Uncovering the Light Jesus Brought

A Christmas Sermon Preached by Dr. James Flamming
First Baptist Church, Richmond, VA
November 30, 2003

Scripture:  Isaiah 9:2

An amazing thing happened at Richmond Hill in November.  For you to understand the wonder of it all, a little history is required.

After the Civil War a Convent was built on Church Hill overlooking the city of Richmond.  The mission of the Sisters who lived there was to pray for the city.  This they did for well over a hundred years.  But in the 1980s they decided their building was very old and they needed more room, so they moved away from the central city to the county.

Developers were eager for the property.  But some men and women of vision said, "We need to preserve this place of prayer."  But the price was high and the prospect dim.  I remember during the fund raising that Rev. Bob Heatherington of St. Paul's Episcopal church said to me during Lenten services that year, "If we can pull this off it, will be a true miracle."  The miracle happened.  They called it Richmond Hill.  For more than fifteen years, Richmond Hill has sought to continue its mission of prayer for the city and to be a central meeting place for Christians of all expressions.

Now out of necessity the work has begun to remodel and preserve the building.  The workmen began by taking down the false ceiling, which had been put in thirty years ago to hide the air conditioning ducts.  As they began to dismantle the ceiling piece by piece, their eyes got big and their wonderment peaked.  The false ceiling had been hiding seven, glorious stained-glass windows and a beautiful 33-foot barrel-vaulted ceiling with immaculate woodwork.  Above the ceiling are the words in Latin, "How lovely is thy dwelling place, O Lord."  Why did they cover up such beauty?  Who knows?  We do lots of foolish things for creature comforts.

It is a parable for Christmas time.  The invasion by our Christ into a world gone amuck has become hidden piece by piece as we put our lowered and false ceilings in place.  Our hurry, our pace, our selling and buying, our planning and plotting.  Day light shrinks as lists lengthen.  Besides, as Wendy Wright has said, "Hurrying makes us feel important."  Our false ceilings keep us from the Christ who can change us.  Isaiah said, "The people in darkness have seen a great light."  It is a promise if we can seize it.

First Notice the People Who Don't Appear in the Christmas Story

The people who mattered on that Bethlehem night slept through it all.  It bothers me.  No, more than that, it frightens me.  They were my kind, theologically and Biblically trained, respected and respectable, and they completely missed the God who comes in Christ.  They were in their own kind of darkness, assured they already had the light.  Meanwhile the Light of the World was being born in the suburbs of their own well being.  They saw themselves as people of the light.  But they turned out to be the people in darkness who missed the light.

It has happened too often to be ignored.  In the eleventh century a huge light appeared in the sky.  It was a super-nova, the death of a star.  For days it completely dominated the sky, even in the daylight, sometimes seeming to be brighter than the sun.  Its dazzling light is recorded in the far east, in islands of the South Pacific, by native American Indians, and even in North Africa.  But from the learned, sophisticated universities and cities of Europe, there is silence.  Not a word about the light in the sky that stayed for so long.  They were so busy about their lives they never looked up.  Their dropped ceilings were in place.

Desperate

Well, who on that night of darkness turned to the light, refused to be wrapped up in their own self-made darkness?  I don't know about you, but I choose Mary and Joseph.  Write over them the word desperate.  How else would you describe the journey from Nazareth, Mary heavy with child?  How else would you describe the "no vacancy" sign on the Inn?  How else would you describe a new-born in a stable, on straw wrapped in soft rags?   But paradoxically, the desperate connect with God more consistently.  Desperate people have no dropped ceilings.  They've all been blown away.  That is why so many find the Lord in desperate circumstances.

Men, take unto yourself the skin of Joseph on the way to Bethlehem.  Nothing seems to fit.  There was the encounter with the Angel who told him to take Mary as his wife even though she was with child of the Holy Spirit.  Then came the word about the census, a circumstance over which he had no control.  It was all about Caesar.  Caesar thought he was missing out on taxes from the outer reaches of his empire.  His edict was that a census be taken to enlarge his tax database.  What is Joseph to do?  Better to go to Bethlehem than to hear the boot-sound of Roman soldiers coming up your walk.  But what ugly timing.  The birth of Mary's son is near.  I wonder how many times during that trek Joseph asked Mary, "How are you feeling?"  Or, "Do you need to walk a bit or stay on the donkey?"  Or "Do you need to rest by the side of the road?"  Questions are the language of the desperate.

But desperate people often see what the rest of us miss.  Jesus often touched the lives of desperate people.  Like those who destroyed someone's roof to get their friend to Jesus.  Or like the blind beggar named Bartimaeus who screamed at Jesus until he got his attention.  Or like the mother whose child was sick and pled, "Lord, I believe, help my unbelief."  Desperate people have had the dropped ceilings ripped away.  They are the people who live in darkness but have the possibility of seeing a great light.  A beatitude might read, "Blessed are the desperate, for they shall see God."

