Grace and Peace to you from God our Father andand the Lord Jesus Christ.
The travel channel had a special this Christmas season on people who go overboard decorating for Christmas. One guy in California, spends over $10,000 a month to feed his “light addiction”. It was amazing to see. Light from his house could be seen blocks away.
Closer to home, I always like to take my out of town quests down to 34th street in Hampden. In this one block section, houses on both sides of the street are saturated with light. Santa Claus’, Rudolph’s, electrified Frosty’s, Candy Canes, Toy Soldiers emitting light, strands of light bulbs strung from house to house across the street. There is even a hubcap Christmas tree with a spot light on it reflecting Christmas glory. Only in Baltimore, right?
When I was a kid, our electric candles had orange, or sometimes blue lights in the windows. But for the last 30 years, people have tended to stick with clear bulbs or white light – they give off a light that looks more natural. Candles remind us of an earlier era – a time of simplicity and naiveté.
Light is central to the Christmas message and to the Gospel of Jesus himself. The angels of heaven reveal themselves to the shepherds “who are out in the fields keeping watch over their flocks by night”. We are so accustomed to the places we live being lighted by artificial light, street lights and spot lights, that it is hard for us to imagine the shepherd’s shock and amazement.
When I was living in Africa where the night skies are not illumined by electric lights, the skies reveal a dazzling brilliance. From almost anywhere on earth, we should be able to look up and see nearly 2500 stars and planets. That’s what I got used to seeing at night, it was what the shepherds saw.
Then, imagine their shock, the light appears. No sunrise, no transition, no gradual lighting of the sky and earth, just sudden, instant flood light, night to day, in a flash.
Notice the reaction. The old King James version says “They were sore afraid”. The New Revised Standard says, “they were terrified”. The actual Greek says “Mega fear”.
The angel of the Lord is reassuring. Angels always reassure us mortals when they reveal themselves because they contain the glory of God. We pride ourselves in being able to explain things in scientific terms, of reducing things to their constitutive elements. Canadian Lutheran Theologian and Pastor John Douglass Hall talks about this phenomenon in his book “Lighten Our Darkness”.
Before the Reformation and the Renaissance people were held captive to superstition and an arbitrary political system where a King ruled over them by Divine Right. In actual fact, 98% of people lived in grinding poverty and 2% lived in sumptuous splendor and the 2% told the 98% that this plan was God’s will.
The Reformation and the Renaissance were collectively called the “Enlightenment”. Democracy was born. People asserted their rights to pursue their own dreams and to have a say in their own governing. The world became a more just place. Science and the scientific method were elevated to the level of absolute truth.
An unintended by-product of this elevation of science and the belief that we could control our environment was that we have become estranged from nature and from each other. We got private property; the joy of ownership, autonomy, that is self-rule, and a payload of entitlements. God was set aide. We still listened to God, but God didn’t have any real authority over us. We are encouraged, persuaded, and conditioned to be good consumers because the market is what creates wealth, yet this unbridled consumerism has created an environmental crises. As masters of ourselves, we live no longer as creatures. Believing ourselves to be somehow different from and over and above the animals and plants we share the world with, we ignored the fact that we are animals too, creatures dependent on the same environment, the same ecosystem that sustains all living creatures.
Speaking of light, thanks to the Natural Geographic Magazine, I’ve lately become aware of the effects of something called ”light pollution”. Now before you groan, hear me out. We are able to manipulate our environment by creating an artificial day when there should be night. London was the first city to accomplish this in the early 1800’s. Now it is nearly universal. A satellite view of the earth taken at night reveals not a dark surface but the outline of all six continents, particularly North America, Europe, Australia and the wealthy parts of others. The International Dark Sky Association estimates that this “sky glow” costs billions of dollars annually and contributes carbon emissions of millions of metric tons.
The rate of breast cancer appears to be higher in overlit sections of the country. Lighting up the sky has a terrible effect on the animals we share the planet with. Sea turtle hatchlings get confused on Florida’s beaches and run toward the town lights, mistakenly thinking it is moon glow over the sea. Millions of migrating birds like the red cockaded woodpecker and Kirtland’s warbler die because they collide with multistoried buildings like the Sears Tower.
Have you noticed how there seemed to be fewer lighting bugs around? Their lights are the ways they find mates and they have been hit with habitat reduction and the effects of light pollution. If you can’t find a mate, you aren’t going to date and we all know where that leads. Yet, I miss those little bugs, watching children hold them in their hands.
Yet, there are signs that we are changing. Our youth carry a burden for the environment and the ecosystem that many of us older folks don’t feel. Yet, each of us at the deepest level of being, has this sneaking suspicion that our behavior is threatening to us as a species. The lights have started to go on in our minds and hearts too.
Susan Cherivein, Lutheran poet has a beautiful piece about light. It reads
Many physicists now believe that matter is composed of trapped light. This is the reason for the inclusion of the speed of light in Einstein’s famous equation; energy is equal to the mass times the square of the speed of light, e = mc squared…matter composed of trapped light… Jewish mystics tell in the Kabala that in the beginning the vessel holding creation shattered into millions of shards of divine light now present throughout creation. Abraham Heschel wrote, “When we say grace, we release the divine sparks in our food”.
God’s light shining through and around….. and in… the things of God’s creation, light… God’s light.
The shepherds were chosen to be the first ones God revealed his Messiah to because they were the lowest ones of the social ladder. The Messiah was for “all the people”, everyone especially the common people, the overlooked, the least. God’s message was simple. “Rejoice, I intend to save you. I will save you from all that you fear. I will absorb death for you in my own body on the tree of crucifixion. I will show you that you will have a life with me forever. I will resurrect you and you will have peace, peace on earth, peace in highest heaven, peace in this life, and peace for eternal life, All that you fear, I will neutralize in my son, my self”.
Speaking of light being trapped in matter, isn’t that really what Jesus is? 2 Corinthians 4 says it this way, “for it is God who said, Let light shine out of darkness who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.. On the darkest night of the year, into our very darkness, comes the Light of the World”.
We read Isaiah’s words every Christmas Eve “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. Jesus comes into our deepest darkness too, to give hope. Whether our darkness has been the death of someone we loved this year, or the loss of a job that defined us. Jesus comes to bring light and hope.
Some of us abide in darkness, harboring secret sins from the world and those closest to us. Even to that darkness, the light of God’s freeing love in Christ has come. Jesus is the light of the world, this world’s hope.
May you walk in the light of this Christ who loves and forgives. May you who are baptized and given a candle and told let your light shine before others that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in Heaven, may you let your light shine. May you know peace, peace born of a God who will sacrifice his own life to bring you home to live forever in joyous peace with him. May you be an agent of peace.
In Jesus’ name Amen.
Who We Are