The Light in Us

This year, my wife and I and about ten other couples took a class called Habits of the Household. The basic idea of the class and the book was about creating habits (hence the title) that would make your household a place where the people who lived in it would be shaped into looking more like Jesus every day because our habits show us what we worship. Not if we worship, because we all worship something, but rather what you worship.

Every moment and every decision we make becomes a habit, which can either passively or proactively shape the person we are becoming and who our children will grow up to be. So the question becomes, what am I worshiping, and who is it making me to be? Through eleven weeks, we spent an hour and a half every Sunday night, talking and laughing about the types of habits the book was inviting us to engage in and the habits we already had in place or were trying to break.

There were many incredible moments when this group of people actively trying to follow Jesus could open up and be vulnerable about how hard following Jesus can be.

About 70% of the time, we talked about what the chapter that week was about, but the other 30% were mainly just stories about our children, the exciting and fun things they did, or the patience and anger-testing moments they had. It was a place of pure and Holy Community.

One of my absolute favorites was the habit of mealtimes. As a dad of an almost two-year-old, I know mealtimes are the least Christ-like moments of our day. Crying, messes, and the occasional flipping of plates and throwing the scraps to the dogs are a typical evening for us. So, to think this moment could be reclaimed as a holy moment was almost hard to comprehend. Could we intentionally bring Jesus into the middle of our third meltdown for yogurt and fingers and hair covered in Jelly?

One of the things that Justin Earley, the author of the book, suggested we might try is lighting a candle at mealtimes. He says specifically that “mental attention is called by physical attention. We all look at the same tiny explosion of a match. We smell the smoke, and we watch it burn. As it turns out, kids like fire. Fire signals that something is happening here. And indeed, it is. The most ordinary and sacred tradition is unfolding. Family dinner is beginning.”

So we tried it, and Luca loves it. He sometimes interrupted conversations or even stopped us from eating if we had not lit the candle. But we don’t just light the candle; we say a prayer, then we light the candle and say in unison, “Christ is light.” Every time my family sits down for dinner. No matter what day or how the day has gone, whether it’s a quick dinner or a long one. We sit down. We say a prayer and remind ourselves that Christ is light.

And there is something beautiful about the fact that we do it around a table as we prepare to ingest the meal before us. From the beginning of the grand narrative of the Bible, our departure from the garden was due to ingesting food we were not supposed to. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, darkness was released into the world. Death was released into the world. The fruit was poison, and it caused a reaction in every aspect of our bodies and reality.

But as Jesus says in John 8:12, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”

Every meal, we are reminded that the God of all creation, the alpha and the omega, the one who was and is to come, is the light of the world. Do you see the redemption story there? We ate, and darkness was brought into the world. Now, we eat and are reminded that Jesus brought light back to the world. What was our demise now reminds us of our new life in Christ.

But the story doesn’t stop there because every week at this church, we choose to eat a meal together. In the holy community, just like that small group of parents who met on Sunday nights. We come here every Sunday, no matter what the week was like. No matter what we did, no matter what was done to us. We cry, we laugh, and we eat.

Because Jesus, the light who has come to us, wants to show you and me that he is in us. The light, the light of the world, is in you and me. Luca in Greek means bearer of light, and that exactly what all of us have the chance to do. When we accept Jesus Christ into our lives as lord and savior, we become the tabernacle, the dwelling place, the temple of the light. Christ is in us.

And what more beautiful way to remind us of the fact that through the ingesting of the light, the antidote to the darkness we have been eating, we can be with and return to the garden?

So over these next few moments, we will do exactly that. Just as jesus and his disciples par took, so will we.

So some of our wonderful volunteers will be passing the body and the blood of Christ to you. When you receive the elements please hold them and will eat our meal as a family, to remember that Christ is light, and that light is in us.

We will eat together, so first, hold up your bread.

“And as they were eating, he took bread, and after blessing it, broke it and gave it to them, saying, “Take; this is my body.”

Eat bread together

Now, your cup of Juice,

And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And he said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many.

Drink together

Pray