Good morning,
It is written, " Jesus Christ in us the Hope of Glory". Jesus came to the world hopelessness with the good news of marvelous hope. He came to the world of deep darkness withe celestial and the heavenly light. Praise the Lord for the way His light shines in darkness. Darkness has not overcome or overshadowed it.
I love Christmas lights. Next week we will take our annual pilgrimage to the Radio City Music Hall in New York City, to attend the Christmas Extravaganza. I love the way the famous Rockefeller Center Christmas tree is decorated with so many lights. Alice loves decorate the parsonage with multiple Christmas trees and a lot of lights. All of the colorful brilliant lights point out that Jesus is the Light of the world. They also remind us of the star that shone brilliantly, pointing the way to Jesus. Jesus, in Luke 21, quite freely mixes words about events that will takes place very shortly with words that seem to point much, much further into the future. In the first 24 verses of this chapter, Jesus speaks about not only wars and rumors of war in the distant future but also, more narrowly, he talks about the fall of Jerusalem, which would take place about forty years after the sermon recorded in Luke 21. Similarly, in other verses, Jesus seems on the one hand to be pointing forward to his own death and resurrection (which would happen within a week's time) yet on the other hand he talks about what looks to be the very end of the world as we know it. Sometimes Jesus talked about next week. Sometimes he talked about something that could come a thousand years later.
In Luke 21 Jesus is doing more than telling us that history will be rough. He is also trying to reassure us that despite wars, earthquakes, and disasters of all kinds, this world still belongs to God. None of those dreadful happenings need make us conclude that the gospel is false or that Jesus is not Lord after all. God still holds history in his hands, a broken history though it often is. What's more, all appearances to the contrary, the whole thing is heading the right direction. Even in verses 27-28 when Jesus described terrifying cosmic events involving the moon and the stars, even then he told the disciples that believers can hold their heads up high and rejoice. Nothing must shake our faith-given resolve that God is in charge and Jesus is coming again.
If the news headlines are all you have to judge your life by on any given day, you will almost certainly despair at times. You may throw up your hands, sit in some corner of your den, and watch the TV screen flicker with images of terrorism and rampaging violence everywhere. If that's all you can do most days then, like many other folks in society, you will find it easy to conclude that the whole world is falling apart. As long as you think that the shape of the future, and the securing of some kind of globally good outcome, are up to human beings alone, there will be no end to the excuses you could find to crumple up into a little ball of utter hopelessness.
Jesus tell us not to do that. Don't think that the future of the world is up to you or any government anywhere on earth. What secures the future, what gives us a future despite the multiple threats to our very existence that surround us all the day long, is nothing less than the promises of God through Christ Jesus the Lord. If you keep faith in Jesus, then not only will you find a motivation to keep on moving forward despite this present darkness, you will also eagerly await the Son of Man's return and will know that you will stand firm right next to that same Lord when he comes.
We begin Advent with passages that happen immediately before Jesus' death because we live in a world that does terrible things like crucifying the Son of God. Ours is a world of upheaval, of genocide, of pride, selfishness, greed, and violent acts, perpetrated on the innocent and the unsuspecting. Soon our neighborhoods will beautiful as they are decked out with lots of Christmas lights. Yet, if the world were really that pretty and serene most of the time, then this world would need no Savior. Advent begins with a frank, honest assessment of history's perils, of the present moment's terrors, and of the future's all-but certain calamities because looking directly at them is the only way to frame Advent and Christmas correctly. We would not even need Advent if the apocalyptic prophecy mentioned in Luke 21 were not our reality. Remind yourself that the darkness still swirls all around, but precisely because that is so, and not despite it, we must recall that a light shines in the darkness. It is a light which no darkness, no apocalypse, no warfare, no falling of meteors, and no holocaust can prevent from shining. Let our Christmas lights shine this season. Let us never forget Whose light it is and why this world so badly needs to see it.
" Let His Light Shine Through us".
Brown
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jKLPyfpb78
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