See light. Be light.
This season of Epiphany brings us again and again back to the theme of light, starting with the star as a sign that points us to Jesus. Scripture repeatedly returns to that theme of light and darkness as it pertains to Jesus.
Light is one of the most useful metaphors and analogies for the ways that we understand ourselves as Christians in terms of our faith and our religion. Please note that I am making a distinction between faith and religion. They are related – inextricably bound – but they are not the same thing.
I’ll take religion first. Religion is, simply put, a way of life, how we choose to live. The analogy of light works with religion because everyone understands darkness, of not being physically able to find your way. If we apply that to life in general, being in darkness means not knowing how to act or what to do. We’d just be groping around, mucking about our hovel in darkness without any purpose or meaning, and so of no real use.
That creates real stress, real depression and often a lot of anxiety. Jesus answers that gnawing human need. Here we are focusing on what Jesus said about how we should live.
To be fair, others, many others, have said useful, correct and beneficial things. We could go back to Plato and Aristotle, Confucius, Mohammed or the Buddha or people today like Tony Robbins or Richard Simmons. (I know he’s silly but he did get people to move.)
Today the industry of coaching, in everything from people’s vocations to diet and exercise, is a booming industry. I bet most of them are saying mostly helpful things. But no one approaches the wisdom of Jesus Christ. Note that often Jesus runs counter to our natural intuition and expectations. “Love your enemies” and “Be good to those who persecute you” are just a couple of examples.
As an ethical teacher for right living, he is without peer in all of human history. This is so much so that we judge the relative worth of all others by conscious or reflexive appeals to his principles. Often people don’t even know the basis for it, but they will say, “That’s just wrong” or, as we might say hereabouts, “That ain’t right. That ain’t even right.”
Jesus’ ethics have stood up to the most rigorous analyses we can muster. His ethics have undergone the most rigorous testing of anything ever, centuries of brilliant minds probing and pondering, kings and armies challenging and outlawing them. Yet they still ring true.
So if you want to live a good life, to be a good person, you can do so by following the ethical teachings of Jesus. Here’s the best way to live and so I shall. On that ethical level, following Jesus’ teachings is like having the best flashlight in the darkness.
Faith in Jesus carries us two steps further. One step is to go beyond what Jesus said about how we should live and believe in what Jesus said about everything beyond this life, to believe what he said about his Father, about heaven and hell, about the Devil and evil, about the Last Day and the Resurrection of the dead. That carries us beyond this life and puts us on an eternal path.
If we are looking ahead to that eternal path, if we believe that we shall live forever, that magnifies the importance of everything we do today. Missteps today require correction as quickly as possible.
The other step is to believe what he had to say about himself; that he is the only Son of God, that he can forgive sins and that he went to the cross to save us from our sins, that he has prepared a place for us and that he is the means for us to get there.
Those two steps (and I think it would be hard to take one without taking the other) bring us into a living relationship with him. That living relationship moves us from holding that bright flashlight to becoming a lantern.
As we do that, we see how Jesus is in the process of fulfilling God’s promise shared through Isaiah so many centuries ago. “I will give you as a light to the nations.”
You might think, “Who, me?” Well, yes, you. God formed us in the womb for this purpose. He said to Isaiah, “to one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, the slave of rulers.” We aren’t quite that bad off, are we? So I’m sure he can and will make use of us.
And that is what we are about. To be fair, that light is most often not a switch that just gets flipped on. It can be, but usually it is more like a rheostat, a dimmer switch that Jesus clicks on and gradually turns brighter and brighter. The brighter we become as lanterns, the brighter we are able to shine for others and to become involved in Christ’s work of helping them become lanterns, too.
Here’s the challenge. If you want to be adept at following Christ’s ethics, you should set about becoming expert in them. Read the Gospels. Get one of those red-letter Bibles so you can see quickly what he said. And while you are at it, learn what he said about everything beyond this life and about himself. Do that and you will shine. And if you shine, we will shine. And if we shine, well, we do have the highest ground (at least in this state.) We are a city on the hill! God knows what he will do through us.
AMEN!