Sermon, Sunday, December 26, 2010

“The Light of Life”, A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, December 26, 2010 at Church of the Ascension, Rochester, New York

Later this week many of us will stay up very late to see in the New Year. All over the world there will be fireworks at midnight, lighting up the dark night’s sky. In New York City millions of people will crowd into Times Square to watch the ball of light descend during the last seconds of 2010 and all will cheer, toast and dance as the year 2011 begins. We humans are very conscious of time and the passing thereof. We mark birthdays and anniversaries with parties and gifts, we worry about “getting old”, we mourn when someone dies young believing that somehow they were cheated of something by not living to a ripe old age. We are obsessed with saving time, being efficient, doing things quickly, as if somehow we fear that there isn’t enough time for each of us to do whatever it is we want to do or think we must do. For this congregation, as you look forward to a year in which you hope new leadership and new direction will come to this faith community the arrival of a New Year is particularly important. As you face the unknown future, you may sometimes wish you could stop the relentless progression of time and rest even for just a moment in the safety of the familiar and known, the dreams and hopes and good times shared in old times, before the new and unknown comes along to change patterns, routines and established rituals.

In this time bound existence that we know and in which we live out our lives, we often lose any sense of perspective about the vastness of time and space. We who believe in God in particular, occasionally need to step beyond our own time bound existence and see a larger picture. Today’s gospel reading from the Gospel of John is one of those biblical passages that remind us of the vastness and enormity of God’s universe and of the endlessness and boundlessness of God’s time – eternity. The gospel writer, being human, uses language that arises out of our time bound world – “in the beginning” he writes, echoing the words of the Book of Genesis that tells the story of the creation of the world. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In contrast to the synoptic gospel writers Matthew and Luke who give us very accessible human stories of the birth of a baby to a young couple in a manger, John paints the larger picture, encouraging us to understand the enormity of God’s act in becoming incarnate in the human, time-bound world. John uses cosmic imagery and a poetic form to draw us out of our narrow human perspective and into God’s cosmic perspective.

John’s gospel is the most mystical of the four gospels and was the last to be written. John is not concerned with relating historical information to us; he is weaving theology and spirituality into the story he tells. He uses both Jewish and Hellenistic traditions to draw his readers into the wonder of the story he is telling. To those who first read this gospel this opening hymn would have been very familiar, drawing as it does on the ancient Hebrew wisdom tradition in which Woman Wisdom, a feminine divine entity, is present with God and active with God at the dawn of creation, helping to make everything and form everything that is or will be. Scholars generally agree that the figure of Woman Wisdom, the feminine aspect of the divinity, is the one that the early Christians believed became flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. In true God-like style, there was some gender-bending going on as the feminine aspect of the Godhead enters human history in the body of a male person. This gospel writer lifts us out of our human perspective about time and further pushes our imaginations to think about the transcendent divinity taking on human flesh and entering this earthly world.

John also uses various images throughout his gospel to express his beliefs about God and about what God was doing in entering the world in the form of Jesus of Nazareth. One prominent image, or pair of contrasting images, which we see here in this Prologue, are those of darkness and light. “The life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” The images of darkness and light were prominent in our Advent texts too, as we reflected on our longing for the second coming of God into the darkness of human existence. Matthew and Luke give us a baby in a manger, while John gives us Jesus, the light of the world.

All too often when we play with the images of light and darkness we tend to think of darkness as something evil, as that fearful place or state where we cannot see clearly, where evil powers lurk awaiting to grab us, or of a place of ignorance or sloth or apathy of which we must be rid in order to enter into the light of God and live. Humans do not like darkness, on the whole. When we are in a dark place, we are afraid, we feel undefended and vulnerable and we want light so that we can be sure to navigate safely, to see what’s coming our way, to feel in control of what is happening to us. In our world we have managed to make sure that we never have to experience complete darkness, having electrified everything so that even in this season of long nights and short days, we can always have light. At this season particularly we see houses and trees lit up at night as part of our seasonal celebration of Christmas. Jesus as light is an image that even our secular Christmas rituals have incorporated, consciously or not.

There is a darkness however, that is not fearful or dangerous, in fact quite the opposite. That is the darkness of the womb. A child in its mother’s womb is in a place of complete darkness and silence, and yet it is the place where that child is nourished, protected and in which the child grows until it is safe for it to leave because it is capable of independent life. But, that darkness is one that however safe and nourishing cannot go on eternally. If the child is not expelled from the womb at some point, it will die in that dark cocoon. But that process of birth, of going from darkness into light is hardly an easy journey, nor is it one that is without pain or travail for both mother and child. John’s beautiful hymn draws on this birth imagery, using the phrase “what has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of the world.” The Greek verb translated “come into being” is a verb that suggests a process of becoming, a dynamic, growth process, rather than the more static verb which we would translate simply as “to be.” John’s imagery as he describes the incarnation weaves birth imagery, a very earthy kind of imagery, into the larger, more cosmic and mystical imagery of the light that dispels the darkness of the human condition.

John isn’t just telling us something about what happened in the birth of Jesus of Nazareth 2000 years ago. John is inviting us to understand something about our own soul’s journey to God, using Jesus as the vehicle for encouraging us to embark upon that journey. God entered human history by being born of a woman, going through the same painful and bloody process of birth that each of us has traveled. What is more important, however, is to understand that the birthing process of the soul is not a one-time event, but rather a continual process of becoming, of being born, of entering the light of the world, even as that process is painful and bloody. Just as a baby must leave the cocoon of the womb in order to live and grow, we each must leave behind the safety and warmth of whatever is safe and familiar to enter a new life with God. Our soul’s birthing process may include overcoming emotional or spiritual issues that impede our relationship with God. It might include such things as overcoming addictions, reconciling old conflicts, learning new ways of behaving or acting in the world, letting go of dependencies which keep us from allowing ourselves to be dependent upon God and God alone. Without a doubt, the birthing process of our souls requires that we give up any idea that we are in control of our own life or destiny and allow ourselves to be guided by the hand of God as we move through our daily existence.

Our soul’s journey to God is one which enables us to gradually gain the larger perspective, to move outside the boundaries of time and space in which we live and to participate in and appreciate God’s eternity even as we live our days on this earth. As we grow and develop spiritual maturity, we are less consumed by worry about the passage of time and the cycle of our own lives and more able to see ourselves as living in God’s eternity in which beginnings and endings are all of a piece and one leads always to the other. The gift God gave in the person of Jesus of Nazareth was God’s own willingness to enter our world, and to live in it as we do, so that we could see and understand that this is not all there is- that God stands outside our temporal existence and God invites each of us to participate in the life of God fully and joyfully.

As we prepare to celebrate the passing of one year and the beginning of a New Year, a fresh start for each of us, John’s reflections on the Word made flesh encourage us to see ourselves as part of that large cosmic reality in which God calls each of us to Godself, out of the dark cocoons in which we would prefer to live, into the challenging, sometimes painful process of the birthing of our soul that God so wants for us. As we are born into life with God, we will enjoy the dynamic and creative life that God has prepared for us and we will know the abundant life that God desires us to share with God. As John tells us, to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

Happy New Year!