Isaiah 60:1-3, 18-22 "Beyond Reflections" Scott Hoezee

If you are a devotee of J.R.R. Tolkien's books, then not only have you read these outstanding novels, you have likely seen (or will see) the latest installment of the film version of The Lord of the Rings. In Tolkien's fictional world of Middle Earth, there is a threat arising in the east as the dark Lord Sauron attempts to find the one ring of power. If that ring, forged long ago in the fires of Mount Doom, returns to Sauron, all will be lost and evil will rule the world. Again and again in Tolkien's story, that threat is depicted as a creeping shadow. As Sauron's power increases, darkness begins to fall over one section of Middle Earth after the next. And as the hobbits and other characters repeatedly say to one another, if Sauron finds the ring, then the entire world will fall into shadow. All that is good and green will cease to grow. Trees will die, grassy meadows will be burnt over, clouds will gather, and the sun will no longer shine. Indeed, the inscription on the one ring says it all: "One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them. One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them."

In the beginning God's first order of creation business was to create light. According to Genesis, God did not create the sun first, nor the stars, nor any proximate source of light, but he created just light. Pure, radiant light. It is one of several features of Genesis 1 that accords quite well with the widely accepted scientific theory of the Big Bang. Whatever else the Big Bang was, it was most assuredly one gargantuan burst of light. The cosmos began in the light. The universe was born when into the deep darkness of the primordial abyss, light flashed. And from God's first light came, eventually, life. Indeed, Genesis tells us that God made humankind from the dust of the earth, and science tells a similar story. Near as we can tell, after that first burst of cosmic radiance, eventually stars were born. They blazed their light into space but eventually died out. And from the ashes of those dead stars was created the very stuff of life itself: carbon. God created us out of the dust of long-dead stars. Something of their radiance has passed into our very life. We are stardust beings, created by God to bear our own kind of brilliance as he fashioned us in the divine image.

In the beginning there was light. And almost from the beginning, evil and sin and all things unholy have been depicted as darkness. To this day people describe depression as rather like slipping into a dark hole. Author William Styron once told his own tale of battling depression in his memoir titled, Darkness Visible. In fact, in recent decades psychologists have discerned a link between a lack of light and depression. Some of the most melancholy people in the world live in the northern reaches of places like Finland and Norway where, during many months of the year, sunlight is restricted to a few scant hours per day. Even in other parts of the world something called "Seasonal Affective Disorder," or "SAD" for short, has been discovered in people who drive to work in the morning darkness of winter, labor all day in a windowless office or factory, only to drive back home in the evening darkness. But when people go without natural light long enough, something goes awry and they begin to slip into depression. For some, a most striking remedy has been prescribed: light therapy. By exposing some depressed people for a few hours every week to sun-like light, doctors have been able to lift the fog of depression.

We were created in the light, from the light, and we still need light. I told you some years ago the story of the farmer whose wife went into labor one dark night in the nineteenth century. As the doctor tended to the woman, he asked the husband to stand near the bedside with a lantern. Soon the woman delivered a healthy baby boy. But then the doctor called out, "Wait a moment--another one is coming," and the woman then delivered a twin baby. That was surprising enough until the doctor called out that yet another was coming. Suddenly the farmer began to move out of the room. "Hey," the doctor exclaimed, "come back here with that lantern!" "Oh no," the man replied, "it's the light that attracts 'em!"

We are drawn to the light. Yet light remains a mystery. We know it is the fastest moving phenomenon in the universe. Einstein theorized that nothing could ever move faster than a beam of light. That is not too difficult to believe in that light travels at just over 186,000 miles per second. When you hear someone referring to "a light year," that is the amount of distance that a beam of light would travel in the course of one year. And by the way, that total is just under 6 trillion (6,000,000,000,000) miles, or a 6 followed by 12 zeroes! So we know light is fast, and we also know it is constant. You can neither speed up nor slow down a beam of light. Einstein even figured out that time itself can slow down or speed up relative to a beam of light, but the light itself will not be affected.

