Dear friends in Christ: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Prepare our hearts, Lord, to receive your Word. Silence in us any voice but your own that in hearing we believe and in believing we obey your will revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Amen.
In our opening dialogue this evening, we quoted that beautiful verse from John’s Gospel which reads, The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. I find those words form one of the most hope-producing, grace-giving, faith-filling phrases in the whole Bible. So, throughout my sermon, whenever you hear me quote the first part, I invite you to respond confidently with the second. Let’s try it right now:
The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not overcome it.
This theme of darkness and light is woven throughout our lives, and throughout the pages of scripture. It is central to the lesson from the Jewish prophet Isaiah that was read moments ago, which happens to be one of my all-time favorites for the Christmas celebration. The lesson begins:
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light,
those who lived in a land of deep darkness, on them light has shined (9:2).
Now, I don’t mean to “dis” darkness—as one who spent our first five years here sleeping with heavily draped windows during our bright summer nights, I fully appreciate the positive qualities of darkness. And I love the way Louis Armstrong praises it with those wonderful lyrics:
I see skies of blue, and clouds of white, the bright blessed day,
the dark sacred night, and I think to myself, what a wonderful world.
In many and countless ways, this is a wonderful world in which we live and move and have our being. Still, there is a strong sense in which we humans are not completely at ease in the darkness.
Without the eyesight of an owl or the radar of a bat, we’re forced to rely on something outside us to dispel the darkness, to illumine the night, to chase away the shadows that can fill us with fear and foreboding. It is a dread with threads that are woven into the very fabric of our beings.
So much so that the opening words of the Bible address this terrible terror. Says the book of Genesis about God’s first act of creation:
In the beginning, when God created the earth and the heavens,
the earth was a formless void
and darkness covered the face of the deep
while the Spirit of God swept over the waters.
Then God said, “Let there be light; and there was light.”
And God saw that the light was good (Genesis 1:1-4a).
The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not overcome it.
Now some other good news about darkness is that it has only a passive quality—it is the absence of brightness, the lack of luminosity, the scarcity of light. Darkness can never extinguish, expel, or asphyxiate light.
But, as we all know, darkness is also very patient, ever-present, always lurking—at the edge of a campfire, beyond a flashlight’s beam, between every street light, and in many abandoned buildings. When the power goes out, when a battery fails, when the wick of a candle gutters and dies, the darkness can seem…palpable, certainly powerful, perhaps even perilous.
Truly, there are many kinds of darkness in creation and in our lives. There is a darkness:
• in nature…the survival of the fittest is never kind and seldom pretty.
• in the ways of the world…where money and might reign supreme.
• in our hearts…where our needs trump every one’s almost every time.
• in the soul…when our whole being seems at war with life and with God.
• in the valley of the shadow of death…when we are separated from our loved ones by a chasm that we cannot cross, by a break that we cannot mend, by a rupture that we cannot repair.
So it is with soothed spirits, healed hearts, thankful lives that we gather this evening and are greeted with those great, grace-filled Gospel words:
The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not overcome it.
Into this darkness, into our darkness, into every darkness, God’s Light comes shining forth. And, as it was in the opening act of creation, so it is in this culminating act of salvation, and so it will be in every act of every generation—God shines heaven’s light in the midst of our darkness. Says the gospel writer Luke:
In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.
Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.
But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for see–I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people (Luke 2:8-10).
Later on, the gospel writer John continues to communicate this good news. He writes: In the beginning was the word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.
And he concludes with those famous words:
Amen
Pastor Scott Fuller