Preached via Zoom
In our Gospel reading today, that great Christmas gospel, the
prologue to the Gospel of John, we find this verse: “The light
shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out.”
“The
Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it
out.”
I have been holding very tight on to that verse
for the last two months, ever since it sprang into vivid prominence
on All Saints’ Day, when we sang “Thou in the darkness drear
their one true light”. Jesus is the light of the world. In the
darkness, Jesus is the one true light, and the darkness has never put
it out.
Jesus himself said, if you remember, “I am the
Light of the World. Whoever follows me will have the light of life
and will never walk in darkness.”
You see, darkness
can’t conquer light! Think about it one moment – you go into a
dark room, and the first thing you do is flick a switch to turn the
light on! You don’t have to scrub for hours to make the darkness
go away. You don’t have to sit and chant or sing or beat yourself
up. All you have to do is turn the light on. Or open the curtains,
if it’s daylight outside.
Of course, it’s only been
for about the past hundred years that we have had that luxury, and in
some parts of the world it’s still not the norm. Even when I was a
girl, I sometimes visited a house that was lit with gas, rather than
electricity. And Robert, growing up in Northern Ireland, remembers
his house being lit by oil lamps, known as Tilly lamps, before it was
wired up to the electricity supply. The last part of the UK to be
wired up to the national supply was Rathlin Island, of the north
coast of Northern Ireland, which was only linked in 2005.
But
even sixty years or so ago, when Robert and I were children, electric
lighting was mostly the norm in the West. By then, there was a
national body that governed the production and distribution of
electricity, but prior to that, if you weren’t in a big town you
had to have a generator to make electricity for your house, as they
do in many parts of the world today.
And when you didn’t,
or don’t, have a generator, you have to rely on gas, or oil lamps,
or candles – or even a “button lamp” where a shred of material
is pulled up through a hole in a button which sits on some grease in
a pot, and you light the grease-soaked material and it works like a
candle. Rush lamps work on the same principle, I believe.
But
the point is, no matter what the light source, it is always greater
than darkness! It seldom gets properly dark here in London unless
there is a power cut, and that doesn’t happen very often. But when
it does happen, we only need to find an emergency lantern, or even a
tea-light, and we have light of a sort. It’s not, perhaps, enough
light to read or sew by, but it’s enough to prevent us from
knocking into the furniture. The light shines in the darkness, and
the darkness has never put it out.
That, of course, is why
we celebrate Christmas at this darkest time of the year. Jesus’
birthday probably isn’t on 25 December – if the shepherds were
out in the fields, it was more probably spring, lambing time, when
the sheep and their lambs were at their most vulnerable. But we
don’t know the exact date – those who wrote Matthew’s and
Luke’s Gospels didn’t think it important enough to record. And
it doesn’t matter, anyway – after all, the Queen has an official
birthday which is celebrated in June, where her real birthday is in
April, and if the Queen can, so can Jesus! The point is, of course,
that the ancient pagan festivals that celebrated the turn of the year
and the renewal of the light, the fact that the days would now start
to get lighter, rather than darker, were merged into the celebration
of the coming of the Light of the World. The return of the sun and
the coming of the Son….
Think of lighthouses and
lightships. They aren’t quite so necessary in these days of
satellite navigation, but still useful, to help ships know where they
are at sea, and to warn them off rocks and other hazards. But, of
course, there were people known as “wreckers”, who would
purposely shine lights to lure ships to their doom, whereupon they
would plunder the wrecked ship! It was a light in the darkness, but
sadly, the wrong light.
Which, of course, brings me to
another point about light – Jesus said that we, too, are light.
“You are like light for the whole world. A city built on a hill
cannot be hid. No one lights a lamp and puts it under a bowl;
instead it is put on the lampstand, where it gives light for everyone
in the house. In the same way your light must shine before
people, so that they will see the good things you do and praise your
Father in heaven.”
Now, of course, some people like to
dwell on that verse to make us feel guilty and fearful, and afraid
that somehow we are letting Jesus down by not being light, or not
being bright enough, or something. But it’s not like that. Jesus
is the Light of the World, and if we are indwelt with the Holy Spirit
– and if we are dedicated to being Jesus’ people, then we are
indwelt by the Holy Spirit – then we will be shining with Jesus’
light. Sometimes we are not very bright lights, but even one candle
is enough to drive away the darkness, and when a bunch of candles
come together, the light gets brighter and brighter and
brighter.
And there are times when our own light seems to
flicker despairingly, and that’s when we depend on one another to
get through. We will sing no 611 at
the end of this sermon, because of the verse that goes:
“I
will hold the Christlight for you
in the nighttime of your
fear;
I will hold my hand out to you,
speak the peace you
long to hear.”
It’s been a long, dark time for many of
us, these past nine months, and it’s not over yet. There is light
on the horizon – see what I did there – with the news that the
Oxford vaccine is going to start being rolled out tomorrow, and I
think they hope that by Easter, we’ll be able to be together again.
But this time of year, when it is still really dark and although we
know Spring will eventually come there’s no sign of it yet, this is
the time when people’s mental health is going to really suffer.
We’ve been suffering horrendous restrictions for the best part of a
year, with only a few weeks’ respite in the summer, and right now
it feels as though it’s going to go on forever. And it’s now we
need to hold the Christlight for one another, now when we falter,
someone needs to be there for us – they probably can’t be
actually with us, as that’s not allowed, but they can be there at
the end of a phone, or on WhatsApp, or whatever your preferred way
of contact is. And similarly, when we falter – and I don’t know
about you, but I’m finding it all too easy to falter just now –
I know I can rely on you, or others, to hold the Christlight for
me.
I imagine there was a bit of a giggle when Jesus said
– and quite probably illustrated with gestures – that nobody
lights a lamp and puts in under a bowl… although mind you, I have
been known to light the torch on my phone and wave it around under
the sofa when I’m looking for my crochet hook, which must have a
lover or something down there, the way it escapes down there whenever
I’m not looking! But that’s different. Jesus knew all about
that sort of thing, too, as you may remember when he told the story
of the lost coin – the woman who had lost it lit her lamp and took
it to all the dark corners of her house to light them up and see if
the coin was there.
I wonder what else she found while she
was looking for her coin – you know how you so often find something
you’d given up looking for when you are looking for something else!
But the light also lights up all the nasties that live in the dark
corners – the dust and dirt, the dead spiders, all the things we’d
really rather visitors to our house didn’t see. I was horrified to
notice, the other day, a really dirty stretch of floor in the
corridor; we quickly washed it, but I’d have hated someone else to
have seen it. Normally that part of the corridor was in shadow, but
for some reason it got lit up and we noticed the grime.
And
that is what can happen, too, when we let the light of Christ shine
into our own dark corners. All the dust and dirt and grime and dead
spiders come into full prominence, and all need to be swept away and
washed – I was going to say “washed in the blood of the Lamb”,
which is a fearful cliché, but for once it’s accurate. We mustn’t
try to hide the dark corners from God – I know it’s tempting,
because we hate looking at them. But it’s only when we let God in
to all the corners that there will be no darkness at all in us.
The
Light came into the world, and the darkness has not overcome it. On
the contrary, the light has brought light to all of us, and has lit
us, too, so that we shine out into a dark world. Let us follow that
light, wherever it leads us, and pray that we won’t be lured onto
the rocks by the false light of the wreckers, but that, like the Magi
of old – for it’s nearly Epiphany, when we celebrate the coming
of the Magi – like the Magi, may we be led by the light of God’s
shining star. In the words of the old hymn:
The distant scene; one step enough for me.” Amen.
