00:00:00.000 - 00:00:30.760

The following sermon is preached by Reverend Dr. Bruce Wheeler Thielman. His sermon is entitled "Starfire in the midst of storm." Let us continue in our worship by giving attention to this reading from the Gospel according to Luke, the second chapter.

00:00:30.760 - 00:00:45.040

In that region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were filled with fear.

00:00:45.040 - 00:01:01.300

And the angel said to them, "Be not afraid, for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all people. For to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you.

00:01:01.300 - 00:01:25.760

You will find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger." And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly hosts praising God and saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased." When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let us

00:01:25.760 - 00:01:40.640

go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened which the Lord has made known to us." And they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph and the babe lying in a manger. And when they saw it, they made known the saying which had been told them concerning

00:01:40.640 - 00:02:05.360

this child, and all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. But Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen as it had been told them.

00:02:05.360 - 00:02:39.120

And may God bless to us this and all of the other readings from his holy word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. No one really disputes its importance.

00:02:39.120 - 00:03:11.520

The psychologist Abraham Maslow said that hope is the underlying philosophy of all values. Tillich, the theologian, said that hope is the conviction which gives life ultimate meaning. The philosopher Houston Smith says that hope is the basic structure for an adequate life. The agnostic Marcel says that hope is the very stuff of which the soul is made.

00:03:11.520 - 00:03:42.440

Von Braun, the scientist, said that hope is as basic as breathing. And Cervantes, the brilliant writer, says where there is life, there is hope. And yet there are many hopeless people about, and their lives are walking tragedies. You have perhaps heard of some incidents coming out of some primitive tribe of an individual

00:03:42.440 - 00:04:04.400

who is hexed, cursed by the witch doctor. Some bone is pointed at him and some threat is muttered. And this individual then goes off alone and separated and proceeds to die. The anthropological records are full of such instances, not because the witch doctor has

00:04:04.400 - 00:04:22.560

any special power, not because there's any magic in the bone or in the muttering, but because the one who dies is so convinced of the power of the witch doctor that he or she gives up hope. And when hope is gone, death comes.

00:04:22.560 - 00:04:40.440

When there is surrender, there is despair. Or move it into our own time and climb. A woman from Wisconsin writes these words at just this season of the year. "I do not enjoy Christmas.

00:04:40.440 - 00:04:58.300

I find no pleasure in it. I used to look forward to it, but I see it now as a time of deadly obligation. I used to listen for my husband's car when he pulled into the parking lot, but now he is deceased and the kids are gone, and every day is an essay of tedium, and Christmas is

00:04:58.300 - 00:05:26.280

especially a time of despair. I have lost all hope," she writes. "I am ill, and I may get well, but I doubt that it will happen." She of course doesn't believe in witch doctors, but the hex of hopelessness is upon her.

00:05:26.280 - 00:05:43.640

Harvey Cox, the noted theologian and sociologist, says that there are millions of people who are stumbling through life without hope. Those who had hope in the '60s have now surrendered to the status quo. Though you do not hear much about the death of God theology anymore, there are many people

00:05:43.640 - 00:06:03.960

who look at the way life is going and who live as if God is dead. What else, they say, can explain the way things are? A rampant consumerism testifies to hopelessness. Eat, drink, be merry, spend all you have, for tomorrow you die.

00:06:03.960 - 00:06:35.200

And what is the drug epidemic but the pitiful state of many who, for a brief moment or for all that's left of their time, try to lose themselves in some oblivion, utterly without hope. Viktor Frankl, the noted founder of the school of psychotherapy called Logotherapy, was in

00:06:35.200 - 00:06:51.080

a Nazi concentration camp for some years. And he tells of one man in the camp who was kept alive by his desire to protect his wife. His great goal was to bring his wife through the camp experience. He would slip her his food.

00:06:51.080 - 00:07:01.360

He would defend her. Sometimes he was beaten and terribly mistreated because of his efforts to protect his life. And he gave himself totally to that protection. This was his goal.

00:07:01.360 - 00:07:17.600

This was his hope to get her through. And then she died. And within 24 hours, he had died. And when Frankl, at the command of the Nazis, performed an autopsy on the body, he discovered

00:07:17.600 - 00:07:36.800

that the man was full of cancer, that he should have died a long time before. He was kept alive by his hope. And when he lost hope, he lost life. I've seen that same thing, not, thank God, in a concentration camp, but in the pastorate.

