I love nightlights.
When we moved back to Seattle this spring, I quickly ordered new ones for our stairways and landings and bathrooms. If I walk down to the kitchen at 2:00 am for a glass of water, the lights will sense my motion and flicker to life.
I love footlights.
I love walking up the aisles in movie theaters, guided by the tiny dots of blue or red along the edges. I love the sci-fi feel of these lights on airplanes, and I nurture my inner boy who wants to ride in gleaming spaceships.
But these lights—nightlights, footlights, all the little lights that shine in the darkness and will not be overcome—these lights exist not to make the rooms and vessels of our lives more beautiful or glamorous. That is incidental. They shine for our safety.
Even the little colorful lights of Christmas are, in a way, about safety. We hang them on trees and across doorways and mantels to cheer ourselves during the longest nights of the year. But our needs may run deeper than our delight in the sparkle of the holidays. Without some form of festive light, we might not survive the winter, emotionally or mentally. I encourage you to keep your lights up at least until the Epiphany on January 6th, but if you like you could compost your tree but keep your other lights up until the Feast of the Presentation, on February 2, the 40th day of Christmas. Leave your windows aglow in holiday cheer for six more weeks. Do it for your sake.
In any case, lights in our bible are a symbol, and as such, they get complicated very fast. Symbols often point us in multiple directions. Many of our Christmas crèches portray Joseph holding a lantern, the better for Mary to gaze lovingly at the baby. (Luke is silent about whether Joseph held anything, but we understandably want the baby’s father to be helping somehow.) But much later, in John’s Gospel, lanterns and torches signify something else: they are held by the guards entering the garden to arrest Jesus, and John wants us to understand that the soldiers need these artificial lights because they fail to see the true Light of the World for who he really is. They hold their lanterns alongside their weapons: both of these objects say, “We do not understand Jesus.”
God lights a strong fire in the sky to guide the Israelites to freedom from slavery. The seven-pillar lamp in the Tabernacle is lit as a sign of God’s presence and guidance. Eli’s lamp has not yet gone out when the Lord disturbs his sleep, calling out for Samuel. The psalmist sings that God’s Word is a lamp, a light. Jesus tells us a parable about wise women who reserve oil for their lamps. Jesus in John says, “I AM the Light of the World.”
This is not an exhaustive list. The bible seems to be full of light. Running through all of these stories and proclamations is the idea that light is a sign of God’s presence, and that while we cannot see or fully understand God, we can say that God is something like light: quick; life-saving; illuminating; a means of safe journey; a brightness and brilliance that shines on us; a roaring fire that delivers us; a faint pinpoint of light in the far distance of deep space, signaling to us that we are not alone; a warm glow from a nightlight that guides me down the stairs in the dead of night.
God shines light from huge stars across incomprehensible distances, yet there is something distinctly intimate in the Light that is God. “Light” can be a way for us to understand how astonishingly close God comes to us.
The Spirit broods over the chaos at creation. Chaos: a swirling, roiling nothingness of stuff, a mass of who-knows-what, a sludge in deep darkness. And the first creative act is the Word of God saying, “Let there be light.” John the Evangelist rewrites this creation story in the opening prologue to his Gospel, which Wren just proclaimed this morning. In John’s majestic reboot of Genesis, he directs our attention to the Word that speaks “Light!” In John’s retelling of Genesis, without the Word, not one thing came into being, and what came into being in the Word was life, and “the life was the light of all people.”
This may sound very heady and complicated, a confusing tangle of Greek philosophical constructs, but if we wait, and breathe, and watch, and listen, we can come to appreciate the beauty, and the intimate loveliness, of what is being said here. The Word of God speaks, and at that sound, light explodes forth, illuminating the whole universe. In this act of creation, God draws as close to all created life as the rays of light from your desk lamp are to your own hand. God as Light draws close, astonishingly close, sometimes dreadfully close, to you, to me, to us in close relationship with one another.
But then God comes even closer. John sings on in his majestic prologue: “The Word became flesh and lived among us.” Some translations have John singing that the Word became flesh “and pitched his tent among us.” A tent: small, intimate, drawing us close together, God as near to me as the sleeping bag around me in this little tent. Near enough to see my flaws. Near enough to cause a quarrel. Near enough to know me better than I know myself.
God draws this close.
There are things I don’t tell my friends and family, my coworkers, my siblings in Christ here at Grace Church. We all have private lives, and that is good: I withhold some things because they are not interesting or pleasant, things like a Tuesday afternoon lost to a stress headache, or a grumpy attitude about zoom. I withhold other things because they include sensitive information: the personal story of someone who turned to me for counseling or companionship, or the personal vulnerability of someone I care about, even if that someone is one of the smaller “selves” inside my own psyche. We human beings cherish our privacy, often for very good reasons.
But God’s light gleams on the surfaces of all these stories, all these private encounters, all these passing moods and small moments. God pitches a tent in your heart, drawing closer to you than you are to yourself.
But why? Why is God so close?
Here is my answer:
God draws close to us so that God’s creative Spirit may brood over the chaos roiling in our hearts.
God draws close to us so that we can draw close to one another, and to the stranger.
God draws close to us because that is how creation works.
An Episcopal priest from a century ago, Howard Chandler Robbins, wrote a hymn text that helps us reflect on God’s light, and how that light draws so close to us. Robbins sings of God’s light that crosses the vast distances of space, but also shines brightly, and sometimes searingly, in our own hearts, in our hearts that beat anxiously during this time of great darkness, but also this time of enduring hope.
On this third day of Christmas, when the sun’s light is beginning to return, I offer you this hymn, with my prayers for light to guide you, and God’s light to draw close to you.
Here is the hymn of Howard Chandler Robbins, a poem about God’s light:
And have the bright immensities
received our risen Lord,
where light years frame the Pleiades
and point Orion’s sword?
Do flaming suns his footsteps trace
Through corridors sublime,
the Lord of interstellar space
and conqueror of time?
The heaven that hides him from our sight
knows neither near nor far;
an altar candle sheds its light
as surely as a star.
And where his loving people meet
To share the gift divine,
there stands he with unhurrying feet;
there heavenly splendors shine.
***
Preached on the First Sunday after Christmas, December 27, 2020, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Isaiah 61:10-62:3
Psalm 147:13-21
Galatians 3:23-25, 4:4-7
John 1:1-18