Properties of Light

Properties of Light

A Sermon Shared at the Suttons Bay Congregational Church

October 20, 2019

Scripture: Matthew 5:14-16

         When I was a boy, my grandfather and I often watched a show called “big time wrestling” together on his tiny plastic black-and-white television set. To help retrieve the weak signal that floated elusively around our neighborhood, he had wrapped balls of aluminum foil around the ends of the rabbit-ear antennas—but, alas, this had absolutely no perceptible effect. My grandfather was an enthusiastic and committed viewer of the program: although he was a devout church-goer who sang the old hymns in the shower, he resorted to somewhat saltier forms of expression when the static grew so loud that you could no longer hear the announcer or when it looked like some villainous wrestler might get away with a dirty move.

The stark symbolism of these battles made an early impression on me: the good guys were very good and wore the light-colored shorts and masks; the bad guys were very bad and wore the dark-colored shorts and masks. A decade or two would pass before I came to three realizations: first, clothing is an unreliable indicator of moral integrity; second, these men were not actually fighting; and, third, the snow on the screen was the result of dreadful reception and not because the match was taking place during a blizzard.  

You have no doubt noticed that our faith makes a lot of use of those same two symbols of darkness and light. The Bible strongly and consistently associates darkness with evil, or at least with the absence of God. And it strongly and consistently associates light with God’s presence, guidance, and grace.

This imagery recurs throughout the Old Testament—right from the start. The book of Genesis tells us that in the beginning “darkness was over the face of the deep.” In Exodus, the Lord tells Moses to stretch out his hand so that darkness will fall over the land of Egypt—a “darkness to be felt,” he adds ominously. Adjectives multiply, with the book of Isaiah saying that the lost will be “thrust into thick darkness” and the book of Proverbs declaring that “[t]he way of the wicked is like deep darkness.” The book of Psalms uses a common metaphor when it says that those of us without understanding will “walk about in darkness.”

We find identical imagery throughout the New Testament. The Gospel of John tells us that people were evil and “loved the darkness.” In three of the gospels, the sky becomes suddenly and mysteriously dark during the crucifixion of Jesus. The First Epistle of John tells us that in God there is “no darkness at all.” Colossians says that Jesus delivered us from “the domain of darkness” and First Peter says we have been “called out of darkness.”

On the other hand, the Hebrew Bible repeatedly employs the image of light as a metaphor for goodness. The book of Genesis tells us that the first words God spoke were “let there be light.” The twenty-seventh psalm begins with the famous invocation “The Lord is my light and my salvation.” Isaiah is rich with such language, including the prophetic statement: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” The book of Daniel declares that “those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above.”

The New Testament uses the same imagery—indeed, we might even say that it turns the lights up a bit. Such symbolism abounds. To give you some idea of how densely the New Testaments packs its references to light, just take the Gospel of John alone.

In that gospel, Jesus says (more than once) that he is “the light of the world”—hold on to that point, I’ll return to it. He warns his disciples that the light “will be among them” for only a little longer, and he tells them: “While you have the light, believe in the light.” John begins his gospel by saying of Jesus: “In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” And he reassuringly adds words often translated this way: the “light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

We find the same sort of language throughout the New Testament. Paul’s writings contain numerous examples. A familiar one comes in his letter to the Romans, when Paul urges us to “put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light”—the “armor of light”: a gloriously mixed metaphor.

This imagery has crept out of the Bible and into our everyday religious language, our traditions, and our literature. We refer to Jesus as “the Lord of Light” and Satan as the “Prince of Darkness.” We put lights up at Christmas and light candles at Christmas Eve services. If we plunge into John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, we discover that he describes the pit into which God cast Lucifer and the other fallen angels as having “no light, but rather darkness visible.” It was a concept that Milton—blind and impoverished when he wrote those words—could fully understand.

Now, here’s the thing. All of this imagery could leave us with a simple message etched in our mind: darkness bad, light good. But, of course, things are more complicated than that. This morning, I want to suggest to you that—if we pay attention to those complications—we might learn something not just about darkness and light …. but about God, about ourselves, and about what God asks of us.

Let’s start here. One risk in thinking in these simple “darkness bad, light good” terms is that we may come to view all existence as ruled by two conflicting, opposed, and equal forces. There is a religion that holds such a belief—but it isn’t ours. Manichaeism, which flourished between the third and seventh centuries, endorsed a dualistic model along precisely these lines. Indeed, religious historians tell us that Manichaeism actually gave us the phrase “Prince of Darkness.”

 The early church leaders did not just question Manichaeism—they declared it a heresy. I’m not big on calling people heretics, but the critics of Manichaeism had a point. After all, one of the fundamental tenets of our faith is that we believe in one God; we are happy monotheists; and dualistic belief systems see things very differently.

