Rise and Shine!

December 25, 1960: 

The soundless video images jerk with the limitations of the 8mm camera and an amateur filmmaker’s unsteady hand. Blazingly illuminated by two lamps affixed to the top of the tiny camera like a buck’s antlers, the little boy in a Christmas-red onesie pajama fights back against the morning, burying his head in the pillow, then rubbing his eyes open, and finally smiling broadly as he sits upright, undoubtedly responding to a voice we cannot hear in the soundless home movie: “Rise and Shine!  It’s Christmas!”

I’ve watched this home movie so many times.  The excitement of waking on Christmas morning, full of wonder (as Kathy so perfectly described yesterday).  What did Santa leave in the living room?  Did I get everything I asked for?  In my mind, I watch today and fill in the missing dialogue, imagining what my brothers and parents might have been saying as each gift was opened…a BB gun, an electromagnetic football game, a new robe for each of us.

But there is no need to imagine the words spoken by my father, the “cinematographer.” There is no doubt, no guessing at his words, because he said the same thing every morning with unwavering consistency whenever he would wake my sleepy head:  “Rise and Shine!”

Long before the birth of Jesus, the Christ, which we celebrate this Christmas Day, the prophet Isaiah brought words of hope to the exiled people of Israel.  “Arise, shine, for your light has come! And the glory of the Lord rises upon you.” (Isaiah 60:1) These words to people who had been living in the darkness of separation are both a message of hope and a call to action.

Just as the Gospel writer, John, has proclaimed that the Christ is the light, and that the light is life, there is certainly good news in Isaiah’s prophetic message: the light is good, it’s here (or it’s coming), it’s yours, and you no longer are sentenced to wander in the darkness.

But Isaiah does more than bring that good news.  This is more than a prophet’s feel-good, Hallmark-card sentiment to people with the “Exile Blues.”  He begins with a command, an exhortation: “Arise, shine!”

“Get up!” Isaiah seems to shout.  “This is too good to stay in bed!”  Like my Dad’s wake-up call on Christmas morning, the message is that there is something great out there, but we must get up out of our comfortable places and do something about it!

“Shine!” Isaiah commands.  “The light has come, but no one will see it unless it is reflected in you! You must both rise and shine!”

Most of the light we use to see is reflected light, not light from an original source.  Often, the light from the original source is too intense, too bright for us to take in.  Instead, it is the reflection of that light off another object that creates the illumination. It seems Isaiah is calling the people of Israel (and us, too) to be the reflectors of that light, to “shine” so that all can see.

The warm, cozy ambience of Christmas Eve is gone.  It is Christmas morning.  Just like those bright, hot lamps affixed to my father’s 8 mm camera, the Light of Christ has come bursting into our comfort zones.  Get up!  Time to get going!  Rise and Shine!  The world needs The Light, the light only we can reflect!

Rise and shine, indeed!

Merry, merry Christmas--

Scott