Wild & Sweet
Download MP3We're gonna be in Psalm 27 this morning. Psalm 27. Last week, through the story in Luke chapter 1 of Zechariah and Elizabeth, and through the story of Genesis 18, Abraham and Sarah, we considered the challenges that we find in waiting for God. Joel spoke of seasons of silent waiting, wondering if God would ever fulfill his promises. And we talked about how this season of Advent is also a time of waiting, longing, and hoping.
Jeffrey Heine:And I want us to continue to follow this thread and these themes of hoping and waiting in our time together in God's word today. And the first passage that we're gonna look at is Psalm 27. So if you have a Bible, you wanna make your way there, it's a Psalm of King David. And in this poem and prayer, he too picks up the themes of longing and waiting. And after we spend some time looking at Psalm 27, we're we're gonna trace this thread of longing and waiting all the way from the garden to the manger.
Jeffrey Heine:And we can do it. I've been assured that since there's not a sermon next week, that I get the time of 2 sermons. But for 1000 of years, Psalm 27 has been sung corporately. It's been prayed privately by the people of God as a way of asking the Lord to fortify our trust so that we can wait on him. And because of that, that kind of hope, the the hope that we need in waiting for God, we we can't just muster that up on our own.
Jeffrey Heine:It's not just out of our own strength. That that hope has to come to us from God, and this is a prayer asking for that strength. And so, let's look together at Psalm 27, a Psalm of David, and let us listen carefully, for this is the word of God. The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear?
Jeffrey Heine:The Lord is the stronghold of my life. Of whom shall I be afraid? When evil doers assail me to eat up my flesh, my adversaries and foes, it is they who stumble and fall. Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear. Through the war arise around and against me, yet I will be confident.
Jeffrey Heine:One thing have I asked of the Lord, that I will seek after, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple. For he will hide me in his shelter in the day of trouble. He will conceal me under the cover of his tent. He will lift me high upon a rock. And now my head shall be lifted up my enemies all around me, and I will offer in his tent sacrifices with shouts of joy.
Jeffrey Heine:I will sing and make melody to the Lord. Oh, hear, oh Lord, when I cry aloud, be gracious to me and answer me. You have said, seek my face. My heart says to you, your face, Lord, do I seek. Hide not your face from me.
Jeffrey Heine:Turn not your servant away in anger, oh you who have been my help. Cast me not off, forsake me not, oh God of my salvation. For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me in. Teach me your way, oh Lord, and lead me on a level path because of my enemies. Give me not up to the will of my adversaries, for false witnesses have risen against me, and they breathe out violence.
Jeffrey Heine:I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord. Be strong, and let your heart take courage. Wait for the Lord. This is the word of the Lord.
Jeffrey Heine:Yes, sir. Let's pray. Oh, Lord, draw near to us by your word and your spirit, because the deepest longing of our hearts is found only in you. Whether we know it or not, or believe it or not today, Lord, you are the only satisfaction for our souls. So help us to believe.
Jeffrey Heine:Help us to hear you, to have ears that are open, eyes that are open to see and hear from you this morning, and give us hearts and minds to respond to you, all that we are for all that you are. We pray these things in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. If you had to guess which redeemer pastor has a tattoo that is a reference to the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. You might be surprised to learn that it is Joshhausen.
Jeffrey Heine:It is not Joshhausen. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a poet and a professor in the second half of the 1800. You're beginning to figure out who has it, aren't you? Longfellow, who's an author of, it's not white. Longfellow was the author of a a poem, a class that later became a classic Christmas carol.
Jeffrey Heine:I heard the bells on Christmas day. I highly recommend Johnny Cash's version of this song. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was one of the few American poets that actually was alive to see his success, but the life of Longfellow is actually quite tragic. He was married in 18/31 to a childhood friend. And after only 4 years of marriage, she died after a miscarriage.
