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Gracious God, we invite You now to come as we continue in

our worship and illumine our hearts, illumine Your word, allow us to

be brought into the truth of who You are and who You intend us to be as

Your people. We pray this together in Jesus’ name.

Amen.

 

 

The Exile Chronicles: Chapter Three.

 

Last winter on one of our weekly date nights, Sharon and I left the Bombay Restaurant and began to head towards the parking garage. Now we got to the end of the walkway and came to the steps and noticed that it was especially dark: one of the lights seemed to be out.

 

So, we carefully sort of felt our way down the stairs and got down to a place where it felt level and we felt confident that we could move forward and we began to step out towards our car.

 

Suddenly Sharon buckled next to me. There—not lit up, invisible in the dark—was a parking block and she had tripped over it and she went flying forward and then in just a moment she was down on her elbow and on her knee.

 

Now, just before Sharon went down, she had threaded her arm through mine. So, Sharon wasn’t the only one on her way down at that moment. But Sharon fell right in front of me and pulled me down with her. So, in an effort not to land on top of her (one of us is holding leftovers from the dinner; I don’t remember which one of us), I lunged over her. I thought, “Now where are those cameras when you want them?” I’m sure all of these people would have said, ”Ten! Ten! Ten!”

 

I lunged over the top of here and managed to miss her completely. But, of course, when I got to the other side of her, I was completely off balance and falling forward. So I did one of those Keystone Kop things where you’re kind of stumbling forward not able to get your balance, and finally I too went crashing to the ground and rolled.

 

We both lay there in the dark on the parking lot stunned. And then, from next to me, I heard a combination of tears and hilarious laughter as Sharon began to recount for me what it was like from her perspective to be lying on her back and watching me flying over her and then this goopy collapse onto the ground. All the while, she claims, me saying something like, “Whoa. Whoa. Whoa.”

 

I don’t remember that part.

 

Conclusion? It’s amazing the difference that just a little light can make.

 

The question before us in this series: what is my place and what is my purpose in this world in which God has placed me, this world to which God has called me but which is not my home?

 

As followers of Christ, as you know, we believe that we have a new place of belonging, that our citizenship has been transferred from this world to the next. As Jesus prayed in John 17:16: “They are not of the world any more than I am....”

 

But we also believe that God has left us in this world for a reason; in fact, as we heard last week, he has not only left us here, he has sent us here into this world. As Jesus prays in John 17:18: “As you sent me into the world, I send them into the world.”

 

We Christians are exiles in this world—strangers living in a land to which we no longer belong. It’s a world which is no longer our home. The question is: How then should we live? In this brief span of time between our first breath as a new Christian and our last breath in this body on this earth, how would God have us understand our place in this world?

 

Jesus answers this question in part in Matthew chapter 5 which you’ll find on page 1501 in your pew Bible. We studied the first part of this passage, Matthew 5:13, last Sunday when we heard Jesus say, ”You are the salt of the earth.”

 

Now, in verse 14, Jesus says, “You are the light of the world.”

 

Now, light has so pervaded every aspect of our life as to seem ordinary, commonplace, even unnecessary. Artificial light accompanies our entire day, and the line between day and night has been blurred away in the hum of light.

 

For most of us, as Christopher Dewdney says in his book Acquainted With the Night: Excursions Through the World After Dark, “It never really gets dark at all…. Night is more like a period of dimness than of pitch black-ness.”

 

As he goes on to point out, “In a natural night sky about thirty-five hundred stars should be visible to the unaided eye, but in a city, even in a dark yard [as you well know], only about fifty stars are visible.”

 

The moisture in the sky perpetually glows with an unearthly shade of amber reflected from the street lights and the headlights and the billboard lights below.

 

But light and especially its absence were far more powerful realities for the first century resident of the ancient Near East to whom Jesus was speaking: far more so than for us who are surrounded twenty-four hours a day by light.