As if all of that were not mysterious and wondrous enough, science also claims that it remains uncertain as to exactly what the ingredients of light are. Oddly enough, light beams appear to consist of both waves of energy and particles of energy. If you treat a beam of light like a particle, then it will behave perfectly well in particle-like fashion. But if you treat light like a wave, then it will also behave perfectly well in wave-like fashion. Light seems to be both and neither.

Isaiah 60 is also somewhat mysterious. On the one hand, this chapter famously opens by telling the people, "Arise, shine." A little later Isaiah predicts that other nations will be drawn, "to the brightness of your shining." But that makes it sound as though the source of the light is Israel itself. If I tell you to "put on a happy face" and then remind you that "when you're smiling, the whole world smiles with you," then it is clear that it's your face and your own smile that I'm talking about. So also here: when Isaiah tells Israel to shine and talks about the brightness of their shining, it sounds as though the light in question emanates from the Israelites themselves.

Yet this same chapter talks a great deal about the fact that it is ultimately Yahweh who shines upon his people Israel. "The glory of Yahweh rises upon you . . . The sun will no more be your light . . . for Yahweh will be your everlasting light." So who is doing the shining in this chapter: the people or God? It looks as though it is both.

It is because the Lord God Yahweh shines on Israel that they themselves can likewise shine. Curiously, however, the way Isaiah puts all this does not make it appear as though Israel were no more than a mirror. He does not say, "Arise, reflect, for your light has come," but rather "Arise, shine." He does not say that nations will come to the brightness of what bounces off them as a result of God's light but he says those nations will come to the brightness of your light.

It all seems a bit mixed up and yet maybe it hangs together in a larger sense. Maybe we need to be so radical as to say that because of who God is, we ourselves possess our own luminosity. We are not just mirrors that reflect but our own source of light. At one time or another we've maybe all heard the phrase "reflected glory." There are people in life who like to bask in the light of others. They themselves are not the president but they like to stand near him, get captured in the same photo as the president. They can then tell other people how close they are to the president, they may even brag a bit about their proximity to power. These are people who exhibit a kind of fake casualness when they drop things like this into a conversation: "The other day I was talking to the president and I said, 'George . . .'" And once you hear that, you know what's going on.

But maybe some of us have also felt the desire to capture some reflected glory. Have you ever been asked to introduce someone famous at a lecture? Have you ever had the opportunity to sit at the head table up on the dais at a banquet where the guest of honor was a celebrity of some kind? If so, then you know how special you can feel being that close to someone well-known. True, no one came to hear you introduce the speaker and no one paid a hefty price for his or her seat at the banquet to stare at you sitting up on the dais, but still you feel like maybe some of this other person's celebrity rubs off on you.

Some years ago Philip Yancey asked me to help him with a book he was writing, and as a result he thanked me by name in the "Acknowledgments" section of the book once it was published. I am certain that more people read my name there than have ever read my name on the spine of any book I wrote! Yet still I confess to having enjoyed being associated with someone as talented as Mr. Yancey is. A little reflected glory goes a long ways!

But it's still just reflected glory. But a reflection does not have much substance of its own. I'm told that reflected sunlight has very little heat to it--something always gets lost in the reflection process. So also those who like to be seen in the company of the famous and powerful may get a buzz out of that reflected glory, but the fact is that such people will likely never be very powerful themselves. There is a big difference between being associated with a person who does a lot of good and actually doing something good yourself.

In theological terms, it would be wonderful if we could reflect to the world the light of God. When the source of light is no one less than God himself, then even a good reflection would be worth much. But how much greater, grander, and glorious it would be if we ourselves could be a source of holy light--not just a mirror off of which God's light would bounce but ourselves a living, glowing bulb of holy illumination. And perhaps just that is the goal. Maybe that's why Isaiah so freely mixed up his imagery, talking about both the shining light of Yahweh and the shining light of the people.

But what is finally the difference? Why wouldn't it be enough merely to reflect God's light? And is it even correct to suggest that we are to bear a divine light ourselves? I think it is correct and I think the New Testament suggests that this is so. Because if we were only mirrors, only something off which God's glory bounced, then that reflected glory might say much about God but not so much about us. Jesus said that we do not merely represent him to the world, we are one with him. When Jesus said in John's gospel, "I am the light of the world," he did not then go on to say that the disciples could reflect that light but that they would have that very light themselves.

