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Christmas Day.
Our theme, this morning, is light, and so I’ve entitled today’s short message “Piercing the Darkness”, to borrow Frank Peretti's book title, because that’s what light does, it pierces darkness.
Do you remember the account of the time when, trying to catch him out, the teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought to Jesus a woman who had been caught in adultery?
He brilliantly turned the tables on them, shining the light on their own sinfulness, and then lovingly, graciously, he sent the woman home.
The very next thing he said was this. “‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.’
Interestingly, Zachariah, in his gentle prophecy over his newly born son, John the Baptist, in one of his first pronouncements after being probably deaf, but certainly dumb for over 9 months, said “And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people in the forgiveness of their sins, … and to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”
At the moment that Jesus was born, something changed. Well, in a sense, everything changed, but specifically, the moment Jesus was born, the light that God created on the FIRST day, before he created anything else, and THREE days before he created the sun, the moon and the stars, the light was personified.
We have a tendency to think that Jesus was just in the New Testament, but he wasn’t. ‘Very truly I tell you,’ Jesus told The Pharisees one day, ‘before Abraham was born, I am!’
John’s gospel, from which Matthew just read, is different from the other 3, as I’m sure I’ve said several times. John’s goal was not to tell people what Jesus did, but who he was. That’s why, rather than talking about Mary and the angel Gabriel, about shepherds and wise men, he started it off in the way that we just heard. “In the beginning was the word …”
In him was life, John tells us, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. That’s the light that Zachariah was talking about.
When a room is in complete darkness, it only takes a very small light to dispel the darkness completely. Light is more powerful than darkness. But when there is no longer any light, darkness prevails again.
That’s the state of the world that we live in. Darkness prevails, light is needed, today perhaps more than ever before.
In the passage that Matthew just read, John said five things about Jesus.
First, he is “the Word” -- the Logos, the very communication of God's message to the world, in human form.
Secondly he said that He is both “with God” and that he “is God”,
Thirdly that he is the Creator of all things,
Fourthly he is the very source of Life itself,
And then last, but by no means least, that He is the brilliant Light that illuminates the dark corners of our souls and dispels our darkness.
Let me quickly give you one example. Most of you probably know who Pete Grieg is. Among other things he’s the reader of Lectio this week. A couple of days ago Charlotte showed me something that he had posted on Instagram.
It was about an article recently published in a daily newspaper called ‘The Australian’, about a Harvard professor and best-selling author called Sir Niall Ferguson.
He and his Somalian wife, Aayan, formerly and famously one of the “New Atheists” alongside public intellectuals like Richard Dawkins, together with two of their sons, have begun attending church and all four of them were baptised in September.
“It was the culmination of a quite protracted process”, he said.
“We have come to see, profoundly, the crisis of our times, and the contribution to that crisis brought about by the abandonment of Christianity.”
But then Ferguson, himself a lifelong atheist, explained “I grew up in a household of science-minded religious sceptics. I didn’t go to church and felt quite sure of the wisdom of that when I was young. However, in two phases, I lost my faith in atheism.
The first phase was that, as a historian, I realised from studying 18th, 19th and 20th century history that no society had ever been successfully organised on the basis of atheism. All attempts to do that have been catastrophic.”
”But then the next stage was realising that no individual can in fact be fully formed, or ethically secure, without religious faith. That insight has come more recently and has been born of our experience as a family.”
When asked ‘does he pray?’ he answered “Yeah, I pray… There aren’t many atheists when your child goes missing … To say, as I would have done as an atheist, that the fate of your child is a matter of statistical probability and that prayer is pointless, is a cruel injunction. I have five children, and in the life of every child there’s at least one disaster that seems as if it might be fatal. If you don’t pray in those moments you’re not flesh and blood.”
What a beautiful example of “piercing the darkness” that is, and it leads us perfectly into our next hymn.
Prayers
Jesus, you who have come with your searing truth and your all-encompassing love to bring light into our dark world. We surrender afresh to you this Christmas Day. Help us to follow you each day of our lives until that day when we find our home with you. In your holy and hopeful name, we pray. Amen.
May the extraordinary love, by which the Father sent his Son at Christmas, embrace our families and friends, our hearts and our homes, this day.
And may the beautiful humility, by which Jesus was born in Bethlehem, mark our attitudes, actions and interactions this day.
And may the irrepressible joy, by which the Spirit conceives and breathes new life, fill us with the holiness of heaven’s happiness, now and forever more. Amen
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