 

In his book Apollo’s Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination, which is sort of the companion volume for Dewdney’s book, Michael Sims captures this reality when he says, “For countless millennia, when the sun went down and the shadows gathered, our ancestors fought back with whatever light they could find.”

 

Dewdney agrees: “We are creatures of the day, and night has historically been our adversary…. Darkness was, and still is, a hostile realm.”

 

For those to whom Jesus was speaking, life was ruled by the sun. Doors were unlocked when the sun rose, and they were barred and locked again the moment the sun went down.

 

Now think about what this would have been like. There were no porch lights, no flashlights, no headlights, no traffic lights, no street lights, no house lights, no building lights, no night lights.

 

Two great inventions forever changed humanity’s experience of the dark. The first was the creation of the olive oil lamp three thousand years before the birth of Christ, when, for the first time, light could be captured and tamed and carried, and the night could be held at bay.

 

The second great lighting innovation would not come for another five thousand years—not until 1879, when an electrical current was harnessed to a carbon filament in a globe of glass and the tyranny of night was toppled forever throwing the world into perpetual daylight. As Michael Sims says, “No aspect of the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century changed our daily experience…more than the widespread distribution of public lighting.”

 

Until then, oil lamps were the world’s primary source of artificial light. Oil lamps were small like this one from Jesus’ time. [Lights small oil lamp] The wealthy may have had a lamp that was made of brass, but most people had lamps that were made of clay, terra cotta, formed by two portions, a top and a bottom, pressed into a mold and then joined together and fired in a kiln with a larger opening in the center into which the olive oil would be poured and a smaller one, the spout, out of which a wick of flax or cotton would stretch and which would be lit.

 

Because olive oil was expensive, most homes had only a single lamp (Jesus always speaks in his parables of “the lamp”). And that lamp would have burned night and day. In the daytime because most homes were simple, one-roomed houses with small windows that would have been cut into only one wall—the interior courtyard wall—and then that window would have been filled with lattice work, so what little light that would have come through would have been somewhat blocked. Houses were so dark that, as Jesus tells us in one of his stories, a lamp would be needed during the day to find something if it fell on the floor in your house. At night lamps were burned both to scare away potential wrongdoers who were prowling about outside and to quiet the fears of those sleeping within.

 

In order to try to illumine the house as much as possible with a single flame, the lamp would have been placed in the middle of the room on a simple wooden stand much as we might place a light on an end table, or it would be set in a shallow niche that would be cut in the wall four or five feet off of the ground.

 

When you stepped out of your house and into the black of night even from a home lit by a single dim oil lamp, your pupils would frantically dilate, the rods in your eyes scrambling to gather in enough light to see—and failing. All would be pitch black.

 

Conclusion: it’s amazing what a difference a little light can make.

 

In a book called Daily Life in Ancient Rome, it says this:

 

“This is in fact one of the characteristics which most markedly distinguished [ancient cities] from cities [today]: when there was no moon its streets were plunged into impenetrable darkness. No oil lamps lighted them; no candles were affixed to walls; no lanterns were hung over lintels of the doors…. Night fell over the city like the shadow of a great danger, diffuse, sinister, menacing.”

 

Public street lights wouldn’t appear for another three hundred and fifty years after the life of Jesus: not until a line of torches was installed first along the main thoroughfare in Antioch, and then along the main street in Rome, and finally along the Arcadian Avenue in Ephesus. Until then, the only ones to step out at night were rich men: men who were rich enough to hire an entourage of body guards and slaves who were carrying torches and lamps. If one couldn’t afford a slave and had to venture out, we’re told by one of the writers of the day, Juvenal, then he would do so with great trepidation “clutching a sputtering candle.”

 

Understanding the experience of first century men and women helps us to appreciate immediately what his followers would have heard when Jesus said to them, “You are the light of the world.”

 

They would have known, first, that he believed them to be precious and of extraordinary value in this world. Solomon reflects this view—the view that was held by the entire ancient world—when he writes in the Book of Ecclesiastes: “Light is sweet, and it is pleasant for the eyes to behold….”

