Well, one sermon was recycled and used on this blog. So i had to prepare and preach another one, it was on John 1. 1-14, here are some snippets:
I think that this reading is beautiful, the structure of the sentence the flow of the words, the poetic nature of the imagery is stunning however one area that I do not like is that is that it seems to polarise. The light of Christ enters into a dark world....
I have a theological problem with this polarity of the light and darkness of the world. My problem is that I don’t think that the world is a dark place, I think that before Christ’s birth Gods presence was still revealed in the creation, God’s spirit was still active and God was revealed in humanity.
Hence, whilst the world is not all light, I think it is also not all darkness - the world is not perfect, there are great tragedies, humanity sickens me at times, but there are also glimmers of hope, glimmers of light which changes the darkness. The darkness becomes a time of dawn, the light is there and is rising, but it’s not yet as bright as we would like it to be...
When we think about light and darkness we often think of it in terms of black and white and fail to remember that within light there is a spectrum of colours. Colours that we have to work at to see, there is a vast diversity of colours that make up the light. In a light spectrum there is red, green, blue, cyan, yellow, green and magenta. There are also the cross over points between those colours where there are an infinite number of different colours. The light is diverse and infinite.
When we think about the Light of the World do we see all the different facets that make up Christ or do we just see the Christ of our tradition that appeals to us the most? I think that Christ is a man of diversity, a man with an infinite number of different facets and as we look to the Light of the World it’s sad that we often only see the one colour that we’re the most comfortable with, and we miss out on so many more.
Different Christian traditions have emphasised different facets of Christ and only when we see all the facets do we see a whole picture of Christ. Only then do we see the spectrum of colours, the spectrum of diversity that makes up the light of the world. We can have the tendency to see the colour that appeals the most to us and fail to recognise the validity of the other colours.
Let me give you an examples, In the Eastern Orthodox tradition Jesus’ entry into the world, his incarnation, brings about God’s healing to the human race and to the creation. The fact that God was prepared to be one of us is the redemptive power of the light of the world. What can I learn, what can we all learn from this facet of the light.
Let me encourage you to remove your blinkers, your cultural conditioning and see the vast spectrum of colours that make up the Light of the World.
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