Sermon: A Light in the Darkness

Delivered at Bethel United Methodist Church in West Greenville, South Carolina on January 3, 2016

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A Light in the Darkness

Audio Version

In the beginning was the Word

and the Word was with God

and the Word was God.

The Word was with God in the beginning.

Everything came into being through the Word,

and without the Word

nothing came into being.

What came into being

through the Word was life,

and the life was the light for all people.

The light shines in the darkness,

and the darkness doesn't extinguish the light.

A man named John was sent from God.  He came as a witness to testify concerning the light, so that through him everyone would believe in the light.  He himself wasn't the light, but his mission was to testify concerning the light.

The true light that shines on all people

was coming into the world.

The light was in the world,

and the world came into being through the light,

but the world didn't recognize the light.

The light came to his own people,

and his own people didn't welcome him.

But those who did welcome him,

those who believed in his name,

he authorized to become God's children,

born not from blood

nor from human desire or passion,

but born from God.

The Word became flesh

and made his home among us.

We have seen his glory,

glory like that of a father's only son,

full of grace and truth.

John testified about him, crying out, "This is the one of whom I said, 'He who comes after me is greater than me because he existed before me.'"

From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace;

as the Law was given through Moses,

so grace and truth came into being through Jesus Christ.

No one has ever seen God.

God the only Son,

who is at the Father's side,

has made God known.

John 1:1-18 (CEB)

I believe in the sun

Even when it's not shining

I believe in love

Even when I don't feel it

And I believe in God

Even when He is silent

From "I Believe in Love" by BarlowGirl

Sunday, December 28, 2014 was a very special day for me: it was the sixth anniversary of the day I delivered my very first sermon.  My first sermon was based on the story of Simeon and Anna, two elderly prophets who had the privilege to see their long-awaited Messiah at the Temple shortly after His birth.¹  The Revised Common Lectionary, from which many churches select Scripture passages for the week, consists of a three-year cycle of readings, so my pastor preached on the very same Gospel passage that day.  Though I was a bit under the weather, I had absolutely no intention of missing church.

A lot had changed in the past six years, so I reread my first sermon the evening before, to see if I would still deliver the same message if I were to preach on the same passage again.  I figured that I would rework a lot of the wording and do some additional research so that I could eliminate any unnecessary filler.  Those superficial changes aside, I decided that I would probably retain the basic structure and overall message of the sermon.  Six years later, I would still preach that, like Simeon and Anna, we, as Christians, are waiting for Someone to set things right.

One evening a couple of days later, I reflected on my experience.  When I wrote my first sermon, I wrote about waiting and longing, most likely because I was personally in a place of waiting and longing.  I was stuck in a bad job situation, hoping and praying for a new direction in life.  I realized that I would probably deliver a similar sermon six years later because I was again in a season of waiting and longing.  A lot changed after I delivered that first sermon: I found a new job and a new community, and I was getting more and more involved in the Church.  For a while it seemed that life was on the upswing, and I thought that my life was finally going somewhere.  Life then took a turn for the worse as I began to break beneath the weight of what I believed to be people's expectations of me.  I suddenly realized that I was angry, and I lost my motivation to write or teach Sunday school.

Some might label what I was feeling that evening weltschmerz.  Weltschmerz is a German word that means "world-weariness" or, more literally, "world-pain."  It describes "the kind of feeling experienced by someone who believes that physical reality can never satisfy the demands of the mind" or alternately "the feeling of anxiety caused by the ills of the world."²  In other words, weltschmerz is the pain of knowing that the world is not as it should be, that life is not as it should be, that we are not as we should be – basically, that nothing is as it should be.  Borrowing a phrase from William Shakespeare and John Steinbeck, I named my experience "the winter of my discontent."

