John 1.1-18 God with us

As the proud owner of Dark Hope Counseling, I feel it should be obvious to anyone who regularly reads or hears my sermons where I am going to go with this passage. Why are we so afraid of the dark? Why do we think of Jesus, and God, and angels as these things that shine light into a dark world? What’s wrong with the dark? The dark is where God is. God created the light for us to help us not to hold us back. The light is like training wheels on a child’s bicycle that one day need to come off. The training wheels come off on the day we learn to see with our heart not with our eyes.

John goes on and on about light shining in the darkness, life is the light of all people, the darkness did not overtake it. He came as a witness to testify to the light but is not the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. John’s light isn’t a literal light, it is the light of knowledge, the light of truth; enlightenment.

Why do we think of intelligence as “enlightenment?” God is not light. God created the light. We worry so much about darkness overtaking things. Have you ever stopped to wonder if maybe the very thing we’re preventing is God taking over?

A fantastic miniseries came in 2023 based upon the 2014 book “All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr. It is about a blind girl and a military soldier and how they communicate in ways which cannot be seen. There are so many forms of communication in this world that we cannot see with the naked eye and yet they exist. Radio waves, physical touch, magnetic fields, however data is stored in a thumb drive that I do not understand. Communication, an essential piece of our humanity, is not based upon light that we can see but that which we hear.

The word of God is not light. It is not words on a page or in a book but something that is heard and felt. For centuries, religion was passed down by word of mouth. It was strong in this world. The tales of our ancestors, where we came from, how we were created, why we were created, our purpose in existence was communicated not by reading but by hearing. Enlightenment of the mind does not come through words on a page but through the opening up of one’s spirit.

God did not come to this earth as Jesus Christ to write books. He didn’t come to be seen but to be talked about, to be experienced. We want God to be someone we are comfortable with God being. We don’t want God to be who or what they are. We want God to be something we’re comfortable with. We want to not just see God with our own eyes but we want to like what we see.

Remember the Israelites on Mount Sinai when Moses introduced them to God because they wanted to meet this God which Moses spoke so highly of?

^{Exodus 20:18} Now all the people witnessed the thunderings, the lightning flashes, the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they trembled and stood afar off. ¹⁹ Then they said to Moses, “You speak with us, and we will hear; but let not God speak with us, lest we die.”

To see God with our own eyes, we are terrified. As we fear the blind, the crippled, the lame, as we shudder away from grotesque malformations of the flesh so too do we shudder away from our God who is terrifying to our eyes. We are the ones who refuse to see God with our hearts and insist on looking only with our eyes.

I loved All the Light We Cannot See because it was a potent reminder of the power of seeing not with one’s eyes but with one’s heart… and ears. A blind girl is assumed to be useless because she cannot see. But one soldier, believes what he hears, not what his eyes tell him.

I struggle with paying attention to what I hear as I have observed many people do. When I look at Wesley, Craddock, and Brueggemann’s sermons, pages upon pages it is a cruel reminder of where we are as a people. If I talk more than ten minutes, I’m told my sermon is too long. The average human attention span is 8.25 seconds, yes that is .75 seconds less than a goldfish. According to a study conducted by Microsoft, this is nearly 4 seconds less than studies conducted in 2000, 25 years ago. Not good.

According to CNN, the average attention span for a screened device, like television, tablets, etc was 2.5 minutes in 2004, to 75 seconds in 2013, and… 47 seconds in 2023. So in other words, I’ve been wasting my time writing any of this because statistically speaking, only a very small percentage of people read past the first paragraph.

Biblically, this tracks. Some people can remember the first line of this passage. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Most will have reorganized a word or two but might get the point, but how many know the second verse?

The question I am asking today is “Why does a creature with such a short attention span rely so heavily upon what it thinks it sees?” The Israelites saw the smoke, heard the trumpet, felt the ground quake and judged the God who freed them from captivity as terrifying. They wanted a God of light not the God of darkness. They declared that which they were unwilling to witness, terrifying.

