Lectures About Light

Lectures about Light

A sermon by Ted Virts

November 24, 2013

Sonoma, CA

Theme:

I am attending a lecture, at a divinity school in New England, about light. The lecturer is a physicist, and expert in black holes, and she is doing her level best to give a bunch of church organists and theology students and preachers some sense of the science that underpins this symbol we ceaselessly invoke: Jesus is the "light of the world"; eternity is "like a great ring of pure and endless light"; "the light of the righteous rejoiceth: but the lamp of the wicked shall be put out"; the flames of Hell emit" no light, but rather darkness visible"; and so on.

During the Q and A, someone asks how light can be both a particle and a wave. The questioner seems perplexed.

It seems to me that anyone who worships a being who is both God and man should not have so much trouble with light.

Lauren Winners

Scripture: John 1:1-17

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it…Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” John 1

It is good to be back.

This Sunday marks the end of the church year. After 6 months of what the church calls “ordinary time” – where we explore the “so what” of the Jesus story, where we start to look at our lives, our issues, our strengths and failings, we return to the centerpiece of Christianity: Christ.

On this particular Sunday we pack in a lot of images.

I need to offer a couple of translations for you:

Logos is the greek word for “Word” but it is more. It is the idea, the thought, the vision – you can think of it as the idea that an architect has of a building, or a writer of a play – before it becomes real, or, in today’s language, before it “becomes flesh.”

Christ, as I hope you know, just means annointed, or designated one – same as Messiah. It is a title. So it is accurate to say Jesus the Christ, or Jesus our Christ.

King, and we’ll talk about this a little later, is the one to whom a person owes full loyalty. In the ancient church if you said that Jesus was King or Lord, it meant that Ceasar was not. It is a radical statement. The ancient world was not a democracy, and this image, used in faith, is a reminder that, as Bob Dylan said, “you gotta serve somebody.”

Light in western culture is the sign of life. In the beginning God said “Let there be light” (as an aside, in Japanese culture, among others, Night or Dark is the holy place where creation and renewal happens)

Our Scripture – the prolog to John’s gospel (and John’s gospel as a whole) -holds light and life as central to the understanding of Jesus presence on earth:

…what came into being was life

…the true light which enlightens the everyone was coming into the world

…to all who received him he gave the power to become children of God

…the Word became flesh and (literal translation : pitched his tent) among us

…we have all received grace upon grace

…grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

The world has had a long fascination with Christ. Sometimes it has been helpful. Sometimes hurtful. In the face of mystery, awe and wonder, and mountain-top experiences we humans slide toward formalizing and institutionalizing.

Remember the story of the Transfiguration (Matthew, Mark and Luke all record this story) Jesus goes up on a mountain to pray, and invites Peter, James and John. In the midst of his prayer he changes form and the boys see him aglow, talking to Moses and Elijah Peter starts the slide, Lord this is just great let’s build a place for you and Moses and Elijah.

…Let’s not lose this moment

…let’s set up a monument

…let’s start an institution

…Let’s get this standardized

…Let’s set some rules

…Let’s write a book of Discipline

Then they see a cloud and hear a voice: This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.

Maybe, human as our tendency is to hold on to things, maybe we miss the point. Maybe trying to formalize and institutionalize isn’t the best or primary strategy.

This is Christ the King Sunday early in the 21st century since Jesus of Nazareth walked this earth. It is an ancient phrasing of an answer to a modern question: Does Jesus matter? Is the title of “Christ” one that makes a difference to you, or to me, in our lives these days?

We are well aware of how the stories about Jesus have amplified across the centuries and generations. We see it in our scriptures, as titles and stories and references shift - “this man Jesus, whom you crucifed” Peter says in Acts, “has been declared Lord and Christ.” John, written nearly a century later, says that Jesus is the Logos of God made flesh.

We have the truth of Jesus of Nazareth, attested to decades after his death, continually re-expressed, re-wrapped, re-decorated – so much so that it is easy to get distracted by the wrapping, the instutions, the expectations, the rules.

You know the story. Kids who play more with the wrapping paper and the package than the content. Charlie and I were getting some artwork framed, and it is way too easy to get the framing more and more elaborate, How many matt boards? How wide a border? How bright a color? -- sometimes to the point where it is a strain to see the art itself.

There is a struggle to find Jesus in the midst of all the decorations over the centuries. What is faith? How do we balance experience and dogma?

