In the Christmas story we hear the phrase “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.” “Those who dwelt in the shadow of death, on them the light has shined.” There are many references to light in the Christmas story – and of course, our modern celebration of Christmas also includes many forms of light. Like many people, Carol and I spent part of Thanksgiving weekend putting up Christmas lights, and bringing out candles to burn. Ever since our children were little, one of our favorite activities at this time of year is to drive around looking at Christmas lights – on people’s houses and property, in parks, on trees. That is perhaps the easiest way to tell that it is Christmas season. Christmas is a festival of light, and always has been.
We celebrate Christmas on December 25, but no one thinks that that was the actual day when Jesus was born. When people began celebrating it as a holiday, they did not know when the actual date of his birth was, so in the early 4th century, they chose December 25 – which was the winter solstice at that time. The darkest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. We don’t know much about the thinking 17 centuries ago, but it seems they chose it because they wanted to commemorate the idea that the Lord’s birth is a celebration of bringing light in the time of greatest darkness. Jesus came as a light into the world. As it says in the opening words of John, “In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness.”
So it is a wonderful time to think about the power and the significance of light. Light is one of the most amazing things in the universe – and yet, it’s very hard to define exactly what it is. People struggled for centuries to figure out how sight works; they used to think that the eye projected onto objects, and that’s how you could see. It wasn’t until the dawn of the scientific age that they realized that sight is all about light entering your eye, and learned how your retina responds to the light and sends signals to the brain that we interpret as sight.
But even that does not explain what light is. In many ways it acts like a wave, similar to sound waves, and we have frequencies of light just the same way we have frequencies of sound. But in other ways, light acts like a particle, and now we refer to photons – particles of light that travel throughout the universe. We calculated the speed of light at 186,000 miles per second, which means that a beam of light can go around the world seven times in a single second. Einstein realized that light is the fastest thing in the universe. On a starry night, I like to look up at the stars and think about what is happening when I see one. That star sent out photons perhaps a billion years ago, in all directions, and at that moment, some of those photons entered my eye and hit my retina. Someone standing next to me will see the same star, which (I believe) means that different photons are reaching their retinas. It is staggering for me to think about.
Imagine how much light energy our sun sends out. It somehow travels 98 million miles through space, and reaches not just our eyes, but our skin, the ground, and all plant life. In those plants, the chlorophyll begins the process of photosynthesis, transforming that light into energy for the plant. The plants become food for animals, thus beginning the entire food chain. No life on earth could exist without the light of the sun, at least indirectly. I once got curious about the question, “What are trees made of?” What I mean is, when an animal is born, it must eat a great deal, and that food makes the animal grow – so in a very real sense, an animal is made out of food. But what is a tree made out of? Where does the matter come from that forms the bulk of the tree? Well, my biologist brother tells me, it is largely made out of light – through the miracle of photosynthesis, that tree turns light into solid matter. Right now, you are sitting on wooden pews, which rest on wooden floors in a good, solid building – if you trace it back far enough, that’s made through photosynthesis, which means it’s essentially made out of light. And yet, the scientists tell us, photons have no mass.
We can also talk about the miracle of color – and of course, many of those Christmas lights I enjoy so much are colored lights. I was just talking with someone the other day about my memory of seeing my first color television. This was when I was a child in England, and we did not have much money, so it certainly wasn’t at our house. But when I was about six or seven years old, some people invited us over to their house where I watched my first tennis match on a color TV. I can still remember the intensity of the green grass on that screen.
Of course, after a very colorful fall season, we are now entering a relatively colorless time of the year. I think that is one reason we put up those cheerful, colorful lights: to bring the color back into our lives. I think about people who live in the arctic, where there are no trees that turn color. Is their world entirely black and white? No, I realized: they get colorful sunsets just like people anywhere on earth. And they get to see something I have yet to see: richly colorful Northern Lights. Before we understood ionization and magnetic shields and solar winds, how could they explain these magnificent lights that appeared in the sky? Do we fully understand them, even now?
I am not a scientist, though, so I shouldn’t speak about things I don’t know much about. In other words, I should not speak out of the darkness of ignorance.
What is darkness? It is not a thing, of course, but the absence of a thing. The Bible, of course, begins with darkness: “the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the water.” And I’m sure you know the next words: “And God said…. _____.”
God did not create darkness, God created light. But the creation of light did not dispel darkness forever. Darkness is depicted as a persistent problem in the Bible, such as our reading from Isaiah. In the very beginning of Genesis, darkness was over the surface of the deep, but in Isaiah 60, once again, “darkness covers the earth.” It even calls it “thick darkness.” How can something that has no physical presence feel thick? But it does. We all know the feeling of thick darkness.
I remember decades ago going to Laurel camp in Pennsylvania. It is a church camp held in Laurel Hill State Park, which is very woodsy, full of paths that wind through the hills and cross streams. There is a main camp when they hold meals and talks and worship services, but then you have to walk a fair distance back to your cabins. There is no electricity outside the main camp, so everyone has to remember their flashlights. People often coordinate walking back to their cabins together, so if you forget your flashlight at least you can walk in the light of someone else’s flashlight. But I remember a time when I stayed up at the main cabin too late, and I did forget that flashlight, and I tried walking back in the darkness. I tried stumbling along in the thick darkness for a while, but it was too risky. Even if I managed to stay on the path, I would probably miss a bridge or trip on roots. I don’t remember how it turned out – I probably walked back up to the main camp to wait for someone to walk with – but I certainly remember what it felt like to try to move when I couldn’t see a thing.
