Of Light and Dark

Second Sunday After Christmas, 01/03/2016 | Sermon on John 1:(1-9) 10-18 | by Luke Bouman |

John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ²He was in the beginning with God. ³All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being ⁴in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

⁵The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.⁶There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. ⁸He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. ⁹The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. ¹⁰He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. ¹¹He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. ¹²But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, ¹³who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. ¹⁴And 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.

¹⁵(John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”)¹⁶From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. ¹⁷The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

Of Light and Dark

Chris was, in many ways, a typical child. He studied hard when school was in session, played hard when it was not. He loved his family, especially his dad, whom he admired. He tolerated his sister and was best friends with his dog. He loved both the excitement of new adventures, especially those born of his vivid imagination, and the routines of the day. He was not an especially troubled child, though he was no stranger to mischief. As he grew older he visited the „timeout corner“ less and less, learning to negotiate the careful balance between boundaries and the challenge of stretching and growing beyond them. He had few fears as a child, but of those things he did fear, the darkness loomed large.

„Night light! Night light!“ he would shout whenever his dad would forget to turn it on. He was strangely drawn to the light in the face of his fears. It amazed him that such a small bulb has such amazing power. It could banish the darkness and his fears with it. Over the years he found comfort in the face of darkness from many places. The night light was his first refuge. When he was a bit older, he would turn on his closet light whenever the fears would resurface, opening the door between the closet and his bedroom just wide enough to give hopeful light to his night. When he would go camping with his family or the scouts, he was always drawn to the campfire like a moth to a light bulb. He learned early how to build and tend the fire, thereby becoming the protector of all around from the hateful darkness.

When he was 10, he received a magical gift for his birthday. It was a new kind of light for his bedroom. It was a star field projector. He could turn it on and it would project the stars of the night sky onto the walls and ceiling of his room. He could stare at it for hours. It had a way of moving through the night the same way as the stars in the sky would move in their grand dance of nights and seasons. It not only kept his room safe from the darkness, it also beckoned his mind into the study of the power of light, even the tiny lights of the stars. These myriad burning gas balls intrigued him, as did light itself. In school, science, especially the science of physics, consumed his mind and attention.

There, in high school, he was fascinated to learn that light had unique properties among the many things that he studied. Light acted both as a wave and had the properties of a particle. There were kinds of light that he could see with his eyes and there were types of light he could not see. There were creatures who could see more of the light spectrum and those who saw less. He was especially fascinated by the ability of light to give. He didn’t think about it at the time, but when he would turn on the light in his closet as a child, it would give light to the next room without losing any of its brightness in the closet. He thought about how light from a single star could travel trillions of miles and be seen in the night sky.

By now physical darkness was no longer something that he feared. He knew that the darkness, with all of its dangers, real and imagined, was not really dangerous. There were far more dangerous kinds of darkness in the world. There was the darkness that provided shelter and cover for people who wanted to do things that they didn’t want seen. It seemed to Chris that there were people who were just as drawn to the darkness as he was drawn to the light. These people preyed on other people with violence and treachery under cover of darkness. Now, as a college student, when he walked down darkened pathways from place to place at night, it was not the darkness he feared, but rather the people who used the darkness against others.

His expanding understanding and awareness of the world also brought clarity to his fear of this new kind of darkness. He lived, as humanity ever has, in a world in which people who love the darkness do unspeakable things to one another, sometimes in the name of good. Except that in today’s world, the news media cover each dark event, amplifying its effect and bringing the darkness from the remote corners of the mind into the very center of consciousness. Chris could not pretend, as others in previous generations had, that humanity’s darkness was limited to people and places far away from his world. He has seen images of war and terror from around the world: the Middle East, Paris, Africa. But he had also seen images from mass shootings, once rare, now a common, weekly event in his own country, the United States: Connecticut, Colorado, Oregon, and most recently California. The darkness seemed to be everywhere. As one with African ancestry, Chris was fully aware of the violence even within his own community, where lives didn’t seem to matter to those who loved the darkness. He wondered at the irony of the violence perpetrated against people in his own community by „white“ police officers. The lightness of one’s skin was used to cover the darkness hidden in the heart.

Chris recognized that he could not know what was in the hearts of others. What made him most afraid, in these uncertain and dark times, was the fact that he could see the presence of both the light and the darkness in his own heart. He knew that the anger that welled up inside him at the injustice, poverty, racism, and terror around him could easily spill over into violence. He knew that only the light of love in his life, the love of family and friends, the love of God, had the remotest possibility of keeping this darkness in check. He knew how carefully the balance was managed within his own soul. He understood that the light of love was the only hope for his own life. He believed firmly that this same light was the only hope for the world.

His family had instilled a love of God in him from the start of this life. He was among the few students studying Physics at his university that was open as he talked about faith. Interestingly most of his professors were active in their own religious communities, though they had a variety of faith traditions between them. He asked one of his professors about this one day. The professors response was revealing. His mentor stated simply that he studies the mechanics of an incredibly complex and intricate universe, one that he finally had to admit had a rare probability of occurring on its own, without God. But his mentor’s faith was not the naive faith in a generic „prime mover“. It was a faith of deep conviction, grounded in a God who was so committed to this creation that God chose to become a part of it. His mentor was a Christian. He lived his faith in many ways and encouraged Chris to do the same.

It was with all of this in mind that Chris heard the readings in Church during the Christmas season. „The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.“ Chris understood this, perhaps more powerfully than most. He understood that he was called to be a child of the light. He understood that loving even those who loved the darkness, even those he feared the most, was the only way that the light would dispel that darkness in the world. He was not naive. He didn’t think this would happen overnight, or maybe even in his lifetime. But having been illuminated by the fire of God’s Spirit, he understood clearly that he would not give in to his fears. He would face his darkness within and the darkness in the world around him. He, who had received the love of Christ, would now give that light to others. After all, light is amazing stuff. It is both particle and wave. And it can give light to others without losing light itself. Christ’s light would shine as a testimony against the darkness, even through Chris‘ own life. The darkness would not prevail.