We’re getting closer to Christmas. Our boys and girls are excited about the presents they will be receiving. Maybe some of us adults are excited, too.
I don’t know if you heard about a mother and daughter who were shopping at the mall. The mother spied an expensive fur coat. “This year,” she said, “I think that I will buy my own present instead of making you and dad shop for me.” Her daughter nodded in agreement. “And I think this fur coat would be perfect,” the mother concluded.
The daughter began to protest. “But mom,” she said, “some poor helpless creature has to suffer so that you can have this fur coat.”
“Don’t worry honey,” her mother said. “Your father won’t get the bill for a couple of weeks.” Well, folks, I hope it doesn’t hurt too much. Humor helps us put it all into perspective.
Our song for this third Sunday is more traditional than the first two Sundays. We began on the First Sunday in Advent, you’ll remember, with “You better watch out, you better not cry; you better not pout, I’m telling you why, Santa Claus is coming to town.” And we talked about Christ’s return. Then last week we began our message on Isaiah’s promise of comfort with “I’ll have a blue, blue, blue, blue Christmas.” Today’s theme is more traditional. It’s the popular children’s song, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine . . .”
The writer of the Gospel of John refers to Christ as the light of the world. No wonder the star shone so brightly over Bethlehem. Light was coming into our world. No wonder that our Christmas trees are adorned with hundreds of lights. That’s what Christmas is all about. The Gospel of John uses the word “light” no fewer than twenty‑one times in referring to Christ. The function of John the Baptist was to point men to that light which was in Christ.
John the Baptist was the voice of one calling in the desert, “Make straight the way for the Lord.” John was a very popular preacher, so popular that he, like Jesus, raised concern among the Pharisees. Who was he and by what authority did he preach and baptize? John assured the Pharisees that he was not the awaited messiah. Instead, he was the one preparing the way for the messiah. In the words of John’s Gospel, “He came as a witness to testify concerning [the] light, so that through him all men might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.” The light, of course, was Jesus. The celebration of Advent is the celebration of light coming into our dark world.
A remarkable event took place a little more than thirty years ago in the Gulf of Mexico. Darrel Dore was working on an oil rig when suddenly it began to wobble. Before too long it tipped to one side and crashed into the water. Darrel found himself trapped inside a room on the rig. As the rig sank deeper and deeper into the sea, the lights went out and the room where Darrel was trapped began filling with water. Thrashing about in the darkness, Darrel made a life-saving discovery a huge air bubble was forming in the corner of the room. He kept his head inside that bubble of air and prayed that someone would find him.
As he prayed, Darrel felt Christ’s presence there with him. For twenty-two hours the presence of Christ comforted Darrel, but deep down Darrel knew that the oxygen supply inside the bubble was slowly giving out. Soon he would be dead.
Then Darrel saw a tiny star of light shimmering in the pitch‑black water. Was it real or after twenty-two hours was he beginning to hallucinate? Darrel squinted his eyes. The light seemed to grow brighter. He squinted again. He wasn’t hallucinating. The light was real. It was coming from a helmet of a diver who was coming to rescue him. His long nightmare was over. He was saved. (1)
When John wrote his Gospel the world was in darkness. He wanted the world to know that a light had penetrated that darkness. A Savior had come. John the Baptist came to prepare the world for the coming of the light of Christ. By his own admission, John the Baptist was not the light. Rather he came to bear witness to the light.
Jesus is the light of the world. That’s the good news for this third Sunday in Advent. The light that enlightens all humankind has come into the world in the person of the Christ child.
I think we all understand how important light is to life. Charles Colson tells about a meeting he and several other Christian leaders once had with the president of Ecuador, a man named Rodrigo Borja Cevallos. These Christian leaders were asking the president for permission to begin a ministry in Ecuadorian penitentiaries. The president interrupted the conversation. He wanted to tell a story. It was the story of his own imprisonment years before being elected to the presidency.
Cevallos had been involved in the struggle for democracy in Ecuador. The military cracked down, and he was arrested. Without trial, they threw him into a cold dungeon with no light and no window. For three days he endured total darkness. He feared for his sanity.
Just when the situation seemed unbearable, the door to his cell opened, and someone crept into the darkness. The president heard this person working on something in the opposite corner. Then the figure crept out, closed the door, and disappeared.
Minutes later the room suddenly blazed with light. Someone, at the risk perhaps of his own life, had connected electricity to the broken light fixture. “From that moment,” explained Cevallos, “my imprisonment had meaning because at least I could see.” (2) Anyone who has ever been lost on a dark night knows what a welcome relief light is.
Luci Swindoll tells about a friend who, along with six strangers, was caught in a stalled elevator during a power failure. Fear was quickly turning to panic. But then Luci’s friend remembered that she had a tiny flashlight in her purse. When she turned it on, the fear in the elevator dissipated. For forty‑five minutes these strangers sat around the light and talked, laughed, and even sang. The light came on just when they needed it the most. (3).
Just when the world most needed God’s light, a babe was born in Bethlehem of Judea. Jesus is the light that shined in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. That’s the second thing we need to see in this Advent season. Try as it might the world cannot extinguish Christ’s light.
It’s like a nativity pageant that the Rev. Bill Adams tells about. This pageant didn’t go quite as planned. The pageant was being performed by the church’s youth group. Joseph and Mary and all the other characters did their parts with appropriately pious expressions, at least they tried. It was a shepherd who turned the pageant into a circus.
