God of the dawn break

A varying assortment of thoughts for today's sermon. When I preach without a manuscript this is sometimes the format in which I blog the sermon. While the thoughts are not all connected it hopefully gives some sense of where the Holy Spirit might be speaking through today's scripture.

Luke 1: 5-13, 57-80

*The light shines in the darkness… and the darkness has not overcome it.

*I’m actually going to start by parsing a Greek word that’s not even in our reading today. (Nothing like talking Greek to make everybody sit up straight and listen to the sermon). It’s that word we know as “overcome” which is the Greek word “katalambano,” which is most often translated “catch” but might also be translated “comprehend.” The light shines in the darkness… and the darkness does not comprehend it. I like all these translations, actually, side by side. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it, will not catch it, and cannot comprehend it in all its mystery.

*Even though this scripture is from John 1:5 it has the same themes as our reading from Luke 1. Light and darkness interplay with one another. These are the darkest days of the year. Long days… lots of seasonal affective disorder, depression, anxiety. Lots of drinking. Lots of generally sad things. This is a season of the highest highs and lowest lows.

*Naturally, Jesus comes into the world in the darkest of days. Of course some history-theology geeks—I bet you didn’t know there were such people; they’re the ones in the library with the plaid coats with a clerical underneath—anyway, they’ll tell you that Jesus probably wasn’t actually born in the winter because of the shepherds tending their flocks in that particular way or some nonsense. Whatever. It doesn’t matter what time of the year Jesus was actually born; the point of celebrating Christmas this time of year is to accentuate the darkest darkness (and also to remind ourselves how northern hemisphere-centric we are). In Australia they should probably celebrate Christmas in place of the 4^th of July, which—come to think of it—they don’t celebrate anyway.

*“The night is always darkest just before the dawn.” There’s so much wisdom in that proverb that it’s been quoted in The Alchemist, The Dark Knight, and by theologians for ages. Darkness seems its most complete right about now. Darkness and sin go hand in hand. When we think about sin we tend to think again about darkness… about things done in secret, about parts of ourselves that are hidden away. These are parts of us that we fear coming to light.

*John is coming to prophesy to something world-changing. “To give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of sins.” Sins are actually how we come to know about God, or rather the forgiveness of those sins testifies to something we know in our hearts: that we are not the perfect people we could be, and the only way to be perfect is to not die, and the only way to not die is to have some kind of salvation, and the only salvation that lasts is eternal, and the only one offering such a promise is one who takes on sin in death for us. There is no other way. There are no shortcuts.

*The light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not comprehend it, because we believe that this little baby boy was born to die. The darkness does not comprehend it, because the darkness is too busy obsessing over our inward thoughts and all our hang-ups. The darkness does not comprehend it, because the darkness is concerned with judging us for what we have done wrong. The darkness does not comprehend it, because the darkness measures us by how we stack up to being “good” people. The darkness does not comprehend it, because the darkness is too busy with the law. The darkness does not comprehend it, because the darkness is blind to the Christ-child. And the darkness is blind to a baby because it is too small, too insignificant, and too out-of-the-way to matter.

*Jesus was born insignificant, just like the rest of us. We dress him up, surround him with prophesies and wise men bringing gifts, even as we talk about the manger and no room for Mary and Joseph at the inn, but the real story is darker. The wise men were supposed to report back to King Herod. The gifts were burial spices; seen another way this looks sinister. King Herod meant to kill the baby before any of this got underway. The night is darkest just before the dawn. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot even see it.

*Zechariah’s song, sung for John, his son, who came to testify to Jesus, concludes with this line:

“By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.” Peace, I bring you. Peace and light. Jesus came and, like the angels with the shepherds, he might as well begin his life with the words, “Fear not.” Do not be afraid. Yes, you have been living in darkness, but it is that darkness that will testify to me, because now you know why you need me, now you comprehend the light that shines in the darkness.

*Our problem is a lack of awareness that that is where we stand. Our problem is that too many people live in darkness and pretend it is the light. But Zechariah’s song lays the framework for what it means to be people of the dawn-break. It means forgiveness; that we acknowledge the darkness is real, but something more powerful is coming. Not power of our hands, not strength or might, but a baby who receives gifts from wise men of burial spices, anointed for death even from birth.

