So, one of the great Advent passages in scripture, a powerful start to the Christmas season, is Isaiah chapter 9. And it begins with words. It’s like a It’s like setting fire to dry kindling on a really dark night because it says, “Nevertheless, there’ll be no more gloom for those who were in distress.” There’ll be no more gloom for those who are in distress. And Isaiah 9, if you read the context of it, it’s a sharp contrast to Isaiah chapter 8 because there’s great darkness and gloom in Isaiah 8. And it’s both external and internal. There’s an external threat because uh God’s people had refused his gentle care of them. They had become idolatrous. They’d become blasphemous. So God was raising up the great war machine of the nation of Assyria to be the agents of his discipline in coming against the northern kingdom of Israel. And all of this is stated very beautifully and poetically. We read because this people has rejected the gently flowing waters of Shaloa. And Shaloa that’s just the peaceful gentle flowing stream that would be this the water supply for the holy city of Jerusalem. the place where God’s presence uh symbolically dwelt. It says, “Because this people has rejected the gently flowing waters of Shaloa, therefore the Lord is about to bring against them the mighty floodwaters of the river, mighty and many. The king of Assyria and all his glory. It will overflow all its channels, run over all its banks, and sweep on into Judah, swirling over it, passing through it, reaching up to the neck. Its outspread wings will cover the breadth of your land, oh Emanuel. And historically, that great power of Assyria did come. It pounced on northern Israel. It stripped the people of all their religious and cultural identity. You can read about that in second chapters, 2 Kings chapter 17. just a horrific devastation that eliminated that uh northern region of God’s people. But the deeper darkness, I think the broader gloom comes in the form of people who are then cut off from their roots and they went looking anywhere and everywhere for some meaning and purpose and transcendence. Their internal lostness, I think, was more consequential than the military defeat. Because the fading notes of Isaiah chapter 8 are these. When men tell you to consult mediums and spiritists who whisper and mutter, should not a people inquire of their God, why consult the dead on behalf of the living, to the law and to the testimony? If they do not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn. Distressed and hungry, they’ll roam through the land. When they’re famished, they’ll become enraged and looking upward will curse their king and their god. Then they will look toward the earth and see only distress and darkness and fearful gloom and they’ll be thrust into utter darkness. So Isaiah 8 is describing people who are experiencing deep darkness in their inner lives, spiritual crisis. They’re looking to mysticism and spiritists and they’re consulting mediums and magicians instead of God. But it’s not working. And eventually they get to such a place of despair that they they curse. They shake their fist at God and they shake their fist at their earthly leaders and they can’t see anyone in heaven or on earth who can answer or fix what’s wrong with the world. It’s a time of existential angst. There’s a vacuum of meaning. And when that happens, societies break in a couple of directions. They break toward despair and they break towards something spiritual to fill that hole, some path of transcendence. That’s what happened in Russia following the collapse of the allencompassing communist ideology in 1989. The evaporation of their 70year socialist experiment left behind what uh what one writer called a zerogavity culture. Suddenly they were free floating with nothing substantial to latch on to in terms of beliefs. Where were who were they now? For several generations, their Soviet leaders had attempted to stamp out all other ideologies other than global communism. And now that had failed. Who were the Russian people? What were their values? What were the traditions that remained? Well, they broke toward despair. States that made up the former Soviet Union crowded the top of the lists for the highest suicide rates among young people. French sociologist Emil Durkheim argued that these suicide viruses happen during what he called civilizational breaks when the parents have no traditions or value systems to pass on to their children. There’s no deep-seated ideology to support young people when they’re under emotional stress. So the people of the former Soviet Union broke to despair. They broke also to any and every form, every mode of spirituality. One television producer noted that it was the only way they could try to make sense of things. And he said, “A new mysticism and a new supernaturalism began seeping into everything on their television sets.” In a recent book by Paul Kingsorth entitled Against the Machine, he summarizes the time that we’re living in by noting that our past, in the past, in our western world, it was characterized by what he calls four Ps that have now been replaced by four S’s. Kings North is a really interesting guy. He’s frighteningly well read. He’s a former environmental activist. Then he became a Wiccan who was seeking all kinds of meaning in the occult and uh a few years ago convert to Christianity. He’s also a pretty astute observer of what’s going on in our culture. And he says at the risk of gross generalization, our older values can be down boiled down to what he terms the four Ps. past, meaning a respect for our history, people, relationships, place, and prayer. And he goes on to elaborate on those four values, say that they lie mostly abandoned in the Western world, and they’ve been replaced by the four S’s of science, the self, sex, and screen. And he quotes a writer named Robert Bllye who observed that typically whenever colonization occurs, the colonizers come in and they demolish and replace the cultures that they come to dominate. They do that. We’ve all we all know how that’s done. They rewrite the histories of colonized people, replace their languages, challenge