The Inn Keeper

And what about the Inn Keeper?  Expend some mercy here please.  Put yourself in his place.  He did not schedule the census.  He is trapped in circumstances over which he has no control.

I see him standing there, seeing Mary in her condition, his mind racing to think of other alternatives.  What about the other inns down the street?  No they will be full also.  If the man had relatives he would have already gone to them.  He can't evict the guests who are already there.  Then he sees an alternative, not a good option, but maybe it would work.  At least it would be something, and this poor mother needs something.  He walks Mary and Joseph out to the place where the animals feed, but it is sheltered from the weather, and has clean straw upon which they might rest.  When Mary goes into labor I think it is the Inn Keeper and his wife who supply the soft clothes into which Jesus will be wrapped, clothes the King James Version gave a holy touch by calling them "swaddling clothes."

When people of faith are trapped in circumstances over which they have no control, the Lord becomes the alternative-finder.  The word says in Corinthians, "No testing has become yours that is not common to everyone, but God is faithful, and will provide an option - look for it."

And the Shepherds

And the shepherds?  The shepherds had no dropped ceilings because nobody liked them.  Not the common citizens who complained that they smelled bad because they didn't take enough baths.  Not the religious folks because they worked on the Sabbath and never attended synagogue school.  Not their relatives who thought, "Surely he could do something with his life other than be a shepherd."  But one thing they could do, and could do it well, they could tend their sheep.  And the favorite Psalm of all begins, "The Lord is my Shepherd."  The Psalmist understands the wonder and beauty of being tended, cared for, counted and even loved.

A favorite story of mine is of a tourist to the Holy Land who asked to see a shepherd and his sheep.  One was located and a jeep took him to the flock.  Through the interpreter he asked how many sheep he had, a typical question of one who values the number of things.  The Shepherd replied, "I don't know how many are in my flock."  "Then," asked the troubled tourist, "how do you know if one is missing?"  A big smile broke out on the face of the shepherd as he replied, "That is easy.  I know them all by name."  What is it the word says, "The Lord knows those who are his and calls them by their names."

Be careful whom you look down on.  It just may be that they are the ones who hear the angels sing while you are turning on the television.

Revelation

Flannery O'Conner has a short story entitled "Revelation."  She painted a vivid picture of Ruby Turpin, a "respectable, hardworking, church-going woman."  Ruby was also an expert on the classes of people.  At the bottom of her value list were blacks, then one level up the poor white trash, then people who rented, then people who owned their house, and at the top, those who owned houses and land.  She and her husband were at the top, owning a pig farm.

One day her rigid ladder of respectability was shattered when in a doctor's waiting room an emotionally unbalanced woman threw at her the most unflattering comments she had ever heard.  In the view of the emotionally upset woman, Ruby was at the bottom of the list with her prejudice, her pride and her pompous respectability.  Ruby brooded in anger over the incident that night while she was hosing down the swine.

As the sun dropped below the tree-line, she finally looked up from the animals and noticed the sunset.  There was a purple streak in the sky, cut like an extension of a highway into the descending dusk.  A visionary light settled in her eyes.  As in a trance, her arms were raised heavenward.  She saw the purple streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire.  Upon it a vast horde of souls was rumbling toward heaven.  There were whole companies of white trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of blacks in white robes, and battalions of the emotionally upset, and the intellectually handicapped clapping and leaping in praise.

Bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as being her kind, people who had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right.  She leaned forward to get a better look at them.  They marched with great dignity, feeling accountable as always for keeping things orderly and respectable.  In the songs they were singing they alone were on key, but even as they sang, their respectable virtues were melting away.  She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes fixed not on what she observed in the pen, but what she saw about what lay ahead.  In a moment the vision faded, but she remained frozen in her place for a long time.

At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way up the darkening path to the house.  From the woods came the invisible chorus of crickets, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field shouting, "hallelujah."

O'Conner never tells us how many times Ruby heard the Christmas story, but I would guess since she was tiny-- every year now, for over fifty.  The dropped ceilings in her life allowed her to hear the Christmas story but never see it until one afternoon a purple sky turned her life around.

Friend, there is a Joseph and Mary within us, carried by the purposes and promises of God.  Yet we find that most of the time nothing fits like we expected.  But we keep taking the next step anyway trusting the light will come.

An inn keeper is within, trapped in circumstances beyond his or her control, but seeking God's guidance for an option that everyone else overlooked.

And a shepherd lives inside of us with a huge inferiority complex, often imagining criticism and rejection.  But be patient, the angels are coming and with the angels, confidence.

What frightens me is that I, or you, might be like those in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, who slept through it all with our dropped ceilings in place and secure, missing the God who comes in Jesus, who loves, who saves, who calls us by name, but we are numb to his longing for us.

Look up and see, for we are promised that the people who walk in darkness can see a great light.