Every once in a while I look over a past sermon in order both to see what was going on in the world back then and
to reflect on the changes that have occurred since. So recently I took a look at the sermon I preached six years ago,
in 1998, on this same Fourth Sunday of Advent. It was entitled, “The Shining Face of God.”
The first thing I noticed was that certain basic things about us and our nation have remained virtually the same over
that period of time, even if a number of details, both social and political, have changed.
For instance, on this same Sunday in 1998, I and many others in this congregation, as we surveyed our nation and
world, were in a pretty despondent mood, and we were feeling the need for a great uplift in hope. Well, I sense that
many of us here today are also in a pretty despondent mood and in need of a similar uplift in hope.
Do you recall the events that were depressing us back then—on December 20, 1998? Well, much of our gloomy mood was
coming from what the lead editorial in The New York Times of just two days before had called “War at Home and War
Abroad.”
At that time, the “War at Home” was the battle being fought in the House of Representatives over the Articles of
Impeachment against President William Jefferson Clinton. And back then the “War Abroad” was the president’s bombing of
Iraq. Sound familiar? Yes indeed, six years ago while the bells of The Salvation Army were jingling outside of
Bloomingdale’s, inviting us Christmas shoppers to offer our spare change to the poor and the destitute, the missiles and
bombs of the U.S. army were falling around Baghdad at the cost of some half billion dollars, a figure which somehow, at
that time, seemed absolutely enormous.
Well, six years later the news of “War Abroad” has changed only for the worse, not the better—and at more than three
hundred times the cost in money and over a thousand times the cost in lives! As for the political “War at Home,” well,
its landscape has certainly shifted dramatically since 1998, but its dynamics are much the same. The Republicans
and the Democrats intend no peace toward one another and seem absolutely incapable of putting aside their partisan
conflicts in order to work together for the common good of all—whether red-state citizens or blue.
Let me recall for you just three of the most recent casualties resulting from our domestic political warfare.
First, a court-appointed panel has found that the New York City schools need an additional $5.6 billion each year
just to meet our students’ educational needs with any kind of equity and an additional $9.2 billion to undertake
long-deferred capital improvements. And yet, because of executive-branch inaction and legislative-branch paralysis,
not a single penny of that money is anywhere in sight, whether from state or federal sources.
Second, the federal Food and Drug Administration over the past ten years has been so under-funded by Congress and
so put-in-bed with the medical industries by the White House that it is no longer able on its own either to uncover the
life-threatening side-effects posed by drugs like Vioxx and who-knows-how-many-others currently on the market or to
oversee the regulation of medical devices, like the defective Red Rooster III defibrillators, so many of which have
broken down while being used to try to save victims of heart attacks.
And third, Congress has been tied up in such partisan knots that it has failed to hold the executive branch
accountable for the damage that’s been done to America’s values and moral standing by the now quite well-documented
abuse and torture of prisoners that we’ve committed not only at Abu Ghraib but also at Guantánamo Bay.
Yes, with such continuing “War at Home and War Abroad,” ours is indeed a gloomy period—a time appropriate for
singing and praying a psalm of lament, like Psalm 80, this morning’s First Lesson. This psalm, so filled with
complaint to God, was composed amidst calamitous circumstances of old—most probably the destruction of the northern
nation of Israel by the Assyrian army in the eighth century B.C.E. Yet it is distinguished from all other psalms of
lament in the Bible by its remarkable, thrice-repeated petition of hope (vv. 3, 7, 19): “Restore us, O Lord God of
hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved”—which is to say: come, O Lord God of hosts; come, and manifest
Yourself among us, so that we may be delivered from our troubles—yea, saved from ourselves.
Once again the lectionary has somehow gotten it right, hasn’t it? For it’s precisely on a day such as this, when
to so many of us the prospects for the next four years seem so gloomy—it is precisely on a day such as this that we
most need to hear the hope that underlies this psalm of lament, the hope that God will become transformatively
present in our world, the hope that God’s face will somehow shine upon us so that we may be delivered, from
ourselves.
The apostle Paul is famous for having put into words that classic triad of Christian virtues: faith, hope, and love
(I Cor. 13:13; I Thess. 1:3; 5:8). Of these three, hope is the one, I think, that we Christians tend to forget or
overlook. Isn’t it the case that you’ve heard us preachers talk a lot more about faith and love than about
hope? And this, in spite of the fact that the great Christian thinker Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, stated as long ago
as the early 5th century, when Rome had been sacked by the Visigoths, that of these three virtues the greatest is …
hope!