Look at the images we create of Jesus Christ. The beauty Warner Sallman and countless other artists depict Jesus Christ. And yet the only physical description we have of Jesus Christ in the Bible comes from Revelation 1:¹² Then I turned to see whose voice it was that spoke to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands, ¹³ and in the midst of the lampstands I saw one like the Son of Man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash across his chest. ¹⁴ His head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow; his eyes were like a flame of fire; ¹⁵ his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters. ¹⁶ In his right hand he held seven stars, and from his mouth came a sharp, two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining with full force. Not exactly the pale skinned, longe flowing wavy-haired, Jesus we typically see. Also… probably not what the disciples saw. I suspect if Jesus had eyes flaming of fire, someone would have made a note of that somewhere.

The Jesus (Son of Man) depicted in Revelation is scary. But only scary for those who see with their eyes, for those who see with their hearts, not terrifying at all but peaceful, calming, and reassuring of safety.

God is darkness. God creates light. God is not the light. To all who receive him, who believe in him, he gives power to become children of God. We have that power but it does not come from what we see with our eyes but what we trust in with our whole heart.

The magi may have seen the star with their eyes but it was their hearts they followed halfway across the globe to witness a king. A light off in the distance guided them to their destination but it wasn’t the destination itself. A small child, asleep in the dark was what they sought.

A child which to the eyes of most, was no king. What appeared fragile and weak would come to protect all. The Israelites weren’t paying attention and they missed it. We weren’t paying attention and we missed it. We got distracted by fancy lights and missed the child. We got distracted waiting.

It’s easy to get distracted especially when our attention is drawn to the light and the easy. We get distracted when it comes to our salvation because we focus on the light. We say we believe in the light and then we forget about it. We miss that it is supposed to change us. We miss that those changes have to be accepted. While freely offered, salvation by faith alone is nothing if it doesn’t change us. It’s like accepting a Christmas gift and then tossing it into the closet or storing it in the attic and never looking at it again. Just because it’s in your house doesn’t mean you’re using it.

A lamp placed underneath a basket sheds no light. Knowledge discarded or ignored creates no enlightenment. Knowledge has to be used in order to enlighten the mind. It has to be applied to life. I can have the knowledge on how to fix a leaky faucet but if I never use it, all that water will continue to be wasted. I can know who Jesus Christ is, even the devil knows him by name, but if I do not apply his teachings to my life, that knowledge is nothing.

A group of people traveled halfway across the earth because they knew that star meant something. And they didn’t just walk blindly, they prepared. They packed up their traveling supplies and their gifts for the journey. They used that which they had been given to create a small blip in our Gospel that we will never truly understand. The only thing we do know, is that they were enlightened, they believed, and they applied their faith and knowledge to their life. They serve as an example of what is possible through faith. A safe journey halfway across the world and back in dangerous times.

So, I ask you this day, those few of you who are still paying attention. What are you doing with the knowledge of salvation. Are you placing it underneath a steeple and expecting it to be seen by the world? Hiding it within the four walls of a church? Are you using the light to guide your way or are you using it as a means of walking into the darkness that one day you might see who created that light?

For so many of us, the Word sits upon a shelf. We forget that it is flesh and blood, a living breathing entity born out of darkness that all might be enlightened. It’s easy to get distracted and just enjoy the light yourself. It easy to forget that the light is meant to be something followed, not something static. It is leading you somewhere, trying to show you something important. It is time to stop only paying attention to the light you can see and start seeking all the light that you cannot see. To stop relying upon your eyes and trusting your heart. To see what it is on the inside, not just what it is on the outside.

Salvation lies in faith that produces action. Faith that allows you to see beyond the light, behind the light, and into the darkness of creation. Faith that changes who you are enlightening you beyond anything you could ever imagine. Faith that will, perhaps, take you halfway around the world and back again. Hope that when received gives you the power to become a child of God.