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Foundry United Rev. |
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“Until Christ
Comes…Whistle in the Dark” Sunday, December 16,
2007 |
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Isaiah 9: 1-7 Rev. |
The
season of Advent is about waiting. Waiting is a universal and commonplace
experience. But waiting is about more than waiting. Waiting
is sacramental. It is an ordinary experience that has a deeper meaning. It is
the outward sign of something more profound and intangible, but still very,
very real. Waiting
is a sacrament of our finitude and mortality. Waiting is an outward sign of
the reality that the universe does not revolve around me…or you. Waiting is a
strange grace. If life,
or the universe, or God did not impose on us the need to wait, we would
probably destroy ourselves and each other. The
question of the Advent season is: What do we do while we are waiting? How do
we handle our finitude…the reality that the world does not revolve around us and that we are not God…the reality that the things we want to happen do not
happen on our time schedule or at our pace or maybe sometimes not at all. There
is a lot we are not in control of, not in charge of. This is the deeper
meaning of reality of needing to wait. What do
we do about the aspects of life where we are not in control? What do we do
while we are waiting? One answer
is that we whistle in the dark. Fred Buechner writes that faith is a kind of
whistling in the dark…“an attempt to keep the spirits up while peering
through the shadows for some glimmer of Meaning.”[i]
And he capitalizes the word “Meaning.” He does this to show, I think, the
connection between meaning and God. Sometimes the only revelation we get of
God is a glimmer of meaning. God and Meaning may not be the same thing, but
they are so closely intertwined that to see one is to see the other. To
believe in the one is to believe in the other. What do
we do at those places of life where we are all too aware of the limitations
of our power and control? We whistle in the dark. We keep faith. We keep our
spirits up. I’ve
turned to a familiar Advent Scripture passage for our lesson this morning. The
reason I was drawn to this particular passage is not just because it is a
lesson we tend to read during Advent but because of the repeated use of words
that mean “gloom.” Verse one
talks about “gloom.” Verse two could easily be translated as being about
“people who walked in gloom…those who lived in a land of deep gloom.” The
Anchor Bible translation is “dwellers in a land of gloom.”[ii]
One of
the hard parts of those aspects and situations in life where we are not in
control…where we can not by our own effort make things come out the way we
want them to come out…one of the hard things about being in a place where we
don’t know what is going to happen but can only wait is that our tendency,
many of us, is to imagine the worst. It is hard not to do. How do we
wait for the results of the doctor’s tests to come back and not imagine the
worst? How do we work hard in a campaign and experience the ups and downs and
not imagine the worst come election day? How do we go through the normal
struggles and risks and distances of a romantic relationship and not
sometimes imagine the worst? How do we avoid becoming gloomy about those
experiences and places in our lives where we are not in control and all we
can do it wait? One way,
of course, is through denial. I read an article not long ago in the New York
Times arguing that there is an upside to denial.[iii]
“Everyone is in denial about something,” the article said, and this is surely
true. The only problem is that denial doesn’t work on anything that is really
important. Denial might work when that which we deny is inconsequential, but
denial doesn’t work about anything that really matters. Anxiety
will never be denied. The deeper we try to push anxiety beneath the surface
of our consciousness, the more insidious its control over us. Isaiah
9 is not about denial. It is about how to keep faith in a gloomy situation. It
is about how to keep our spirits up in our most vulnerable situations and
times when we cannot control our own destiny. It is about whistling in the
dark. The
situation in Isaiah 9 was this. Ahaz is king of “For a
child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his
shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father,
Prince of Peace. His authority shall grow continually, and there shall be
endless peace for the throne of David and his kingdom. He will establish and
uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time onward and
forevermore.” (Isaiah 9: 6-7) Scholars
can’t figure out why Isaiah sang this particular hymn. They can’t figure out
the occasion. I think Isaiah was whistling in the dark. He was reminding
himself and Judah that no human king reigns forever. New kings are being born
all the time, and our true king – the one who will bring peace and justice – is being born even now if we
could only see him. Isaiah was keeping faith. He was keeping his spirits up. He is
not in denial. He is looking at the gloomy realities straight in the face, but
he is choosing to keep faith. He is whistling in the dark. Craig
Barnes, when he was pastor of National Presbyterian Church up the road,
called it living doxologically. He told once about a bad week in his life.
He’d spent most of the week at a denominational meeting that, he said, was a
disaster. He came back to the church Friday morning to find a stack of phone
messages 2 ½ inches high. He didn’t have a sermon prepared, and he found
himself in the middle of a staff conflict. Having
made little progress on any of this, he was scheduled to lead a service at a
neighborhood nursing home Friday afternoon. It was the last thing he wanted
to be doing. He rushed through the service and then had to take communion to
people too disabled to leave their rooms. One was
an elderly woman, almost blind and hard of hearing, named Lucille. She had
outlived her husband and most of her friends. She had had to give up her
home. She was confined to a small room. She had lost almost everything but
life itself. Barnes
said he could hardly wait to give her communion and get back to his office
and the staff mess that needed to be sorted out and the sermon that needed to
be prepared. It didn’t help his mood, he said, that her hands were shaky,
they spilled juice on his slacks. He finally got the Communion done and
hurriedly gave her a pat on the back and began to rush away, when he heard
her say these words in a clear voice: “Thank you, God, for being so good to
me. Thank you that I am not forgotten. Thank you for always loving me.” Craig
Barnes said that, when he heard Lucille’s prayer, something broke in him and
suddenly he did not want to leave her. It was the only sacred moment he had
had all week. He realized that he himself had not said a single prayer of
thanksgiving all week because he had been so focused on asking God to help
him achieve what he wanted to achieve and the frustrations he was
experiencing along the way.[v] “Thank
you, God, for being so good to me. Thank you that I am not forgotten. Thank
you for always loving me.” Lucille,
like Isaiah, was whistling in the dark. We
sometimes think the word “faith” means doctrines or ideas that we believe
intellectually, but that’s not what faith is. Faith is the decision to trust,
even when things look the gloomiest. Certainly
it is true that in the ideal world, it is better to light a candle than curse
the darkness. But even if we don’t have a candle or a match, we can still
whistle. www.foundryumc.org |
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