Blessed Shards of Light
Epiphany 5, Yr. A
Isa. 58:1-9a (9b-12)
Psalm 112:1-9 (10)
1 Corin. 2:1-12 (13-16)
Matt. 5:13-20
February 5, 2023
Rev. Joanie Brawley
Blessed Shards of Light
Jesus says something quite extraordinary in today’s Gospel (as I hope the change of lighting might have signaled to you during Deacon John’s reading.) There is much in this passage that is familiar, perhaps too familiar to our practiced ears. Jesus uses the images of salt and light as metaphors for the way His followers are to act in the world around them. Salt adds flavor, richness - savoriness - to the food with which God nourishes our bodies. Salt has long been an important preservative of that food (and thus of human health.) It purifies, and surely anyone who lived near the Dead Sea at any time, knew of salt’s healing properties.
In every religion’s imagery, light signifies truth (vs. lies), good (vs. evil), that which enlightens …ignites! … (vs. that which obscures, confuses or deceives.) Light is one of the very first things God creates in the opening verses of Genesis. Seven hundred years before Christ, God tells the Israelites (through the prophet Isaiah) “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” (Isa. 49:6b) God’s divine light provides Wisdom, Love and Truth for His people’s blessing and provision… as they reflect that light… as they participate in the spreading of His Kingdom to His eternal Glory.
These are rich, dynamic metaphors on which thousands of sermons have been (and will be) preached. It’s perhaps because of such richness that we can miss a subtle - but critical - shift in exactly what Jesus declares about his followers today.
While Isaiah’s prophesy is delivered as a future action (“I will give you as a light”) Christ’s words are very much in the present tense; this was something happening at the exact moment Jesus declared it. Yet, what the original Greek further implies (which perhaps our English does not) is that Jesus is stating a present and continuous action - something that will always be from that moment onward … and - significantly - it implies an ongoing condition of lifestyle: Something present and so continuous as to become a pattern of life. Jesus is making clear that His present-tense declarations to the 1st C. crowds gathered around Him on a hillside in Galilee… are also our collective present-tense realities! Jesus says that You … you who believe - YOU - are the light of the world! Pretty heady stuff!
So what is this lifestyle - the life situation - to which Jesus is referring? For that, we need to set Christ’s statement in context within His Sermon on the Mount.
Today’s Gospel immediately follows the Beatitudes, a passage in which Jesus upends the world’s assumptions about what defines a triumphant, purposeful - a blessed - life. Radically, He declares the inverted blessedness of those who are poor in spirit, those who mourn, who are meek, merciful, peace-seeking and pure of heart…followers who are actively persecuted for righteousness, and reviled for Jesus’ sake. Even today (maybe especially today) such “blessedness” is counter-cultural. But, let’s be honest, does such a “lifestyle” honestly feel like a blessing?
All around the world, these past several years have been especially difficult. We are living in an international age of Covid and Putin… of so much that seems to be the inversion of Good! There is much to mourn outside these walls. And, even in our own parish, 17 much loved and deeply involved members have died, just in the last year, touching all of us, and leaving a web of grieving friends and family right here in these pews.
So, is there anyone here who does NOT know, from personal experience, what it is to be poor in spirit? Does anyone really escape some soul-shaking human grief? All of us will, or have or are facing great challenges of illness, or betrayal or sorrow or loss in dealing with the grievous Facts of human life. As St. Paul tells us, this is endemic to a “suffering, groaning creation.” These are certainly not situations - not a lifestyle - we seek to experience, or (too often) can even explain on this side of heaven. But, this IS the world in which we are living (and in which we are ever-more aware of dying.)
But, despite whatever unanswered questions any of us has about the daily, human cost reflected in our very serious and real questions or circumstances… Jesus’ words today are profoundly … wonder-full …Good News! For in His re-defined blessedness, Christ enters into the harrowing, soul-sucking events we face in our unhappy world… and (amazingly) sanctifies - makes holy - our sufferings… most especially when those sufferings include our efforts to act (or re-act) through the lens of our faith in Christ. To know the sorrows of this world, and to bear them … “for His names sake” intimately invites (or perhaps more correctly … intimately trusts!) Christ… with even the worst of this world’s cruelties. “ For we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him” (Rom 8:28). In His hands … in His hands!… we are assured that … even something that was intended for evil can be used by our Savior-God to some eternal, upended good …which we may never understand on this side of heaven. When we trust Christ, we free Him to do all He intends to do in us, with us and through us… to the Glory of God. And that Wonder … that contradiction of earthly perception …transforms all suffering, ultimately. ——
The point in my returning to the Beatitudes is to make the important connection between the blessed “you” of the Beatitudes with the “you” of salt and light. And here is where Jesus astounds!
