Sermon: Into the Light

This Advent, we began using Brian McLaren's book, We Make the Road by Walking, to shape sermons and worship, a pattern that will continue through Pentecost. This sermon connects to the chapter meant for Christmas Eve, "The Light Has Come."

 John 1:1-5, 9-10; 3:19-21

Into the Light

James Sledge                                                                                       December 28, 2014

If your neighborhood looks much like mine, the Christmas lights are everywhere. The house around the corner from me brings in a bucket truck like the power company uses to hang lights along the roof line. In another yard nearby there’s a huge tree that has lights at the very top. I have no idea how they get them all the way up there.

Lights have been big at Christmas for as long as I can remember, although they have gotten a bit more “over the top” in recent years. When I lived in Columbus, OH, one of the radio stations sponsored a “tacky tour.” You could join them on a chartered bus that drove around to some of the gaudier displays that listeners had recommended.

As I understand it, the whole Christmas light thing evolved from an old German custom of putting candles on evergreens at Christmas time. The custom came to America with German immigrants, and when electric lights became available, they replaced candles on the trees. Then they began to migrate to other places.

It’s hardly surprising that Christmas became associated with lights. What with Christmas Eve services held at night and Bible verses that tell of Wise Men following a start and that speak of Jesus as the light that shines in the darkness, how could it not have?

Of course our modern world is brightly lit up all the time. The electric lights of our culture shine in the darkness and practically overwhelm it. You have to find some desolate wilderness to experience real darkness, to see the Milky Way and the stars and planets in all their glory on a moonless night. Even when we go to bed at night, little lights stare at us from TVs and chargers and clocks and cable boxes. We could use a little more natural darkness in our nights.

But if our electric lights have all but banished the night, we have plenty of the darkness John speaks of in our gospel reading.

A lot of people did not want the recent Senate report on torture to see the light of day. Some were genuinely concerned it could incite violence, but I suspect that most simply didn’t want it public. There are disturbing things in the report that many of us would just as soon not know. They run too counter to our self-image. Even those who support “enhanced interrogation techniques” still want them confined to the shadows.

When Congress passed a spending bill earlier this month, I was happy we didn’t have another government shutdown. I was less happy to hear of the things that always get tucked into such bills, statutes and pet spending projects that would never make it through if they had to be discussed in the open, in the light.

The recent hacking of Sony’s Hollywood studios has revealed the seamy underside of that business. Sony is probably no worse than other studios or many corporations. There is much in the corporate world that no company would want to become public. And at the intersection of the corporate and political worlds there is surely a “land of deep darkness,” to borrow a phrase from Isaiah, a realm that truly loves darkness and fears the light.

There is much in our world that loves darkness rather than light. It likes to stay hidden in the shadows, but we have glimpsed it. We know darkness well, and many of us have become numb to it and cynical about it. It is just the way the world works, we say.

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.  Life and light that penetrates the darkness; life and light for which our Christmas lights are only a paltry symbol; life and light more powerful than all the darkness of the little worlds we create, and of all the world.

The darkness of the world does not like the light and so did not like Jesus. It killed him, but that could not quench the light. Much of the world still does not care for the light or for Jesus, even many who bear the name Christian. They sully his name by connecting it to hatred and all manner of darkness, but the light still shines. We in the Church sometimes look more like the world than the light. We sometimes prefer the darkness, acting in ways we’d rather people not see, but the light still shines, and no darkness can overcome it.

That is why we celebrate at Christmas. Not simply because of a beautiful and beloved story of a birth long ago, but because of the promise that eternal light, light that existed before the Big Bang, has come to us, suffered for us, and refuses to leave us in the darkness that we create and so often prefer.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. And we are invited to come into that light, to learn the ways of life and light that Jesus shows us, the ways of true aliveness that don’t need to be hidden. When the light and incredible aliveness of Christ becomes part of us, it cannot be contained.  Light and life fill us and spill over into our lives in ways that reveal light to the world. When the light and life and aliveness of Jesus fill us, the true hope and promise of Christmas shines in us. And the world becomes just a tiny bit brighter.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.