Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
Morning Worship · January 27, 2008
Third Sunday After Epiphany
Prayer of the Day
Creator, Lover, and Sustainer; we hope to know you and to be known by you. In the dark places of our lives, grace us with your light and presence. Open our hearts to the warmth of your love and directing guidance across the great distances of our lives. Amen.
Scripture
Matthew 4:12-17
Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. He left Nazareth, and made his home in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, so what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled:
“Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali,
On the road, by the sea, across the Jordan,
Galilee of the Gentiles, crossroads of the nations,
The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.
For those who sat in the region and the shadow of death,
Light has dawned.”
[So said Isaiah.]
From that time, Jesus began to proclaim, “Repent. Turn. For the kingdom of God is at hand.”
May God add blessing to this Word for us this day and in our lives.
Message
The Magnificent Dawn
Kim Ryan
Twenty-one years ago today, I stood at a window, and I watched the sun rise. Did anyone see the sun rise this morning? Did anybody else see that? It was a sunrise kind of like this morning’s sunrise, with those soft, gentle colors of morning over frosted trees, and at that time, snow-covered ground. I welcomed the dawn of a new day on that particular day. I knew my life would never, ever be the same. You see; I was standing at a hospital window. Just a few hours earlier, our first-born son, William Gage Ryan, had been born.
It had been a long night. If you ask Bill, he will tell you, at one point I said, “Get out of my face. You’re breathing my oxygen.” It wasn’t pretty.
But in the morning, standing at the window, embracing a new day, a new life, a new me, I was overwhelmed by the awesome beauty – the mystery, the joy of life. I was overcome with this tremendous gift of having a chance to be a part of birth and of creation. I was awestruck by the feelings of love that were born fresh in me for this baby that was a stranger, and the realization of how proud, and how tender, and how incredibly vulnerable this child would make me feel for the rest of my life.
I remember wondering, standing at that window, if this was some small way of how God felt about us? Was this some small measure of the incredible, over-the-top crazy kind of in-love-with-you feelings? At the same time, I was standing on the edge of a grand canyon of vulnerability with an exposed and bare heart. It was a magnificent dawn.
It was a magnificent moment. It was a God moment, surrounded by the unmistakable presence and power of love so much more than myself. God felt so near in that morning, or perhaps I was the one who had come closer to that which is always there for us.
Of course, two days later, they put me in a wheelchair. They put that baby in my arms, and they pushed me out of the hospital. They had to push me out, because I would have never left on my own. His Daddy and I both were crying, because we didn’t know “nothing” about raising babies. I remembered my best girlfriend Lori Furno’s older and wiser sister looking at a group of us 17-year-olds in the throws of our first love and saying to us, “Remember. There’s a difference between saying, ‘Let’s have a baby,’ and saying, ‘Let’s be parents.’” (Now, you may want to write that one down. You may not need it any more, but I bet there is somebody you know who does.)
Thank God my parents were there. Thank God Bill’s Grandmother Apple came a few weeks later to help us. Thank God we had a congregation in Indiana that loved that baby and loved us into being parents.
But 21 years later, I have never forgotten that dawn, that magnificent morning. I have not forgotten the nearness of God and our nearness to God. Sometimes it just dawns on us in intense moments with a magnificent clarity and assurance, “Yes. God is at hand. God is near.”
It leaves us with a story to tell: “Once upon a time I stood at a window…” Do you have a story? Do you have a story to tell – a moment in your life when the reality and the presence of God broke in and broke through the day-to-dayness with such sparkle like morning sun on a frosted tree branch that it took your breath away? I hope you do. I would love to hear your story.
If you don’t have a story… You know what? You’re here today. That simply means that you don’t have a story just yet. But your being here means you are looking for a moment. You are looking for an encounter and an experience with the living and loving God. I believe God is delighted that you are looking and yearning for that. God will not disappoint you. Maybe your particular moment won’t happen in the six walls of this church, but what will happen in these walls is an opportunity to put experience into words. You will get a way to talk about it, a way to speak it, so that you can share your story of God’s nearness for yourself and for others.
This morning, together, we step into someone else’s story. We step into Jesus’ story. It comes to us from the gospel of Matthew. It is a remembered story about a moment in Jesus’ life. It’s a moment when Jesus proclaims, I believe, for himself as well as for those around him, the nearness of God. It is proclaimed for all of us who have sought God some 2,000 years later. Only this story of Jesus, if you remember hearing it just a few moments ago, is not a glistening, sparkling, magnificent, grand moment of God’s nearness.
This is a story that is in the midst of danger. This is a story that anticipates despair. This is a story of darkness, and politics, and pain. The story begins when Jesus got word of John’s arrest. We need to pause right there. John’s arrest!
Who was John? John was Jesus’ cousin, actually. He was a wild, hairy prophet kind of guy we find in the early parts of the gospel story. John is the one who, earlier in Matthew’s story, has been preaching, baptizing, stomping his foot around anyone who would listen saying, “Pay attention! Your lives are a mess! Turn around. Something happened. Someone’s coming, who is going to ignite God’s reign for you and change your life. God’s kingdom is near. Watch out!” That is John.
John was the one who recognized Jesus as that Someone who was going to clear lives, change people. John actually baptizes Jesus, just in a few verses before our story today began. In spite of John’s protests, Jesus insisted that John baptize him. They were kindred spirits with a message about the real presence of God.
