A reading from the prophet Isaiah.
Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord
has risen upon you. For behold, darkness shall cover
the earth, and thick darkness the peoples.
But the Lord will arise upon you, and His glory will be seen
upon you, and nations shall come to your light, and kings to the
brightness of your rising. Lift up your eyes all around and
see. They all gather together.
They come to you. Your sons shall come from afar,
and your daughters shall be carried on the hip.
Then you shall see and be radiant.
Your heart shall thrill and exalt, because the abundance of
the sea shall be turned to you. The wealth of the nation shall
come to you. A multitude of camels shall
cover you. The young camels of Midian and
IFA, all those from Sheba, shall come.
They shall bring gold and frankincense and shall bring
good news, the praises of the Lord.
All the flocks of Kedar shall be gathered to you.
The Rams of Nebayoth shall minister to you.
They shall come up with acceptance on my altar, and I
will beautify my beautiful house.
Violence shall no more be heard in your land, devastation or
destruction within your borders. You shall call your walls
salvation, and your gates praise.
The sun shall be no more your light by day, nor for brightness
shall the moon give you light, but the Lord will be your
everlasting light, and your God will be your glory.
Your sun shall no more go down, nor your moon withdraw itself,
for the Lord will be your everlasting light, and your days
of mourning shall be ended. Your people shall all be
righteous. They shall possess the land
forever, The branch of my planting, the work of my hands,
that I might be glorified. The word of the Lord.
Good morning and happy 5th Sunday of Lent.
We're almost through and I will invite you to turn to Isaiah 60,
Isaiah 60 as we come toward the end to the end of our series
called Shine, our Spiritual Beacon call.
This is bringing us to our midpoint, our commitment Sunday
in our two year initiative to prepare for our spiritual beacon
calling. And we'll have a moment in a few
moments to renew a commitment or make a new commitment to the
Lord and to just the vision that he's given to us as a church.
So Isaiah 60 bulletins or Bibles, would you pray with me?
Lord, we're so thankful that you are truly Emmanuel, God with us.
And we thank you that Isaiah saw that this was true of you and
that he turned the diamond ever so slightly to see all of the
beautiful ways that Emmanuel desired to shine the glory of
God on the people of God. And so we pray that even this
morning in 2026, you would shine your Emmanuel light on us.
In the name of Jesus we pray. Amen.
Well, in his book Every Valley historian, Charles King tells
the story of a once powerful man named Charles Jennings.
Despite his wealth, Charles Jennings was depressed, anxious
and very lonely. He took a political stance in
his day. This is the 1700s in England
that had cost him his position in society.
And so he was kind of exiled. He had lost many of his friends.
There was a just a higher mortality rate in that day.
And so he didn't have a lot of community to speak of.
What's worse, the news of the day was really gloomy.
There was a lot that he saw around him and that he read
about in the newspapers that just increased his sense of
doom. And many times, you know,
Jennings was so depressed and so lifeless that it was hard for
him to even, like, take a step, take a walk around his empty
house. But at one point, a Jennings was
inspired to pull down off of his shelf the book of Isaiah,
including Isaiah 60. And he pulled off his shelf
other prophets from Israel and the gospel writers and the
epistles of the New Testament. He pulled off the Anglican Book
of Common Prayer. And he just began to pour over
the pages and just sort of noting all of the notes of
surprising hope, all of the things that he didn't
necessarily feel were true, but he saw that with a glimmer of
light, the saddest stories of his life.
We're not going to end in sadness, but we're going to end
it. Something that he could couldn't
even imagine. And as he began to take notes,
he actually began to piece together all of the different,
the best lines. And he began to imagine what
would it be like if a choir were to sing these words?
What would it be like if a soloist were to sing these
words? What it would be like to set all
of these words of beauty to something beautiful in form.
And he wrote that down. And then at the top of all of
these notes, he he wrote this line, Let us sing of greater
things. And then he took this what he
called a word book and he handed it off to his friends, to his
friend George. George was an artist past his
prime. George was not in a good place
in his life either. He was deeply in debt.
He was recovering from what may have been a stroke.
And and yet he spent 24 straight days giving his best laborers to
taking his friend Charles's word, Book of Hope and Beauty,
and setting it to music. He poured everything he had into
this artistic endeavor into a work that would lift up the
hearts of anyone who was close to despair.
