Light in the Dark / Isaiah 9:2–7 / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Wednesday December 24th 2025/ Season of Advent / Mount Olive Lutheran Church

Mount Olive Lutheran Church / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Wednesday December 24th 2025: Christmas Eve / Isaiah 9:2–7 “Light in the Dark”

        The people who walked in darkness

               have seen a great light;

        those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,

               on them has light shone.

        You have multiplied the nation;

               you have increased its joy;

        they rejoice before you

               as with joy at the harvest,

               as they are glad when they divide the spoil.

        For the yoke of his burden,

               and the staff for his shoulder,

               the rod of his oppressor,

               you have broken as on the day of Midian.

        For every boot of the tramping warrior in battle tumult

               and every garment rolled in blood

               will be burned as fuel for the fire.

        For to us a child is born,

               to us a son is given;

        and the government shall be upon his shoulder,

               and his name shall be called

        Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,

               Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

        Of the increase of his government and of peace

               there will be no end,

        on the throne of David and over his kingdom,

               to establish it and to uphold it

        with justice and with righteousness

               from this time forth and forevermore.

        The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in Your sight O Lord. Amen.

Grace peace and mercy to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Good Christian Friends what was the deepest darkness you’ve ever experienced? Was it on a guided trip into a cave where they cut the lights and you suddenly weren’t able to see your hand in front of your face? Or was it something else? Was it something less tangible, harder to put your finger on at first?    

The night was dark, dark like we are not accustom to in the city, it was country dark, and darker than that, because the shepherds had no electric light; and while in the fields across the valley from Bethlehem in the wee hours of the night they would have their sheep tucked away into the even darker caves along the crest of the hillside there and they would then sit watch at the entrances of those natural corrals. Did they have a fire lit? The Bible doesn’t say. In the deep darkness of that night it would be cold, but not Saskatchewan cold.

And then in that night, lit only by moon and stars, suddenly, “an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and [the shepherds keeping watch over their flock] were filled with great fear.” And just like that — like a mighty divine match struck in the dark — the angle appeared, like a heavenly flint sparked with news of great joy and in the midst of grinding and gritty, fragrant blue collar work the messenger from the Lord says, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.”[1] Bathed in the light of the glory of the Lord suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom He is pleased!” This was not another day at the office; this was not another day in the pasture. Did the words of Isaiah spring to their minds, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone … For to us a child is born, to us a son is given” did they make the connection? They must have made the connection because their response was to head into Bethlehem town to see it all with their own eyes, to hear they baby with their own two ears, to seek and find what was announced to them, what they had all long hoped for, and watched for in their dark days.

Come, Thou long-expected Jesus,
    Born to set Thy people free;
From our fears and sins release us;
    Let us find our rest in Thee.
Israel’s strength and consolation,
    Hope of all the earth Thou art,
Dear desire of ev’ry nation,
    Joy of ev’ry longing heart.

These days, generally speaking, unless the power goes out, unless you’re way out in the country you will not sit in the same sort of darkness the shepherds sat in that night, but even still the words of Isaiah were not specifically about the darkness of the night sky. Isaiah’s prophetic words from our Old Testament reading this evening are about the sort of darkness that can fall upon us in the middle of the day. This is why I asked ‘what was the deepest darkness you’ve ever experienced? Was it on a guided trip into a cave where they cut the lights and you couldn’t for the life of you see your hand in front of your face? Or was it something else? Was it something less tangible, harder to put your finger on at first?’ In our daily lives this is the kind of deep darkness that comes upon us when everything is going wrong and you ask yourself, “How can it keep getting worse?”

For the moment though let’s leave our daily lives, and let’s also leave the shepherds and the night the Christ Child was born and go back to the days of the prophet Isaiah and what was pressing upon those folks.

A darkness was about to fall upon the people of Isaiah’s day, a darkness where the Northern Kingdom of Israel would fall to invaders and they would be dragged off into a kind of captivity that would see them absorbed into the population of the dreaded Assyrians forever losing their Jewish identity. And then not that long afterward the people of the Southern Kingdom of Judah (where the city of Jerusalem was) would fall to the Babylonians and would be dragged off into a different sort of captivity where they would be kept in Jewish ghettos in the area that is now called Iraq in the Middle East. That was a time that was very dark indeed, and growing darker by the day.

Isaiah spoke these words from God roughly between seven to eight hundred years before the angle of the Lord appeared to the shepherds outside the city of Bethlehem. The darkness of war and the aftermath of these conflicts fell upon those original hearers in waves, generations later some were able to return and rebuild only later to have the Greeks come and conquer them (during that time it is said the people began to celebrate what would become Hanukkah) and then the land would be taken by the Romans, and men like the Roman Caesar Augustus and Quirinius the governor of Syria and the false king Herod the Great who was appointed king by the Senate in the city of Roman: Wave after wave of darkness, generation after generation of darkness, and just when they thought they were getting ahead back into the deep darkness they would go and there they were all sitting and waiting the night the shepherds heard the Good News that we to hear this night, the Good News of “a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger,” who was “Christ the Lord,” the long promised messiah.      

