RISE AND SHINE John M. Buchanan
Isaiah 60:1-5 Broad Street Presbyterian Church

January 6, 1980 - Communion Columbus, Ohio

New Year's Eve always had a certain mystery for me. As a child I was never quite
sure what to believe about it.I knew that the calendar changed, that the designation
of the year increased by one digit and that everyone was working very hard at cele-
brating. I rather enjoyed the opportunity to stay up and celebrate whatever everyone
else was celebrating. To my questions about what, really, was going on, my father told
me that as one year ended and another began, I could - if I watched very carefully - see
the space between them. I watched for several years for that space. Ina sense, I
guess I still do, wondering what really is going on at midnight.

The overwhelming spirit of the event in the past has been happy, positive, optimisti
Words of Alfred Lord Tennyson were put to music in the last century in what is the only
New Year's hymn with which I am acquainted. It defines the reason for New Year's
celebration...

"Ring out, wild bells, to a wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night,

Ring out, wild bells and let him die.

"Ring out the old, ring in the new.
Ring, happy bells, across the snow;
The year is going, let him go.

Ring out the false, ring in the true."

That's quite an assertion - that the past is false and the future true.

Tennyson's prose is a catalog of past optimism and a good description of the
reason people celebrated New Year's...

"Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind,
Ring out the thousand years of war,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

"Ring out false pride in peace and blood
Ring in the love of truth and right
Ring in the common love of good."

The poet captured the universal sense that human history is a progression, a noble
quest, that things are getting better, that the future will be a better time, in every
way, than the past. That's why people have always celebrated the passing of time and
the changing of the year.

As I observed the first five days of this one, however, I was reminded of a two-
liner Ogden Nash once wrote on December 31...

"Hark, it's midnight, children dear.
Duck! Here comes another year."

Watching the frantic crowd in Times Square on New Year's Eve, I couldn't help but ask -
"What in the world are they celebrating?" Ogden Nash's advice is appropriate - we
should be looking for cover.

XL Cit Aw bek~ WA un nek ot
| '
x 0 - 2 = Lett. / Mele diz ow AukEe were

There is remarkable unanimity among scholars, intellectuals, journalists at this
point in tgme. All believe that something /fundamental has changed, and is changing, in
the world. | James Reston alluded to it in his year-end editorial about the mood of
Washington. He observed, "What is bothering people in both parties here is the world
changed faster in the 70's than we have been able to change ourselves...that the pre-
vailing assumptions of our people, our gowernment and our institutions are out of date."

Time's Essay "Epitaph for a Decade"/talked about the fact that somewhere between
Vietnam, Watergate, the Energy Crisis, and Iran things will never be the same. Robert
Middleton, in a paper on the future writles..."The assumptions which were once an un-
questioned part of existence have been transformed into questions..."" (The Ministry,
December/January 1980).

What are these commentators talking about? Where precisely, are the changes taking
place? Well, for one thing, most of us/grew up believing in material progress - that is.
if we worked harder we'd get ahead. And the simple fact is that for the vast majority
of Americans, 1980 will not be better -\but worse, financially - regardless of how hard
they worked.Paul Volker is saying the unthinkable - our standard of living may have to

w recede a bit. Most of us grew up believing in the invincibility of our nation and

Suddenly we have to come to terms with the fact that we are not invincible - we're not

even independent. We are dependent on the whims of oil producing nations. There are
many other instances of fundamental change, but beneath them all I think is a brewing
theological crisis. Where in the world is that benevolent man upstairs we thought had
things firmly in hand? Where in the world is God in this mess? Emile Zola one time
described the human situation as follows: "Human history is like a train hurtling througl
the darkness. The track is fate: the freight is humanity; the engineer is God, who is
dead.'' For many people that grim vision seems very close to the truth.

Today is Epiphany Sunday. There is no historical evidence for it, but church tra-
dition has always celebrated the arrival of the Magi at Bethlehem, following their star,
on this date. It is "Twelfth Night" the official end of Christmastide. Its symbols
are that mysterious star, the Magi and their curious pilgrimage and, in a sense, that
deeper Biblical assertion that God, in sovereign freedom, chooses all sorts of ways to
work His will in human history.