And as he neared completion of this work, George Frederick
Handel began to weep. And as his servants asked him
what was happening, he said, I did think that I see all of
heaven before me, and the great God himself seated on his throne
with his company of angels. And thus these two friends,
rather than sinking into despair, gave the world handles
Messiah. It's a work of beauty that has
thrilled hearts, awakened hope and sustained the soul for
almost 300 years and counting. There's something about beauty
that can summon us out of the gloom of despair, isn't it?
The prophet Isaiah shows us that the source of all beauty is God
Himself, and not only that, that He is ready to generously pour
out His beauty upon us, to bathe us in His beauty.
We actually in, in our day have the privilege and call to
reflect God's beauty to the city that we love.
We're going to explore what that could look like.
And it begins at the beginning of Isaiah 60.
And that is this, that God's beauty summons us.
God's beauty summons us out of gloom.
Look with me at verses one and two and hear these words ring
for us today. Arise shine, for your light has
come, and the glory of the Lord shines over you.
For look, darkness will cover the earth, and total darkness.
You could translate this as thick fog, the peoples, but the
Lord will shine over you, and his glory will appear over you.
Now the summons to arise are spoken to a people who are lying
flat on their backs. They've been flattened by life.
They're in despair, they're in darkness.
They're not exactly resting, but they're not able to rise either.
It's like the anxious fog of a sleepless night.
Have you ever had a sleepless night?
You wanted to rest, but you couldn't, but you just were
lying there, immobilized. And then something happens.
The Lord shines over people who are lying prostate, prostate
like a dawning sun. Think of the most beautiful
sunrise you could ever imagine. And it gets them up and they
have this call to go up and to go out, to arise, and then to
shine, to reflect the power and the glory and the beauty which
has filled your life and filled your vision.
And to say to anyone who will listen, come and see.
Come and see this beautiful light which shined on me in my
darkest moment. Now I think the genius and the
inspiration of Isaiah's prophecy is how timeless this imagery is.
When he says, look, you know, darkness will cover the earth
and and thick darkness. The peoples, every generation
can relate with those statements.
The darkness of our world can sort of take on a life of its
own. You might be familiar with like
a black hole, a black hole, this phenomenon in space that
swallows up anything that comes near to it.
Just if matter gets near to the black hole, it just sucks the
matter in and doesn't give anything out and and the
darkness of human misery can can do the same thing.
Conflict between people has a way of like acting like a black
hole, just like drawing in more and more people.
War has a way of doing that, drawing in more and more
nations. Hatred has a way of doing this,
just drawing in more and more hatred.
Evil has a way of doing this, just perpetuating itself like a
black hole. We get anxious and then we get
anxious about maybe we will feel more anxious.
We feel ashamed, but then we feel shame because of the fact
that we feel shame at all. Recently, someone shared with me
about a very dark moment in his life.
He was under incredible pressure.
He was missing his family. He did not feel a sense of
purpose in his life. And so in this place of sadness
and despair, he began to to drink with the friends that he
did have. He would drink three times a
day. He would work as well, getting
up really early, early. So he was exhausted is abusing
alcohol. He was in despair.
He, his heart was broken and this lasted for for months.
And he got to the point where he couldn't sleep at all at night.
And he was literally just lying on the floor of the bathroom
after a day of drinking, after a night of drinking, completely in
despair. And then he said, and then I
felt what I knew to be the presence of holiness in that
room. And I looked up and I saw that
shining out of, I kid you not, the shower drain was light and I
had no idea where it was coming from.
And I got up, I arose and I looked at the light and I
couldn't believe my eyes. So I went outside and I looked.
This is in the middle of the night.
Is there any light source coming from outside the house inside
this bathroom? I couldn't find one.
Goes into every room inside the house.
Is there light somehow coming? Where's this light coming from?
He couldn't find the source and it left him so just, you know,
in shock, but he, he knew that God was reaching out to him.
Now, eventually one of his friends who happened to be
staying at that same house found him, said what's happening?
He told her about the light. She went in.
She saw the same thing. She comes back to him and she's
like, this is the Lord and he's reaching out to you.
And she prayed with him, and she prayed for him, and this man
turned his life to the Jesus Christ, was soon thereafter
baptized, and to this day is shining with the light of Jesus
Christ. He arose physically and
spiritually and continues to shine.