Jeffrey Heine:Longfellow spent some years alone, but later remarried and had more children. And then in 18/61, his second wife died in a fire accident. And a short time after that tragedy, Henry's first child, Charles, left to fight in the civil war against his father's wishes and was severely wounded in battle. And it was at that time, during the civil war and during a time of turmoil within our country, it was at that time that on Christmas day, 18/63, But in his deep and overwhelming grief, that long fellow sat in his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and heard the nearby church bells begin to ring out. And as poets do, he began to write.
Jeffrey Heine:I heard the bells on Christmas day. They're old familiar carols play and wild and sweet. The words repeat, of peace on earth, goodwill to men. I can hear church bells from my home. I didn't know that was going to be a perk.
Jeffrey Heine:I feel like they should have, listed that in the first descriptions in the house listing. But every advent, the bells play Christmas songs, and it honestly pleases my heart to no end to hear them. Longfellow goes on, and in despair, I bowed my head. There's no peace on earth, I said. For hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth, goodwill to men.
Jeffrey Heine:Longfellow heard the bells from his home too, and those happy church bells of Christmas were ringing out on Christmas Day. And Longfellow sat alone in his grief, hanging his head in despair. Hate was mocking those happy bells. Evil was laughing at the hopeful song of peace on earth and goodwill. There's no peace on earth, Bonfellow said, at least not any peace that he could find.
Jeffrey Heine:All the decorations and the happy songs, they didn't match up with the sorrow that Longfellow knew in his life. Longfellow's poetry reminds me of King David's poetry and in particular Psalm 27, the struggle for peace in the midst of enemies and evil, the mocking laughs of pain and suffering as David longs for the peace and comfort of God's sanctuary. Do you ever find yourself in this strange disparity of how the world tells you how to expect things to be and how things actually are? Or what about the disparity between what the Bible says and what you see or experience or feel. The advent and Christmas seasons seem to, intensify this dissonance, that dissimilarity between what we expect and what we get.
Jeffrey Heine:Because if you pay attention long enough, you have to admit that there is a profoundly unresolved longing in the season of Christmas. Think about this. At Christmas, we literally make lists of our wishes, and we encourage children to do the same thing. And then, we start to expect that we are going to get what we have been wishing for. But what happens when we don't?
Jeffrey Heine:What happens when that present isn't under the tree? What happens when those old hometown friends don't invite you out or even call? What happens when that one family member doesn't show up to Christmas dinner or even call, or if they still haven't proposed yet. Hope I don't ruin anyone's Applebee's lunch with that one, but just saying. Tricky time.
Jeffrey Heine:Or when that one family member does show up to the dinner and brings an uninvited plus one, or the family conversation turns political, or someone gets sick, or someone who's been sick for a really long time, you can't help but think that this will probably be their last Christmas. And that thought keeps playing over and over every moment of that Christmas Eve. All the while, these wishes, these expectations keep ringing out like bells in our ears and the enemy of evil and darkness mocks us and all of your unmet expectations. They laugh at you and your songs of hope. That's what Longfellow's describing.
Jeffrey Heine:Often, it's the roaring bells of expectation that can instigate our despair. Yet other times, it's an overwhelming silence that can creep in, the silence of apathy. Because God knows that you've been disappointed so many times before that you no longer expect anything. We are left wondering, how could it possibly be that the darkness will not overcome the light this time? Because the darkness is just too great and the light is too faint.
Jeffrey Heine:As we considered last week, waiting is really hard. As Christians, we can and should acknowledge this, because we're not good at waiting. But we should not miss that there is also something surprisingly beautiful in waiting, and it's this. It's the anticipation that something truly wonderful is coming, Not just a gift from our wish list, not just an expectation of a perfect family Christmas. No.
Jeffrey Heine:It's it's a confident hope that the arrival of something truly and eternally magnificent will come at last, and that our ultimate waiting will one day end, and our ultimate longings will one day be fulfilled. It's the hope that brings beauty to our waiting. This holy waiting isn't just sitting around. It's not dull existence of merely biding our time. No waiting on God subsists on hopeful anticipation that something right now is being prepared and readied.
