In July 2002, a coal mine in Somerset, Pennsylvania, collapsed, trapping nine miners. It was a terrible time.
“These nine men were 240 feet underground with water rising around them,” said Mac Brunson, senior pastor of Valleydale Baptist Church in Birmingham. “The only oxygen they had was in their four-feet-high chamber, and the only light they had was on their helmets. They wrote love notes on cardboard to their families and stored them in a plastic bucket. They prayed together, and they bound themselves with cable so the water wouldn’t sweep them away.”
“We’ll die together,” one of the miners said.
As first responders worked to rescue them, the miners tapped on the wall with a wrench nine times every hour, signifying nine men were alive.
“Suddenly they heard a voice asking, ‘Is anyone there?’” Brunson continued.
“They initially thought they might be hallucinating in the thin air pocket, but then joyfully realized hope and help [were] available. All nine survived.
Miners and shepherds
The miners’ plight echoes the story of the Judean shepherds, watching their flocks by night as the story of Luke 2 reveals, Brunson said, addressing those gathered for the Birmingham Metro Baptist Association Ministers Conference Christmas celebration Dec. 13.
Brunson said familiar stories of Christmas can become rote, since pastors have preached them for years — but each contains dynamic and life-changing truth.
“These shepherds sat in darkness until the light of God suddenly appeared,” Brunson said. “Angels don’t carry light — they carry messages — so this light was the ‘doxa’ glory of the Lord as the text explains. In the same way the glory of God appears to us in the frustrations of our lives and dispels the darkness.”
The shepherds knew emotional darkness since they were “quarantined” all of their lives as unclean, Brunson explained. They knew moral darkness since the Mishna said they were thieves and liars who couldn’t testify in a court of law. And they knew spiritual darkness because they were unwelcome in the temple and synagogue as the unclean “people of the land.”
“Into this darkness came the glory of the Lord,” Brunson said.
“The last time the glory of God is mentioned is in Ezekiel 10 when the prophet saw the glory depart the temple of God. But now the glory appeared to the lowly shepherds, and their lives were changed forever.”
Brunson said these men who couldn’t testify in a court became witnesses of what they found in Bethlehem.
“I believe they trusted in Jesus as their Messiah that day,” he asserted, “and they experienced the joy of the Lord.”
‘Help has come’
Such joy is all too often hard to find in our world today, but Christmas is a season to remember joy is present, even in the darkest moments, Brunson said.
Brunson quoted newscaster Brian Williams, who gave his final sign-off on Dec. 9 after a 28-year career with NBC and MSNBC: “I believe in this place, and in my love of country I yield to no one, but the darkness on the edge of town has spread to the main roads and highways and neighborhoods. It’s now at the local bar and the bowling alley, at the school board and the grocery store, and it must be acknowledged and answered for.”
Williams’ words express a truth believers through the ages have known, Brunson said.
“The Apostle Paul said darkness is more than the absence of light; it’s also a realm ruled over by ‘the god of this age,’ according to 2 Corinthians 4:4,” Brunson said. “There is a darkness that is darker than the absence of light. It’s a darkness that lives in us.
“This is, indeed, the message of Christmas: The glory of God appears in our darkness and hope and help has come.”
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