Of course, we understand that God gets a lot of opposition here on earth. As C. S. Lewis observed, we live in “occupied territory.” But make no mistake about it, our faith believes in one God and, to quote Luther’s great hymn, “on earth is not his equal”—or anyplace else, for that matter. I think that, in this sense, many translations of John’s gospel don’t get the sense of things exactly right: it’s not just that the darkness has not overcome the light; it’s that in the end the darkness cannot and so will not overcome the light.

There’s another problem with this simplistic “darkness bad / light good” dichotomy: darkness has a natural place in the very order of things. God may have brought forth the light and declared it good—but notice that God did not obliterate the darkness. To the contrary, God gave the night a proportional role and preserved it. Indeed, we cannot have days without having nights.

This means that darkness gets its seasons and we will inescapably spend some part of our life there,  like it or not. “There is a time for everything,” Ecclesiastes tells us, and that includes the dark periods and places of existence. If something bad happens to us, or to someone we love, or to an individual or group for whom we care, it makes no sense to say we shouldn’t go into the darkness—we will and, if we are compassionate human beings, we probably even should.

Whether we should stay there is, of course, a different question entirely. That’s where the redeeming forces of hope and grace and salvation come in. Sure, the Bible candidly recognizes that the valley of the shadows exists and that we will walk there. But it also promises that we will not walk alone and that, with God’s help, we will pass through it.

Still, darkness is more than just an unavoidable lapse in our otherwise well-lit lives. Sometimes darkness has important lessons for us. A spell in the darkness can help us recalibrate our thoughts, our behaviors, and our priorities. Being the weak creatures we are, sometimes we need the darkness in order to appreciate the light and to take a fresh new pleasure in it. The Prodigal Son had to wallow in the dim and filthy corners of a pig sty before he could return to his father’s warmly lit home—and to himself.

We can even have a little fun with this idea. Before we buy into the “darkness bad / light good” cliché, think of all the physical places in your life that you do not want to be bathed in light. Your bedroom at 2:00 AM. A restaurant on Valentine’s Day. A movie theatre once the film has started. The other night I was driving down a pitch-black road and accidentally hit the button for the dome light inside my truck. I immediately started scrambling to restore the darkness—since I thought it might be a good idea if I could see where I was going. I needed the darkness inside to see the light guiding me outside.

So: darkness bad? It’s a useful shorthand symbol. But there’s more to it than that.

Now, with respect to light, I want to make a somewhat different point. And I want to get at it by starting with a foundational question: what is it about light that makes it such a powerful, compelling, useful symbol of goodness? After all, life has many other good things in it as well—cheeseburgers, for example. And yet Jesus does not caution us against putting our cheeseburgers under a basket. What are the properties of light that give it such awesome theological utility?

Before getting to that question, it may be worth noting that thousands of years ago something was true about light that is no longer the case: it was precious and almost entirely outside of the control of human beings. Today, with the flick of a switch or push of a button we can light up a house, a backyard, a highway, a football stadium—we can even connect a lamp to Alexa and call out “Let there be light!” and play god in extreme miniature.

For the vast majority of human history, however, this did not hold true. We urgently needed the light—to grow crops, to work by, to find our way, to travel safely, and so on. But it was hard to make and hard to come by. Whenever the power goes out we get a tiny taste of the helplessness with which the authors of all these biblical texts lived on an hour-by-hour day-by-day basis.

So, today, we tend to take the magic of light for granted. Rather than thinking of it as a wonderful and important thing we may scarcely think of it at all. Perhaps we can regain some of our appreciation for light—and why it meant so much to the authors of the Bible—by remembering how precious it once was and by looking closely at its properties.

A fairly obvious property of light is that it affects other things. It warms them. It pulls them out of the shadows. It illuminates them. Numerous biblical texts make this last point—that light can show the way for us and keep us from getting lost, or worse.

We’ve all had these sorts of experiences. I recall a few years ago staying out a bit too late on our boat on Lake Leelanau. It was an extraordinarily starless night and as we approached the shore I could barely make out our dock. Fortunately, we had a good strong flashlight on board, and in short order I could see where we needed to go. That same light led us down the dock, along the path through our woods, across the road, and safely up the farmhouse steps. Right in my hand I held a nascent sermon, complete with rechargeable batteries.

 

And, of course, light does not just affect things—it affects people. Like plants, we naturally bend toward the light. In the introduction to his brilliant translation of the gospels, the poet Stephen Mitchell refers to this as the “irresistible phototropism of the human soul.” I suspect it explains why a ragtag collection of hardboiled fishermen would leave their nets and immediately follow Jesus; they saw the light in him and rushed toward it.

