Christmas Light

[Here you'll find live stream of video of today's Christmas morning worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, along with the text of the sermon presented.]

John 1:1-14

Christmas morning may be both the best and the worst time to have John 1:1-14 as our Gospel lesson.

It’s the best time because it tells the story of the first Christmas simply: “The Word [that is, God the Son] became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” (John 1:14)

It’s the worst time because there is so much richness from God to unpack in these verses. That’s a tough thing to address when so many of you are likely tired from family celebrations and crazy weather. 

So, I’m going to do my best to nutshell these verses.

The lesson, known by scholars as John’s prologue, starts before God created anything. There was just God and uncreated chaos. John shows that while God is one being, He’s also more than one person. “In the beginning was the Word,” John tells us, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1) This Word, God the Son, John goes on to say, made the cosmos. He is the Word that God spoke to the chaos–"Let there be light, let there be a vault [the sky], let the dry land appear.” And it all happened!

In this Word, John says, is “the light of all” humanity. 

In other words, the God revealed to us all in Jesus Christ is the One Who can lead us through sin, death, and temptation to life with God. 

“Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path,” the Psalm says. (Psalm 119:105) 

“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me,” Jesus tells us. (John 14:6) 

According to the Bible, the idea of God being the light of all is to be taken both literally and figuratively. 

When Moses met God, His face bore the radiance of God’s presence. 

When Jesus revealed His divinity to Peter, James, and John at the Transfiguration, pure light poured from Him. 

And according to Revelation 21:23, heaven “does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb [another title for Jesus] is its lamp.” 

God, including God the Son, is pure light, and the darkness of sin, unrighteousness, and impurity isn’t in Him.

The problem is that, as people born of sinners, we want to do whatever we want, no matter how much it may hurt God, others, or ourselves. We like the dark. Jesus says that we love darkness instead of light because our deeds are evil. (John 3:19) 

When I was a kid, I loved to let my parents know what good thing I’d just done for one of my sisters. But I tried like everything to keep them from knowing when I’d done something rotten.

Once I was put in charge of my sisters while my parents went out for a while. "Don't have pillow fights," they told me. Of course, we had a pillow fight. As I raised my arms to wallop one of my sisters with a pillow, I broke one of the glass shades on the living room's overhead chandelier. How was I going to keep this in the dark so my parents couldn't see what happened? 

I remembered that in the attic, there was an extra glass shade. I cleaned up the old, broken one and installed the spare. Then I swore my sisters to secrecy. After all, I told them, they'd been involved in the pillow fight too.

The misdeed and the cover-up worked just fine until the day that another one of the chandelier's glass shades was broken. No problem, my parents thought. "Mark," my dad said, "go up to the attic and get the spare." It was then that a bright light shone on my lie and cover-up. Busted!

On the first Christmas, as we remembered last evening, shepherds, prompted by angels, visited the manger where the baby Jesus lay, then told everyone they encountered that the Word–the Lord, Messiah, and Savior–had been born. “All who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them,” Luke says. (Luke 2:18) 

“Yet we may suppose,” Martin Luther remarks in one of his Christmas sermons, “that with most of them this astonishment was but of short duration.” 

Within a short time after Jesus’ birth, people seem to have totally forgotten about the news the shepherds brought and nobody really wanted a Savior Whose truth or light would show them their sin or guide them off the dark paths of sin and self-worship that they preferred. 

And we too, if we’re honest, prefer darkness. 

Or, maybe we want just enough of God’s light to reach us in order to help us do what we want to do, but not so much that we need to accede to His control over our lives.

And so, John writes in our Gospel lesson of Jesus the Word: “He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.” (John 1:11) That phrase "His own" should not be read ethnically as though the only people who qualified as Jesus' own were His fellow Jews. Every member of the human race, including you and me, is meant by that phrase, "His own." His own didn't want to receive Jesus!

For years, I used a shallow understanding of science to spurn Jesus. I clung to this nonsense even though a creation must have a Creator. The fact is, there was no room for God in my arrogance. 

Others spurn Jesus because they can’t imagine a loving, omnipotent God presiding over a world in which there are things like child abuse, racism, human trafficking, drive-by shootings, abortions cavalierly used as birth control, war, and injustice. But the very fact that we can be revolted by the darkness of our world should tell us that we know, beyond the limitations of our human reasoning or efforts, that there is a light–the Light–Who shines in the darkness and our darkness cannot overcome it!