00:07:36.800 - 00:07:53.320

People who lose hope and are paralyzed. These are the hopeless. And they see no promise in life. But in addition to the hopeless, there are also the hoping.

00:07:53.320 - 00:08:11.520

And by the hoping, I believe, I'm speaking of those who have given themselves over to what are basically false promises. They live a kind of buoyant optimism. They argue that change is inevitable and just as inevitably it is going to be changed for

00:08:11.520 - 00:08:24.040

the good. They see a certain advance in the course of the human experience and so everything is going to come out all right. Have you seen the Broadway show, Annie, where these pathetic little orphans caught in a

00:08:24.040 - 00:08:45.240

bleak orphan asylum get together and in the midst of their misery sing every day the song, tomorrow, tomorrow, the sun will come out tomorrow. That kind of wishful thinking isn't hoping, it's built on illusion. It's like those great balloons you see in the Thanksgiving Day parade, full of air but

00:08:45.240 - 00:09:04.520

little reality. This is the kind of thing that captures the imagination of the devotee of the chain letter, who gets the letter and takes seriously the warning, don't break the chain or you'll be like that plumber from Pacoima who on the same day lost his job, his union card, and

00:09:04.520 - 00:09:33.920

his wife. And if you keep the chain going, then you'll be like that seamstress from Cincinnati who, while pumping gas into her '47 Buick, saw there on the sidewalk before her $6,732.95. To put it very bluntly, that kind of hope, the pap of that kind of positive thinking,

00:09:33.920 - 00:09:50.880

it's not enough. It doesn't cut it. May I see the hands of all of those of you who can identify Sadako? Sadako was a little Japanese girl who lived in Hiroshima.

00:09:50.880 - 00:10:04.840

She went through the bombing there. She received terrible burns but they thought she was going to live and then the signs of radiation sickness came. And when the sickness came, she pledged herself in the short time that she had left to making

00:10:04.840 - 00:10:19.220

a thousand paper cranes. Now to the Japanese, the crane is the symbol of peace. And she was folding a thousand paper cranes to send out to people in the world to promote peace.

00:10:19.220 - 00:10:40.640

She managed to finish 644 of them and then she died. And a Japanese poet wrote a five-line poem about her. You yourself must fold the 645th. You must fold all the other paper cranes.

00:10:40.640 - 00:11:01.520

Never let their fluttering wings be still. Never let them die but see them winging, winging, winging. That's a beautiful thought, isn't it? But you see, none of you ever heard of Sadako.

00:11:01.520 - 00:11:23.520

You've heard of Vietnam and Cambodia and Tibet and El Salvador and Nicaragua and Afghanistan and Angola and the West Bank and Lebanon and Ethiopia and Libya and Panama and Romania and all of those other atrocities that have happened since Hiroshima but you never heard of Sadako.

00:11:23.520 - 00:11:45.720

We want to be thankful for the efforts of this little girl and hold her in very tender memory of course but the fact of the matter is that paper cranes don't stop wars. To believe that they do is to commit oneself to the idea of human perfectibility and there is no evidence to support such a contention.

00:11:45.720 - 00:12:04.360

None whatever. It's to believe that humankind can pull itself up by its own bootstraps when the fact of the matter is humankind has no boots but stands naked and ashamed. It's to rest on the thesis that every day in every way things are getting better and

00:12:04.360 - 00:12:26.960

better and they're not. There has been more blood spilled in the 20th century than in all of the centuries of recorded history before it. Rene Descartes, the great French philosopher and mathematician, set himself the goal of

00:12:26.960 - 00:12:47.680

determining a set of mathematical formulae by which one could establish a morality and an ethical system and a spiritual value system which would be what man would need to live successfully. As the result of his researches, he developed analytic geometry which is a great gift to

00:12:47.680 - 00:13:13.320

humankind but as far as creating any science by which he could determine morality or ethics or spirituality, he failed utterly and so has everyone else who's ever tried to do such a thing. The hopeless despair and those who are the hoping who give themselves to false hopes

00:13:13.320 - 00:13:40.280

are not much better off. There's little that separates the one from the other. And then there are the hopeful and the hopeful are those who rely on the promises of God. Let me say something to you that may at first sound rather shocking.