Jeffrey Heine:As Joel said last week, from our perspective, God seems to move quite slowly, but our God does not waste time. And moreover, don't we need him to be incredibly patient with us? I need God to be slow, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. I need God to be slow with me. And what each and every one of our souls is most longing for today, it's being prepared, whether we know it or not, or believe it or not.
Jeffrey Heine:And though God might seem silent today, he is on the move. David begins his poem by pointing out what he knows to be true. In verse 1, he says, the Lord, all caps, which means Yahweh. Yahweh is my light and my salvation. Yahweh is the stronghold of my life.
Jeffrey Heine:He says he knows these things to be certain and true. His hope is a certain hope. And even though war is rising against him, he will be confident because Yahweh is. God is his light and salvation. Then David petitions the Lord.
Jeffrey Heine:He expresses what he needs to be able to wait on God. And he says he desires the presence of God. In fact, the way he says it is that he wants to live in the house of God every day of his life. Have you ever felt like that? Have you ever been in God's presence in in prayer or maybe in gathered worship, and you just wanna stay in that place and time forever?
Jeffrey Heine:David says, I want to hide in your presence, to live in your holy house, to gaze upon your beauty. Here this David is saying, I don't just want to be delivered from my enemies. I want to be hidden, covered, and lifted up into your holy presence forever. That is David's deepest longing. And I would venture to say that that is the ultimate longing of your heart too.
Jeffrey Heine:In verse 8, David declares, you have said, seek my face. And then my heart says back to you, God, your face, Lord, do I seek. And David goes on in his prayer to restate his hopeful confidence in the Lord. In verse 9, he says, hide not your face from me. Turn not your servant away in anger.
Jeffrey Heine:Oh, you who who have been my help, cast me not off. Forsake me not, oh God of my salvation. When David asks that the Lord would not hide his face from him, he's asking that God would not be far off, that he would not withhold his presence and let David fall to his enemies, because that's what happens. That's what happens when the Lord turns his face away. People fall and are given over to their enemies.
Jeffrey Heine:And again, David is longing for the presence of God and he is confident that the father will not turn his face away from him, that he won't have to cry out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The Hebrew poetry scholar, Robert Alter, calls David's next line, verse 10, quote, the most extreme declaration of trust in God in the whole bible, end quote. Alter calls it breathtaking. He says this. For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me in.
Jeffrey Heine:David is referencing the most unconditional and dependent relationship of human beings on earth, the relationship with parents. And David says that, even they have forsaken me, but my confidence is in my total dependence on the Lord, who will care for me and without question take me in. The Lord will be my father. The Lord will be my mother. The Lord will tend to me intimately, unconditionally.
Jeffrey Heine:David is saying, Lord, don't hide your face from me. Don't forsake me. Take me in. Care for me. Lead me so that I won't give up in waiting for you.
Jeffrey Heine:No matter how long it takes or how bad it gets, help me to trust in you. Because I believe that one day, one day the waiting will end and I will see your face. Then David closes his Psalm by speaking to his own heart, saying, wait for God. Take courage. Wait for God.
Jeffrey Heine:Psalm 27 reminds us that the Psalms teach us how to pray when we're waiting for God. Because as I've said, and it's good that we admit it, we are terrible at waiting. Because waiting, as the prophet Tom Petty said, is the hardest part. But you take it on faith and you take it to the heart. The waiting is the hardest part.
Jeffrey Heine:The whole of the Bible, and I'd say the whole of life really is about waiting for God. And if the prophet Petty is right, and he always is, that means that life is hard. You can write that down. It doesn't matter how much tensile we put on our days or sparkly lights or how loud the happy church bells are ringing. Life is hard and waiting on God is hard.
