The light given to everyone

Feast of St. John the Evangelist

John 1: 1-14

The Rev'd Richard Smith, Ph.D.

Back in the days of slavery, there were certain passages of scripture the slaveowners would not allow the slaves to hear. Today’s gospel from John, the patron of this parish, was one of those passages.

This passage is the start of what, for John, will be a new creation story. It begins with the very same words as the old creation story in Genesis: “In the beginning…” And it goes on to speak about everything in the cosmos coming into being. And then it says out of the Creator came life, and that life was a light given to every person. That light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.

That divine life, that light, is given to every person--no matter their skin color, or gender, or whether they’re Christian or Muslim or Jewish or card carrying atheists. That divine light was planted deep in every one of our hearts by the one who made us. It is very powerful. The darkness cannot overcome it.

The slave masters were afraid that if the slaves started to really believe they carried in their own selves this powerful divine light, they might begin to see themselves as creatures of vast and infinite beauty and dignity. They might start to resist the slave masters’ brutality and cruelty; they might rise up.

John’s message in today’s gospel has powerful implications.

Women who start to believe it might not be as willing to go along with all the subtle and not-so-subtle manifestations of a rape culture--whether those manifestations come from a President-elect, or at work, or just walking down the street.

Undocumented immigrants might reject the characterizations they are rapists and criminals, might rightfully take pride in their determination against enormous odds to find a way care for their kids, their amazing contributions to this economy and culture. They might refuse to let their families be torn apart by unjust immigration laws.

Let me say this another way drawing from the recent work of Richard Rohr…

Take a look at this fifteenth century icon by the Russian iconographer and mystic Andrei Rublev. It’s called “The Hospitality of Abraham”, or simply “The Trinity”.

There are three primary colors in Rublev’s icon, each illustrating a facet of the Holy One:

• Gold: “the Father”—perfection, fullness, wholeness, the ultimate Source
• Blue: “the Incarnate Christ”—both sea and sky mirroring one another (In the icon, Christ wears blue and holds up two fingers, telling us he has put spirit and matter, divinity and humanity, together within himself. The blue of creation is brilliantly undergirded with the necessary red of suffering.)
• Green: “the Spirit”—the divine photosynthesis that grows everything from within by transforming light into itself (Hildegard of Bingen called this viriditas, or the greening of all things.)

The gaze between the Three shows the deep respect between them as they all share a meal from a common bowl.

Notice the Spirit’s hand points toward the open and fourth place at the table. Is the Holy Spirit inviting, offering, and clearing space?

At the front of the table there appears to be a little rectangular hole. Some art historians believe the remaining glue on the original icon indicates that there was perhaps once a mirror glued to the front of the table. There was room at this table for a fourth.

That fourth person is you, the observer. You—and all of creation—are invited to sit at the divine table.

This is the Christmas mystery. As one of the most ancient prayers of the church says, God humbled himself to take on our humanity so we might share in God’s divinity.

This is who we each are: beloved creatures, bearers of a divine light that is powerful and can never be overcome, welcomed into the very life of God.

Our task is to claim that dignity.

The problem is we forget who we are, lose touch with that light and life the Creator planted deep in our hearts. All around us, we hear so many messages to the contrary:You’re too old, or too you. Too skinny, or too fat. The wrong color or gender or sexual orientation. If we’re not careful, we can unconsciously start believing those voices.

Which is why we need other people to remind us now and then of our own profound beauty and dignity that no one, not even we on our worst days, can take away.

Cleve Jones, one of the leaders in the modern gay rights movement, says that when he was a kid, he never knew any other gay people existed. He thought he was the only one who felt and experienced the world and people as he did. After being beaten and bullied several times at school, he began to quietly stash away whatever pills he could find, thinking someday he might use them to commit suicide.

Then he found a copy of Life magazine that told about some homosexuals in San Francisco, the culture they were forming, the movement they were creating. He stumbled across authors like Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Allen Ginsberg and eventually came to believe that he was not alone.

Once he discovered there was a community of people who were like him, who could understand and welcome him, Cleve says he flushed all those pills down the toilet. A few years later, he arrived in San Francisco, joined the movement for LGBT rights, and the rest is history.

Sometimes we lose touch with the unique dignity and beauty given us by the Creator. We forget who we are: bearers of God’s own light, invited into his very life. We need other people to help us see it.

It’s why we need communities like this one at St. John's where we gather week after week to immerse ourselves once more in the ancient stories, and share this meal, and remember not only God's mighty deeds in history and who Jesus is, but also who we are.

I hope we in this crazy community can be this reminder to each other in the year ahead; each of us in sheer awe of the beauty and dignity and dignity the Creator has given us, reminding each other of theirs.

Let me close with a poem by Jan Richardson...

Blessed Are You Who Bear the Light Blessed are you who bear the light
in unbearable times,
who testify to its endurance
amid the unendurable,
who bear witness to its persistence
when everything seems in shadow and grief.
Blessed are you
in whom
the light lives,
in whom
the brightness blazes—
your heart a chapel,
an altar
where in the deepest night
can be seen the fire
that shines forth
in you
in unaccountable faith,
in stubborn hope,
in love that illumines
every broken thing it finds.