NOTE: I am putting my weekly sermons on the church website. It will be on for two weeks (usually posted on Friday) and then placed in the Archives area by date. You can download in a matter of seconds.
Let me know what you think. The church Email is: slumc@direcway.com, Phone: 480.895.8766
Sunday,
January 4, 2004
Sermon: "Visioning the New Year"
Scripture: Isaiah 60:1-6
Reverend Larry M. Gerber
Our human eyes are stocked with specialized cells so sensitive that they can detect very small amounts of visible light. But in order to capture the light of God that is coming into the world, we need a whole new set of sensors.
Arise,
shine," says the prophet Isaiah. "Your light has come." Problem
is, many of us can't see it. Not that we don't take our eyesight seriously.
More than a million Americans every year agree to let an ophthalmologist take
a small excimer knife, called a microkeratome, and cut the flap of the cornea
- so that a laser can be used to change the shape of the cornea - so that they
won't need to wear contacts or eyeglasses anymore - so that their overall vision
will be improved. It's called LASIK surgery, which is an acronym for Laser-Assisted
In Situ Keratomileusis. A hinge is left at one end of the flap which is then
folded back, revealing the stroma, or the middle section of the cornea. Pulses
from a computer- controlled laser vaporize a portion of the stroma, and the
flap is replaced. This procedure helps millions of people to see better.
Yet, one of the absolute wonders of our world is that it is full of light, even
on dark and gloomy January days — but only a tiny sliver of all this radiance
is visible to us. Our human eyes are designed to detect only visible light,
which is a tiny slice of the electromagnetic spectrum - it's the part made up
of light with relatively short wavelengths.
All other forms of light are completely invisible to us. Take infrared light.
We cannot see it, but in this case our blindness is really a blessing. Since
any heat-emitting object glows with infrared light, we would be constantly distracted
by those wavelengths if we could see them.
Bottom line: Our human eyes do pretty well for us. Each eye has about 125 million rods and cones, specialized cells with such enormous sensitivity that some can detect a mere handful of photons of visible light. Joel Achenbach writes in National Geographic that the particular position of our eyes, protected by the skull and located close to the brain, is evidence that visual data is important to our well-being. About one-fifth of our brain has the job of doing nothing but processing information from the visual world around us.
But processing the light that Isaiah calls "the glory of the LORD" (60:1) is quite another matter. This is a wavelength that doesn't require dish eyes big enough to capture radio waves. But it does require the eyes of faith. The glory of the Lord is "like a devouring fire" (Exodus 24:17), it's a powerful radiance that changes the face of anyone who looks upon it. Remember that the face of Moses began to shine when he talked with God directly, so much so that he had to put on a veil to keep from frightening the people of Israel (Exodus 34:29-35).
This
is the powerful light that appeared later when Jesus Christ was born, and the
glory of the Lord shone around the shepherds in Bethlehem, terrifying them (Luke
2:9). Simeon said that the baby Jesus was "a light for revelation to the
Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel" (Luke 2:32). Glory appeared
again in the transfiguration of Jesus, and in the resurrection.
Looking back, the apostle Paul rejoiced that God "has shone in our hearts
to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus
Christ" (2 Corinthians 4:6). The glory of the Lord. It's intense, overwhelming,
frightening at times … but most of all it's illuminating. It helps us to
see the full power and personality of the Lord God Almighty.
The gospel of John says that when the Word of God became flesh and lived among
us, it was then that we saw "the glory as of a father's only son, full
of grace and truth" (John 1:14). Grace and truth.
That's
what becomes so clear in the light of the glory of God. So why don't we perceive
it? It's a good question to ask at the beginning of this new year, 2004. What
will we see this year? What won't we see? What are we visioning as we step into
a new year of opportunities and challenges?
Perhaps we need a whole new way of seeing — an eye transplant. The eyes
of cynicism are not working for us. We have a hard time believing that people
can live authentic lives of compassion and selflessness. It colors the way we
choose to live our own lives. It affects our belief in a loving and caring Providence.
