Christmas Eve Sermon: A Light No Darkness Can Overcome
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Text: John 1:1-5
Series: Glad Bethlehem's Living Light
December 24, 2020, Christmas Eve
Eugene O’Neill was one of the great American playwrights of the last century and a Nobel laureate to boot. Like most playwrights, O’Neill did his best to capture the spirit of his times more than merely penning plays that told people what they wanted to hear.
For example, in his play, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” O’Neill makes what I think is a somewhat unsettling statement: “We are,” he wrote, “born into the brightest light we will ever know. And from that point on, the shadows begin to gather. The shadows deepen as we move further and further into life until finally, we come to total darkness and into that total darkness we helplessly slip.”
I get where O’Neill was coming from. If there’s anything these past nine months have taught us, it’s that just when you think that things are looking up and good times are around the bend, something totally unexpected comes your way, something like a coronavirus, something that knocks the props out from under you, plunging you into pitch darkness, a darkness that is so profound that you don’t know when or if it will ever end.
But on this most holy of nights, we stand in the very midst of the darkness and dare to ask the question that is on everyone’s hearts: “Will this darkness have the last word? Will it consign us to a future that holds no hope, no peace, no joy, no love?” And the answer is, “No, no it won’t, not according to God’s promise, God’s promise fulfilled in the person of Jesus, His Son and our Messiah, who was born into this world at a time of intense darkness and brought to bear upon the darkness a source of light that the darkness would not and never will overcome.”
This evening we have before us the opening verses of the Gospel of John. While most students of the New Testament wouldn’t consider this passage to be an account of Jesus’ birth in, say, the same way as those familiar verses in both Matthew and Luke, I’d say that this passage from John 1 at least points people to the significance of Jesus’ nativity and how it shows the manner in which his birth stands at the midpoint between the beginning of all creation and the unfolding of the new creation that Jesus makes possible for all who would receive him.
In other words, Jesus is the manifestation of the light that God, back in the book of Genesis, had introduced in the very beginning, when the earth was formless and empty, and when darkness was over the surface of the deep. The same chaos and confusion that God overcome in creation with His divine pronouncement, “Let there be light,” is why the birth of Jesus merits our most glad celebration. Jesus’ presence assures us that regardless of how bewildering or disorienting our everyday existence can get, when we trust those moments to him, it’s not so much that we are condemned to some sort of “long day’s journey into night,” as much as it is that we are ushered in to a new day of promise and hope, for as John tells us, speaking of Jesus, it is his “light (that) shines in the darkness, and the darkness overcomes it not.” Any life that is illumined by the light of Jesus’ presence is delivered from all darkness and redeemed from the chaos and confusion that darkness always brings.
There is a lot about light that we tend to take for granted; wouldn’t you say? Electricity has spoiled us and, unlike in ancient times, light in our day is practically always within our reach. But as we have all experienced, from time to time there is a glitch in the power source, something happens to cut off the flow of electricity, and we find ourselves in the most uncomfortable darkness, which requires us to turn to a match and a candle, a flashlight or a cell phone, just something that will dispel the darkness, even for a moment, until the power is restored, and life can get back to some semblance of normal.
That’s sort of how I feel on this Christmas Eve. Let me explain. Our custom here at Mountain Brook Baptist Church is to end our Christmas Eve service with the passing of the Christ light and everyone holding up candles as we sing “Silent Night." But this year, there are no candles. The spike in COVID cases has made it too dangerous to have everyone removing their masks to blow out their candles. And so, in an abundance of caution, as we’ve learned to say in 2020, we’re dispensing with the candles, but hopefully, just for this year.
When I had to make that decision, my first thought was, “Well, there goes Christmas Eve.” But not necessarily. It may well be that as we sit in the darkness on this holy night we can better appreciate the light of the one candle that sits in the middle of our Advent wreath, the candle that represents Christ, the Light of Life, the Light of the World, and maybe from such a vantage point we can understand in an even more pronounced way what John was getting at when he said that “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness overcomes it not,” and maybe we can come to believe even more fully that God in Christ is indeed with us to see us through every struggle, every heartache, every setback, and every disappointment.
That may have been what the woman I once heard about was doing when two weeks after Christmas she had invited a friend over and the friend noticed that the woman had left up one lighted ornament, which the friend assumed her hostess had forgotten. We’ve all done such a thing; have we not? In our haste to get all the decorations down before New Year’s Day, we sometimes forget one ornament or one decoration. But in this case the woman had not forgotten. “Oh, no,” she explained. I know it’s there. I didn’t forget. It’s just that every Christmas when I’m cleaning up all the mess and putting up all the decorations, I choose one ornament to remind me that Jesus is the Light of the World not just one day or even one year. He is the Light of the World forever.
So, perhaps the playwright was correct, when he said that we are born into the brightest light we will ever know, and from that point on, the shadows begin to gather. But when you are born again, when you are born from above, from that point on, the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness overcomes it not – not today, not tomorrow, not ever, which is in a nutshell what Christmas is all about.