their cultural norms, ban or demonize their religions, dismantle their elder system, upend their traditions. In the western world, he says, we haven’t been invaded by a hostile colonizing force, but we’re the first people on earth to selfolonize, to dismantle our own history, our own cultural norms and traditions, and we continue to deconstruct everything, to deliberately disconnect from our past and uh give the reigns over to impulse. Our culture has reversed its spiritual polarity. You know, for 17 centuries or more of Christendom in the Western world, not without problems, not without great problems, but for the better part of two millennia, you had to opt out of religion because it just it was all over the society. In our day, you have to opt in. So, in our own modern zeroravity type culture, people still want something. They’re still searching for meaning and transcendence. And they’re doing it via what Kings North’s 4S has described science, the self, sex, and screen. We’re a little like the people of Isaiah 8 who have lost our moorings. We don’t know where the boundaries or the limits are anymore. We don’t often question or take time to evaluate our current forms of capitalism and consumerism. Might be facing deep environmental challenges. We maintain kind of a blind trust in technology. We place great confidence in our inner impulses to tell us who we are and provide us with our identity. And we gather most of our knowledge, our information, our entertainment, our opinions, our relationships in an online world that is constantly surveilling us and trying to exploit our weaknesses and our wants and our desires. Even even worse, we’re probing into that world of artificial intelligence and we don’t have a map or a plan or even a reliable set of breaks. We don’t really know where it’s all going to take us. Surveys conducted among AI researchers and developers show that overall they estimate a 10% chance or greater chance of an existential catastrophe arising from AI. The CEO of Google has said that concerns with what AI might become keep him awake at night. So in the words of Paul Kingsorth he says our age I think is unique. It might be that everyone says that about their time but I think to that today we have a good case. The sheer scale of global culture the degree of technological interconnectedness. The dangers of those technologies from AI to nuclear missiles. The human impact on the natural world. The rapid falling away of many things that have boyed and sustained us for centuries, from languages to religions, means that the times we live in are perhaps less rooted than at any other time in history. We may be in the process of creating something unique in human history, a global anti-culture, unmurreded from reality, increasingly at war with it. So, having colonized ourselves by and we we know how the we know how the story ends as Christians. We know that there’s a linear end to history and it ends with a huge violence with a huge upheaval. Having colonized ourselves, we’ve thrown aside our traditions. We’re kind of naively inclined to trust in and believe that in things that are never going to satisfy our deepest longings. GK Chester said that when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing. They believe in anything. So what’s all that have to do with Advent and Christmas? Isaiah shows us that Advent has to be understood in the context of a great existential void. As only that deepest kind of darkness described in Isaiah 8. Only there can the light of Christmas be truly apprehended. Otherwise, we just make Christmas sentimental. sentimentality embraces this time of year, saying it’s all about a general kind of peace and goodwill. It’s non-specific. It’s for all people. And certainly Christmas is a shared holiday between spiritual people and secular people. We wouldn’t have it any other way. As believers in Christ, we’re glad to share this season with everyone, especially if some of our most treasured beliefs spill over a little bit into our greater culture. But we do diverge from our secular friends in understanding Christmas to reach far beyond what is just sentimental. Sentiment says Christian Christmas is time we can cheer up and smile and if we pull together, we work really hard together, we can we can join hands and fix the things that are wrong in this world. But in contrast to that kind of sentimental Christmas, the true unscentimental arrival of Christ declares that the world is a place of deep gloom, deep darkness, distress, despair, and it’s mingled with spiritual yearning can’t be fixed from within. So, we can’t just pull together and make things right in our world. Something someone from the outside has to come in and sort it out for us. And so the darkness of Isaiah 8 is then shattered by the sudden light of Isaiah chapter 9 where it says, “Nevertheless, there’ll be no more gloom for those who were in distress. In the past, he meaning God humbled the land of Zebulun, the land of Naphali, but in the future he will honor Galilee of the Gentiles by way of the sea along the Jordan. The people walking in darkness have seen a great light. On those living in the shadow of death, a light has dawned. You know, Isaiah wrote his prophetic message 700 years prior to Bethlehem, 700 years before the coming of Christ. And in Isaiah’s time, those territories mentioned, the lands of Zebulun and Naphali, two of the northernmost tribes in Israel, they’re located right in the region of the Sea of Galilee. And they were the first to experience the deep gloom and anguish of the Assyrian invasion. They were easy targets. They suffered the effects of God’s discipline. The northern kingdom of Israel had fallen into idolatry and immorality and injustice and blasphemy. And God was disciplining and humbling them by handing them over to a very cruel people, the Assyrians, who specialized in conquering people and turning all of their conquered people into exiles. What they would do is they would put everyone’s identity and culture in a blender and they would take large portions of one nation they conquered and move it to another nation and move another nation in. They