When the Light of the world came to us, what did we do? 

We did what the darkness of a world enthralled by sin, death, and the devil led us to do: We killed Jesus, thinking that we really could be in charge of things if we did so. 

We were like the tenants in Jesus’ parable: “This is the heir [the Father’s Son]. Let’s kill him, and the inheritance [the creation] will be ours.” (Luke 20:14) 

Even today, I encounter people who tell me that the world will be a better place when the last vestiges of belief in God or trust in Jesus have been wiped off the planet. 

But no matter how hard we may try, friends, as you’ve heard me say before, Jesus will not and could not stay dead! 

When Jesus offered His sinless life on the cross to destroy the hold that sin and death had on us and He finished the work He had come to do for us, God the Father raised Him from the dead!

And that is exactly what Jesus will do for all who receive Him.

It’s what He will do for you. 

Not because you’re perfect. 

Not because you abide by commandments you cannot keep in your own power. 

But solely because He came into your world and has died and risen for you. 

To make you His for all eternity. 

As John writes in our lesson: “...to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.” (John 1:12-13) 

To you, Jesus says: “...My Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.” (John 6:40)

The lights of our altar candles and the lights on your Christmas trees are meant to remind you that you no longer are stumbling in the darkness, forced to fend for yourself in a sinful, death-plagued world. 

All who have received Christ at the font and at the table and in His Word walk in the light of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, Who came to us at Christmas to die for us on Good Friday, to rise to give eternity to us on Easter Sunday, to be our light in this life, and to one day return to usher us into the heavenly city where He alone will be our light and where darkness will be no more. 

Merry Christmas, friends! 

Amen

Weeknight Study, Gospel of John, Chapter 9

Jesus: The Light of God for Our Darkness

[This message was shared during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, yesterday.]

John 3:1-18

A man I know lost his wife at a young age. It was devastating for him. 

We lived in the same city at the time and I did my best to be there for him. There were times though when I prayed for him that I wondered whether the darkness that enveloped his life would ever go away. 

We both later moved and largely lost touch with each other. 

But then, unexpectedly, I ran into him at a conference. I could hardly believe it. The darkness in his life had given way to the undeniable light of God’s love given to believers in Jesus Christ even in a world that can be tragically dark.

As followers--disciples--of Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, we are as prone as anybody else to fall into the darkness that can fill our lives as human beings: the darkness of sin and doubt that lead to things like self-pity, fear, the denial of realities we don’t want to face, and the demonizing of those with whom we disagree. 

Of Jesus, we confess with the apostle John: “In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:4-5) 

And yet, we can often be like the first-century world--Jewish and Roman--that nailed Jesus to a cross, of which John writes, “...though the world was made through [Christ], the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.” (John 1:10)

Why is that? Why did the world reject Jesus? Why is the first impulse of every human being to reject Jesus or our need for Him?

Jesus tells us the answer to those questions in John 3:19: “This is the verdict [He says of the human race]: Light has come into the world [Jesus has come into the world], but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” 

When we are honest, we must admit that we do prefer darkness. We wouldn’t say so overtly, but there are parts of ourselves that we like to keep tucked away in the darkness, places that we think are out of God’s sight. 

But it’s no good. To God, Jesus says, “...there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.” (Luke 8:17)

Our Gospel lesson for this morning, John 3:1-18, tells us that a teacher of the Jewish religion, Nicodemus, went to see Jesus...at night...a time when it would be less likely that his peers or the peons he was supposed to be qualified to teach could see him. 

You see, by the time Nicodemus makes his visit to Jesus, associating with Jesus was starting to be suspicious, even dangerous, stuff. 

If you wanted to have others’ respect...if you wanted to get ahead in the world, you didn’t have anything to do with Jesus. 

Isn’t that still true today? 

How often have you wanted to tell a friend living in darkness about Jesus but kept quiet? 

How often have you wanted to pray with someone in Jesus’ name when you were in a public place but didn’t offer for fear that people might think you weird? 

How often have you wanted to tell people at the office that a decision being contemplated is more filled with the darkness of sin than with the light of God’s love, but clammed up? 