 

They also would have known that he considered them essential and necessary for the well-being of the world into which he sent them.

 

So important was light, that light was often used as a synonym for life itself. This is one of the things that comes through in the writings of Homer and other Greek and Roman thinkers, but the biblical writers were also shaped by this same connection joining together these two ideas as, for instance, in John chapter 1 where it says: “In him [in Jesus] was life and that life was the light of men.”

 

Light is the possibility of life; it makes living possible; it possesses a power that is essential to life. Without light, we can’t live—not as we were intended to live. We cannot make sense of, and, therefore, we cannot successfully negotiate our way through this dark world.

 

This is what Jesus says to those of us who belong to him and follow him: that we are the source of this world’s light. And Jesus’ followers would have understood that the thing that made them so precious and so valuable to the world in which we live was the significance of light for people of that day and its symbolic meaning.

 

Light had three symbolic and significant meanings.

 

First, light is something that we see.

 

When light shines in the darkness, it beckons, it woos, it calls to us, it gives those in the dark something to move towards—a destination towards which to go, out of the darkness and toward the light.

 

All through the ancient world, not just with Jews but with Greeks and Romans, light was associated with hope, with the promise of deliverance, with the offer of salvation. When we are caught in darkness, a glimmer of light gives us hope that we might be rescued.

 

Think of all of the movies that have a moment in them when the main characters are trapped in darkness: maybe in a cave, maybe in a mine. And they suddenly notice faint light coming through a crack in the rocks—breaking through, suggesting to them that there may be a means of escape after all and bringing hope into their hearts.

 

That would be a common association of light in the ancient world.

 

This summer our family had the privilege of stopping at the home of John Rankin, a Presbyterian pastor during the 1800’s whose home was a principal stop on the Underground Railroad in the town of Riley, Ohio which is on the shores of the Ohio River just east of Cincinnati.

 

His house stood high on a bare, cleared hilltop overlooking the river, and it was visible for miles. And whenever the way was safe and clear, John hung a lantern—a single lantern—in the front window of his house, and that single flame could be seen across the river and far into slave country on the other side. And when those who were trapped in darkness saw that light, it gave them hope, and they began to seek their freedom by making their way towards it: some in ones and twos, others as families or whole groups wading, riding, rowing, hopping from ice floe to ice floe making their way to that light on the top of the hill.

 

It’s estimated that Rankin and his family helped to rescue as many as two thousand escaping slaves because of that one light in his window.

 

It’s amazing the difference that a little light can make.

 

He took them in, he offered them shelter, and then he saw them on their way to safety and freedom. If you’re ever traveling in the Cincinnati area and you have a little bit of time, I would really encourage you to go see his house and go stand and look out that window where the lantern hung.

 

Light is precious in part because it is something that we can see. It is something towards which we can move. It’s a source of hope holding out for us a way of escape for those who are trapped in darkness.

 

But light is also precious and valuable because it something by which we see. As we make our way through the night, light reveals what’s shrouded in darkness and gives us the freedom to move, throwing light upon the path along which we walk.

 

Think of all the movies that capture this theme as well: when the way forward is uncertain in the darkness or in the night and then a match is struck or a torch is lit or a flashlight is turned on, and suddenly the way forward becomes clear.

 

In his book The Spirit of St. Louis, Charles Lindberg describes what it was like to fly a nighttime airmail run from St. Louis to Chicago without adequate lighting on his plane or on the ground to light the way.

 

He says lighting an airport is no great problem if you have money to pay for it. With revolving beacons, boundary markers and floodlights, night flying isn’t that difficult. But our organization couldn’t buy such luxuries. We were unable to buy full night flying equipment for these planes to say nothing of lights and beacons for the fields that we land on.