would mix them up and scatter them all around. They specialized in creating those zeroravity societies because it was easier for them to control people who had no common identity or tradition remaining. The result was that people who came under the hands of the Assyrians, they were disoriented. They they had no hope of ever being repatriated as a as a nation again. They lost their national and their religious identities. Despair, mysticism, religious synratism. Again, you read about it in 2 Kings 17 how that happened and how the Assyrians shuffled the deck of all the people they conquered, taking away all of their treasured beliefs. But it was to people like those enslaved Israelites, ravaged, destroyed by a merciless enemy, left to walk in gloom and darkness, hunting all over for some spiritual truth. To them the words came, “Nevertheless, there’ll be no more gloom for those who were in distress.” And Galilee that’ll become a revered place, not because of its geography, but because of the person who would make his home there. People walking in darkness have seen a great light. On those living in the shadow of death, a light has dawned. A dawn would break out over the darkness. And we know that for every dawn to occur in our world to dispel our darkness, something far beyond our world, some ancient sun about 150 million kilometers away must give us its light or would be in perpetual darkness. A dawn isn’t something we can just manufacture with all of our human ingenuity. We can’t control it. Something has to come from the outside to dispel the darkness. The people to whom Israel proclaimed this message 700 years before Jesus, they had no idea how that prophecy would be fulfilled. From our vantage point this morning, looking at the candle of hope, it makes perfect sense because the passage goes on, “For to us a child is born. To us a son is given. Government will be on his shoulders. He’ll be called wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting father, and prince of peace. Great light has dawn. It’s been revealed concretely in the person of this child and this son. The one who would grow up and walk and teach and perform miracles and minister largely in that region of Galilee. He’d walk in the ancient footprints of those tribes mentioned in Isaiah 8, Zebulun and Naphali. This child, this son has come from the outside to dispel our darkness, take away both our despair and any of our spiritual meanderings. He’s given some very grown-up titles, four titles that belong to God alone. He’s a wonderful counselor. Terrific if any of us are going through something that’s really difficult. It’s good to talk to someone who’s walked that same path before us. I mean, he’s been through the suffering. He’s been abandoned by friends. He’s been crushed. He’s been mocked. He’s been tortured. he’s been killed. There’s no experience we go through that Jesus doesn’t understand from the inside out. Dorothy Sers, a great British poet and and writer from the early part of the last century. She puts it this way. For whatever reason, God chose to make man as he is limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death. He had the honesty and the courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he’s playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience. From the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played a man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile. So our wonderful counselor made himself vulnerable, completely emotionally available to whatever we’re going through. Doesn’t stop there. He’s also mighty God himself. He’s not just a a human who suffered who could inspire and motivate us. No, he’s God himself. No other religion in the world has their God walking on this planet in weakness and suffering. But Jesus isn’t just a Gandhi or a Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King Jr. He’s mighty God in the flesh. And the other two terms reveal Jesus, everlasting father, prince of peace. He’s come to dispel the gloom, take away the despair, resolve our search for mystical meaning, and he’ll accomplish all of it without firing a shot. That prince of peace would direct all the violent forces of sin and hell against himself. He’d pay the supreme sacrifice. He wouldn’t build an empire through oppression or war. And when he came face to face with death, he would quietly allow himself to be taken outside the city to a hill where he’d be nailed to a cross. And he’d die in our place for our sins. Having none of his own that he’s accountable to God for, he’d sacrifice for us so that the gloom and despair in our souls could be dispelled by the dawn of his light. Because of the cross, every year since, people living all over the world, every corner of the globe, living in despair, in gloom, in darkness, hunting about for mystical answers, they have found light. One of them is Yolena Echimoff. She’s a classically trained pianist. She fell in love with jazz. And on one particular album, every one of her tunes is based on the text of a particular psalm. And in the liner notes, she tells the unlikely story of how that album came about. She was one of those millions of Russian citizens caught in the existential void when the Soviet Union was grinding to a halt. She writes, “I just had my third child. The Soviet Union’s ideology had begun to crumble down, leaving a spiritual vacuum in place. Many people hungry for something to fill that void.” She and her husband started visiting the only Baptist church in all of Moscow, alternating Sundays so that one parent could stay at home with the kids. And she says the church which occupied an old theater auditorium, it still operated on a semi underground basis. Nothing was really sorted out yet in the Soviet Union in terms of opening up to Christianity. But she found the service to be full. There were more people than seats. They all took turns sitting during the two-hour service. And she writes, “I was academically trained in classical music. I was familiar with rock and pop and jazz and other styles, but the sound of the church choir accompanied by pipe organ was new to my ears, as were the