LIVING IN THE LIGHT

Scriptures: Isaiah 60:1-6

Matthew 2:1-12

You may remember that last week I quoted one of my favorite persons, Cynthia Wedel, as saying, “Christmas comes like a shaft of light in the darkness of human despair.” This whole period of time – what we like to call the twelve days of Christmas --from Christmas Day, December 25, to Epiphany (today, January 6), is all about light. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it,” the gospel writer John says. He goes on to say about the Christ-event: “The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.”

Now, this may be a difficult concept for us here in Las Vegas to grasp. We are surrounded by light – the glitter, the neon, the fireworks on New Year’s Eve, the mostly sunny days (I have to tell you, being back east for five weeks where it was mostly rainy and gloomy and the sun only peeked through occasionally, I became ever more aware how glad I am to be in Las Vegas most of the year with all of its sunny days). Oh, we may sing hymns like “In the Bleak Midwinter”, but basically we are people of the light and live most of our lives where there is brightness shining.

Or do we? “The light”, as the gospel writer John uses it and as we experience it at Epiphany, is really a metaphor. When you come down to it, “light” has to do with how we are living our lives – whether, and therefore how, we are living in the light. Or, as the marvelous African song puts it, “We Are Walking in the Light of God, we are walking in the light of God” (which I almost had us sing).

As I mentioned last year, the word “epiphany” means “manifestation” or a “miraculous appearance”, and it is intended to mark how Christ was shown to the world. Christ is manifested to us – that is, appears to us – as a creature of the light. We see it in all kinds of ways: that rollicking song that young people like to sing, “Shine, Jesus, Shine”; the emanations from the angels as they appear before the nativity; the glow from the candles that we raise on Christmas Eve; the torch that Jeannette and Isabella bring; the lit-up Christmas tree in our homes.

But most especially, of course, we see it in the Star of Bethlehem – that star that the wise kings from the Orient – the Magi – followed. The birth of Jesus was so significant on the world’s stage that a special spotlight was required. This was no quickly shot-off fireworks, to be oohed and aahed over and then forgotten, but this was a steady, long-lasting light for the whole world. As the last line of the familiar hymn’s chorus says it, “Westward leading, still proceeding, Guide us to thy perfect light.”

One of our Christmas traditions, which started when my mother introduced me to an NBC broadcast of it back in the ‘50’s, is to watch a video of Gian Carlo Menotti’s short opera, “Amahl and the Night Visitors”. (It was first aired by NBC in 1951 as the debut production of the Hallmark Hall of Fame, by the way.) Amahl is a poor crippled shepherd who has a penchant for, shall we say, stretching the truth a bit. His mother finds it hard to trust the tales he tells. So, when he starts singing, “O mother, you should come outside; there has never been such a star”, and starts laying on about how it is “as big as a window”, it’s no wonder that she just keeps on with her bedtime preparations and bemoans, “Oh, what shall I do with this boy, what shall I do?”. But as they fall asleep the three wise men come to their door, looking for a bit of respite in their long journey, and as they tell about the star’s mighty power to draw them along their route Amahl’s mother realizes that she was wrong to doubt him. Later, when the kings are asleep, the mother seeks to steal some gold “for my child” and is caught, but when King Melchior sees her poverty and desperation he sings, “Oh, woman, you may keep the gold. The Child we seek doesn't need our gold. On love, on love alone He will build his kingdom… And the keys to his kingdom belong to the poor.” The light of the Star is about to come into Amahl’s life, for as the kings prepare to leave he offers to take his crutch as a gift to the child and finds that he is able to walk, to jump, to sing. That’s the kind of hope the light of the star can bring into our lives.

But the light of Epiphany isn’t just about the rosy glow that is symbolized by the healing of a crippled boy. There is darkness here, too, in the midst of the light that must be acknowledged before we can see how it could be possible, in the words of John, that “the darkness did not overcome it.” It is a darkness that we feel deep in our souls; a darkness that aches for a shaft of light.