00:13:40.280 - 00:14:01.680

I believe that the hideous state of our planet confirms my belief in God. Why? Well, I believe that God's world is subject to God's law. Now if the world breaks God's law as it has and if nothing were to happen as the result

00:14:01.680 - 00:14:24.600

of that, then that would testify to me that there was either no God or he was not at all concerned about what was transpiring here. But the fact that when we on earth break the law of God and then suffer because of it proves to me the reality not only of his making us but being involved in the living of our lives.

00:14:24.600 - 00:14:43.320

Earth's agony doesn't deny the existence of God, it affirms it. You see, God has established a moral order and those who break that order break themselves against it. It is not that he reaches down and breaks them, not so at all.

00:14:43.320 - 00:15:08.400

They do it to themselves. And add to these truths this one, that the God who established the moral order which we understand to be the order of the universe, that God must be a good God because he cares and he loves and the truth that he gives us in the pages of scripture is a truth which

00:15:08.400 - 00:15:27.320

can be trusted. His promises are sure and dependable. So while the hopeless lean on despair and the hoping lean on delusion, the hopeful, they rest on the divine.

00:15:27.320 - 00:15:52.520

God says the wages of sin is death and the result of his saying that is that a world that's intent on killing itself is dying. But God also says in me is life and light and the result of that is that all those who give themselves with hope and in hope to God, they know what joy is.

00:15:52.520 - 00:16:13.360

They stand with Paul when he wrote, "We rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God." There was a time many centuries ago when a man named Isaiah stood in his little country and looked at the world about him. It was a time of great tumult and disarray much as we live in today.

00:16:13.360 - 00:16:33.360

Tiglath-Pileser was leading the Assyrian armies on a march across the fertile crescent. Rezin was leading the Syrian people down to dusty death. Merdeth-Baladin was planting the seeds of the Babylonian empire which would impress itself upon the Mediterranean with ferocious cruelty.

00:16:33.360 - 00:16:49.240

The 23rd dynasty sat on the Pharaoh's throne in Egypt, Aluf and Dostir. Romulus and Remus were founding the city of Rome. The Mycenaean empire with its king Agamemnon had passed away and the city-states were coming into existence in Greece.

00:16:49.240 - 00:17:08.200

The flags and symbols of different nations and times were rising and falling all about a little Israel and it was the tiniest pawn on the checkerboard of history at that time. And it was a rotten pawn. It was full of paganism and unbelief and the sacrifice of children and abysmal poverty

00:17:08.200 - 00:17:28.320

while some lived in sinful luxury. And Isaiah looking at the world about and looking at his own land and being spoken through by the Holy Spirit of God wrote, "I built a vineyard on a fertile hill. I digged it and I cleared it of stones and I planted it with choice vines and I built

00:17:28.320 - 00:17:57.640

a watchtower and a wine vat for its produce. But when I looked, I saw that it yielded wild and stinking grapes." That was the state of that time and as much the state of our own. But Isaiah did not surrender to despair and he did not give himself to some vain positivism.

00:17:57.640 - 00:18:21.040

Instead of that, he turned the telescopic prophetic insight which was his on a time centuries hence when a star would rise above a Judean hillside. And looking at that star he wrote, "For unto us a child is born and unto us a son is given and the government will be upon his shoulder and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor,

00:18:21.040 - 00:18:36.420

Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." And many years came before that star was rising. But in all that time he remained true to that hope and those who walked with him remained true to it also.

00:18:36.420 - 00:18:51.760

There was a wilderness of years to be crossed before Bethlehem just as there was a wilderness of 85 miles for Joseph and Mary to cross for Bethlehem. Just as there was the wilderness of the Arabian desert for the Magi to cross as they came to the manger of the king.

00:18:51.760 - 00:19:21.740

But in all of the wilderness the hope endured because the promise was that the God who made it and made us and sustains us and gives to us the direction so necessary for living had come into the midst of us not to give us good advice of which we have too much but instead to give us power for salvation.

00:19:21.740 - 00:19:35.520

In Krakow, Poland during the Second World War the cathedral basement was being used as a field hospital. There was only one doctor there and a handful of nurses and many, many hurt and dreadfully harmed soldiers.

00:19:35.520 - 00:19:58.120

And as the doctor worked by candlelight moving through the wounded men he noticed one man who was apart over in a corner and he took his candle and he began to approach that soldier there in the corner and as he drew near he could tell he was dead. The body was still and the pallor was white with death.