religious songs and the hymns. And the singing of the congregation, nearly a thousand people, impressed me most deeply. I often felt the surge of goosebumps running down my spine, almost lifting me off my feet. As months went by, she says her and her husband gradually turned from atheists to believers and then they were baptized and her newfound faith and her it brought fresh musical impressions and creativity and inspired her to compose her own religious songs. She started searching for texts. She tried to work with the psalms in an old Russian Bible, but it had an ancient Savonic language and it was difficult for her to understand and work with. She had studied English in school, and she had listened to a number of English-speaking rock bands. And she decided, “I’ll work in English,” but had no idea where to find an English Bible in the Twilight days of the Soviet Union. One day, her mom brought her a flyer in English that a foreigner had given her in the subway. She says it was probably a missionary flyer and included an American address, and blindly she sent a letter to that address asking for a Bible in English. against all odds to her total surprise a parcel arrived containing Good News Bible in English. So she went to work composing melodies for the psalm saying after we became believers we just saw the world with different eyes. We noticed noticed that most people around us were not guided by faith and there was an anger and meanness in society among people toward one another. Country was moving into despair. People were hunting for anything to believe in. She wanted the new music of her heart set free. So, as time went on, Yolena and her husband wrote a plea for help to just randomly selected English uh churches in English-speaking countries. To demonstrate her sincerity, she included some of her musical settings of the Psalms. It cost an entire month’s wage to send 75 letters. They received 10 responses from the US and Canada. One response included the official invitation required by the Soviet government to grant some form of an exit visa. That invitation came from the elderly widow of a Baptist pastor in North Carolina. Well, it took more than a year for Yolena to get her entire family over to the US. During that time, she would play her psalms in various churches and the love offerings went toward the ticket fair for her three young boys. Since then, she’s worked regularly as a church m musician, put out many uh jazz albums, including her album based on the Psalms. She’s one of those who could sincerely and personally acknowledge those words. When men tell you to consult mediums and spiritists who whisper and mutter, should not a people inquire of their God? Why consult the dead on behalf of the living, to the law, to the testimony? If they do not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn. Nevertheless, there’ll be no more gloom for those who are in distress. The people walking in darkness have seen a great light. On those living in the shadow of death, a light has dawned. I mean, this is all pretty wonderful stuff. This Advent hope we’re reflecting on this morning. There’s no more gloom. A light has dawned. The light is Jesus. He’s a wonderful counselor. He’s mighty God. He’s everlasting father and he’s prince of peace. And in verse six, it states, “For to us a child is born. to us a son is given. And that gift of Jesus, we know this, it’s not automatically downloaded in our souls. Although a a Christian family heritage may well be the means by which God offers that gift to us. But all gifts must be received. Receiving a gift is not always easy. Last couple of months since Charlene’s accident, some in the church have offered uh and supplied meals for me, for us. Well, mostly for me, lasagnas and soup and baking, it’s all appreciated. For me, it’s not always easy to receive, right? Receiving a lasagna can be a little humbling. But receiving Jesus incredibly exponentially more humbling because I can eat a lasagna provided for me or I can supply one myself. I can’t make one, but I can buy one. But I can’t supply at all what Jesus offers. And that means that before I can receive his gift, I have to acknowledge that I’m one of those people described in Isaiah, walking in darkness, living in the shadow of death, in grave danger from forces that want to destroy me, stumbling around like a spiritual madman. I can’t receive the gift of Jesus if I think I deserve it. You know, these familiar words from the Gospel of John, the first chapter, state that true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world. He was in the world and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, meaning the people of Israel, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. Only those of us who admit that we are spiritual train wrecks. We’re looking for meaning everywhere but uh but the right places, we can admit our helplessness. Then we can open our hand to receive that gift of Jesus. Requires tremendous humility. A kind of a sober, difficult evaluation of our darkness that we find ourselves in. This little advent candle this morning, it’s nice to look at. It represents our hope, but it’s also pretty challenging. It illuminates, but it also burns a bit because it shows us who we are. Our challenge is to receive the gift that shines light on all of our flaws. Shows us at our true worst confirms that we’re just a bunch of humans stumbling around in the dark. And then that light can come to heal and to counsel and to rescue and to bring hope. To us a child is born. To us a son is given. The government will be on his shoulders. He’ll be called wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting father, and prince of peace. Just let’s just spend some time in silent private prayer. Some of the things you might want to pray about this morning is just to thank God that in your darkest times, he sends light. Admit your deep need for your wonderful counselor and praise God for giving you the gift of Jesus and giving you a heart that was able to receive that gift. So, just take some personal time between you and God in prayer and I’ll close us off in a moment.