Arthur C. Clarke, the science-fiction writer, has a short-story that I read many years ago. I can’t remember the name of it now, and I’ve been trying to find it for several years. But the story has hauntingly stayed with me. It takes place in the distant future, and it’s about a Catholic priest who is also a xeno-archeologist – that is, he specializes in sites of ancient, alien civilizations. He is on his way with an expedition to a very distant solar system where they find the remains of a race that perished long ago when their sun went nova. They were not advanced enough to have space flight and thus escape what they knew for years was about to happen to them, and so they spent their last decades cataloguing and displaying what had made their civilization great. Members of the expedition marvel at the beauty and grace and ethical wisdom of the culture that they find buried on this dead world. But then the priest starts doing some calculations and discovers that the sun went nova and was positioned at such a point in the sky that it most likely was the Star of Bethlehem – and he is forced to confront the possibility, which nearly shatters his faith, that God sacrificed a whole, beautiful people in order for the star to show the wise men the way to Bethlehem.

Fanciful? Sure. Heretical? Well, maybe. But the note of realism that this story introduces for me is that even the most hopeful, loving, light-filled actions may have unintended consequences. Jesus Christ may have come as a shaft of light into the darkness of despair, but there have also been countless wars conducted in his name and hatreds espoused by those who believe they are trying to do his will. It is not enough simply to proclaim as the prophet Isaiah does:

Arise, shine; for your light has come,

and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.

Isaiah, himself, knew what it meant for that light to be coming, for in his next breath he says,

For darkness shall cover the earth,

and thick darkness the peoples

Nevertheless, he comes back to the promise:

but the Lord will arise upon you,

and his glory will appear over you.

So, like Isaiah, we also must work to make sure that that light and that glory are truly conquering the darkness and letting the Lord arise within us. We need to confront the darknesses that are in the world and the darknesses that are in our souls – each of our souls, where evil and sin wait to snuff out the small light of a wavering candle or the great light of the Star of Bethlehem.

Herod certainly had a lot of darkness within his soul. There’s one little piece of this story of the wise men with Herod in Matthew’s gospel that caught my attention as I read this familiar story over again for the umpteenth time. Herod “learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared.” And it is only then that he sends them on to Bethlehem. Herod wants to use scientific inquiry and logic to further his ambitions and cunning. He then takes the cautious approach by sending the wise men as, he believes, his emissaries. But Herod’s whole approach is contrasted with the wise men who, when the star stops and shows them where it has led them, “were overwhelmed with joy” and “knelt down and paid him homage”. Moreover, it’s not logic that comes to their assistance, but rather, “having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.”

Epiphany means that something wholly new has happened. It is something that cannot be explained by philosophical theory or scientific experiment. It is something that comes to each one of us personally. The Magi of old by their visit affirmed that here is the manifestation to us of divine love, and that this is not a realization that they could have reached by their own calculations. This is why we truly refer to them as “wise men”.

An epiphany is an “aha” moment which some describe as having found the last piece of the puzzle and now the whole picture has become apparent. When the star stopped over the stable and the wise men were “overwhelmed with joy” they had that kind of a moment – and it changed everything. Epiphany moments change us. The Epiphany of the Christ changes the whole world. This is the revelation we receive on this day.

We show our awareness of that revelation when we come before this communion table and prepare ourselves to eat this bread and drink this juice – symbolizing thereby that the light of Christ is shining through us and into the many worlds in which we belong. Communion bonds us to one another, as it also binds us to those wise men and those shepherds and those angels and those disciples in that Upper Room. These elements represent the sinews of our faith which hold us together precisely because we have seen a great light,

This truly is the light of God that is breaking into our lives. Whether you perceive it as real brightness, as the Magi did with the star, or as a metaphor for the kind of insight that comes with an epiphany, the true light that enlightens everyone has come into the world. And because this is so, you can use that light to incinerate each one of the darknesses you find inside yourselves. It is a glorious thing to be able to affirm along with Isaiah:

Arise, shine; for your light has come,

and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.

Amen.

Dave Pomeroy

First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ

Las Vegas, NV

January 6, 2008