There are two major times for celebration on the Church calendar – Christmas and Easter – both of which are preceded by more somber seasons – Advent and Lent respectively.  Advent is the perfect season for people afflicted with weltschmerz, for it is a time of longing.  We light candles for hope, peace, joy, and love, not because we experience such things, but because we long for such things.  During Advent, we remember that, in the same way that the Jewish people longed for a Messiah to come and set things right, we long for the day when our Savior returns to set all things right in the world.  If Christmas is the time when we celebrate, in the words of the priest Zechariah, the breaking of "the dawn from on high,"³ then Advent is like the darkness before the dawn.

During Advent and Christmas, the Church typically reads the birth narratives found at the beginnings of two of the four Gospels.  The Gospel of Luke tells the story of Jesus' birth primarily from Mary's point of view.  We read that Mary and Joseph are forced to travel far from home to Bethlehem, and, unable to find any place that will take them in, they end up delivering the baby in a stable.  There, they are visited by a group of nervous shepherds who have just seen an army of angels heralding the infant's birth.⁴  The Gospel of Matthew, on the other hand, tells the story of Jesus' birth primarily from Joseph's perspective.  We read that the family is visited in Bethlehem by wealthy astrologers who have followed a star to their location.  The magi present the child with gifts of gold, incense, and myrrh shortly before the family has to flee from the violence of a paranoid king who is afraid of losing his power.⁵

In the Gospel of John, we read not a birth narrative, but rather poetry, which some have titled the Hymn to the Word.  We read that "in the beginning was the Word," that "the Word was with God," that "the Word was God," and that "everything came into being through the Word."  We read that the Word, who is "the light for all people," "became flesh and made His home among us."  In the words of Eugene Peterson, "The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood."⁶  The Hymn to the Word is very different from a birth narrative, but it tells us all we really need to know about the Christmas story.  It tells us that the creative force at work when God spoke that first word hayah ("let there be")⁷ became a human and lived among us as Jesus of Nazareth, a man "full of grace and truth" who "has made God known" to us.

As the longing of Advent gives way to the joy of Christmas, everything changes – or at least everything is supposed to change.  There I sat, on the sixth day of Christmas, feeling like I was wandering in the darkness, still waiting for dawn to break.  Over time, I got my motivation back, but the pain that the reality of my life does not match my expectations for life did not go away.  During the summer, I asked some of my friends to pray for me because I felt stuck.  For a while it seemed that my life was changing for the better, but it ended up taking a turn for the worse once again.  The Bible study group that has been my community for the last five years has called it quits; I am not certain where I belong in the Church; certain issues within my family have been causing me stress; and, as a result of all these things, I have been battling a case of the blues.  It is now the tenth day of Christmas, one year later, and once again I find myself waiting for dawn to break.

I wonder if it is common for people to experience a bit of a letdown after Christmas.  After months of buildup, we visit our families, exchange presents, and sit down to feast on ham or turkey.  Eventually we have to go back home, and everything goes back to normal.  As children, we can barely fall asleep on Christmas Eve, full of anticipation for what awaits us in the morning.  When we grow up, we realize that we long for things that money cannot buy, things that Santa Claus cannot leave under the Christmas tree.  At Christmas we sing, "Joy to the world!  The Lord is come!" yet, once the festivities are over, it seems that little has actually changed since Advent.  Unfortunately, life does not always follow the liturgical calendar.

In the midst of everything going on in my life lately, there is one phrase from the Hymn to the Word that has returned to me multiple times during the holiday season: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness doesn't extinguish the light."  The season of Advent took on a new meaning for me in the last few years when, during Christmas Eve services, my pastor began putting out the other four candles on the Advent wreath before lighting the Christ candle.  It was into a dark world – a world in desperate need of hope, peace, joy, and love – that Christ made His entrance.  The world can be a very dark place, and the circumstances of our lives can be dark as well, but the message of Christmas is that the Light of Christ continues to shine in spite of the darkness.

The Hymn to the Word tells us that even though "the light was in the world" and "the world came into being through the light," "the world didn't recognize the light."  The Light of Christ shines in the darkness, but apparently it is easier to miss the Light than one might think.