In today’s Gospel, Christ doesn’t simply assert that the “you” who believe… are “bearers” of God’s light, but that they ARE, in fact (and in lifestyle) that light! He goes on to say (as the original Greek literally translates) “Thus, let shine the light of you before men.” How stunning! We’ve known that believers are to be bearers of His light, but here, Jesus says such people are that light! Jesus is describing a state of being, not just of bearing! Those who trust and follow Christ are somehow so imbued with His divine light that they become that light in the world! The thought is so shocking as to seem heretical! What kind of Saints is Jesus talking about… that can actually BE (not just bear) Christ’s Light to this darkened, diseased world? Is Jesus simply reminding us of some long ago, frozen-in- time - unapproachably remote - Saints … like those memorialized in a church window? Could He actually be talking about the likes of you or me, at all?
——
Well, speaking of windows …
From where anyone sits in this church, you and I are surrounded by the rainbow beauty of Good Shepherd’s windows. Especially at night, when darkness envelopes our little church-light on the hill (or on the Ridge as we would say in Lake Wales)… the warm glow of our saints of light permeate - penetrate - even the darkest, starless night outside these walls. We (You!) who worship within these walls, are indeed literally surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses! You are encircled by over two millennia of illuminated lives who demonstrated, in their times and in their places, what it is to BE lights in a dangerous and broken world. (Each Sunday, our bulletin highlights one of these windows from Fr. Tom’s wonderful little booklet; I encourage you to take a look at that pamphlet.)
But right now, I ask you to look, not so much at those larger, completed works of art … but at the smallest details of any one window. What are these windows made of… exactly?
If you look closely, each window is composed of many, many individual pieces of beautiful, colored glass. And that glass is not flat and uniform and made to fit into a perfectly precise image (as most stained glass windows are traditionally made.) Rather, our saints’ windows are made of… well, chipped, ragged, ill-sharpened shards which, in any other context, might have been ground up and tossed into a recycling basket. Our glass, our windows … Your windows … are made from broken, useless (by the world’s standards) chunks of roasted sand (that is… Florida “dirt”) that would likely have been cast off, and ground up, in any other setting … except right here in this worshiping place!
But not here! Not in these saints’ windows! Their holiness, their sanctification … their beauty … each completed work … is made lovely …through its collective brokenness… each piece held together - suspended - in just the right spot… with the encasing fierceness of solid concrete… so that.. every tiny, chipped piece … shines… igniting the particular, fractured beauty of each shard, as it gives God His Glory! These glowing, uniquely wooing, beacons of light encircling you … come from hundreds, maybe thousands, of individual pieces of impertfect, worthless bits of, well, trash!
I think this is a bit of what Jesus wants us to understand about being salt and light in the world. Out of the meek, the humble, the grieving… the least, the lost, the last … when the ostensible brokenness of earthly life is used to illuminate the wonders and glory of Christ and His Kingdom … something beautiful, mesmerizing and eternally solid is created and visible to all who have eyes to see!
So, I pray you will look very closely at these beautiful windows, especially when your own blessings seem inverted. I pray you find yourselves (your faithful struggles, your hardest questions, your grief, your pain)…not just reflected in THE Good Shepherd’s windows, but as a brilliant - absolutely essential - element of their beauty. The Lord has not hidden you under some paralyzing bushel-basket of life in a hostile world … He has placed you, on His lamp stand, right where you are, with what you have experienced and know of His divine shaping, and He has equipped you to “let shine the light of YOU before all men” in here, and out there … in a darkened, anxious and diseased (dis-eased) world.
For YOU, whose spirits have been broken by cruelties and sins (even those of your own doing), and have asked for and trusted Christ’s forgiveness and provision… YOU are part of these windows! YOU, who have been chipped (shattered) by illness or grief… YOU are part of these windows’ light! YOU, who have shown mercy … you shine out from these windows too! YOU - ALL - who live your belief in Christ Jesus - are set right there, in just the perfect spot only you can fill …where your broken edges become perfect, wooing prisms of Christ’s holy light.
“Let shine the light of you before” a world that needs - desperately - to know and see - in you - that broken shards, fractured lives, and shattered hearts … placed into Christ’s hands… can actually, always and forever become windows into heaven itself.
May YOU, Beloved Ones, Go forth from this place and Shine as God’s light …outside these holy walls… and through all your cracks and chips and losses and sorrows … give Glory to God!
Thanks be to God … THE Lord of all Light and Life!
AMEN