My favorite new place to visit in Dallas is the Nasher Sculpture Center. Trees and sculpture stand side by side in the beautiful outdoor garden of precise proportions, yielding an organic feel. One piece that always causes me pause is Aristide Maillol’s blackened bronze called simply Night. The lone smooth figure of an unclothed woman is seated in cramped pose: knees up, arms folded upon them, head fallen as if to give the impression of self-imprisonment. Maybe she only poses repose, but she seems to me an encased box, immobile, admitting no hope for the break of day or the dawn of her freedom.

When Matthew quotes the prophet Isaiah about the land of Zebulun and Naphtali, the region of Galilee into which Jesus goes to make his home, he wants us to sense this feeling of the people who dwell in that land. For 800 years Assyrians and Babylonians and Greeks and Romans had run roughshod over the natives. Jews living there must have felt cramped, immobilized by their oppressors. Even fishermen like Andrew and Peter, James and John, could hardly make a living for the burdens of taxation: water tax, boat tax, net tax, fish tax—all attempts to control their livelihood. Galilee of the Gentiles, it was called, too, because for centuries Jews had had to cohabit with pagans who had no respect for the God of Israel and no light of the law of God by which to live with moral integrity.

Just here, then, is where Jesus goes to make his home base. He is the light of the world himself, the will of God in person. Yet he goes first to the darkest place. He does not go to the city of Jerusalem, where the darkness is offset by the artificial lights of politicians and priests who claim power but do not transform people’s lives, because they are too interested in maintaining the lives they enjoy at the expense of others. By contrast, Jesus brings light to those who need it most, those who sit in darkness, those who know themselves to be without hope in the world beyond staying alive another day.

Lithuanian-born Polish poet and American educator Czeslaw Milosz was one of the most important prophetic voices of the last generation. He spoke out against the soul-crippling effects of Communism. When it was not fashionable in the poetic community to speak of the human condition in spiritual terms or to refer to hope in clear Christian ways, Milosz put ink to paper in a way that feels like spilling blood. Milosz’s last compilation, Second Space, was published last fall after his death and includes the poem In a Parish. The poem reminds of those who sit in darkness, of those whose lives were a contradiction of their intended destinies, of the dead who seem to sit immobile forever in darkness unrelieved. Were I not frail and half broken inside, he begins, I wouldn’t be thinking of them, who are, like me, half broken inside. He is thinking of those who are buried in the church cemetery. He goes to visit them. They are half broken inside encased boxes underground. He sees the names and knows that their actual lives never lived up to them. Crazy Sophies,/Michaels who lose every battle,/self-destructive Agathas/Lie under crosses with their dates of birth and death. Crazy Sophies—sophia means “wisdom,” and yet her life was anything but wise. Michael reminds of the archangel of battle, but this Michael never won a thing. Agatha comes from the Greek for goodness, and goodness would never destroy itself, although this sad one did. We are all like this, Milosz says. This is our common lot. No matter how high you rise in life, you go down into the earth. You join the fellowship of the dead.

Thus we go down into the earth,/my fellow parishioners,/With the hope that the trumpet of judgment will call us by our names./Instead of eternity, greenness and the movement of clouds/They rise then, thousands of Sophies, Michaels, Matthews,/Marias, Agathas, Bartholomews./So that at last they know why/And for what reason?

The fact that we live and die under the cross of Christ is our only hope. He is the light that shines in the darkness. Only from him and through him and in him can we find hope that our lives will one day make sense, that the contradictions we feel in the world and in our souls will be overcome.

Carol Ann McElhannon wrote to me this week about the sad loss of a friend. Carol Ann is a social worker. Julie Harris worked in a boarding house. A native of England, Julie had no relatives in the States except for a son in prison. Last week, her drunken boyfriend drove his car into the rear of another vehicle, killing Julie in the passenger seat. No one claimed her body. No one mourned her properly. The medical examiner cremated her. Her ashes are now mingled with other nameless dead. Carol Ann wears the cross of Christ in her heart while others wear it round their necks. She was rebuffed by the boarding house when she offered to hold a memorial service for Julie. Can’t upset the patrons, don’t you know?! Carol Ann knows that Julie Harris was a child of God. She remembers her as a half broken one who strove to survive. She mourns her as one who is herself half broken inside.

