Lights and Darkness

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Christmas Eve 2015; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 1:1-18

Christmas is a time of beginnings, one of which is a little hard to wrap our heads around on this particular peculiar evening.

That beginning is the beginning of winter.  Remember winter?  Winter was supposed to begin three days ago, and Lord, it don’t feel that way.   The night air is warm and moist from today’s rains, and it’s late May out there, barely a whisper of winter’s bite in the air.  Good King Wenceslaus is slogging through mud on this feast of Stephen, with murky puddles in the dinted sod where his foot had printed, and if you try to sing that you’re dreaming of a white Christmas, just be sure that you’re nowhere near anyone who works in the East Coast ski industry, because you’re either going to make them cry or you’re going to get punched.

It’s a bizarre, paradoxically unChristmasy Christmas, more Maui than Montgomery County.  But Christmas is a peculiar celebration no matter what the temperature outside, because it’s a day when we celebrate something new by doing the same thing we’ve do every year.  On the one hand, the story of a new life, a new child born into the world bringing new possibility.  On the other, it’s the same story, told and retold, iterated and reiterated in all of its familiarity.

Right there in the thicket of tonight’s readings of that story we’ve heard so many times, there came that soaring and poetic excerpt from the opening chapter of the Gospel of John. That tells us something different about this Jesus, something that adds a different flavor to the images of mangers and donkeys and wise men and flocks by night.

John’s story goes back to the beginning. Not to the beginning of Jesus’s life, which is where the dear old Gospel of Luke opens the story. For his opening of the tale, John goes way back, back, back to the dawning of time and creation itself, to the beginning of all things.

The story John tells of the beginning is a story of beginnings, of something happening that isn’t easily grasped or understood.  It is the story of the Word, meaning not spoken human language but God’s own self-expression.  It is about the order of the universe, about the way everything is set up, about how everything changes and is made new.  There’s a little passage in there that’s always striking:

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”  That’s how it was read tonight from the New Revised Standard Version, but there’s a tighter translation:  “...the darkness did not grasp it.”  Or “..the darkness did not comprehend it.”

Meditating on this passage of light and darkness this week, I was reminded of a paradox deeper than the strange warmth of this Christmas Eve.  There was a time, in the history of human understanding of existence, that we believed the universe had never known a beginning.  Nothing was truly ever new, argued the scientific consensus of the 18th and 19th century, and creation was infinite and went on forever in both time and space.  There was no “in the beginning.”

But there was a challenge to this, one that was a part of the night sky itself.  The challenge is called Olber’s Paradox, named after 19th century physicist Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers, who, in case you missed it, vas just a little bit German.  If the universe was infinitely large and infinitely ancient, and filled with evenly distributed stars, Olbers noted, what we should see in the night sky is not darkness, but infinite light.  Every point in an endless sky should be a star or galaxy of some magnitude, the sky just a sea of radiant brilliance.

But it is not.  And that means that the stars, seemingly endless and infinite and unchanging, are neither.  The stars are not, much to the ultimate disappointment of Javert from Les Mis, silent sentinels that hold their course and their aim, that return and return and are always the same.  The salt-speckled deep of the heavens tells us that they are not infinite.

The stars tell us, in their intermingling with the darkness, that creation had a beginning.  There was a time when they were not, and a time when they were new.  Olber’s Paradox points towards the Big Bang, but it has other resonances this season.

That there are stars in the night sky looking down where he lay tells us that all things were once new.  It tells us that there is the hope for new birth, that there is the possibility for grace and mercy and transformation in all of our lives.

Both John and Luke are telling us stories of beginnings.  In the dawn of light and existence, the firelight flickering in the warmth of the manger, we proclaim that a new thing has happened.  In the life of that tiny infant, we see things differently.  We see the promise of a human being would would give themselves over fully to the cause of God’s love.  We see how that child will change and grow into adulthood.  And in that man, we see the promise of the Creator.  In that child that has been born for us, in that life given to us, we can see hope for restoration, and hope for righteousness, and for peace without end.  We encounter that in him, no matter where we are in life.

And that realization that things might be new again changes how we see the world, because if we hear it and embrace it, it becomes a vital part of the change in each of us.  We become different people when we stand in relationship to it.  It shifts the arc of our lives.  

In that that promise of beginnings, in the promise of transformation in all of our hearts, lies the hope of this night, and tomorrow, and all of our days.

Let that Christmas hope live in you.  See the world through its eyes.   Let it be a Merry Christmas, for you and for me, AMEN.