Ringing in Hope, Ringing in the Light

I love trivia.   I don’t just love it because it makes me a wicked trivial pursuit player, though it does.  I love it because a little known fact can change the way I see the world.  One piece of trivia can cause me to see things I always took for granted in a whole new light. 

Take these handbells here.   Did you know in the middle ages, we baptizedthe bells?   Folks believed that once a bell got baptized, it could ward off evil spirits.  So when people died, they had a ringer come in and ring the bell at the bedside as the person passed.   Otherwise the evil spirits that hung around would seize the person’s soul as they died.  The bigger the bell you rang, the better; bigger bells kept the evil spirits further away. 

That’s why people started hangingbells in the doorways of their homes.   They thought that evil spirits were always hanging around outside just waiting to get in.   So if you rung the bell when you visited someone, you’d chase them away.  You’d both protect yourself and them too from the evil spirits lurking about.   That’s why even today we have doorbells in our houses.   After hearing that, will you ever take for granted your doorbell again?     

And I’m sure glad that we had a lot of bell-ringing today.  We need it.  Our world needs it. In the last months, we’ve seen how evil can hit us anywhere.  Death and mayhem can come in ways and to places we could never have imagined.  We live in a world that can be very dark.  

But in the face of such darkness, Christmas comes with a profound response.  That’s why we celebrate it at this time of year.  We don’t know when Jesus was born.   Our best guess doesn’t lead us to December, but maybe the fall or the spring, but definitely not the winter.   So why do we celebrate his birth now?   As Christianity spread, it connected to people who had other traditions, ones often rooted in the seasons.  So, folks would hold a celebration called Yule around the time of the winter solstice, the time when the nights were longest, and they days shortest.   They did so to remember that even in the dead of winter, soon would come the new life of spring.   What better time to celebrate Jesus’ coming than then, early Christian leaders thought, a time when darkness hangs so heavy.  What better time could there be to remember the coming of the light of God’s love to the world.    So around the year 300, Christians set Christmas in the darkest days of the year.

Still in the midst of these days of terrorism and uncertainty, it can be hard to see that light at times.  Fear can hold us instead of hope. How do you not let the fear take hold?  How do you live in the hope and confidence of the good news that proclaims no evil shall defeat Jesus’s love?  In these words, words written in the midst of darker days than these, God shows us the way.  Let’s hear what God has to say. 

Zephaniah 3:14-20

As Zephaniah shares this incredible song of joy, his nation has suffered under the two worst kings in their entire history, Amon and Mannaseh.    And Zephaniah knew just how bad they had been.  He saw it up close.  He was a member of the royal family.  If you read the rest of the book, you’ll see how angry their abuses made him.  Yet here he closes his writings with exuberant joy?  What’s up with that?

Zephaniah understood that these evil kings hadn’t written the end of the story.  God was writing that.   That’s why Zephaniah can write a song of joy even after the calamitous rule of two kings.  He knew that somehow, some way God will work it out.   The darkness would not win.   God’s light would shine through.  And as crazy as that sounded, he was right.  After the reign of those two horrible kings, God brought to the throne, a young boy, named Josiah.  Josiah became, after King David, Israel’s greatest king.

But Zephaniah wasn’t simply pointing to Josiah.  Zephaniah was looking further ahead than that.   Zephaniah was telling us that, even when it may not seem that way, evil is dying.   The light of love is spreading.   God is making what is broken whole.    Zephaniah was looking ahead to the One who would bring that light of love like no one else, to the coming of the one whose light would shine in the darkness as no other.   

And indeed here we are, 2000 years later, looking back at that good news that Zephaniah could only look towards.   And indeed in spite of this world’s brokenness and pain, that light still shines.   Indeed it has changed the world.  Too often in our world, we hear all the bad news.  But in reality this year has been the best yet in human history.   37% of the world used to be desperately poor.  Now less than 10% is.  Violent crime is at at its lowest level likely ever with 600,000 less violent crimes in this country alone than 20 years ago.  Today more kids are in school than ever.   Polio has been virtually eradicated, and measles outbreaks have been cut by 2/3s saving 17 million lives.  And these transformations happened because of the transforming value that followers of Jesus brought to the world.   Today, what began in an obscure Roman province in a small town among a poor family now captures the world.   If God could in that small event change the world so profoundly, do you really think some hate-filled extremists in the Middle East are stressing him out?  

So in those moments, when you sense the darkness rushing in, the fear rising up, the discouragement seeping into your soul, ring the bells.  Let the light shine in.  Christmas is coming.    And when you see the darkness that lies in your own heart, don’t let that deter you either.   As the great song-writer Leonard Cohen put it:

Ringthe bells that still can ring,

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.

When you see the cracks in you, and in our world, remember that in those cracks the light of Jesus shines.    His perfect love will cast out your fear.   His faithful presence will make room in you for hope and joy.  His light will overwhelm your darkness.  And you will experience that hope that no circumstance can take away.   You will know that God’s love will win, because that love has won you. But Jesus didn’t simply come to let the light shine in.  Jesus came so that together we might shine the light out.  The more we let Jesus work, the brighter the light of his love will shine into the dark places around us, turning our world from violence toward peace, from vengeance towards compassion, from death towards life.   That is the call of Christmas, to let that light shine, to let it shine brighter and brighter until by God’s grace, there lives only the light of God’s love. 

Ring the bells that still can ring,

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in

In the name of the God who first loved us, who gave his life for us, and who is doing more in us and in our world than we could ever ask or dream or imagine. Amen.