Today is a time of transitions. Today is the Twelfth Day, the end of Christmas time; and yet today we also celebrate Epiphany Sunday, the moment we linger over Christ’s move from infancy, through boyhood and into his adult ministry. Biblical time and liturgical seasons have their own clocks and calendars, their own ways of mapping the world, their own methods of marking time and imagining geography. Today we remember the story of the three travelers from Mesopotamia heading west to Judea, following that shining star to locate the newborn King of the Jews. But on this same Sunday we also remember the baptism of the adult Jesus by the prophet John, and the glow of heaven surrounding them and the crowd gathered beside them at the Jordan River.
Light, the gift of light, is a central concept throughout the Biblical story. The prophet Isaiah in today’s Scripture reading speaks of the dawn, the rising of the sun, as though it were an epiphany all of its own—the arrival and revelation of divine presence, an overcoming of the darkness. Sunrise is pictured as the dawn of a new age for the people of Israel, a return to its glories of old, recovering from two generations of exile in Babylon.
“Arise, and shine,” we read, “for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and God’s glory will appear over you. Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.”
As we notice in this prophecy, the gift of divine Light is contrasted with the darkness in which human life is so often trapped. I imagine that this imagery resonates with many of us in terms of our own periods of relative darkness, which we can hope will be lightened by forces seen and unseen. These midwinter days are so brief, and so often overcast to boot. The nighttime darkness extends well into our morning time. Though darkness could at times be greeted as “my old friend,” we also want “to see the light” and have friends and loved ones “brighten up our day.” So, the poetic and theological images of Light and Darkness have their everyday meanings, too.
The strict Biblical binary of Light and Dark plays out in Scripture right from the opening verses of Genesis, when the creator God—as their very first act—speaks into existence a stark division between the light of Day and the darkness of Nighttime. The contrast is only heightened by the placement of luminaries in the night sky, the moon and stars serving as signposts. Then we hear of the gathering of the waters to let the dry land appear—imagining the binary pair of wetness and aridity.
There is much to be celebrated in the sunrise that greets each morning. The hymn composed nearly a century ago by Eleanor Farjeon, and popularized so movingly by Cat Stevens, summons up that emotion:
Morning has broken, like the first morning. . . . Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning. Born of the one light Eden saw play. Praise with elation, praise every morning, God’s re-creation of the new day.
One thing I like about winter mornings is that I’m always awake to notice and appreciate the dawn on my morning walk with my little beagle companion, Reggie.
Despite the beauties of the dawning new day, however, I must admit that I find the Bible’s sharp contrast between daylight and nighttime to be overly simple, expressing a binary view of existence that correlates poorly with my own feelings, influenced as I am, I suppose, by my transgender experience. Contrasting pairs of light and darkness, of water and dry land, give too little space for their meeting places, their boundaries. Places where both ends of the spectrum meet and collide.
Certainly the biblical authors knew of marshy lands, places than can at times be either or both wet and dry; though the eastern Mediterranean experiences only a bit of tidal ebb and flow, still, as a seaside culture the ancient Israelites must have noticed how their shorelines grew wet and then dry in the cycles of the ocean tides. No doubt the biblical authors experienced the slow movement of the skies from the light of day, through the dusk of evening, into the full darkness of night. The biblical binary of Light and Dark is thus more of a rhetorical device than any sort of realistic picture of our world.
The same can be said of the famous verse later in the opening chapter of Genesis—where God creates human being in God’s own image—male and female God created them. Not that these two ends of the gender spectrum express all the possibilities for human existence – totally male or nothing but female, nothing in between—any more than day turns abruptly into night without the setting sun and the first appearance of the evening star.
Indeed, that time of day when the blue sky moves slowly through darker blues, to violet, to a purply dark is my favorite time for contemplation and centering and calming of my spirit. In this regard, I relate to the narrator of Robert Frost’s poem, when he says:
I have been one acquainted with the night/I have walked out in rain—and back in rain./I have outwalked the furthest city light. . . . /And further still at an unearthly height,/One luminary clock against the sky/Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. /I have been one acquainted with the night.
The poetic opening of John’s gospel that Xan read this morning riffs on that spare account of creation in Genesis, and in fact correlates the divine Light with life and with human existence itself: “In the beginning there was the Word. The Word was in God’s presence, and the Word was God. The Word was present with God from the beginning. Through the Word all things came into being. . . . In the Word was life, and that life was humanity’s light—a Light that shines in the darkness, a Light that the darkness has never overtaken.” I’d like us to ponder the potential meanings of this divine Light shining in the darkness, and how its sparkle and brilliance are never overcome.