Paul himself suggests that in the face of all the causes of anxiety and despair in life, Christians are able to have
hope precisely because that hope is solidly anchored in the whole record of God’s gracious and loving actions toward
humankind in the past, such as those that gave hope to the author of Psalm 80: namely, God’s calling of Abraham and
Sarah to found a people of light, and God’s delivering of Israel from its bondage in Egypt.
To that list known to the psalmist, Paul adds two gracious and loving actions of God made known to humankind in Paul’s
own period of time: God’s taking of flesh in the person of Jesus, and God’s overcoming of death through the power of
resurrection.
Because Jesus was born of Mary on that first Christmas and because Jesus was raised from the dead on that first
Easter—because of those, we followers of Jesus can have hope.
Through an act of hope akin to that of this morning’s psalmist, we can dare to affirm that through Jesus the light
of God’s face did shine and that through the risen Christ it continues to shine, such that we may yet be delivered,
from ourselves.
Even though others may see only chaos and may expect only the worst, we followers of Jesus, like those who long ago
first prayed Psalm 80—we can have hope and can expect the light of God’s face somehow to shine forth still.
Christmas is above all a festival of hope. On that day each year, we celebrate anew the birth into our world of the
one named “Jesus,” of the one whose very name can be translated, “The Lord delivers.”
On Christmas Day, we celebrate the birth into our world of God’s eternal love, the birth into our world of the person
into whom God chose to pour the divine purity and perfection of love, a purity and perfection expressed both in Jesus’s
love for God and in Jesus’s love for all of humankind.
On Christmas, this great festival of hope, we celebrate the birth into our world of the shining face of God, the birth
into our world of the radiant, beaming face of God’s pure and perfect love.
This truth about Jesus’s birth is the bedrock for our Christian hope, and we proclaim it anew each and every time we
sing that most beloved of all Christmas carols, Silent Night. Listen again, please, to the words of this carol’s
third verse: “Silent night, holy night! [O] Son of God, love’s pure light, radiant, beams from Thy holy face, with the
dawn of redeeming grace, Jesus, Lord, at Thy birth, Jesus, Lord, at Thy birth.”
This carol, together with the very first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, this morning’s Second Lesson, proclaims to
us the heart of our Christmas hope: that the baby Jesus is “Emmanuel,” is “God-with-us,” is the shining face of God, is
the radiant, beaming face of God’s pure and perfect love. Listen: [soloist sings Silent Night, Holy Night, verse
3]
And in the very last words of the Gospel of Matthew (28:20), this same Jesus, this same shining face of God, proclaims
to us the promise that has, ever since, been the source of Christians’ enduring hope in the midst of a world whose
dreariness is, of course, of our own making. There, at the end of Matthew, this same Jesus who is the risen Christ,
this same Emmanuel who is God-with-Us, says to us: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
This truth—that the risen Jesus continues with us always—this truth is the mainstay of our Christian hope, and we
proclaim it anew each and every time we sing another one of those beautiful carols of Christmas, this time the
contemporary carol Born in the Night, Mary’s Child. Listen, please, to the words of its second verse: “[O] Clear
shining light, Mary’s child, Your face lights up our way. Light of the world, Mary’s child, Dawn on our darkened day.”
Yes, Jesus was the shining face of God, and that same Jesus, the Light of the World, the risen Christ, is still the
shining face of God, lighting up our way to the end of time. Listen: [soloist sings Born in the Night, Mary's Child,
verse 2]
The early 20th-century American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote her poem “Renascence,” which means “rebirth,” at
the youthful age of 20. In it, she speaks of the choice that confronts the human heart and soul—the choice, when we are
confronted by the condition of our world, to be crushed by pessimism or to take wing with hope.
If we don’t let our heart and soul take wing with hope, says Millay, then this will happen to us:
“… East and West will pinch the heart
That cannot keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat—the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.”
But if we do let our soul take wing with hope, then, says Millay:
“The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.”
On this dour and gloomy day, when for many of us our hearts are heavy and our souls are aching, please join with me
in lifting up a soul-full prayer of hope, a prayer that can, I truly believe, “split the sky in two,” and “let the face
of God” made known in Christ Jesus “shine through.”
So I invite you now to join with me in repeating, phrase by phrase, that hope-filled petition in Psalm 80 (vs. 19).
Let us pray it together:
“Restore us, O Lord God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.” Amen.