The Lovely Light

This is the text of a sermon I preached on January 16, 2011 at Community Presbyterian Church in Waldport, Oregon.   Great thanks to Kate Huey of the UCC "Weekly Seeds" blog for her thoughts and for that wonderful Madeleine L'Engle quote.

Isaiah 49:1-7

John 1:29-42

The American humorist Oliver Hereford once said, “Many are called but few get up.”  Today we heard about people who are not only called, they actually got up. First hear about the baptism of Jesus from John the Baptist, who tells the story of his own experience to his disciples, describing the presence of the Holy Spirit coming down from on high like a dove.  The next day when he sees Jesus again, he again announces this title for Jesus, “The Lamb of God” a title that comes straight out of the turbulent history of the Jewish people, a lamb that atones for the sins of the people. So these disciples of John decide to check out this Jesus guy.

So they go and Jesus asks them what they are looking for.  So they ask Jesus, where he lives.  It is almost like that game where you have to keep asking questions and the first one to make a statement loses.  Jesus is the first one to make a statement, so I guess he loses.

The answer Jesus gives is also no argument, no harangue, just something we should say a lot more when we are touting our mission, our churches: "Come and see."

Jesus is on to something.  He makes this simple invitation, come and see. 
Come and see not my house, but how I live.   He asks these two friends of John the Baptist to become his friends now. 

The great Christian writer Madeleine L'Engle said this, “We do not draw people to Christ by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.”

I think L’Engle has a point.  Too often we try to harass or scare people into Christian faith.  Visions of hellfire and brimstone fill so much of Christian evangelism.  Instead we need to be that source of L’Engle’s lovely light, the light of Christ shining through our lives.

Just a few minutes ago, we sang the praise song, “Shine, Jesus, Shine.”  I was struck by how well the last verse said what I am trying to say to you now:

“As we gaze on Your kindly brightness.

So our faces display Your likeness.
Ever changing from glory to glory,
Mirrored here may our lives tell Your story.”

We think it is difficult to be that source of lovely light.  We don’t know where to start or how or we think that we need a revelation like John the Baptist had, a dove descending from the open skies.  It doesn’t work that way for most of us.  For most of us, showing the light of Christ in our lives is a journey, one foot in front of the other, praying, studying, worshiping, ministering as the lovely light grows stronger and stronger in us every day.  And you know what?  That was the journey for Andrew and Peter and all those others who have responded to the call of Jesus.

I’ve been thinking about that lovely light this week as our country has mourned and tried to make sense of the awful events of a week ago yesterday in Tucson, Arizona.  Those who died, from nine year old Christina Taylor Green to the older people including Presbyterian Phyllis Schenck and Dorwin Stoddard, a pillar of the Church of Christ, who put his body between the gunman and his beloved wife, to Judge John Roll were people who were committed to making their community a better place, who tried to shed some light in the world.  They lived lives that were not glamorous or famous, but lives that shed light in the world.  The same is true for Congresswoman Giffords, for young Daniel Hernandez who saved her life, for Roger Salzgeber, Bill Badger, and Patricia Maisch who disarmed the gunman, the first responders, the police and the EMTs, all good people who tried to do the right thing and in doing so, became sources of light. 

As President Obama said so movingly this week at the Memorial Service, “These men and women remind us that heroism is found not only on the fields of battle.  They remind us that heroism does not require special training or physical strength.  Heroism is here, in the hearts of so many of our fellow citizens, all around us, just waiting to be summoned -– as it was on Saturday morning.”

The President went on to say, “The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better.  To be better in our private lives, to be better friends and neighbors and coworkers and parents.  And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy -- it did not -- but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud.”

That is very much what it is like for us, disciples of Christ, ordinary Presbyterians who go to churches, work at our jobs, volunteer in our communities.   In doing so, we make our lives a memorial to the living Christ.  We must seek to make our lives more Christly every day in a way that would, for lack of a better term, make Jesus proud.  What would Jesus do cannot just be a slogan for a bumper sticker, it must be the model for our lives.

Sounds daunting, doesn’t it.  There is old saying, God doesn't call the qualified; God qualifies the called.  When God calls us to service and work, God equips us as well.

These two disciples of John came and saw Jesus and one of them, Andrew, went and found his brother, Simon and brought him to meet this new source of God’s light.  Jesus looked at Simon and gave him a new name, Cephas, Peter or in our language, Rock.

Peter’s future with Jesus was rocky indeed, even denying Jesus when Jesus faced the cross.  But this Rock would be equipped by God to go out, and just as his brother Andrew carried the good news to him, Peter carried it out into the wider world.

So tend your own lovely light, a light that will shine the love of God through you, God’s own unique creation.  So others will come to the light and the story will go on and on.

Amen.