For one thing, in the Gospel of John Jesus repeatedly refers to himself in terms of God’s light. At John 8:12, Jesus states, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness.” In chapter 11 he compares his presence to the sunlight of daytime: “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble, because they see the light of this world. But those who walk at night do stumble, because the light is not in them” (11:9). So, in this sense, followers of Jesus are called upon to look to him for illumination, as our guide through our daily journeys, our day-to-day experiences. Jesus as the exemplar of God’s presence in our all-too-often darkening world. Here Light and Darkness take on moral qualities, but their resonance can be echoed in many directions. “It’s morning in America,” boasted Ronald Reagan forty years ago. No, I felt little or no joy and elation at the dawn of that administration, and, if it were possible, even less so this time around.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus declares that his followers are themselves carriers of divine light—and have an obligation to shine that light on others. “You are the light of the world,” we read in Matthew chapter 5. “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Parent in heaven” (Matt 5:14, 16). The values or politics of Jesus, as we have pondered them this past fall in worship, can and must serve as our own moral signposts, even in these troubled times—especially in these troubled times.
In my own darkest days, during the six long and painful years my late wife, Kathleen, spent ill and dying from cancer, I teetered on the brink of utter despair, and nearly fell off that cliff on her passing away in August of 2013. Would I ever see my own true love again? Bob Dylan’s song Girl from the North Country spoke to me as strongly then as it still does now, especially the stanza that goes:
I’m a-wonderin’ if she remembers me at all/Many times I’ve often prayed/In the darkness of my night/In the brightness of my day.
I, too, have been one acquainted with the night. What saved me in the end, as I see it, what brought me up from that deep and desolate abyss, was the care and love shown me by family members, by old friends, some newer ones too, by colleagues from work. These amazing folks were examples of people shining that loving light on me in a time of great distress.
In any case, we cannot discuss the interplay of light and darkness in Christian scripture and theology without taking note of how this pairing operates still today in our culture. Though the Book of Genesis draws a sharp distinction between the realms of Light and Darkness, of course neither quality has much meaning without the presence, real or imagined, of its opposite. Night does not exist without Day; Wetness loses its meaning with Dryness. This strongly binary thinking can infect the way we humans conceptualize our world, including most painfully, as it plays out in our country’s original sin of racialized enslavement and incarceration.
In this context I turn to Dr. Jimmy Hoke, a scholar who brings feminist and queer approaches to New Testament texts. In his online commentary on this week’s lectionary readings, Hoke addresses the issue of racialized abuse of Scripture’s equation of Lightness as goodness, as evidence of God’s loving presence, as contrasted with the Bible’s use of Darkness as a metonym for wickedness, human failure, and emptiness. Jimmy Hoke writes:
Past lectionary comments have called attention to the racialized uses of light and darkness in biblical texts and their interpretive uses in Christian theology. The racialized depiction of light and darkness is especially pointed in the history of John 1:1–14, as numerous Black biblical scholars and theologians have called attention to. “The light appears in the darkness, and the darkness did not seize it.” (1:5) This text has often been used in ways that reinforce a white supremacist ideology that assumes lightness and whiteness to need defending over the threat of darkness—a threat that carries racial implications in a society that excuses violence by claiming Black and brown bodies were threatening, usually just for the act of existing.
Acknowledging such a reading, Hoke goes on to say, “could also provide some avenues for thinking about ways to read this passage alongside the Movement for Black Lives.”
And so, in closing, I ask that each of us ponder where we find our own patches of Light and Darkness in the world around us, day by day, night by night. In the darkness of our nights, in the brightness of our days.
Where might we find occasion to project God’s bright and sparkly love on those around us, friends or neighbors, even strangers, trapped in a darkness they feel helpless to escape? When and where does morning break open in all its glories?
If indeed we should find ourselves lost, wandering in darker places, how can we summon the solace of divine presence to walk alongside us in the nighttime? All of it—the light of day, the dark of night, and all those stages in between, are the backdrop and atmosphere of our lives in this world. It’s up to us, with God’s help, to shine God’s light in whatever places and circumstances we can manage to follow Christ’s example. Amen.