Isaiah 21: 1-4, Romans 13:11-12

Dawn or Dusk thinking?

Both Isaiah and Romans paint a picture of the dawning if a new age.  As such they are perfect Advent passages.  We go into a new church year today, having left behind ordinary time for the expectation of the Christmas season.  It s not completely clear what the authors of the texts were really thinking about the new age that was coming, but chances are they thought it was coming very soon.  To Paul the day is near and to the author starting to write the words of the book of the prophet Isaiah there was a clear image of peace coming to the earth or their part of the earth: swords would be turned into plowshares.  So at first glance the Bible texts present us with “dawn thinking.” Something wonderful is about to happen.  In Paul’s case we see a call to preparation woven into the verses. We are supposed to take on the “armor of light.” As in Isaiah there is a kind of warrior imagery.  We have to get ready.  When you really think through that, you could easily become very aware of the fact that as an age is about to be born, another age is fading.  We feel differently about that than the Hebrews and Christians of millennia ago.  Isaiah echoed the hope of a people that was born out of desperation of “a small and vulnerable nation that was trapped between mighty empires.”(Hardy Kim, Christian Century, November 27, 2013).  Paul was writing to the embattled leaders of a tiny new faith living in the capital of the greatest empire the world had ever known, ants under the feet of a great elephant.  They welcomed the dusk of their time.  What was to come was not better. This is not us. We live in the capital of the most powerful state of the richest and most powerful country the world has ever known.  We are not going to be so happy about our time ending.  We face the dusk of the US as the dominant nation, the dusk of the Church as powerful force in society and the dusk of our natural world as we have known it due to global warming and weirding.  You and I don’t really want a new dawn, we want a never-ending or at least an extended dusk.  This is true of our personal lives too.  We kind of like it here! We want to extend our lives as long as possible, even though it comes at huge emotional and financial costs.  So the new dawn the Bible speaks about, of a new life beyond, of a new kingdom, hey, that may be great, but how about this dusk of this present day?  I remember riding in a mini-bus many years ago in Thailand and traveling at dusk from the seaside to the capital. Because we were heading west it turned out the sunset kept being extended and some of you may have noticed that in the tropics sunrise and sunset happen much more quickly than elsewhere. Dusk was extended.  The sunset was enjoyed longer. Of course more and more we have a different understanding of dusk and dawn.

A Canadian astronaut shared his experiences of months in the International space station. He would see a new dawn and dusk every ninety minutes.  He said he would catch as many of them as he could.  What a different way of viewing, what a different understanding of time?  A rapid succession of sunsets and sunrises. We can fly from Asia to the U.S. and see the same sunset we saw in Asia hours before in the US after a twelve hour flight on the same day.

Of course, friends, we all know dusk and dawn are connected.  When we walk to the American river and as we near it this time of year, the stench of rotting fish meets our nostrils.  The salmon have reached the end of their dusk.  Yet in that water their bodies leave nutrients for other fish, for birds, for the whole ecosystem. More importantly eggs have been fertilized and a whole new generation of salmon will soon flourish and find their way out the Golden Gate.   Dusk and dawn are connected.  This, friends, is also the great message of our Christian faith.  Without faith all we do is extend our lives and make the dusk longer and maybe give a new generation a chance to flourish even longer than us. But without faith, for us personally there is no dawn.  There is only the day and the dusk of the day.  So with faith there is the confidence of the dawn. There will be a new world although its shape we will know very little about.  There will be joy and peace and birth and new energy.  Everyone should have that hope.  Christian thinking is dawn thinking, but it has consequences for how we live the dusk of our times.  Do we live mindlessly, selfishly, inconsiderately, without a sense of stewardship or will we live with eyes wide open, hearts wide open, arms wide open?  If it is the latter, the river will open up for us to the sea. Our global society may even experience a new dawn itself.

Friends, we talked about Philomena, the Irish woman who had to face her dawn in order to live her dusk well, her companion who had to face the dusk of his career and find a dawn and the four British secret service women in the Bletchley Circle who wanted their country to thrive in a post-war  dawn by facing the dusk of another era.  May we at Advent hopefully face the dawn our faith provides while living responsibly, caringly and joyfully in our time. Thanks be to God.