“In him was life and the life was the light of all people.”
Sermon for the 2nd Sunday before Lent 2009.
“In him was life and the life was the light of all people.”
I’m sure all of us have experienced a power cut from time to time. Sometimes they only last for a minute, and we tend to agitated, and on the phone to the electric company, if it last more than 5. This is very different to many parts of the world. On my first visit to Ghana I remember returning to the town where we were staying after a day out visiting, only to find the town covered in darkness. “Oh we often lose power around this time of day” said our host. “It’s when the pressure falls in the Volta Hydro-electric dam.” So we groped around in darkness while a palm oil lamp was lit and waited till it came on again. No big deal. The thing I missed most were the fans in our bedrooms.
Of course there’s a big difference between a power cut in the day and the night. In summer it might even take a while before you notice it at all, whereas on a winter evening it will become immediately evident. If we’re well prepared there’ll be a torch to hand, but we soon realise what a pathetic little beam of light it sheds compared to our lights, but most of all compared to the light of the sun that lights our room and the outside world. Hasn’t it been wonderful to see that sun and feel a little of its warmth these last couple of days? We can’t imagine life without sun though some writers have tried to do so. In CS Lewis’ Narnia story The Silver Chair, after the children and Puddleglum have released the Prince from the silver chair, the witch returned and tried to enchant them all. The Prince had been kept captive in an underground world that was only lit by lamps hanging from the ceiling. The Queen tried to persuade them that these lamps were the only source of light that existed and that the sun did not or could not exist.
In John’s gospel, whose first chapter we read from today, just as we do every Christmas time, we read that the Word, which we later discover have taken form in Jesus, is the light “that lightens all people”. John doesn’t actually compare God and Jesus to the sun, as other early Christian writers did, but in a way he is saying that. Just as you and I find our way around in the daytime without thinking of the sun that guides us, so we are all guided by God’s inner light, whether we know it or not. That, for me, is the starting point in talking or thinking about the Christian faith. Christianity isn’t about strange things from a long time ago, or a secret society for preserving the memory of Jesus or a certain church tradition, or for people who like certain architecture or music. It’s about life’s essentials – light, bread, direction, water, shelter- and how Jesus can help us with all these.
How I wish we could understand this better! Our society in Britain today is polarised between two forces: on the one hand there is the secular force that wants to put religion in a little private box marked ‘religion’ containing odd and old people holding odd and old beliefs irrelevant to our everyday needs and wishes. The other force comes from some religious people, including many Christian who get so caught up in arguing their particular cause – be it around sexuality and gender, abortion, a particular understanding of creation, government or education, that they miss the bigger picture in which most of spend our lives. Each side’s behaviour confirms the others’ prejudices and perpetuates the stalemate we find ourselves in. A stalemate in which Christians can be charged by secular authority for wearing a cross or saying a prayer, and where Christians themselves can threaten people with hell for holding this or that belief on evolution or abortion or denying God’s existence.
We need to stop and take a deep draught of the selfsame air that each one of us breathes and bask in the selfsame sun with which we are all lit and warmed. There is no book of the Bible that can help us do this better than John’s Gospel. It calls Jesus the way, the light, the bread and the water of life. This year’s Lent groups focus on that Gospel and I urge you to put aside just an hour and a half each week to attend them. So far only 7 people have signed up for this but I cannot believe that this is the sum total of people interested in such essentials of Christian living. We have had some offers from people willing to host and even to lead. Please consider this even if you’ve never done it before.
I believe this church to be at something of a crossroads. The last few years have seen us very busy in a number of areas of community life, be it through the Park Centre, our musicals, our Harvest festivals as well as our schools. Things are changing, people have left, and a new orientation is needed. We need to chart our course for the next few years, to find out what God wants for this parish and us. The Lent course is one step, the Vision Day is another, yet both are diminished by people’s non-attendance. That is why I have postponed the Vision Day to a time later in the year when people from not just the PCC but all the congregation can have their say .on the future of St John’s.
Jesus is the light that lightens every one. We can walk in that light into his future , or we can huddle round the little lamps of our present situation. Which is it to be?