RISE AND SHINE

January 5, 1986, 11:00 a. m. Woréhip Service
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

"Arise, shine; for your light has come."
--Isaiah 60:la (RSV)

Scripture
Psalm 72:1-14
Tsaiah 60:1-6
Matthew 2:1-12

The New Year has always held a kind of mystique for me. As

a child, I was never quite sure what exactly was happening.

I knew that the calendar changed and that I would have to learn
to say and write a new number to designate the year. I knew
that everyone worked very hard at celebrating New Year's Eve.

I rather enjoyed the opportunity to stay up and join in whatever
it was that. was transpiring. I asked my father once what really
was going on, and how did we really know that one year was
ending and another beginning, and how one could tell when

the exact moment occurred. He explained that if I looked out
the window--and if I watched very carefully--I would see that
space between the years go whistling by. I watched for that
space several years. In a sense, I guess I still do, still
wondering what really is happening at midnight.

In the past, the overwhelming spirit of the event.has been
celebrative, positive, optimistic. Alfred Lord Tennyson

wrote: a poem which was put to music in the last century, an<
it is the only New Year's hymn I know. It expresses the tradi-
tional reasons why people celebrate the New Year:

"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 géing, let him go.

Ring out the false, ring in the true."

That's quite an assertion when you ponder it a bit--the past is
false, or at least obsolete. Truth will be found in the future.
Tennyson's promise sounds almost florid to us now in its rosy
optimism about the future:

"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."

Thd poet captured, inthose words, the universal optimism

of the day. Indeed, that optimism is at the heart of

American culture. Western democracy is founded on the convic—
tion that human history is a progression, a noble quest; that

things are getting better, and that the future will be a better

time, in every way, than the past. That is why the passing
of time and the changing of the year have been regarded as

worth celebrating, not mourning.

As we celebrated New Year's recently, however, it may be that
Ogden Nash, not Alfred Lord Tennyson, is the poet who best
captures the spirit of the time.

Nash wrote, one December 31--

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

As I read the year-end review of the events that made news in
1985, the acts of violent terrorism, the natural disasters

and plane crashes, the continuing stalemate in the Middle

East and Afghanistan, the escalating violence in South Africa,
the dilemma in the Philippines and Nicaragua and El Salvador-—
none of which show signs of peaceful and happy resolution,

it occurred to me that Nash, not Tennyson, speaks for and to
the hour. Prudence would seem to dictate looking for cover.

There is, in fact, a growing sense in the scholarly conmunity
that a fundamental change has happened in the way we regard
the future.

Until now, as far as anyone knows, all the generations of
Americans before us assumed that the future would be better
than the past. In the past several years, that has altered.
The economists have warned us that economic growth-~-extending
into infinity--is not a reasonable assumption. The environ—
mentalists have warned us and we have discovered in the past
decade, the simple fact that there are limits--population
limits, resource limits, ecological limits.*

*symbolized by those last pathetic condors we must capture
and cage in hopes of saving them from ourselves.

Meanwhile we have discovered that the position of absolute
preeminance we have enjoyed since World War II is now

over. We have to live in a world which often seems to regard
us as threat, not friend. As a result, the majority of young
people today, public opinion pollsters tell us, believe that
their lives will not be as good as the lives of their parents.
Even more distressing, a majority of people in high school
several years ago indicated their assumption that they would
die, not of natural causes, but in a nuclear war.

Listen to Lewis Thomas, not at all a political radical, but

a wise, perceptive Doctor-scientist. His last book was Late
Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony. That
symphony is about death and it is moving and strong and deep
and assuring. Thomas used to love it, but no more, because of
his sense of universal death--the. death of all. “How do the
young stand it?" he asks, “while those things are still in
place, aimed everywhere, ready for launching..." “If I were
sixteen or seventeen, I think I would begin, perhaps very
slowly and imperceptivly, to go crazy." (p. 166)

We are so close, this wise scientist teaches, to a future
that can be full and rich and glorious for humankind.
"provided we do not kill ourselves off. At this eariy stage
in our evolution...what our species needs most of all right
now, is. simply a future." (p. 62)

What bothers Thomas and many other social scientists is
hopelessness about the future. When we feel hopeless we
accommodate our thinking too easily to the idea of nuclear

war, and compromise our hopes and expect it to happen, and
before you know it--or as the fear goes-—we are behaving in ways
that make our hopelessness self-fulfilling.

The fact that 1985 ended without a shooting war between major
world powers is worth celebrating. But how easily we have
accommodated our thinking, our world view, our future, to the
permanent existence of weapons capable of ending all life.

In his classic, the Theology of Hope, Juergen Moltmann

wrote: “The other side of pride is hopelessness, resignation,
inertia, melancholy.... Temptation consists not so much of
the titanic desire to be as God, but in weakness, timidity,
weariness, not wanting to be what God requires of us." (p. 22}

Fundamental theological questions always leap out of any
consideraiton of the future. Is there a sovereign God who has‘
anything to do with the possibilities ahead of us? Are we
saying that we are alone? that the fate of the race is in our
hands? that God has no control, power, or influence over

how things will turn out?

We have just celebrated our answer to those difficult questions-—-—
at Christmas. Today is Epiphany Sunday. There is no historical
evidence for it but church tradition has always celebrated

the arrival of the Magi at Bethlehem, following their star,
twelve days after Christmas. Tomorrow is “Twelfth Night,"

the official end of Christmastide, by the way the church keeps
time. It's symbols are that mysterious star, the Magi and their
curious pilgrimage and that deeper Biblical assertion, that

God, in sovereign freedom, chooses. all sorts of interesting ~

ways to work His will in human history.

