Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Sometimes it is helpful to state the obvious: as a species, Homo sapiens are not nocturnal animals. If we were exhibited in some intergalactic zoo we would not be housed with the night-foraging creatures. We are a diurnal species. Our eyes are not the wide, round eyes of owls nor even of lemurs, which glean the faintest trace of light in the darkest of nights. Maybe you can remember when you were a child and awoke in the middle of the night. Even a misplaced coat draped over a chair could become a most sinister looking figure. Fear of the night has motivated our race in past ages to devise many kinds of unusual lights. From Kings in Babylon to Kubla Khan, from Alexandria to Rome the human race has constructed search lights, pyres and lighthouses on one continent after another.
Today in our well insulated neighborhoods where lights are just a switch away, we may think we have left behind the primitive night-fears of our ancestors. But are there not times when you get out of your car on a dark street, or walk down a darkened corridor, that some shadowy presence seems to follow or lurk around the next corner? Driving down a winding mountain road at night your head lights suddenly go out, the brake peddle pushes clear to the floor and just as your car careens off into the utter darkness of the canyon you awaken from your dream. Crawling back to consciousness you’re left momentarily feeling your helplessness in the darkness.
Is it any wonder the lights of Advent and Christmas, the flickering of candles and the logs burning in the fireplace bring a heartwarming glow to the lengthening nights of December? The true message of Christmas, however, goes far deeper than this nostalgic glow. Yet light is still at its center. The prologue to John’s gospel echoes down the centuries to human beings still groping and lost in a darkened cosmos”” “In him [Christ] was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:4-5). For John, the darkness is an apt symbol for the presence of evil in the universe, in our civilizations and their systems, and in our personal lives. In Jesus Christ the divine light shines through the darkness of the world as we receive him into our lives. So the gospel continues “”¦the true light that enlightens every one was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not. He came to his own home, and his own people received him not. But to all who received him, who believe in his name, he gave power to become children of God”¦.” (John 1:9-12)
It is this Christ and the luminosity of the life and light he brings into our darkened lives that is the truest meaning of Christmas. It glows long after the Christmas lights come down. To come to this light of the world is always, as William Temple put it, “an act of self-surrender.” On the far side of this self-surrender the light is about hope. Indeed, this hope is our experience and what we are privileged to witness to””for once this self-surrender is initiated it becomes the passion of the follower, the disciple, to bear witness to the light of Christ””his warmth and his illuminating presence which no cosmic darkness can absorb.
My prayers for a bright and radiant Christmastide,
–(The Rt. Rev.) Mark Lawrence is Bishop of South Carolina
It is affirming to hear a Christian message at Christmas. Several years ago the thought struck me that we among the few who have ever lived who know light apart from fire. Many passages will work using fire instead of light.