Adventure into Light

Well, hello, friends. This is Dick Thoth again with stories from the road and I have to confess again I'm not on the road at this moment. I'm sitting in my front room looking at a nice fire and sound of a refrigerator sort of humming in the background over here. But I'm thinking about this Christmas season and the language we use to describe it. If you were in the Hawaiian Islands, I understand Malikoliki Maka is a way they say Merry Christmas if you are in a Spanish-speaking region or household. Feliz Navidad is how you say it. We say it Merry Christmas here in the United States. I think if you live in the United Kingdom, happy Christmas is often the case. But the structure of language and words is fascinating because that's how the birth of Jesus is described in the Gospel of John the first chapter where it says the word becomes flesh and camped among us, tented among us. That what we call in theological circles, the incarnation is described by this word, word in the beginning was the word and the word became flesh. So there's a word we use or that is used historically for this season. It's called Advent which means coming. If you know the word adventure which most of us know, it's a similar route, not exactly the same, but it means something that's about to happen that has some risk connected with it. I don't know that the coming of Jesus to Bethlehem as a baby would have any better definition than the appearance of the word made flesh. Having some risk connected with it. You go back 700 years before that event and you listen to the prophet Isaiah and he describes what's going to be happening as light versus darkness or light overwhelming darkness. There's a gentleman pastor who lives in San Diego by the name of Morgan Mitchell and he wrote a little piece about Isaiah, the prophet Isaiah's writing what we call chapter nine in Isaiah verses two through seven. These are just some of his thoughts. I'm not going to read the entire article, but I love how he captures it. After the hours of heat, the early evening beckons with a soft light and it's pleasant coolness, the late hours crack the egg of the day to reveal the golden yoke of the setting sun. It would be a mind bending exercise to try to explain darkness without describing light. It's likely impossible to do so. Light beckons on the horizon of even the darkest moments. Prophet Isaiah, however, had awakened with the dawn. He was a prophet of Judah who ministered during the reign of four kings and he was commissioned. Morgan says, to be a mouthpiece of God, he spoke with prophetic force even though his words would fall on deaf ears and his throat would grow scratchy. His work in writing bears some of the most profound words in all of scripture echoing themes of holiness, justice, allegiance, trust, righteousness, and hope. The words read today in Isaiah 9, 2 through 7, reveal sparks of this truth reflecting the contrast between light and dark hope and heaviness, honor and gloom. And this is fleshed out as it continues to write. We simply cannot explain the darkness without describing the light. The people walking in darkness have seen a great light. On those living in the land of deep darkness, a light has dawned. That's verse 2. It's interesting years ago when I lived in Washington, DC, I was invited to speak to a handful of senators, do a little study for them. And I asked them what darkness was in the course of our little conversation. And almost in unison, these four or five senators said, darkness is the absence of light. This is how CS Lewis describes it according to Morgan. After an amazing work of God in our hearts, we begin to redirect, reroute, reorient ourselves toward light and find it so real, so sustaining that the noble crew of CS Lewis's dawn tread are called it drinkable. We begin to experience the goodness of things to come, like drinkable light. And that break in the clouds and sunlight on our back fuels the drum beat of freedom. A freedom that comes from aligning our values, allegiance, obedience, delight, and hope with our God of unfailing love. Isaiah foresaw a future light and was welcoming the dawn that would one day break after a long dark night, casting beams of hope 700 years into the future. He saw radiant air that would come as a peasant even as he was the Messiah. Jesus shines a light past the evening, awakens the dawn, sets the course for redemptive history. A baby growing to be a man who would experience true darkness so that we, with sleepy eyes, may gaze upon eternal light. There's nothing like the dawn of a day to encourage the soul. An advent, this adventure that for at the very least for Jesus included risk, brings light into a dark place and I am so grateful for that. At this Christmas season, I pray this for each of us that we, by our presence as we seek to understand, know, and follow Jesus, the light of the world, that when we walk into a space, somehow people sense that, that when we walk in some darkness has been chased away. Thank you so much for listening. We're at the end of 2024. Hard to believe we're going to just go catapulting into 2025 before we know it. Turn around once or twice and we'll be there. But thank you for your encouragement this year in some many ways. And during this project that we've been involved in, called Stories I Love to Tell that has recently come out on Audible and also on Apple Books. So grateful for the scores of you who have reached out to listen to that. We encourage you to do that and may those stories be some, at some level, a Christmas gift to you. And may it lighten your day. May it bring some dawn into places perhaps where you've needed some light for a long time. I found that as I listened to those stories from others over the years, they certainly did that for me. That's it for now. That's it for 2024. And God bless you, have a wonderful Christmas. This is Dick Foth, signing off.