A Sermon for the First Sunday after Christmas

This time of year has been called a “season of light,” a generous phrase, which embraces all the ways in which people of faith, and people who don’t identity with or practice a religion, seek to bring more light into this world during the short days and long nights of winter. We light candles and even non-religious people string lights, tasteful or tacky, on their homes. This year the start of Hanukkah coincided with Christmas Day, a rare occurrence. The Jewish holiday of Hanukkah commemorates the miracle of a menorah that burned for eight days on a scanty supply of oil. The setting for the miracle was the armed resistance of one extended Jewish family, the Maccabees, to a tyrannical foreign ruler who desecrated the temple and sought to destroy the religious practices of the Jewish people. In this time of great peril, when it appeared that darkness might overcome the light of God, the eight flames of the menorah, burned brightly, kindling faith.

Interestingly, the ancient rabbis, who handed down the tradition of Hanukkah and the ritual of lighting the candles of the menorah, had a choice to make regarding the message of the festival: Should the eight flames on the menorah represent fire—the destruction of our enemies—or light, working together for a better world? The rabbis chose light. They did not want future generations to glorify extremism, or the vilification of one’s ideological opponents.

I wonder how the message of Hanukkah might help us to hear the Word of God in the Gospel According to John. Christian tradition offers a wide range and depth of biblical images, including fire (as in hellfire) and light (as in Jesus). Why is John a gospel of light, not fire? What might we see by the light of Christ?

Christmas Eve is for pageantry. We celebrate the nativity our Lord, which we always hear from the Gospel according to Luke, who gives us Mary and the manger and the angel and the shepherds, with a sprinkling of Matthew, who gives us Joseph and his visions and the star and magi and their dreams.

In Episcopal Church tradition, Christmas Day and this first Sunday after Christmas are always for the opening verses of the Gospel according to John, which takes us back to the beginning, which echo the creation stories in Genesis, where God said, “Let there be light. And there was light. And God separated the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day and the darkness Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”

In John, the evangelist deftly introduces the Word, who is co-eternal with God—indeed, the Word is God. The Word was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.

It’s in this light that we meet the man named John, who in the fourth gospel is known as a witness to the light, so that all might believe through his witness.

Bob Woods tells the story of a couple who brought their son and daughter to Carlsbad Caverns. The tour of this wonderful national park includes a dramatic moment at its deepest point underground. Upon reaching the lowest point, the guide turns off the lights to show just how dark darkness can be. Enveloped in complete darkness, the little boy began to cry. Immediately was heard the quiet voice of his sister, who said, “Don’t cry. Someone here knows how to turn on the lights.”

The Gospel is an affirmation that not only does Someone know how to turn on the lights, Someone already has.

Are we willing to enter into the dark and unfriendly parts of our communities in order to bring hope to those who feel “overcome” by darkness? Where are those places that are in need of more light?

Wherever poverty grinds, where money is an obstacle to education or healthcare, where there is self-hatred because of prejudice, where there is a sense of personal failure, wherever there is loneliness and despair—those are the places where Jesus calls us to shine our lights.

Frequently, the church may be more like the little boy than the older sister: trembling at the depths of the darkness, instead of remembering that there is One who not only knows how to turn on the lights but who is truly the Light. For people in a secular age, marked by the decline of religious practices, it is much easier to be overwhelmed by the darkness than to recall the power of the Light.

The Gospel tells us that the darkness cannot prevail—God be praised!—and that we never meet anyone who is completely unenlightened by the true light of Christ. In other words, no one can be a stranger to Christ. Christ has already met them and touched them in some way. If that is true, then no one ever need be a stranger to those who are in Christ. With the dawning of this light, all should be approached, and all should be welcomed. With the dawning of the true Light, we may begin to see strangers not as dangerous but as magnificent creatures already touched by the power of God.

C.S. Lewis in a sermon expressed this insight memorably: “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”

David Brooks wrote recently about his journey of faith: “In 2013,” he said in a podcast, “I had a thing they call illumination. And illumination is not just some spooky experience. An illumination is an event or an experience that leaves you permanently changed, that changes the way you see the world.
“So one morning in April, I was in the subway under 33rd Street and 8th Avenue near Penn Station. And if people know, that subway station’s possibly the ugliest spot on the face of the Earth. And yet I looked around this crowded subway car, and I had this sense that everybody in it had souls. That every single person in this car and every single person in the world has some piece of them that has no size, weight, color, or shape, but gives them infinite value and dignity.
“And I had the sense of these souls not just sitting there inertly like the brain matter, but alive and moving. And some people’s souls I imagined were soaring with joy. Some people’s souls were suffering and crying out. Some people’s souls might be yearning for something.
“As I experienced that, it felt enchanted. There’s not just material atoms. That there’s some force in the universe and can’t really be easily explained by a bunch of neurons rubbing against each other. And so if you think that there’s a spiritual element in each person, then it’s an easy leap to believe that there’s a spiritual element in the universe as a whole. And that would be God.”

How different would our congregations be, how different we would be, how different the world would be, if we took seriously the wonders of John’s testimony that the true Light had intervened decisively, had touched everyone?

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called faith a leap. What if we took a leap of faith? The French philosopher Blaise Pascal proposed that if it can’t be proved that God does or does not exist, why not believe that God does exist since in doing so there is everything to gain and nothing to lose? Why not live as if there is a God? The Indian philosopher and poet Rabindanath Tagore called faith a “bird that feels light and sings when the dawn is still dark.” Have you felt the Light? What is your song?

Let me be clear on one point: John’s message is not a call to naïveté, a summons to ignore the realities of sin that separate us from God, or of mental illness, which moves us to harm ourselves and harm others. John reminds us that there is a darkness that would overwhelm us if we were left to ourselves and our own efforts at self-improvement. The glorious good news is that we are not alone, that there is Someone who knows how to “turn on the lights.” Jesus Christ is the Light who has triumphed over the darkness—the darkness that causes us to fail to recognize strangers as our siblings and simultaneously renders us unable to properly see who we are in the light of Christ and in the sight of God.

If C.S. Lewis is correct that there are no ordinary people, that includes those who are in the church as well as everyone else. We are free to explore the splendor of living when we walk in the Light that dawns in Jesus. We are empowered not to take the destructiveness of human sin as the final word.

How do we see strangers as people who also have been touched by the true Light? The answer to that is to begin in the beginning. Before any problem ever presented itself, the Word had been spoken and the light had dawned. All our sin, all our problems, are significant. At the same time, as Phillip Jamieson suggests, they are only plot twists in the grand story of the Gospel, which promises the triumph of the Light and grants us the grace to live as those who believe God is the One, who, in Jesus, has “turned on the light.” Thanks be to God. Amen.

The Rev. Gregory Bezilla