Then John confronted and offended the ruler Herod and his family. He was arrested. Later in the gospel, Matthew will tell us things do not go well for John. John is beheaded, in a twist and a turn of events within the royal family and for political revenge. He has been silenced, or so they think.
But in our story today, John was arrested, and then Jesus left. Jesus left in the midst of danger. He moved his ministry to a lakeside village of Galilee. The writer of this story reaches way back to that writer’s Hebrew-Jewish Scriptures and pulls from a prophet Isaiah, and says, “Here’s what was happening.”
When Jesus left, it was to fulfill an expectation from years ago that Jesus’ ministry would come out of the crossroads of the nations, meaning it would be for all people. Then this writer beautifully takes the poetic words of Isaiah, and places them right there at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry and says, “People sitting out their lives in the dark, saw a huge light. Those who sat in the region and the shadow of death, light has dawned for them.”
It is a glorious metaphor. It is a statement of what Jesus would be all about.
Elizabeth Gilbert, in her very popular book, Eat, Pray, and Love, says after a year of her own soul searching and her own religious explanation this statement:
I believe that all the world’s religions share, at their core, a desire to find a transporting metaphor, some magnificent idea – big, magical, powerful enough – to carry you across a mighty distance.
I don’t disagree with this and that description. “A transporting metaphor.” I hadn’t ever thought of it that way. “Some magnificent idea – big, and magical, and powerful enough to carry us across a mighty distance.”
One of Christianity’s transporting metaphors is this magnificent image of light dawning in the darkness. It’s a metaphor for Jesus’ message, and life, and witness, his death, his resurrection. “The kingdom of God is near at hand.” “Behold, the light!”
There is something so real and powerful that this message comes from Jesus’ heart and from the life of Jesus in the midst of his own darkness of John’s arrest. It is in the midst of not only John’s danger, but also Jesus’ danger and the reality and the tragedy that is yet to come. In that risk, Jesus says, “John was right. God is near at hand. Even now, especially now.”
This morning, you may be feeling you have a mighty distance to cross with something in your life. Most of us do. You may be feeling you are sitting in the dark in some way. You may be under some shadow caused by circumstances in your life, perhaps of your own choosing, but perhaps not of your own choosing.
Christians have long described those experiences as dark nights of the soul. They come in all sizes, and shapes, and varieties, just the way we do. Yet, there is something strikingly similar about them.
Let me share a story with you, here at the end. It’s a story that belongs to a woman named Karla. Karla is a minister and an artist. In her book, Creativity and Divine Surprise, she so openly describes her dark night of the soul. Maybe there is something in her story that will connect with something in your story.
Karla says:
While vacationing with my family one summer, I stepped into a dark night of the soul, even though everything was going well in my life. I enjoyed fulfilling work, a good family, a wonderfully-supportive community. But I was restless and wondering if I needed a change? I started to feel odd as if something was different with me, but I could not put my finger on it. A pervasive fear seeped into myself and engulfed. For the first time in my life, I felt as if God had vacated the premises.
Even in dry periods on my journey, I had sensed the ground of my being present with me. But this was different. God was not merely silent, but apparently had gone on vacation, too. I searched my soul to see if I had caused this change. Did I need to refocus my life with Christ? How could I get God to come back? Reading the Bible seemed nearly impossible.
That is an amazing statement for a minister to confess.
Then she says:
I did not want to think about God. I wanted to experience God. The only piece of Scripture that made any sense to me was Romans 8, which tells us “Nothing can separate us from the love of God.” I desperately wanted to believe it, but no longer knew if that was true. I felt abandoned by God and cut off from the source of divine love. This awareness shook me to my core.
Ten months after my dark night began, I became aware of it slowly lifting, like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, but is not ready to fly. But I could smell the fresh air.
A few months later, a small, carved female figure came into my possession. This beautiful dark-skinned woman stands erect with open and empty hands. I treasure her, because she symbolizes my experience of the refining dark night. Whatever I had held on to in my faith before the dark night was gone. My hands had been pried open and emptied out. The dark night instilled within the marrow of my bones the wisdom that God was holding me and will always hold me.
Under the cover of darkness in ways I can never understand, I was freed from the illusion that I am capable of holding on to God. Mercifully, tenderly, God does the holding. All I can say is, “Yes.”
The good news this morning is that God is holding us, as certainly as dawn emerges from the darkness. You may know that truth in a moment of intense and sparkling joy, and all is right with the world. Or you may know that truth in moments when we are up against the wall of difficulty, and nothing is right with the world. It’s all out of whack. Or you may learn that truth in times of increasing discouragement and pervasive perception of distance.
But the prophets of old, like John and Isaiah, and even that prophetic word of Jesus, and the prophets in our own time, remind us and echo a similar chorus, “God is near at hand as dependably as the magnificent morning light brings us day.”
That’s a simple idea. Isn’t it? This little metaphor. Yet, it’s big enough. It’s magical enough. It’s powerful enough to carry us across whatever distance is before for us.
“Mercifully, tenderly, God does the holding, and all we can say is, ‘Yes’.” And, “Thanks.”
Amen.
Benediction
Thank you for the way your light dawns in our lives with warmth, and brightness, and possibility. Even when we hang our heads in the heaviness of our humanity, let our eyes look up as we take heart in the promise of things made new. Let us raise our face to the One who intends to make a way and lead us through. Let our prayer be, “Hold on, the Son is coming.” Amen.
