, who (if he keeps doing what he s been doing since 1916) will turn 103 this year, said, At that time America was euphoric in its accomplishments. It had done something that nobody thought it could do. Now almost everybody wants to do their own thing. We don t have a shared sense of mission. Everybody is looking out for themselves. According to these wise elders, in a little more than seventy years we ve gone from being a nation united by a common mission to a nation divided by individual concerns; we ve gone from fighting a world war to fighting over a wall. i I told Virginia Darnell, I don t have as much historical perspective as you do, but I ve never seen our nation so divided. She said, I ve heard people talk about another civil war. It s bad out there, friends! We can t blame it on any one person. It didn t happen overnight. I remember reading an article years ago by a futurist named Faith Popcorn (her real name) who said, What the World Needs Now Is an Alien Invasion. ii What she meant, of course, is that an attack from outside pulls us together; it unites us. It wasn t long after that that the movie Independence Day came out, which is all about the world coming together to fend off an alien invasion. At the end of that movie people from every nation are celebrating as America did after World War II. But we can t wait for an alien invasion to bring us together. We re going to have to find another solution to the problem. Today I want to begin a new series called Hopes and Fears, based on that line from O Little Town of Bethlehem: the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee 2
tonight. I want to look at where the nation of Israel was when it began to fear for its future and hope for a savior and then compare it with where we are as a nation. I think there are some parallels there some striking parallels. You may recall that Israel, too, was conceived in liberty, born as a nation when God brought his people out of their slavery in Egypt and into the Promised Land. At Mount Sinai he said, If you will be my people, I will be your God, and they all swore that they would. Wandering in the wilderness for forty years they faced challenges that united them as a people hunger, thirst, attacks from outside enemies all of which only bound them together more closely. As they entered the Promised Land they were, truly, one nation under God. But as they got settled things began to change. With every man was sitting under his own vine and fig tree (as the Bible says) they didn t seem to need God as much as they had before. They didn t to need each other. This was in that period when there was no king in Israel, and every man did what was right in his own eyes (Judges 21:25), a time that sounds remarkably like our own. But they kept being attacked by their enemies round about, and eventually they asked God for a king who would fight their battles for them. God gave them Saul, a fierce warrior who stood head and shoulders above every other man in Israel and who, for a while, was a good king. But Saul turned out to be too half-hearted for the job, so God sent his servant Samuel to anoint David, a man after God s own heart. With a few major exceptions David was a good and faithful king, the best Israel ever had. His son Solomon, however, had no heart for the job (although he enjoyed the benefits), and his son Rehoboam provoked a civil war that split the nation in two. Sound familiar? 3
In the years that followed a series of corrupt kings led Israel in the north and Judah in the south further and further away from the promises they had made to God at Mount Sinai, that wedding in the wilderness, where God had vowed, If you will be my people I will be your God. They had not been his people. They had committed adultery again and again. They had gone their own way and done their own thing. According to the author of 2 Chronicles God had no choice but to punish them. He sent the armies of Babylon up against them. They burned the temple to its foundation, broke down the wall of Jerusalem, and carried its citizens into exile. By the rivers of Babylon, they said, there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres, for there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion! But how could we sing the Lord s song in a foreign land? (Ps. 137:1-4). They didn t sing, but in Exile the religious leaders of Israel began to assemble the old stories, the laws and the histories, the prophecies and promises that now make up our Old Testament. In those pages they could see clearly how they had broken their promises to God, and how they were being punished for their unfaithfulness. But if God was the one who had brought them into exile, then God was the one who could bring them out again. And that s when they began to pray for their salvation, and to look to God for a savior. Suppose that s where we are as a nation: that we are experiencing some kind of exile. Not from the Promised Land, but from the promise of those days just after World War II when we were united as a nation and believed that anything was possible. Would this be a good time for our religious leaders to tell some of the old stories, to remind us of 4
the laws and histories, the prophecies and promises, of Scripture? Is it possible that America would then begin to pray for its own salvation, and to look to God for a savior? I don t know. It took a long time for Israel to reach that point, a long time before they were humble enough to stop cursing their enemies and start seeing their own faults, a long time before they were willing to fall on their knees and ask for God s help. But when they did God answered, almost immediately. In today s Old Testament lesson the prophet Isaiah says to the people, Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you. For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you. For people who had been stumbling around in the darkness for decades, it was good news indeed. It wasn t long after that that the Babylonian Empire was overthrown by the Persian Empire, and Cyrus, king of the Persians, set the exiles free. Some people assumed he was the light the prophet had been talking about (Isa. 45:1): their rescuer; their savior! They went back to Jerusalem and tried to rebuild their city and the temple, but it was hard work, and they were beset on every side by their enemies. The men repairing the wall had to work with a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other (Neh. 4:16). And even when they finished it wasn t much to look at; nothing like it had been in the old days. And Israel was nothing like it had been. In the years that followed it would be attacked by one foreign enemy after another, so that the people began to pray for a king who would give them rest from their enemies round about, and rule over them with justice and compassion, someone like David. They began to pray that one day, one of his descendants would sit on his throne: someone they began to call The Messiah. 5
Our psalm for today, Psalm 72, describes the kind of king they were looking for, and if you listen closely you might imagine that this is the kind of leader all nations are looking for. Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to a king's son. May he judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice. May he defend the cause of the poor, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor. May he be like rain that falls on the mown grass, like showers that water the earth. If Israel had been looking for an ideal king they had not found one in Herod, not by a long shot. But then those wise men came from the East talking about the new king of the Jews, and they had Herod s full attention. What king is this you re talking about? he asked. They said, We saw his star at his rising and have come to pay him homage. So, Herod called his own wise men together and asked, Where is the Messiah to be born? In Bethlehem, they said, for it is written: And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel. So, Herod sent the wise men to Bethlehem to look for the new king of the Jews. And when you find him, he purred, come and tell me so I can worship him, too. Off they went, and suddenly there was that star again, leading them to the place where the child was. When they saw him they bowed down before him, and offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. We ve been singing songs about Bethlehem ever since. It was in 1865, at a time when America had been broken into two jagged pieces by the Civil War, that an Episcopal priest named Phillips Brooks went to the Holy Land. On Christmas Eve he was in Bethlehem, where he participated in a worship service at the Church of the Nativity that lasted from 10:00 at night to 3:00 in the morning. When he 6
staggered out into the street afterward, he was exhausted but inspired. The words of a new hymn were beginning to gather in his mind. O little town of Bethlehem, he thought; how still we see thee lie. Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by. Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light; the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight. Was he right about that? Were the hopes and fears of all the years met in that little town? The hopes and fears of ancient Israel? The hopes and fears of post-civil War America? Even our own, present-day, hopes and fears? O come to us, abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel, Brooks pleaded. Is it possible that what we need more than anything else in this world is God-with-us? And is it too late to start praying, even now, that it might be so? Phillips Brooks didn t think so: near the end of that hymn he wrote, No ear may hear His coming, but in this world of sin, where meek souls will receive him still the dear Christ enters in. Jim Somerville 2019 i Buddy Hamilton, who had just been watching the news, lamented the current impasse between Congress and the President over a proposed wall along the southern border of the United States. ii I have not been able to track down this article, but I remember seeing the title (or one very much like it) on the cover of a magazine, and I have never been able to forget the author s name. 7