This is what the beauty of the Lord does for every generation.
It summons us out of thick darkness, which always wants to
envelope us. Now listen.
Once we're on our feet and we're walking in the light of God's
beauty, reflecting it, you know, humbly to the world, that's when
things get interesting. Beauty summons us, and then
beauty surprises us. You ever been surprised by
beauty? Just a moment catches you off
guard, takes your breath away. Beauty has a way of surprising
us. And in Isaiah, the beauty takes
the form of an unlikely reunion. People we'd never expect to see,
never expect to love, never expect to come under one roof
together will gather around us. Why?
Because beauty has this attractive magnet like quality
which draws people, draws people you would never expect.
And thus, verse three, nations will come to your light, and
kings to your shining brightness.
Now listen for Israel. Kings and nations did not
represent peace. These were former enemies and
former oppressors and former rivals.
And it turns out they're gathering to the light which is
shining on Israel, not with armies and not with Spears, but
they come in verse 6 with camels and gold and frankincense and
praises to the Lord. Now just imagine all of your
frenemies and all of your old bosses and all of your strict
teachers and everyone from your past gathering around and
saying, we saw you shining with God's light and we saw his
beauty, and we've come to share in it with you.
Would you let us surprise? Beauty surprises us.
Notice also not only unfamiliar people, but also familiar
people. Come verse 4.
Raise your eyes and look around. They all gather and come to you.
Your sons will come from far away and your daughters on the
hips of nursing mothers. Now listen, this isn't a day
before FaceTime and inexpensive flights and cars and and
transportation being easy and cheap.
No parent wants to have their their children, whether small or
grown, exiled some faraway place where they never get to see them
again. But this was Israel's reality.
They were separated from sons and daughters and people that
meant as much to them as sons and daughters.
Familial connections, beloved connections.
And they're separated. And they thought that separation
was forever. They thought I'd never see them
again. But Isaiah says no.
Lift up your eyes. There's this reunion coming
that's so good to be true you can scarcely believe it that the
story you thought was over is actually coming to a a, a soul
thrilling conclusion of healing. And for all the pain of
separation, it's going to melt into an embrace and into a meal.
And maybe Isaiah is giving us this vision for all those people
who are meant to be with us, but they aren't for some reason.
But now beauty surprises us by drawing them back.
Like the beauty of the Lord. It's so powerful.
It's powerful because it can do things that our words can't do,
that our actions can't do, that human beings cannot muster on
their own. And all those sad fragments of
love and connection are get woven back together.
And verse 5, then you will see and be radiant, and your heart
will tremble and rejoice. Then everything sad is coming
untrue. And that is the gospel writer
Luke said that our like will disbelieve for joy.
It's too good to be true. This surprising gathering,
friends, is nothing less than the community of Jesus.
And, and we see that whenever Jesus arrives in this world as
Emmanuel, God with us, the unlikeliest of people are drawn
like a magnet to him. The first time he arrived, you
know, the wise men came with their gold and frankincense and
myrrh and, and they worship Jesus.
And it was totally unlikely. And the second time Jesus will
arrive, people from every tribe, tongue, people and nation will
bring the wealth of the world and the praises of their hearts
to worship the King of Kings. And in between those two
arrivals, he's here with us now. He's Emmanuel and he's
beautiful. And we will be surprised to see
whom he draws. Now, some of my friends, you
know, they realize this. They decided to, to, to shine
the beauty of God's light. They lived in Lakeview at the
time, about a mile from here, and they invited one of their
children's teachers to their apartment for dinner.
And they just spent an evening of conversation, just great
conversation, the chaos of the kids and, and the, and toward
the end of the meal, the teacher said to them, something to this
effect. She's like, you have something
very special here that I don't have.
And I can see it. I can't quite put my finger on
it, but there's a reality here. There's a beauty here that I
cannot deny and see The thing is that this is the this is the
beauty of Jesus Christ shining through us in ways we don't even
know. One prayer that we can put in
our pocket this week is this Lord, let your beauty shine
through me and through a manual and then surprise me with an
opportunity to share the hope that I have with someone.
Or how about this prayer? Lord, let me open my table or my
schedule to your surprising guests.
Beauty will surprise us. Beauty will surprise us.