00:19:58.120 - 00:20:24.700

As he reached down to take the sheet he noticed that the hand of the young soldier was wounded and as he pulled the sheet aside he stepped back in amazement. You see there had been much splendid statuary in the cathedral upstairs and during the days of the onslaught they'd taken it all down and wrapped it in sheets and put it in the

00:20:24.700 - 00:20:44.260

basement and when he pulled aside the sheet he revealed a crucifix. And falling back he said, "Christ is here." Was only a whisper but others heard it and it echoed like some pebble dropped into a pool sends its reverberations out to the shorelines.

00:20:44.260 - 00:21:03.760

It echoed to the bare cold walls of the basement. Christ is here. And that you see is the truth of Christmas and that is what keeps Christians hope filled. That the wonderful counselor and the mighty God and the everlasting Father and the Prince

00:21:03.760 - 00:21:26.140

of Peace took upon himself all the hardness of the world, took the hardness into his hands, took the hardness into his feet, took the hardness into his side, took the hardness onto his brow, took the hardness onto his back, took the hardness into his heart until it broke, that great heart broke.

00:21:26.140 - 00:22:04.540

And in it all, loved, and after it all, rose and with his rising fulfilled all his promises. His promises that in the end light will vanquish darkness and right will triumph over wrong and truth will defeat untruth and mercy will rise above cruelty and justice will put down injustice and life will be resurrected above death and hope will stand above and beyond

00:22:04.540 - 00:22:34.380

hopelessness. And that's what brings us here on Christmas Eve. Nothing is ready for tomorrow except maybe some corner of our hearts. So we come here to think about Isaiah's star and Christ's star and our star and the flame

00:22:34.380 - 00:22:56.500

of hope. Back in 1956, when I was doing graduate study at St. Andrew's University in Scotland, I love that town because it's on the edge of the North Sea and I love the sea. I love the heave and the halt and the hurl of it.

00:22:56.500 - 00:23:12.060

I love Homer's pictures of it and Debussy's music about it and Conrad's words written about the sea. And I walked out one night onto the Edward II Pier, which juts like a great stone finger out into the North Sea.

00:23:12.060 - 00:23:38.340

And the sting of the spray was on me and the sound of the sea, the deep diapason of the sea and the wind hounded waves smashed on the pier at my feet. And I was very much disturbed. For you see, it was just at that time, 1956, October, that those young Hungarians were

00:23:38.340 - 00:24:00.660

revolting in that land and trying to throw off the communist yoke. And you will remember how they were being run over and shot down by Russian armors in the streets of those Hungarian cities. And the whole world listened while those Hungarian students spoke over radio stations, clandestine

00:24:00.660 - 00:24:19.200

stations, the voices getting weaker and weaker and the headlines ran red with blood and the whole world's face was filled with tears. And I was far away from home and alone and hurt because of what was happening to young people just like myself.

00:24:19.200 - 00:24:57.980

And I was afraid. And in the midst of it all, I looked up and I saw scintillating in that cold, crystalline air a star, star fire in the midst of storm. And as I looked at it, I remembered that other star, that star which speaks to us of the

00:24:57.980 - 00:25:26.540

presence of God in Christ in our lives, that star which calls us to the splendor of service, that star which offers us the intimacy of communion with a Christ who prays for us, that star that calls us to invite others to the joy that we know, that star which gives to us the sweetness of hope, the joy star, star fire in the midst of storm.

00:25:26.540 - 00:26:08.180

And that is why Christmas claims us. The God whose dream we are puts into the storms of our lives which are altogether of human manufacture, puts into the storms of our lives no matter when or where or why they come, no matter how long they last, always, he puts there star fire, hope.

00:26:08.180 - 00:26:46.620

And the angel said to them, "Be not afraid, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy. For to you is born this day a Savior who is Christ the Lord." Let us pray.

00:26:46.620 - 00:27:27.320

O God, on this night of night, when we are in the midst of the greatest mystery of all the ages, when time itself stands still and memories parade across our minds and nostalgia claims our spirits and the ghosts of loved ones lost awhile walk again with us hand in hand, on this night which is so different from other nights, this hallowed and this

00:27:27.320 - 00:27:54.540

gracious time, on this night, grant that we might see the star. And seeing it, never, ever be without hope. We pray our prayer in the baby's name. Amen.

00:27:54.540 - 00:28:04.540

[BLANK_AUDIO]