Advent 3 - Isaiah 61

Most of you know by now that I was not raised as a Christian. The exception was Christmas. Once a year, starting right after Thanksgiving, our home began to transform. Lights went up, the tree was decorated, cookies flowed like water, my dad set up a little village of ceramic houses on a cotton snow field. We looked forward to Christmas. Really, we started celebrating Christmas before December 1, and stretched it out as long as we could. It was bad luck to take the tree down before New Year’s. We didn’t talk a whole lot about God or Jesus during that time, though they were mentioned. But we talked a lot about joy, about mystery, about light coming into dark places. To understand Christmas in my childhood, you have to understand Christmas in my father’s childhood.
My dad grew up in an alcoholic home. His father was a binge drinker who was often abusive, mostly emotionally, but sometimes physically as well. His mother, though loving, was not able to shield her six children from her husband’s abuse. Eleven months out of the year, my father spent time ducking and hiding, developing coping mechanisms and figuring out how to get out of the way. One of his favorite ways to escape, once he was old enough, was to get on his bike and ride. It was on these rides, he says now, that he most experienced grace, in the ability to find out who he was beyond the confines of the family’s dysfunction.
The only other time that things let up was Christmas. Though there was still drinking, there were also lots of people around. The number of grown-ups in the house around the holidays meant that there were buffers to my grandfather’s moods. There were aunts and cousins and friends whom he wanted to impress, and who could distract him. For the time around Christmas, their father was on his best behavior, and my dad could relax and enjoy an almost normal family life.
One consequence of life in that household was that for about 11 months a year, it was pretty difficult for my dad to believe in God. The family went to church, where he heard about God, but he didn’t really see much evidence of God in his day-to-day life. And unfortunately the church he attended did not do much to help. But for about a month each year, and when he was able to get away on his bike, my dad could hear the words of Isaiah and believe that there was such a thing as a God who would send “good news to the oppressed, bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty to the captives, release to the prisoners, and comfort those who mourn.” At those times, my dad could imagine what it would mean to “greatly rejoice, to exult, to be clothed in the garment of salvation, covered in the robe of righteousness.”
Many in the world today are skeptical of what we confess: that our God chose to be born into the world, chose to live here among sinners, and then chose to die on the cross for the sake of each and every one of those sinners. Given the condition of the world, I can understand their skepticism. Some days, I even share it. But at this time of year, as darkness closes in around us, we have some time to reflect on how mystery touches the world, as the year begins to turn, and the earth begins to tilt back toward the light. In this time of the year, we have the opportunity to speak to one another, and even to the skeptics, about mystery, about light coming into dark places, about joy. We have the opportunity to arise, greatly rejoicing in the Lord, and in so doing, share a bit of the good news ourselves.
In 1983, a friend asked my dad to help find a bike for her son for Christmas. She couldn’t afford a new one, so my dad pulled together some parts he found, and fixed them up. By the time he was done he had a handful of new bikes, including one for his friend’s son. Since then, he has delivered nearly 5000 bikes, including about 1000 to Africa and South America. He now has a workshop space downtown, and coordinates with local and international agencies and organizations. The Christmas bikes have become a ministry of his church, with organized work parties and donations throughout the year. When he talks about this ministry, he says that this is his way of sharing with others the moments of God that he experienced in his childhood. To put words in his mouth, this is his way of rising up and rejoicing, of exulting God, by sharing with others a foretaste of the feast to come, by allowing the kingdom some room to break in.
I see in my father’s life an example of how God works. Obviously things were hard for my dad growing up. And he still deals with the results of that broken family, as do his siblings, and even some of us in my generation. But that is not proof, as the skeptics would say, that God is not present. Rather the moments of escape, of finding ourselves in spite of the world around us, are proof that God is present, even in our darkest moments. In those moments, God is at work in us to redeem the world, one life at a time, by making room for light to come into dark places. And then God moves us, one life at a time, to share that light with others.
The words we hear today from Isaiah are the very words that Jesus spoke in the synagogue in Nazareth. God, who spoke through the prophets, who was born to us in a stable, and who comes to us again and again, year after year, and day after day, spoke these very words, and claimed their purpose as God’s own. And year after year, day after day, God works in us and in our lives, renewing us through our baptism, forgiving our sins and offering us a moment of grace, a time of joy, a touch of mystery, and a glimpse of light coming into dark places. Each of us has experienced it. And for each of us God finds a way to move us so that we too may rejoice in it, may share it with others, may arise to meet God in the light.