And it leaves us bitter and feeling that the world has given us short shrift,
that life has unfairly passed us by. We need faith eyes.
The eyes of rationalism aren't much better. We think that there's nothing real
except the visible world. Unless we can see it, touch it, taste it, hear it,
smell it - it's not there.
It's hard for us to believe that there's an unseen God, who cares about us.
We want a God who is manageable, understandable, visible — a God who shows
himself once in a while.
What we've got instead, we complain, is a bunch of promises made by a make-believe
deity for the popular consumption of the gullible and naïve.
We're the Thomases. We're the "Show-Me" Missourians. We're the ones
who will believe when we understand; believe when we see — but not a nanosecond
sooner.
Not everyone
"sees" it that way. One light in the history of faith [Anselm, Proslogion
1] put it this way: "I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but
I believe in order to understand.
For this I believe - that unless I believe, I should not understand."
Another [John Chrysostom] said that a comprehensible God is no god at all.
We need faith eyes. If a transplant isn't needed, perhaps we simply need a new
prescription. We need a lens that will enable us to see what we've never seen
before.
It may be the lens of Scripture, from which we've been away too long. It's a new year. Time to get back to the Word. We'll see better.
It may be the lens of the church: We need the encouragement and support of a community of faith. It's a new year. Time to get back to the church. We'll see better.
It may be the lens of worship: We need to feed our souls so that the eyes of faith will remain healthy. It's a new year. Time to get back to worship. We'll see better.
It may be the lens of service: We need to get outside of ourselves to minister to others. Removing the focus from ourselves to others will make the eyes of faith much stronger. It's a new year. It's time to get back to service. We'll see better.
It may be the lens of love: We need to apply compassion and charity to those around us. Love is the ointment that heals the eyes of faith. Indeed, love, as Paul implies in 1 Corinthians 13, opens the eyes of faith and hope. It's a new year. Time to get back to love. We'll see better.
Faith eyes can pick up divine light in times of deep darkness, and this was as true in the first century as it is today.
There wasn't much brightness in Judea in the time of King Herod, when Jesus was born in Bethlehem - in fact, Herod's reign was an absolute orgy of violence and bloodshed. Full of insecurity, Herod ordered the killing of his brother-in-law, his uncle and then his wife. Fearing loss of power, he went on to execute his mother-in-law, a son and then two more sons. At one point, Caesar Augustus remarked that he would rather be Herod's pig than Herod's son! And this list of murders doesn't even include the massacre of the infants, which Herod ordered in a desperate attempt to kill the baby Jesus. He commanded the slaughter of all the children in and around Bethlehem who were 2 years old or under … but fortunately Mary and Joseph spirited Jesus away to Egypt before the massacre began (Matthew 2:13-18).
Dark days.
The wise men had eyes of faith. They could see a faint flicker of light in the middle of the darkness, a light that signaled the presence of God's Son, Jesus Christ.
Our challenge is to focus on this light as well, and to trust that Christ is always present — even in times of chaos. There is always some light to be found, if you have the eyes of faith. In fact, none of the shadows we encounter in day-to-day life are totally dark and depressing — they all contain some small amount of light. Even in our shadow times — our times of disappointment, failure, temptation and tension — God is going to bounce some light into our darkness.
The good news for us is that faith eyes are not given to us at birth — they are developed over a lifetime of looking. If we are willing to search for the light of God in times of deep darkness, we will find it.
If we
look hard for Jesus Christ in situations of chaos and confusion, we will discover
him.
If we train our eyes on the small glimmers of light that appear in our shadow
times, we will emerge from the blackness that threatens to overwhelm us.
Although darkness shall cover the earth, promises Isaiah, "the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you" (v. 2).
In visioning the new year, what light will you follow,?
Let us pray
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Let me know what you think. The church Email is: slumc@direcway.com, Phone: 480.895.8766