
Genesis 1:1-5
01-05-14
When I was growing up there was a street lamp just
outside my bedroom. During the long
Michigan winters the birch tree outside would be leafless for months. The barren limbs of the tree were in-between
the street lamp and my room. During the
cold winter evenings those limbs would make weird shadows on my wall. I am sure many of you remember nights like
those as a child. You aren’t tired and
your parents send you to bed. As you lay
awake in your bed your eyes start to adjust to the darkness. The tiniest bits of light bring the room to
life, sometimes too much life. Shadows start to dance and you don’t realize it is
only the wind blowing the trees. Noises
are heard and you can’t figure out where they are coming from. There you are in the darkness and terror
starts to sneak in. Fear starts to
capture you and your heart starts to beat very hard. You do the only thing you know how to
do. You do the one thing you know will
make it all better. You yell at the top
of your lungs, MOM!!!!!!
Relief from this fear and terror comes, not when she
walks into your room. Relief and peace
comes when that light frames your door.
That light that tells you the hall light is on and she is coming down
the hallway or up the stairs. That
light, that glowing splinter around your door, eradicates the darkness and sets
all your fears, terror, and those dancing trees at ease. Everything is okay and your Mom hasn’t even
gotten to your room just yet.
Light is a powerful thing. Light is a form of energy that makes it
possible to see things. It is found in
the sun, the reflection of the sun off the moon, from a candle, a match, a
flash light, or now recently, the glow of a cell phone. To know the power of light we can simply look
in the sky at night. Stars are other sun
but light years away from us. All we
know about stars is what we learn by looking at the light they produce. A light year is the distance it takes light in
a vacuum to travel in a year. A light
year is 5.8 trillion miles, TRILLION with a T.
Light travels from these stars to us on earth and that is why we can see
them. After our sun, the closest star is
Proxima Centarui which is 4.24 light
years away from our sun. Although we
cannot see it with the naked eye because it doesn’t shine bright enough, the
light from that star takes 4.24 light years to get to us. Think of it this way. If you turned on a flashlight really quick
that light then travels 24.5 trillion miles until our telescopes can see
it. And that is the closest star to
us.
Sirius is actually the brightest star in the sky and it
is 25 times brighter than our own sun. This
star is so bright that it can be seen in the day at times. It is 8.611 light years away or almost 50
trillion miles away. The fact that it
has to travel that far and can be seen in the day time, is pretty
remarkable. That light travels through
the darkness of space and is so bright that it can be seen before it is dark on
our planet. WOW. It kind of makes you feel small and in awe
all at the same time.
This sermon series is all about light because Epiphany is
about light as well. Today we mark the
start of Epiphany, really the day of Epiphany is tomorrow, January 6th. Epiphany is the day we mark the Magi coming
to see the new King of Israel, Jesus Christ.
What does the Magi follow, a star.
The light of a star leads them to the baby that is born. Light is what brings the foreigner, the
outsider, representatives of the rest of the world to the God child that is
born. It is the light of a star that
tells us that we are all welcome as God’s children to worship and see that God
has put on flesh.
God uses light to bring us to faith all the time. The burning bush caught Moses’ attention. The pillar of fire led the Israelites out of
Egypt during the night. The Psalms burst
with light as a reference to God leading people. Psalm 119:105 says, “Your word is a lamp to
my feet and a light for my path.” As we
go on with this sermon series I will be talking about what light tells us about
God and what that means for us as we follow God. Light is mentioned over 230 times in the
Bible and is one of the most common metaphors when talking about God and especially
Jesus (which we will get into next week).
Today we start in the beginning. We start in the ancient story of how God
created the world. Genesis 1 reads, “When God began to create the heavens and the earth— the
earth was without shape or form, it was dark over the deep sea, and God’s wind
swept over the waters— God
said, “Let there be light.” And so light appeared. God
saw how good the light was. God separated the light from the darkness.
God
named the light Day and the darkness Night. There was evening and there was morning: the
first day.”
In the beginning wasn’t light, it was
only darkness. Did you know you cannot
measure darkness? Darkness isn’t a form
of measurement, it is only the absent of light.
The darker something is doesn’t mean there is more darkness, there is only
less light. In the beginning there was
an absent of light but God did not see that as a good thing and so the first
words out of God, the creator’s mouth, is “Let there be light,” and there was.
