"THROWING SOME LIGHT ON . . ."
Third Sunday after the Epiphany
January 22, 2017
Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church
Glenshaw, Pennsylvania
TEXT:
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great Light; those who dwell in a land of deep darkness, on them has Light shined.
Isaiah 9:2 (ESV)
You may be wondering right now whether or not you are in a time warp--whether or not this is a "flashback" of sorts. After all, it's the twenty-second of January and the verse of Scripture that I just read to you is obviously a Christmas text--and a very well-known Christmas text at that. We heard it and read it a couple of times at our candlelight service on Christmas Eve. It was a part of our responsive reading and it was also the first verse of the Old Testament Reading for that night. This passage is usually associated with Christmas because it speaks so eloquently about God's Light coming into this world and dispersing its darkness. The glow of that Light (which is Christ) shines far beyond Christmas, to be sure, and it is during this Epiphany season that we are especially mindful of the Light of Christ that shines in our world of darkness--the darkness of our sin and death.
It could very well be that this verse of Scripture is even more appropriate now than it is at Christmastime. All of the excitement of Christmas (and by "excitement" I mean all the tinsel and glitter and everything else that competes with Christ for our attention) is over and done with. And now that all of that is out of the way, we finally have the chance to stand back from the Christmas event, so to speak, and to take in all of the richness of its meaning. What does it mean to us that our God has come into the world in human form? What difference does it make in our lives that Jesus was born? How has our world (and particularly our life) been changed by His coming? In what ways are we different than we would have been if He had never come? These words of Isaiah that serve as this morning's sermon text reveal two things in particular about what the coming of Jesus in the flesh means for us: (1) He lights our way and (2) He dispels our darkness.
It is necessary that Jesus Christ, the Light of the world, should throw some light on our way because, as people living in a sinful world, we are, as the passage before us puts it, "the people who walked in darkness." We are "in darkness," first of all, in the sense that without the light of Christ all people are living in spiritual ignorance. Not only are we by nature unaware of God's grace in Christ; by nature we aren't even aware that we are in need of God's grace in Christ. We have no concept of how serious our sin is and what kind of peril it puts us in. We have no natural knowledge that "the wages of sin is death" and that "the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 6:23). Like a man who is about to step into an open manhole that he doesn't see, we are ignorant of the great spiritual danger that we are in because of our sin.
Because we walk in the darkness of spiritual ignorance, we are also without hope. Even though we are fond of saying that "ignorance of the law is no excuse," people use that very argument as their defense in our courts every day, and guess what? --Quite often they get away with it! The sad thing is that we have gotten so used to that kind of faulty reasoning in our society that we have deluded ourselves into thinking that God can be coerced into using the same imperfect and subjective standards that we use. Don't kid yourself for a minute. You alone are responsible for your sin, just as I am for mine. And in the end we will all be judged by the perfect standard of God's Law, and the darkness of our ignorance will not be an acceptable excuse. The only thing that can spare us from the judgment that we deserve is the Light of the One who bore that judgment in our place: Jesus Christ, the one and only Son of God.
The coming of Christ certainly does throw some light on those living in darkness. But you know, light shining in the darkness isn't always appreciated. When you're comfortably asleep in your nice warm bed, you're not usually all that thrilled about the idea of being rudely awakened by suddenly being bathed in light. Chances are that you'd just as soon turn that light off and go back to sleep. It's no different with those who are complacent in their spiritual sleep, comfortably slumbering in ignorance. They don't really want the light of Christ because His light wakes them up and makes them aware of some things they perhaps do not want to be made aware of. What we need to remember is that very often what people need the most is what they want the least. Before we can even begin to be delivered from the darkness of our sin and ignorance, we need to be made aware of it. The Holy Spirit does this in us through the preaching of God's Law. Like the cleansing of a wound, it is a painful but necessary experience that our sin be exposed for what it is in order that it might be dealt with honestly and effectively.
The text explains to us that "the people who walked in darkness" are in fact "those who dwell in a land of deep darkness." This "deep darkness" is what the apostle Paul calls "the last enemy" (1 Corinthians 15:26). This "enemy" is nothing other than death itself--the final and worst consequence of our sin. Because "the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23), death is our ultimate and deepest darkness--the darkness that we need to be delivered from the most. And I'm not talking here merely about physical death; I'm talking about the spiritual death that leads ultimately to eternal death--being forever separated from God and His grace. Yes, I'm talking about what people commonly refer to as hell. The "great Light," which is Christ, delivers us from this greatest darkness by shining on us the light of His perfect life and innocent death, through which He has justified us in the sight of God and reconciled us to our heavenly Father. This justification and reconciliation of sinners is proclaimed in the glorious resurrection of the Christ who has promised: "Because I live, you also will live" (John 14:19). It is this Light of Christ and this Light alone that is able to scatter the "deep darkness" that surrounds us--the darkness of our sin and death and the hopelessness and despair that it generates--and to replace it with the confident hope of forgiveness, reconciliation with God, and the sure hope of everlasting life
In the incarnation of His one and only Son God has thrown the light of His Christ upon us so that we no longer need to live in darkness and in the shadow of death. Because of what Christ has accomplished for us, we are free to be the people who God has created us to be and called us to be, and we can respond to this undeserved grace through the power of His Holy Spirit, given to us in Baptism, by shining His light on others as well--the light of His Gospel--in the hope that more of those for whom He lived and died and rose again may live no longer in the darkness of sin and death but in the light of His grace and truth. That's a tall order. Indeed, for sinners like us it is an impossible task. But we are confident nevertheless, because it is God Himself (who specializes in doing the impossible) who does it in and through us.
Amen.
May the God who caused light to shine out of darkness cause you to increase and abound in love toward one another and toward all people, as His love abounds for us; and may the glory of His Son be manifested to you and in you, that you may be witnesses to all nations now and until the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful, and He will do it. Amen.