Village Shepherd

Rosemary was 33 years old. She'd been married to James for four years and they had two children, Sam who was two and the baby, Elizabeth, who was just three weeks old. Apart from the baby blues and extreme fatigue, both of which got her down a bit when James was at work, Rosemary was happy. They had recently moved to the London suburbs and James commuted each day by train.

Life was basically very good and held a lot of promise. James was earning good money, they lived in a beautiful old house with plenty of garden for the children to play in when they were a bit older, and the kids were just gorgeous.

One Tuesday morning, James left as usual at 7.00am to get his daily exercise by walking to the station for the 7.30 train. At 11.00am a policeman rang Rosemary's doorbell to tell her that James had had a massive heart attack on the station platform and had died in the ambulance on the way to hospital.

Rosemary's world fell apart at that point. It was weeks before she even began to believe that James was gone. She had no money of her own and they were so young that they had not yet made any provision for the future. Both sets of parents lived far away and Rosemary and James had not yet made new friends.

Rosemary's mother came down for the funeral and a couple of weeks after that, but she had to get back to her own job. She begged Rosemary to come back home at least for a short while, but Rosemary was quite incapable of making any decisions at all. She dragged herself into the basic necessities of life on automatic pilot, but had no energy left for anything else.

For some reason, she could hardly bear to see the baby, so other than feeding her and changing her two or three times a day, Rosemary neglected her. They took Sam at nursery school. He was a bit young, but under the circumstances it seemed the best way forward. At least he was out of the way.

Rosemary had no money for the mortgage and gradually sank deeper and deeper into debt. She felt as though she was in a bottomless, black pit from which there was no escape.

Eventually, events overtook her. The house was repossessed and Rosemary had nowhere to go except back home. With the children she moved in with her parents and there she gave up completely. She left the children to her mother's care and her days passed in a kind of black limbo.

But the human spirit is amazingly resilient especially when you're young. We human beings have a built-in survival instinct. So with the right help and the support of her parents and the medical profession and the many friends she had in that area, Rosemary gradually recovered. At last, after many weary months, the darkness began to dissipate and she returned to life again.

One of the problems with life's dark patches is that when you're in them suffering, it feels as though the darkness will go on forever and there is no light anywhere. You can't see beyond the immediate anguish of it all. But God's message, even in times of extreme national peril and agonizing suffering, has always been a message of hope. God always offers light in our darkness.

In today's lovely passage from Isaiah, a familiar passage which is repeated almost word for word in the book of Micah (Micah 4:1-3), God makes wonderful promises full of the sort of light and hope we all dream about, especially in times of violent conflict between nations.

God says, "In days to come many peoples shall come and say, "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths."

They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."

One of the great promises of Christmas, reiterated every Advent, is the promise of universal peace. But as each Advent comes and goes, peace seems no nearer. As fast as one trouble spot in the world eventually settles, so another trouble spot erupts and on we go in a never-ending cycle of destruction and darkness.

The light which came into the world that first Christmas is a fulfilment of God's promise here in Isaiah, but that light too apparently ended in darkness. The promise of Christmas appeared to end in the torment of crucifixion. But that ending was finally and irrevocably changed when Jesus rose from death into a glorious and radiant new life.

He promised the same for all of us, and those like Rosemary who struggle through their own little bits of crucifixion do eventually discover their own resurrection and a new life. But the principle also holds good for our world. After the darkness in our world we will eventually reach resurrection in the form of universal peace and harmony.

Of course, the time scale of the world is very different to our individual human time scale. We humans have only been around for a fraction of the time that the world has existed, so 2000 years are a mere blink in the world's time scale. Or to put it in churchy language, God's time scale is infinitely greater than ours.

We may never see universal peace in our lifetime, but be assured, it will come. God has promised us light in our darkness, Jesus has proved that promise to be true, and most of us have discovered it for ourselves at some point in our lives. One day our descendants will enjoy peace and harmony throughout the earth. All we need to do is to go on praying for that day to come and to remember that the darkness of Advent always ends in the light of Christmas.