Jeffrey Heine:The reason waiting is the hardest part is because what we experience and see day in and day out makes it so hard to believe that what we are waiting for is actually going to come. It can seem like the hope that we claim is being mocked by the darkness all around us. And it can be hard to believe that there is still yet more to come, that the final curtain has not fallen, that another advent is on the way. There's a tradition in the history of the theater that when a night's performance is over, and the stage is cleared, and the audience and the actors go home, before the last stagehand turns off the lights, they place a lone light bulb on a stand in the middle of the stage. You see, it's because theaters are designed without any windows, So when the stage lights and house lights are turned off, there's nothing but darkness.
Jeffrey Heine:A stage is a dangerous place to be in the dark, especially when there's a 10 foot drop into an orchestra pit. So the tradition began long ago to place what became known as a ghost light in the middle of the stage after every performance. And the next person to enter the theater would have, at the very least, a faint, distant guiding light in an otherwise overwhelming darkness. The light offered direction through the darkness. And the light also offered hope, hope that although the stage was empty now, the production was not yet over.
Jeffrey Heine:There was still more to come. As Christians, we need ghost lights too, giving us guidance to help us through the darkness, to give us hope that there is more to come, to believe that what we are really waiting for, that someone is coming. You might be familiar with the phrase 400 years of silence. It's used mostly by protestants to talk about the time between the prophet Malachi, who was the last prophet, and whose book is the last book in the old testament, 400 years. And then the angelic pronouncement of Jesus' birth in the gospel of Matthew.
Jeffrey Heine:If you have a Bible with you, and you turn about 2 thirds of the way through, you'll find this this division between the Old Testament and the New Testament. Oftentimes, there's a blank page there. And I can remember as a kid finding that blank page between the testaments and wondering why it was there. And what's more, what happened during that blank page. The blank page represents 400 years of what a lot of people assume to be, since God was silent through the prophets, it must have been inactivity on God's part.
Jeffrey Heine:But if you were raised Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, you you, would have had in your Bibles a few additional books after Malachi. And the reason that those writings exist is because while the people of God did not have additional prophets who were authoring inspired books during that 400 year span, God was still active in the silence. God was on the move, leading his people and preparing the way for the Messiah. And you might be surprised just how much there was to prepare. One thing the ancient people of Israel knew so well and that we would benefit from greatly is this, knowing this, if you desire to grow in your confidence and hope in God, then consider what God has done in the past.
Jeffrey Heine:At Christmas, we behold the coming of Jesus as the baby in the manger. And in that beholding, we grow in our confidence and hope that he is truly coming again. And when we behold the story of how God, the father, promised and prepared the way for Jesus to enter this creation as a baby, we grow in our confidence and hope that God, the father is right now preparing the way for Jesus to come again with the fullness of his kingdom. Since August on Sundays at Redeemer, we've been studying through the book of Genesis. So what have we learned so far?
Jeffrey Heine:Well, first, that God created everything from nothing. He creates humanity, male and female, to tend his creation. Man and woman disobey God. And in doing so, they bring about brokenness and curses into all creation. As a result, the man and the woman are banished, exiled from the garden of paradise.
Jeffrey Heine:They have sons. One murders the other. And in that, sin is shown as not only the choices that humans make, but also something inside of them passed down through every generation. And that is the cycle that we see repeated again and again. They distrust, they disobey, they destroy.
Jeffrey Heine:God calls another man and another woman out of nothing, Abraham and Sarah. He makes promises to them, promises that God will unfailingly keep, promises about land and a people, a people that would be his, a possession for him forever. But the people kept disobeying and distrusting God, falling into destruction, but God did not forsake them. Like the sin that was being passed down from 1 generation to the next, so were the promises of God. Abraham has Isaac and the promises continue.
Jeffrey Heine:Isaac has Jacob. The promises continue. Jacob has 12 sons and the promises continue. The descendants of those 12 sons end up in slavery, living not in the promised land, but in a foreign land. But the promises of God do not end.
Jeffrey Heine:God call calls out another man seemingly out of nothing to lead the people out of captivity. And after that Exodus, when the people of God finally enter into the promised land, all these descendants of Jacob's 12 sons are given a portion of the land. These 12 tribes are ruled by judges until they eventually, they beg God for a king to rule over them. So God makes a man named Saul king of the 12 tribes of Israel. Eventually, he was succeeded by another man called out of nothing.