 

“I lost a DeHavilland (it’s one of the mail planes) just over a week ago because I didn’t have an extra flare or wing lights or a beacon to go back to. I encountered fog that night on the northbound flight to Chicago. It was a solid bank rolling in over the Illinois River valley. I turned back southwest and tried to drop my single flare so that I could land on one of the farm fields below, but when I pulled the release lever, nothing happened.

 

“Glowing patches of mist showed me where cities lay on the earth’s surface. With these patches as guides, I had little trouble locating the outskirts of Chicago, but a blanket of fog about 800 feet thick covered the field. Mechanics told me afterward that they had played a searchlight upwards and burned two barrels of gasoline on the ground in an effort to attract my attention, but I saw no sign of their activities.

 

“After circling for a half hour, I headed west hoping to pick up one of the beacons on the transcontinental route. They were fogged in too. At 8:20 my engine spit a few times and then cut out almost completely. I followed the emergency procedure of turning on my reserve tank, I shoved a flashlight into my pocket and got ready to jump, and then power surged into my engine again and I began to climb while I had opportunity.

 

“I was 5,000 feet high when my engine cut the second time. I unbuckled my safety belt and dove over the right side of the fuselage and after two or three seconds of fall, pulled the ripcord. It was in pitch black. The parachute opened right away. I began to play my flashlight down toward the top of the fogbank when I was startled to hear the sound of an airplane in the distance. It was coming toward me.”

 

What happened was as he jumped out of the airplane, it shifted the balance of the airplane just enough that a little bit more fuel was able to reach the line and the engine fired back up and his own plane began to circle around on the same altitude that he was and circling right near him.

 

He says, “I shoved my flashlight into my pocket and I caught hold of the parachute risers so I could slip the canopy one way or the other in case the plane kept pointing toward me. It came within a hundred yards and then passed leaving me on the outside of its circle and the engine noise receded. But then it increased again as the DeHavilland appeared again still at my elevation. I counted five spirals and then I sank into the fogbank and could see nothing.

 

“Knowing the ground to be less than a thousand feet below, I reached for the flashlight. It was gone! In my excitement when I saw the plane coming toward me, I hadn’t pushed it far enough into my pocket. I held my feet together, I guarded my face with my hands and I waited. I heard the DeHavilland pass again. Then I saw the outline of the ground, braced myself for the impact and hit in a cornfield.”

 

And even here, light figures prominently in his account.

 

“The wagon tracks took me to a farmyard. First, the big barn loomed up in the dark haze and then a lighted window beyond it showed that someone was still up, and I headed for the house.”

 

After the first service, somebody came up to me and said, “That airplane crashed a hundred yards from my grandfather’s house and I have a piece of jewelry that’s made out of a portion of one of the struts.”

 

Light has always been considered the most important source of safety and protection in this world. Without light, we’re vulnerable—exposing ourselves to the threat of muggers, of ditches, and of ill-placed parking stops! In the pitch of night we’re immobilized narrowing the sphere in which we feel comfortable, navigating to the cautious reach of our finger tips and our toes. And if we try to venture out in the dark nonetheless, we risk falling into even greater danger.

 

And that’s because light informs us about reality. It illumines the world in which we live. It tells us what is true about our surroundings. By shedding light on our world, light equips us to go forward with freedom.

 

For this reason, light has always been understood by the ancients to be a metaphor for wisdom, insight, and understanding such as in the book of Job when Job says that many “grope in darkness with no light” and that “evildoers rebel against the light and do not stay in its paths, but that by God’s grace, this has been his experience: His lamp [God’s lamp] shone upon my head, and by his light I walked through darkness.”

 

Proverbs 4:18-19 captures this same ideas when it says, “The path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn, shining ever brighter till the full light of day, but the way of the wicked is like deep darkness; they don’t know what makes them stumble.”

 

The light is a source of hope and deliverance. Light is a way of wisdom and insight. But in addition to these understandings, the men and women of Jewish background in Jesus’ time as well as those from a Greco-Roman world view, would have understood that there was one more symbolic significance to light that figured prominently in the entire ancient world.

