Saturday, December 23, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Hill country solstice
Zechariah asked for a tablet and wrote, “John is the baby’s name.” Immediately his mouth was opened, his tongue freed, and he spoke blessing God. All these matters were discussed throughout the hill country.
On the day of winter solstice we visited Texas’ hill country with Mike and Diane, Miles and Jasper. We traveled down choked Austin highways to the edge of town, then outside town into the hill country, to Mike and Diane’s RV.
Getting to their 51 acres, we traveled up and down gravel roads through forests of cedar, maple, juniper and live oak, across a dammed up river into Christmas tree country. Mike pointed out a tree full of Texas vultures, 50 or more of them, hungry no doubt, watching for death on the ground. He showed us his giant birdhouse with its roof partially eaten away by raccoons. We talked about the wild hogs infesting his acreage, and his hopes of “eliminating” at least a couple of them this weekend with his friend from Dallas. Miles and Jasper put together Lego creatures on the kitchen table. I thought about the last days of Advent.
Lo, I will send you Elijah, the prophet, before the day of the Lord comes, the great and terrible day, to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with doom.
Philip Yancey writes about Advent, a time of dual anticipations:
Advent both remembers and anticipates. From the very beginning, the church has marked the season of Advent as a time to commemorate both Jesus’ birth and his promised return. We live out our days between already and not yet.
We drove out of Christmas Tree Land into the birthplace of LBJ, Johnson City, where each year millions and millions of holiday lights are brought to us by Pedernales Electric Cooperative, electricity for the farmers in the 1930’s made possible by Lyndon Johnson’s legislative genius and his compassion for the folks he grew up with. We ate BBQ and chicken fried steak, ice cream sundaes, drank lemonade and hot chocolate. Even the Blanco County courthouse was dripping with thousands of lights. After six pm all the lights came on, and we wandered through a fairyland under the magical trees, laughing and leaping and praising God.
Getting home I read Yancey’s thoughts about Advent, about Jesus, about light and dark:
John’s Gospel sets Jesus’ birth in a cosmic perspective, positioning him at the very moment of creation. “Without him nothing was made that has been made,” John declares. Yet the master artist who spanned the universe took on flesh and blood, and “moved into the neighborhood” (as The Message has it). Like a streak of light across the darkling sky, his life brought hope to all humanity, and especially to those who walk in darkness.
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it,” John writes. I pause to consider that he wrote these words after watching Jesus’ agonizing death, the martyrdom of his disciples, and the Romans’ ravaging of Jerusalem. But John has faith in a radiant future, and elsewhere he explains why: “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.”
Yancey, who camps in the mountains of Colorado near his home there, knows the power of darkness as the sun sets on a paradise where only his tent separates him from wilderness.
But it is light that extinguishes darkness, not the opposite. “We dare not underestimate the power of light,” he exclaims.
We never seem to run out of light. That, of course, has not always been true. And perhaps now it is too true. Yancey tells the story of Pastor Hanns Lilje in a Nazi prison camp on Christmas Eve, 1944, when he led a communion service for four in the dim light of a cell. Lilje later wrote:
It is possible for the candles and the lights to blind our eyes, so that we can no longer see the essential element in Christmas; but the people who ‘walk in darkness’ can perhaps see it better than all who see only the lights of earth.
We drove home in the dark, mostly sleepy while Mike stayed alert, back into the never-ending lights of Austin, grateful for the light but also craving the darkness of night, which on this solstice Thursday came the earliest of all the year.
It was a good day.
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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