Jeffrey Heine:His name was David. This man was given the same promises that began with David and more. The promises further, the throne of David would be an eternal throne. One day there would be a forever king to reign over the fullness of God's kingdom forever. David was followed by his son as king.
Jeffrey Heine:Then when he died, his son became king. But 10 of those tribes in the northern part of Israel rebelled against the king, The one who came in the line of David. They wanted an advisor to the previous king to become the new king. And so David's grandson runs and and goes south to 2 tribes that would receive him. So the 10 in the north, 2 in the south, the kingdom's divided.
Jeffrey Heine:There's now one king, not from the line of David, who's ruling over the 10 tribes in the north and in the south, 2 tribes, Judah and Benjamin. They have the true line of David as their king. This is known as the divided kingdom. It's a big moment in the life of Israel. Now Israel is called Israel, and then the other one is the smaller, 2 tribes.
Jeffrey Heine:They're called Judah, because that's helpful. It's not it's not that helpful. It's really confusing. It's kind of like there wasn't an editor for this bible. Why are there so many Josephs, so many Marys, Zechariahs?
Jeffrey Heine:It gets confusing after a while. There are 3 sets of people with the same name in the 12 disciples. If you can memorize those, you've got half of them figured out. The story continues. This little Southern Kingdom of Judah.
Jeffrey Heine:They're under constant threat. They're not that big in number, but it's the, the larger Northern Kingdom, the 10 tribes. They're the first ones to fall to a foreign army. They fall and are defeated by the Assyrians. They're exiled.
Jeffrey Heine:And then this little kingdom of Judah, they avoid being taken over by the Assyrians, but in time, they fall to the Babylonians and they are exiled. Jerusalem destroyed, the temple destroyed. Eventually, the Babylonian empire will fall to the Persian empire. And in that move, that means that these exiles from Judah get to return, and they start making their way back. They start building the temple back.
Jeffrey Heine:It takes 20 years. They come to restore this worship of Yahweh, to obey his commands. Then Alexander the Great takes over the known world and 2,000,000 square miles. And the Greek Empire now rules the day. During that time, God used prophets like Zechariah and Malachi to call the people of Judah back to faithful obedience.
Jeffrey Heine:But that old cycle continued of distrusting the Lord, disobeying his commands, and then destruction. That all continued during the Greek empire. And one one of the kings during that Greek empire, that that had the most bearing on the people of God there in Jerusalem, was Antiochus the 4th. He was a Greek king in about 175 BC. And by the time he was king, Jerusalem was nearing total corruption yet again.
Jeffrey Heine:Even the God ordained role of the high priest was now appointed through bribery. And the way they would make these bribes to the Greek officials was stealing from the temple itself. They would steal these offerings and then bribe their way into the role of the high priest. Not only that, when Antiochus the 4th heard that there were still some people in Jerusalem who were worshiping Yahweh, following his commands, he then, set an order that the temple would be stripped of all of its sacred items and that the holy temple of Yahweh would now have an altar to Zeus. And the unclean animals, pigs were brought into the holy of holies, the place of God's presence and sacrificed to a foreign god.
Jeffrey Heine:That's what was happening in Jerusalem. Are you still with me? Do you need me to tell you a Christmas story? I'll do my best. It was wintertime in Jerusalem.
Jeffrey Heine:The nights were the longest of the year and the pagan celebrations of solstice were nearing. I'm sure that there were terrible Hallmark solstice movies that were on marathons. In reality, the celebrations around the winter solstice were quite frightening and dangerous in the city of Jerusalem, Especially now that obedience to the law of God, any obedience to any of the laws of God, which is totally forbidden. In fact, if anyone was caught obeying god's law, observing the Sabbath, observing circumcision, or offering the daily sacrifices, any of it, the people would be executed. And they were.
