Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 23, 2011

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of being home after dark when the power went out. When that happens in our electricity dependent homes, everything goes dark. There’s not much we can do at that point. We can’t watch television. We can’t read, except perhaps by the dim and flickering light of a candle or the inadequate glare of a flashlight. If we were working on something we have to stop because we can’t see. So probably, for a while at least, we just sit and wait for the power to come back on, hoping that it won’t take too long. Usually after not very long it does. The lights come back on. The television comes back on. The stove or vacuum cleaner or power drill we were working with comes back on. Most importantly for many of us, the computer comes back on, and we just go back to doing whatever it was we were doing before the power went out, before it got dark. That’s how it is with electricity. That’s how it is with electric light.

Our passage from Matthew this morning talks about light too. It quotes the passage we heard from Isaiah, more or less, to say that the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. And it says, if somewhat indirectly, that Jesus is that light. Jesus is the light who has shined on the people in darkness. Matthew makes that connection by quoting Isaiah, then immediately telling us of Jesus’ first appearance on the public stage as an itinerant preacher. The point is pretty clear in the way Matthew tells the story, even though he doesn’t say in so many words that Jesus is the light in the darkness. He doesn’t have to. He makes the point in how he tells the story.

Matthew then has Jesus, the light shining in the darkness, appear to four fishermen on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. He tells us that all four of them, Andrew, Peter, James, and John, upon seeing Jesus and hearing him call them “immediately” left their nets, their boats, and in the case of James and John their father Zebedee, and followed Jesus. Matthew’s story of Jesus’ call of the first disciples has it that the four, upon seeing Jesus, immediately left everything they had known—home, livelihood, family—and went off after Jesus.

Frankly, that “immediately” has always troubled me. It strikes me as historically unlikely. As far as we know from the story these fishermen had never seen Jesus before, had indeed as far as we know never heard of Jesus before. Yet we’re supposed to believe that they immediately turned their entire lives upside down to go running off after him. Maybe he was so obviously charismatic, so obviously filled with the Holy Spirit, that people would do that, but I’m not entirely convinced. I have a hard time believing that it really happened that way.

So if it didn’t happen that way, or actually even if it did, what is this story saying to us? Is it saying that as soon as we see the light of Christ we’re supposed to leave everything we know, turn our lives upside down, and somehow follow him? Maybe it is, but let’s be realistic here. I doubt that any one of us is actually going to do that. I know that I haven’t done it and am not likely to; but if we aren’t going to do that like the first disciples did in the story, does this story have anything to say to us?

Of course I think that it does, or I wouldn’t be talking about it with you this morning. One way to look at the story to get something out of it for us is to consider that perhaps it isn’t so much telling us something as it is asking us something. We see in the story how the first disciples respond to the light of Christ. Let me suggest seeing their response not just as a story about them but as a question to us. This story says to us: That’s what they did to respond to the light of Christ. What are you going to do to respond to the light of Christ?

You see, the light of Christ isn’t like our electric lights that go out when the power fails and light up again when it comes back on. When that happens with our electric lights we just go back to doing what we were doing before they went out. Those lights illuminate the physical space around us. But the light of Christ illuminates the spiritual space within us. When the electric lights come back on they allow us to resume life the way it was before they went off. The light of Christ won’t let us do that, not if we really perceive it, not if we really let it light up our spirits and brighten our souls. When the electric lights come back on, we see the world the way it was. When the light of Christ truly shines in our lives we see the world differently. We see the world in a whole new light.

What do we see that is different? We see first of all that every single person, absolutely without exception, including even ourselves, is a beloved child of God, a beloved son or daughter of infinite worth. We see also that with God we are safe and saved no matter what befalls us in life. We see too how horribly far short of the Kingdom of God the world falls. We see how many of God’s beloved children suffer needlessly from poverty and hunger. We see how greed distorts the distribution of the world’s resources to benefit the few at the expense of the many. We see how our human violence kills and maims so many of God’s beloved children and causes grief and anguish in so many souls where the Holy Spirit dwells. We see how we human beings despoil God’s good creation as we dig and drill and chop down and pollute to support our unsustainable way of life. We see how little we care for each other, how our anger harms others and distorts our own minds and souls. When we truly let the light of Christ into our lives everything changes. Nothing stays the same. We see clearly what we never saw before at all. We see the limitless expanse of God’s love and grace, and we see how much work there is yet to do in God’s world.

When we see all that in the light of Christ, when we see how God loves us, how God loves all people, how God loves all of creation, and when we see how all of creation is groaning for rebirth and newness of life, we can’t stay the same as we were before. What we see in the light of Christ calls us to respond. It calls us to repent as Jesus called us to do, to have a change of heart, to changes our ways of living. The light of Christ beckons us to come, to come to the light, to come to a life transformed by the light, transformed from following the ways of the world to following the ways of God, from following our own selfish desires to following Jesus Christ, the light in our darkness.

Which brings us back to those first disciples, the ones who, as the story goes, when they first saw Jesus immediately dropped everything and followed him. We aren’t going to do that, or at least I’m pretty sure I’m not.; but the story asks us: What are we going to do? Are we going to go on living as before, wrapped up in our own narrow concerns and driven by our own narrow interests? Or are we going at least to broaden the scope of our interests and our concern, to think more about the wellbeing of those in need, to think more about what we are doing to God’s beloved creation, to think more about the ways that truly make for peace and give up our attachment to violence?

It seems to me that those things are the least we can do once we let the light of Christ into our lives. I can’t tell you precisely or in detail what the light of Christ means for your life, although I’d love to explore that question with each one of you; but I do know this: The light of Christ, when it truly illuminates our inner darkness, changes everything, That, I think, is what we are to take from the Gospel stories of the disciples “immediately” leaving everything and following Jesus. For them, everything changed. In the light of Christ it does for us too. Amen.