*The darkness does not comprehend the light because the darkness assumes that death wins. Jesus, becoming love incarnate for the world, comes to bring us a promise that darkness is just fleeting. Dawn breaks. Amen.

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.

Calves, Other Idols and Electricity

Test: Exodus 31:1-14

            On Thursday afternoon I was sitting in my living room, pondering the Israelites and their golden calf while also thinking about getting by without electricity. For us, that was a few hours; for others of you it has lasted a few days. We all have a baseline level of comfort that, when breached, can make us uneasy. When you take away a simple thing like electricity it becomes immediately obvious how dependent we are on all sorts of little things around us. Losing power is different from going on a camping trip. I love hiking, camping and generally getting away from electricity and technology, but those are occasions where I intentionally remove myself from those comforts of home. When the power just goes out I have a very different feeling—a “what on earth do I do now?” feeling.

            I think that’s pretty close to where the Israelites are at when Moses went up the mountain. There they are at Mt. Sinai, completely unsure what Moses is doing up there, and their sense of what is normal has been completely obliterated. There is no normal, no home, nothing to do now but wonder, “Where on earth do we go from here?” It may seem silly to turn from worshipping the God who led them out of Egypt, but that’s where they are. They’re confused.

            What the people demand of Aaron is something visible to hold their focus in light of their current predicament. It’s not so much that they want a different god than the one who led them out of Egypt; rather, they want a physical image of the true God. Aaron’s problem is that such an image is not forthcoming; God shows himself to Moses alone, not in idols to appease the crowd. They have to take it on faith that the road through the wilderness is led by a God they cannot see. Unfortunately, Israel does not yet have this kind of faith. It seems silly to create a golden idol and honestly believe it is a god. Clearly, God is not a calf, but then again, tell me we don’t do the same thing. How much physical stuff do we put before God? How much do we consider worship to be about the pastor or the building, the music or the liturgy? Those are the things that upset us, and though God certainly works through all of these they are no more God than that golden calf.

            In our lives we have a base level of comfort, and whether it’s the power going out, a wildfire, an accident, health concern, or something equally unexpected, there are many things that can rock that comfort. Those are the moments where the depths of our souls are bared and we are shown for what we really are. Last week I talked about what is right and what is easy; this is similar: in the face of trouble, do we build another idol or do we trust in the unseen.

            The stakes are huge. One of the things that gets lost in this story about the golden calf is that God nearly destroys the Israelites for their stupidity. This is not a fuzzy, lubby-dubby God willing to offer cheap grace; this is a powerful God who the Israelites are right to fall before on their knees and worship. This is a God willing to give it all up and start over with Moses. This is a God who demands obedience.

This scene really is remarkable. God proposes to Moses his intent to destroy the people and offer the promised future instead to Moses and his progeny alone. This is a ticked off God. And it is Moses who is the calming voice—the one who saves the day—yes, the very same Moses who came up with every excuse in the book why he should not be leading the people out of Egypt; that very same Moses intercedes before God to save the people from God’s own wrath. He asks that God remember the promises that God has made with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and in a line of thinking that should resonate with people up here, Moses adds in the line about what Egypt will say about the God who destroys his people. “What will the neighbors think?” he asks God.

Then, strangely, in verse 14: “The Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.”

(Breathe out.)

There’s part of us that doesn’t like that. It doesn’t square with how we understand God. There are these Greek terms that Christians like to use, even though they never occur in the Bible—omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, omnibenevolent—which mean respectively: all-powerful, all-present, all-knowing, all-loving. These terms do not describe the God who visits Moses, and since we believe in one God, and we proclaim that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the same God that we worship today, this should tell us more about our misconceptions about God than anything else. God is beyond our knowing, so when we try to put God on the couch, perform a psychological analysis and slip the creator of the universe into categories of our own making, we are essentially doing the same thing that the Israelites did: we are asking Aaron to create for us an idol to worship. God doesn’t like that.