Jeffrey Heine:Thousands and thousands of Jews were executed for obeying God's law. Men, women, children, infants. Some faithful Jews fled Jerusalem to live in the more rural areas away from the oppression of the Greeks. And one such family included an old priest named Matthias. He oversaw worship in the tabernacle outside of the city.
Jeffrey Heine:And on the pagan holiday of solstice, 25th of the Jewish month of Kislev, but on 25th in that winter of that year, an officer of, the Greek empire came and visited Matthias, wanting him to make sacrifices to Zeus. He demanded that these sacrifices be made. And the old man, Matthias, refused. He knew the brutality of the officers. He knew how they had crucified mothers of newborn sons who had been circumcised and the child with them.
Jeffrey Heine:He knew how they would slowly torture entire families who sought to obey the Lord. He knew all of that, but he would not defile the altar with sacrifices to a false god. He grew angry at these demands, and he struck and killed the officer. And he fled with his family into the hill country. They lived in the hills hiding from the officials and they sought to worship the Lord.
Jeffrey Heine:This rebellion grew in number over time, as more and more Jews sought to restore Jerusalem to the worship of Yahweh. After Matthias died a few years later, his son, Judah, took over leading the families in rebellion against the Greeks. And so, King Antiochus ordered the city of Jerusalem to be burned to the ground and the temple of the Lord destroyed. Thousands died. The city was ravaged.
Jeffrey Heine:The rebellion in the hills took 4 years to gather strength in number, to advance in gaining ground in warfare. But eventually, once again, 4 years after the first incident, on the 25th of the month of Kislev, during the pagan pagan holiday of winter solstice, Judah Maccabee and his army took back the site of the temple. And in that most sacred holy part of the temple, the holy of holies, where the presence of the Lord would rest and meet with the priests, In that place, there was a lampstand that had been commanded by God to be lit 24 hours a day. We read the instructions about the lampstand in the book of Exodus chapter 27. It was large, 100 pound golden lamp.
Jeffrey Heine:There's a pillar in the middle and 3 branches coming out on the right side, 3 branches coming out on the left. The center was known as the servant lamp, It was used to light all the other lamps. The center light was the light by which all the others receive light. The lamp was to be filled with pure oil, and the priests in the line of Aaron were to tend it every morning and every night to ensure that it was always burning. The light was always on, even when no one was around.
Jeffrey Heine:The light had to shine in the darkness. Because though the holy of holies was silent and unoccupied by people, God was always at work. The Maccabees went on into the place where the Holy of Holies was and they they returned the golden lampstand, which is called the menorah. And due to the desecration of the temple, they could only find enough of the commanded pure oil to burn for one day. But in light of all the corruption and the wretched state that the temple had been in for so long, that one day of light would be the best that they could offer in restoring obedient worship to the Lord.
Jeffrey Heine:To the shock and surprise of the Maccabees, as they were trying to produce more oil as fast as they could, that small amount of oil continued to burn for 8 nights. The light shining in the darkness, signifying the presence of God, that he was with his people, a faint trace of light in an otherwise overwhelming darkness. This rededication of the temple, or in Hebrew, Hanukkah, was a small step in returning to the Lord, their God. Over the next 46 years, the temple would be rebuilt once again. And they would return the city of Jerusalem to a place where the people of God would obediently worship and hear the scriptures read and taught, and they would learn to follow the law of the Lord and seek his face.
Jeffrey Heine:And it would be only a 150 years later that an 8, 8 day old little baby boy would be brought into that very temple and dedicated to the Lord. His parents would one day tell him the story of the Maccabees and how the temple in the city were regained. That same boy would one day find his way into the same temple, listening as a rabbi's taught from the scrolls of scripture. And later one day he too would be a rabbi reading in that temple, the scrolls of the prophets. He would go to the temple to celebrate the Hanukkah feast, to remember the work of God and restoring his people.
