“Finding the Light”

Both of today’s scriptures tell the story of failed prophets – failed prophets trying to move on and make something out of their failure.  Failed prophets trying to cling to their faith and make sense of things.  Well, maybe “failed” sounds all wrong to you.  I mean, Isaiah and John the Baptist!  They’re great prophets – right up there with Moses and Elijah.  But the truth is, people didn’t exactly follow them in their own lifetimes -- at least not in the way they expected, or all the way to the goal they'd hoped to reach.

The original Isaiah, the one we call “first Isaiah,” was as a prophet more than 700 years before Jesus.  He warned the rulers of Israel to put the needs of their people ahead of personal gain, but no one listened, and the divided kingdom fell – the northern half first, to the great Assyrian Empire.  Some 200 years later came the author of today’s scripture, the one we call “Second Isaiah,” likely a group of advisors to the southern kingdom of Judah while the people lived in exile under the next great empire, Babylon.  This “Isaiah” tries to make sense of the people’s failure and lead them back to a restored and more faithful kingdom.  But again, the people don’t go.  They don’t go until the Persian King Cyrus makes them go.  Another foreign king got them to obey.  The prophets failed.

John the Baptist might look more to us like a success, if we’re Christian and we know how the whole story ended.  I mean, he has all those Baptist churches named after him!  But let’s not forget what I said last week when I preached about his baptism of his younger cousin Jesus – John knew he was not the Messiah.  “He confessed and did not deny it,” as today’s text reminds us.  John started out with huge crowds of followers but ended up like a candidate who lost too many primaries. He had to throw his endorsement over to someone he knew to be the better choice to lead his nation. 

Even though, unlike Isaiah and John, we are not biblical prophets, we do like to know what to expect in the future – we want it to unfold in predictable, controllable ways.  So when the plans we make fall short of success, we know their frustration.  Most of the time, we stumble around in the dark, trying the find the light.   We don’t like it when things go wrong.  It’s like hitting a patch of black ice.  Whenever we think we see the way ahead clearly, we get frustrated when it turns out we didn’t.  When we fail, it takes real faith to just keep doing the work we believe God gave us to do, and leave the rest in God’s hands.  I don’t know about you, but it helps me to know Isaiah and John struggled like this.  The world said to them that they’d failed.  But somehow they were able to keep going and even to inspire others.  Martin Luther King, whose birthday we celebrate this weekend, could do that too.  As he said in the speech he made the last night of his life in Memphis, when he knew there were death threats against him,

 “Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. … I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land.  I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

And the next day he was dead, the victim of an assassin’s bullet.  Why does God allow these things to happen?  Why would God call us to do certain work and then make it so hard to get it done?  It’s so hard to be faithful, and not frustrated, when the world doesn’t see the light or behave the way we think it should.

Many of us lived with that feeling all last week.  Our latest national tragedy, that terrible shooting in Tucson, got all our national media prophets stirred up.  From the left and from the right, all the commentators and pundits – our prophets of today – weighed in about what they saw as the causes behind this latest failure of humanity to live together in peace.  Like Isaiah and his people, hope to find a solution that will get us back on track.  We desperately want to find the light at the end of the tunnel of our troubles. 

Here’s what Isaiah has to say about that:  “The Lord called me …. My cause is with the Lord, and … my God has become my strength.”  Isaiah comes to believe that even if he has failed as a prophet in the short term, God may still be able to use him to do something in the long term.  It’s great Isaiah holds to faith in God, but even more amazing is God holding on to faith in Isaiah, and in us.  God still believes in what human beings are capable of doing.  God says, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant… I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

This is why Christians read Isaiah with John’s Gospel at this time of year.  Isaiah’s light still shines in the darkness, that light that John’s gospel says is “never overcome.”  It is the light of Christ that John the Baptist experiences as a spiritual epiphany when Jesus rises from the Jordan at his baptism.  And having FOUND the light, John will not rest until others “come and see” the light with him.  So one by one, disciple by disciple – Andrew and his brother Simon Peter, then others – one by one they accept John’s invitation to “come and see,” and one by one they DO see.  They find the light – and having found it, they begin to point the way to others.  And now – continents and ages away from ancient Israel, we have been entrusted with the prophet’s task of helping others find the light. 

Madeleine L’Engle, I think summed up our call when she said, “We do not draw people to Christ by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.”