The Magi were drawn into an unknown and risky future by the
light of that star. Their part in the Christmas story
reminds us that to celebrate the birth’is to be called toa
journey--into a similar future...risky and unknown, but one
which promises God's presence. In fact, sometimes the
promise is clearest when things look mast dismal.

A prophet wrote a letter one-half century before Christ to

a group of people for whom the future could not look more
dismal. “Rise, shine, your light has come," he wrote. A
generation before they had been captured as their nation was
defeated and overrun by the Babylonians. The victors had
carried them off to Babylon to live under virtual house arrest,
and then devised a subtle but effective form of non-violent
genocide. Instead of slave labor and concentration camps, the
people of Israel in Babylonian captivity were welcomed,

invited and encouraged to settle in, get jobs, participate in
the culture, intermarry, invest in the community, worship Baby-
lonian gods. As a new generation was born and matured, a
generation of adults who had never been in Judah, had never
seen the Temple, the Babylonian idea of cultural assimilation
began to make sense. The Jews were in danger of disappearing.

The prophet who wrote to the community. of Jews in Babylonian
exile made an astonishing assertion. He looked around the
world of the Middle East, a worid remarkablly similar to ours,
and observed political ferment in Persia. He had the audacity
to see in the Persian Emperor, Cyrus the Great, an instrument
of God's will. He had the greater audacity to suggest that

- & -

the sovereign God was. about to redeem his people and Cyrus
would be the means. He was no pollyanna. His imajye of Judah
as a violated woman, lying in the street, is harsh. It is to
that woman, however, that he addresses the words: "Arise, shine,
for your light has come." Her children are returning, her
poverty will become wealth. At the very moment when things
could not look worse, the prophet suggests that God is active,
present and doing something creatively redemptive for his
people within the larger events occurring around them. And
that they, in the middie of their gloomy exile, have a respon-
sibility for their own future. The time for inert mourning
and fretting is over. It is time to Rise and Shine!

That is quite a claim. The prophet is working out the
distinctive theology of Judaism and Christianity: namely,

that God is God: that God is not dead when His people are
defeated: that God's will is majestic and mysterious and that
nothing in history will thwart it forever; and that God will
use the events of human history and the people of human history
to redeem and reconcile and bring his Kingdom into the future.
The claim is personal as well as global. Nothing that happens
in our lives will separate us from God's love.

That is what happened in Bethlehem. GOD USED HUMAN HISTORY.
God made his grand entry onto the stage of history through
the totally human event of birth.” It is precisely when human
histery 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 Christmas makes the most sense-~-and is most
clearly heard and understood.

Christmas Eve 1943 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was in a Nazi prison.
He wrote words there that are important for us to hear now.
" 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 than in
the places where all that survives of the feast
is its name...that God should come down to the
very place which men usually abhor, that Christ
was born in a Sstable...these are the things a
prisoner can understand better than anyone else.
For him the Christmas story is glad tidings in a
very real sense." Letters and Papers From Prison
(p. 77-78)

_€-

the promise of Christmas is not that God will intercede and
make things right. Bonhoeffer knew Nazis would execute him.
The realities of life in 1986 remain: “Those things," as
Thomas calis them, are still aimed everywhere...." Rather, the
word here is a promise of God's creative, redemptive presence
in the future--and a summons to “Rise and shine," to get up

and get on with it.

It is a particular word to the Christian Church in a world
desperately in need of intelligent hope. Moltmann writes:
“This hope makes the Christian Church a constant disturbance

in human society...the source of continued new impulses
towards the realization of righteousness, freedom and humanity
here in the light of the promised future to come...." (p. 22)

The very essence of the birth--and the mystery of the incarna-—
tion is that God makes people resvonsible for the future.

In the most radical “possible, God put his own future on the
line. We are given freedom regarding God's own Son, to welcome
him or ignore him. And regarding human history, we are given
freedom to extend it creatively and responsibly--or to end it.

The stakes are high. We can blow up the whole place. God
will not bail us out.

"Tf we fail" Matthew Fox wrote recently, “it will be
because we did not believe....We did not believe we were
creators...we did not believe that heaven had begun. And
fullness...and divinity...our own. The new was too good."
A Spirituality Named Compassion (p. 269-70)

Or when “those things" are aimed, or the terrorists attack,
or your dearest love dies, or the test comes back and the
news is bad, or when the dream ends and the future looks dark.

The story never wears out because it makes the most important
promise in the world; namely, that God comes into creation, and
into human life; quietly but surely: that God will live 1ife
with us, stand with us, and give us strength, courage and faith
as we need them. The promise is that God will be in whatever
future there is and that, therefore, we can walk into it--
courageously, head high, briskiy, almost jauntily.

I do not say that lightly. Nor does the Bible. Hope in the
Bible emerges out of exile and suffering, and, finally, from

a manager behind the inn. The future may not evolve the way we
would design it. Tragedy may happen-~sickness, death, pain,
loneliness, depression-~some of us may walk through all of it
in 1986. All of us will walk through some of it. The promise
is of One who will be in it with us, Who is sovereign Love,

Who loves us and Who will never let us go.

Rise--Shine-~-Because of the star, because of the promise,
because it is. God's: future -— we can, without fear or
hesitation, ring out the old and ring in the new. Our light
has come indeed.

God of all time and eternity, as a New Year begins, we commit
ourselves, our present and our future, to you. Call out of

us. the steady faith of your people in the past. Help us to

see your hand at work in the world, and to trust your providence.
Lord of ail, we thank you for the promise that you will be

with us in the future. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen