In the Name of Jesus, the Light

The New Revised Standard Version The Word Became Flesh

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. 8 He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. 9 The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

10 He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. 11 He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. 12 But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 13 who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

14 And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

The Darkness

Greetings in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ on this Second Sunday of Christmas! The light has dawned, the Christ child is born! We sing carols of joy and we continue to feast and we continue to display the lights of Christmas!

In our house, we’ve been talking a lot about the 12 Days of Christmas this year. Asher is learning the song and has been counting each day since Christmas Day. He’s connecting to the concept that the celebration continues, not just confined to Christmas Morning, but a celebration that lasts as we affirm that the light is with us!

And yet, my friends, while I want to celebrate the dawning of the light, and while I don’t want to be a downer, I have to acknowledge this morning that the darkness feels ever so close still.

Rewind back to the beginning of Advent — we acknowledged that the darkness was growing deeper and that we longed for the light to dawn.

Friends, while the light of Christ is our hope and has dawned in a way that shatters the darkness, as we will celebrate and honor today as we are reminded of that hope in God’s word, we must also state it plainly — we live in dark times.

I know I don’t need to remind you of what darkness we see. We are a nation poised on the brink of yet another war. Our political landscape in America is shrouded with impeachment and scandal, schism and dishonesty.

It feels as though the darkness grows. Perhaps it is the clouding of smoke, as our world burns. Hundreds of millions of God’s beloved animals spread across the Australian subcontinent. A world growing closer and closer to the point of no return on issues of climate change, the tipping point nearing us and looming with the spectre of an uncertain future for our children and grandchildren.

The darkness is not only out there, in the big wide world. This is a darkness we know intimately ourselves. In the Pacific Northwest, this is the season of depression. The dreary days lead us deeper into sadness, loneliness, despair. I’ll speak for myself, but I know I speak for many others — this is a hard time of year to ward of the melancholy, the self-doubt, the depression.

And so the metaphors of darkness and light are so appropriate — they move from being metaphor to something closer, more true, more real than we’d like them to be.

I do not mean to draw us down today. Rather, I seek to speak the truth of what is and the truth of what our hope is nonetheless.

This is the season of light — and yet it pushes directly against all the darkness that we experience in the world, in our lives.

We are a peculiar people, us the followers of Jesus. We have found this story to be our ground, our foundation, and it tells out a wholly counterintuitive story to what we have come to expect of reality.

We are a people who claim that, in Christ… “the light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it.”

Today I want to remind us not only of the darkness, but of the light. And that Light, as it dawns in Christ, draws each of us to a choice. There is the dark, there is the light, and there is, for us as individuals and us as a community a choice — which will we live in? which will we choose to orient our story around?

The Light

We’ve begun to name the darkness. Now, let’s turn to the light. The Apostle John does it better than anyone with the opening words of his gospel:

The New Revised Standard Version The Word Became Flesh

3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

The New Revised Standard Version The Word Became Flesh

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

There are all kinds of amazing truths and metaphors written into these opening lines. A few nuggets, highlights for us today:

The Word was at the beginning — Not a being, not a form, not something described and pinned down — but the WORD. Words have immense power.

Rabbi Joseph Heschel’s daughter, Susanna, wrote of her father’s love and fear of words and their power:

“Words, he often wrote, are themselves sacred, God’s tool for creating the universe, and our tools for bringing holiness — or evil — into the world. He used to remind us that the Holocaust did not begin with the building of crematoria, and Hitler did not come to power with tanks and guns; it all began with uttering evil words, with defamation, with language and propaganda. Words create worlds, he used to tell me when I was a child. They must be used very carefully. Some words, once having been uttered, gain eternity and can never be withdrawn. The Book of Proverbs reminds us, he wrote, that death and life are in the power of the tongue. (viii-ix)”

For Christ to be the Word is for Christ to be the source of ultimate power, the one dwelling before all things.

Another super interesting part of this passage is if we connect the power of words to the realm of physics and light and the origins of life and matter.

The Word is the one who was at the beginning. The Word creates. Out of the abundance of God’s love, God creates and it is in Christ that this creative word is spoken out, lived out.

