When Darkness Hits, What Key Truth Leads Towards the Light?

I’ll admit it.  I’m not afraid to tell the truth.  In the church I serve in, at night, when I’m walking through the dark hallway in the back, I move kind of fast to the door.  Ok, sometimes I may even run.   I still get a little scared of the dark.   But who isn’t?

Now, the literal darkness may not scare you.   But darkness has more forms than that.   You go to the doctor.  She finds something suspicious.  Suddenly, you’re having tests for who knows what.  And you’re wondering what those tests will tell you.   You’re in the dark, and it’s scary.

My father started decorating for Christmas this past week.   He knew.   My mom would have wanted that.   But each day, he still wakes up feeling her absence, the absence of his beloved on this the first Christmas without her.  He carries that darkness every day.  He doesn’t know when or if it will ever end.   He’s in the dark.  

The report appeared the day after Thanksgiving.  It doesn’t paint a pretty picture.  No, our nation’s latest climate assessment warns of a dire future, filled with storms and fires, droughts and disasters.   Hearing that, I fear for the world I’m leaving for my son.  Heck, seeing all the ugly conflict today, I fear for the world he’s living in right now.  It feels dark.

Darkness takes a lot of forms; forms that fill you with fear, that weigh you down with discouragement.   Whatever your darkness is, every life has some.  So, how do you stay in the light, even on the darkest of days?   How do you live in hope, even in joy?   In these words, God shows you the way.   Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.   

John 1:1-14

In the midst of this world, with its dark unknowns, and the darkness we already see too well, how do you stay in the light?   How do you live with a lightness within, hold on to hope, even experience joy?   Here God tells you.   You realize.   In every dark place, the light shines.  And nothing can overcome it.   More than that, one day, that light will banish all darkness until no one will even remember it at all.

You see.  In these words from John, God makes two things clear.   First, this world has darkness, a lot of it.   But into that darkness, from outside of it, light has come.  But what exactly is this darkness?  To understand that, you gotta understand the light a bit first. 

To describe Jesus, John uses a word that had become the in-God word of the day, Logos, the Word.   So, take that word out of the way for a moment.  Get what John is saying. John is saying this.  In the beginning there was Jesus, and Jesus was with God and Jesus was God.   Hold on a second.   Jesus was with God, and Jesus was God.   How can you be with someone, and also be that someone at the same time?  But in that bizarre phrase, God is telling you something hugely important not only about God, but about everything.  God is telling you.   I can’t be one single solitary being.  No, God has to be more.  Still one God, but more.   Why does God have to be more?   Because solitude isn’t the ground of reality.  Relationship is.   Everything down even to the smallest particle possible exists in relationship.   And that’s because God is relationship, three beings in love with one another.  That very relationship creates God.   When God tells you that God is love.  God isn’t giving you some Hallmark sentiment.  God is telling you the truth.   God literally is love.  And love, by definition can never exist by itself.   Love has to have someone to love.   In these words, God is saying to you.   In the beginning there was with-ness, there was love.  That is the light coming into the world.  And that light tells you all that you need to know about darkness.  

Do you realize America is in a sex recession?  It seems lots of people aren’t having it.  Why aren’t they having it, in a culture that seems kind of sex-crazed?  Basically, it’s because lots of people, mainly younger people, aren’t falling in love.  That means less babies, half a million less than ten years ago.  

But they’re not only not making a love connection, they’re not making much of any connection. They’re connecting with their phones, with drugs, but people not so much.    And it’s killing them.   For the second year in a row, American life expectancy went down.   That hasn’t happened in a century.   And why are more people dying?  It turns out it’s because they’re killing themselves, literally killing themselves.  

What creates darkness in the world, in your life, ultimately comes down to separation, to disconnection, to losing the love.   And no matter how much you try on your own, you can’t conquer this separation by yourself.   You can camouflage it.  You can numb yourself to it.  But you can’t conquer it in you or in the world.    

So here God tells you that God has come to be that light that breaks the darkness, that destroys the separation. God has done what only God can.  God has come as the light, the love that shatters the separation, that conquers the darkness, that illuminates everyone.   That’s why Christmas matters.  It tells you.   God has broken through the darkness, the isolation.   God has come to be with you, so powerfully, so profoundly, that not even death will separate you from his love. 

In fact, that’s how you know God really came.   You see, John plays a little game here in these first words.   The word he uses for Jesus, the Logos, the Word, folks used for an idea of a god, but not the God.   People speculated that capital G, God lived above the fray disconnected from all this darkness below.  But this capital G God, had a sort of lower g, God, the Logos who managed everything.   And John, in the Greek, (you can’t really tell in the English) doesn’t make it all that clear in the beginning, who he thinks Jesus is.   Is Jesus a little g God or the capital, G god.  Not clear.  John wants to keep you in suspense.  

So, when do you know?  You know at the end.  The risen Jesus appears before the disciple known as Doubting Thomas.  Jesus says.   Look at the nail holes, Thomas, at the wounds.  Touch them.  Feel them.  And Thomas says it.  Thomas uses words that make it clear, the God, the Capital G God has come to be with us, with us even in death, the greatest darkness of all.   And even that darkness has fallen before that light.   And one day, when Jesus returns, that light will shine so bright, that we’ll even forget there was ever darkness at all.