 

For all the ancient world, but especially for the Jews, light was always associated with the presence of God. Light was one of the Bible’s most important symbols. It’s referred to more than two hundred times through the pages of Scripture especially in capturing the nature and the character and the nearness of God.

 

Light was especially associated with God making Himself known, God revealing Himself, God showing Himself present. Wherever God is present, there is light—the manifestation of God’s presence.

 

Exodus 13:21: “The Lord went ahead of them…by night in a pillar of fire to give them light.”

Psalm 104:2: “God wraps Himself in light, as with a garment.”

Daniel 2:22: “Light dwells with Him.”

Habakkuk 3:4: “His splendor was like the sunrise, rays flashed from His hand.”

 

Light reveals reality. But also, and especially, it reveals the author of reality. It reveals God Himself.

 

To his followers Jesus says, “You are the light of the world.”

 

And this is what they would have heard:

 

You are precious and of great value to this world. It cannot live without you.

You offer this world the hope of salvation.

You demonstrate to this world the way of wisdom.

And you present to this world the very presence of God: His very light shining in all that you say and do.

 

Jesus goes on then in the passage. He says:

 

“You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.”

 

Almost all the cities in Palestine were built on the hilltops—along the ridges, both to make the city as safe as possible from the possibility of attack, but also to save the soil-filled valleys between these stony ridges as places to grow wheat and barley.

 

Even without city lights, a city would have been a glowing point of light on the night horizon. Traces of light escaping from a lamp-lit interior here, the flickering skyward of a fleeting torch there would have been all the light there was, but it would have been, in the pitch of night, enough to be able to make out that the hill was there unmistakably.

 

In fact, from where Jesus stood as he was saying these words to his followers on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee, his hearers could look across the Sea of Galilee and see the hilltop city of Hippos perched atop a thousand foot high knoll—faint, but clearly visible from Capernaum in the dark of night across the sea to the southeast.

 

For a city to be hidden at night was absurd. It made no sense—as absurd as lighting a lamp and then putting a grain bucket over it.

 

You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl.

 

Of course, you would never do that.

 

To place a pail over a lamp at the very least would rob the room of its light; more likely, it would rob the lamp of its oxygen and extinguish it altogether. That’s nonsense! Light is for shining, not for shrouding, not for sequestering away, not for smothering.

 

No!

You are the light of the world [Jesus says]. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.

 

You remember that the word praise in English is the Greek word that means to glorify. And as we talked about, the basic root idea of glorifying God means to reveal God for who He is, to throw light on God, to illuminate God so that we can see Him more clearly.

 

I think when Jesus says this about our good deeds being allowed to shine before men that he’s echoing a beautiful passage that was written seven hundred years before to another people in exile, in Isaiah chapter 58 verses 9-10 which says this:

 

“If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.”

 

Jesus is insistent when he says these words. This is an imperative: let your light shine! In other words: be who God made you to be! Do the good works that God has prepared in advance for you to do. Step out into the night and let Him live His life, let Him shine His light through you.

 

When you act as a follower of Christ, Christ is invited and called to act; when you speak as a follower of Christ, Christ is directed to speak. When you listen, when you forgive, when you show concern, when you give of yourself, when you share with a person in need or stand up for a neglected child, or challenge a law that benefits the wealthy at the expense of the poor, or spend time with a boy or a girl without a father, or clean the house of a single mom, or sit by the bedside of the sick, or clean out the gutters of the elderly: in other words, when you are who Jesus has made you to be, when you do what Jesus has called you to do, when you live your life in Christ without apology in this world and without shame and without self-concern, when you do anything in Jesus’ name, then you are holding before this world not only a word of hope and a way of wisdom but a glimpse of God Himself.

 

This is God’s plan for every one of us as His people. This is His call on each of our lives.

 

You are the salt of the earth.

 

You are the light of the world.

