They have
such enthusiasm and joy and it’s so early in the morning! Rise and Shine with a vengeance. Whereas the rest of us who are older love to
sleep in on a holiday morning. Rising
and Shining is something that we tend to resist the older we get.
Isaiah,
which we’ve been reading since the start of Advent, was writing in a time of
political turmoil, and the audacity of him, telling people to rise and shine
when all around them were wars, poverty, and political shenanigans. People must have wondered why he was so
hopeful when the world seemed so bleak. Today’s
passage is from what Scholars call 3rd Isaiah. This particular
writer was preaching to the people who had returned from the Babylonian Empire,
and the first part of Isaiah was writing to people who hadn’t yet been conquered
by Babylon. There’s about 100 years between
the two events. Third Isaiah was writing
to the refugees rebuilding the Temple and the city. They had come with high hopes fueled by the
stories of their parents and grandparents of the ‘good old days’ of the
glorious temple. They were living with
the legacy dream of rebuilding and restoring those glory days. When they arrived, they faced the awful
reality of a city that had been left to crumble for a hundred years. The countryside was sparsely populated by the
descendants of survivors who had struggled to survive without infrastructure or
community. A hundred years means shifts
in language and accent, so probably those that stayed had a hard time
understanding the newcomers. Like a
young person who goes away to school at university and comes back home with new
ideas and new language, the ones who stayed must have felt overwhelmed by all
the plans and idealism of this large group that arrived. And the folks who were returning with their
heads full of dreams, were staggered by the immensity of what had been lost and
what needed to be rebuilt. When faced
with rubble and weeds, even the best dreams seem daunting. Isaiah 60 talks to these people, the
discouraged idealists, the frustrated dreamers, the refugees and the survivors
who struggled to find common ground and a new hope for the future. “Arise, your light has come!” Join together to work for your dream of a
city so filled with light and peace and wisdom that nations will flock to learn
together about God’s people. Isaiah
wanted to remind everyone to work together no matter where they were born, in
captivity or in hardship on native land, and in that cooperation, despite
language barriers and cultural differences, they would remember what they had
in common, the heritage of a faith in a loving God who would sustain them in a
better way that would benefit the world.
We see the
same coming together in our Gospel reading with scholars coming to a poor
family in an obscure town in Israel.
Now, Matthew doesn’t mention shepherds or a census or a stable. That’s all Luke. And we have to be careful to remind ourselves
that both Gospel writers were not primarily historians, but theologians. Josephus was a Jewish historian writing about
the same time as Matthew and Luke, and he makes no mention of massacres
although Herod the Great had a reputation of being ruthless and murderous in
other situations. Matthew is writing
theology to his community of Jewish Christians, the ones who were first
converted to following the teachings of Jesus.
He’s also writing to the whole Jewish community because he sees himself
as part of the long story of the people of Israel. So his focus is on Joseph, more than
Mary. And Joseph, like the technicolor
dream coat Joseph in the book of Genesis, has dreams and respects what those
dreams teach him. And Joseph takes the
mom and the baby to Egypt after a dream of danger. Just like Moses was saved from a massacre by
a powerful monarch, so too Jesus was saved from a massacre. And just like Moses grew up in Egypt to be a
savior for all the people living in oppression and slavery, so too Jesus would
grow up in Egypt to free his people. The
parallels were an important reminder that Jesus was rooted and grounded in the
traditions and stories of his Jewish heritage.
And just like King Solomon of old, Jesus attracted special scholars from
outside the country to come and pay their respects. This contrasts again with Luke’s theology
which talks about Jesus being presented in the Temple as a young infant according
to the customs of the time, or staying behind in the temple to debate the scholars
when he was only 12, showing that he was a student of Torah, again according to
the traditions of the time. No mention
of Egypt because Luke’s theology is a little different.
Both
Christmas stories, Luke and Matthew, are not writing a theology of escape. Nor
is Isaiah writing a theology of escape. Theirs
is a theology of imagination and courage. It asks us to envision a world
ordered not by fear or scarcity, but by building community, compassion and commitment. Scholars and carpenters, farmers and city
dwellers from another land, peasants and rich magi alike come together to rise
and shine as one community of hope.
The United
Church is at a crossroads. If we don’t
rise and shine, our grandchildren won’t have churches to come to to find hope
and healing for the future. If we don’t
build community, compassion and commitment, our country might fragment into
small territories that lack infrastructure for all. If we don’t dream of a better future, our
schools and hospitals will become privatized and the rich Herods will continue
to hoard trillions of dollars. If we don’t
find ways to work together, our lights will struggle to shine. We too have hard work ahead of us, both as a
church and as individuals. Do we buy
into a theology of Herods accumulating power and wealth and not caring who we
hurt as we do so, or do we buy into the theology of Isaiah, Matthew and Luke
that cares for each other and helps each other shine? As Isaiah proclaimed, “Though chaos still
covers the earth and conflicts cloud the people, upon you God now dawns, and
God's glory will be seen among you! The
nations will come to your light and the leaders to your bright dawn!” God, help us to see your glory, help us to
rise together to be the light of hope to your struggling world this year. Amen.
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