Thus we go down into the earth, Milosz says. Thus we go down, as fellow parishioners. We cannot rise by ourselves. We cannot bring our own light into the darkness. We cannot make sense of our lives as they are today. We can only go down into the earth with hope in the cross that will be etched into the stone above our graves, the Christ who went down with us and became a fellow parishioner.

But look, Christ is also now the risen one who will blow the trumpet of judgment at the last day. He will calls to life. He will call our names. And at last we hope our names and our lives will make sense.

When a tsunami hits unsuspecting innocents in Southeast Asia and takes the lives of so many Crazy Sophies, and Michaels who never win a battle, and self-destructive Agathas; when Julie Harrises are forgotten by the world and turn up ashes to ashes and dust to dust; when you feel like a statue of a woman all balled up within herself and feeling like the very definition of Night when you know you are supposed to be Light, does anybody care? Can anybody do anything to set things right? Where is God?

Jesus shows us that God is right there with those who suffer. God promises us an eternity that is not vague and listless but greenness and the movement of clouds. God is walking into every Galilee, including yours, to bring light and life to those who sit in darkness, in the shadow of death.

Tyranny from foreign invaders had bred in Galilee a Wild West mentality. Every ragtag gunslinger who could mount a movement would spring up with thoughts of revolution. Quiet submission or violent resistance seemed the only two ways of life. But Jesus brings a different way—a way President Bush pointed toward in his inaugural address this week. Although he continues to defend the use of force in places like Iraq, he rightly declared that the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in the world is not primarily the task of arms.

Jesus defeats tyranny by extending his arms on the cross. He will not fight fire with fire. His cross shows that his radical way will get you caught in the crossfire. True freedom comes only when people determine to live in peace and for the good of all.

I was with our former student minister, John Brashier, last weekend. He is now Dr. John Brashier. I am really proud of him, and so should you be. Not because he has earned his doctorate, but because he knows what to do with it. He has accepted the pastorate of a church in the nearly abandoned neighborhood of downtown Jackson, Mississippi. The grand church he serves once ran 1,600 in Sunday school. That was before all the white people moved to the suburbs and left the area to low-income blacks, mainly. Church attendance hovers at about 190 now. The buildings still bear signs of a glorious past. It’s been 33 years since the walls have been painted or the carpet changed. They gave a couple of a million dollars in endowment to the state convention foundation to manage, because, as some said at the time, that way, when we close down the church, the funds will already be there to be given to missions work. There are two congregations that coexist in the pews and challenge John to bring together: those who have all but lost hope, and those who have lost all but hope. Some want a church to die in, some a church to live in. John and the latter group are the presence of Christ in that place. They have no illusions of bringing back the glory days, but they are little white crosses that point upward to life. They are lights in the darkness. They are reminders that this is precisely where God is at work in the world.

And this is why Jesus calls upon everyone to repent and get ready for the coming of the kingdom of heaven. He doesn’t mean that we should all feel sorry for our sins in order to make God choose us for heaven when we die; he means that we must stop being obstacles to the power of heaven. He wants us to get on the side of the living and give hope to the dying. He wants us to rise up from our usual way of doing business and give ourselves to the work of the kingdom.

To that end Jesus calls Andrew and Peter, James and John to be his disciples. He wants them to drop their nets and follow him. He wants to turn their fishing skills toward snatching up people who are drowning in despair, who are over their heads in pressure, who are sinking under the weight of sin. He wants them to fish these souls out of the stagnant ponds they are floundering in. By following Jesus, they will share in his resurrection power and witness his healing touch.

Some of you here this morning identify with Galileans who sit in darkness, with Southeast Asians that struggle to put life back together again after a destructive event, with the woman who is being turned to ashes or the sculpture called Night. Listen, Jesus comes to you as the presence of God. He is precisely in the places where darkness and death rule the day as night. He is still healing all those with diseases of body and soul, making people marvel at his life-giving power.

But what about you who have already known the quickening power of his cross in your life? You have felt his peace. You have sensed the darkness give way to the light. Now he calls you to come and follow him—to be his presence in the world. He wants you to be intentional about it. He doesn’t just want you to feel the power that raises the dead or lights the darkness; he want you to join the dead in the places they lie and to sit with those in darkness. He wants to use you to bring life and light. For some of you, that will mean dropping your nets and taking up a new work for God. For most of you, it will mean taking the skills you have and employing them for the kingdom of God.

Thus we go down, Milosz says. Thus we go down, my fellow parishioners, in order that together with them—not by ourselves, but together with them!—we may rise. Jesus is coming. Jesus is calling.