Go back to that childhood bedroom. In the darkness there you cannot create light
yourself. Although there is light in the
room for the street light or the moon, the light you crave you cannot
create. The fear of the darkness
consumes you and the only person who can create the light is no there. If it was up to us humans we could not create
the light we need. That only comes from
God, the creator of the universe. The
light that makes everything better in our childhood bedrooms comes from our
creator, our mother or father. In the
beginning the Father know that we could not live in darkness and so the first
thing he created was light.
He created the sun to provide our world
light, warmth and tells us when the day is done and the night is to begin. God created light because without what is
there? What does the Bible tell us was
in the darkness? It says the earth was
without shape and without form. Another
translation says it was “a shapeless, chaotic mass.” Another says it was empty. Whichever English translation you read you
can get a sense that things did not make a bunch of sense in the
beginning. There was no order or
organization. There was only a mass that
was shapeless, empty, chaotic, and without form. God saw this chaos and created order. God created something that made sense that
gave us meaning and purpose. Day and
night define who we are. It is how we
count time, our lives, and make sense of the world.
There are places on earth that defined days and nights
only exist some of the time. In Alaska,
the days are extremely long in the summer because of the way our earth
tilts. The sun can be up for 18-21 hours
which means that during the winter the sun is only up for about 3-6 hours. I looked up what it would be like to live in
that type of conditions and it took me to Alaska.net. This website answered questions people have about
whether or not they would be willing to move there. Here is an actual quote from the website; “The
most important thing to be prepared for, however, is not the cold or the snow,
but rather the darkness. Mid-November to the end of January can be difficult
weeks because of the lack of daylight, and many Alaskans take a one- or
two-week vacation warm-weather vacation during this time. If you can do that,
too, the lack of light probably won’t get to you.” So if you have the money to get away for a
couple of weeks during the winter, DO IT, because if not the lack of sun can
get to you.
When Alycia and I moved to England we didn’t realize the
same thing is true about that area too.
Now they aren’t AS high as Alaska but they are almost. I remember trying to sleep off the jet lag
when we first arrived in August only to find it starting to get light out at
5am. Then during the winter it was hard
to get going when the it doesn’t get light until after 8:30am and dark at
4pm. The winter became very long with only
7.5 hours of sunlight and we missed the usual 10 hours of light we have here in
NC during the winter.
Without defined day and night, things get confusing,
disorienting, and just like what is described in that first chapter of Genesis,
shapeless, empty, chaotic. We can find
comfort in knowing that God did not want us to be created in a world that is
those things. God wanted to create order
out of chaos, structure out of anarchy.
God did not want us to be in darkness so he commanded, “Let there be
light,” and light came into being. God
saw the light and said it was good.
I am not sure about you but when you arrived in church it
felt awkward didn’t it. Things didn’t
feel quite right. There were no lights
on and the sanctuary was darker than usual.
How many walked in feeling confused?
How many thought there was a problem?
How many of you couldn’t stand it and wanted to turn on the lights
yourself? Darkness does that to us. It confuses us and things feel out of
order. Something is out of place. That was the same feeling that God had as the
Spirit of God swept over the waters.
Here is the good news.
We worship a God that is big enough to create something out of
nothing. Where there was nothing but a
dark void, God created light. God is the
only one that can do that. Science can
explain a lot but they cannot explain were something came from. Sure, God may have created the universe in a
big bang and science can tell us a lot about how that happened, but they can’t
tell us where that something that went bang came from. Out of nothing God called out; out of the
darkness God commanded, “Let there be light!” and there was.
We worship a God who is all powerful and the source of
our live. Light is the source of our
life. Light is needed for the majority
of the living things on earth to be in existence. God knew that and created light. God knew that in the darkness we humans feel
empty and scared. We are afraid because
we feel vulnerable and weak. God did not
want to create us in that type of world and so he said, “Let there be light.” God wanted everyone to come and see his
Son. He invited shepherds and
animals. He invited angels and Mary and
Joseph. Though a light in the sky he
invited the Magi to travel to see what the light illuminated.
Today we give thanks that we can worship in the midst of
this light and in the midst of this awesome God we worship, the creator of the
universe. And all God’s people said…Amen.
(sermon series and images came from this article at Ministry Matters)
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