Thankfully, even when we make our idols we have an advocate. This story is Moses’ time in the spotlight. As much as he gets a lot of credit for parting the sea and bringing God’s messages to Pharaoh, the real moment of star-power in Moses’ life comes here on the mountain, talking God out of the destruction of his people. Honestly, Moses is only a little man in the scheme of things, but he foreshadows something bigger and better on the horizon. The conversation between Moses and God was not just a debate about the future of the chosen people; it was a preview of what comes to us in the New Testament in the person of Jesus Christ and the sending of the Holy Spirit into the world to live with us today. We still have an advocate—not Moses, but the Holy Spirit—who hears what we pray and intercedes on our behalf with God.

            There’s a reason that the first commandment chiseled on those stone tablets in Moses’ hands is what it is: “I am the Lord, your God, you shall have no other gods before me.” You want to know a secret about those commandments? We never get past the first. We get hung up on murder and theft and adultery, but none of us can be judged right by the first commandment of all. Each of us is building idols; we’re doing it right now, even in this worship space. We all want a golden calf; not the true God just beyond our sight. We all want glory; not a cross. We all want a god we can fashion, not the God we cannot control, who may, in fact, destroy us at a moment’s notice. “Too bad!” said God in last week’s reading, “You will be my people and I will be your God… and you have an advocate who is going to keep it that way.”

            Just as the Israelites didn’t deserve Moses, so we don’t deserve Jesus. We deserve to suffer for the idols we have made, and yet, God is willing to do something incredible, remarkable, and completely inhuman: he’s willing to change his mind.

            Thank God for that.

            Amen.

The problem with "This is all part of God's plan"

Text: Exodus 3:1-12

"O God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."

I changed it up this week—the prayer, that is. This prayer, taken from the Evening Vespers service in the ELW, may as well have been Moses’ prayer. It’s also one of my favorites. The path before us is always only dimly lit. At my ordination last October, a professor mine preached on Psalm 119, which famously says “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path,” and he posited that the lamps that were around in the time of the Psalmist were really pretty weak things. We’re not talking 100 watt halogen bulbs; more like a candle wick only capable of penetrating a foot or two into the darkness.

That is the irony of the burning bush. Light imagery in the Bible so often has to do with knowledge of the future, and yet the burning bush offers only an end destination with no map to get there. It does not light Moses’ path; it just tells him the end result. God does not outline how Moses is going to deliver Israel from Egypt; he just tells Moses he needs him to do it.

If you’re a planner this would be a problem. Kate, my wife, would have a serious problem with these kinds of instructions. She’s a planner. She wants to know how things are going to go down to the finest detail. She needs to know dates, times, contact info; she makes packing lists, shopping lists, to-do lists, cleaning lists, cooking lists. I’m thinking Kate would not like to be summoned to a burning bush that tells her the end result without a map of how to get there. Come to think of it, I don’t think many of us would. Even I would have an issue with this call--and I am anything but a planner. But this is exactly how God calls us most of the time. We are not given all the information. We are not told how we should act or what we should do. All we are told is the end of the story. Whatever you believe is the simplest synthesis of the Christian faith—you are saved by grace through faith, or Christ has died for your sins, or love wins, or whatever answer you would give to that question—that promise gives direction to your life.  

And yet, none of those summations of our faith tell us exactly how to get there; they are at best partial blueprints of how to live right here, right now.

 Moses had no clue what to do. He wanted more information. So he asks for God’s name. It seems like an innocent request—the kind of thing we would like to know—on whose authority does this radical vision come? But the appeal for a name is hardly innocent. To know a name means to have a measure of control. Adam and Eve gain dominion over creation by giving names to all the creatures; now Moses is asking for God’s name not as a matter of clarification but in order to change the playing field. His request is sneaky, which makes God’s response all the more fantastic. My name? says God, “I AM WHO I AM.” In Hebrew: Yahweh, or even better (since the verb tense is not clear): “I will be who I will be."

God is going to be exactly who God will be, and we can do little to change that. God was going to make certain the people of Israel were led out of Egypt no matter Moses’ resistance. For us, God is bringing about salvation regardless of our petty wants and desires. It sounds strange to say it, but God isn’t so interested in the details. At the very least, the details aren’t the point of the story.

