Light, C.S. Lewis, and letting it burn.

John 1:6-8, "There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He was not himself the light, but he came to testify to the light. 

C.S. Lewis once said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” You can tell that Lewis was intimately aware of John’s Gospel, especially these verses. John the Baptist comes on to the stage, testifying to the light, and causing us to pause—as we should with any metaphor—to wonder, “Who (or what) is this light?” Our Sunday school answer tells us: Jesus. But what on earth does that mean?

Try explaining to Confirmation students that Jesus is the light, and he is also the Good Shepherd, and he is also the lamb… and, oh yeah, he’s the prince of peace… and watch as their eyes gloss over. Metaphors are rough. At their best they open up worlds of interpretation and get us to see things in new ways; at their worst they positively turn us off to everything that the story is saying. Take this light image: Jesus is the light, the true light, the light of the world.

You have undoubtedly heard that a thousand times. Now let’s unpack it. If Jesus is the light that means that it is through Jesus that we see the world. Without light your eyes are useless; try walking alone in the woods on a cloudy night with no moon and thick tree cover and that’s about as close as you can get. So, we could say that Jesus allows us to see, but that opens up further possibilities. Is Jesus the sun?

This would be, I suppose, taking him literally, but it doesn’t really tell us much about God—unless you believe that God is a flaming ball of fire… I hope you don’t. It seems to me that the best way to think about Jesus as light is to think of his immanent presence. Light is all around us but we can’t touch it and have only our eyes to tell us of its existence; we can’t smell it or taste it; it might give off heat but the light itself doesn’t feel like anything.

So the obvious answer to the riddle is that light surrounds us, and so does Jesus. This is a single layer, but a good metaphor like this begs us to go deeper. To do so let’s return for a moment to C.S. Lewis’ quote. Lewis connects Christ as light to the way we believe. There’s a well-known Bible passage from Hebrews 11 that reads, “Faith is the evidence of things unseen.” Pardon the pun but Lewis sheds new light on faith, suggesting that faith isn’t only evidence of things unseen; it is also the very act of seeing itself. Everything visible, everything that our eyes take in is an article of faith, because the light itself is Christ—giving us sight just as he gave sight to the blind.

One of my favorite books is Blindness by Jose Saramago, a story about a sweeping pandemic of white blindness that quickly envelopes a country. The story follow a group of diverse individuals who are never named, led by a single woman—given only the title, “the doctor’s wife”—who is the only person in the world that can still see. Without ruining the whole story—because I strongly recommend it—they encounter all the horrible means to which people go in a society completely devoid of sight. Near the end, the doctor’s wife reflects on the ordeal of blindness as the sun rises over the city with a quote that is as haunting as it is profound. She says,

“I don’t think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.”

  

Life without Christ is to be “Blind people who can see, but do not see.” You can physically see the world, but the true light of it is missing. To see the world without Christ is to be blind but seeing. Light is Christ in and through us.

This is all well and good, and we can certainly feel good about ourselves for believing in a God who is light to the darkness of the world, but here’s the thing: if we live like the light we experience is merely light, then we too remain blind. If we take the metaphor and think, “Well isn’t that a nice image for Christ… well, isn’t that Advent candle a great ritual… well, isn’t that Christ candle or baptismal candle a wonderful ritual…” then we remain blind, because we are forgetting the nursery rhyme that we really have no excuse not to remember. You know the one: “This little light of mine. I’m gonna let it shine... Hide it under a bush, O no! I’m gonna let it shine.” It changes things when that light is Christ.

I imagine when you hear that song you think of holding a candle. Yet, I wonder if we’re not thinking big enough. Christ isn’t a puny little flame at the end of a wick; we don’t need to protect Christ from going out. Instead, Christ is everything that we see; not just the candle but the space in between us as we meet each other face to face. The candle is our faith, hanging tenuously on the end of that wick; it is ours, but not ours to keep. Our faith is to be shared with the world. The light that we hold is more powerful when it lights the wick of another.

Some peoples' approach to evangelism is to take their candle and drop it on the floor and let the whole place go up in flames. You see these people on TV with their altar calls, exorcisms and strong language of conversation. For them, faith is something shared by force; they don’t have candles as much as flame throwers to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The problem with this approach is that many will smell fire and bolt before they ever see Christ. The strong act of sharing their faith is off-putting to those standing by the exit in the first place.

We have a different problem up here in the northwest corner of Minnesota. We take our little lights and we hold them close, so close sometimes that no one else can see them. We hold them tightly because it is what we value, what we love, what we care about deeply. Our problem is not the depth of our devotion but our willingness to let it burn for the world to see.

So, here’s my hope this Advent season. We let it burn. We don’t need to burn the place down with our faith, but we should not be afraid to let it shine for the world to see. It’s the season of light. Let it shine. Let it shine. Let it shine.