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The Light Has Come! |
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Summary
The Light Has Come! Today is a very special day on the church calendar: Epiphany. I know what some of you — perhaps many of you! — are saying: “So what?” To be honest, you may feel that you’re still recovering from Christmas and New Year’s Day, so you hardly need another special day. Besides, who ever heard of Epiphany? How important can it be if the drug store doesn’t have a special display of Epiphany greeting cards? Epiphany is an ancient holy day This may be hard for you to believe, but Christians were celebrating Epiphany before they began celebrating Christmas. And one of the oldest Christian bodies, the Armenian Orthodox Church, still celebrates Epiphany rather than Christmas. Epiphany is the festival of the Incarnation: that is, of the coming of God to earth in human form in Jesus Christ. Perhaps we might say that Epiphany emphasizes the theology of Christ’s birth, while Christmas — as we now generally know it — emphasizes the mood of giving and perhaps also of sentiment. We might even say that Epiphany is the thinking side of the Christmas story, whereas Christmas as we now think of it is the feeling side of the story. But however we say it, at Epiphany, the church celebrates the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ, and his manifestation to the whole world. That’s the mood of our scripture lesson of the day. We don’t know what was in the mind or heart of the prophet Isaiah when he gave us these words hundreds of years before the birth of our Lord, but for centuries the church and its teachers have sensed that whether Isaiah knew it or not, he was revealing something about the Christ. “Arise, shine,” Isaiah shouts, “for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.” That was good news in the day when Isaiah spoke it, and it is good news today. Isaiah spoke of a time when “darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples.” We know something about darkness. In a world where war has come to seem normal rather than the exception — so normal that sometimes the death reports from the war are crowded off the front page by the meaningless conduct of people whose only merit is their ability to get in the news. Ours is a world just now where when we put out one brush fire of hatred, three new ones arise in its place. So yes — in a world like this, we know something about darkness. Well, the prophet Isaiah knew about bad news, too. He knew about darkness that might seem to cover the whole earth. But into that darkness, Isaiah said, a light has come; the glory of the Lord has risen upon us. Epiphany is the day of divine Light And that’s what we celebrate today — the coming of light through our Lord Jesus Christ, the One who is the Light of the world. Whatever we may have thought of on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day about the coming of our Lord, today we say it again in another way: The Light of heaven has broken into our world’s darkness. In an earlier chapter from this same book of Isaiah there is another reference to darkness and light that we often quote at this season. “The people who walked in darkness,” the prophet said, “have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness — on them light has shined.” There is no better word to speak on this Epiphany Sunday than this: that Christ has come into our world to drive out the darkness and to bless us with light. If you are a soul who sometimes is plunged into darkness, whether for moments or hours or days — or perhaps even interminable periods — I speak to you this good word: Christ has come to bring light. The darkness that afflicts us is not as strong as the light that is in Jesus Christ. No one can put out this Light But let me say a second word. The light that we celebrate on this Epiphany day is a light that can never be put out. No matter how great our world’s darkness may sometimes appear to be, no matter how pervasive, how invasive, how insistent — that darkness can never put out the light that has come in Jesus Christ. Consider this: Jesus of Nazareth lived 33 short years — with only three of those years in the public eye — and then they crucified him. The people who hated him thought they were done with him. But you cannot put out the Light. On the third day he rose again, and within two months of his crucifixion, literally thousands were being converted to follow him. Repeatedly in the first two or three centuries of the church’s history, one emperor after another sought to wipe out or at least to limit the followers of Jesus Christ. But you can’t put out the Light. In our own time, missionaries were forbidden in Communist China for more than a generation, and we wondered what would happen to the one or two million Chinese Christians under such circumstances. But when China once again opened itself to organized religion, we found that the few million Christians the missionaries had left behind now numbered in the tens of millions — mostly in house churches that worshiped secretly, at the danger of their lives. You can’t put out the Light. This Light is for all humanity And let me say a third word. This Light, this Epiphany light, is for the whole world. On the Day of Pentecost, when the church was born, people of a number of different nations were present, and each one heard of Christ in his own tongue. This was God’s signal that Jesus Christ had come into the world, not to save a single nation or a particularly appealing ethnic or racial group, but to save the whole world. This light called Christ shines in every corner of our globe, including many places where the Light is officially forbidden. And it shines because Jesus Christ belongs to our whole human race. He is irresistible. He belongs to all of us because he came from our heavenly Father. No wonder then that centuries ago when Italian artists painted Jesus, they made him look Italian; and when Flemish artists portrayed him, Jesus looked Flemish. Some of the most popular American paintings of Christ make him look like an all-American athlete. Christians in the Orient give Jesus an oriental cast, and those in Africa make him look African. Of course! Jesus Christ belongs to the whole world because God sent him into the whole world — because “God so loved the world.” But of course we know this fact from the Christmas story itself. Many of the churches that celebrate Epiphany put special emphasis on the story of the Wise Men because some traditions say that it was on this day that the Wise Men came to visit the one to whom the star had led them. Have you considered how illogical it was for the Wise Men to come to Bethlehem? They were looking for an infant who had been born King of the Jews. But why would thoughtful, perceptive scholars come looking for a Jewish king? The Jews hadn’t had a king of their own for some six centuries. Politically, they were not an important people. What did it matter if a king had been born to the Jews? Well, for some divine, wonderful reason, the Wise Men knew that it mattered — and moreover, that it mattered to them, to people who were not Jews. Because this Light that had come into our world was not a light that belonged to one special nation or that shone only on one place on the map; Jesus Christ is the Light for the whole world, for every tribe, tongue, people, and nation. Our scripture lesson of the day has some passing phrases that make us think of the Wise Men. It speaks of camels coming, and nations delivering “gold and frankincense,” so the peoples of the world can “proclaim the praise of the Lord.” We cannot say that we have here a fulfillment of prophecy, but the language is wonderfully reminiscent of the Christmas story. But this we do know: We know that as the prophet Isaiah said, ours is a world of deep darkness. It was so in Isaiah’s day, and it was so when Jesus Christ was born into the world. But when Jesus Christ came into the world, he came as Light. He is Light for all persons, all ages, all levels of culture and economy who will receive him. The light he brings is a light that every human being needs, regardless of his or her state in life or location in geography. And remember this, above all. Jesus Christ is the Light that can never be put out. All sorts of people have tried for nearly 20 centuries to be rid of Jesus. Over the centuries, many have predicted that he would soon be forgotten. But you can’t put out the Light. This is the word to remember on Epiphany Sunday, nearly two weeks after Christmas: You can’t put out the Light. Thanks be to God! |
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