We don’t get this. I know, because just about every time something tragic happens I hear the same hollow words. I’m sure you have heard it too. I heard it again this week when a friend of a friend was tragically and senselessly killed. It seems like every time something like this happens somebody—well-meaning and good-hearted as they may be—says the magic words: “This is all part of God’s plan.” I understand the sentiment. We want to be able to say something helpful in a time of helplessness. We want to believe that nothing bad ever happens without a “good” to follow. We long for justice in cases that simply seem unjust, and since we believe in a just God it only follows that this must be part of some divine architecture for the universe. It's just that neither scripture nor experience show us a God who works like that.

Sometimes awful things just happen.

That’s not to say there is not justice for the hurt, joy for the sorrowed, and peace that surpasses the loss we experience in this life. There is. But it’s at the end of the story and not in the middle. God does have a plan but, as with Israel captive in Egypt, it is not the kind of plan that seeks to justify tragic loss as if it being part of God's will makes it better. That should be good news. It frees us from justifying every evil in the world as part of God’s plan; it frees us from defending God whenever anybody experiences loss; it frees us to get about the business of life in a complicated world and to stand alongside those who hurt without feeling the need to give a half-hearted reason for it all. God doesn’t give anybody cancer, but God is redeeming the cancer-sufferer. God does not take the lives of children because heaven needs another angel, but God does give to children the kingdom of God. God does not cause hurt, but God is with us in our suffering.

You see, the burning bush tells us that God does have a plan for us, but it is always bigger than we can figure. Sometimes it doesn’t involve us at all. Moses, for all the work he does in leading the people out of Egypt, never sees the Promised Land. Many of us will never see the fruits of our labor. To the world our lives will look like abject failures. For most of us, nobody is going to write a history of our lives; nobody is going to carve our faces on a mountain.

But, you know, that’s OK.

Our lives are not meant to be remembered. Our lives are meant to discover God, and to know God is not to ask God’s name; to know God is not to have your life planned out ahead of you like a carefully delineated trail map. To know God is to live every day of your life as if you might learn something about God. To know God is to ask yourself how God desires you to work, or how God might wish you to treat your family and friends; and to wonder how God impacts every decision of your lives not because God planned out all those instances and knows what you are going to do but because our lives are more sacred--and just better--with God in them.

Too often we dwell on who God is, what God is, and what we can say about God with certainty. When we find ourselves in that rut we stand like Moses before the burning bush asking, cleverly and all too ignorantly, “God, what is your name?”

I will be what I will be.

Take that, Moses. Take that, preachers and teachers who tell you who and what God is. Take that, books, magazine articles and TV shows debunking the divine. Take that, Confirmation and Sunday School classes. As a teacher of mine once said, “How do you like them apples, Moses?”

I do not know how God is impacting your life. I can’t tell you. All I can hope is that you’re open to seeing it. We believe in one God, and that God is much bigger than our declarations. We believe in one true faith, but that faith is lived by individuals through eyes that see the world in vastly different ways.

The important matter is not who God is but whether we are going to allow God to make any difference in our lives. What is God calling you to be? What is God calling you to do? I don’t care if it’s the voice of a bush lit with fire or quiet deliberations that you feel in your heart. The only way to discover what God would have you be is to live as if the God of the universe is with you now.

Thankfully, God is who God is. He will be what he will be. And he is here with you now and every moment of your lives.

Thanks be to God.

Big Questions: A Sermon on 1 John 1-2:2

I have a friend who was preparing to move back to his hometown of Minneapolis after college and a long trip abroad when he sent me a message asking for some advice. Now, this was not the normal moving questions—where’s a good place to eat, do you people up there really eat lutefisk—none of that. You see, my friend is Mormon, and he was preparing to come back to the Twin Cities with his Mormon family who had never lived anywhere but Utah. He had spent time doing mission work in Russia, finishing up school and, before returning home, he wanted to know some things about Lutherans, because, well, there’s a lot of us in Minnesota. Particularly, he wanted to know about salvation. 

What do Lutherans believe about salvation?

I told him we believe that we are saved by grace through faith apart from works of the law. We believe that Christ gives us the gift of faith in baptism, so we baptize infants, as well as adults, as a sign that it is not our will that matters but God’s will for us.

My friend read what I wrote carefully and responded with the question I have so often heard: “So… what’s the bare minimum that a person must do to achieve salvation?”