On the one hand, for us today it’s rather hard to imagine being conquered and dragged off into captivity, it’s hard to imagine having all you owned wiped out by war and bloodshed and having to start over from scratch, only to have it happen all over and over and over again, but it does happen. There are places in the world where, on the other hand, even now people are struggling in the darkness, darkness that covers over them not just in the night but their every waking moment; the kind of darkness that is not just obscuring light from the eye, the kind of darkness that cast a shadow over the soul and the mind and threatens to swallow up your entire life.

Now, you don’t need to be in a war zone to experience this, or in the aftermath of a war, this can come upon a person outside of those things due to the death of a loved one, devastating financial hardships, brutal public embarrassment and bullying, ongoing family conflicts, continuing health crisis, sudden terminal diagnosis, crushing heartbreak or even a smothering feeling of incompetence and failure. With no hope of escape, this kind of deep darkness can paralyze a person, a community, a province, a nation, a world.     

There are two types of Christmas, the nostalgia driven Christmas of the World which is all ‘visions of sugar-plums’ all ‘Dasher! And Dancer! Prancer and Vixen! Comet and Cupid! Donner and Blitzen!” And then there is the Christmas of the Christ Child who comes to save a World undone. Tomorrow morning in the Christmas Day Gospel this Christ Child Jesus is described as “the Light of Men,”[2] later, once He’s grown up, this same Jesus would say of Himself, “I am the Light of the world. Whoever follows Me,” Jesus says, “will not walk in darkness, but will have the Light of Life.”[3] Dear ones Saint John says “The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”[4] If you feel like darkness is covering you wherever you walk, wherever you go, like darkness is covering you wherever you dwell wherever you live remember that the what Isaiah prophesied in our Old Testament Reading “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone,” has already happened, it happened that first Christmas at the birth of the Christ Child we celebrate today. However dark it is for you right now, however dark it is for someone close to you that you love dearly, remember as a Christian you have the Light of the world, you have Jesus and more importantly He has you. And because in faith, in your baptism you are His and He is yours this very same Jesus says to you “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.”[5]

The ‘visions of sugar-plums’ style Christmas is literally like the sweets and candies it promises, fun for the moment but lacking nutritional value unable to save you from the dark, the other kind of Christmas focused on the announcement of the birth of the Christ Child only makes sense to people when they know that they need to be rescued out of the deep darkness in which they sit. The joy of this kind of Christmas comes from remembering that the darkness has no ultimate power over you when you’re in the light of Christ: that no matter how dark it looks, how threatening the clouds that darkness was doomed to fail. Doomed to fail when the promise was first made to Adam and Eve, doomed to fail when Isaiah pointed forward to Jesus saying”

      “For to us a child is born,

               to us a son is given;

        and the government shall be upon His shoulder,

               and His name shall be called

        Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,

               Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

Over the last year, whenever the darkness of the World threatened to blot out the Light of Christ, I would be reminded of the first line of the hymn “Lord Jesus Christ, with Us Abide” Whenever I saw something so dark as that I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, whenever something so dark that the joy of Christian hope was terrorized in my heart, these words sprung to life; they speak to the truth of the promised light that shines in the darkness, and what it means to be in the light of Christ when all else fails and everything seems to be falling apart, when hope feel far off: I will leave you with these words, they are in fact like a prayer (you can find it in the hymnal # 585):  

Dear ones, Marry Christmas, today the great light of the Christ Child, the very grace of God which has appeared in this world, shines upon you. This is the great Light that shines for you and for all the faithful, for everyone you know, even for those who have yet to believe and will come to faith through this next year and in years and generations to come. When the shepherds came to know the truth of this Light, when they saw the Christ Child, they made known the saying that had been told them concerning this Child Jesus. People wondered at what the shepherds told them, but that didn’t stop them from sharing this news. We are told that the Virgin Mary “treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.”[7] Do likewise and the darkness will have no place there in your heart either. Amen.    

 Let us pray: Lord have mercy on us, Christ have mercy on us, Lord have mercy on us, “take our minds and think through them, take our lips and speak through them, take our hearts and set them on fire; for the sake of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Amen.

[1] Luke 2:8-12
[2] John 1:4
[3] John 8:12
[4] John 1:5
[5] Matthew 5:14–16
[6] “Lord Jesus Christ, with Us Abide” Lutheran Service Book, Concordia Publishing House 2006, #585
[7] Luke 2:18-19

Photo Credit: Main photo of a quilt belonging to Mount Olive Lutheran Church made and donated by Kim MacLeod.