I pray that you are coming to know this light, this light of Christ.  Maybe you see it shine brightest here on Christmas Eve, when you hold your candles aloft in our meetinghouse and sing. But it also shines downstairs each Sunday with our kids in Church School and across the parking lot with our refugee families who come to stay in our cottage, and with our youth and mission groups as they go out to help others, as our women did this weekend on their trip to Rhode Island.  A million frustrations get in our way, but because we keep walking in the light of God, we can find the faith to keep going.

I want to close with a little story about one night in my life when I literally went on a quest, with a few San Francisco friends, to find the light.  Our friend Sherena, who was a bit of an environmentalist prophet, got a new job with the National Parks Service with the peregrine falcon release program, so she moved north across the Golden Gate Bridge to the Marin Headlands.  She just kept saying to us, “Come and see.”  But of course we never did.  We stayed too busy.  So finally she bribed us with a dinner party.  And after a delicious spaghetti dinner, she tried to talk us into a moonlight hike to the Point Bonita Lighthouse.  But we were all warm and comfy inside.  It was winter.  No one wanted to go out on the windy, foggy cliffs above the Pacific.

Eventually about half of our group agreed to go.  So off we went, down a trail with a rock wall on our right and a steep precipice on the left.  “Beautiful moonlight,” we kidded her, because you could hardly see your hand in front of your face.  Sherena hiked like a cross-country runner, so we were desperate to keep up with her and her little flashlight.  But it only got worse.  She led us into a pitch black tunnel, and that was one of the few times in my life where I did actually cling to the hope that came from seeing a dim light down at the end of that tunnel, which was some combination of fog- diffused moonlight and the far-away lighthouse.  We came out below fog level, but we still had farther to go.  “Here we are,” she finally said.  “Come and see!” And there before us was a long, rickety suspension bridge that we still had to cross to get to the lighthouse.  (That old rusty bridge was just condemned as unsafe, I just read, 10 days ago, on Epiphany.)  But here's the thing:  She started to unlock the gate for us and realized she had forgotten the key!  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.  So we laughed.  Laughed at her, laughed at us.  Laughed at the freezing cold moonless night.

The way back up was completely different.  I’d played tennis with Sherena, so I knew she did not like to fail.  She was not laughing.  She was frustrated she forgot the key.  She was frustrated half the group hadn’t bothered to come along.  She was frustrated at the lack of moonlight.  She was frustrated we laughed at her.  She finally laughed when we made choo-choo train noises all the way up the long, dark tunnel.  But this time when we came out, we had to blink and rub our eyes.  The cloud level had dropped and there we stood in a dazzling full moon night.  It was so bright, you could see your shadow.  And right before us was the Golden Gate Bridge and all the sparkling lights of the city.  Above us a million stars.  We just stopped dead in our tracks, breathless. 

And before we knew it, we were running back up the path, shouting to the rest of the group – “Come and see!  Come and see!”  And this time we didn’t’ take “no” for an answer.  We started dragging our friends out of the house – without coats, without shoes – it didn’t matter.  We wanted so much for them to find their way to that light, to get a glimpse of that view before the world’s miserable fog closed in again. 

That’s what life is like if you accept the prophet’s call to be the light of the world.

When you find the light, you get frustrated when your friends don’t want to see it.  When you find the light, it’s hard to contain your joy.  When you find the light, you just have to help the whole world to see it too.

Thanks be to God for this Good News. Amen.

 

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Isaiah 49:1-6

Listen to me, O coastlands, pay attention, you peoples from far away! The Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb he named me. ²He made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me away. ³And he said to me, “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.” ⁴But I said, “I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; yet surely my cause is with the Lord, and my reward with my God.” ⁵And now the Lord says, who formed me in the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him, and that Israel might be gathered to him, for I am honored in the sight of the Lord, and my God has become my strength— ⁶he says, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

John 1:19-20, 29-42

¹⁹This is the testimony given by John when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?”  ²⁰He confessed and did not deny it, but confessed, “I am not the Messiah.”

²⁹The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! ³⁰This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ ³¹I myself did not know him; but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.” ³²And John testified, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. ³³I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ ³⁴And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.” ³⁵The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, ³⁶and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!”

³⁷The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. ³⁸When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, “What are you looking for?” They said to him, “Rabbi” (which translated means Teacher), “where are you staying?” ³⁹He said to them, “Come and see.” They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was about four oclock in the afternoon. ⁴⁰One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. ⁴¹He first found his brother Simon and said to him, “We have found the Messiah” (which is translated Anointed). ⁴²He brought Simon to Jesus, who looked at him and said, “You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas” (which is translated Peter).