Show Us the Light: An Advent Reflection on Salvation

Rank on rank, the host of heaven spreads its vanguard on the way,

as the light of light descendeth from the realms of endless day,

that the powers of hell may vanish as the darkness clears away. Amen.

Restore us, O Lord God of hosts. Show us the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.

Amen. Did you notice that refrain repeating in our psalm today?

Show us the light of your countenance and we shall be saved.

All week I've been thinking about the things that, over the course of my life,

people have told me I need to do in order to be saved.

Believe, repent, get baptized, ask Jesus to come into my heart,

speak in the language of angels, demonstrate my faith through my good deeds,

persevere to prove my conversion was real.

Maybe but here in this psalm god's people sing it differently all that is needed

for salvation is for god to show us the light of god's face.

One of the most common anxiety dreams I have is that I'm driving,

and suddenly everything goes dark.

I've gone blind, or all the streetlights and the headlights are out, or both.

But in this dream, every time, I keep driving.

Just driving blind into the dark.

And sometimes life on Earth feels that way.

Another campus is on lockdown we drop our kids off at school anyway or we walk

our neighbors kids to school because their parents are too afraid to leave the house,

families gather for sacred prayer and gunmen are in the bushes anti-semitism

again A million people are homeless after floods in Asia.

Sudan is facing the world's largest humanitarian crisis, and we hardly ever hear about it.

Violence in Gaza and Ukraine continues, and madmen in positions of power spew

lies and hate, taking what they want and then trying to cover it up.

We keep driving. even as the lights go out blind into the dark what else can we do?

Today is the fourth and final Sunday of Advent, this season of waiting and preparing

for the salvation that is promised.

And while our assigned gospel reading wants to move us ahead a few days to the

birth of Jesus, reading these headlines, it feels right to stay with the ache of Advent.

The how long, O Lord, Psalms, the prophecies, strange and unfamiliar and mesmerizing

in their otherworldly visions.

It's right to acknowledge this darkness and

to plead restore us show

us the light of your countenance and we shall be saved if you've come by my

office in recent weeks you've probably noticed that i've inherited a cactus

it's an overgrown twisty thorny thing that i've wedged between my desk and the loveseat.

And at the top of each of these long thorny trunks, shiny green leaves sprout

in pairs around tiny delicate pink flowers.

And they move, these leaves and flowers.

They turn toward the light from the window.

You've probably seen this in your houseplants or in the aptly named sunflowers in your backyard.

Perhaps this is how we are saved Like plants The light appears And we move toward it.

It's also translated smile. O God, restore us and smile on us so that we may be saved.

I remember being told when my babies were smiling their very first smiles that

those smiles were just physical reflexes, not signs of any emotion.

But recent science has questioned that, actually, suggesting that early smiles

are imitative, that the babies are learning happiness by imitating.

Babies can imitate smiles, scientists say, as early as within the first 36 hours of their lives.

One study found that new mothers looked at their 16-hour-old babies 80% of the

time and smiled at them 34% of the time, as if we needed a study to tell us that.

Within the first month of life, nearly all babies who have been smiled at learn to smile back.

So perhaps this is how we are saved. God smiles at us, and eventually we learn to smile back.

Restore us, O Lord God of hosts, show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.

It's in Jesus, of course, the Son of God, that God smiles at us,

that we see the face of God shining in our world.

In just a few days, when we do get to Christmas, we'll read those familiar words

about Jesus from the first chapter of John.

The true light which enlightens everyone was coming into the world.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen His glory,

the glory as of a Father's only Son, full of grace and truth.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

In Jesus, we see the light and glory of God shining on us,

smiling at us, and more than that, in Jesus, God becomes skin and bones,

blood and water, infusing our humanity with divinity,

beginning this process of healing all the stuff of the earth.

In Jesus, finally the image of the invisible God took on flesh,

and all we who bear the image of God saw, finally, what we were made to be.

Trappist monk thomas merton speaks of this in

his poem the victory make ready for the face that speaks like lightning he says

make ready for the christ to smile like lightning sets free the song of everlasting

glory that now sleeps in your paper flesh like dynamite.

Christ shines on us, and we see what we were made for, and it obliterates all

that is false and fading, leaving only the glory of God.

This is why Jesus could say both, I am the light of the world,

and you are the light of the world, because the face of God has shone on us in Christ.

Restore us, O Lord God of hosts Show the light of your countenance and we shall be saved,

Today is not only the fourth Sunday of Advent It's also the winter solstice

The day of the year in which we have the fewest minutes of daylight The longest night,

In this moment we're looking to Christmas But we must be looking to more than

Christmas because Christmas comes every year and our world is still dark.

So we're looking to Christmas, but we're also looking for that promised coming again.

Sometimes I've found it hard to believe, this idea that salvation means that

there is a kingdom coming,

that there is life after death, that everything wrong will be made right,

that a new heaven and earth are real and not just a bedtime story.

But if our hopes for the second coming are false, if there is nothing more than

this world, how can we bear it?

How can we bear to look straight on at a world like this one,

heavy with so much pain and injustice and inequity, which, despite our best

efforts, we can't seem to end.

How can we bear only glimmers of reflected light without hoping for more?

Waiting for this second coming, for a world in which justice and mercy meet,

well, it feels like the longest season, the darkest night, a world where it's

always winter and never Christmas.

But the light has come. We see it shining through the dark fir branches even now.

And the light will come again.

So this week we pray. Restore us, O Lord God of hosts.

Show us the light of your countenance, and like plants, like babies,

like image bearers in paper flesh, we shall be saved.

The homily was offered by the Rev. Amy Peterson. Musical contributions were

performed by Dr. Kevin Seal.

Introduction and closing reflections were shared by the Rev. Amy Peterson.

Sermon audio was prepared by Nanette Popa. Production was guided by Karen Marie Frederiksen