In one of his earliest and best books, our recently departed friend, Lewis Smedes, wrote extensively about what it means to have "union with Christ." When we are baptized, Smedes wrote, we do not become merely associated with Jesus, we really become one with him. "What is in us is not a distilled version of the divine life; it is the concrete individual Jesus Christ." The reality of Christ in us is too radical, too all-encompassing, to allow for the image of Jesus shining "out there" somewhere. Instead it is the case that because Jesus shined on us in baptism, he now shines in us in so intimate and real a way that it is no mistake to join with Isaiah in saying to any individual Christian or to any entire congregation of Christians, "Arise, shine! Let the people around you be drawn to your light." Because if you are one with Christ, then there will not finally be any difference between his light and your light. Both will be the same.

Just now we are coming to the end of our annual "season of light." Still today and next week we'll be able to see this Christmas tree and its lights and the Advent Wreath and candles. Our neighborhoods have lately been transformed into little fantasy kingdoms of glittering lights adorning shrubbery, porches, and windows. But they will also soon be whisked away for another year. What cannot disappear for us is the light of the Christ shining in our very lives. No matter how dark this world becomes due to the advance of evil, we must shine. It must never be enough for us to adopt some cozy, individualistic "Me and Jesus" spirituality in which we think that no matter what happens to the rest of the world, at least Jesus shines down on me. Who cares if the darkness pervades other sections of the planet, the main thing is that we live in the light.

No, if it is good news that the Lord God is himself our sun and our moon and our light, then we need to respond to that good news by shining ourselves. The Church of Jesus Christ, and we as individual members of it, need to be in the business of dispelling the shadows. Wherever people are tempted to throw up their hands in despair because problems of poverty or crime seem insurmountable, then there is where we must shine the light of God to say that we must never give up in ministering to those around us who are in need.

Wherever people claim that the only way to defeat those who are clouded over in evil is to become dark and sinister ourselves, then there we must shine with the radiant peace of the gospel to proclaim again that it is love that overcomes hate; it is goodness that has defeated and will defeat evil. Wherever someone suggests that the only way to get on in life is through tit-for-tat acts of vengeance, then there we must shine with the light of grace, demonstrating in our own lives that forgiveness, not more violence, is the road that leads to the kingdom of God.

The devil sometimes masquerades as an angel of light. As bearers of the true light, we dare not masquerade as agents of darkness. For instance, in the past year it became known that our government was pondering creating an office of disinformation. The idea was that the best way to defeat empires built on lies would be for our nation regularly to put out its own pack of lies. But many people, including people of faith, protested and said no. We must not become what we despise for then we have lost already. If we are to shine with Christ's light, we cannot then also adopt the tactics of darkness.

In short, it will never be enough as a congregation for us to tell people that somewhere out there a light shines and if they come to faith, well maybe they'll see it, too. Instead we must shine. Calvin Church must shine as a light to this city. Through our deeds of love and mercy, of hospitality and kindness, of service and outreach a light must shine--not a mere reflection, not reflected glory in the sense that we can be proud to be associated with Jesus and all the great things he did way back when and once upon a time. No, we must arise and shine when we do Christ-like works. If the Lord God who is Christ Jesus does not shine in us, then he doesn't shine in any way that can help this world.

Light is a great mystery. Nothing moves faster. Time itself will stand still before a beam of light can be stopped. The cosmos began in a burst of pure light. The gospel assures us that light is our future. But in between the primordial light that was and the eternal light that will forever shine, darkness has also come. In another part of Isaiah the prophet says, "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light," and that's wonderful news except for the fact that there are many in our world who still walk in darkness right now.

There are many who have not seen a great light, and some of them are slipping into grave despair as a result. As Christians, we cannot hope or pray that some day God's light will get through to these lost souls unless we are, right now today and on into the new year of 2003, willing to shine on them ourselves. If we feel like we're too dim a bulb to make a difference, then we are underestimating what it means to have union with Christ. We are the light of the world through the Christ who is in us. And so, people of Calvin Church, arise, shine, for your light has come. It has come to you and so it is now in you. The gathering darkness around us demands that we let that light shine. Amen.