That's God's beauty. And the more we share with that,
share it with others, actually, the more it surprises them too.
Not with bad news that shocks, but as we'll all see in the next
verses, with good news that secures God's beauty, not only
surprises us, it becomes our sanctuary.
It becomes our sanctuary. Isaiah pictures the day when
God's beauty surrounds us protectively, that we kind of
live inside of it like like architecturally.
Verse 18 says this of Isaiah 60, verse 18, violence will never
again be heard of in your land. Devastation and destruction will
be gone from your borders. You will call your walls
salvation and your city gates praise.
Is our world like this? We hear about violence and
devastation all the time, and so we rightly have locks on our
doors and security systems and bulletproof glass and bodyguards
and borders and walls and they surround us.
And this is just sort of the living reality of human
existence in the air that we're in.
But listen to the promise. The promise of the Lord is that
one day his beauty will be our sanctuary.
Instead, we'll have different names for our security systems.
We'll literally name them after what God has done for us.
We will name them salvation. Salvation is when God sweeps
away all that violence and threat from our world.
And do you know that this work begins now?
This work, this security work, this sanctuary work begins now.
It begins when the beauty of the Holy Spirit of God fills our
hearts and addresses areas where we are given to violence, all
those areas in the 10 commandments that we named and
beyond. The Holy Spirit fills our heart,
fills our life and begins to say, no, let me clean that out
because I'm going to make You Beautiful.
And then Christ, as we give ourselves to the Lord, Christ
himself becomes our shield. He, he protects us above us,
behind us, before us, all around us, beneath us even.
And He guards us until we are secure in His forever city,
where there are no need for walls and gates and security
systems. This work of salvation and
sanctuary begins now. His beauty is within us and
around us. And as we come together, we
reflect the beauty of His glory together in our habits, in our
interactions, in our praises. And there's a sanctuary and
there's a safety, and there's a surrounding here of the beauty
of the Lord. As we come together, the very
atmosphere we breathe as the people of God is suffused with
God's beauty. Verse 19, The sun will no longer
be your light by day, and the brightness of the moon will not
shine on you. The Lord will be your
everlasting light, and your God will be your splendor, your
splendor. You know, look at the sanctuary.
As beautiful as this sanctuary is, this is not our splendor.
As beautiful as Anglican liturgy is, that's not our splendor
either. And as beautiful as the city of
Chicago is, the city of Chicago is not our splendor that we wear
as a garment. The most beautiful gift we share
is the presence of the living God.
God will be our splendor. You know, I think for all the
soaring language of Isaiah, there's something really
humbling about this. This is good medicine for people
with good taste. Because we're not the source of
our own beauty. We're not the selectors even of
our own beauty. It's a gift.
Just like these stained glass
windows are a gift. We didn't build them.
We didn't create them. We just received them.
The sunlight behind the stained glass shining in, that's also a
gift. We're just receiving it gladly.
And the source of all of this beauty?
Emmanuel got himself. He is a gift.
He's a gift of grace. He's our splendor and he's our
radiance. And we're basking in a beauty
that is not our own. Thus thus, we must not think of
ourselves as special and deserving of it.
We must not keep it to ourselves.
Otherwise, we'll start putting up borders and walls.
We'll stop praising and start protecting.
Because when God's beauty is our sanctuary, there's always to be
a way for others to take shelter with us in the same splendor.
Now, once we make our home inside that sanctuary, here's
what we find. And that is that God's beauty
sustains us. God's beauty sustains us.
And this is so important because the city has a way of chewing
people up and spitting them out. You may read, as I do every few
weeks. It's like Peeps, people moving
away, restaurants closing, school shuttering, churches
folding. The city can be a tough place,
and it takes a lot of resilience to thrive here, doesn't it?
The these final verses offer an encouragement to those who love
Chicago, who want to thrive in Chicago, who want the people of
God to flourish. Isaiah speaks about a permanent
beauty for people who have known only of temporary homes and
instabilities, as the first audience only knew instability.
Here's a permanent homes being spoken of verse 20.
Your sun will no longer set and your moon will not fade, for the
Lord will be your everlasting light, and the days of your
sorrow will be over. The Lord offers a permanent,
never ending light which shines upon a branch of His own,
planting His people. As verse 21 says, All your
people will be righteous. They will possess the land
forever. They are the branch I planted
the work of my hands so that I may be glorified.