I got into a conversation over the Christmas break about the origins of the universe. It is often suspected that Christians must hold an opposing view to the concepts of modern science regarding the big bang and origins of life. However, along very orthodox Christian theological lines, it is quite reasonable to recognize that God’s creative work corresponds to the concepts of scientific reasoning and is not in argument with them.

It goes like this. The Word was there at the dawn of Creation. In Christian theology, we believe that God is Three-parts: God the Creator, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And we believe these members of the Trinity, as we call it, have been always in a loving dance with one another. Three-persons of God in loving connection with each other, loving and supporting and empowering each other in union.

And because of the abundant love in this union, God’s love also pours out. Out of the hyperabundant love that God holds in Gods union with Christ and Spirit, there is an overflow of love and light that bursts out.

What if this is the creation story? The explosion of love that speaks creation into being. We hear that God speaks and creation is. The Word is speaking, and worlds are created. Doesn’t this sound a lot like what we hear the scientific community positing about the energetic overflow that sparked the universe?

What if they’re the same thing? God’s loving presence in the Word creates light and life. What if? It’s beautiful, isn’t it? That the universe is born out of God’s love.

And so hear this verse again, in a fresh context: “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

While this might feel like a digression, I actually hope this is an “illuminating” line of thought that leads us to the choice.

The Choice

Hear again verses 10-13.

The New Revised Standard Version The Word Became Flesh

10 He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. 11 He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. 12 But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 13 who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

The celebration of the Christmas story and the engagement with the life of Christ is always about a choice. It is before each of us and it is as simple as it is immense: Will we walk in darkness, which will continue to push on us and surround us; or will we embrace the light, which breaks through it all?

We hear that the world did not know what to do with Jesus when he came to be flesh and blood among us. And we know that we can go through each day very easily denying that Jesus’ light has any power over the darkness.

But there is also the option to know light in fresh ways, to find it in our lives and let it sustain us.

You and I — we can walk around each day, letting ourselves be overcome by darkness. How can we not? It presses in so steadily.

Thankfully, we can also choose to live in the light.

We can choose to seek the light out — to discover its presence in community with other people, to open ourselves up to it in prayer and silence with God, to know its shape as we see it in the helping of others, the care for those in need. We can know the light and we can be the light for others as we learn to be more and more like the True Light, Christ Jesus.

How do we choose it?

Again, thankfully, we cannot do enough work or say the right words or read the right books or give enough money or time or effort to choose it. We choose the light by letting go. We choose the light by letting go of the control of our lives and surrendering to the love which is already surrounding us, already waiting for us.

It is deeply affirmed in our Christian tradition that we do not choose God, but God chooses us. So truly, the choice is not ours to make — yet it is ours to surrender to. God has chosen you, me, us. Our work is to let ourselves be chosen by the Light of the World. Our choice is to say “yes Lord, yes Light of the World, yes.”

It is with this “yes” that the Light begins to enlighten the nations, begins to change us, breaks through the darkness around our hearts and in our world.

And once we’ve surrendered, once we’ve said that yes, then we start living out of a place of light instead of darkness. The light which we then hold in us begins to change our world, begins to dawn in other people, other places. The light gets shared, because there is infinite, abundance of light to go around.

We can keep walking in darkness. And the light will keep pursuing us.

Epiphany

Tomorrow the church celebrates the Feast of Epiphany — the coming of the three wise kings and their giving of gifts to Christ.

Epiphany means revealing. It’s a sudden and striking awareness or a breakthrough experience.

Revealing - sudden and striking awareness or breakthrough experience

Put a simple way — Epiphany celebrates turning on the light. It is a “eureka” moment, a shift, a choice, a revelation — there is another way possible. There is hope in the darkness. The darkness will not win.

I pray that for you, this week of Epiphany will be a dawning, a turning on of a light, a reception of the goodness of God. May it happen for the first time for you. May it happen in a new way. May it awaken your whole self to the love that pursues you and will not let you go — the light of love that shines through the darkness.

O Lord, may it be so!