December 25, 2008

The Light of the World

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 98
Isaiah 52:7–10
John 1:1–14

We do know that you hold initiative for our lives,
that your love planned our salvation
before we saw the light of day.

And so we wait for your coming,
in your vulnerable baby
in whom all things are made new. Amen.

Walter Brueggemann
“In Violence and Travail”

Grant us, God, a mind to meditate on you;
eyes to behold you; ears to listen for your word;
a heart to love you; and a life to proclaim you;
through the power of the Spirit of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Merry Christmas. It is a pleasure to celebrate with you the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ.

My father once told me that endings are more important than beginnings. I was just about to graduate from college, and he was telling me in his philosophical way not to be overcome by a case of senioritis. He wanted to see that I was doing my best until the very end—until the last exam was taken, the last paper was written, and the final good-byes and thank yous to professors and mentors were spoken.

Years later, when I was a ministry intern, learning to minister to residents of a retirement community in Hyde Park, the director of my internship shared with me a lesson he had learned in his years of ministering to an elderly community. Like my father, he too told me that endings matter. Closure matters. Whether or not we have put our affairs in order, how we end relationships, how we end the story of our lives or a chapter of the story of our lives—all these things matter. Endings matter, he stressed to me, not just in and of themselves, but also for the sake of new beginnings. Our willingness to enter into future relationships with others, our confidence to face new challenges, our readiness to begin a new chapter of life—for the sake of all these things we need to attend well to how we end things.

Christians know how important an ending can be. Christian theologians often say that we are a people of Easter faith. By this, they mean that the church first came into existence with the good news of the resurrection following Jesus Christ’s crucifixion and death. The oldest preaching of the church concentrated on the resurrection, because that was the moment when Jesus was recognized to be the Son of God. This focus of preaching on the resurrection is reflected in the earliest stage in the formation of the Gospels.

You can imagine the difference that the resurrection made for the followers of Jesus. Having witnessed his crucifixion and death, they must have experienced a dense cloud of darkness settle upon them. The resurrection that followed Jesus’ death meant that life, not death, had the final word and that Jesus had returned to be with his Father in heaven, where he belonged. In the light of this news, those early Christians could go on, facing life’s hardships with hope and courage. Their futures, which seemed so dim before, became brightened.

We know that life is not simply a chronological sequence of events, beginning here and ending there. The present moment can be just as powerfully colored by the past or by anticipations of the future as the past can be reinterpreted in light of the way things end. I recently received a small book for Christmas. It is entitled The Last Lecture. Perhaps you know the book. Written by Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, it is in fact the last lecture he gave. It is not uncommon for professors on the brink of their retirement to give “last lectures” in which they are asked to ruminate on what matters most to them, as a sort of legacy for their students. The case of Professor Randy Pausch, however, was a bit different. He was a young man with three children, the oldest six years old and the youngest eighteen months old, and yet he didn’t have to imagine this lecture to be his last, because he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Having the end of his life so clearly before him, he proceeded to give his last lecture in which every bit of advice was colored by his knowledge that the end of his life was to come sooner rather than later. His advice was colored also by the hope that what he said would be received by and helpful to not only the students in his lecture hall, but also someday in the future his own small children. His advice wasn’t about dying but rather about living into the future, and his lecture wasn’t for him but for the next generation.

A new outlook on the future was not the only significant effect that Christ’s resurrection had on the early church. In light of his resurrection, the followers of Jesus recognized that his whole life, from beginning to end, must have been significant. So soon after his death, they began to circulate stories about the Jesus Christ they had known in the past—about what he said, taught, and did during his lifetime. The New Testament Gospels are our record of these accounts.