Think about that first fall day when the sunlight makes the leaves glow orange and red and yellow. Think about that first winter day when the sunlight dances across the crystalline snow. Think about that first spring day when the sunlight teases the crocuses out of the ground. Think about that first summer day when the sunlight flashes over the waves on the water. “It’s beautiful outside; I’m going to go sit in my closet,” said no one, ever. We are hardwired to move toward the light. As Mitchell says: like plants, we are phototropic.

But light has other instructive properties as well. It can be dispersed—meaning that it can be broken down into its constituent colors. We see this when we put light through a prism or when the sunlight gives us a rainbow after a storm. In other words, it is through a diversity of colors working together that light is achieved. There’s a powerful lesson embedded in there, although we human being seem to have a lot of trouble getting it.

But the properties of light have still more to tell us. Light can be diffused—meaning that it can be spread out and scattered—and it can be diffracted—meaning that it can be bent. Unleashed and directed, light finds its way into the darkest and most remote corners. In the example of his life, Jesus shows us exactly how that works—and how it changes everything.

As some of you know, my wife Lisa is an avid photographer. A few years ago, she was watching an excellent instructional video by Joel Sartori, who has had a long and storied career taking pictures for National Geographic. At one point, he said something like this: “Everyone takes photographs of sunsets. Next time, turn around and look behind you and see where the light from that sunset has gone. Often, it is a better and more interesting shot.”

Throughout the gospels, Jesus tells us the same thing: “Turn around. Look at the neglected places. Watch how the light can go there, too. See how it makes things beautiful.”

  

Light has an additional property as well: it can be reflected. Light can make contact with something and return to its source. Light comes back.

Jesus understood this, a basic principle of the physics of divine light. If we send ours out into the world, we will get the benefits of it as well. As we give, so shall we receive. The brighter, the better, for the other, for us.

We need to pause and notice here that our understanding of the source of the light has shifted. In much of our religious language, the light comes from outside—from God, from Jesus, from the Holy Spirit ... like the headlights on my pickup. But Jesus plainly declares that the light comes from within us as well. As I noted earlier, in the Gospel of John Jesus declares “I am the light of the world.” But in our scripture reading for today, he also says “You are the light of the world.” This makes perfect sense coming from the one who said: “The Kingdom of God is within you.”

Permit me a brief detour on that phrase. The biblical scholar C. H. Roberts points out that the words usually translated as “within you” here literally mean “in your hands” or “within your power.” Theologian Charles Dodd explained the implications of that meaning: “That is, the Kingdom of God is not something for which you have to wait anxiously … but is an available possibility here and now, for those who are willing to receive it as a little child.”

This idea gets at such a universal truth that devout followers of other faiths have embraced it. Mahatma Gandhi wrote: “My experience tells me that the Kingdom of God is within us, and that we can realize it not by saying ‘Lord, Lord,’ but by doing His will and His work. If we wait for the Kingdom to come from outside, we shall be sadly mistaken.”

Think about it. You are the light of the world. The Kingdom of God is within you. That is what Jesus says to us, in as clear, unmistakable, and well-lit a way as he knows how. What good news. And what a daunting responsibility.

Because this, then, is what Jesus asks of us: What will you do? Where will you shine your light? How will you spread it, disperse it, bend it, diffuse it, refract it, direct it, share it? Who is the person, now sitting in darkness, who will lean into your light if you offer it? When will you toss away your bowl and give your internal dimmer switch a good, hard twist to the right?

         In 2010, a mine in northern Chile collapsed, trapping thirty-three men inside. It took sixty-nine days to rescue them. During that period, helpers were able to send food down to the miners and the miners were able to send videos up to the surface so they could communicate with their families. Perhaps some of you recall watching this drama unfold on television.

         Once supply lines were established, the miners asked for something else, too. Most of them were deeply religious men, so they requested Bibles, crucifixes, rosaries, small statutes of the Virgin Mary—whatever could be provided. The rescuers found a way to get these things to the miners, who built a shrine in the blackened space where they were huddled. There, 2,300 feet underground, three miles from the entrance, in the very heart of utmost darkness, the light went on … and those miners assembled a remote outpost of the Kingdom of God.

         There are no limits to where the light can go. There are no limits to where we can send it. There are no limits to where we can bring it. There are no limits to the places, the lives, the circumstances that the light can reach.

         And this is so because, through God, all things are possible. Even the most impossible things imaginable. Even that the Kingdom of God would be within us. Even that we would be the light of the world.

         Praise God that it is so.

         Amen.