Light it up: The light of the world and how we are unified by darkness

Scripture: John 1:1-18

            Yesterday was the shortest day—or, if you prefer, longest night—of the year, so it works out well that today we get to talk about light, because we’re all in need of a little more of it. All this darkness alters our moods, heightens our anxiety, and forces us indoors, making us at once more lethargic and, yet, on higher alert. Without the light, our nights get colder and we become gloomier. Our Confirmation kids’ art for today expresses more about light than anything else. It’s hard not to focus on that aspect of John 1 when Confirmation class ends this time of year in the dark.

            Our traditional scenes of Jesus’ birth are set at night. Our Christmas Eve services are candle-lit. We sing Silent Night. All is dark, and yet, in the words of that hymn, all is also bright. It’s almost as if that first Christmas was pointing toward the first chapter in Genesis. “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep…” Then, out of the darkness God said, “‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.” The story of Jesus is, in a way, a retelling of that Genesis story set in a manger in Bethlehem. Just as light emerged from the darkness on that first day of creation, Jesus Christ was born as the light of the world in the midst of thick darkness, making it especially appropriate that we celebrate this day during the darkest days of our year. Light shines brightest in the darkest night. Christ was born into pure darkness; a light the likes of which the world had never seen.

           This is something that’s wonderful about John’s Gospel. In order to tell us about Jesus coming into the world, John forgoes the manger scene entirely, instead starting with the origin of everything. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

            From John’s Gospel alone we might have some trouble envisioning how, exactly, Jesus came into the world, but where he’s lacking in a birth story John is very clear about the implications of it. This is a Savior who came to change the way we see the world. The darkest night passed and the dawn broke to a more glorious day.

Yet, in spite of the fact that we certainly feel the seasons up here in northern Minnesota, light images are different for those of us in 21^st century America who have light at the flick of a switch. I had a poignant realization of this when I was traveling in Tanzania with the Augustana Choir in the summer of 2006 [As an aside: some seminary professors say you get to tell three stories about yourself in sermons in the life of your ministry—just three, so that you don’t make a habit of making the sermon about you—so I think today is my first if you’re keeping score]. Our choir was traveling in Iringa in the highlands of central Tanzania, over a ten hour drive from the well-traveled safari lands further to the north where we would be heading later on our trip and a twelve hour drive from the slums of Dar es Salaam on the coast where our time in Tanzania started. We slept in concrete structures with no warm water and a plentiful abundance of creepy crawlies—mostly, thankfully, small lizards—and the morning calls from the Islamic Mosque woke us at daybreak each day.

            We visited a local Lutheran university called Tumaini and performed with their choir. Then, finally, we had a performance scheduled for our last evening in Iringa in a community center on the main drive through town. In a little over two weeks in Tanzania we probably had a dozen such performances, but this one sticks out (I think for all of us) because, as we were driving up to the community center, there were rolling blackouts all over town. This was, apparently, not unusual. The people of Iringa were quite used to functioning without power for sometimes extended periods of time. We weren’t.

            For us, it was more a case of not knowing what to do. Occasionally the power would come back on and we’d line up to go on stage, and then it would go out. This happened several times before somebody found our director a flashlight and we just went for it in the dark. I don’t know how many people were there—some several hundreds I can only guess. They lay beyond a veil of darkness that was only occasionally broken by the lights coming to life and then flicking off once again. The performance was vivid, like those moments where your senses overcompensate when one is hindered. Singing “Light Everlasting” in the pitch dark of a building in central Tanzania was an experience unlike anything else I’ve ever been a part of. Afterwards it was punctuated when, in talking with a local man, he apologized profusely for the power outages, but we knew better: the experience was a gift to remind us of the silly ways that we distinguish one another when the lights are on. It allowed us to inhabit the same space, to share in the same music, and to do it without knowing whose skin tones were what, because in the dark nobody could know.

            And that’s what I think of now when John talks about God’s light coming into the world, because the most well-lit place I’ve ever experienced was that community center in Iringa, Tanzania. Our ideas of sight and blindness are mostly shallow imitations revealed for what they truly are every time the power goes out. In spite of how we look—whether it’s our race, or gender, or age, or whatever way we see distinctions—we are one people, equally in need of every word of grace and mercy we can get. I’ve also never felt as united with an audience as I did with a few hundred Tanzanian men, women, and children who could not see us, even as we could not see them.

            And it is for moments like that that Jesus came into the world. The light shines in the darkness and darkness did not overcome it, because, frankly, darkness is not a real thing. It is fear and insecurity and psychological triggers that give it its edge, but darkness only reveals that all people are in need of the same baby in the manger. It is darkness that unites us. All of us sometimes have darkness that clouds our days; all of us live in thick darkness from time to time; some of us are there more often than we’d like to admit. Darkness is nothing but the imperfections we know too well that we have.

            The last couple verses of John’s Gospel for today take us back to Moses in a jaunt into the Old Testament that may be jarring, except Moses is forever linked with the darkness by way of the law. When the Israelites were wandering in the wilderness they needed law and order, but law and order only sets guidelines; it cannot actually create light. At its best it merely gives order to our darkness, but most of the time the law only reacts to the darkness after it overwhelms us. Moses’ law is contrasted with Jesus’ grace and truth, because, contrary to the harshness of the law, Jesus actually brings something useful to the table: he offers us the ability to see things as they truly are. On occasion we can see in just that way. For me it happened in Iringa, Tanzania, which is funny because it took a dark room for it to happen; a dark room to show us that it is not the darkness we perceive at night that is our enemy, but the darkness we do not see at all that grows inside of us.

            Jesus came to light it all up--to be that candle in the midst of a dark room, shining bright. He is the only real light in an otherwise dark world.