Jeffrey Heine:That same man would also one day cleanse that same temple from oppression and injustice, fulfilling the prophecy that his zeal over the house of his father would consume him. And that same man would walk into that same temple and receive the blind and give them sight, receive the lame and make them walk. That same man would draw the indignation of the religious leaders when he would one day say, destroy this temple and in 3 days I will raise it up. And those leaders, dumbfounded, would say, it's taken 46 years to rebuild this temple again. And you're saying that it could be torn down and raised up in 3 days, because that man was talking about himself.
Jeffrey Heine:All these things, each and every one of these things, none of them would have occurred if that temple, which for 100 and 100 of years had either been desolate rubble or in the hands of vile pagan worship. None of these things would have happened if the Lord had not been at work in the silence. The golden lamp stand, the one that signified the presence of God, that ghost light that pierced the otherwise great darkness offered a faint light of hope, that God was not finished. He was active. And even in the seeming silence, he had not cast off his people nor forsaken them.
Jeffrey Heine:He was not dead. He was not asleep. No, the Lord was their light and salvation. The people clung to the promises of God. And like David, they declared, though an army and camp against me, my heart shall not fear.
Jeffrey Heine:The war arise against me, yet I will be confident. Their confidence was not of their own strength. It was the presence of the lord. They trusted that God was near and that he was at work, that he was preparing the way for the Messiah to come. So there's your Christmas story.
Jeffrey Heine:It just happens to be the Hanukkah one too. In the first chapter of John's revelation, the beloved disciple describes when he was initially called into this vision of seeing the Lord. And he writes this in Revelation chapter 1. I was in the spirit on the Lord's day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet saying, write what you see in a book and send it to the 7 churches. And then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me.
Jeffrey Heine:And on turning, I saw 7 golden lampstands, and in the middle, the lampstand like the son of man. He was clothed in a long robe with a gold sash around his chest. When John describes his vision of seeing Jesus, he says that he sees Jesus standing in the middle of 6 lamps, 3 to his right and 3 to his left. He sees Jesus as the servant lamp in the middle, the true light which gives light to everyone. And the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.
Jeffrey Heine:Jesus is what David was talking about. Jesus is our light and our salvation. God had prepared the way for Jesus to enter into the his own creation, to enter the world crowded with darkness. And Jesus stands as the light that will not be subdued or extinguished. It is the light of confident hope that there is still more to come.
Jeffrey Heine:God is not finished. He is, in fact, on the move. When Henry Wadsworth Longfellow heard the bells that Christmas morning, he hung his head in despair that the evil and hate in our world was mocking the wild and sweet song of hope. But the poem does not end in defeat and sorrow. Longfellow describes that as he hung his head in despair, he heard the bells begin to ring louder and deeper, saying, then peeled the bells more loud and still.
Jeffrey Heine:God is not dead, nor doth he sleep. The wrong shall fail. The right prevail with peace on earth, goodwill to men. That's what the bells were responding with to the mocking of evil, of brokenness, of darkness. The bells rang louder and deeper, still proclaiming that God is not dead.
Jeffrey Heine:He is not asleep. He has not done. He has not forsaken you. He will take you in. And this advent in your waiting on God, whatever that might look like in your life, The words that your heart needs to hear this morning, perhaps more than anything else, are the words that David spoke to his own heart at the close of his own poem.
Jeffrey Heine:Wait on God. Take courage. Wait on the lord. For the lord is not dead. He is not asleep.
Jeffrey Heine:The Lord God is on the move. Even in the darkness, even in the silence, even when the page looks blank, let your heart take courage and hopeful confidence. For you shall look upon the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Because Christ, Christ your light, has come, and he is coming again. Let's pray.
Jeffrey Heine:Oh Lord, by your spirit, draw near to us. Speak tender comfort to our souls that we might trust you. Lord, I pray especially for those here this morning who who feel like that blank page or feel like that silence and that darkness? Do you bring your light and remind them that you are not finished, that your promises are still true, and you are still worthy of our belief and our trust, Though the enemy encamps around us, help our hearts not to fear. Though war rises against us, help us to be confident, not in our own strength, but in Christ, our ever present help in time of trouble.
Jeffrey Heine:We pray these things in his name. Amen.