Here is Christian Wiman:

…mystical experience needs some form of dogma in order not to dissipate into moments of spiritual intensity that are merely personal, and dogma needs regular infusions of unknowingness to keep from calcifying into predictable, pontificating, and anti-intellectual services so common in mainstream American churches. So what does all this mean practically? It means that congregations must be conscious of the persistent and ineradicable loneliness that makes a person seek communion, with other people and with God, in the first place. It means that conservative churches that are infused with the bouncy brand of American optimism one finds in sales pitches are selling [waste]. It means that liberal churches that go months without mentioning the name of Jesus, much less the dying Christ, have no more spiritual purpose or significance than a local union hall…

Faith is nothing more – but how much this is – than a motion of the sould toward God. It is not belief. Belief has objects – Christ was resurrected, God created the earth – faith does not. Even the motion of faith is mysterious and inexplicable: I say the soul moves “toward” God, but that is only the limitation of language. It may be God wh moves, the soul that opens for him. Faith is faith in the soul. Faith is the word “faith” decayng into pure meaning.”(Wiman, My Bright Abyss p 138)

So much of our Christian vocabulary these days implies that with God you will never fail, that Christ is the one who rescues you.

Lauren Winner:

It turns out the Christian story is a good story in which to learn to fail. As the ethicist Samuel Wells has written, some stories feature heroes and some stories feature saints and the difference between them matters: “stories…told with…heroes at the centre of them…are told to laud the virtues of the heroes – for if the hero fialed, all would be lost. By contrast, a saint can fail in a way that the hero can’t =, because the failure of the saint reveals the forgiveness and the new possibilities made in ?God, and the saint is just a small character in a story that’s always fundamentally about God.”

I am not a saint. I am, however, beginning to learn that I am a small character in a story that is always fundamentally about God.” (Winner, Still, p 193.)

My friend Geoff Wood once commented that he has had a life long fascination with Christ – not the church, not the rules, not the forms – each of which may help from time to time, but each of which is ultimately the wrapper, and not fundamentally about God. And probably more fundamentally about us.

John’s gospel says that grace and truth came to us in Jesus Christ. I believe that. As I look through the history, the writings, the traditions I strain to see the source of all of this. And on my good days, I recognize that Jesus’ light points toward the graceful God who longs for us to recognize who we truly are, and who we might become. Jesus shines in the light of full life, even in the face of struggle, and the rhythm of daily life, both then and now.

I mentioned that our fascination with Christ is sometimes helpful, and sometimes harmful. It is harmful when we mistake the human rules that we create as the true message Jesus lived.

A small example, and I realize there are others who see this in exactly the opposite way. This week a majority of the Council of Bishops in the United Methodist Church voted to ask for a complaint to be filed against Bishop Mel Talbert for performing a wedding of two men. Our rule book says that shouldn’t be done. My former bishop says that excluding the blessing of the church from a couple who want to commit their lives to each other is what shouldn’t be done. I believe Bishop Talbert is right Rev. Frank Schaeffer officiated at a wedding for his son and his male partner. In Pennsylvania, the clergy who made up the jury said he had 30 days to decide which was more important to him, our rule book or blessing the love that his son holds and lives out with his partner.

Where is Christ in these institutional decisions?

Is faith about Jesus? Is faith about our rules?

This is Christ the King Sunday.

We inherit ancient phrases and lean toward the unknown future, all the while, looking for grace and truth to be revealed.

This day the church declares that Jesus does matter, that as the annointed one Jesus the Christ reveals the true nature of our humanity, and the nature of God.

I’m not hung up on the exact nature of Jesus. I appreciate the ancient vocabulary that attemnpts to describe what humanity has experienced in him. I claim that I see in Jesus, and no other, the logos, the design, the dream of God, made real eternally in Jesus, and offered to me.

We have this “king” and “savior” and “light” vocabulary deeply embedded in the church. Here’s a thought:

Progress by Julie Cadwaller-Staub

I did not just drag and drop.

I did not just haul a burden so heavy

that my hands, arms, and shoulders

gave way

and I had to let go.

Neither did I just browse.

I did not get on my hands and knees

and join the gentle cows

to slowly sample

whatever the open field had to offer.

Instead, I sat here at my desk

manipulating a mouse

which is not, in fact, a mouse

and I searched

for something on the web

that is not, in fact, a web.

And isn’t this how we move forward:

with horsepower for jet engines

and candlepower for light bulbs

we take what we understand from one era

to describe

what we don’t

in the next.

We return to the center. Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

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