Then you know why Nicodemus visited Jesus at night. 

He knew that Jesus wasn’t just some preacher, that there was something more to Jesus than that. Still, Nicodemus wanted no one else to see Him fraternizing with Jesus.

How often do we justify dwelling in the shadows, hiding our faith from others, hiding our lives from God, by saying that faith is a private matter or that we don’t want to offend others? If Jesus is our Savior, our faith is not a private matter. It is a deeply public matter. 

After Jesus had died, risen, and ascended back into heaven, the apostles Peter and John told temple leaders who had ordered them to never again speak about Jesus, “...we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard." (Acts 4:20) They refused to conceal Jesus, the light of the world, from others!

So, in our lesson for this morning, we go with Nicodemus to Jesus under the cover of darkness. Even in the dark though, Jesus sees Nicodemus for the man cowering in the darkness he truly is. Nicodemus, Jesus sees, is a man afraid of being seen by his friends, of losing his position, of having his self-righteous religious belief exposed by Jesus, to seek out Jesus. 

So, Jesus tells him, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” (John 3:3) 

The word translated as again that John uses to quote Jesus here is anothen in the Greek in which John wrote his gospel. It can mean again, but it also means above. And, as is typical of John, it’s safe to say that he has both meanings in mind here. 

• We must be born again if we’re to have life in God’s kingdom. We are born sinners. The sinner must die to sin and rise to newness of life through repentance and faith in Jesus. 
• We must also be born from above. It’s God Who gives us new life. We have no control over it. And in the final analysis, when we are reborn matters less than that we are reborn. Listen: Even if you don’t have your birth certificate, your existence proves that you were born. Just so, the fact that you can confess that Jesus is your Lord, tells you that even if you don’t remember the time or the place it happened, Jesus has given you new life, you are born again, born from above.

Jesus underscores that being born again is God’s work and not ours when He tells the incredulous Nicodemus: “...no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.” (John 3:5) 

Your salvation, your born again life, your birth from above, is God’s work. 

It’s a gift that came to you when you were baptized when the Holy Spirit moved over the waters of Holy Baptism and you were made God’s child. 

Just as you had no control over when your parents conceived you, you had no control over when the Spirit moved over your baptismal waters to give you new life with God. 

This is true even if you were baptized in later childhood or adulthood. Only the Holy Spirit would impel you to believe in Jesus and want to be baptized at that point. 

After the lay evangelist Philip explained the good news of new and everlasting life for all who repent and believe in Jesus, an Ethiopian eunuch spied a desert wadi and asked Philip, “Look, here is water. What can stand in the way of my being baptized?" (Acts 8:36) 

It was the Holy Spirit who caused that man to be born from above, born again, not his own decision, not his ethnicity, not reason, not emotion, not an experience, not his parents. 

“The wind blows wherever it pleases,” Jesus tells Nicodemus in our Gospel lesson. “You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8) 

Left to our own inborn devices and impulses, we will always choose darkness, choose life without God, which is death, over life with God. 

We are so mired in ourselves, in our inborn desire to exercise power over our own lives, that we wouldn’t even think to turn to God. The desire we inherit from Adam and Eve--to 'be like God'--is integral to our characters and personalities. 

But when the gospel--the good news of new life for all who entrust themselves to the crucified and risen Jesus--comes to us, the Holy Spirit batters away at our defenses. 

He tears down the walled cities we erect around our hearts, minds, and wills. 

He floods our lives with light so that we first, see our need of God’s forgiveness and grace, and second, see Christ not just as the light of the world, but as the way to eternal life with God. 

Jesus becomes our light and we confess that what Jesus says of Himself is true: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6)

In the Bible’s most famous verse, Jesus tells Nicodemus today, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16) 

Friends, if you believe in Jesus, imperfect though you may be, imperfect though your faith may be, you have been born from above. 

The Holy Spirit has done His work in you, creating faith in Christ within you. 

So, no more quaking in fear. 

No more hiding in the dark. 

Live in the light of God’s love given through Jesus, because all who can confess their faith in Jesus belong to the Kingdom of God. 

You belong to Jesus now and forever. Amen

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

[The photo above shows sunrise on an ocean body. It's a NASA satellite image. Jesus is the Light Who banishes the darkness of sin and death for all who believe in Him.]