During Advent, as the Church prepares for Christmas, congregations who follow the Lectionary typically read about John the Baptist, the one who was called by God to prepare the way for Jesus.  At some point after Jesus began His public ministry, John rubbed the wrong people the wrong way and landed himself in prison.  For those called to be prophets, this is a hazard of the job.  As John sat in prison, he began to second guess himself and wonder if the One he had been supporting was going to do what He was supposed to do and set things right.  He sent two of his disciples to ask Jesus, "Are You the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?"⁸  Basically, they were sent to ask Him, "So are You the Messiah, or not?"

Jesus, who had already done a lot of wonderful things in His ministry, said to the messengers, "Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them."⁹  Though life was indeed dark for John, the Light of Christ was still shining.

After the messengers left, Jesus said to those around Him, "I tell you, among those born of women no one is greater than John; yet the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he."¹⁰  If the greatest man to ever walk the face of the earth didn't fully understand the Christ and the Kingdom He came to establish, what does that say about the rest of us?  Though we may have certain information that John did not, are we really any more enlightened than he was?  If even the voice crying out in the wilderness, "Prepare the way of the Lord!" didn't fully understand why he was preparing people, then what might we fail to understand?  If even the one "sent from God" to be "a witness to testify concerning the light" could lose sight of the Light amid the darkness of his circumstances, then how easy it must be for us to miss the Light!

We tend to think that light and darkness are opposites.  According to Shane Hipps, this assumption is a fallacy: to say that light and darkness are opposites is to imply that they are equal opposing forces.  The fact of the matter is that darkness is merely the absence of light.  If you enter a dark room and turn on the light, the darkness will flee, and there is no way to bring darkness back into the room as long at the light is present.  Darkness is utterly powerless against light.  In fact, darkness exists only at the mercy of light.¹¹

Hipps says that, if you want to dispel the darkness in your life, you need to seek a source of light.  If you are in a place of despair, seek a source of hope.  If you are plagued with anxiety or anger, seek peace.  If you are dealing with sorrow, seek a source of joy.  If there is hatred in your life, invite love into your heart.  If you are tired of the darkness, then move toward the light.¹²

We don't usually notice light, because our attention is most often focused elsewhere, usually on whatever the light illuminates.  What we don't always realize is the fact that light is the only thing our eyes can actually sense.  You aren't really seeing the objects in the room around you: you are seeing the light reflected by the objects.  The sense of sight is totally dependent on light.  This is why, in a pitch dark room, all you can see is a field of black.  We don't typically notice light, but, at the same time, light is the only thing we can actually see.¹³  I wonder if, at times when the world seems devoid of light, we are actually walking around with our eyes closed, spiritually speaking.  Perhaps the light we seek is always hidden plain sight, and perhaps we only need to open our eyes to experience it.

"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness doesn't extinguish the light."  When our Christmas celebration is over, when the decorations are taken down put back in the attic, when all the leftovers are finished, this is the message we must keep in our hearts, whatever lies ahead of us in the new year.  The world can be a dark place, and our lives can seem dark at times, but the Light never stops shining.  The Light is always shining, no matter how dark life seems, but we must keep our eyes open if we want to see it.

May we all keep our eyes focused on the Light.  Amen.


Notes:

1. Luke 2:22-38
2. Wikipedia: Weltschmerz
3. Luke 1:78-79 (NRSV)
4. See Luke 1-2.
5. See Matthew 1-2.
6. John 1:14 (The Message)
7. https://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?t=niv&strongs=h1961
8. Luke 7:18-20 (NRSV) (See also Matthew 11:2-3)
9. Luke 7:21-22 (NRSV)
10. Luke 7:28 (NRSV)
11. Shane Hipps.  "Spoiling the Illusion."  Mars Hill Bible Church podcast, 05/08/2011.
12. ibid
13. Peter Rollins says stuff like this when comparing love to light.

The image featured in this blog post is part of a photograph taken by Jack Delano in the Union Station waiting room during World War II.