Sunday Sermon: Let There Be Light
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Text: Genesis 1:1-5
Series: Glad Bethlehem’s Living Light
First Sunday of Advent - HOPE
As the holiday song puts it, “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.” And while there is much that is evident about the yuletide season drawing near, the one thing that causes us to know that to be most true is the prevalence of Christmas lights. It’s about this time of the year when houses and businesses and even churches start to put up their Christmas decorations, which though different in so many respects, is always in some way marked by the stringing of bright lights.
What’s most interesting to me about this phenomenon is how people manage to gear up to string those lights in spite of the fact that they are such a hassle to do so. By that I mean that while you might be able to hang a strand or two to say that you’ve put up decorations, it’s becoming more and more the case that you’re something of a Scrooge if you don’t go all out and illuminate rooftops and porch frames and bushes in the front yard. That’s why an entire cottage industry has sprung up over the last decade or so to help people do what by themselves they might not be able to get done. Yes, hiring professional Christmas decorators can cost you a pretty penny, but at the end of the day, when the darkness descends, we’ve got to have our light.
Might there be something in that desire that actually reflects the heart of God? Isn’t God Himself a God who will not tolerate the darkness but who instead has to have His light?
I say that because of this passage before us from the book of Genesis. It’s the first verses of the first chapter of the first book of the Bible. It reminds us of how everything began and, more importantly, why everything began. And so, it should not surprise you at the center of it all, the very first act God took was to speak the power of light into the formless and empty darkness. Verse 3 describes the scene majestically. “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”
As we all know, the essential characteristic of light is its ability to illuminate and to make things show up. You can’t so much see light as you see what light reveals. That’s why when we find ourselves perplexed by something someone tells us, we say in response, “Can you shed a little more light on that?” Light, at least from a figurative perspective, involves the spiritual principle of understanding, by which all knowledge and maturity and development become possible.
And that is why it is God’s first act of creation, preceding the creation of the sun and the moon and the other heavenly luminaries, which don’t come into being until the fourth day of creation. And it’s also why the Bible makes such a big deal of how God separated the light from the darkness. The Hebrew people understood God to have structured reality that way because while other cultures worshiped the sun, moon, and stars, the Hebrew people instead worshiped the God who brought those luminaries into being because darkness, in any form, has never been God’s will for His creation. Darkness represents chaos, while light promises hope and promise and possibility and expectation.
Over the last several weeks, you might say we’ve been “in the dark” as to what the future holds, especially with respect to the coronavirus. But in the last week or so, our spirits have been encouraged over the news of vaccines pending approval, vaccines that, if enough people receive them, will provide “herd immunity.” And so, in our hopes for an end to this exasperating season, we say, “We can see light at the end of the tunnel.”
What Genesis invites us to see is that such hope has always existed, even from the very beginning. It’s existed because of the will of our Creator God, who began speaking creation into existence with a word of victorious light.
And in this season of Advent, a time when the shadows loom more deeply and the period of waiting for Christmas becomes more difficult, if we open not just our eyes but also our hearts, we can see God’s light in the Bethlehem Baby at the end of the tunnel, the Light of Life, the Light of the Nations, the one true Light, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made.
So, let all of our holiday lights point us to how even in the darkness, it really is beginning to look a lot like Christmas, a time when God came down to be with us in Jesus, to keep all options open, to make new things possible, and, most importantly, to keep our hopes alive, and to keep them alive forever.