There are blind people who can do that, of course. It is amazing to see how they can compensate for their disability, using their other senses or special devices. When I was growing up, a boy in our school was legally blind, but he was also a pretty good baseball player, and he even played outfield, listening for the sound of a fly ball coming his way. But it’s also easy to overestimate how much of that you can do, and I recognize that getting around in the world is not easy without being able to see. You have heard those talking intersections, I’m sure, which is a great gift to the blind, but they also tell you how dangerous a city can be for a blind person. They would not have installed those systems in intersections all over the city if they had not been needed.
Blindness too is a curious thing. I have read all of the books of Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who wrote many fascinating books about neurological disorders, music, and the senses. One of his last books was called “The Mind’s Eye,” which is all about blindness. In it he explores interesting questions like, “When a person goes blind, do they completely lose their sense of what vision is?” Do they remember sights, or do they get used to a world without that entire dimension in it. The answer is: it depends on the person. One of the people he describes in the book is a tour guide who can still take people on tours and point out landmarks and vistas from memory, even though he hasn’t seen them for years. For other blind people, their whole sense of distance gets distorted, and since their world revolves around what they can touch, they lose a sense of things that are far away. Much of the book explores the reality that blindness is not just about corneas and retinas and lenses: it is about your mind. Sadly, the last chapter in Oliver Sacks’ book is about his own growing blindness, after he was diagnosed with cancer in his right eye.
In an earlier book, Sacks wrote about a man called Shirl Jennings, who went blind at age 3 due to thick cataracts. But when he was 51 years old, he encountered an ophthalmologist who realized that modern technology could remove those cataracts and he could get new corneas. So, miraculous, he regained his sense of sight late in life. They even made a movie about his life, called “At First Sight” (starring Val Kilmer). But it is not a happy movie – after undergoing this miracle, his life gets complicated. He has enormous trouble interpreting distance and perspective, telling the difference between shadows and solid objects, or the difference between large objects far away and small objects up close. In order to “see” objects, he still often has to pick them up and feel them. And sadly, after a few years, he starts to lose his vision again. Tests show that it’s not his eyes: it is his mind that cannot read the visual signals and gives up. His eyes were fine, but he could not see, and by the end of his life, he was fully blind again.
In the Bible, darkness and blindness are of course metaphors for spiritual states. The creation story itself is a metaphor of our spiritual progress, so when it says “darkness was over the surface of the deep,” the deep is our own spirit. When Isaiah says “thick darkness is over the peoples,” he is of course talking about their spiritual state. And just like me in that deep woods camp, once the darkness took over and they could not see, they could not move forward. This is why Jesus came into the world.
When Jesus began to teach people, he knew that there were people who did not want to see. He recognized that there were people who hated the light, who wanted to live in darkness, who saw the light as a threat. They are like the creatures who live under rocks – if you move the rock and they are exposed to the light, they scurry away into the darkness. Why do they hate the light?
Imagine a person named Larry who is living a totally selfish life, interested only in accumulating money, who uses others as a tool to gain power and wealth. But even he gets lonely, and decides that he wants to have a social network of some kind. So he joins a sharing group, and they welcome him and spend time with him. But it is not easy for them, and they get to the point where it is time for them to give Larry some honest feedback. One says, “I notice that in our group, you always talk but you never listen. You interrupt others or looked bored by what they are saying.” Another says, “In the weeks you’ve been in this group, I’ve learned a lot about you, but I don’t think you’ve learned anything about any of us.” Another pointed out that when they ate meals in restaurants, he was always happy to let someone else pay the bill, but he never offered. A fourth says, “I know you joined us because you want to make friends, and I support that, but I must tell you, it is not easy being around you.”
At that moment, a light goes on in Larry’s mind, and he realizes that what they are saying is true. But it is a painful thing to hear, and a part of him wants to fight against it, and shout them down and tell them they are all wrong. That part of him would rather dwell in darkness. Coming into the light can be a painful thing, because it means you have to change. If he wants to get past his loneliness, Larry can’t keep being that same person. If he did remain in the dark, he would make no progress in life. Or he would stumble through blindly, not understanding why his relationships don’t work out. If you don’t know right from wrong, if you can’t see the difference between light and darkness, you stumble through life. And in your stumbling, you hurt yourself and you hurt other people.
The Lord came into the world because it was so dark—because so many people were stumbling in that deep darkness. He knew that there were people who would resist the light because their deeds were evil. Jesus knew that when he brought the light to them, some people would rejoice and be grateful. And he also knew that other people would hate him and plot to kill him.
We need to learn to welcome the light, to love the light, to rejoice in the light. At this time of year, we celebrate the light and how it penetrates the darkness, and how it gives hope and purpose and a sense of direction. A person can live with physical blindness, but if you are spiritually blind, trapped in darkness, you will not find happiness. So we pray for the coming of light. We rejoice in the story of Christmas because of what it tells us about the Lord bringing truth into the world, bringing light into our darkness. And so we can all say together, as it says in the Psalms, “Come and let us walk in the light of the Lord.” Amen.
READINGS
Old Testament Reading: Isaiah 60:1-3
Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord rises upon you. See, darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the peoples, but the Lord rises upon you and his glory appears over you. Nations will come to your light and kings to the brightness of your dawn.
New Testament Reading: John 1:1-9
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world.
Reading from Swedenborg: Heaven and Hell #347
People who are moved and delighted by the truth itself are moved and delighted by heaven’s light. This light enters the deeper levels of the mind only, since the deeper levels of the mind are formed to accept it; and to the extent that it enters, it moves and delights us because anything that flows in from heaven and is accepted has delight and pleasure within it. This is the source of a genuine affection for what is true—an affection for what is true for its own sake. People who are caught up in this affection enjoy heavenly intelligence and shine in heaven like the radiance of the firmament. However, people who are engaged in a love for what is true for the sake of praise in this world or praise in heaven cannot possibly shine in heaven, because they are not delighted and moved by heaven’s light.