The shepherds quite naturally were dressed in flannel bathrobes with towels around their heads. They marched up to the altar steps where Mary and Joseph stared earnestly at the straw in the manger. All was well to this point. The manger itself glowed with the presence of the newborn Jesus. In this case the divine infant was played by a light bulb nestled in the manger. It was a radiant sight and a beautiful way of expressing the meaning of Christ’s coming.
All was well until one of the shepherds turned to the boy playing Joseph. In a very loud whisper which all the cast could hear, the shepherd said, “Well, Joe, when you gonna pass out cigars?”
There was something about this unexpected wisecrack that sent a wave of hilarious hysteria through the cast. The chief angel reacted worse of all. Standing on a chair behind Mary and Joseph she shook so hard in laughter that she fell off her chair. This brought the stage curtain behind her and all the rest of the props down with her. She was rolling around on the floor holding her stomach she was laughing so hard. The whole set was in shambles. In fact, says Rev. Adams, the only thing that didn’t go to pieces was that light bulb in the manger . . . it never stopped shining. (4) How appropriate.
The light of Christ it never stops shining. Wars, pestilence, famine, good times and bad, that light continues to shine. Our grandparents saw its glow in the darkest hours of the depression. Our soldiers saw its glow even on distant battlefields. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.
Now that the election’s over I guess it’s safe for me to mention the name John McCain. Senator McCain once wrote a story for Reader’s Digest. It was about the time he spent as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Any of you who know his story know he was cruelly mistreated in that prison camp. Fortunately, he and the other prisoners were given a little freedom as the time drew closer for them to go home. This increased freedom made for a very special Christmas.
The prisoners were gathered in a dimly lit room with one light bulb. With solemn awareness of where they were and what they had been through, they began to sing “Silent Night” and exchange crude handmade gifts. John McCain remembers it as his best Christmas ever.
The world cannot extinguish the light of Christ. That light shines in prison camps. It shines in hospital rooms and funeral parlors. It shines amidst poverty and every manner of heartache and hardship. Nothing can stop it. Life nor death nor powers nor principalities, nor anything in all creation, if I might paraphrase Paul, can stop the light of Christ, the light of God’s love for humanity from penetrating the darkness. You can try burying it in the ground and it will still break through. As John declares so beautifully in verses 4 and 5 of this chapter, “In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.” Jesus is the light of the world. That light cannot be extinguished.
But there’s one thing more to be said. The greatest privilege in the world is to share that light with someone else. “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine; this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.” John was not the light. He came to bear witness to the light. That is our job as well.
Judith Carrick, a vocational deacon, tells of visiting a nursing home in her community. In that nursing home was a woman whose mind was as sharp as anyone’s, but because of her illness, she could no longer walk or speak. This poor woman communicated mostly by gestures. She and Carrick had become good friends over the years they had known each other, and, as friends do, Carrick occasionally would run little errands for the woman, small tasks that she could no longer do for herself.
On one occasion the elderly woman waved Carrick into her room with some sense of urgency. There on her bed was a paper napkin with a picture drawn on it. Looking straight at her visitor, the elderly woman pointed to that napkin over and over again. It was obvious that this was something important. Carrick looked closely, and she saw the woman had sketched, as best she could, what appeared to be a flashlight.
“Is that a flashlight?” Carrick asked. Her friend’s head nodded up and down, while she pointed first at the picture and then to herself. Carrick laughed.
“You want a flashlight?” The head nodded again.
“Whatever for?” Carrick asked.
The woman could not answer verbally, but in her own way she made it known that this was a matter of great concern and importance to her. So Carrick agreed to bring her a flashlight.
The next time Carrick went to the nursing home she made sure that she had the flashlight in hand. She walked into the woman’s room, shining the light all over the walls. A big smile crossed the woman’s face. “Please,” Carrick said, “tell me what this is all about. Why do you need a flashlight?”
The old woman moved her wheelchair toward the door and indicated for Carrick to follow. Together they went down the hall to the nurse’s station, where one of the aides told Carrick that, a few weeks earlier, during a week of heavy rain and high winds, the power in the nursing home had gone out for a time. The woman had become frightened, and she wanted the assurance that if it happened again, she would have that small beam of light to shine in the darkness and ease her fears. (5)
What a great gift for someone who might otherwise have to sit in the darkness. What a gift to give someone the gift of light. Do you understand that this is our call as followers of Jesus of Nazareth, to shine his light into the lives of anyone who is sitting in darkness? John was not the light, but he came to bear witness to the light. That light was Christ, who is the life and the light of the world. And now we have the same privilege that John the Baptist had. “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine; this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine . . . Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.” That’s our job when we leave this room. Let the light of Christ shine through us.
1. Rev. Richard J. Fairchild, http://www.rockies.net/~spirit/sermons/b‑ad04sm.php.
2. Ronald W. Nikkel in Fresh Illustrations for Preaching & Teaching (Baker), from the editors of Leadership. Cited at http://www.firstpcavillarica.org/Sermon%20Notes/THE%20LAMP%20WITHIN.htm.
3. Dr. Shotwell, http://acbc.us/sermons/struckbylight.pdf.
4. http://www.rockies.net/~spirit/sermons/b‑ch00‑adams.php.
5. Sermons That Work, http://www.episcopalchurch.org/6087_69568_ENG_HTM.htm.