 

Several things become obvious when you take these two passages and place them side by side and compare them:

 

Both images say that we are of exceptional value and utterly crucial to the life and the well-being of the world. Is that how you think about yourself as a follower of Christ?

 

Both say that ours is a unique role in human society. The structure of the Greek implies that you, my followers, you and no others, you are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world.

 

Both say that mission is simply part of what it means to be a Christ follower. It’s not the calling of a few. Everyone who’s received grace is to share grace. Recipients of the good news become its messengers. Have you come to embrace that, understanding who God intends that you would be in this world?

 

Both say that we can quickly and easily lose our value to this world: salt, by losing contact with it or becoming contaminated by it; light, by being quenched or prevented from reaching out into the darkness. Is there something that has robbed you of your saltiness or shrouded your light?

 

Both require that we openly make our allegiance to Jesus known that others around us would know what it is that defines our lives and makes sense of it. Salt is to stay salty. Light is to keep shining. And the way that we do that is by being open about our first allegiance. Do those that you work with or go to school with or play on the same team with, those who are your neighbors or your family members, do they know that you are a follower of Christ?

 

Finally, both of these suggest a holistic understanding of our mission as followers of Christ in this world. We need to proclaim our faith through words, shedding light in a dark world, and we need to express our faith through practical actions of compassion for those in need spreading salt in a decaying world. We need to address the needs of people and the problems of society at the same time, to share Christ and to pursue justice.

 

As you may be aware, different congregations have different strategies for how they seek to fulfill them.

 

Some congregations have the idea that the primary avenue for evangelism is within the walls of its church building. Worship services become evangelistic outreach events and a number of other events are held as a means of drawing people to the church in order to proclaim the gospel. And that’s certainly appropriate in churches. It’s a reasonable strategy that they would do that.

 

Our strategy is a different one. We believe that our primary responsibility when we draw together as a people of faith into this building, our primary responsibility is to equip you and to encourage you as followers of Christ to help you become fully, more fully, who it is that Christ intends you to be, to help fan you back into flame, to allow your light to burn more brightly, and then to scatter you back out into the world in your respective neighborhoods and places of vocation there to honor Jesus and to reflect Jesus and there for you to begin to reach out to those whom God has placed around you right in that setting.

 

I would ask that each of you would walk out of this building at the end of the service with this [holds up handout enclosed in bulletin] somewhere—on top of your Bible, loose in your hand, I’d like to not see any of these wind up in the recycling basket—about The Other Day.

 

This is an opportunity for us as a congregation to be intentional in being salt and light in this community, and I’d like to ask that each one of you over lunch—wherever your lunch is, whatever it is that you’re doing—that you would pull this out, read it through together and begin to pray and talk about how it is that God might direct you and direct us together in making a difference in this community on Saturday, February 9^th.

 

Jesus says:

 

“You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”

 

The conclusion? It’s amazing what a difference a little bit of light can make.

 

Yesterday morning in the crisp sunlight of mid-morning, I saw the most beautiful parhelion that I’ve ever seen. That’s the atmospheric phenomenon known as a sun dog. It happens when six-sided ice crystals high up in the atmosphere orient themselves vertically because of gravity and then they both reflect and refract the sun’s light creating a bright splash of light 22 degrees off center from the sun on either side of it like the gathered rays of the sun through a magnifying glass.

 

When Jesus says that we are the light of the world, he’s not telling us to somehow make ourselves bright. He’s not saying, “Go. Somehow try to combust yourself from the inside.” Instead, what he is saying is, “Go out in this world and reflect my life, refract my life.”

 

Yesterday, because of these suspended mirrors and prisms, you could see two thirds of a complete halo around the sun and the whole spectrum of the rainbow was obvious in a long arc on both sides of the sun. It was stunning!

 

So God intends that we would be, catching and throwing about us the light of the Son of God: light passing through, light reflecting off of our lives in a colorful and brilliant, scintillating expression of the love of God shining like stars in the universe as we hold out the word of life.

 

Shine! Mirror in your life His light and shine!