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Let There Be Light





Genesis 1: 1-5; 14-19
August 18, 2019
First Presbyterian Church, Sterling, IL
Christina Berry


In this season of celebration of our 175th anniversary as a church,
we are continuing with the theme of “light.”
We are called by Jesus to let our light shine before others,
so that they may see what we do and give glory to God.

Today, we are going to think a bit about the source of that light:
God our creator, who brings order from chaos.

In the ancient world, the understanding of God’s work in creation
was that before God spoke, there was nothing but watery chaos.
It was murky darkness, swirling shadows;
the King James Bible says “the earth was void, and without form.”

Just as we humans turn on a light in a dark room
so that we can find our way and see what we could not see,
God began by bringing light into the misty obscurity of chaos.
The bringing of light begins the ordering of all things.
Let’s listen for God’s creating word in Genesis 1: 1-5; 14-19:

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth,
the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep,
while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.
Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.
And God saw that the light was good;
and God separated the light from the darkness.
God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.
And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

And God said, “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky
to separate the day from the night;
and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years,
and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.”
And it was so.
God made the two great lights—
the greater light to rule the day
and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars.
God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth,
to rule over the day and over the night,
and to separate the light from the darkness.
And God saw that it was good.
And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

The word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.


For those who have bravely attended our Wednesday night Bible study,
this is going to be a little bit of review.
If you want to check your email or something, I won’t be offended.
For those who haven’t been there,
the Wednesday night group has worked their way
all the way through the Book of Revelation.
While much of the prophecy in the book
is as murky and obscure as the formless void in Genesis,
one thing became very clear to us as we finished the study:
the Book of Revelation ends much as the book of Genesis begins:
with the creation of a new heaven and a new earth.

Contrary to the popular conception of Revelation
as a dire prediction of the destruction of the entire world,
we learned that the book is a story of hope and restoration.
At the last, the new heaven and new earth come into being,
and “the heavenly throne of God comes down to the new earth
in the form of the new Jerusalem:”

The home of God is among mortals.
The glory of God and Jesus Christ bring so much glorious light
that there is no need of “light of lamp or sun.”

In fact, in the new holy city that God creates,
over which Jesus rules,
“the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it,
for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb.
The nations will walk by its light,
and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it.
Its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there.”

No longer does the light shine in the darkness –
because there is no longer any darkness!

But at the beginning, there was darkness.
Genesis is a book of beginning – the very word means beginning.
As I mentioned, the ancient view of the creation of the cosmos
is that before there was light,
there was disorder – chaos.

So to begin, God spoke a creating word and said, “Let there be light.”
But God did not eradicate night or the darkness of night;
the fourth day begins at dusk,
as do all days in the Hebrew conception of time.
The Sabbath day begins on Friday at sundown
and continues until sunset on Saturday.
The fourth day of creation,
when God created the sun and moon and stars,
began at dusk at the end of the third day.

We order our time by cycles of light and darkness,
because the day and night were given to us
“for signs and for seasons and for days and years.”
Metaphorically, our lives are similarly shaped.
None of us have lives that are all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows.
Nor would we appreciate it if we did.
We need the night.
We need the darkness as much as we need the light.

The night brings gifts of its own – rest, sleep, quiet, darkness,
and even the darkest hours of our lives bring us blessings.
The long dark night of the soul does end at dawn.
I was struck this past week by the conversation
between Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper,
in which they discussed the deaths of their fathers;
both of them lost their dads at the age of ten.

Colbert, who is a Christian, said
“It’s a gift to exist and with existence comes suffering.
There’s no escaping that.”[1]

He later elaborated on the role that grief and loss can play in life:
“…we're asked to accept the world that God gives us
and to accept it with love.
If God is everywhere, and God is in everything,
then the world as it is all just an expression of God and his love
and you have to accept it with gratitude…
This is part of being alive.
…you can't have happiness without having loss and suffering.
…And in my tradition that's the great gift of the sacrifice of Christ
is that God does it, too, that you're really not alone.
God does it, too.”[2]

The trouble is that in the night, it’s hard to see our pain as a gift;
its hard to be grateful to God for our suffering.
And sometimes it is hard to believe that the sun will rise.
Until a new dawn comes and illuminates everything,
it’s hard to make any sense out of our troubles.

The word of promise and hope in Genesis
is that God begins by saying, “Let there be light.”
That light shines from the very beginning,
as God brings order from chaos
sets the rhythm of our lives with days and nights.

That light continued to shine in the world
as God guided God’s people through struggle, exile,
cycles of faithfulness and disloyalty.
God was always there with them and for them, shining in the darkness.
That light increased exponentially as the star of Bethlehem
pointed all of the cosmos to the true light coming into the world.
When Jesus called the disciples, the light spread into the empire.
And when the Spirit came to those gathered at Pentecost,
the unquenchable light flamed up to shimmer within the church.
It was not a single flash, not a moment that faded,
but a luminous glow that continues to glow in the world even now.
That light now shines in us.
Although we might sometimes be more comfortable
keeping it to ourselves--
within these walls, in our control--
this light of God’s is not ours to keep.
Colbert, in that same interview, said that he never proselytizes,
because it means “more Jesus for me!”[3]
But that is really not how it works,
and we are called to let our lights shine before others.
We let our lights shine so that others will give glory to God –
not glory to us, but glory to God.
So much for “more Jesus for me!”

As you heard at our 175th Birthday celebration,
our founding leader John Galt carried his candle out of a meeting,
but he did not extinguish it –
he carried it beyond himself to gather others
to form this congregation.
We too have a light that we are to shine.
“The purpose of light is to reveal the properties
of the objects it collides with.”[4]

Light shows us where there is disorder and despair.
Light also reflects beauty.
It’s the light of God, the light that illuminates the world;
that light shines in us.

We don’t have to generate this light.
We don’t have to concentrate to make it shine.
We don’t need to try to increase its intensity.

All we really need to do is hold the light,
carry it, let it shine,
and let God do what God does.
So let there be light,
and let your light shine
until that final dawn comes in which there is no longer any night,
when death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
but only endless, glorious, shining light,
the radiance of love that has no beginning and no end.
Therein lies our hope;
therein lies our sacred work:

Let there be light.

Amen.




[1] http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1908/15/acd.02.html
[2] ibid
[3] ibid
[4] http://www.jeremystatton.com/purpose-light

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