Most likely the last stories to be incorporated into the Gospels are the narratives about Jesus’ birth, our Christmas narratives. At Christmas time, we traditionally read the beginning chapters of Matthew, Luke, and John. If you attended a Christmas Eve service here last night either at 8:30 p.m. or 11:00 p.m., you heard readings from all three of these Gospels. Each of these Gospels begins differently, and they all differ from the oldest of the four Gospels, Mark. The four Gospels begin at the points at which their authors considered the salvific significance of Jesus to become apparent. Without any mention of Jesus as an infant, Mark begins with an adult Jesus being baptized. For Mark the moment at which Jesus Christ was known to be the Son of God was at his baptism, when the Holy Spirit descended upon him and a voice from heaven proclaimed, “You are my Son; with you I am well pleased.” Written at a later time than Mark’s Gospel, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke begin with infancy narratives, and the Gospel of John, from which we read this morning, reaches even further back to a time before history, a primordial period prior to the creation of the world.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” This is how the Gospel according to John starts. It’s not an accident that the Gospel starts with “In the beginning.” Echoing chapter 1, verse 1 of Genesis, the first book in the Old Testament, John opens with a heavenly prelude to the life of Jesus Christ in which Jesus Christ is the Word that not only already existed before God created the world, but was responsible with God for creating the world. There is no earlier starting point from which the author of John could have chosen to begin his Gospel.

That the followers of Jesus Christ could envision a future transformed by their hope in the resurrection and that the writers of the Gospels felt compelled, in light of the resurrection of Christ, to reinterpret and retell the past, reaching as far back as possible, tells us something about the significance of Jesus Christ for them. To put it simply, for those early Christians, Jesus Christ had revelatory significance, and for us, he still does.

What do I mean by revelatory? I have two ideas in mind. First, a revelatory event has illuminating power. It brings to light all that has happened not only in one’s personal life, but also in the history of a community and the world. Even those parts of our past that we try to forget or to keep buried are brought to light. Nothing—good or bad—is left in the dark. Second, a revelatory event is something like the kind of experience that results in an aha of recognition. In the light of a revelation, things that never made sense before finally make sense. Whatever was forgotten, neglected, or buried—whatever failed to make sense before—in the light of a revelation makes sense.

Christmas Day is without a doubt a joyous celebration of Christ’s birth. We sing songs of the joy Christ brings to the world. The joy we sing about and express when we wish each other “Merry Christmas” does not spring from an outlook on life that sees only the good and none of the bad. Christians don’t go around wearing rose-colored glasses during the Christmas season. The joy that Christians celebrate in the coming of Christ stems from knowledge of the real suffering that people undergo and the real injustices that people perpetuate. For the early Christians and for us today, Jesus Christ is the revelation that illuminates our lives—the good and the bad; personal, communal, and global; past, present, and future—and Jesus Christ is the revelation that makes it possible for us to make sense of all that he illuminates.

During Advent, the weeks leading up to Christmas, Christians everywhere waited for the light of Christ. We sang hymns about the darkness that he would dispel, about “death’s dark shadows he would put to flight” (“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”). The Gospel of John draws out the image of Jesus Christ as the light of the world: “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

In celebrating Christmas, we are celebrating Christ’s revelation for us. Christ is the light of the world, and we are God’s children trying to live in this light. It is not easy to live in the light of Christ, because it will expose us, all of us. It will bring to view events from our lives that we would rather forget about. It will uncover the injustices of the world to which we have grown accustomed and no longer notice. And yet at the same time, by God’s grace, Christ will not leave us exposed. As the Gospels testify, Christ will help us to make sense of the world. The story of his own life, death, and resurrection reveals to us the power God has to make all things cohere.

When we at Fourth Church call ourselves “a light in the city,” we identify ourselves as a people who strive to dwell in the light of Christ. Not to be misunderstood as claiming to be a shining example to which others can look or as possessing all the right answers while the rest of the world lies in the darkness of ignorance, we call ourselves “a light in the city” out of a profound hope and confidence in the revelatory power of God through Jesus Christ: that the light of Christ will illumine the world, uncovering both the good and the bad in it, and that the light of Christ will help us to make sense of the world, showing us in time how every part fits into the whole plan God has for our redemption.

Amen.