Isn’t that the question? In fact, it’s such a great question that I’m going to let it simmer for a minute, and turn to 1 John to find an answer. And 1 John 1-2:2 suggest two things.

1) We tend to do the wrong things

2) It would be nice if we didn’t do the wrong things, but when we do we have a God willing to forgive us.

I quote, “This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all….[and] if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another” (1 John 1:5, 7a).

Apparently, what we do matters. We can stumble through the darkness of this life, but it is an existence apart from God, not knowing God; in fact, denying God. Life without God is dark and sinister; we recognize people who live in that place, without hope not just for a future beyond this life but also for anything much to come of their time on earth. Depression and despair separate us from the light of the world. Somehow we have to find what it means to live life through Jesus-colored glasses.

So, I return to my friend’s question, “What’s the minimum a person has to do to know that they are saved?” I responded, in good Lutheran fashion, that we Lutherans dislike the word “do” when it comes to salvation; we don’t believe that we do anything, but it is Christ who does the saving work through us. I say that a lot—and honestly, I believe it very strongly—but I can see the worry my friend has with this approach. Why, then, are we here at all? What is the purpose of life if not to find salvation through Jesus Christ? It seems like a loving God would just skip this whole life on earth and push the divine fast-forward button and shoot us into heaven, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. These are the real questions, aren’t they? But 1 John also offers a peak at the answer.  

Why are we here?

We’re here to discover what it means to walk in the light, to find fellowship with one another, to discover our own unworthiness (what we often call “sin”), and then to discover that we have an Advocate in Christ Jesus who is going to save us nonetheless.

But it’s more than that. When God created the world he created everything

“good”—I hope you remember this from the creation story, after every day God saw that each and every created thing was good. We went and messed all that up, but underneath our patina of unworthiness there is something in our nature that was created good. I believe we’re here on this planet because it is fundamentally “good”—even if our experience of it is often not. All of creation is broken, but it is all subject to Christ. Therefore, all of creation is dying, but when Christ died a funny thing happened. Three days later, he came back.

Resurrection is at the heart of the Christian faith. One of the Confirmation students on their sermon notes from last week asked me the following question:

“If Christ was resurrected does that mean we will be resurrected, too?”  

Yes! That is the big picture. Paul writes in Romans, “If we are united with Christ in a death like his, surely we will also be united with him in a resurrection like his” (6:5). We spend a lot of time trying to escape this world, trying to search out heaven as if it is some distant and foreign place, when heaven lies right before our eyes; always an instant in front of us. When we walk in the light we walk in that reality; in that knowledge. See, walking in the darkness is not only an image for doing bad things; it is also—I think, primarily—an image for a life with no greater purpose.

I was once asked by another friend—an atheist:

"Why do you believe in God?" 

When most people ask this question I tell them something about Jesus, but I knew he had heard that before, and his question was not about faith but about reason. So I answered differently. Hardly even thinking about it, I said, “I believe in God because of my sin; because I believe that things in this world matter and I’m not worthy to fix them.”

Somehow, I had stumbled on exactly 1 John’s point. The only way you can believe in Christ is to believe that you are not worthy. We try to make ourselves into God, but we only end up walking in darkness, trying desperately to believe that we are the perfect people we wish ourselves to be. But as 1 John reminds us, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1:8).

OK, let’s say you believe that much—and I realize that may sometimes be a stretch—but humor me for a minute. Let’s say you honestly believe that you are an imperfect person who cannot justify yourself apart from the grace of God. Let’s say you believe that Christ died on a cross for you and rose again on the third day. Let’s say you believe that God died to save all created things from a life without purpose; he did this not just for you, but your brothers and sisters, your friends and family, the people down the street, men and women and children throughout the country and the world who you will never meet and never know existed. Let’s say all this is true. Then let’s return to the big question of life's purpose--the question my Mormon friend asked, 

“Why do we live here at all? Why doesn’t Jesus just skip straight to the resurrection without the pain and suffering of this life?”

To this question we finally have a great, biblical answer. God’s will is always that we see things how they truly are. That’s what it means to walk in the light. It means to see that underneath all the suffering that we experience in this world there is something that God created and called “good,” and that all things called good are worthy of being resurrected; so worthy that in fact that in the end they will be resurrected with Christ into a life where the patina of sin will be washed away.

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.