Where has God planted us? Where has He asked us to
flourish? If God has planted us in
Chicago, His beauty will sustain us.
Our roots will deepen right here.
If He's called us elsewhere, His beauty will sustain us there.
All of us are called to be planted ultimately upon this
earth. It is here that the Scriptures
speak of that the Sun of Righteousness will shine with
healing in His wings. It is here where we as His
people will flourish in His light and give Him glory and
honor forever. In the meantime, it's a
struggle, isn't it, to flourish here in this earth.
I think one of the reasons that our city wears people out is the
scarcity mindset. Are you familiar with the
scarcity mindset? The scarcity mindset says
there's not enough to survive and thus we need to protect what
we have so that our Kingdom can come and so that we can be
glorified. We feel the scarcity mindset
when we're new to the city and can't keep seem to catch a
break. Rents keep rising, jobs are
scarce, friend groups are really hard to break into.
Jobs go to people with an in and we are on the outside.
We feel it. We feel it once we have just the
smallest of toe holds in the city.
But the cost keep rising and the Co workers are ruthless and the
schools are competitive and our car gets towed because we didn't
see that sign over there. Scarcity mindset.
Someone steals a package off our porch.
Like everyone here is just out for themselves.
We're like, well, maybe that message starts to seep in and we
go, well, maybe I need to. Maybe if I'm going to survive,
I've got to operate the same way because I can't afford to
overflow. Now being a spiritual beacon
church really takes Isaiah 60's promises to heart.
And that means that we we operate in the abundance mindset
that he talks about throughout his book.
And there's a confidence that comes from this abundance
mindset, which is that the Lord has us here.
We're the branch that he planted.
And he's going to provide all that we need so that we can give
generously. We can open up our homes.
We can invest our time in the next generation.
We can put others 1st. And we'll be like that well
watered garden that Isaiah talks about in chapter 58, flourishing
even as we seek the flourishing of the city that doesn't seek
our flourishing. Though deeply in debt when
composing the Messiah, George Handel was greatly enriched by
the beauty of this text. This text, Isaiah 60 made it
into Handel's Messiah. Arise, shine, for your light has
come. And he was greatly enriched by
all the other texts that he included from the Scriptures, so
filled with divine beauty, so surprised by it, so sustained by
it, so cultivated by it, handled, made a radical,
generous decision about really one of the finest works in the
Western world that he created, that he helped create, which was
this. He was going to bequeath the
rights to the Messiah to the Foundling Hospital.
The Foundling Hospital served the poorest of the poor and it
was specifically designed to care for abandoned children,
which were everywhere in England.
This hospital was overflowing with kids with no parents.
They had been deserted on the streets of of of London and
Dublin, other places. And he's like the rights to the
Messiah go to that place. And in the years following his
death, George Handel's death, the Messiah shook the Western
world with that same beautiful vision that had gripped him and
gripped his friend Charles before him.
One historian who attended the Messiah's performance about 25
years after Handel's death at the Westminster Abbey, he it was
performed and the historian reported this this great work,
the Messiah has been heard in all parts of the Kingdom of of
England, Britain, with increasing reverence and
delight. It has fed the hungry, clothed
the naked, foster the orphan, more than any single musical
production in this or any country.
This same beauty that shine through Isaiah's words is the
same beauty that shine through Handel's songs.
And it is the same beauty that shines through our lives and
through our church, my friends, it's the same beauty.
And so Emmanuel Anglican, this is our day to arise to shine,
because the glory of God has risen upon us right here where
He's planted us, right here where the pain is real and
undeniable, right here where He has actually called us to shine
His truth and goodness and beauty until the pain becomes
glory and until the gloom becomes His grace.
So, friends, let us lift up our eyes and see all those around us
who would be drawn into this beauty, who would be sustained
by it, who could take sanctuary in it.
And you could join us in the praises of the glory of the King
of kings, who is Emmanuel, God with us, in the name of the
Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Let's just take a moment to tell the Lord where we need His
beauty to shine in our life, in our world, in our church, and
open up our souls to His light. And Lord, we do pray that you
would now fill us with the Holy Spirit.
And we pray that the presence of Emmanuel, God with us, would
bring us encouragement and light and hope until we overflow for
the life of the world in Jesus name, Amen.