As the Magi followed a star into an unknown future so the church on Epiphany
remembers its oldest, similar stories. “Arise, shine, for your light has come!" Those
words were written by a prophet five and one half centuries before Christ, to a group
of people for whom the future could not have looked more dismal. A generation before
they had been captured as their nation was defeated and overrun by the Babylonians. The
victors had carried them off, back to Babylon and then had instigated a very effective
form of genocide. Instead of concentration camps and slave labor the Hebrews were
welcomed, encouraged to settle in, get jobs, participate in the culture, worship Baby-
lonian gods. As a new generation was born, a generation of young people who had never
been in Judah, never seen the Temple, the Babylonian idea of assimilation began to
make sense. The Jews were in danger of disappearing.

The prophet who wrote to them looked around the world of the Middle East, saw
political ferment in Persia under the firm hand of Cyrus. He had the audacity to call
Cyrus the servant of God, He had the greater audacity to suggest that God would act in
a way to redeem His people, even in this depressing set of circumstances. He was no
Pollyanna. His image of Judah as a violated woman, lying in the gutter, is very harsh.
It is to that woman that he addresses the words "Arise, shine". Her children are
returning, her poverty will become wealth. At the very moment when things could not
have looked worse, the prophet suggested that God was active, present and doing some-
thing redemptive for His people.

Doorn Wa PW TCS IM STK
a ck | re. Chane / Aes?

In the process the prophet was working out the radical theology of Judaism and
Christianity; namely, that God is God; that He is not toppled from power when His people
are defeated; that His will is majestic and mysterious and that nothing in history will
thwart it forever; and that He will use the events of human history, and the people of
human history to reconcile and redeem and save. That is why we spend so much time with
the prophet around Christmas time. That's what Bethlehem means: God using human history
God making His grand entrance onto the stage of history through the totally human event
of birth. It is precisely when human history is not doing so well on its own, when the
human spirit is sagging, when things do not look so good - that the message of Christma:
makes the most sense and is most clearly heard and understood.

é (2 OVr\sn
X/ hristmas Eve 1943 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was in a Nazi prison cell and he wrote words
which I regard as very important: "For a Christian there is nothing peculiarly difficult
about Christmas in a prison cell. I dare say that it will have more meaning and be
celebrated with greater sincerity here in this prison than in the places where all that
survives of the feast is its name...that God should come down to the very place which mer
usually abhor, that Christ was born in a stable.,.these are things that a prisoner can
understand better than anybody else. For him the Christmas story is glad tidings in a
very real sense." (Letters and Papers from Prison, p.77-78).

Carl Sandburg once asked in a poem, "Why the story of star silver and pine green
never wears out?" The reason is here. The story suggests that there is hope; not just
when that portion of human history we happen to be living is proceeding nicely, but
precisely when the reverse is true. There is hope, even when things are falling apart
at the seams; when there is no room in the inn, or when the oil is running out; when the
captives are in Babylon or the American Embassy in Tehran; when Herod is slaughtering
the innocents or the Russians are invading Afghanistan. There is hope.

ee The story never wears out because it makes the most important promise in the world;
namely, that God comes quietly, but relentlessly into human life; that He will live our
lives with us, that He will stand with us; that He will give us strength, courage and
faith in our time of need; that He will come into whatever future there will be and that
therefore we can walk into it - head high, courageously, briskly, almost jauntily.

I do not say that lightly. Nor does the Bible. The future may not be what we
want. Tragedy will happen. Sickness, death, pain, loneliness, despair - some of us
will walk through it all. All of us will walk through some of it. The promise is that
God will meet our need, That He will be in it with us. That in ways as human and
common as bread broken and a cup shared, God will be with us.

Rise and Shine. Ring out the old, ring in the new -
Our light has come indeed, :
Amen,

God of all nations, God of all time and eternity, as a new year beginning, call
out of us that steady faith of Your people in the past. Help us to see Your hand at
work; help us to trust Your providence; and walk with us in days ahead; through
Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.