It’s a light display that puts Clark Griswold’s to shame and landed a family a spot in the Guinness World Records, I read at some online news outlet.[1] Tim and Grace Gay, together with their three children, of the Hudson Valley, proudly hold the record for the most lights on a residential property. The family earned the title in 2014 when they hung 601,736 lights around their home, spanning eight miles of extension cords, in a display of spirals, stars, animals, snowmen and icicles – synchronized to a playlist of 250 songs. They beat their own record [last] year when they set up a dazzling 686,526 lights on their property.[2]
We light one candle. And this year we do it again in the company of folks gathering for vigils. Once again the images have come across our screens of people holding a single candle in their hands, or leaving it at an improvised memorial in a parking lot people mourning the violent deaths of a janitor working his shift at a Virginia Walmart, a 40-year-old woman returning home to Colorado Springs for the holidays, and a young man at his girlfriend’s side, watching her friend perform in a drag show. Three college football players. A mother who worked to help foster children. One bartender who remembered your drink and another who danced. White and Black, gay and straight, old and young. Fourteen people who did not know their last Thanksgiving was already behind them. Tuesday’s rampage, in which six people were killed in a Walmart in Chesapeake, Va., was the 33rd mass shooting in November alone, and the nation’s 606th this year.[3]
We light one candle. One candle to contain our grief, our anger, our solidarity, and, yes, our hope. The first word from scripture we hear in Advent is spoken by the prophet Isaiah. In days to come the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be raised above the hills, and all the nations shall stream to it. They shall come – not to conquer, not to kill, plunder, and destroy as in days past, no – they come to learn God’s ways and walk in God’s paths. And they come not because they have been defeated and forced to pay tribute and to submit to the gods of the victors, no – they come willingly, uncoerced, eager to learn. Nations come to Jerusalem to let God’s justice be their justice, and under the Lord’s governance they are finally free to beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. The sound of Advent on this first Sunday is the sound of people coming from the ends of the earth making their way to the city of God. It is the beautiful noise of their chatter and their shouts, their stories and songs, their laughter — and above the happy clamor, the clanging of hammers falling on anvils, ringing across the land, bright and clear as bells. Swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, tanks into school buses and war ships into bridges, fighter jets into bicycles and M16s into water pumps – every tool of destruction is being forged into a tool of shared life.
Hope wasn’t Isaiah’s first word, though. His first word was a clear-eyed description of what he saw when he looked around the city and the land: what stands out from just the first four verses of the book’s opening chapter are words like rebellion, iniquity, sinful, evil, corrupt, estranged – and it doesn’t stop there. The religious festivals have become a burden God is weary of bearing. The country lies desolate. The city is marked by injustice. Her silver has become dross, her wine is watered down, her princes are companions of thieves. Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not defend the orphan, and the widow’s cause does not come before them. The prophet’s first word is a long litany of indictments, line after line written with tears of grief and burning rage: “The strong shall become like tinder, and their work like a spark; they and their work shall burn together, with no one to quench them.”
Hope is not the first word the prophet utters. First come accusation and judgment and fiery conflagration, and then Isaiah abruptly stops. It’s as though he has picked up bits and pieces of a different tune, a song as old as creation and overflowing with the promise of newness. It’s like he must start over, because in the gloom of corruption and injustice in his beloved city, a heavenly light shines. And so he begins to speak of days to come, of a marvelous newness far beyond what current circumstances might suggest. He draws a wide horizon of hope, not because the citizens of Jerusalem suddenly changed their ways, but because God’s faithfulness is greater than our faithless ways.
Ruby Bridges was one of four children to integrate New Orleans public schools in 1960; she was the only black child to enter the William Frantz Elementary School that year. On her way to school, for days that turned into weeks and weeks that turned into months, this child had to brave angry mobs who were hurling threats and slurs at her. Every day, federal marshals walked with her to school and brought her home. At first, she attended school all by herself, because of a total boycott by white families. She sat alone in the classroom, and only one teacher overcame her own fear and taught her.
Robert Coles was a young psychiatrist working in New Orleans, and he volunteered to talk with Ruby to help her process the daily terror. A teacher told him, “I was standing in the classroom, looking out the window, and I saw Ruby coming down the street, with the federal marshals on both sides of her. The crowd was there, shouting, as usual. A woman spat at Ruby but missed; Ruby smiled at her. A man shook his fist at her. Ruby smiled. And then she walked up the steps, and she stopped and turned around and smiled one more time. You know what she told one of those marshals? She told him she prays for those people, the ones in that mob. She prays for them every night before going to sleep.”
Coles asked Ruby why she prayed for them. “I go to church every Sunday, and we’re told to pray for everyone, even the bad people, and so I do.” When the subject came up again she said, “They keep coming and saying the bad words. But my momma says they’ll get tired after a while and then they’ll stop coming. They’ll stay home. The minister came to our house and he said the same thing, and not to worry, and I don’t. The minister said God is watching and He won’t forget, because He never does. The minister says if I forgive the people, and smile at them and pray for them, God will keep a good eye on everything and He’ll be our protection.”
Coles asked her if she believed the minister was on the right track. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I’m sure God knows what’s happening. He’s got a lot to worry about; but there is bad trouble here, and He can’t help but notice. He may not rush to do anything, not right away. But there will come a day, like you hear in church.”[4]
Young Ruby looked at the people who harassed and assailed her, but her eyes were fixed on God’s promise. There is bad trouble here, and God can’t help but notice. He may not rush to do anything, not right away. But there will come a day.
There will come a day. Ruby had learned, young as she was, that the most important question to ask is not, “When?” but “Who?” The future doesn’t belong to the haters and harassers, but to the One who is coming. About that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.
When, no one knows, but we know the One who is coming is the same who has come and who is with us now. There is bad trouble here, but the future does not belong to the gun manufacturers and those who worship at the altar of the Second Amendment gods. The future belongs to the One who has made us his own and called us to walk in his paths. The future belongs to Jesus who lived fully for God’s reign and who entrusted himself completely to God’s faithfulness. Jesus died alone on a hill that looked nothing like the mountain of the house of the Lord. He died, scorned and taunted, surrounded by swords, pierced with a spear. And in the thick darkness of that Friday, the full depth of God’s commitment to Jesus and to us and to all of creation was revealed.
We didn’t start the fire in the forge where the nations will beat their swords into plowshares. God did by raising the crucified Jesus from the dead. John Calvin wrote,
A blessed resurrection is proclaimed to us – meantime we are surrounded by decay. We are called righteous – and yet sin lives in us. We hear of ineffable blessedness – but meantime we are here oppressed by infinite misery. We are promised abundance of all good things – yet we are rich only in hunger and thirst. What would become of us if we did not take our stand on hope, and if our hearts did not hasten beyond this world through the midst of the darkness upon the path illumined by the word and Spirit of God?[5]
What Calvin has in mind is not a faith that flees the world, but one that walks in it like Ruby Bridges did. A faith that sees clearly that there’s bad trouble here, like Isaiah did, and yet keeps its eyes on the horizon of God’s promises. The future doesn’t belong to the haters and harassers, but to him who fills all of creation with the light of his love. Come! Come let us walk in the light of the Lord!
[1] https://www.wvlt.tv/2021/12/14/familys-christmas-lights-breaks-their-own-guinness-world-record/
[2] https://www.mlive.com/news/2021/12/see-homes-guinness-world-record-setting-christmas-display-of-nearly-700k-lights.html
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/24/nyregion/shootings-virginia-walmart-club-q-thanksgiving.html
[4] Robert Coles, The Moral Life of Children (New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986), 22-24.
[5] John Calvin, quoted in Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 18-19.